David Santoyo Portfolio

Prolgoue of the original short story "Prima's Children" by David Santoyo
 

Prologue: Part1: Xavier’s Theorem (see Illustration "Ruin's On An Alien Landscape")

            The facility had been finished almost 150 years ago now.  “Built to last” was an understatement, as the only thing that could destroy it would be a direct hit from an asteroid, the size of a small mountain.  Dr. Xavier Clark was confident about that boast, but the facility that the young genius had designed and delivered by age 50 was all but a monument to his failure now. 

            If a system went off line, a redundancy system would kick in and the problem system would be resolved, within a few hours  by small automaton bots issued from the lower levels of the gigantic underground facility (see Illustration "Bit").  Yes, his design was flawless, a smoothly running machine that no longer needed its creator, yet his purpose and his self value were not built upon this ingenious facility which had served human kind for the past century and a half.  He began to develop contempt for the facility and its endless empty halls ... that had started some years ago, with the passing of his long time assistant and wife, Cassandra.  The contempt was more of a hatred now.

            The floater vehicle purred up through the large central tube of the research facility and made its way topside through the large round portal, which lead directly into the high domed shaped communication center.  Xavier mechanically performed his nightly ritual of perusing the frequency scanner indicators.  Why he did this he did not know.  He would have been notified immediately if the scanners had picked up any short, middle or long wave activity.  Continuing his ritual, he switched over from the real time view to the daily, monthly, and then yearly views.  It had been 12 years now since he had seen any activity and a quick view of the sun scanner logs, at that time, showed the anomaly to have been a direct correlation to a gargantuan sunspot, that had long since disappeared.  He quietly redirected his floater and made his way back down to his personal quarters, the lab.  He had taken to sleeping, eating, working and relieving himself all within the confines of the smallish lab room.  This was all relative of course, as he no longer had any need to move about the facility.

            Xavier switched the holoview of his floater over to the Prime Code and reviewed his final coding instructions.  His mind drifted through sequences of instructions, derivations, theorems, postulations and techniques, all the time the holoviewer synthesizing them seamlessly into the algorithmic matrices of the Prime Code. 

            He had recently come to terms with himself and no longer used the term “my” when he thought of the catastrophic failure.  He had come to realize that it had been “our” failure and this lightened his burden just a little bit.  The situation he found himself in was not his fault.  He had only tried to help, although ultimately failing in these personal efforts.  He was sometimes actually grateful and felt that he had been fortunate to have been the preeminent mind of his time. He denied to himself the regrets of not having the fame that usually comes with such brilliance.  He often felt that only intelligent design could have produced a mind like his exactly  when a mind like his was needed, though he could not fathom to what ultimate purpose.  This did not, however, relinquish him from the depth of his internalized pain or from the failure which he took to be his.  He had failed in the task that had been set out for him, that task being all together too much, even for a great mind like his.  So this remarkable research facility built by the remnants of a hoping human kind to unravel its most devastating mystery became the sole reminder and remainder of all those who had fallen into oblivion behind him.

                                                   ~~~~~~~~~~

            It had been accepted that evolution came in quick spurts to adverse situations, and the adverse situations, in general occurred between long periods of time, but nobody expected "devolution" to do the same.  "Devolution" as he termed it,  was the “de – evolution” of a species or more succinctly, the unwinding or degeneration of a species' genetic coding.  His early research had shown that certain cases of late in life and spuriously manifested retardation had a congenital nature … not hereditary but still related to the gene.  The cases soon became widespread and had cleaved into a multitude of manifestations including gross physical deformity and death.  Xavier had linked these devastating and terminal diseases, to the failure of whole sequences of the human genetic code and genome structure.  The mechanism of chromosomal replication became suspect but was too random, at the time, to isolate.  In his time, because of advances made in the sciences and because of new technologies that had emerged, the average life span had been doubled to 190 years.  By the 100th century the human condition had been completely radicalized.  Humans no longer had to lift a finger to manipulate their environments, they disappeared into small spherical shells called “floaters” which hovered from place to place, traveling was no longer necessary as virtual networks could be wired directly into the cerebral cortex.  Arms and legs became shorter from atrophy and the torso became more spherical due to "zero gravity envelopes", a by product of the floater technology, that were created inside of a floater's shell, where the human body spent most of its time.

            Curiously the rapid spread of the genetic disease did not become a startling phenomenon until wide spread infertility became the norm. Within one technologically prolonged generation the world population had been decimated as the majority of people were effected.  Humans became living time bombs of externalized mutated and defunct genetic instructions.  Wars came to halt, manufacturing, exports, imports, mercantilism as a whole soon became a thing of the past.  Entire cities and towns became graveyards by the double effect of disease coupled with the loss of our technological substructure which could no longer be supported.   Political and national borders dissolved as whole countries became destabilized and fell into oblivion.  That is when his underground research facility was conceived.  The idea was quickly ratified and all resources were funneled into its creation.

            Xavier made a simple observation:  The more technologically advanced a country had been, the more affected was the country.  That realization had been the basis of the formulation of Xavier’s Theorem:

 “The long term survivability of a species is inversely proportional to its dependence on technology.”

 And its corollary:

“The genetic mechanisms of the survivability of a species need continual adversity so that these mechanism be sustained within the genetic coding, removing the adversity ultimately removes the genetic coding which sustains the survivability of said species.”

 Ten thousand years of technological dependency had been enough to cause the failure of these mechanisms, which strengthened and ensured a species survivability ...  our survivability.

Prologue, Part2: Beyond the Fear

     If Xavier could sit, or if Xavier could reach his head with his arms he would have been sitting with his elbows on a table grasping his head in despair.  For despair was all he felt now.  But all he could do was sit, like an egg in its nest.  He had become one with his floater a long, long time ago.  He took a brief glimpse of the genome being processed by the Prime Code in the holoview and with a thought he switched it off.  He felt the despair lift ever so slightly.  He had finished his work.  The Prime Code had been running now for 144 hours, passing all the initial tests and no further tests were to be made.  His genius was now contained within the 3-dimensional holographic matrices of the Prime algorithm.  The vestiges of humanity were now hers, The Prime Code's.  The Prime Code would finish what he had started and would finish what he could not finish.  He now took leave of all his responsibilities, no longer being able to carry their weight.  He remembered Cassandra and his deep and profound feelings for her.  He remembered his youth, his father, his mother, his brothers and sister.  How short his two hundred and some years had been, in the sharing of his time with those he loved and in the time he needed to solve his puzzle. In his life he oscillated between laughing at the idea of God and feeling that some God was laughing at him.  He hovered to the glass that separated his lab from the corridor, across which was the DNA repository where the remains of his wife had been carefully stored and sealed.  His eyes focused on his reflection just inches away.  He murmured the words, “at least I won’t have to bury myself.”  He said it again, but this time louder, for no one to hear.  He then joined with that idea of his Creator and began laughing at himself.  In that moment he thought of all the countless lives that had passed before him.  Lives like his, that had never been recorded or remembered, each life with its very own struggles, passions, defeats, love, wonders and purpose.  He became sobered again ... All of it was gone.  He looked closer at his reflection and thought he could see the death that was certainly moving through his cells at that very moment.  But no, it would not happen for him that way.  He would not die a painful death.  He had diagnosed himself long ago and knew that his God had at least given him a death without suffering, and judicious that was, for he had seen and experienced much suffering in his life.  He knew in which cells the degeneration would start and he could feel it now, his breath became slightly less effective, and his lungs worked slightly harder to extract the oxygen from each inhale.  He knew the hour that it would come but although he tried, he could not calculate the minute.  So he waited.  As he waited he attached the intravenous vacuum to its counterpart waiting in his arm.  By the struggle of his breath he knew he did not have much longer.  Xavier never liked the idea of suicide but it was necessary to extract the living samples for his repository.  That meant he had to do it before he died.  His thoughts again snapped to the Prime Code, had he missed anything, had he miscalculated or forgotten?  Had he balanced the ancillary systems?  Would the geo-therm units hold out and would the short-term backup power last long enough, for  the automatons to fix them if they did not hold?

Well it was just too damn late.  What he did would either be enough or it wouldn’t, there were too many other factors that were beyond his control to worry now. 

In his life Xavier had studied life so acutely; he had acquired so much biological knowledge in his great pursuit to restore the failing genetic code that he had overlooked one last possibility, until the end.  He only saw it when he came to terms with the failure of reconstructing life as he knew it.  Yes he had failed and yes he understood that.  He marveled at and yet hated his answer to that failure ... non-biological life might have a chance, but only if over time it could become sentient.  In its turn maybe one day it would also create life of its own ... biological life ... human life ... just as biological life might ... must ... create it.

The vacuum switch actuated as he reclined the floater to a corpse position and did the only thing he could…

“Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name …”  

 Here is a sample from "Prima's Children".  A story of earth's future.