Tag: Short Fiction

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