Sunday, April 24, 2011

Flash fiction ecoSciFi "The Outpost"

The Origin


     As Suzi's biosensors measure the jungle's system of separation(S.O.S.) of positive and negative charges, her observations confine themselves to the remote region; it appears she has already, over the course of a few days, written her own paradise program yearnings(H.O.P.P.Y), extrapolating life forms created by DNA sequencing--the way a data logger routinely extracts data for exact polarization densities; the way a 20thCentury explorer would position herself inside an exotic charged array of paired charges in an alien world for the simple thrill of measuring charge location and their forces of separation  (yes, polarity to calculate array density), electric field polarization densities, supercharged arrays of useful information garnered for the purpose of ...what? Her fine-grained assessments have to be connected, in a way, to DNA holographs, extrapolating species that, at one time, had shared this jungle--animals that had never gasped this type of heat, or humidity.
     Here is Suzi with the signature animals, the monkeys and parrots and here, placed in memory, are their hidden homes, gone for almost a century, well, less than a century, presented, showing on a screen for Suzi in jungle with never an ambivalent calling; her program, her very own genetic algorithms, need to see these forms on her screen. 
     The darkness of the rain forest allows Suzi to view the shadows, the same shadows that once meant nothing.  She holds still, fascinated with their intricacies. She searches the information of their charge arrays,with its division of charges and currents (yes, both the free and bound ones). Her collection of pattern entity data(C.O.P.E.D.) within this dense, darkened forest should be hostile to her lasers--they seldom work at night. Suzi senses no animal activity has occurred here for decades, yet expects something (wasn't the best time they liked to interact at night?), as if they should simply come out to play.  
     Suzi does not consider evolution legacy of pattern entities(E.L.O.P.E.) any sort of miracle. She considers they just existed here, as if a simple surface component of bound charges of jungle. She depicts the animal life forms that once lived in this jungle as real enough. She feels the scanned copy of DNA molecules alive, running wild as an algorithm rather than primal biological molecule. She views her extrapolated data and life forms neither with a feeling of loss or comradeship (pairs of physical properties such as location and momentum cannot be precisely known in a closed system); the tolal momentum of the jungle is conserved as behaviors of sequences of values--never converging (or, for that matter, never diverging), always having no limit--as the perfect cyclic convolution. She knows her job, deep in her algorithms: analysis of DNA signals in discrete and continuous time; to perform useful operations on those signals. Still the cloud of oceanic origin remains.  

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