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 ecoSciFi "The Outpost"

The Wanting

     "Hurry," he says.

     She hurries without fully knowing the meaning of time constraint.  Her code stutters for a moment, then kicks in. The algorithm goes directly, in its own wireless way that arrives at the terminals of the ArtIntelles. An array of algorithms go out from there, spans the globe, then returns. She looks into her remote eyelid monitor(R.E.M.) to see what has returned: the need of assurance that she is here for the well being of ...what?

     "Fine," her computer analyst says.  

     She entrances her gaze to meet Carter's eyes. Suzi stops for a moment. Why does she let her machine vision operate on such archaic fuzzy logic while Carter's's traces are so crystal clear? At this instant Carter is no man-of-the-life-sciences. Her man-made eyes code for system intrigue gendering him(S.I.G.H.). His eyes became eager prisoners. Her true virtual(T.V.) appears, for a moment, to descend from a data cloud. Just in this instance she wants--the sensation of wanting, such an odd feeling--but without blame, or regret.

     "It's Ok," Suzi says.

     He glances clinically, knowing she's intentionally presenting a challenge to his scientific mind. It's her call now, something photonic, only increments above electronic logic in programmability but light years faster in memory from the old models of network enticed yearners(M.O.N.E.Y.), the ones he suspected of getting theHumans in this mess in the first place, the ones that never made an attempt to befriend, much less understand, human intelligence;  somewhere the connectivity had been lost in the nuclear electro-evolution of their intelligence---even they didn't know how they did it. He wonders. Yes, that had to be the fallacy of using genetic algorithm logic systems(G.A.L.S.) with neuro-network meta analog logic embedded systems(M.A.L.E.S.). His perception of her photonic vision changes even as she approaches.  

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.