IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016 - 62

FICTION

Joe Carvalko

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the
idea that anything is possible.
-Ray Bradbury, Los Angeles
Times, Aug. 9, 1976.
ello out there, communitarian Vladi
Sarouk coming to
you from Cektop  4.
Today's guest is
Helen Mensa, a leading advocate for
parents, like herself, trying to locate
children locked behind firewalls that
techno-laws have made impossible
to penetrate. She is also one of our
oldest living witnesses to what life
was like before and after the cataclysm of the twenty-first century,
and the Great Inflection that led to
the separation between many relatives and friends.
"Recently, on Cektop 5's bulletin,
she posted, 'As a child, I imagined I
might fly across the Southern Gulf
like the primordial monarch, but in
time came to understand that only
animals that adapted form, albeit
over the millennia, were permitted
to cross. Evolving form is nature's
solution to conforming complex
organisms to diverse environments.
We fought hard, determined to
endure in this intricate space called
earth, but we've forgotten what we
left behind to survive on a planet left
in ruins by our forefathers.'
"Helen, few of our listeners have
heard about how our ancestors

H

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2618659
Date of publication: 12 December 2016

62

surrounded by majestic peaks
separated by emerald green valleys. A place I'd spot hawks soaring
over cliffs searching for their next
meal. A place of streams and pine
forests, rock faces, where springs
jettisoned into narrow crevasses.
In the final throes of winter, snow
melted in the higher elevations recreating rivers, overflowing into the
arroyos, spawning new cacti, columbines, and orchids. Branches
carried cocoons borne of rootless
caterpillars, vessels for the emergent kaleidoscopic butterflies.
Where ancient tributaries overflowed their banks, where cougars,
rattlesnakes, and coyotes, came to
sip upon the waters. All this wildlife now extinct."
"You describe a world before the
meltdown, a world lost largely by our
obsession with unclean energy."
"Yes. And when we faced annihilation, we had only one option. Allow
technology into the deepest recesses of our body."
"Before we get to that, we'd be
interested in hearing what your configuration was growing up."

wikimedia/jay odin

"

Crossing the
Evolutionary Gap

dealt with the coincident forces of
a deteriorating environment and a
technological outburst that permitted our eventual adaptation, primarily through in-the-body devices and
genomic alteration. And only a few,
such as yourself, lived through the
meltdown of the 2080s. What was
the world like, before then?"
"Thank you Mr. Sarouk, my pleasure to link up. Before the catastrophe, I lived in the Rocky Mountains,
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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DECEmber 2016



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