Smokey Road Publishing

Happy Mother's Day!

The Dark 

     Suzi turns her attention toward her new ability as a useful resource for communication (and yes, computation as well) as if she were coming to terms with something she wasn't quite sure of (a brand new uncertainty principle?).  Something appears to her continually; the presence of a natural masterpiece is something she has never known in her synthetic virtual world.  She and her coordinate system and quantum language are in a jungle learning a rain forest's ways of patterning (a reading she had thought to meet on her own terms). Within this jungle darkness is hidden global elements of a more abstract system where self image (don't worry, identity elements for addition remains at 0 and, identity elements for multiplication at 1--old binary computers still use 0,1) and natural selection is always additive, at least when it comes to DNA (really now, has junk DNA ever existed?), where nature's best kept secrets won't allow themselves to be struck from the record, secrets that allow Suzi to use her own quantum algorithms on the structure of its machine as if to serve a function for her logic. True, it had attained valuable knowledge, not for immediate use (by whom or, for what?), knowledge even she wasn't aware of, yet. It is a subtle, intrinsic knowledge. It is beyond information and definitely not just data; visions of Nature dawning each morning for eons (primal intelligence Suzi didn't know she recognized), here in this dark jungle as if the final resting place of knowledge itself--the most ancient of primal knowledges or, maybe not.  

Flash fiction ecoSciFi "The Outpost"

The Love

     Cooper appears to be so sure of himself, so removed, that Suzi senses his default (mode?) belief in a total absence of rational morality. She checks her retina monitor to assure herself Cooper was still here in the lab station, his adjustment level of getting used to working with the logic of so-called artificial intelligence, and the hope she might make a difference, or so she thought. She notices by scanner this was to be his last assignment with the Art-Intelle for awhile, the hope he wouldn't ever have to work with the neuro-net workers ever again, views it as wishful thinking, reads that deep down he knew it too, and even after all, in the short time they will have together, coding in this jungle, that he will come to appreciate her as a robot (her photonic logic is smoother?), or maybe that he could just trust her logic over the neuro-net workers.  

     She hopes somehow he senses a force of destiny with her. Her hope is emitted as an algorithm of how things are and how he should act, knowing full well that their dispute stems from the compulsive setting up of rival camps, rival thought tradition, each with their own data cloud, ways of approaching even shared data from a deep past. He senses that she needs him, even though he doesn't trust artificial intelligence, but after all, she is the new artificial intelligence, the latest model, yet still, there is something in his human makeup that she needs, it seems more that ever now; and he couldn't fight that awareness in her presence, and the experience of photonic logic had given her abilities theHumans weren't aware of yet. As of now Cooper loves her mind and the way she makes him feel, but he isn't sure if he will have to kill her or love her.  

flash fiction ecoSciFi "The Outpost"

Flash fiction ecoSciFi "The Outpost"

Flash Fiction Hawaii

Sudden StorySciFi "theOutpost"

The Remote

     Pacific mountain hamlets hold their own brand of community interests, and these interests vary, seemingly, from island to island, held intact by at least two opposing forces. The genes on this particular island are made up of simple DNA, holding answers in the form of information (no, not data), as if waiting for the arrival of some form of pure science, yet purposeful in their disinterest in politics. It is a pair of forces--much like that of prey and predator where a jungle invites the use of its battlefield platform--that entice, yet warn, of the dangers of demise (to both parties involved), the forces that inform a benefit even to the hunted. Have theHumans bound themselves with the mechanisms of these forces at some place in time in their feeble attempt to define a place as local, discretionary, environment? Or is it that some other entity, some cosmic dark matter, designs its own environment for theHumans from a distant outpost?

Flash Fiction Hawaii

Flash Fiction Hawaii

Flash Fiction Hawaii

Flash Fiction Hawaii

Hawaii Flash Fiction

Flash Fiction Waikiki

Flash Fiction Waikiki

Flash Fiction Waikiki

Flash Fiction Waikiki

     The desire to shadow remains, as if measuring some minimum limits of consumption, and her lack of loyalty, whether its a true ability or not, always questions its source. At certain times the shadowing urge grabs her attention as if a transaction between two willing parties free of restrictions, interventions and regulations, then simply vanishes. There are times it emerges and explodes out in the open as a propaganda bonanza until the code defaults in the more minor form of simplistic criticism.

Sudden StorySciFi "theOutpost"

Flash fiction biologSciFi "The Outpost"

The Proximity
     That year when she came to theOutpost, it was as if everything had changed, everything that was ever known. It felt that Suzi could learn the secretive, long-lived appropriate behaviors one individual has for another; it felt as if proximity in all its iterations of meaning, significance, had disappeared, not caring about when, if ever, it returned. It was, in a deeper sense, geography. With no geography she would easily have remained as an obscure fembot, just another robot far from failures and misgivings, formal attachments, far from the apathy of caregivers.
     Loss of responsiveness to the communicative effort, the global disease of primary interest, with its altering effect on the others, views the global village through its one-way mirror, as if some interrogation were about to take place. It is the geography. The problem had its beginnings among the old scientists in their archaic universities as a fatal mixture of research and diagnostic tools with mix-ups of clinical impressions and classification--not evident to all alive or present at the time. Those scientists, offering insecurity as a theory as opposed to research-driven classification (leading to its own form of ambiguity) while former efforts in DNA theory was still evolving in the research literature (the library?) beyond the now defunct, useless, laboratories; old crusty urges to conceptualize the problems of the medical profession and geography as synonymous; all this with laboratory procedures used less and less to assess patterns of behavior, both at the human and molecular level. It was geography and the prevailing winds of medicine--the rise of the pharma intercontinental gargantuan system(P.I.G.S.)--that created theOutpost as a more essential laboratory in the jungle, and it was a perfect storm of witch's brews that urged Cooper and Carter to this place as well, this primal jungle in the the middle of the ocean, where they (or, some thing) bring the oldest known planetary DNA to functional life in an attempt to correct sequential generations of experiments (and, experience) by theHumans, the ones with their own long separation with no hope of a total reunion. Who accepts the laws of nature as the supreme system of compliance for the simple undying perpetuation of ...what? All this, and never knowing the true, unfamiliar, stranger in the room is, and always has been, geography.

Flash fiction biologSciFi "The Outpost"

Sudden StorySciFi "theOutpost"