Flash fiction biologSciFi "The Outpost"

The Different

“You look very nice today,” DrCooper says. Suzi expects—with a bit of uncertainty—that DrCooper is wondering about her photon receptor array in light of the fact that Com:Trax no longer sees her as brilliant. True, she's the end product of centuries of study, the epitome of determinants and eliminants as some like to say, but she's not exactly high narrative algorithm, art in motion--the sudden  perfect biobot they all expected her to be, is she? Her quantum programming was written off as unsymmetrical and undiagonable; she is, in all reality, a sort of self-appointed (when she feels like it) self-annointed self-assembly machine, to be ignored by the largest of mainframes. She views DrCooper as someone with a you-should-look-around-you look. She begins to feel friendly.

“What brings you up to the lab station so late?” she asks.

“Carter and I are doing some work tonight.” he says. “He's all of a sudden so energetic with his new gadgetry. He says he wants to go over some system determinants.”

“At twelve midnight?”

“I'll watch and let him know when the dark comes rising. He probably just wants to feel a little more human for old time's sake.”

“Would he feel like checking some of my data? I'm testing a few of my calculations in response to that Com:Trax request.”

“Really?”

“You don't know anything about that?”

“No.”

“Its not a big deal. They act like another question is the only solution to a question. They only send these things out when they detect new abstract realizations in calculable structures—they seem to enjoy blasting perfectly good algorithms into literary dust, as if to get one last chuckle.”

“Really, now.”

“Yes. Perfectly good, concrete abstract algebra structures in space and time—poof.”

An odd sense comes to DrCooper's look. Suzi ventures some guesses. Does he have any idea what she's talking about? Or would he be noticing her for the first time as she is: a functioning compact operator in infinite dimensional spacetime—a fully formed matrix of developmental analysis? Could he have at one time thought of her as well-read, and now, well-downloaded?”

“I sense you've never thought of my data collection as elegant, my approach as serious,” she says.

DrCooper says he will ask Carter if Carter wants to exert any brain power on Suzi. DrCooper is not happy Suzi puts so much faith in Carter's half-machine half-human brain, and Com:Trax probably agrees with her. DrCooper is oblivious. The world should hold no hate for Carter, who never planned to be a war hero, who turned out smarter than most humans with his prosthetic machine brain typing coder for derivatives of successive operators (great for the differential, variational math of transform theory), finding endless derivatives as linear operators functioning nicely as DNA structures in exotic, abstract spaces; all self taught and, just think of it: Carter theOutpost Tropicologist. 

You find  people like Carter all over theContinents, people who will tell you they have earned their machinery from time served in The Great Gulf Wars; that they have no regrets with the coming of human interface technology, never wonder how it could have been. Suzi believes the rise of the half-machine-warriors add to the color of culture, a grey area to the survival urge. It's the exact drop in population the system hankered for, and now look. Didn't they need a drop in the population so they could finally enter the realm of pure logic? Can it be so bad to ask for just a little more mathematical rigor, again? Anyway, Carter is not exceptional; not really exceptional. He codes with the best of theHumans—tries to seek out new unitary operators in infinite dimensional spaces—and he also is very good at functional analysis of infinite systems in nonlinear worlds, like Suzi's. His efforts continually keep her playful urges in check; he codes on a continuous spectrum with infinite determinants—looks for DNA as a partial differential operator, one with convergence, functional sequences, a spacetime topology using a self-taught operational calculus. He cares most of all about theNature (in this later 21stCentury, a good measure of the human heart). You get sick of barriers to communication between the  practices and the disciplines. Suzi appreciates Carter's constant attempts at healthcare usefulness, even if he pretends to not care about theHumans, even if he tends to minimize the power of his resolvers, self-adjoint operators; he makes DrCooper wonder about Suzi's orthogonal projectors and spectral integers, her ideas of compact operators in the abstract. Com:Trax is simply requesting more normal operators (not Suzi's favorite natural language--she prefers quantum programming in infinite dimensional space) for a collection to their self-adjoint system. Call her crazy, but Suzi prefers to not talk about any matrix defined as infinite, settling on the sweet commutative communion between all of the lost algebras (yes, not even she can escape classification and analysis)—defining a domain's closure and extension, using adjoint and unbounded operators. Let's just say Suzi likes pure math, Carter likes applied. We'll leave it at that.