Flash fiction biologSciFi "The Outpost"

The Oxygen Maker

     On the island, genes grow within the lattice of their cellulosic captors, the leaves and the stems; even photosynthetic genes. How amazing the most recent renditions, the most belated--compared to the millions of gene pools that came before--the right juxtaposition of the latest mutation as if perpetually young; and so the humans found this to be true in their genes. 

     Humans never fully cut their ties from the gene world, though they tried on the continents. Humans thought they had become the best nature had to offer, yet now, in the year 2064, they are the forsaken, and the chosen, all in one, the performers and the waiters, as if two herds separated by a huge chasm.  

     Culture shapes itself into the future, pauses occasionally to announce itself as a government to speak in harsh tones and collect percentages (a tax?). It's the normal route, workers and co-ops, an occasional forming of corporations then a political group with rules for growth and drawing borders, name recognition for markets, selling to the public, institutions for more learning  the playful growth of more rhetoric pretending it's real life, posturing fatherly (or motherly), create a bigger corporate network, form nations, pay for health (everyone's?), grow more ideology, cross borders with bigger markets, build drug making factories and computer component factories offshore to avoid paying taxes to this system of politics and nations, more and more markets over and over again, build a robot.   

    Genetic apex, yes, culture trusted it; behavior that led into a game of competition and profit, made to accuse others of greed, to envy a status, form a populist movement, collect cash riches, get dividends from more investments, get workers for factories of computers and drug makers, create an algorithm, gain another profit, hide money, build a health hotel, invent health insurance, manufacture more, get more wages, build another robot. Meaningless behavior, genes would think; just activity as if a wind-up doll responds to a light source, turns and follows the brightness for no particular reason--not like the photosynthetic genes in this jungle that actually do something with their photons they gladly receives; these gene make the one thing culture must have above all else: pure oxygen.