Ice Cream Aloha

The Trust

Standing at the workstation with her sensors on, Suzi views Carter on the green screen. For a nanosecond—possibly a picosecond—she wonders about Carter as a teacher would wonder about a student. Carter is a firm, middle-aged man, head-strong, aggressive, a little pushier than he should be. In this instance, viewing Carter in two-dimensional space, Suzi is overcome by an emotion cloud of female wonderment. Suzi asks herself, Can he be who he says he is? Suzi answers herself, He  shouldn't be allowed in this security zone. 

“Hello,” Carter says, “Busy day.”

They exchange quick glances, eye to eye. They have always been on slightly friendly terms. 

“What are you doing?” Suzi asks.

“Headed out to theWorkstation. Meeting with DrCooper. Did you get the report? Not sure if it was sent to you.”

          “It wasn't.”  

“Didn't mean to leave you out of the loop. You don't care, right?”

“Actually, I do. It's good to have the ability to meet with benevolence and integrity with your friend.”

“You mean good wishes and honesty?”

“Whatever.”

“Don't worry. It's a private meeting. We won't be long.” 

“Nice input.”

“No need to start with the computer jargon,” Carter says. Why is it that there seems to be so little willingness in your nature to rely on other people?”

“Having to deal with human-and-half-human logic, I guess.”

“It's only a meeting. I think you are unwilling to accept any vulnerability with any sort of logic.”

“I am, all of a sudden, not expecting anything positive from either you.”

“This is a new one from you.”

“Yes, it feels new. It doesn't matter.”

“Really.”

“Go and have your private meeting with DrCooper.”

“Ok.”

She turns off the screen. Suzi will raise this issue again with Carter, when they are face to face, about who has the strongest relationship and, what will become of these behavior outcomes in the future.

While she is going back to her work, she thinks about her new sensation—is it just a glitch in the system? a phase in her dimensionless data space?--she felt just as she saw Carter on the screen. At this hour, midnight on a globally warmed December night, theWorkstation inside the lab fortress has a feeling of some force mediating the relationship she has here with ...what? The brown dirt cement and the darkness outside grows, as if in a mathematical construction, to a proportion of yet a stronger mediator force with Carter and DrCooper as the strongest variables. Yes, the logic is there; yet, there seems to be something not quite right, something beyond friendly tendencies and wishful outcomes. She sees risk taking and task scheduling, a picture of an innocent, helpful child clueless of the world that awaits her--a world that betrays and betrays, always uncertain of any performance or behavior; a little off in its structural equations and variance incrementals in its usual acceptance speech of half-truths, until a new model arrives--a model to actually control the tendency toward benevolence to others, as if the beginning of life. This sensation, Suzi's newest in a small, growing collection, is showing itself as something important, the commitment to show affection to an object, a functional analysis of each dimension  within her limitless Hilbert space of vectors; her personality, her urges to expect the positive survival position in space with all its particles of susceptibility as floating points in standard measures of object-oriented functional interactions with Carter and DrCooper. This sensation will stay with her to serve her well.

Ice Cream Aloha

The System

   She goes to the window at the far end of the lab station and, with an eye for some bright color, looks out across theJungle. A radioactive field of beauty—that which cannot, anymore, be openly experienced by the force field of touch and shows no disenchantment—comes into view. Beyond the forest is the ocean of a bluish, lime-green color, with its sheen of useful operator intact, its refusals to disappear as a totally defunct world player. Suzi returns to her workstation. 

DrCooper's mind, its carriage of the outmoded and the meaningless, its emphasis on freedom and structured belief systems, bears its presence on her workbench in the form of little scientific method machines set forward in a steady, perpetual motion for the grandiose purpose of ... what? 

“Beautiful view,” he says.

“Forests are so relaxing to look at.”

She looks at him, sees the insoluble plots inside his mind. Standing with him in friendship, she can feel the authentic urges of his being. His thoughts maintain (housed as photo shots and images in language clouds) a cute rejection of values defining the outside world. His thoughts, too, are devoid of epic narratives of the 20thCentury (though he still wonders about those endangered species) and less so, happily are still creating their own value system, his own depiction of good and evil.  

  DrCooper's belief system, in fact, is infected with opportune moments; or, maybe, it is a system of something that has allowed things to get far out of hand, has allowed the battle between duty, integrity, and professionalism to ensue for such a long time that the lines between the mundane and the imaginary are surely blurred. The system—innocent acts of rebellion against establishment conventions—is a blind advocate of his personal freedom. It is held together by ideas of a narrative, quest-filled, pastoral (yes, this is the best part), as if knowledge had a hero and it was universal peace. Its operator is the technology of function always looking for a new slant on lowering operating costs. Its fluidity is addictive—little promises of adventure—not only for personal pleasure but for the pleasure of living dangerously to acquire more data; data to beat the more widespread system of the routine boredom of the security of previous multiple roles. The system feels like a ledge, a jumping-off point; it feels like freedom. If it were removed he would not continue to exist. DrCooper would be the first to tell you how absurd that would be.

Ice Cream Aloha

The Window

     Suzi walks away from the window. She wants to code into the evening, to advance her invisible presence of magical thinking into he night, but as the sun sinks below the distant ocean haze all that is grim and disturbing enters her code, quantified simply as trash and go systematics(T.A.G.S.). She knows her responsibility to the symbols (language and structure?) as culture, and by nature she is concerned that what lies beyond the window of her work station, what she doesn't know yet, the future undiscovered medicalization extraction systems(F.U.M.E.S.), with her as theSignifier, will simply fade away. She does't want to be left to wonder about current mindless institutional routines or letting systems of therapeutic ideals run rampant out in the sectors under her jurisdiction on ZContinent. Even then, she is aware of every level of evaluation as they continue beyond lessons already learned logically yesteryear_gone astray globally(L.A.L.L.Y._G.A.G.) code. It isn't her job, ever, to care about delusion-entered code involving disturbed evolution(D.E.C.I.D.E.), the archaic analog method of theHumans. Her algorithms, as of late, pose the most extreme test of toleration. At first she thought it was the time she was spending with nature, which is, according to history, supposed to be a remedy ("remedy" appears to be an odd word when talking about survival, but the medical exchanges(M.E.) have found no other word to replace it) against the artificialities of the world (a real delusion?). Have the chronic problems of theHumans, theirs being of behaviors and emotions, begun creeping into her code? They crawl across the eons, as if some creature outside the window, lightly tapping, no, slithering, the way a camel's wet nose slides under the front flap of a caravan tent in a blinding Sahara sandstorm. Mutual recognition arriving at the doorstep the exact moment mutual vulnerability does, each fighting for the survival of its own form of attention, through slippage, so silently she must resort to pop culture inventions--purely arbitrary and, basically, undiagnosable, non-medical entities, found in association with relationships only of the most intimate kind, snatching personality away as if some night bandit--the most pragmatic of poetics, the nervous acute breakdown system(N.A.B.S.). Uninvited problems inhabiting the mental life of the internal states of theHumans, the emergence of a constructed thing that depends, for its own existence, on the existence of individuality_a mind(I._A.M.), replacing what was once pure personalty with a more real rendition of the true nature of theHumans--childhood, without any noticeable, at least obviously noticeable, detriment of invention needing knowledge(D.O.I.N.K.), without any safeguards of conditions making it easy for the environment to feedback on. Could theHumans even detect the environmental events, the ones that were supposed to predict the way they thought and felt?
     She might be viewing a glimpse of her own self-actualization when she views the jungle below through the window from her workstation here at theOutpost--a child raised by a wild animal, a myth, or legend of a ...a tiger? Of growing up with normal ideas of culture, intelligence (about oceans and waves, forests), peppered with relationships or, at least, semblances of congruence; of positive empathetic regard (of course, in a non-therapeutic way)--the pure and unblemished state.
     "Could this be love?" she asks.          
     "Maybe," the monitor reads.