Tag Archives: technology

As You Wish

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Guin walked around the room, mentally measuring the space she needed.

Members of Ursa Major and Canus Major had contacted her, asking her to increase her participation in their plans.

Guin had other plans.

But plans, even in one’s private thoughts, find their way into other people’s lives.

She calculated the gravitational field she wanted to generate, solely in her imagination, out of sight of the ISSANet (or so everyone thought, ever present as social media posts or the shadows in-between).

Lee opened the closet door in the small bedroom where his upstairs laboratory disguised the labyrithine lab hidden below, accessible only through a heavily-reinforced tornado shelter trapdoor in the floor of the closet.

Neither Guin nor Lee knew what the other was doing.

But they did.

Quantum physics explained a lot of the reasons why they were connected but weren’t.

In Lee’s thoughts, the argument of a Sicilian with Dread Pirate Roberts.

In Guin’s thoughts, a young man named Westley yelling, “As you wish!”

They worked out vectors in four-dimensional space without using calculators or computers.

They built not because they thought they wanted to but because they had to.

Had to because of love.

Love where engineering, science and dancing met.

Love for each other.

Infinite possibilities in infinite directions.

True eternal love.

Truck Drivers on Mars

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Kitrpac loosened his tie.

As a project manager for a major government subcontractor, his duties changed as quickly as he could swap a baseball cap for a construction hat.

“Taking care of our species.”

That was the company motto.

And Kitrpac felt responsible for our species about an hour a day, in the morning, standing in the kitchen with his wife and kids as everyone hustled and bustled to drink their favourite caffeinated beverage, nibble a bite or two of carb-loaded snacks, hug, kiss and take off for their respective, if not always respected, places in society.

Kitrpac removed his tie.

His parents still lived in Haiti, avoiding the Rovers, robotic guardians sent by the ISSANet to protect Haitians.

Haitians laughed that the only thing they needed protection from was the software flaws in the Rovers, which tended to cause the machines to light up a road intersection with explosives at the slightest misunderstanding of the natural chaos of city streets.

Kitrpac missed his parents but accepted their absence as progress.

Most of his siblings had left for America after a devastating hurricane obliterated most of what counted as civilisation.

They were too ambitious to stay on the island to help rebuild although they did send money back home to assist those who stayed.

Kitrpac removed his sport coat.

Once a week, when his family scheduled allowed — that is, when his wife and he agreed they needed to spend more time with their kids than on their individual activities — Kitrpac liked to dance.

He had the typical Dad bod, tight upper body strengthened through gym workouts and lifting heavy machinery at work, a small protruding belly from sitting too much at work desks and drinking an extra beer at night, with gray hair that made the ebony skin on his face shine.

Kitrpac laughed loudly, purposefully too loud, getting the group’s attention.

“Where is Delymo?  She thinks I’m a total machine.  Class, let me show what she was talking about.  We’re going to accelerate through several dance moves in the next two hours.  If you can’t keep up, then you’ve got your work cut out to become a dancing machine like me!  Ha ha ha!”

He untucked his shirt and demonstrated a two-minute dance routine with a random person he picked from the group, showing that the best lead/follow team depends on trust as much as pre-knowledge of what either the lead or follow expects to be used in a song.

Matym nodded.  She looked forward to dancing her favourite song with Kitrpac later in the evening.

From hear to eternity

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Trischnia adjusted her large celebrity sunglasses studded with pink rhinestones.

Sitting under the shade of a party tent erected on the grounds of Downtown Ducktown, a spring-fed park used primarily for public events, Trischnia wanted a perfect view of this year’s art festival to paint for next year’s poster.

Her mother fanned herself with her large garden hat.

The ArtFest celebrated different themes each year.  This year’s theme, From Hear to Eternity, celebrated deaf and hard-of-hearing artists, including painters, sculptors, musicians and dancers of all ages, encouraging young people with physical challenges to express their creativity.

Lysal was in Trischnia’s thoughts.  She didn’t know Lysal well but had heard of her through Guin and Shelmi.

Trischnia thought about how her friends came and went in the daily activities of her life but were always there in her thoughts.

Living in Rocket City, a high-tech hub, Trischnia met a lot of people with engineering and science knowledge who wanted to create a hyperhuman, an artificial intelligence being with humanlike features but superrobotic skills.

She mixed blue and white on her palette to emulate the washed-out blue sky of this humid mid-spring day in late April, cloudless and muggy, the temperature around 30 deg Celsius.

Should she add the gaggle of Canada geese which flew out of the pond at sunrise?

As she painted, she smiled at her boyfriend who was talking to the snowcone vendor on the sidewalk.

Her business was growing, should she say successfully?

Her paintings sold well, the handmade soaps and candles were moving off the shelf and she had doubled the size of her art gallery twice.

What is success?

Would a robot ever replace her or any of the artists out here and why would they?

Sure, she sold lithographs and other reproductions of her work, including postcards, which, by extension, were a sort of autonomous replication of human-produced originals.

But would a robot ever be her, able to paint and think at the same time?

How would a robot process thoughts of someone like Lysal, whom it wouldn’t know directly?  Sure, it could look up facts about Lysal through online databases but could it have feelings about unknown persons?

How would feelings make a robot a better person, able to grow as an artist?

Why would a robot bother to have feelings?

Do engineers and scientists have to waste time reproducing humans when they could be making better lives for humans who already exist?

Her mother coughed, worrying Trischnia about her mother.  She had just recovered from a bad bout of flu and probably shouldn’t be out here helping Trischnia sell paintings.

Trischnia would have to ask Guin about Lysal, see if she was also an engineer and what she felt about being duplicated as a robot.

She looked at the artists with their tents set up around the pond.  How many of them are better artists because of their physical challenges?  If medical professionals could create perfect versions of these artists, would they still be artists?

And what of artists with severe mental challenges?

Trischnia laughed to herself.  She realised the ArtFest theme applied well to her — she had an eternity of questions to ask, always seeking to improve herself, her art, and the world around her, no challenge too great to overcome.

Earth Day 2017

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Lee sat in a plastic chair on the porch of his new house.

He had no idea how long he could afford to live there but he decided that living there was the first step toward living at all.

“April showers bring May flowers.”

He watched new patterns of rivulets streaming off the house roof, forming pools next to the house foundation, draining off in directions he’d never seen before.

Was he happy?

He wasn’t yet ready to answer the question.

He sipped a cold cup of tea, wondering what he was going to do with his new day, his new life, facing uncertainties, contemplating which boxes he’d unpack inside the house, which he’d leave packed in case this move didn’t pan out.

He kept the larger, more grand plans pinned on the kitchenette walls.

Despite taking literary licence with the details of his life, at the core he was the same person, not just wishing his life away, but taking action at the pace of the universe which was not always understood by the people around him, who sometimes saw repetition or inaction.

 

Lee was in love, always would be.

In love with himself, in love with friends, in love with lovers.

Love on a galactic scale.

Lee knew that romance described the love he shared with humans.

He also knew the chemical/physical descriptions of love that connected him to the universe.

He cherished both, balanced both moment to moment.

He wanted something to eat with the tea but his budget wouldn’t allow breakfast for a few months.

Lee valued the thoughts that an empty stomach created…

Thoughts that would take him and the new twist on ecosystems to other worlds.

Can one love a bioelectromechanical creation that will never know who you are because it will be created for a life on a planetoid that Lee will never be able to enjoy himself?

He thought about the first artificially created E. coli and smiled.  The answer to that last question was a resounding YES!

He stood up and walked back to the bedroom he’d converted to a laboratory.

A peace mint

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Jogger, wearing a headlamp on a north Alabama side road, influenced by a viral video of villagers rescuing a neighbour’s body from within a python, bobs up and down as bobolinks and robins wake up in the predawn air.

We don’t pick cotton or cut sugar cane by hand around here anymore.

No, manual labour has lost its value as far as commercially-farmed edibles is concerned.

Manual labour still exists in the form of handcrafted art and jewelery.

Workers still fill potholes with shovelfuls of asphalt, still run power cable by hand, still hammer studs and plant bushes with their arms as levers.

But the tools grow more sophisticated, the workers’ brainpower redirected, their hand-eye coordination rewired.

We look to education to solve human-machine interface configuration issues.

What are looking for, really?

Is it one person’s yacht versus a thousand persons’ robotic movements?

Are we forever doomed to be hierarchical antmound builders, some with a mountaintop view and some in perpetual darkness underground?

A recent visitor to this planet asked if we’ve always been mountbuilding social creatures, observing from space that our domiciles are primarily boxes piled on top of boxes, linked by antlike trails carrying food and supplies from domicile to domicile primarily across the surface of the planet.

Who was I to disagree?

The visitor asked if we planned to carry these habits with us as we moved on to other planets.

A good question.

Have we advanced beyond moundbuilding civilisations?

Will we ever?

Will we continue to appease our ancestors or completely reconfigure ourselves to enhance our ability to travel great distances across the galaxy?

The visitor left us with many questions, providing no answers except in the negation of our Earthbound habits.

The visitor was not humanoid or superintelligent, the visitor did not use a universal translator to communicate.

The visitor was an asteroid with a shiny surface, reflecting us back to ourselves, reminding us that the tree which drops seeds on the ground is composed of the same galactic material.

The messages we write into DNA which triggers a new species to assert itself beyond Mars orbit, that is the lesson the asteroid taught us: we already have the tools we need to successfully move away from Earth, we just need to reeducate ourselves to use the tools properly, getting beyond moundbuilding and social hierarchies in the process.

S’iht Egneh Snots

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S’iht sat silently.

Assigned to the new outpost ten sols ago, S’iht had studied the goals and expectations of the outpost team.

This being the 14th outpost, with tourists taking up much of the old science station quarters of the First Colony, S’iht’s job importance had grown significantly as tourists put pressure on the new Martian government to provide fun, exciting places to explore safely.

S’iht knew that the first thirteen outposts were overcrowded.

The team for this outpost wanted something different, too.

After all, they has mastered all the knowledge that 200 marsyears of recent robotic exploration had accumulated. 

They wanted to be remembered.

Memory was gold in the outposts.

Being remembered by more than your teammates was priceless, rarely if ever achieved.

S’iht had once been remembered.

S’iht arrived in a group of ten excited tourists who had arrived with a shipment of permanent Martian settlers, Permartians, the first people designed to live there.

The Last Humans, S’iht’s tour group were called.

With so many returning tourists reporting major health problems the Mars Tourism Bureau declared the Red Planet offlimits to all but Permartians for next 100 marsyears.

S’iht had won the DNA lottery, surviving untold marsyears of ultraviolet and cosmic radiation exposure with little longterm damage.

S’iht was not remembered for health reasons.

S’iht has been wealthy on Earth, taking calculated but high risks investing in AI technology which turned whole planets into sentient beings, integrating many of Earth’s governments and corporations, forming the precursor to the ISSANet.

The economies of scale turned S’iht into the solar system’s first quintillionaire.

Until the ISSANet reached beyond the mere imaginings of Earthlings, converting S’iht’s wealth into a public resource for, of course, the greater good.

S’iht was erased from public memory, left to serve as a Martian Outpost Operator, unable to convince anyone of S’iht’s previous life.

Always inside the unending view of the ISSANet, the omniscient caretaker crafted to grow its existence beyond the solar system, rewriting and reinventing its connections, no longer dependent on human-based algorithms. 

But S’iht still dealt with tourists using old-fashioned methods of talking, facial movements and body postures developed over millennia of human evolution.

The fourteenth outpost was going to be remembered.

S’iht had a plan.

All while fighting off thoughts of self-hatred, dark thoughts of suicide when S’iht knew the ISSANet would please itself by keeping S’iht alive for centuries.

What if evidence of a strange alien civilisation was uncovered in the fourteenth outpost?

S’iht had new friends, including humans, Permartians and ‘bots. They formed a cohesive unit that communicated ideas without talking about them.

Together they had created a whole back story for a civilisation that had arrived on Mars billions of years ago but died out.

A civilisation that had known Earth in its early days before single-celled organisms had spread across the planet through water networks and evaporation. 

Together S’iht’s colleagues would dig out in full view of the ISSANet a civilisation that never existed.

Despite its advanced technology, the ISSANet carried within its network a series of iterative, reinforcing behaviours that mimicked humans’ sympathy networks, ever so slightly susceptible to subliminal messages.

S’iht’s colleagues spent decades of marsyears nurturing the seed of an ancient civilisation on Mars until the ISSANet convinced itself of the same possibility, doubling the duties of outpost builders to look for such.

S’iht had become an indispensable outpost crew member because of S’iht’s insistence that such a civilisation didn’t exist.

The ISSANet gambled a small portion of its galactic expansion resources on the chance S’iht was wrong.

S’iht just wanted to be remembered again.

S’iht joined the 14th Outpost crew and yelled out, “Let’s Stonehenge this place!”

A few seconds of your tone

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Guin adjusted her memory filter, choosing “Eidetic” for tonight’s star viewing.

Lee joined her in the star chamber.

Laying back on cushions, they smiled at each other, happy after an afternoon break spent dancing in the Martian gravity, never tiring, even after centuries of Earth time had passed, to spin and leap, tossing and catching hours on end.

Guin passed a memory to Lee.

“Do you remember the old mills in Huntsville?”

Lee breathed deeply, the pungent smell of raw, wet cotton filling his nostrils, his lungs feeling heavy with dust, sweat and cobwebs.

“Like it was yesterday.”

Guin nodded, watching in her thoughts the day the water tower was erected in the neighbourhood, every kid anxious to climb the tallest structure in town.

“And the day the water tower fell?”

“Which one?”

“Haha. Right!”

A shower of meteorites reflected in their eyes as they looked at each other.

They closed their forward facing eyes and stopped talking with their mouths, sharing memories more quickly through the ISSANet link they shared.

Just chilling but no longer on ice

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While these words are placed here, the one who is writing the words in sequence is part of the words so should “I” step out from behind them and write a personal blog entry or a third-person story?

I step out today as I slowly awaken from a months-long slumber, stirred awake by my dear friend Jenn a month or so ago.

When I stood over the kitchen sink looking into the backyard a little while ago, I wondered how I could thank Jenn for getting my attention.

Should I sing her praises?  After all, she is a person worth writing lyrics and melodies instead of short stories and poems.

Or should I celebrate our friendship by writing what I used to write before I fell asleep, knowing as I do that my six months of snoozing directly correlated to the moment when I stood outside a Hammersmith community center in London, waiting on my wife to finish a Ceroc dance when a white male in his 30s/40s approached me (he had eyed me a few times during the evening and I had simply nodded at him in what I thought was the typical heterosexual male recognition manner) and offered to perform a sex act with my in the loo?

I had maybe 5 or 10 seconds to consider telling my wife that I had to go to the bathroom and she wouldn’t have questioned anything.

Running through my thoughts was the tube schedule and how much time we had to get to the nearest subway station to catch a ride back back to South Kensington.

Plus my natural reticence, the slight paranoia that the guy’s offer could be a setup.  Or maybe he had an STD that he would fail to mention and I would get infected.

The look of anticipation on his face told me he feared my saying no so I chose to believe that his offer was truly genuine.

In the last second when I was deciding whether to commit to “what goes on during London holiday, stays in London,” my wife stepped up beside me and interrupted the nervous gaze I was sharing with the guy.

Therefore, I thanked him for the offer and told him I wasn’t interested, upon which he literally ran off.

If I hadn’t told my wife, she wouldn’t have known what just transpired.

But I’ve told myself all this in a blog already.

What I failed to mention was the connection of this event to my failure to move out into a house rental on my own when I thought my wife might be dying of heart failure just before our London trip.

Failure, failure, failure.

Most importantly, I lumped all of this together with my love for Jenn.  And not just Jenn, but the part of me that is unashamedly polyamorous, and how many times I’ve failed to show, as opposed to tell, Jenn how much I love her.

By admitting I love Jenn, I admit I love many more, such as the only woman whose body has no personal space between her and me — Michele.

Michele and I are happy dogs in heat when we’re together, including when my wife is there.  Being bisexual, too, Michele loves my wife.  Michele is the only woman I’ve ever loved with whom we can be in full embrace and talk about our spouses at the same time. Zero jealousy in either one of us.

So, when I didn’t take the free opportunity to demonstrate to myself and myself alone that I was truly bisexual with a stranger in London, I thought my life was over and if my life was over, there was no more Jenn, Michele or others in my life and all I was left with was the monastic life that I could have led had I chosen to give up sexual relations with another person at any point before I got married 30 years ago.

I returned home and focused on the life of an asexual aesthete, telling everyone about the moments in my London trip where I had felt the greatest epiphanies, in Newgrange and Westminster Abbey.

I also started masturbating a lot more and quit writing.

I won’t say that I hated myself but simply that I felt it was no longer necessary to care about the future, every moment felt the same as the previous moment which would be the same as the next moment, ad infinitum.

Not a bad thing, really.

In fact, for most of us that’s the daily truth, the FEELING that everything is the same when it truly isn’t.

It was in the tiny realisation that no two moments are exactly the same that I lived the last six months.

My hearing loss increased and the sense of smell decreased, worrisome signs of either depression, dementia, or both.

I wasn’t dead yet.

Meanwhile, the winds of society shifted ever so slightly, something I smelled when we were on our Rhine River cruise in December 2015 and reinforced during our Ireland/England trip in August 2016 (nothing like going out-of-country to get a clearer view of your national subculture, especially as globally loud as an American one).

When I stood face-to-face with the guy in Hammersmith I was ever so slightly aware that our encounter could be recorded and used against me in an overbearing ultraconservative government intent on making examples of citizens it deemed unworthy or who would not buckle under blackmail to get in line.

For you see, as a writer I think I am my own god and as my own god I believe I have an influence on others that outweighs evidence to the contrary.

The little pebbles I throw into the pond of life are not causing typhoons in the South China Sea.

Or are they?

What if I believed that words I had written months or years ago were part of the zeitgeist which understood our species was only going to establish permanent offworld colonies by depriving the peasant class of essential raw materials needed to build laboratories where the next great living things were going to be created from scratch, beings specifically created to live in space and on other celestial spheres?

And that despite my reservations about his sanity, the current U.S. President and his administration understood the same thing?

Would I be willing to sacrifice my personal desires to declare a permanent presence on Mars of Earth-based lifeforms fully successful by 6th May 2050?

Can I have both?

Jenn gives me the hope that I can.

I don’t know how. I’ve already tried and failed once.

“If at first you don’t succeed…”

My smartwatch reminds me I’ve been sitting for an hour and not exercising.

My future is alive again and I feel fine. Time to stop writing/talking and dance!