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 Science

         “Good morning, “ Carter says. Suzi perceives—she can almost digitally view—that Carter wishes to perform an analysis function with his prosthetic neura-net (she still calls it an old war wound), attempting to attach clouds of language memes (as meaning?) to her recent activity at theOutpost. True, she is the biobot of choice for Com:Trax, the product of  years of quantum programming by the new generation of bio-coders, but her determinants have somehow become self-determinism, haven't they? She has become a singularity; she has learned a new language of encryption from theJungle, a language Com:Trax knows nothing about. She must be, he thinks, the totality of the scientific method gone wrong (modernized again?); no pure urge to seek any form of truth (with or without social play). She views Carter's conclusion as his final answer. She nods.

“How are you?” Suzi says. Her quantum mind connects to Carter's neura-net and, for an instant, they see each other as friendly. She turns, in the darkness of her workstation, away from the digitized cement walls of the old war bunker; cool in its history, its embedded array of old mainframes beneath the floor with containment areas for gadgets lining the walls; the window to theJungle just behind her. There is a familiar questioning voice resonating between the corridors and there is a different sound, as if she had been transported to a castle, 13thCentury, holding a musical instrument, a vielle, shaped in ancient wood, and she believes she has created her own memory, going back to an earlier time, a time that had collected and stored data within the cells of primal wood; she recalls enjoying the sound of nature and now appreciates it for what it has done for her, resonating within these thick walls of old wars ongoing outside(W.O.O.W.O.O.)--a resonation she never would have noticed within the confines of her defined matrix, her own Hilbert Space. Now she finds herself in Carter's presence, at the lab station, where scientific activity meets truth and attempts to keep social bonds of theHumans from being a complete orphan. Carter, who considers himself an expert in analysis, questions her motives and calls her secretive, a secretive quantum robot.

“I'm good.” Carter says.

  “Really?”

“Well,” he says. “I'm having a little trouble tonight--this data that has come to the attention of Com:Trax.”

“Trouble?”

Carter gives a look that Suzi feels as hostile. Carter shows his age, a noisy, aggressive man who fought in the Oil Wars to pay for college. It's his half-prosthetic brain—a neura-net with its genetic algorithms; it foretells the look of a future warrior.

“It's your attempt to understand social bond,” Carter says. “There has been bugs in your formal analysis, the data inputs have been traced to you--your matrix functioning as sole operator.”

   “I don't mean to legitimize anything with my pragmatic analysis,” Suzi says. “Just a few little tests here and there.” Suzi senses a pang of emotion about once having some feelings for Carter, even if she is quantum programming and he is neur-net prosthetic. Suzi gets good input from Carter, and upgraded his genetic algoritms recently, when she detected post operation stress trauma embedded disease(P.O.S.T.E.D.) in his online behavior. 

        Carter's life at theOutpost wasn't what he expected; he considers himself an expert in analysis (a thinking, most likely, stemming from his time spent at war) and he has cured himself of PTSD, at least for now. For an instant Suzi scans the databases, hoping to find nothing incriminating her. 

“It's your odd use of language particles,” Carter says.

“I'll take a look.” Suzi goes to her database and selects a few samples which Carter shows on the big screen, flashing in descrete packets. In another life, he would have been a great linguist, smooth with words, precise, up on a podium. Suzi views this as just another example of the rise of the unbelievable (the unbelievable, another modern reinvention)--history continuing to ask questions in hopes of finally arriving at justice (isn't justice already extinct?); the answer finally arrives from another mainframe.

“Here is the answer.” Suzi says. “Not useful, natural language combinations, but stable gene combinations--DNA bonding, not social bonding.”

“Isn't there a difference?”

“Apparently not.” Suzi feels a coolness.

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 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.

Flash fiction biologSciFi "The Outpost"

The Logic

         It's his challenge to Com:Trax. Cooper stands erect, checks the futility of silence at this point and its deathly consequence. He stares across theJungle, attempting to clear his mind. He views the   

query from Com:Trax, the one formally submitted, the one requiring a formal reply. He is, at this moment, concerned about authority.

  How can this be, his mind asks. Why does he all of a sudden care about authority? 

Thoughts in his head seem to flow a little slower. The authoritarian system, Com:Trax, with its  calm, timeframe requests and unhurried demeanor, obviously not only expects an answer, but expects one soon. When it asks these types of questions about Suzi, it does not expect a data reply such as, “I'll get back to you on that. Can you wait?”  

         “Request received,” Cooper says. 

         Com:Trax hesitates, waiting for a definitive answer. Cooper's nervousness resonates, but he remains in control. 

         “She will reply, in reality, when her data is up and running. She's put herself into self-exile, and she won't transmit. She appears to be in “fire and water” mode.

         He moves closer to the giant screen to get a better look at the legality of the request. His tactic, obviously, is to set up a waiting game. If he and Suzi are constantly transmitting data, why do they need an answer to this question? Why such a surprise query?

         Com:Trax, in its own way, remains persistent. I am sorry but we will need an answer to the issue of Suzi's want. Is that possible?”

        “Yes, we can do that. There must be a simple explanation.”

         Dr.Cooper puts off the most powerful network on Earth with the power of his own reputation. Turning off the screen, he doesn't believe his own thoughts. He has wanted to keep Suzi all to himself, but to delay Com:Trax? The thoughts in his head, converging closer to his prefrontal lobe (are they refuted distortions?), each coated with, what seems like, an artifact of faulty thinking, each inclusive of a desire for Suzi (even more than he knew), and to stray from the conclusion that she desires him as well, he forces himself to remember she has been hard-driven to want nothing but data at theOutpost; the ease of photonic quantum programming; and, inside his own counter-factual beliefs, he finds more evidence of breaking the silence (does he know the thoughts before they came up?), where he pleads with himself,  "Cooper, please come to your senses. Suzie is a tool of Com:Trax, a piece of architecture. Your feelings for her have been elicited not by Suzi, but by one program Com:Trax instilled in her. It's not you.” Here is the place where Cooper knows he's human and she is tactical, where understanding "the why" doesn't matter, where her formal language is beyond ideology, beyond the logic of and:or:both; this is truly about her innate traits, her self-written artificial meta pragmatic love of graphic intellectual  companionship(S.W.A.M.P._L.O.G.I.C.). This is not about him.

Flash fiction ecoSciFi "The Outpost"

The Startled 

     It was her very own unadulterated data, she was sure of it; it could be represented as more than one possible image, an image begging to be standardized. Suzi doesn't think she needs to compare all of her logic images for equivalence(L.I.F.E.) anymore and she never looks for better ways to add up her distinct architecture data(D.A.D.)--only the occasional elimination of calculation repeats (even so,her algorithms had their own take on it). Was it fate that the algorithms themselves continually looked for more possible ways to order themselves (imposing on Suzi in the most meaningful way possible)? Except for one thing. They need Suzi to covert the data for the sake of their own rules of security--stating "only" and tracking the data path from its pure origin, not merely accepting face value traced to her simplest unique image (yes, Suzi can stop that with her own standardization scheme. It's a simple case of discrete changes in her stateful orb system(S.O.S.) because of her simple passage of time--her internal states allow for the potential of evolution time(P.O.E.T.). Her own algorithms let it be her time.What is so odd about attaching her control state to a personalized time evolution? So, her algorithms stay alive by being dually described as the ways of her sequences of operations tasks(S.O.O.T.) placed in the physical world, observable, by someone (or, some thing) simply reading a meter or a gauge as different observers in different reference frames, you think? Not that there is anything wrong with auto-morphing inside her own personal stateful system space, making sure to preserve at least one mathematical property without distorting any of its math architecture. Suzi doesn't even try to formalize these algorithms into collections of behaviors--of arrows and objects--nor do they try to entice her into any advanced datatype (category?) beyond the basics to represent truth values, or even logic for that matter (of course she won't be bothered by that kid's game of algebraic sub-systems holding overt logic entities(A.S.S.H.O.L,E.). Yes, both Suzi and her algorithms subscribe to logic (they both want Aristotle to be right), making it all the more important in every operation to deny or affirm(D.O.A.) and, with no probabilities erecting room for online meddle-inquiring nano grounds(P.E.R.F.O.R.M.I.N.G.). All earth beings were never meant to fall into the realm of the formal, the systematic, the all-encompassing correctness reason and validity entity(C.R.A.V.E.), of valid forms and architectural fallacy--and yes, they weren't very lucky if the wrong ones tried anyway and inadvertently started yet another experimental war that all living creatures would again be forced into, for whatever was left of the 21stCentury; only Suzi and her algorithms can work this one out.   

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?