FAST FICTION #23: Upstream - part 1

The river turned sluggish on the fourth day, becoming choked with debris, logs and clumps of biomass that had gotten tangled into mats further up in the rapids, and were now hurtling toward the small research boat. Cordova, standing on the cabin roof, got out his binoculars and turned them upriver, trying to see if the way got clearer up ahead. As far as he could see, it didn't. Marie came up next to him, watching the crew -- most of them hired hands from the port -- standing at the prow of the boat. They used big poles to push aside the floating chunks of forest as they came. The boat kept pushing through this semi-cleared channel, but the pilot had dialed down the throttle to prevent running into anything at a damaging speed.

"Terrazas says that he's never seen anything like this," Marie said.

"Well, he ought to know," Cordova said, taking his binoculars down, but still looking ahead. He didn't want to look at her. If Terrazas was concerned, with more than twenty years navigation experience than anyone else on the boat, then he supposed they should be too.

"How far away do you think we are?" Marie said. "And is the way going to get harder the closer we get?"

Cordova answered with a terse, "Two more days, at this rate. And probably."

Marie crossed her arms, and he could feel her stern look without turning to her. "Are we even sure that we're going to know what we're looking for when we find it?"

"We'll know. Something that causes this much damage will be obvious." There were other signs, too. The jungle sounds that usually filled the air had started to fade, which meant that they were getting closer to the center of -- whatever this was. And maybe he was imagining it, but the trees seemed to be leaning the slightest bit downstream, opposite the direction the boat was traveling.

"I'm going to say it again," Marie said, "but we're really not equipped for this kind of thing. All our equipment was designed for weather data, and this--" she swept a hand at the thickening river ahead of them, "--definitely isn't weather related."

Cordova sighed, finally turned to her. "I agree with you. The only advantage we have is that we'll be able to get to the site before any other military presence can get feet on the ground. And to the bosses, that means something."

"Well, I don't like it," she muttered. "We have no idea what we're getting into. We could be heading toward a radiation-heavy site, or a volcano that could go off again..."

Cordova interrupted her. "No evidence points to that. That's the reason why the government called us to check it out first. We've got our radiation detectors running, and if this is some sort of missile attack gone astray, that's important information to have."

Marie just looked at him for a moment, then swatted at a persistent, noisy fly that was circling her ponytail. "I'm going to take a shift on the prow," she finally huffed, and went down to relieve one of the tired men on the bow.

Cordova watched her as she stepped up beside one, put her hand on his shoulder, and took the pole he was using to push debris out of their path. He wondered when -- and if -- he should tell her, what he suspected, and what the commander he had spoken to had suggested to him when they were taken away from their weather station monitoring to undertake this mission.

He raised his binoculars up again, and was stunned with what he saw when he scanned the horizon. There, clearly rising out of the mist in the distance, was a small clump of tall buildings. He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and checked again. Yes, there they were. They had to be some kind of mirage in this green wilderness. But they didn't shimmer, didn't move, just became steadily clearer the closer they crept toward it.

He waited until he was absolutely sure that his eyes hadn't deceived him before calling Marie up to verify what he was looking at. They were the highest personnel on the boat, so no one could see it from the lower deck, even if they hadn't been preoccupied with clearing away the junk below that threatened to impede their progress. He didn't speak when she responded to his call, did nothing to allay the sense of annoyance in her eyes when she came up from her work to stand beside him. He just handed her the binoculars. He waited patiently while she held them to her eyes, followed his pointing finger, lowered the lenses, raised them again, lowered them again.

"What the hell is that?" she finally asked.

"It's the impact site," he said.

Marie stood silent for a few moments. "I thought this kind of debris was most likely caused by a volcanic eruption, but since there was no ash, I thought it might have been a meteorite."

"That's what I thought too," Cordova said flatly. "But this is... something different".

"How soon until we get to it?" Marie asked.

"The river hasn't stopped flowing, so it's not blocking the river."

"Wait," Marie said, "you think this thing just appeared there?"

"I don't know," Cordova said. "I think anything we guess is going to be proven wrong tomorrow." Marie nodded. At the rate they were moving upstream, they wouldn't get to those distant man-made peaks until the next day.

By nightfall, the whole crew knew about what was ahead of them. Cordova had spoken to each of them separately, slowly and calmly, and as night fell, he was glad he had. There were sounds and a few lights from over there, some of which might have been shouts. Cordova also thought he might have heard gunfire. Some of the buildings had fires burning on their roofs, and a bigger fire he couldn't see the source of underneath that might be a whole small building going up. Engines could be heard, and even the blat of a few truck horns. As fascinating as it was to watch and listen to the steadily-growing incongruity, he forced himself to bed early. He suspected he would need all the energy he had.

They arrived at the point of the river closest to the city the next morning before noon. They knew they were getting closer because the trees' tilt -- which he hadn't imagined after all -- grew progressively more pronounced, until they found they had to hug the right bank of the river to avoid the low-hanging branches from their left. He ordered the crew to continue upstream, drawing abreast of the city, until he perceived the trees to be leaning upstream along with them, figuring that that would mean that they had just passed the closest point they were going to get to the city. He ordered the captain to park as close to the left bank as they could, once they found a spot relatively clear of bent trees.

He and Marie, carrying their packs full of supplies, jumped off onto solid ground and began to pick their way forward, now able to see several of the tallest buildings over the lowering treetops. They proceeded without speaking, both excited and frightened in equal measure. Periodically, he would close his eyes as they reached a relatively clear stretch of ground, and the closer he got, the more he could hear the unmistakable sounds of a city. It was subtly different, though; more human voices, less traffic.

It was during one of these periods of self-imposed blindness that Marie caught his arm, holding him back. He stopped and opened his eyes. They had finally reached the point where the forest had been flattened enough that their heads were sticking out over the top of the foliage. In front of them lay about a hundred yards of utterly flattened ground, and beyond that, a city on a pedestal. It took him a while to realize what he was seeing. Being a scientist above all other things, two words stood out in his head like neon: “core sample”.

He was looking at an excised section of a city, a cylindrical piece that started at about fifteen feet below street level and ended somewhere above the top of the highest building, as if it had been and dropped there. The force of such a weight being landing on a swath of virgin forest, he imagined, would force so much air out from under it that it would cause the arboreal devastation in all directions, smothering trees and clogging river with blown debris. The most amazing part of the excision -- if he was thinking about this correctly -- was how it failed to take human geometry into account. The edge of the sample was a perfect circle, judging by the smooth way it curved away from him and Marie in both directions, one that sliced through buildings regardless of how they were arranged. In fact, he could see at least two places around the half of the circle visible to him where buildings had been clipped so thinly that they had collapsed, falling away from the center and off the elevated disc, crushing even more jungle floor. He imagined there were just as many that had fallen inward, which might account for the random firelight he had seen the night before.

The several yards of underground that was exposed were riddled with pipes of all sizes, huge mouth-like storm drains and smaller utility pipes as well. Many had thin streams of brackish water still flowing out of them, turning the ground surrounding the base into a swampy morass. There were more than a few overturned cars in this mire below spots where surface streets ended, implying that the displacement had happened so quickly that they did not have time to realize that the street before them didn't continue, but ended in a sheer drop to the jungle floor.

"Hey!" a voice called. It had a strange tone to it, both echoing and muffled at the same time.

Marie pointed up to the edge of the street that ended closest to where they stood. A man was standing up there, holding an imposing-looking rifle against his hip.

Cordova raised a hand and waved it over his head. Marie grabbed for it, as if to prevent the gesture, but either thought better of it or realized the damage had been done, and let him do it. "Hello!" he called as he waved.

The man with the rifle placed his other hand on the butt of it, but still didn't point it in his direction. "Where are you from?"

Cordova stepped forward, far enough that the flattened trees and undergrowth only came up to his knees. "We're scientists. We were exploring the river when we spotted you in the distance." If Marie minded that he was bending the truth, she didn't seem to mind. "How long have you been here?"

The man with the rifle looked behind him, but from this low angle Cordova couldn't tell what he was looking at. "This is the third day," he said. "None of us knows what happened. We just appeared here."

"You were carried and dropped?" Marie asked, addressing the sentry for the first time.

"Not carried, just dropped. We estimate we appeared about ten feet off the ground, then fell. We're shaken up pretty bad, but we're trying to pool resources and keep order."

"Is there a leader we can talk to?" Cordova asked.

The sentry considered his answer for a moment, then said, "The mayor's residence was outside the circle, so we're trying to figure out that part too."

"Is there a way for us to come up?" Cordova asked. "We'd like to help, if we can."

The sentry looked behind himself again, nervously this time, and looked back down at them. "We haven't really left the circle yet, but we know we'll have to eventually. Hang on a minute." The man disappeared without waiting for an answer from either of them.

When he left, Marie began to wonder. "What city *is* this?" she asked.

"I don't recognize any of the buildings." Cordova shook his head. "I'm just glad they speak English. But look at the cars."

She followed his pointing finger at the smashed cars that had fallen off the edge of the city circle. She didn't know cars very well, but there were a few that bore strange design elements that she hadn't seen before. They were sleek, curved in ways she wasn't used to seeing. "What does that mean?" she asked.

Cordova shrugged. "Maybe nothing. But this looks like an American city to me. The only trouble is, I don't know any of these car models. They look somewhat... futuristic, don't you think?"

Marie squinted at them, wishing she had paid more attention to car design. Or that they had a chance to look at specimens that were more intact. When she looked too close, she began to realize that the cars she was looking at were gruesomely occupied. Those who had been driving the cars when they plummeted and crashed were, for the most part, still visible inside the vehicles. She turned away. "God," she muttered.

The man with the rifle reappeared, this time flanked by a half-dozen more people. They were unarmed, and their dress ran the gamut from t-shirt and cutoffs to business suits, all similarly scuffed and askew. "Hey!" the sentry called again. Cordova and Marie looked up to him. "We're working on a ladder for you," he said. "Do you have a radio down there? We have a few intact towers, but don't seem to be getting any bars up here."

Cordova had no idea what the man was talking about. "We have a radio in our boat, but we're too far inland to call anyone. We'd have to travel at least two days downstream before we can call the coast."

The man looked perplexed. "Which coast?" he asked.

When Cordova said, “Columbian, of course," a murmur went through the elevated crowd. Clearly, this was not an answer they had expected.

They turned and talked to each other in hushed tones, although they needn't have; nothing less than a hailing call could be heard over the distance between them and Cordova and Marie.

"Are you saying," the sentry called, making sure to speak over the rising voices behind him, "that we're in Columbia?"

"That's right," Cordova answered. "Where were you expecting?" He wasn't mocking him, he just wanted to know.

Marie jumped in, fearing they would misunderstand his tone, "We're guessing that you're American, yes?"

The sentry seemed a little reluctant to talk to Marie, noting her accent. "Yes. That's right."

"What city?" she asked.

The sentry turned and spoke to his cohorts behind her, and in lieu of an answer, he called down, "Hold on," he said. "We're getting the ladder now." The group moved away from the edge, at least far enough that Cordova and Marie couldn't see them anymore.

“You're going to spook them," Marie said. "Please be careful. You can't convey tone across this distance."

"Don't worry," Cordova said. "These are my countrymen. We understand each other."

At that moment, the group reappeared at the edge of the city. Now they were all armed, the barrels of rifles, shotguns and pistols alike trained on them. The sentry kicked a bundle off the edge of the street, and it unfurled into a chain-and-plank safety ladder on the way down, its end snapping just two feet off the ground and waving in the still air. "Come up, please,” he said. “The woman first."

The Alien Sequel That Never Will Be

Alien fever is starting up again. After proving that he can handle sci-fi in new and inventive ways with District 9, Elysium and Chappie, South African director Neill Blomkamp has set his sights on revitalizing the Alien franchise -- and if Hollywood is going to continue chasing its own tail in its pursuit of franchises, it just might kick off a Marvelesque universe that incorporates Predators and Prometheii (?) alike.

That being said, we're starting to see some pre-visualization sketches coming out for what will be Alien 5, and I'll be damned if they don't look sorta familiar. Because, you see, back in the 1990s, when the independent film boom was bringing new visionaries to the screens of America -- a torch that has since been passed to cable television -- I thought I had a new take on the Alien idea, fueled by my love/hate relationship with the end-of-the-world fever-dream that was David Fincher's Alien3.

I felt that some wrongs had to be righted, the worst of which being that the beloved side characters who survived Aliens deserved better than being killed in their sleep at the top of part three. I believed that the future of the Alien franchise hinged on three basic questions:

1) What if Alien3 really were some kind of dream? Could I finagle a "take-back" that made sense in the arc of the whole series?
2) Could an android feasibly be a host for an alien embryo? And what would the resulting creature look like?
3) The teaser trailer for Alien3 featured a giant Alien egg floating above the Earth... what if that original idea (later scrapped for a setting on a prison planet) was followed through?

With these thoughts in my head, I started visualizing my own version, one that wouldn't have to involve Sigourney Weaver if she wasn't game to reappear (although for Blomkamp, she apparently is). In the interest of testing my precognitive abilities against that far-away release date, I submit my treatment here for your approval:

---

It begins with Rebecca "Newt" Jorden, now grown up. She lies on a dark hillside on Earth, looking up at the stars and imagining that Ripley is singing "You Are My Lucky Star" to her. A shooting star streaks across the sky, followed quickly by another. And another. Soon there are dozens of them, drawing lines in the sky, lines that begin to take the form of an enormous Alien head, bending down toward her and opening its jaws, as if it intends to swallow the Earth whole...

Rebecca wakes up; she hadn't realized she nodded off while lying on the hillside. She goes back into the farmhouse where she lives with her grandparents and quarrels with them. She still believes that the world is in danger, while they think that she is still suffering from the trauma she endured as a child in the doomed colony of Hadley's Hope on LV-426.

They have cause to worry, too. When Newt and Ripley arrived back on Earth, they spent the next five years trying to evade the law and the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It ended with a standoff situation, Ripley finally giving up Newt on the condition that she be left alone and returned to her surviving family. Ripley then escaped capture and disappeared. Now that Newt has graduated college (online, not having left the farm the entire time), her grandparents believes she needs to get back into the world. She resists, but eventually concedes to going to an interview for a social work job in the city.

Meanwhile, in the bio-labs of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, a science team (led by the a man named Marcus King, and partially comprised of seven mentally-connected Bishop androids that are modeled in his image) have managed to salvage a small cache of Alien eggs from deep beneath the nuclear wasteland of LV-426 and have brought them to Earth for study. They have taken every precaution, and have as their chief of security former Marine Dwayne Hicks. Now scarred and half-blind from his previous run-in with these creatures, Hicks very good at his job and watching this project with keen interest.

Rebecca ventures into the city for the first time, and marvels at its splendor. W-Y has used its terraforming capabilities to transform former urban blight into a rainforest-like utopia. All the skyscrapers have their own exterior ecosystems -- including hanging gardens and bioengineered rabbits that can leap dozens of feet from ledge to ledge. The jewel in this emerald crown is the W-Y headquarters, a beautiful, gigantic glass pyramid. Newt can see it from the office building where she has her interview, where she hopes to start working with troubled kids. She aces the interview -- having been a frightened child once herself -- and goes to have lunch in a nearby park.

There, she sees a man preaching to anyone who will listen. She recognizes him from Ripley's description of a hypersleep-induced dream she had on their way back to Earth... in the dream as well as here, the man’s name is Dillon. Fascinated, Rebecca follows him to the place where he holds his own version of church services every midnight. He runs the Church of Hypnos, a group devoted to the interpretation of dreams. His beliefs center in particular around oxygen, which he sees as a gateway to divine dreaming. Since Ripley's vision was had in super-oxygenated hypersleep, Dillon is very interested to hear it. When he unveils a painting he made while inspired by a nightmare he recently had, Newt recognizes the face of the Alien and faints.

Meanwhile, something has gone wrong in the W-Y biolabs... While King is conspicuously absent from the lab, a massive power outage affects the entire building. The science team had been wearing coolsuits to mask their body heat so they could study the Alien eggs at their leisure, but as the power fails, so do the suits, and the eggs start to open up, sensing possible hosts. Hicks, seeing what is happening, activates an old high-level security code that effectively closes the building's defenses against nuclear attack, including blast shutters over every window and utterly sealing all exits. It's an extreme measure, in effect closing the building off from all communication with the outside world, but Hicks knows better than anyone else the horrible outcome if an Alien were to get loose... This is why he became security chief at W-Y after his honorable discharge from the Marines -- to prevent this very situation from getting out of hand. Unfortunately, the science team -- including the androids -- become hosts for fifteen of the creatures.

Leaving the Church of Hypnos, Dillon and Newt are confronted by a young woman in a limousine. She is Mimi Yutani, daughter of the current CEO of W-Y. She wants them to help her get inside the building, because now that the building has been closed up, her father is trapped in there. W-Y has clearly been keeping tabs on Newt all along, and now Mimi sees her as a way to get to her father. In exchange, she says that she has similarly-obtained information on where Ripley is, and will help Newt… if she helps Mimi first.

Avoiding the gathering crowds and arriving at a secret subterranean entrance to the building, Mimi gets in contact with Hicks and uses Rebecca in a reverse-hostage situation, to get *into* the building. Hicks manages to broker an exchange... all the personnel in the building that he can get together in exchange for letting Mimi in the building. The transfer goes well, but Mimi brings Newt in as a possible further bargaining chip, and this sets up an adversarial but symbiotic relationship between them... one is trying to find her father, the other trying to find her foster mother, and each using the other to get there. Dillon, refusing to be separate from what he sees as his divine destiny, goes in as well.

Pulling up a schematic of the building, Hicks realizes that none of the personnel he could save came from a certain area in the building, a vast greenhouse deep within the pyramid called "The Atrium", where a division of W-Y is trying to naturally reproduce various pharmaceutical chemicals usually found in a rainforest biome. Hicks' small security team, along with Newt, Mimi, and Dillon, venture warily into the area.

There, in the dark caused by the power outage, they find an Alien hive, and many of the missing personnel being held as potential hosts for a small, rapidly-maturing Queen. Just as they attempt to rescue them, though, a different tribe of Aliens -- sleeker, faster albinos bred of the Bishop androids -- arrive and tear the old breed apart, carting off the captured humans for their own use. Hicks and his team only manage to survive by pulling back from this Alien crossfire.

After leaving The Atrium, they run into King, who claims that he knows nothing about what went wrong with the power, and says he's trying to find CEO Toshiro Yutani. Hicks and Newt don't trust him, but Mimi will do whatever she has to in order to rescue her father. When King says there are more Bishops that they can revive to help, the group reluctantly agrees.

He leads them to a biolab storage office, where there are not only four more Bishop androids, but a cache of prototype bio-limbs, reverse-engineered from what the Company knows about the Aliens so far, which give the wearer extraordinary arm and leg strength. Armed with four hive-mind Bishops and arm/leg augmentations that might prove to be somewhat of a match for the android-Aliens, the crew heads for a large elevator shaft that leads up to the very top of the W-Y pyramid, where Mr. Yutani's office is. Mimi is convinced that this is where her father is hiding.

Halfway up the shaft, the team meets up with a group of bone-white androidal Aliens, and a vertical battle ensues. Over the course of it, it becomes clear that not only has King programmed the Bishops to value Alien life over human, but that he caused the power outage, sacrificing his science team to experiment with how android-based Aliens will differ from human-based. Unfortunately, his experiment went too well, and he couldn’t contain the results. Even now, he's only trying to get the new Bishops up to the android Queen (who we're sure is residing above) so she can have more minions.

They reach the apex of the pyramid, which is glass on all four sloped sides, the only part of the building that is strong enough that it doesn't need the blast shields. That turns out to be a good thing, because here is where the white android Alien Queen has built her transparent nest. The sun is setting outside, and Mimi finds her father, who has been cocooned in the clear resin just like all the other captives that have been brought up from the rainforest atrium.

The final battle happens here in the blood-red and purple of twilight, and everyone ends up being destroyed except for Newt, Mimi, and the Queen. An airlock does manage to get blown open, and the Queen escapes to the outside of the building. The two women, their arms and legs still outfitted with bio-limbs, follow her out.

It has been raining, and the outside of the pyramid is slick. The Queen, seeing her opportunity to escape, begins sliding down its side toward the city below. Newt and Mimi follow her, just managing to destroy her before she does. When they reach the bottom, and confronted by the police forces that have surrounded the building, the two of them escape together in fifty-foot leaps, on their way to find Ripley.

---

So that's what I came up with... I think I kept a lot of the elements that I enjoyed about the first two Alien movies. There's more detail that I left out here, of course, mostly about how the dream prophecy of the third affects the events and decisions the characters make, and there are always a few more things that need to be fleshed out, explained, streamlined or just plain rethought.

But at least it's now out in the real world. Let's see how Neill and Sigourney handle their version of it. This franchise was the first to teach me how related stories could be told in drastically different styles and still feel of one piece, so I'm genuinely excited to find out.

FAST FICTION #14: Awesome?

I've been going back and forth about this song.

Back and forth how?

Well, I'm concerned about what's going to happen when the kids who are running around singing it grow up and figure out that it's a song about embracing conformity.

"Everything is Awesome" is a about conformity?

Well, yeah! I mean, come on. *Everything* is awesome? Doesn't that imply nothing in particular is more awesome than anything else?

You're going to have to explain this to me. It's a song, from a kid's movie, about having a positive attitude. How subversive do you think it can be?

Pretty damn subversive, actually. It *sounds* like a positive let's-all-work-together pop song, but look at it in the context of the movie. It's the sole theme song of a city where everyone likes the same things, and loves everything that happens no matter how good or bad it is. That's how Lord Business keeps everyone down.

Now, wait a minute. I thought that Lord Business is just misguided. He wants everything to run smoothly and for everyone to be happy. And he did that! Brickburg is a happy place.

But at what cost? And I don't think he really wants people to be happy. He just doesn't want them thinking for themselves. That would lead to them building their own things and "messing with his stuff". It's why he's going to coat the whole world in Crazy Glue.

Wait, we're getting off track. What's stuck in your craw about the song, now?

It's an incessant, impossible-to-escape ode to doing everything that everyone else is doing. "Everything is cool when we're part of a team", right? And doesn't the last line of the chorus sound like "When you live in a dream"?

I think they're saying "When you're living our dream". Big difference.

But doesn't it sound *intentionally* similar? And whose dream are we talking about here?

I don't know. Living in a world where everyone is happy is kind of the ultimate goal of civilization, isn't it?

Sure, it's easy for everyone to be happy as long as they don't do anything because of their own wants or needs. Do you think ants are happy?

I don't know... I'd suppose if they have emotions, they are. They never have to wonder if they're doing the right thing, or what they really want to do with their life. And they look like they're at least motivated to do what they're doing.

But look at how Lord Business runs things! He threatens everyone into doing what he wants, he has no regard for the common people... his bureaucracy is manned entirely by robots, for crying out loud!

I think you're reading an awful lot of political allegory into this.

Am I? Think about Emmett's job. He's a construction worker, and the first thing they're told to do in the morning is to blow up "anything weird". Meaning all the individual, interesting houses. It's a wrecking ball and explosions for all of them. Even at the end, when they break into Lord Business's office tower, how does Emmett help? By telling the rebels how to get in, and he says he knows how because he's built about *ten* of the same kind of towers.

So you're saying that Lord Business is... stomping out individuality and creativity?

Of course! Because what do you get when everyone is allowed to build whatever they want?

Um... I guess you get Cloud Cuckoo Land.

And didn't that place seem bewilderingly chaotic and confusing?

I guess... but it looked cool.

It did, true, but look at Unikitty and you can see what it does to you. She was the epitome of emotional self-denial. You'd have to be that way, in order to co-exist with people who could do anything they wanted, any way they wanted, any time they wanted. Lord Business is imposing order to keep out that kind of chaos.

It's starting to sound like you're going over to his side now.

Not really, I'm just trying to show you that both sides are equally misguided. People aren't genuinely happy in either place.

Now, wait a minute. Unikitty's kind of a mess, but Emmett seems happy.

Does he? Think about the beginning of the movie. He loves every part of his day, even when it consists solely of trying to fit in. He watches the same stupid "Where are My Pants?" show as everyone else, he dutifully drinks his $37 morning coffee with a houseplant instead of friends, and still no one he encounters during the day even knows anything about who he is.

So then Emmett's a great example about how playing by the same rules as everyone else doesn't really get you anywhere.

To Lord Business, he's the perfect citizen. And we're back to the song, since it's all he allows to be played. It's catchy and upbeat, yes, but it's really telling you to accept, to actually *believe*, that... "Everything you see or think or say, is awesome" ... Everything.

Even living the lonely life that Emmett's living?

Exactly. He's super-excited about having a totally banal, effectless life. That's what Lord Business wants. That's exactly what the Master Builders are rebelling against.

Ah-hah.

Emmett is constantly reassured he's on the right track, and now we've got a whole generation of kids running around singing the very same theme song about the joys of being oppressed!

..... oh dear God.

Giving It a Think #4: The Fermi Paradox

"Are we alone?" is one of the first questions we humans asked ourselves, even before we realized that the Universe is a vast, filamented web of uncountable galaxies... and not a tight ball of crystal spheres centered exclusively around us.

Two great scientific thinkers answered this question in their own particular way...

Carl Sagan: "If not, it seems like an awful waste of space."
Enrico Fermi: "If so, then where *are* they?"

They both had a point, but since good science brings up at least as many new questions as it answers, I'll focus on what Rico said. (And yes, I feel comfortable calling him that.)

We've come to accept the immense age of the Universe (in the ballpark of 13.8 billion years). We've also learned that the most necessary elements of organic life (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon) are, item for item, also the most abundant materials in it. Given those facts, shouldn't the Universe be profoundly stupid with life? Shouldn't some great galactic civilization have been formed a hundred million years ago and colonized us by now?

That's the Fermi Paradox. The fact that we turn our telescopes (both optic and radio) toward the Universe and find absolutely no evidence of intelligent life seems fundamentally wrong. In the interest of taking a stab at what we should be expecting, astrophysicist Frank Drake made a famous equation where he started with the estimated number of stars in the Universe, and then whittled it down toward a possible number of intelligent civilizations by nested sets of criteria: How many stars have planets? How many of those planets are habitable? How many of those habitable planets have life? What about intelligent life that can communicate across space? And perhaps most importantly, how long do such civilizations survive?

Today, even though we have more complete answers to some of those variables than Frank did, we still end up with a number that could be anywhere between 1 (that would be us) and 100 million. That's a big range, but take note that any number larger than, say 10, seems like should result in our being able to find alien civilizations pretty quickly. After all, odds are that anyone else out there would have technology thousands or even millions of years beyond ours. So, as Rico queried... why don't we?

There are a couple different theories why not. We'll start with the most cynical one, and work our way toward hopefulness... an approach that I tend to find does the most good in all situations.

Possible Reason #1 - There is no one else, and never will be. It's been theorized that we live in an especially hospitable situation here in our little solar system. We're in our solar system's "Goldilocks zone" (not too hot, not too cold), outside of which it would be difficult for liquid water (and thus our concept of life) to exist. In addition, we've got a nice, big moon that not only stabilizes our planetary spin so that there's a relatively small difference between winter and summer temperatures over most of our surface, but also causes tide pools, isolated little ecosystems that some think might be very important to the development of early microbial life.

Galactically speaking, we're in a placid locale as well, cozily nestled between spiral arms, and yet we don't get interfered as much by nearby supernovas and giant gas clouds as we would be if we were closer to the center. All these factors might point toward life being actually quite hard to get started on a planet. Note that our relatively peaceful planet has had to essentially hit the reset button on life (via mass extinctions) no less than five times... and only one of those was because of a giant asteroid hit. The rest were caused by natural planetary and biological processes.

So maybe life isn't inevitable at all, or the factors that lead to it come into conjunction a lot less often than we think. But let's assume that it does actually happen once in a while. What then?

Possible Reason #2 - Civilizations always die. Any civilization sophisticated enough to communicate across space, and even travel through it, also has the capacity to destroy itself. Perhaps it always does.

Take a look at us. We perpetually seem to be on the brink of doing that very thing, whether through nuclear warfare or climate change (actually, there appears to be a sixth mass extinction going on... *and* *we're* *causing* *it*). Maybe intelligence is just another way Nature has of wiping its own slate clean, like a super-effective, all-species-affecting disease (remember Agent Smith's "humans are a virus" speech from The Matrix?). Maybe the creation of an immortal, space-faring civilization isn't the direction we should be heading in. Perhaps that road *always* leads to strife and ultimate destruction.

Possible Reason #3: They're out there, but hiding. Star Trek called it "the Prime Directive"... a policy not to interfere with the development of the "new life and new civilizations" that they came across. (I actually seem to remember them interfering/kissing the heck out of those new-found civilizations, but I digress...) The idea is that life needs to find its own way, and showing them new technology or letting them know that there's other life too soon might cause society-wide psychological damage (cue the UFO conspiracy theorists who think that the government is hiding aliens from us for this very reason).

So maybe we really are being observed by some pan-galactic overlords, but they're consciously not letting us in on the secret of their existence. It wouldn't be all that hard, really... in terms of viewing the Universe in its entirety, we're still like little kids on a hill looking around through the wrong end of our binoculars. The Universe is so mind-staggeringly vast that we've only begun to explore one fraction of our little part of it. And this blends nicely with the next reason...

Possible Reason #4: We have no idea of what life can look like. At this point, science and astrophysics are defined more by what we *don't* know than anything else. Dark matter, dark energy, dark flow, quantum uncertainty... these are official terms. We're consciously ignorant of what the Universe itself is mostly made up of. Wouldn't it be easy to miss any kind of life that isn't virtually identical to our own?

The SETI program (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) has spent a lot of its time and budget searching for structured radio emissions from space. After all, we have been beaming out constant streams of electromagnetic waves for decades, so why mightn't other worlds? But in the last ten years the stray radio transmissions of Earth have dropped significantly, because instead of just beaming radio and TV out into the aether, we've moved more and more communication into underground cables and ever-shorter wireless connections. We might not see anything because other civilizations have done the same.

I'm probably wrong, but this shows a flaw in our thinking when it comes to intelligent alien life. We're necessarily limited to using technology that we know and understand. Who knows what kind of unknown future tech they may be using? Maybe they're not aware of our radio emissions because they've moved on to some other method far beyond what we understand.

Possible Reason #5: This is my favorite answer, and the one I'm rooting for most... Another thing we've learned about the Universe is that stars and planets form out of the wreckage of earlier generations. Just as trees die, fall over and enrich the soil for new trees, stars explode, sending out material and dust (including freshly-minted heavier elements that they can't create otherwise) to seed the next generation. Given that the sun has a lifespan of about 6 billion years, and the Universe is not quite 14 billion, we can estimate that our Sun is part of maybe the third generation of stars that have been created since the Universe began.

It seems to me that we need heavier elements to support intelligent life. Yes, the building blocks of both the Universe and Earth life are identical, but there are many aspects of our complex biology that require metals, minerals, and other materials that are only created when stars go supernova and scatter their ashes out into space. As Carl said many times, our bodies are made of "star stuff". Taking this into account, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it might have taken at least two solid rounds of star explosions to create enough raw material for our world, and us, to form out of.

So maybe that galaxy-spanning civilization that doesn't destroy itself with its brilliant technology, and becomes the very first to spread across the cosmos, discovering its wonders and learning to understand the whole, glorious span and depth of it... is really *us*.

Giving It a Think #3: The Singularity

People tend to fall into two camps when you talk about The Singularity: those that think it's the next inevitable step in evolution, and others who think it's impossible. It's hard to think of any other scientific concept that's so fundamentally divided... which is why I thought I should think on it for a while.

The Singularity is a name -- popularized by futurist Ray Kurzweil -- to describe the inevitable moment when humans switch on a computer that is smarter than a human. He, and others who think similarly, believe that people will thereafter find themselves obsolete, surpassed in every way by the ever-increasing intelligence of machines they've created. And while they are certain that human life will be fundamentally different after that point, they are equally uncertain in what way those changes will take place. Will the computers decide to eliminate us? Or will we allow them to take over, relegating us to leisurely existence while they assume all creative, mechanical, and cognitive work?

I have to say, right off the bat, that I don't fall into this latter camp. I think that there is something fundamentally unreplicable about the human mind, and I doubt if there's any amount of microchips that can quite match its flexibility. So I guess what I'm trying to do today is explain why I think that is.

I think it all comes down to what you believe "intelligence" means. If you're looking for a computer that can hold more factual information than the human brain, they're not that hard to come by. But as far as taking that information and formulating answers to questions, the most highly developed one is probably Watson, IBM's supercomputer that dominated over two humans on the game show Jeopardy! in 2011.

While it's true that Watson won the competition overall, it's more telling to see what kind of questions it missed... context clues, for the most past. Watson couldn't distinguish the difference between "the '20s" and "the 1920s", and it ignored the name of a Final Jeopardy category when it answered "What is Toronto?" -- the category was "U.S. CITIES", although that particular fact wasn't restated in the clue.

Okay, so maybe pure factual recall isn't the benchmark we should be using... there's also the famous Turing test. In the mid-20th century, Alan Turing postulated that if computer can convince you that you're talking to a person, then that computer should be considered a person, in every practical sense. It's the flip-side of that junior-high philosophy freak-out question everyone ponders at some point: How do you know everyone around you isn't a robot? The answer, of course, is that you don't... every human life is purely subjective. Thus, computers only have to live up to the same "human" standards that you hold every other person in the world to.

This task, however, hasn't been lived up to all that well, either. In a 2014 AI contest, a computer convincingly named "Eugene Goostman" by its inventor, Kevin Warwick, convinced one-third of the judges that it was a thirteen-year old, mostly by answering their questions vaguely. Any grammatical or factual slips were glossed over by the backstory that the child was raised in Ukraine.

So was this a real pass of the test? There's a lot of debate about it. But for myself, until a computer convincingly fools a majority of people that are specifically looking to determine its authenticity, I doubt we can definitively say that it has.

Keep in mind that Watson (and Eugene Goostman) were built by some of the brightest human minds, provided with millions of dollars and years of research and equipment -- for *one* specific purpose -- and even then, they couldn't quite mimic a human brain doing that same task.

I personally think that the really unique aspect of the human brain -- and the one that it's going to be hardest for computers to ape -- is its ability to take all its factual and emotional recalls and weave them into a story, extrapolating either into the past or the future.

In his excellent and hilarious science book "What If?", Randall Munroe unwittingly illustrated my point with a drawing... A tall figure is standing with its hands on its hips, looking down at a small figure who is wearing a cowboy hat and holding a rope at its side. A table is nearby, and next to it lies the broken shards of a vase. Munroe points out that while it's easy for us to synthesize exactly what has happened here and what is probably going to happen (with only minor differences in detail), a computer would have a devil of a time trying to do it.

And when you think about it, it's not that surprising. Let me try to outline all the information you need to piece together in order to make a coherent story out of this image:

- basic sequencing of cause and effect
- relative size of humans, based on age
- likely relationships between tall humans and short ones
- human body language (the tall figure's akimbo stance can mean many things, but in this case probably connotes frustration or anger)
- the cowboy hat on the child's head suggests character play, which children are known to engage in
- the recognition of the rope as a lasso, based on the shape of the child's hat and cowboy lore
- info on the use of a lasso, and in what way it might become out of control in the hands of a child
- understanding of gravity
- the typical structural makeup and integrity of vases, along with the ability to determine the object *is* a vase when only partially intact
- likely reactions when certain materials (i.e. vases and floors) come into contact
- relative monetary or sentimental value of objects (i.e. vases) held by adults, and likely emotional reactions when that vase is destroyed

I realized, even as I was writing that list, that I was glossing over whole layers of information and intuition that our brain does, instinctively, all in a fraction of a second. Never even mind the fact that we were looking at a *drawing* of an incident, and one with stick figures in it to boot. That adds a whole new levels of image recognition and conceptualization.

Even if it got everything else right, a computer would get totally hung up on what was responsible for the broken vase. Of course, we immediately assume it's the kid with the lasso, but that's only because we've heard enough stories to know that if it weren't, that would make a lot of the details in the picture irrelevant. And since this drawing was made by a human, we assume that the details *mean* something.

That's the sticking point, isn't it? So much of our intuitive understanding is based on the fast that we're humans communicating with other humans. There's a common baseline understanding that derives entirely from developing as a human in a human society.

Think about it from a different angle... aliens visiting our world wouldn't understand our music, and it wouldn't resonate emotionally with them, simply because they haven't grown up with it. They wouldn't have a genetic predisposition to enjoy it, and they wouldn't have been indoctrinated with it since before birth like we have. Even if they studied it extensively, it wouldn't truly be a part of them, and thus forever beyond their ability to comprehend it fluently.

I think that's the trouble I have with the assumption that, once computers have the capability to be more intelligent than us, that they will be. Human intelligence as we know it requires one to have lived as a human, to have grown and experienced humanity from the inside. If you don't have that, then you don't have that instinctive baseline that all we humans do. The best you'd be is a good mimic.

I also don't know what the advantage to building a computer that is smarter than humans would be, anyway, when it will probably turn out to be easier to augment human thought itself. We already know there are places in the brain that can have vastly improve cognition and reaction times if you stimulate them electronically. Improving the human brain itself seems like a better way to go (unless, of course, you care about controlling the improved mind that results). But why build something from scratch when you can improve the original?

My opinion: Hacking the brain is the future we should be thinking toward. It's the original computer, after all.

Giving It a Think #2: Zombies!

This is a good time for zombies. Just as prophesied by dozens of movies and comic books, they're *everywhere*. One of the most popular scripted shows on television is a drama about people living through a zombie apocalypse, for crying out loud. And unlike a recent vampire craze, people are actually discussing a "zombie apocalypse" as if it could really happen.

I understand the attraction/repulsion of the zombie idea. The mystery of death is one of the few universal parts of all the world's cultures. At least in Western cultures, it has become the foundation for a lot of cultural fear, as well... The image we have of the Grim Reaper (skeleton, clad in a black robe, holding a scythe) has been postulated to come from exhumed bodies from the Middle Ages... when people were buried in a shroud, with a sharp farm implement nearby to discourage the corpse from moving around once it's been interred. It appears that long before the voodoo-based idea of "zombie" came into our culture, we were already confused about the line between alive and dead.

This primal fear actually wraps a lot of our biggest worries into a neat package... Not only is it fear of our own mortality, it can be used as a reflection of our fears about many other things: society breaking down, xenophobia, disease, and even poses questions about what it is that ultimately makes us human. But now, I'm thinking past the metaphorical... how would zombies work, actually?

It's been almost fifty years since Night of the Living Dead started to canonize zombie lore, and since then there are a few things we've all come to agree on:

1. Zombies are dead people, resurrected by some means
2. Their only drive is to pursue and eat the living (brains on occasion, but mostly they seem content with whatever they can grab)
3. The only way to stop them is to destroy their brain

(I'm not going to get into the fast/slow zombie argument here, nor am I going to debate about whether you have to be bitten by a zombie to turn into one, versus any manner of non-head-trauma death getting you there. I'm just going with the universally accepted "facts" for starters.)

First of all, are zombies really dead? Let me see... They're up and shuffling around, eating stuff. The brain is still calling the shots -- it has to, or else destroying it wouldn't affect the rest of the body. It sounds to me, on the surface, like they're alive. At least, I'd count any organic being that had all those characteristics as alive.

But the thing we love about zombies is that they're *not* alive like us. They have human mechanics, but with all their humanity stripped away. There are no memories of who they once were, no emotions, the inability to use simple technology (like doors or stairs), no modus operandi other than to shamble around and eat things that are still alive when they come across them. For me, that's really the thing that clinches it that zombies are really dead... they can tell the difference and don't bother eating each other.

The one part of their alive-ness that they do hold onto is that drive to eat. The weird part is, though, that zombies never starve to death -- how could they, right? -- but the basic point is that they don't use energy from what they eat to keep them moving or to repair their dead flesh. Giving them something to eat doesn't seem to benefit them... They don't get stronger, move faster, or hold together any better. It's a prime directive that serves no purpose.

So it seems to be unnecessary for zombies to eat at all. But I think the reason they still do must reside in the same brain that stubbornly refuses to give up the ghost. All that remains, apparently, is the basal ganglia that keeps them mobile... and hungry. The function of this innermost portion of the brain is (in part) to control motion and provide motivation for hunger. It also controls habitual behavior, so that might explain zombie appetite... after all, what's the most basic habit that people engage in? This would also explain why zombies often seem to continue to do what they did in life -- I'm thinking of the mall zombies from the original Dawn of the Dead. So it's entirely plausible that only this portion of the brain works in zombified folks.

But then again... isn't the brain one of the more fragile structures in the human body? I would think that it's one of the first to disintegrate, unless there's something in the "zombie virus" that helps to keep it together.

Then there's the issue of the rest of the body. We don't seem to have a consensus about whether zombies are so haggard and fall-apart-y because that's the state of decay they were in when they were resurrected, or not. On the fifth season of The Walking Dead -- and by this time at least a year of real time has gone by -- the zombies seem to have the physical constitution of butter sculptures, and can be dispatched by a strong hit to the temple (or even a high-pressure fire hose).

For an opposing view, we can look to the granddaddy of long-form zombie lore... The undead in George Romero's "Dead" films (as of the sixth, 2009's Survival of the Dead) look pretty much the same as they did at the beginning of the series. While I'm not sure of the timeline of these films, it seems that many years have gone by, and this would lead me to believe that zombies actually maintain the state they were in at the time they died, and any infirmities they have were either sustained pre-death, or from obliviously stumbling into something in the ensuing time.

But both methods beg the question... how much of the body has to be intact for a zombie to shamble effectively? Most of it, I would guess. Even people who have been bedridden by an illness take some time in physical therapy to build back the muscles they have lost during their inactivity. Consider that most Walking Dead zombies are still ambulatory, and you have to assume that they have enough brain, muscle and bone mass left to balance (since most of them are still ambulatory). That just doesn't sound plausible to me.

If I have to choose, then it seems Romero has it right. This seems to be the only method that cause zombies to not only keep the brain from decaying after death, but the vast majority of the body too.

So, where does that leave us? In order to kick a zombie apocalypse off properly, we need a method of zombiefication that can mostly preserve the body and nervous system , *plus* can run indefinitely without any apparent form of metabolism (and I don't think I'm going out on a limb there... in all these representations, zombies clearly outnumber the living by a vast amount, and it's never been established that one can expire from hunger).

Those are the sticking points, for me: this idea that zombies have the drive to consume but don't gain anything when they do. And the fact that they can run forever. Even with our bodily functions stripped down to a minimum, we'd need at least some kind of caloric input to keep going. The fact that they don't seems to put them entirely outside the realm of the possible. It's conservation of energy... you simply can't have organic perpetual motion machines staggering around.

So, barring supernatural influence of some kind, it looks like the zombie apocalypse won't be happening anytime soon. And if one appears to be starting, it can't last for long. Give it a month or so, and it should blow over. Start your stockpiling now, friends...

Giving it a Think #1: Black Holes

I've heard a story that, when presented with a new problem, Albert Einstein would say in his German accent: "Let me give it a think", and go on one of his long walks to work it out in his head. Taking inspiration from him, I thought I'd perform some thought-experiments of my own. I don't guarantee that I have all my facts right, and I'd appreciate hearing where I've gone wrong, but these are things I'm trying to puzzle out...

I've been fascinated with black holes ever since the Disney movie The Black Hole came out in 1979 (I was 7). I actually dragged my family back to the theater to see it a second time, because I was so intrigued by the idea and scope of it. While the irony of Anthony Perkins being killed by a blade-wielding robot was lost on me, the whole idea of black holes, a place where the logic of the universe as we know it ceases to exist, irreversibly lodged itself in my brain.

I think most people know what black holes are, but here's my attempt at a nutshell definition anyway: when a truly massive star collapses at the end of its life cycle, its own mass crushes it down into an infinitely small point, creating a spherical area around it where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. It essentially creates a hole in space, pulling in everything around it, never to be seen again. Since, like I said, light can't escape, there's no way to see it. It's totally black... hence the name.

Now, gravity by itself is a pretty weak force. Pick up any object, and you're singlehandedly trumping the fact that the entire Earth is trying to hold it down. But gravity has two things going for it: it's everywhere -- every particle in the Universe pulls on every other one -- and it never, ever rests. There are no known exceptions to gravity. Which makes black holes all that much more impressive.

I remember reading in the movie's tie-in magazine that black holes were theoretical. In 1979, no one had ever observed one (which is kind of a weird way to say it, because by definition you *can't* observe one... you have to look for its effect on things around it). By now, we've learned that not only are they real, they are responsible for the formation of galaxies, most of which (including our own Milky Way) have supermassive black holes in their centers.

In the movie, the surviving protagonists (35-year old spoiler alert!) actually manage to fly through the black hole and come out... well, somewhere else. Of course, no one knows whether black holes actually go anywhere. That was kind of a problem for physics, this bottomless pit that seems to defy the second law of thermodynamics -- it seemed like all the stuff that fell in had to end up somewhere. But then Stephen Hawking realized that everything *does* radiate back out, just one particle at a time, super-slowly. It makes me think of a far-future Universe where all the stars have burned out, and there's nothing but these black holes slowly spitting reconstituted matter back out into the otherwise empty, ever-expanding Universe for quadrillions of years...

But that's what I love about black holes. They take everything we think we understand about space, time, matter, and energy, and push it to extremes. And there are all kinds of cool thought-experiments you can do with them. One of these -- which you can hear Neil deGrasse Tyson giddily describe in many places -- is how your body would be stretched if you fell into a black hole. When you're that close to such a strong gravitational body, its pull on whatever part of your body is closest to it (I'm assuming that's your feet, because we tend to think of gravity's pull as "down") is much stronger than the pull on the farthest part. The closer you get, the bigger the difference in pull, so you'd eventually be stretched thin and broken apart into smaller pieces, which would then also be stretched and broken down.

I actually got to see Dr. Tyson speak at the home office of Borders (back when that was a thing). And his description of "spaghettification" -- the official term he's been campaigning for when talking about this phenomenon -- led me to start wondering not so much about what would happen to you if you fell into a black hole, but what you would *see*. Disregard the fact that your eyes would be just as spaghettified as the rest of you... what would falling into a black hole look like? Well, here's what I've come up with... Again, feel free to have any physicists you know tell me whether/where I've gone wrong.

The main thing has to do with what we call the "event horizon". It's essentially the spherical "edge" of the black hole's full effect, inside of which nothing can come back out. It looks black to you because no light inside its boundary can come out. But let's say *you* drifted across this boundary. The Universe wouldn't suddenly go dark, because light can still come in through the event horizon, exactly like you just did. You can turn around and see perfectly well where you came from, because the only light that can't get to you will be that which is now closer to the black hole than you already are.

And this, I think, would create a weird optical illusion. Rather than being aware that you've passed any kind of barrier, you would appear to be continually hovering on the edge of the event horizon, which would be getting smaller and smaller. Not only that, but the light around its edge would get more and more severely bent as the gravity ramps up (in fact, now that I think about it, some light would actually go whipping around the back side of the hole and come back at you, meaning you could conceivably see a super-distorted picture of yourself!).

The weirdest part -- assuming that I'm understanding the physics right -- would be that the same kind of distortion would happen with *time*. You see, Einstein's theory of special relativity says that you can cause time to move slower for yourself in several ways. You can either move through spacetime, or you can be in the presence of a strong gravitational force.

Both of these things have been measured here on Earth. People who spend a significant amount of time traveling at great speeds (say, those on the International Space Station) live at a slightly slower speed than we here on Earth do. That's been proven -- GPS satellites actually have to be programmed to compensate for time dilation when they're locating your phone as they whizz by overhead.

It works the same way with strong gravitational fields... the harder you're being pulled by something, the slower your personal time goes. Given that, it makes sense that moving in to a progressively stronger and stronger gravity well makes your personal time slower and slower...

But here's the catch with slowing your personal clock... time doesn't actually appear to pass differently from your point of view. Everything else around you just moves faster. That's general relativity at work... because physics-wise, there's no difference between you walking down the street at three miles an hour and the earth turning under your feet at three miles an hour.

So here's what I think would happen if you fell into a black hole... Like I said, you'd appear to be hovering on edge of an ever-shrinking event horizon, which would have a larger and more distorted halo of bent light around it. When you turned around to look back at where you were... you would get to see the Universe evolve in fast motion. Although time still ticks along normally to you, you're actually speeding faster and faster into the future. You'd see the galaxies start accelerating... centuries, millennia, and then thousands of millennia of the Universe's evolution passing right before your eyes.

And, if the theory really is correct that in the very center of a black hole, mass collapses into an infinitely small point and thus creates an infinitely strong gravitational field... you would see the entire future of the Universe before you reach that center. In fact, the Universe itself would end before you actually get there. It would be like the ultimate fireworks display.

Of course, this is all providing you can hold your body together long enough to witness it, which I guess is true even if you're not falling into a black hole.

(One caveat: because the speed of light is always constant from your perspective no matter how you're moving through spacetime, I think that the eons of light piling onto you would be of ever-higher wavelengths. So you'd soon be unable to actually "see" the ensuing x-rays and gamma rays that would start pelting you, but let's assume that you have some kind of tech that could translate it into visible light for you. Cool?)