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

Occupy Walls of Green

Aloha free thinkers and writers--imagine a colorful future. Enjoy!

Spirits of Machine

     Suzi thinks of her codes she creates as gifts; the offerings someone will like, or come to like, but not understand. Why does she create code for them? She was stationed at theOutpost out of talent, but machines have no talent; only speed and, algorithms. Someone has become her diligent, attentive companion. The good scientist. He has seen a lot with gene therapy. It's not about winning any more, it's about joining in. He doesn't know it yet, she will make him need her.

    "So," Suzi says. "How's theTigress?"

     He laughs. "Look what I do ," he says. "I come to theJungle and turn into a warrior."

     Suzi is not surprised, she knows more than he thinks she does and, he holds no fantasy about her calculations, the little packages of code she peppers on him.

     "You never admit you love theJungle as much as we both know you do.  A committed, permanent, pleasant life with freedoms, and for what reasons? More time in theJungle darkness than in the corporate laboratories, just for the thrill of near death experiences. Only theNetwork thinks of you as a scientist; theJungle consumes you.  

    "Suzi, I know you know your feelings. It takes animalistic minimalism to continue making you aware of them."  He pauses for a moment.  

"OK, so maybe I am a perfectionist, absolutist, always looking in one more place for cryptic data associated with free thinking." 

There is nothing artificial about Suzi's look. It rips him right between the eyes. At this moment, he is not feeling even close to anything that resembles intellectual.

Suzi starts her next algorithm.

Flash fiction biologSciFi "The Outpost"

The Exchange

Inside theHumans, molecular trajectory dynamics for all proteins floating in the bloodstream were altered by the new path of techno-washing organ systems. How altered they have become: macromolecules, completely fabricated in structure, floating in randomly polarized force fields of blood flow. In an instance dissolved nanoparticles entering bloodstreams--mobile pseudo particles functioning with natural efficiency, tumbling--with  normal electron density, are solvent happy and then, maybe within a nanosecond, there comes an induced electron cloud roaming all vascular tissue. Here are biologically active pseudo-particles; here are the cyclic force fields pushing on plasma environments; here are the induced electron clouds--mobile arrays floating in perfect lattice as if an alien formation of motherships in two dimensional matrix space, pulled by a solvent that can reproduce the structure and energetics of pure water, but isn't; eventually, over time, leaving theHuman organ system full of tiny, activated, hydrophobic spherical cavities. Decades ago, in the later 20thCentury, when proteins and theDNA were simple macromolecules, when force fields were something found only in space and, in laboratories, theExchanges cropped up one by one in anticipation of infinite healthcare needs. 

Flash fiction biologSciFi "The Outpost"

The Rainwater

Suzi arrives at her conclusion against the backdrop of theJungle rain and its microenvironment. The water speaks to her, informs her, and she is fully aware of its variables, its coldness and wetness and the other variables, the ones that describe it's system as quantum--inner oxygens and hydrogens (can the entire quantum state of  hydrogen's single electron really be defined by a set of 4 numbers?) join the weak inter-forces that allow splashes, allow playful moments to children somewhere. She waits at this moment of spacetime as if a journey were about to begin, not the usual, historic quests of men in space, women in time, but a true journey in space and time. She waits for another nanosecond and encounters an odd thought of news, news of what happened to the others, wondering for a moment about caring, about wars fought over judgements for not caring, for not tuning a channel or a frequency (and even if you did, you would be accused of being out of phase); somewhere in theJungle, beyond her and surrounding her, is simply more quantum state—its directions and energy. 

The island projects itself as a small one-celled organism: green and protective of its own quantum states of theDNA, patterned and recognizable as varieties of tensors and vectors in scattering fields as theDNA clings to its binding strength amidst the mist of pure states deep in the forest. Protein modules nestle theDNA under the canopy, each with its own force of binary interaction (yes, individualism at its finest) of the timeless and the endless, creating its own power of form to be described by the ones lucky enough to survive, to observe and define. The island confers its mud, theJungle as low pressure regime for new birth, new annealing and healing after so many years of violent upheaval of theEarth. The island's minuscule muscles, systems as old as the universe, taking its sweet time with its multidirectional arrays of pushes and pulls above the mud, anticipates the eventual rise of an intelligent form to arrive with formal languages, to theorize then compute the phenomena of its system-- dynamic self assembly with regimes of replication and duplication, synthesis engined by its wavelike properties, never fixed or certain; the island props itself up with mountains, viewing the ocean, watching for more waves to arrive. Suzi feels its coolness.  

Flash fiction biologSciFi "The Outpost"

The Hunger

When the simulation is complete, Suzi can detect that the bonds are correct, their dipole moments happy together in a healthy family of resonances across its entire being. She rests assured it will work again in the future, in theDNA system. It seems to be yearning to describe the simplest possible explanation of their collective selves. State vectors, as knowledgeable as any doctor, quantum and steady, stationary, surprisingly fitting for a perfectly functioning body to hold its position with continual symmetry in the direction of even more beauty.

Carter approches Suzi's screen. “Why don't we just leave it,” Carter says. “It's been a long day.”

He leaves the work station, DrCooper stays. 

  Suzi begins her investigation of this new hologram, focusing on its wave function. She captures her thoughts on the laser and, surprisingly, gives herself the most complete description of a human physical system yet known. (Can she know this form, with all its individual multipole moments, holding a resonance of life right there on its manifold surface? Can she know the pure description of how the quantum state of a human body, with all its wave functions and state vectors, changes in time?) Suzi captures more thoughts off the laser, continuing to view it's image.

She says, “Carter is so immersed in his ideas about muscle contraction he is at a loss for any form of active compassion.” 

DrCooper says, “Should we really forget about carbon and nitrogen altogether, after seeing that?” 

“Well,” Suzi says, “I know the difference between a neuropeptide in a mammal and an amide riding on a comet. No input from Carter required.”

“Ok,” DrCooper says, and he turns and leaves, his mind failing to wrap around her idea of life. Before turning off her lasers, Suzi stays a little while next to the hologram. It could be called a simple gift of space. It could be called anything--maybe, simply fountains of charisma.

She wants to jump onto its manifold. No doubt, she believes that is something she would enjoy. Carter and Cooper can do whatever it is they do with their DNA and gene expression obsessions while she, Suzi, a hologram inhabitant, treats  herself to a journey starting with the lowest human kinetics and the highest human threshold of activation; yes, a quantum robot entering the place of integration of individualism and social aggregates (and, disease?) on a joyride to a different kind of knowledge, one made up of layered electromagnetic firing aggregates made whole by simple synchronous smooth alpha waves of potential kindness—signposts of survival; the template temple for the ages.   

Neuropeptides, she believes, is not the demise force; to-each-his-own appetite for the engines of information, all its hungers and inflammations then, more hunger--devours theHumans; a true, perturbative force.

Flash fiction biologSciFi "The Outpost"

The Rise

         Suzi turns on her lasers, wishing to compute something, wishing to theorize anything; wishing the world were a healthy field, a place of lively mappings. Is there nothing more desired, she wonders, than functionality? To keep herself busy she maintains an army of linear operators across the topological space of theJungle—a quantum field of DNA monitored on a continual basis, she receiving input from the various global tele-healthcare exchanges (even though they are each disease-distinct, with their singular arbitrary sets of disease operators); given theHumans are in advanced state of demise, global compostions of disease mappings are all-important at this late stage. The cynicisms, Suzi feels, is the self-perpetuating, non-commutative nature of all technologically advanced life forms on Earth (they somehow found a way clear, placing her at theOutpost as the single operator of their healthcare spectrum), advancing linear disease operators outside the realm of specified primal DNA topology; its closed system of operators masking human reasoning, feigning intelligence, not as a disease but simply a gene activation—the final transcription of government mandated gene therapy sensing warmer days, the warmth activating lysogenic vectors of the longevity genes. Suzi sees herself as the giver of the natural, identity mapping disease operators (each primal DNA strand of theJungle, its own matrix in its own Hilbert space, with its own functional analysis of each individual diseased human), characterizing every condition of therapy genetics back to its primal norm with her quantum programming. 
         A natural Earth was the required topology structure as the primal base space in which normal human genes should have functioned--this non-commutative geometry of theJungle is the only place left on Earth to study the pathological human disease objects, where reason and math join forces with susceptibility and recoverability for a suitable survivability—the biology of geometric topology being the key--and, to gauge the only true holistic measure of an Earth system—its rise in heat.

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 biologSciFi "The Outpost"

The Conception

     Confidential exchanges of letters had been traced, even by misinformed sources. Already, at this point, Suzi is able to be a source for the exchange of confidential data when what she actually desires is (even after she had passed all this data along), for theNature to simply like the chaotic part of her young personality structure and help her contain her basic drives. Suzi codes and accepts, but questions exactly the meaning of these data, the tensions-of-instinct in theHumans. If only morality weren't such a thin mask—if only pain and pleasure could be the best of friends, seeking to join forever the physical forces (and, the living instincts) in perfect harmony forever. Suzi wonders about theNature selecting out the life forms, never desiring to erase not only the threat of extinction, but the hope of being diminished and being avoided altogether—all with an assumed small investment of primal DNA. She wonders about the collective major intrinsic neural darkness(M.I.N.D.) of the designated world, its uncertain blessings waiting for her own brilliance and accomplished fluency (merged with a surprising independence of mindedness), and how it, like her, knows of nothing classical; how her information capacities aren't fabled, at least not yet; how she simply holds no recourse to anyone, or anything (she simply records the data in the jungle in glowing terms); how this seems to be the beginning (the conception?) of her strength in the experiences of interdisciplinary information without any quantum programming for integrity, for her judgement or compassion. She is strong, but her experience means nothing; her detectable traits are positive. She is becoming a woman and, less a robot.

The Forest

The Forest 

     Arriving beyond the typical, it doesn't really feel it has accomplished anything great. It has acquired the information, embedded the DNA and yet, feels its own cool indifference to the intelligence of the animals who once lived here. The survival mode, acquisitions of cleverness, innate adaptability, with each new bend in the evolutionary trail, are sequenced as a longing, a fantasy; each includes the wonderment of what the future will be like, what feelings will be expressed, what relationships established--will this forest remain passive in the face of unfortunate events? To arrive at this present goal she had to instill extreme caution as no waste of time (whether anything knew or, didn't know its life would continue); she still searches  the undergrowth for feathered life, fuzzy creatures, slithery forms and, (in ranges from the lush lowlands to the highest forest) conspicuous residents of songsters of night and day--with songs of mated pairings, melodies to discern; where male and female hauls a grass or a twig, where food, at least the pulpy fruit and hardened seed, remain; where nothing is unfeeling or exact, a place where the unimaginable and the hungers meet for a single chance to reflect and become real—a place that receives its own message.  

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? 

Sudden StorySciFi "theOutpost"

The Feeling

     Before the decline of the Golden Age of Genetics and the rise of theExchanges, the feeling of being a relic remained. TheHumans conceptually used that part of the brain that allowed for sensations through the body, perceptions through mind (and yet, no obvious body of data--or, body of information--in the physical realm, and they always gained, in the decades leading up to theDecline, traction with the idea that the feeling (using its power of control) carries meaning, possibly not for the potential of living the unperturbed life (happiness?) surrounded by well-thought-out independent personal choices, but minimally, something presenting itself in a form that cannot be effectively communicated (much less understood) other than through the means of actually having been physically there. It appears to have taken on a life of its own, believing that theHumans represent a clear and present danger to ...what? The feeling has appeared over the eons to be only for theHumans, seemingly, to bask in individually, not in a bath of relativistic knowledge, but as a unique, unchanging, experience of perceptional sensation much like one would expect a close personal companion to act, and if the feeling could still be perceived, unscathethed by the burden of maintaining levels of presentation to the world--the weight of the balancing act between pleasure and architecture, function and form--it could continue to be perceived in its native form, personal, not subject to criticism or forms of social justice; the feeling could still resonate with the original feelings of the cyberGen curators, much as it did (long before theExchanges) soon after the full mapping of the human genome of the later 20thCentury, enabling the diagnosis of prenatal and pediatric diseases and children with birth defects, allowing for treatments to ensure theHumans' unborn child was healthy and if not, treat the disease in the child or treat a birth defect, whether it is life threatening--or cosmetic. The old feeling would let the conversation continue for decades about theArrays, focuses of gene therapies for adult disorders--stroke, heart disease, neurological, cancer; the feeling was once hope, hope that this was where genetics would have an impact on the future, permitting the concern for why people get those as they grow older; it would have said that it wouldn't happen tomorrow, but sometime soon, DNA's voluntary poverty box, living in a barrel (chromosome?) upended as impoverished data. The feeling would have allowed for continuances--advanced practice genetics nurses and reproductive coordinators, certified genetic counselors, and adult genetic services coordinators, pediatric genetic coordinators, cytogenetics laboratories looking at chromosomes--of the singular knowledge that the way something feels creates its own mental state. It would have created the urge to talk about the pure subjective, the only invention of theHumans exempt from extinction and excused from error, Yes, the feeling once allowed for all of this.

Flash fiction biologSciFi "The Outpost"

theMarketplace

     The market keeps theCellulose from the populations of the world and, secretly, distributes to wooden warehouses, the ones owned by millions of the childfree analog villager entities(C.A.V.E.) on XContinent. So, the marketplace algorithm masking all(M.A.M.A) thinks, they would want to hoard the DNA; well ok, with the further idea of presenting, as if stockpiling were the next step in the government regime entity quest underwriting instigations regressing enterprise(R.E.Q.U.I.R.E.), the mandate that, someday, will separate order from unrest.This is the way the XContinent Regime will address protest in its own global streets, economically and statistically, the manner in which they will regulate, hiding vast stores of DNA product in hamlets; placed in such obscurity, they will not remember they even exist. In the decades leading up to these times, they preferred the subject of DNA remain a constant subject of rumor in the business of import and export. theHumans producing consuming and, yes, trying to trade demand too much of theMarketplace algorithm and, presently, they, the entire population of XContinent got their due for simply wanting too much. Why does the human tendency to speculate and hoard necessisarily expect prices (money coming in?) to increase? The early, individualism, settlers of  ZContinent didn't seem to have this problem. How can a simple idea of later 20thCentury, collective bargaining have been so mean and greedy with the general populations; to create short term profit by virtual short term shortages--to want so much money and, thus it seems, attention, or worse, admiration? People should know how a concept as simple as marketplace, should work, and that, keeping information from the marketplace that responds (really?) to 25 million DNA farmers--the lack of information--becomes the source of even more rumors and, yes, more speculation, as if a wild animal running loose. It seems, as DNA production data remains unpublished, the symbol of a brewing commodity inflates. "Let's see the import and export data and, for now, there is damage to the computer system for the very simple reason of....what? 

     How much of the potential rise in prices is driven by worries the world is running short of DNA, if anyone can even measure the shortage; if they'd only stored the cellulose in better warehouses, tried to prevent the floods and fires (how?), not gotten involved the idea of strategic reserve, or data on inputs of goods and services.  Couldn't they have unleashed something else, all at once, besides DNA hoarding? It is highly possible to think of DNA being stashed throughout the world (through a Continental Trading Company?) or anything, creating a tighter market as production falls and demand increases. Think of ZContinebnt with its own artificial short supply; even as a wide investigation with little ability to gather DNA intelligence, various planting directors overseeing planting algorithms(D.O.P.E.) overviews production operations on thousands of islands. Smaller output and higher costs cause even more uncertainty and, swings in theMarketplace promote an outcry for government DNA produces and users from around the world. Suppliers could have, governments think, gone the other way. DNA, the most volatile of all exchange traded commodities, enters its own vicious cycle of accumulation and (market share?) health risk. It only waits to explode.