Flash fiction ecoSciFi "The Outpost"

The Flexibling

     The problem is found in theFarma, for so many reasons. Suzi has figured it out, or pretends to have figured out--the DNA flexibling of theHumans. She knows theHumans and thePeople, their goals and desires, once hammered out by their own will; they are now affected by genetic coalitions continuing to seek to resolve their differences; theHumans won't, in the final analysis, stand up to the preliminary open DNA standards(P.O.D.S.) of independent, moral worth.

     "Allocation," Suzi commands, as if she were a field general in a war and theHumans were her warriors. She codes theHumans' brains in her algorithms and, when she is finished, seeks full reconciliation through dialog on the future, upcoming commissions. She knows the status when it comes to lack of political philosophy, self-reliance, within theHumans. She accepts her will over them.

     They often stop, as if to allow strong feelings and prayers to divide them even more, long suppressing the demanded ownership of their genes lost in court battles, old disputes of the Golden Age, before they became theHumans. They still yearn for government sponsored bills (languishing in chambers) over property rights and DNA proselytizing. Right now, in this place, government sponsored prescription drug programs continue--always a priority to older voters--an inevitability that led the government bureaucrats to decide which drugs and medical procedures are available to what faction of the population; yes, their own little economic mechanism for resource allocation. Here is the availability to the population (including the unborn population, the prenatal). Here is the imposed gene therapy. This is where theFarma had fought to keep decisions in the hands of doctors and (unsuspecting?) patients; where the political plan of focus groups--those who made the drugs--outweighs the plan for those who take them; here is the launch pad of reckless campaigns, special interest groups winning (winning?)over the actions and will of theHumans, the genesis of the loss of a free market mechanism; the loss of the very place of individual aspiration and want--the kind of want that supplies a feeling of accomplishment, the permission for the starting from scratch, from innovation, the very entranceway to the thrill of competition. Here is where the censors gather, hastening to chasten in horrendous back firings of theHumans, and now, DNA flexible. With no purposeful intention, no foresight or forethought, the loss of knowledge indicates the loss of a particular gene, the beginning of the end of civilization as they know it. Really?

Flash fiction ecoSciFi "The Outpost"

The Hunters

Viruses enter the programming extremely sharp, slicing, as if ninja knife arrays. They appear, in a way, as an excessively preoccupied entity delivered by the (externally motivated?) process of internalization. Their prestige self-sustains them; it becomes probable the future will hold the answer to any of their disordering functions--yes, they'll become more self-centered, nonlocal, bypassing the evolution of entire immune systems--as entities that go down in history marked as the true crossers of boundaries, traversing virtual land bridges. 

The Global DNA Initiatives were, in their own way, part of an archaic internet system monitored by later 20thCentury technology--old companies with infected, overloaded computer systems of (once thought) extinct data, information, once again monitored.  

Suzi codes her next algorithm, thinks of her next one, codes it too. She views the 21stCentury growth explosions, simply, as speed damage; she covers the viruses and hackers; she comes from a place of no sensitive temperaments (where the most data-intensive are the most loss-prone), a place of no praise, no external feedback loops, no entanglements of alleged poor behavior, no parental value, no emotion, nothing unpredictable, nothing unreliable--yes, a pure birth from nothingness. She is busy simply writing code against internet-instilled powers of disease with their own viruses to track. How can it make any difference that she doesn't care about either the finance systems of insurance industries or medical service providers? 

Flash fiction ecoSciFi "The Outpost"

The Conceptualized

   

     Enzymes are continuing their (partially functional?) drive toward a Darwinian extinction, floating in the arteries inside the bloodstream of theHumans (high levels of amino acids means high levels of risk, right?), when they run into yet even more trouble. How funny theHumans used to ponder that they would survive (much like they thought they would in the later 20thCentury); they would ponder cytogenics, molecular genetics as the route to salvation. They have come to see it different. They still think all diseases have a genetic component, now cyber researching in the direction of a fancied magic bullet, competitive urges once deemed normal now rife, as if tumors of maladaptation scurry toward their own little fantasy of domination--which surely has agreed to come out of the darkness--agreeing to be a worthy opponent to the soul of theHumans, appearing as it did in the ancient animals of jungle, eyes glaring. Even if it approaches from the opposite direction as if the new Madonna, the holiest of holy, theHumans take it on, remaining minimized by their own outgrowths of aggression, after all, obtaining a human genetic makeup was once so time consuming, right? Should they feel fortunate that even today they remain alive? They view themselves as all different, needing to know the genetic makeup of each individual, identifying a cause, tailoring the treatment. Yes, theHumans created this brand of socialization, started from a simple, genetic, competitive urge. 

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.