Flash fiction biologSciFi "The Outpost"

    
The Paradox
     She looks out across the ocean surface, seeing a brightness, seeing what was once dark depths, life stretching beyond their ocean mountain corridors, above the sea floor ink. There can be no future glossy damage control, Suzi thinks, no more words on a schedule to protect those winds. To keep her code active she scans through her database and simply reads, and reads well, but not for the benefit of this lab station, for her own pleasure (her pure intelligence tells her to read for the purest reasons--to discover and augment self); for the pleasure of the history of life that exists there, the global marine database of the independent organizers of early 21st Century digital libraries, ocean genes barcodes, even before the great regional infrastructure panic societies(G.R.I.P.S.) with their systematic pilgrimage of earth's masses(P.O.E.M.) rituals, before the temperatures and the acidifications, before overfishing of the waters (yes, both fresh and salt) have reached their tipping point. The paradox of this life, Suzi thinks, is that the age of golden ocean discovery(G.O.D.) is found in its purist form, in its association with the clean, clear digital world, as a two minute video.