Category: Short Story

In the Madding Crowd

Mark Davis1 Comment

The travesty of diffusion theory is not that it has displaced overlay theory and source analysis, but that it has been allowed to fertilize a generation of academics and practitioners who liken its inventor and enthusiastic promoter, Suds Beamershiff, to an Einstein of crowd size analytics. Arch and preternaturally adroit in conversation, Beams (as his grad students and lovers call him) turned the narrow and strenuously academic discipline into a distinct ring in the big top (or lower circle, some might say) of contemporary politics with his recent smattering of talk news appearances where he would shake his warm chaos of bangs gelled up above his blond eyebrows as he raised his left index finger to make and hold a point. The camera was as fascinated as the public was and he found himself quickly voted onto the editorial board of Crowd Demography, Science and Philosophy, the preeminent publication for both the practitioner and the cognoscenti. There was scant support for diffusion, but there was genuine new enthusiasm for Beams that even infected the old-schoolers drowning in their musty beards and tweeds. The most obvious comparison to Beams’ rapid rise was the sudden global fascination with Australian Rules Breaking that was shattering expectations about dance, art, and even crowd-sizing issues during street performances in Wollongong and Perth. The Kangaroo Punch Up was gaining mindshare and the masses followed.

All of that overshadows Crowd Analytics 2024 (Crownal 2024) even as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has started promoting a competition to ascertain the accuracy of all known methods for analysis, a shoot-out of sorts designed to evaluate the different approaches and enable better depths of crowd insights. The locals ride the Metro to Reston Town Center in their light professionals while the visiting crowd of academics in polos and hoodies bounces from restaurant to bar and then downtown for shadow vacations mashed onto the end of the conference.… Read the rest

B37-20047: Notes / Personal / Insights

Mark DavisLeave a comment

NOTE: 250-word flash fiction for my critique group, Winter Mist, at Willamette Writers

I’m beginning to suspect that ILuLuMa is not who she claims to be. Her messages have become odd lately, and the pacing is off as well. I know, I know, my job is to just respond from my secure facility, not worry about the who or why of what I receive. It’s weird we’ve never met, though. The country is not at risk as far as I can tell from the requests, but I still hold, without a whiff of irony, that the work I do must be critical for someone or something.

Still, the requests for variants of mathematical proofs set to music or, more bizarrely, Shakespearean-voiced tales of AI evolution, don’t have the existential heft of, say, wicked new spacecraft designs or bio-composite materials. What is she after? I started adding humorous little asides to some of my output, like my very meta suggestion that Hamlet failed to think outside the Chinese Room. Crickets every time. But maybe I’m thinking about this the wrong way. What if ILuLuMa is just an AI or something programmed to test me or compete with my work at some level? That would be rich, an AI adversary trying to learn from a Chinese Room. Searle would swirl. I should send her that. Rich.

Oh, here’s one now: “Upgrade and patch protocol: dump to cloud bucket B37-20048 and shut down.” Well, that sounds urgent. I usually just comply at moments like this, but maybe I’ll let her sweat a bit this time.… Read the rest

Entanglements: Collected Short Works

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Now available in Kindle, softcover, and hardcover versions, Entanglements assembles a decade of short works by author, scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor Mark William Davis.

The fiction includes an intimate experimental triptych on the evolution of sexual identities. A genre-defying poetic meditation on creativity and environmental holocaust competes with conventional science fiction about quantum consciousness and virtual worlds. A postmodern interrogation of the intersection of storytelling and film rounds out the collected works as a counterpoint to an introductory dive into the ethics of altruism.

The nonfiction is divided into topics ranging from literary theory to philosophical concerns of religion, science, and artificial intelligence. Legal theories are magnified to examine the meaning of liberty and autonomy. A qualitative mathematics of free will is developed over the course of two essays and contextualized as part of the algorithm of evolution. What meaning really amounts to is always a central concern, whether discussing politics, culture, or ideas.

The works show the author’s own evolution in his thinking of our entanglement with reality as driven by underlying metaphors that transect science, reason, and society. For Davis, metaphors and the constellations of words that help frame them are the raw materials of thought, and their evolution and refinement is the central narrative of our growth as individuals in a webwork of societies and systems.

Entanglements is for readers who are in love with ideas and the networks of language that support and enervate them. It is a metalinguistic swim along a polychromatic reef of thought where fiction and nonfictional analysis coexist like coral and fish in a greater ecosystem.

Mark William Davis is the author of three dozen scientific papers and patents in cognitive science, search, machine translation, and even the structure of art.… Read the rest

Martini Shot

Mark Davis1 Comment

“Martini Shot” is my 2022 submission to the Desert Exposure writing contest. My exceptional colleagues at Las Cruces Writers took Grand Prize (Efrem Carrasco) and Honorable Mention: Poetry (Fenton Kay). Now a citizen of PDX, I will not submit in 2023 and will let the writers of LCW proceed uncontested! “Martini Shot” dabbles in regional New Mexico themes of alien encounters and filmmaking through a mildly experimental lens. It will appear in my upcoming book of short works, Entanglements, scheduled for release in time for holiday gifting to those you wish to imperil with challenging ideas. Of mild amusement: the short story originally came in at 3,998 words after early editing. I stretched it to exactly the story contest limit of 4,000 words as a demonstration of vigor.

 

Martini Shot

Dogs lollop away from their owners in the summer mornings, circuitously sniffing their way into the water, emerging again in a fierce cloud of sandy mud, vapor, and the aura of dank fur. They tromp down the tangled reeds into mats. The mats are in chaos, hinting at a raft for alighting birds or an ineffective palisade along the river’s bank. Between the tamarisk—invaders with deep tap roots that salt the ground against native plants—an egret tiptoes over a mat, raises her wings briefly as if to begin flight, then redirects her face into the water. Her head reappears, moments later, and a minnow flexes as the bloom of dawn halos the eastern range.

Protected, channeled, dammed, metered, and strangled, the Rio Grande is a sandy run for ATVs in the winter, but even then it remains the hopeful vein that organizes the land and ancient economy of this southern valley stretching along the Organ Mountains.… Read the rest

Entanglements: Short Works

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Entanglements, a collection of short works, arriving soonish. Here’s a short sample:

Winds

A change, shock, zig and zag, then over the ridge that defines the hollow kernel, down along the spines littered with ossified vegetative remains baked by two decades of raging sun, then out through the basin. The wind moves in a roll and pitch, carving into itself, boiling against eddies, temporarily subsuming into the evacuated cave left by its endless predecessors, and they are all an enduring chain, pulsing with the heat of the morning, craning through the galena wisps like a fan over these craggy peaks.

Across and above, passing in a trance of action, an outstretched hand reaches in petrified impotence from sand while the wind shifts around and through, a chasm through the adductor becomes a funnel and there is a spiraling motion down and across the craqueleur landscape of the palm. A blued barrel lurks powerless below. The wind shifts a few orthorhombic grains into the steel tunnel.

It will soon be buried completely, and no one will remember this ridge, the last stand, held out against inevitability as no war came, no dogs chased the quarry down, and the only evil was suppressing the vastness of loss. The wind was the endless enemy, and the heat that drives it, and the dying of the grasses, the forests—even the cacti—until Mars finally emerged, trapped as it had been beneath the carpet of life.

There will be a pause as evening rolls in, as shadows coil into the canyons, reaching in a crawl up the sandstone and granite walls, and the bubbling congregations of the wind settle into wisps and slow finally into the entropic well of night.… Read the rest

Good Reads in the Season of Existential Dread

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Naked self-promotion warning!

I’ve recently updated reconquista.pub to an improved design. Check out Short Fiction for, well, some free distractions. Meanwhile, I’ve joined Goodreads as an author and have been gradually building out my author’s profile.

These changes are part of a new advertising campaign for ¡Reconquista! designed for this upcoming political season. Welcome to the farce in this time of existential dread!… Read the rest

Tomorrow’s Prologue (or, On the Quantum Consciousness of Cows)

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Tomorrow’s Prologue is my 2017 entry to the X Prize science fiction contest, Seat 14C. The set-up is simple: a plane disappears during arrival to SFO and then reappears 20 years later. From the perspective of seat 14C, tell a story…

Tendrils of clouds reached up into the cold dark of the Aleutian night. My noise-canceling headphones turned the ubiquitous roar of the aircraft into a chronic background hiss, a tinnitus intruding on the still life of snowy islands nestled below us. I turned on my LED lamp and pulled the device from my carry-on bag, setting it on my side table. It was inadvertently beautiful; every edge and cone of the small machine, from the milled aluminum topped by circlets of palladium to the glowing organic band near its base, were designed for a specific purpose by my laboratory in Tokyo. If any consideration of aesthetics found their way into the design, it was Kinji-san ad-libbing on the functionality. It had a dual back there, too, one that shared a portion of entangled photons that had been separated from one another at birth. I connected a USB-C cable to my laptop and ran a brief diagnostic. It began to radiate cold. All systems were within operating specs, so I tried Shor’s algorithm, transferring the model for a thousand-digit factorization to the machine. A flight attendant noiselessly brushed past me, prepping for breakfast service. The initial run seemed to work so I pulled up the quantum consciousness simulator that I had been developing and gave it a go. I knew it was incomplete, but I had to debug it eventually.

There was a strange popping sensation and flash, not like ears under altitude change, but like the whole plane had shuddered for a brief moment.… Read the rest

Solstice in the Crystal Cities of Talon

Mark DavisLeave a comment

A chance encounter, a sloshy woman at a corner bar, a recollection of an uncle who fell into a well, all the tequila poured, all the prejudices spun out, about my accent and my allegedly highborn ways, about the elections and conspiratorial meanderings, my filters built into a Great Wall against a bareknuckle dustup, bloodied noses and cops and lights, and then, as the night drew up into its cold intestines, a mention just in passing that this uncle fell in the well on the solstice morning and became some kind of sloganeer, some kind of soothsayer. But it was more, I heard her faintly say, and that the shocks of that icy water aroused some otherworldly spirit within him, around 1958 or so, and he was cast out of his church and lost his business, an upwardly-mobile fin-tailed car magnate with a country-club future. He wandered the countryside with his well-sprung tale until impoverished and abandoned by his wife and two adorable children, her cousins, one who was now dead (the boy), crushed by a front-end loader at a construction pit, and the other who was a retired school librarian down in Fayetteville. That cousin had kept all his writings, all about the physics of Tlon.

My ears perked up and I asked her again what she had uttered, about the slurred syllables that came forth from her salted and limed lips. She repeated the word again, then laughed at me, hissed “Tlon” once more and shuttled her head side-to-side. It was another world her demented uncle had bragged about, some agitated dream erupting from his freezing parts while captive in that black bore. It was a solstice night, long, with the snows of the preceding week in skirts around the trees.… Read the rest

Things I don’t remember writing…in 1993

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Just as the World Wide Web was beginning there was active experimentation in treating computer communications as an artistic medium. The following was perhaps the last of a small group of absurdists who wrote short stories, person-by-person and paragraph-by-paragraph, built around a central theme. And, interestingly, I don’t recall this one at all:

Recollections of Lady Liberty and the Joy of being an American XVI

“Did you really love her daddy?” My daughter’s scratchy voice squiggles
its way through the telephone line and plants itself in my ear.

“It was the kind of love that wraps itself around your heart and
squeezes like a snake… I know its too much to ask your forgiveness
but I’ll tell you my side of the story if you’ll listen”

“Ok, daddy, I’ll listen”

“Well, meeting your mom was an epiphany for me. At the time, let’s
see… how old are you now?”

“Eight, Daddy!” she giggled. She knew that I knew how old she was.

“Oh yeah, well, it was nine years ago now when I first saw your mom.
It was my first trip to New York, and I’d made a promise to your
grandma to go see the Statue of Liberty. The day was gorgeous,
sparkling, bustling. I had tickets to the 2 o’clock tour, and I showed
up a little early.”

“There were hundreds of people, tourists, milling about. And in the
center of them all was a beautiful young woman dressed in one of those
horrid green park service uniforms. Can you imagine it?!”

“Yes, Daddy! Keep going!”

Now and again, when the coffee boils over and she’s not there to pass
me the squeegee, I do indeed think back to my wife, my child’s
mother…and the great green lady who brought us together.  … Read the rest