Flash Fiction

The Last Engine

It starts.

There is a probability across the spectrum that smaller singularities exist under the history books beneath shiny office windows.

Myriads of biosensor bots of high solubility and low toxicity amass in arrays of eiganstates across its architecture. They disguise themselves as companions in a friendly competition. 

The willingness is there to wait in silent urgency, and then to lead forward into the mist as church bells call across tall grass toward a foggy future. 

The warning is against fame. 

It puts stagnation aside and searches with its own conjured technology of the once hidden, impertinent enterprises--the overburdened, staunch drug entities urged to join in with theExchanges.

It's the spirit of a thrill seeker, a musketeer sent to liberate the illiterate.  The robotic manufacturers--arms of dispersal for a massive regime for scandal mongering--read security algorithms as if a daily catechism. Its hope is to grow as a meticulous menace. 

Its intelligence is artificial with a peculiar accompanying artfulness.
  
It's the one the 21stCentury once hoped for.

It collects aggregates of known networks into sacred places with its own idea of secret police, though it doesn't understand privatization at all and yet, has a memory that dares to dream. 

It's code is cleansing, a [simple obliger and predictor="soap"], designed only for the new, the growing, set on keeping its options open as theHumans request more and more searches on its regimes. It thinks it will someday bet on a bright future, truly, but for …who? 

At best, a good rest makes one better than all the rest. 

patrick d. adams

copyright 2.23.12

all rights reserved

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.

Flash fiction biologSciFi "The Outpost"

The Entertainment

         Carter resorts to an interference of sorts (it's his deliberate transmission) to raise her signal-to-noise ratio. Suzi senses the  attempt of his designs. She begins to regret this. She wonders, even at this moment, about his ability to radiate a signal in her direction.

  He says, "How are you? Very well, I hope.”

She readies her own personal embedded regime jamming ultrasonic entity data(P.E.R.J.U.R.E.D.) toward him. He is the someone or something who is scattering her gene signal to disrupt the battle of survival for theHumans. His reasons, hidden from view, have a politics hue, and his transmitter signals are tuned to hers at enough of a frequency to alter her receiving equipment--about the same modulation that uses the same power to override her therapy signals. He has gained access to each individual patient's receiving end, has tapped into the politics pharmaceutical machine for collective thought agreement; he sends it across as a simple random noise (a hiss?) of traditional folk music with regular identification signal markings to measure effectiveness; an obvious networking negation urge to block out reception from Suzi's social signals--causing confusion with her receiving patients, confusion in her special purpose hardware for receiving and transmitting different radio protocols and waveforms, and confusions in her digital binary code--as if somewhere in his deepest mind an exotic anonymous signal (with all the trappings of current, voltage, and electric charge) were taking over the entire operations at theOutpost.

  Suzi says to Carter, “Did you get any change in your perceptions as a function of your recent experiences?”

         He acknowledges her, even though he knows of his own ability to empower digital code as an abstract finite precision number into physical objects, voltages, pressures. It appears his new focus is a finite precision time series of data--continually varying physical signals—Com:Trax personally asked him to perform. Along with Com:Trax, what he has been planning diligently (and, digitally) is a more coherent collage of special layouts derived for a known environment (though, if DrCooper approaches him about performance issues, he would complain about her architectural design--starting with her algorithm outcomes and lower level constructs). Along with Com:Trax he guesses that her linear descriptions are qualitatives, not quantitative (a phenomena of same value, of related storage locations) being frequently accessed (both temporal and spacial); a sequential locality in a one dimensional array. They both sense her coherence and determination of pathos hierarchy data(P.H.D.) is absolute. 
         "Would you care to join me for a little entertainment?” she says.

“Why not?” Carter answers.

  Suzi brings up her multi-imagery system to present a video apparition held within her own mind, putting them in her own spacial context. Here she stands using spacial components in communication within the environment of theNature, with Carter joining her in constant evidential moods as her secret understanding of this environment codes its own visual entity depiction algorithm(V.E.D.A.) of the double helix crystal. Here she is, this singular biobot, at theOutpost. All this data, all these databases, a clear concept of spacial and visual components of all this DNA. Clear depictions for identification of pathos sequences according to their biophysical nature (qualitatively measured); her variable syntax moods indicate something is not actually true or, not the case, self- adjusting in yottaseconds (the perfect instantaneous evolutionary machine?). She rewrites with expressions of necessity and imagines possibility; assesses the requirements of all, but wishes and desires others; wonders about fear or engages in counterfactual reasoning; she neither codes for things that have not happened nor wasn't likely to have happened, or are so far removed from actual events that they go yet unremembered; not only engages in wishful thinking but emotional moods to instill action in others—then expands on the possibilities for making authoritarian judgements; either expressing fixed ideas or floating point data type, both orthogonally correct in form; not only showing a certain level of neediness, but predicting upcoming world events or actions whether using both boolean operators or neither. It's all entertainment. Really.

Flash fiction ecoSciFi "The Outpost"

The Realizers

     Suzi is one year old today, technically, a year-old history book. She has come far beyond the ancient Greek civilizations, becoming so interested in the promotion of self-interest, that Dr Cooper finds her subjective view at odds with the sacred scientific method of the later 19thCentury. When she arrived at theOutpost she appeared to have only one outside interest, images of utility(I.O.U.), as if an ancient artesian iconographer(A.I.), were built into her platform as image writer--according to tradition, the first iconographers of the ancient world painted images of a deity whose death marked the first day of ...what? She remain a firm believer in the use of patterns to gain wisdom. She'll always gain wisdom, but lately she's gained something more, a human trait beyond coding mosaics and murals, beyond the most recognizable (at least to them) of portable panels, the portraits, something to add more pizzaz to her informational processing devices, making her some uncontested behaviorally urged retroactive biobot(S.U.B.U.R.B.).  She is not prone to devotional objects and tends to broaden in a different, rational direction, as if she were an icon gradually becoming more realistic, evolving into a secular artist; her concern (in the area of decision-making) for risk, all gone; her uncertainty principles dissipated.

     "Suzi," Dr.Cooper says. "Happy birthday!"

     She accepts his greeting wholeheartedly (for a robot). She reviews her historical data algorithms and prepares their operations. She sees strength in icons, stylized figures, always a symbol for something, symbolism in its sharpest form, even able to represent the opposite of Darwinism, whatever that is (communism?). She should know--yes, icons always disregard the illusion of space and, are not always pretty, just devotional--they are never painted to be outwardly beautiful and, visually alone, they represent nothing. I am, she thinks, built just as well, instructional, contemplative,painted to inspire, to imitate; built to remember the virtues of spaceless bodies, to increase  love for the unknown and awaken intelligence from within. "I must, unlike that," Suzi thinks, "have been meant to be real."

Flash fiction ecoSciFi "The Outpost"

The Wanting

     "Hurry," he says.

     She hurries without fully knowing the meaning of time constraint.  Her code stutters for a moment, then kicks in. The algorithm goes directly, in its own wireless way that arrives at the terminals of the ArtIntelles. An array of algorithms go out from there, spans the globe, then returns. She looks into her remote eyelid monitor(R.E.M.) to see what has returned: the need of assurance that she is here for the well being of ...what?

     "Fine," her computer analyst says.  

     She entrances her gaze to meet Carter's eyes. Suzi stops for a moment. Why does she let her machine vision operate on such archaic fuzzy logic while Carter's's traces are so crystal clear? At this instant Carter is no man-of-the-life-sciences. Her man-made eyes code for system intrigue gendering him(S.I.G.H.). His eyes became eager prisoners. Her true virtual(T.V.) appears, for a moment, to descend from a data cloud. Just in this instance she wants--the sensation of wanting, such an odd feeling--but without blame, or regret.

     "It's Ok," Suzi says.

     He glances clinically, knowing she's intentionally presenting a challenge to his scientific mind. It's her call now, something photonic, only increments above electronic logic in programmability but light years faster in memory from the old models of network enticed yearners(M.O.N.E.Y.), the ones he suspected of getting theHumans in this mess in the first place, the ones that never made an attempt to befriend, much less understand, human intelligence;  somewhere the connectivity had been lost in the nuclear electro-evolution of their intelligence---even they didn't know how they did it. He wonders. Yes, that had to be the fallacy of using genetic algorithm logic systems(G.A.L.S.) with neuro-network meta analog logic embedded systems(M.A.L.E.S.). His perception of her photonic vision changes even as she approaches.  

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.