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 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 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.