A cause for concern

A well worn science fiction trope is humanity stumbling on to a higher intelligence.  By definition, it’s tricky to write, and very often we end up concocting aliens with super-human powers, rather than intelligence that somehow operates on a whole extra dimension.  What would that even look like?  Think if ants were to be able to do sudoku, or a gecko plot a political campaign.  What would a similar leap be for us?

Well, yesterday, I think I may have stumbled on an insight.

I turned from reviewing coverage of my team’s galling 96th minute defeat to a relegation rival to reading that global warming is melting the arctic permafrost, causing it to release carbon dioxide, increasing the rate of global warming and therefore defrosting of the poles, in a spiralling nightmare equivalent, in greenhouse gas emission terms, to dropping another China on to the planet.

Objectively, I knew these issues were of such vastly different scales that no sane and sentient intelligence could react to them the same way.  But I couldn’t help but do exactly that.  It’s hardwired, no doubt down to still, biologically, needing to assume there's a sabre-toothed tiger hiding behind the postbox until disproved.  And, I suspect, it may lead to the ultimate destruction of the species.

A higher intelligence would give each of those two scenarios the weight they deserve, treat them intuitively as vastly, cosmically different.  But not me, not this homo sapien - and, I would suggest, not the vast majority of homo sapiens.

I mentioned it to the good lady wife, who said her main concern was the eczema on her elbow.  ‘Nuff said.

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2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.