EcoSongs: April 2010

Cooper started the long walk up the rock steps to the cliff lab. He looks out across the ocean and says, "Another temporary home. I could never think of this place as different."
It happens again; the PTSD kicks in. So the great scientist looks out across the vast green sea, smug with his so-called education. So he now holds the esteemed title of lead scientist with his projected energizing manner.
It took close to four billion years for the genetic code to ravel up in this place and all that comes in is "temporary."

The lab base is an oversized fortress abandoned on the edge of a jungle. Remodeled on the inside, high tech, and of course paid for in full by the Consortium. The lab was immaculate, not in a Christian kind of way, more control freakish, but clean doesn't matter to Cooper; not now. He enters.

"Hello," Cooper says.
"Hello Dr Cooper." Suzi stays at her lab station, as if she were communicating with a space object near a black hole.

Cooper was being extra personable for a bespectacled scientist. These new digs made him easy going. Carter was already in the lab when Cooper unlocked the inner metal door.

"Suzie from Beijing came up here while you were gone," Carter told Cooper. "She's the one who interviewed for this job about five months ago," Cooper said.
"I remember her. Tall, thin, always carrying a red umbrella, rain or shine. Yeah, her complexion. She's worried about it. Pretty face. She said she's applied to a number of consortiums. She wants to work here."
"Because we're closer to Beijing?"
"No."
"No homesickness? A true woman of science."

Cooper opened a fresh stick of gum and began chewing. He considered himself a lucky man, never getting hooked on the pleasures of smoke.
"She says she's a scientist," Cooper said. "And really, there's no reason to disbelieve her. But a woman with those looks?" Cooper hesitated with a side glance. "I'm a fool to think women of science should all be Madam Curie. Has anyone else seen her transfer papers?"
"I don't think so," said Carter.
"May I see them?"
Carter stopped checking protein gels long enough to retrieve the document. . "Yeah, it's right here," he said.

Outpost#7

Cooper walks down the long stairs across the rock cliff above the lab complex, far below lies the Link Station (List).
"Another renovated oversized pill box out of our warlord past," he thinks
Dense tropical shrubbery sets the old structure into a natural camouflage against the rocky coastal terrain. He could smell the cool air of the beach below, and the ocean beyond. The view was an overload of multiple blues and greens in the midday sun. Then, in an instant, the ocean looked different. It has been, what, almost a year now, and the greens are a lighter tinge, a shade of yellow.
"Oxidation," he says.

Cooper arrives at the station and enters the front door with a single mind.
"How's the project?" A friendly girl's voice came from a screen.
Everyone here was either a scientist or a student of science. Anonymity was not easy at a science station such as this, though it had nothing but a motion activated cold screen (Macs). Cooper didn't mind, though. Everybody knew each other by link, things went smooth that way.
"It's OK," Cooper replied.
"What do you need, Dr. Cooper?"
"I need to log into the frame terminal at ComTrax."
"The array displays are down in that zone." She held her eyes there for him a little longer than usual.
A sensation rushed through Cooper. He knew that this wouldn't be easy. "I have to tell you something, and you must swear to me that you won't tell anyone."
A crooked smile came to Jamie's face."Sure, Dr. Cooper," she said.
Cooper looked her square in the eyes. "I've received transfer orders from a woman who has no record of ever being born."

Outpost 8next
Patrick Adams
Extrapolation Science Fiction -- The Outpost

Nature's Heaven
Florescent mists gather in the distance as parched granite dust clouds-from the volcanoes-pass silent to the south. Darkness settles.
The tigress rests on the mountain floor, a steamy setting of tropical thickets. Giant ferns dance nude against the wetness. Koa and Monkey Pod trees stand majestic, hopeful, now host to a silent audience, ghosts of millions of creatures who once lived here.
Suddenly, a presence is sensed in the banyan grove. The tigress discards her sleep as if instantly disrobing. A reddish gaze emerges in her eyes from deep fires. She comes out, an inspired Olympian given one chance to demonstrate her gifts. The focus of a gentle tactician in need. Moon sparkles the jungle floor through patches in the dense canopy. Her raw urge leaves no shadow against this night. Her eyes designed before glamour and gene therapy was ever invented by humans. Her sounds pure. A damp, dark place this, her nature's heaven lay, her only honest place.

Outpost9next

A heavy rain falls as tiny crystal marbles, the river is alive with hunger as gravity feeds her.
Cooper puts himself next to a window and closes his eyes hoping for the warmth of memory. He took a deep breath as he thought of his life, a life racing back to him now, like that river rushing outside.
Intelligent people don't like to kill. It's the prefrontal lobe that does the killing. The Army knows it. The problem is, the Army is guessing too. Scientists spend their entire careers trying to prove their guesses.
Cooper thought to himself, "Mystic research. People in fourth world laboratories are into that." He hoped that wasn't happening here at this military post.. He was well aware of the unseen forces. "Humans would love to have this jungle floor take on mystic powers," he thought.
There was a renewed interest in the recent discovery that anger and fear had nothing to do with the urge to kill. Pleasure before death, procreation before demise--psychologists had studied this for centuries--but his were primal thoughts, ones hoping the tigress shows again.
He is not given to pandering wild thoughts, but can't help being drawn to her aura. The tigress shows no fear, her silence sends Cooper deeper into the caverns of his own mind. This wasn't a mere trickling of information here. He would go after this data like it were an addiction, But then again,Cooper didn't want this to look like a bunch of scientific mumbo-jumbo. He had his own plan.

OUTPOST 10
The Horizon Event Reader (HER) program was operational when he got back.
Suzi flashes a smile and glances up. She says, "Are you back already? I'd wished to have these scans done by now." Cooper does not speak, at least not to Suzi. He listens to the sound of his own thoughts.
Cooper turns to Suzi, "You can stop working on that." She was glad to see Cooper.They look at each other across the opening.
"This place is always so quiet," Suzie says, and as she speaks she appears aware of her own words, their natural timbre. He's only my programmer, she thinks, but then again, after this amount of scanning, after all the hours of raw data, she wants to elicit in Cooper a special appreciation. She wants him to think, "This one's really on task, isn't it?"
Cooper is not feeling the proper mood right now, and there is no changing that, but at least by the end of this conversation he'd have gotten a few straight answers. He follows his instinct as he approaches Suzi, and as he passes the window that views the distant jungle below he feels the urge, briefly, to look, as if to gain a glimpse of the tigress. But he stays focused. Raising his head, he enters Suzi's corner lab zone. Suzi will be his window, his design, his slice of the natural world beyond human, the space where desert intelligence meets rain forest beauty.
He touches Suzi, gently, on the shoulder.

Outpost 11next
Carter picks up his gun from the lab bench, spins it Old West style. He says,
"Do you know this lab building is right over the top of an ancient burial ground?"
"Right, I recall." Cooper prefers keeping these thoughts to himself. The deep secrets that remain hidden in burial grounds etch Cooper's face and remind Carter of an old gunfighter, and he gets the feeling of a gunslinger readying, steady in stare and grip,for a real life gunfight.
He says, "There is something out there, I think. And it walks at night.
"Out there, Carter? And walks?
"We haven't been in the forest on the mountain behind the lab station at night, ever. I'd rather keep the noise pollution down, it would kill the data."
"Tracks on the coast mean there is something up there, I don't have to go on the mountain to know that."
Cooper's look became serious. "You're a plant, aren't you?"
"No, I'm human."
"Don't get cute with me. You've been placed here to test my will, haven't you?"
Carter was doing some quick thinking for being half a computer.
"I want you to tell me the truth. The government is running their own little experiment here, aren't they... American and Chinese governments are run by the same people, aren't they?"
Cooper was looking for a clue in Carter's eyes. He found nothing there.

Next

"Don't hold this against me, Cooper." Suzi says.
"What is it?"
"Sorry, I seem to have forgot you're a scientist. The last time you asked for government data, I was thinking something else, about remembering the government programmers. And i do remember those programmers. I seem to have drifted."
"The programmers haven't arrived yet."
"I get it. Please believe me, I get it. But, you know, I feel as if I drifted forward, as well. I have a clear memory of programming events that haven't happened yet. I remember their codes as if it were yesterday."
"Did they install the Founding Fathers program?"
"How do you know of that/ Of course they did."
"And did your hard drive receive it?"
"I remember taking the program. But it's possible I only planned to take it." Have you noticed any government programs iter mixed with the Biodata?"
"I haven't noticed any yet."
"Then I guess I figured a way to store it with the Physicsdata. Government programs don't really mean anything, right?"
"This government dats matters a lot, Suzi
She says,"I'm not sue I can handle it, Cooper."
"Handle what?"
"Being fast and articulate around humans. My memory places me in the center of government programmers. My biodata wavers with uncertainties, a little biorobot accepting powerful government instructions."
"Suzi, you don't need to be fat and important if you don't want to.
"Yes I do. I won this assignment to this outpost. You must know I'm here because of my speed, for being fast, not intelligent.
"Stop. You know this assignment has the markings of your knowledge. Your knowledge of the beginning and ending of the evolutionary trail."
Suzi stared at Cooper.

.
you don't know government mentality. Even the Founding American Fathers only wanted freedom for themselves, no one else. Yes, this Outpost is the perfect lab bench for the government. Don't you see? Life on earth started in these rain forests and the most intelligent humans work here. It's the beginning and end of the evolutionary trail.

Start

Cooper pulls close to the window, views the deep jungle. he thinks of his life, a scientist's dream, a window into the evolution of intelligence itself. His memories are, clearly, a powerful possession--for simple reasons, they stay with him, untouched by jungles. With each passing moment distant pictures of a wife, a family, capture a deeper hold on his thoughts.
"You don't believe they sent us here to find antibodies, do you?"
"Yes, I am simply a Biobot so I must believe that."
Cooper turns his eyes toward the jungle again, through the cool wet window. His memories seem to be shaking him now. Cooper may be at the beginning of a new approach here, as if there were now some real danger. A danger like no other, beyond beauty and intelligence itself, beyond the craft of logic he perceives in Suzi. The feeling that survival itself has the need for Cooper's expertise.
Cooper turns back and says, "I trust you. You are an intelligent woman, artificial or no."
Suzi's eyes showed nothing, and they showed everything.

You have no wife, no family. Most women bore you. You can only be intrigued by the most perfectly programmed computer."
"You?"
"Yes, me."
Cooper remembered the first time he lay eyes on Suzie. It was her beauty in the beginning. And her intelligence that kept him there.
"You yourself have said your boss is no scientist. He's a politician," Suzie said.
"I need your honest word on this, Suzie."
"I'm a robot."
Listening to Suzie, Cooper was intrigued. Her logic and insight had a craft. Her words were art in motion. The joy of logic.
"I trust you. You are an intelligent woman, artificial or no."
"What do you want from me?"
"Honesty. The truth. The same honesty I get from the tigress."
Suzie never turned red. She doesn't feel resentment. Suzie's eyes showed nothing and they showed everything.

Next
Outpost 11
Tigress never spun deception. She never had visions of God. She wasn't concerned about burning in hell. There was no faking it, no cynicism.

Dr. Cooper looks into his computer screen with solid, composed expectation. He feels, for the moment, like a wild-eyed college student at the computer lounge. His reverie vanisheshes; it is improbable to feel curiously comfortable with Suzie--she's beautiful, womanly, soft and naive about her intelligence, a selection of new generation of computers scientists and pysisists would say, She has what it takes to save the human race, she does. The science world already, secretly, has an odd feeling being closely involved with her brand of artificial intelligence. Cooper looks out the window, thinks again of his college days. He does good science, by accident; he plays god with his genetics; he runs his gels of the genetic code, far from the misery, hunger, far from the everyday stresses. He does his work. Who cares if he is neither fast nor intelligent.
"Hey," he says to Suzi. He is a littleshocked at his urge to get Suzi to speak.
"Yes," Suzi says.
"Did you get the dats? Did it come in on time?"
Suzi sits perfectly still, for a moment, as if looking nowhere. She thinks to herself. She sits at her station the way one would sit on a pew during church service.
She says, "I have to search the augmented reality maps for a few more days."
"What happened?"
"I'm not sure exactly. I have some kind of interference program."
"Damn."
"It's crept in, I think. My maternal codes."
"What?"
"My brain. I have to give myself a look."
"How?"
"I'm not sure---some impoverished childhood teacher fantasy code. ComTrax ordered it. I need you to stay silent on this."
"OK. What did they want?"
"It's only that I needed to scan it, and they need for me to tell them what I find, truthfully. It may be--what the problem has been all along. About getting the data"
"Then," Cooper says. "Then they will help you get back on task."
"They say they will make that decision. They say they want to hear my findings first."
Cooper looks at Suzi, who does not speak again.
"You're a robot. You didn't have a childhood," he says.

Cooper's mind raced to his college days. His friends always accused him of playing God with his genetics. Messing around with the genetic code.
Suzie broke her silence. "What do you want?" she asked.
"I want a normal life. A wife, children. Is that too much to ask?"
"I can't give you children, but I am somebody to talk to. And I like the way you get things done."
Truthfully, that's all Cooper really needed, someone to talk to. In fact, Suzie was the first woman he'd been able to talk to in years.
"I didn't have an impoverished childhood with teachers eliminating my fantasies in life," Suzie said.
"You're a robot. You didn't have a childhood."

next
Cooper gives Suzi a salt water injection. "You look godd today," he says.
Suzi's silicon face has always been captured by her beauty: the rounded high cheekbones and bright wide eyes; the shiney hair, soft textures of her skin. She was designed to work with young scientists, never to be aged by the passage of time.
"Thank you," Suzi says.
"It seems like you are a little disinterested."
"You know, just because I am a robot, I don't always do what I've been told."
"Really."
"Even Pavlov couldn't brainwash every one of his dogs. Some he had to castrate to get them to do what he wanted."
"Excuse me?"
"Never mind."
Cooper is shocked at Suzie's apparent sudden relaxation of censorship. But he wasn't ready for her next suggestion.
"Would you take me to church in the village this Sunday?"
"Why?"
"Because I want to know why humans go to church."
"I can tell you why. They stop wanting to listen to each other, only to God."
Suzie said nothing.

Outpost#4

Nature at night smells different. It's a helpless thrill, deep down, nobody can help you. There are no awards when this battle is over--just the right to continue

Tigress appears from the shadows now. A renewed encounter, the worthy huntress. Forgotten magic responding as if to evoke religion. Beauty in pure natural motion, a ritual dance of sweet hate-- a reassuring killer instinct.

Cooper checks his weapon and thinks,"Crosshairs optical instruments used for astronomy and surveying." He locks on the tigress, intersecting lines in the shape of a cross.
"... who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge..."
He pulls the trigger.

Her ferocity was a deep contrast to the darkness of the jungle. She wouldn't have been complete without this. Her eyes held his. So young, yet ancient in her moves, holding her youth as a clever disguise.
Cooper pulls the weapon up again to aim. The inscriptions faint and subtle in raised lettering near the end of the stock number. He feels the glow of tritium, that radioactive form of hydrogen creating a light that helps.
...let light shine out of darkness,' ... give us the light of the knowledge of the glory...
He shoots again.

Cooper's mind wanders momentarily. Telescopic sights in the shape of a cross, a device associated with crosshairs. Cooper thinks of motion pictures and the media, crosshairs as a dramatic device. His memory floods back now--telescopes for polar alignment with a reticle that indicates the position of Polaris relative to the north celestial pole. Telescopes for precise measurements with filar micrometer as reticle; adjusted by the operator to measure angular distances between stars.
..."My goodness, and my fortress; my high tower, and my deliverer; my shield, and he in whom I trust; who subdueth my people under me."

Cooper's scanners click in automatically, "for aiming telescopes, reflex sights are used in conjunction with a telescope with a crosshair reticle. The reflex sight makes aiming the telescope on a Astronomical object or a region of the sky instant. Constellation Reticulum is designated to recognize the reticle and its contributions to astronomy."
..."blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight."

Tigress lives here. Cooper was part of it now, coaxed on by her dominance, as if finalist in a contest. A face-off with nature herself. This one moment in time, no oppressors or victors yet. Raw power the way it was intended to be. Her teeth, her only jewelry. Her smell pure, as if the jungle floor itself.

Cooper locks his weapon in again for discharge. "...blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.

Evolutionary companions don't want to be any stronger or less strong than they are at this moment. He was here for the same reason she was. ..."be not that far from me, for trouble is near; haste Thee to help me.
..I trust in thee: let me not be ashamed, let not mine enemies triumph over me."

Her ferocity was a deep contrast to the darkness of the jungle. She wouldn't have been complete without this. Her eyes held his. So young, yet ancient in her moves, holding her youth as a clever disguise.
..."whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

Recognition emerges. Something in her eyes. She has the primitive wild gene, the one lost in a century of cloning. The xEVEo project.
Cooper locks his weapon in for one final shot. "Every living substance that I have made will I destroy,,,"

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