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.  

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.