flash fiction-fashionistaSciFi "The Outpost"

    Once he is away from the lab, crunching all the data possible, Cooper says to Carter,"These new findings are pure conjecture. The research is too low key. We've got to find the bug and get the newE.A.R.T.H.E.R. code up and running. We should have done it yesterday."

     "Well, now," Carter says, picking up on Cooper's mistrust of Suzi. "She'll be glad to see you won't she."

     Cooper ponders the new developments, which are distasteful but not overblown to his mind."I hate this," he says. "She was a beautiful design."

     Carter smiles unconsciously, secretly, as if he were finally getting his way. He is not concerned in a regimented way, as ComTrax would expect from their soldier of fortune in the jungle. Where do these signals emit from, these designer fashionista Xradio waves that arrive so brilliantly in the dead night?

Has one of the machines tapped into a Wide Angle Need Track (W.A.N.T.) code? 

flash fiction-jungleSciFi

The Gift

The tigress rises, smooth, without thought. She knows the pattern signal. Dispatch razor sharp claws flying, and feel the blood.  A telling yelp emerges up the steep cliffs.  The signal of 'they had hit their mark.' A dialogue that convinced with no apology.The pure passionate urge to kill.  An honest rendering of the laws of this jungle.  She had sensed movement in the corner of her eye.  The manifestation of a device designed by evolution, the edge detector. Her head turn was instant.  First nothing, then a ghost shadow.  Her figure moves once again with grace, the gift given her by nature. 

flashFiction

He is sipping his reflection in the water. "That smile," he thought. "That unexpected smile." He hears her voice, soft, smooth. He'll always hear it as poetry. He thinks for a moment, that she never hated, but she never loved either. He thinks of all those blues. All those tints of blue in her eyes but barely a human heart. He thinks he could escape when she pierced into his eyes. He escapes from nothing. That look of hers always comes out to play and it's here at this moment as a memory. She looks glamorous--beautiful--the way she always wants herself to be presented. Though her memory has come after him as if a phantom, he sees only her beauty. He sees her as any man would see her, not as something odd about her program. It's always summer with her, summer in robot seasons. Where raindrops never hit the ground.

ecoSciFiction "The Outpost"

flash fictio -intelligenciaSciFi "The Outpost"

Winners and Losers

     Suzi thinks of her codes she creates as gifts to Cooper; the offerings he will like, or come to like, but which he doesn't understand. Why does she create code for him? She was stationed at this outpost out of talent, but machines have no talent; only speed and conceptual algorithm. Cooper became the diligent, attentive companion. The good scientist. He had seen a lot even with P.T.S.Dgene therapy. It's not about winning to him, it's about joining in. He doesn't know it, he needs her.

    "So," Suzi says. "How's The Tigress?"

    Cooper laughs. 'Look what I do ," he says. "I come here and turn into a night warrior."

     Suzi is not surprised, she knows more than he thinks she does. Cooper holds no fantasy about Suzi's calculations, her little packqges of code she peppers on him, now show irritation.

     "You never admit you love something in the jungle as much as we both know you do.  A committed, permanent, pleasant life with someone, and for what reasons? More time in the jungle darkness than in the lab, just for the thrill of near death. Corporate thinks of you as a scientist; danger consumes you.  

    "Suzie, I know you know your feelings.  Since it takes Corporate Artificial Telligenia (C.A.T.) to continue making you aware of them…"  Cooper paused for a moment.  "OK, so maybe I am a perfectionist, absolutist, always looking in one more place for its cryptic data."

    There is nothing artificial about Suzi's look. It rips him right between the eyes. At this moment, he is no intellectual entity.

flash fiction--ecoSciFi"The Outpost"

Brat Code

She is, Cooper has come to the conclusion, someone he can talk to. She is precisely human, no more no less. Cooper steps up to the monitor and, after a slight second thought, takes in a breath, and braces himself. 

"I assume, you've read the data," Jenna says.

"I have. Yes."

"Doesn't it make you think twice?

"About Suzi?"

"Who else?"

"Yes. I've thought twice."

"She doesn't even pretend to care, according to data."

"Do you think she's going to tell us anything about herself, something we don't already know?" he says. "It's Suzi who writes her own code from her own biodata, mixed in with some of her own fantasy about space." 

"It's a strange combination."

"So ComTrax seems to think."

"It's an endless rant that gives advanced warning. It goes on and on. And then, click. She shifts to quantum mode."

"Proves her value is intrinsic."

"We know. Still, her data, it's gone tangential."

"You seem to agree with the terra engine central holograph(T.E.C.H.) logic. They're theorizing has expanded to the Suzi terra outpost program(S.T.O.P.) project, and why?

Jenna focuses. "Those data are advanced warning," she says. 

Cooper steps closer and looks at her softening eyes. For one moment, Jenna thinks, he's gone back to his flirty professor ways. He's become the man she hoped he would be.

Jenna smiles. "Look at you," she says. "A sexy man flirting with his corporate officer. His silence only sharpens her need to have him speak.  "The clock is ticking on Suzi." 

"So," Cooper says. "Suzi is rogue." 

"Yes, her mainframe is forever, but her mind has gone into focus meandering(F.M.). We feel she is beyond retrieval."

Suzi has always kept corporate on their toes, by being a little smarter than they are. Cooper knows she is a calculating machine, her little attempts to trivialize corporate, her "bratty code" he calls it, has gone so far as to make corporate queazy now. Her full unmock won't occur without their physical presence, the one who created her. Suzie has a gun to her head.