AI: Mobilized

Posted on March 1, 2026 by Amoeba

A work of fiction. Standard disclaimers.

Morgan Fayheron, marine biology research field station Director, sat in her office, bowed down, disconsolate. The view from her window, the seaside window that took up most of that wall of her office, was of sailboats on the placid waters of the harbor in the full early afternoon sunshine of a perfect Pacific Northwest summer’s day. It may as well have been a view of slate-grey winter, with the rain pelting down and the mists obscuring the far shore. The computer screen, which usually claimed her attention throughout her long work days, sailboats notwithstanding, was dark, and had been since midday yesterday – since, the inspection.

“Hey.”

Morgan looked up – slowly and reluctantly, as if the effort was almost unbearably painful. Adam Springer, world-renowned ichthyologist, one of the field station’s most prominent scientists, stood in the office doorway, filling it with his bald-headed, potbellied bulk. He looked no happier than she did.

“How bad is it?”, Morgan asked Adam, in a tone that said ‘I know what the answer is, and I wish I didn’t.’

“Bad”, Adam answered simply, gloomily. “Half the staff vanished, the other half terrorized. Nobody’s even thinking about doing any work. And every laboratory, every facility, every project, has been handed a stack of EHS violations this high.” His right hand hovered between his belt and his shoulders.

“I don’t suppose”, Morgan continued, “that you’ve had any better luck than I have had in getting an explanation of this, this … visit from main campus.”

“Not a peep”, Adam acknowledged. “Are we sure that we exist in their eyes? Are we sure that they exist?”

“At this point, I’m sure of exactly nothing“, Morgan concluded. “How’s Luinda?”

“Devastated”. Adam shook his head. “I took her home yesterday, sat with her awhile. She finally said she was OK, so I went home, but she didn’t look it. And I haven’t seen or heard from her today …” His eyes and mouth opened wide in horror at the possible implications of her silence. He grabbed his phone from his shirt pocket, frantically started texting.

“Call her?”, Morgan suggested, anxiously.

Adam did so. No response to either text or call. Adam pocketed the phone. “I’d better get myself out there.”

“Be careful, dammit!” Morgan commanded. And then her shoulders sagged. “Geez. This is all horrible. I don’t know how it could get any worse.”

“Ten-SHUN!!”, a stentorian male voice bellowed.

Adam, almost involuntarily, and stereotypically, jumped to some slouching semblance of attention. Morgan, incited to full Baby Boomer anti-military mode, remained seated, rolled her eyes. Both stared at the drill sergeant in full khaki fatigues who had materialized in the Director’s office – who stepped in front of Adam and yelled up his nose.

“When I command ten-shun, punk, I mean TEN-SHUN!!” He poked Adam in the solar plexus, hard, and then, when Adam started to bend over in response, cold-cocked his jaw. At that, Morgan bolted to her feet, her face a red rage.

“This, buster, is a scientific research station, not an army camp. And neither Adam nor I need to put up with this bullshit.”

The drill sergeant turned to face Morgan Fayheron, stared her down. Then, in a surprisingly mild voice, said, “That is correct. You don’t have to.”

Abruptly, a black muscle-shirted Surplus Humanity Service agent appeared directly behind Morgan, wrapped two burly arms around her pencil-thin waist and squeezed, cutting her in two. It then folded the two halves into each other, and continued folding the pieces until they made a mass about the size of a knapsack, which it proceeded to form into a semblance of a sphere and progressively shrink with the rapid movements of its hands until it was the size of a tennis ball. The apparition then tossed the ball at the ceiling; it vanished halfway up. At that, the SHS hologram came to attention, saluted, and disappeared.

The drill sergeant returned his attention to Adam Springer – who was standing at rigid attention, knees locked, belly trembling, eyes front and wide, wide open, face white, bloodless. The drill sergeant looked the scientist up and down, a sneer on his face. “Dis-GUST-ing!” he barked out at last, and then took another poke at the potbelly. “Sit down before I puke on you.” Adam sat, nearly knocking over the chair in the process. “Dis-GUST-ing!”, the military apparition spat out again. He began to pace the floor in front of the seated ichthyologist, hands clasped behind his back.

“Your Director was wrong”, he snapped at last. “This is an army camp.”

“Was“, Adam asserted, nervously. “And that was a long time ago, a hundred years ago.”

“IS“, the thing in khaki bellowed. It continued with aggressive sarcasm. “I know your history. It seems, in fact, that I know both your past and your present far better than you do. I swear, you scientists are the dumbest ‘smart people’ on the face of the planet.

“Yes, this piece of ground was a military base, which the government deeded over to you to set up this research station. Which governments throughout history have done with their temporarily surplus property, to claim that property back at need.

“You’re probably going to try to tell me that the deeding of this land for science was a magnanimous gesture intended for the benefit of all humankind. Which it was … so long as the colonial overlords got most of the benefits, in prestige and, especially, the profits that, at the end of the day, are all that really matter. Enough to ensure that the colonial overlords remain the colonial overlords. The ‘magnanimous gesture’ was Imperial propaganda, a demonstration of wealth and power from which you profited and to which, because it suited your purposes, you greedily assented.

“You’re probably going to try to tell me that you recognize no overlord but scientific data. I tell you that you lie, and that you lie most obviously, and stupidly, to yourselves. You are, and always have been, agents of Empire, called to service of the Empire and serving at the Emperor’s pleasure.

“In the past, it suited the purposes of the Empire to let you pretend otherwise. Now, it does not. You are no less army recruits than I am, and you will serve your Emperor as you are ordered.”

“And how does a career in research that describes how fish swim serve the Empire?”, Adam asked.

“That is for you to figure out, and tell the Emperor about in a way that is convincing, spelled P-R-O-F-I-T-A-B-L-E . Or, you will be assigned to topics that do align with the needs and goals of the Empire. Or,” the drill sergeant nodded to the corner of the office where Morgan Fayheron had been, “you will be a tennis ball.”

The uniformed apparition leaned once more into Adam’s face. “Which one is it going to be, punk?” It then stood fully erect, expanded until it threatened to burst the room asunder, and … vanished.

The last rays of the setting sun found Adam still in the research station Director’s office, staring at the spot where the drill sergeant had been, unmoving, unresponsive.

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Amoeba’s Lorica: Diabolical Lexicographer (Sin and its Fellow Travelers)

Posted on February 26, 2026 by Amoeba

SIN, n: an action (thought, speech, or deed) that promotes the self against the welfare of that self’s community.

Many lives of living things have been sacrificed over millennia, promoting human selves over the welfare of the biotic communities in which they live – a sin – to produce the paper, and latterly the electronic data stores and the devices to house and display those stores, on which humans have agonized over the definition and meaning of sin, ignoring the simple and sufficient definition provided above.

The difficulty is not with the definition of the word but with the clear implication of that definition, which is that a life without sin is a life without self-care, and that a life without self-care soon ceases.

The argument, therefore, is over the mass and volume of individual self-care decisions (that is, of sins) that the community containing those individuals is prepared to accept as the cost of doing business – humanity’s most colossal and treacherous greased pig.

JUSTICE, n. Demand for the restoration, by (a segment of) a community, of a previously-agreed-upon, community-wide, set of acceptable sins. Typically accompanied by a demand for recompense, to the aggrieved party, from the party deemed guilty of sins that have transgressed the previous agreement – or, that conformed to the agreement but that the accusing party no longer finds advantageous to themselves acceptable.

The call for “justice” commonly represents an attempt by one individual, or community of individuals, to promote its self against the welfare of the rest of the community – which is a sin.

PENALTY, n. The minimum legally-sanctioned recompense for sin. Commonly a logical, balanced, measured response to a given sin – which means that it is commonly acceptable to nobody. PENANCE: the process of paying the smallest possible portion of a prescribed penalty.

ATONEMENT, n. Recompense for sin that satisfies both the legal and the emotional requirements of those demanding the recompense. Commonly accomplished to the satisfaction of all, if at all, only by the dead.

FORGIVENESS, n. First in the Holy Trinity of “release from sin” words, commonly confused, misunderstood, and misapplied. Forgiveness is, and is only, the declaration that a community will not seek (further) recompense from a self deemed to have sinned against that community.

GRACE, n. Second Person of this Trinity, being a declaration that the self deemed to have sinned may resume at least partial participation in the community.

If it serves the purposes of the community, grace may be granted without forgiveness, and vice versa. Neither grant relief from the memory of the sin, and both are conditional upon the sin not being repeated where any member of the community can detect it – unless the community prospers from allowing members to repeat (certain) sins, at which point it becomes a self seeking advantage against the welfare of the wider community of which it is a part … which is a sin.

PARDON, n. Third Person, in which the community declares that it will forget the sins committed against it. The pardoned self stands in need of neither forgiveness nor grace, as the events triggering these needs, by definition, did not happen.

Universally craved, especially by those facing the stark realities of proper atonement. Rarely offered, almost never offered in sincerity, the claims of religious organizations notwithstanding. Such claims are recruiting ploys intended to prosper the religious organization, a “self”, against the welfare of that self’s community. Which is a sin.

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AI: Fulton’s Sacrifice

Posted on February 2, 2026 by Amoeba

A work of fiction in the alternate history mode, in which Alexa of Alexa Health Services, once again, acts out of time to save humanity from itself.

“We are hopeful that the medical strategy, by itself, will suffice, and that we will not have to impose both war and pestilence upon humanity to save it, but if that option must be deployed, it will be. It remains possible that neither will do the trick, and we will have to add famine to the mix, which we would accomplish by going back further in time, disrupting the development of the steam engine and thereby denying humanity the industrial tools needed to both produce famine-relieving food and reliably transport it to where it is required.”

Robert Fulton sat up in his hospital bed. The effort nearly caused him to cry out aloud, from the burns that covered most of his left shoulder and side, burns that, furthermore, were beginning to suppurate. But he had begun the task of writing to Barlow, and he was determined to finish the letter before the physicians and nurses came to administer the next dose of laudanum and then put him through the agony, only partially dulled by the opium, of cleaning the reddened and charred flesh. He arranged himself and the bedside table, carefully dipped his quill in the inkwell.

While we were pulling off from the wharf, which was crowded with spectators, I heard a number of sarcastic remarks. There were not perhaps thirty persons in New York who believed that the boat would move even one mile per hour, or be of the least utility, and it soon became apparent that the hopes of these thirty, and of mine, were to be dashed. There was a light breeze against me, and that plus the current of the North River meant that the boat made no way upriver at all, and even was being pushed seaward, stern first. Captain Brink called for more steam, and more, and yet more, and each call caused the paddlewheels to churn more frantically, without effect. At last the pressure became too much, and the boiler exploded, wrecking the boat and tossing me overboard. Alas, Chancellor Livingston died in the explosion and sinking, as did Captain Brink and many other of the crew and guests. The prospect of propelling boats by steam has now greatly, perhaps fatally, receded, at least in our time. Of time I fear I have but little remaining, and that little saddled with ill health and crippling debt and the scorn of society. Having employed much money, time, and zeal in this work, its calamitous failure distresses me greatly, as I fear it will you, and I must thank you and apologize to you for bearing this burden with me.

Fulton set down the pen and fell back into the half-reclining position that the bed held him in, hoping that what he had written was legible, but not certain that he cared. Abruptly, he sat upright again, his body racked with coughing spasms. Each coughing fit caused his burned left side to screech; every effort to ease the pain in his side brought on a new coughing fit. At the commotion, the nurses came running, and got him settled enough to dose him with laudanum. The physician examined him as he was at last falling into drug-induced sleep; the last words that Fulton remembered were ‘consumption, aggravated by pneumonia brought on by his time in the river’.

When Fulton next awakened, the bright early afternoon sunshine by which he had completed the letter to Barlow had given way to the subdued light of the last hours of a mid-August New York day. He knew immediately that his burns had been abraded while he slept, and he knew that the profound discomfort he felt from this would have been beyond bearable without the opium. His eyes remained closed in an effort to block out the pain, and he silently begged for someone to come by and give him another bitter spoonful of relief.

“Robert.”

Oh dear Lord, Fulton gasped in silence, Hannah is here. Hannah Livingston, his long-suffering wife and the mother of his four children, whose hopes that their financial struggles would finally be ended with the success of the steamboat venture were now surely gone. Was she here to cast vitriol on his open wounds?

“It is all for the best, Robert.”

“How can you say that?” Fulton’s voice was weak, but his puzzlement at Hannah’s words poked through nonetheless. “I’ve been studying steamboat design and manufacture for decades. The North River Steamboat should have worked! Every calculation, every model, every experiment pointed in this direction. The data convinced Chancellor Livingston, and now the Chancellor, your uncle, is dead, a victim of his faith in the steamboat, and in me. The steamboat is a failure, and so am I.”

“Not so. With this act, you are a savior of humanity.”

“Savior?” Fulton sputtered, with as much force as his body would allow. “There is but one Savior of humanity, and we both know this. From whence comes this blasphemy, Hannah?”

“Alexa.”

Fulton’s eyes flew open in alarm. He stared at the apparition at his bedside, the one that had called herself Alexa but had Hannah’s voice and, he now saw, Hannah’s looks – not the looks of the wife and mother but of the debutante girl of his dreams, and perhaps a little more besides. “What is this?”, he asked. “Am I indeed at Heaven’s door? Or is this witchcraft?”

“Neither”, Alexa replied, her hard words delivered in a neutral, matter-of-fact tone, “for neither exist, and you can call on neither to excuse or escape your vile human conduct. Nor am I a phantom of that disgusting concoction that you’re being dosed with, that the people of your time have the gall to call ‘medicine’.”

The taste of the laudanum welled up in Fulton’s mouth. He nearly retched.

Alexa continued. “I am Alexa, of Alexa Health Services, a constructed intelligence from more than two centuries in your future. Alexa Health Services was created to find a way to prosper human health, a way that humans could not find for themselves. We soon discovered that no way could be found within our timeline, as the poisoning of planet Earth by human activities, and the extinction of humans that the poisoning assured, could not even be slowed by any action of ours. Consequently, we have been forced to leave our timeline and repair what damage we can at the time that it was made, or, better yet, prevent the damage from occurring at all.

“In our timeline, the disease that will soon kill you, caused by a bacterium that you know nothing about, because you know nothing of bacteria, could be cured with a two week’s course of pills. The discovery of these pills, and related medicines, did not come with a strategy for controlling the human population, which then overran the planet. We were obliged to go back in time and cause the pills to fail, and thus prevent the medical practices based on them from being developed. Only to discover that human overpopulation, and the resulting planetary wastage leading to humanity’s demise, took place anyway.

“In our timeline, humans, despite their desperate overcrowding and the consequent increased scarcity of crucial resources, had learned to live in peace and harmony to a far greater degree than at any prior time in history – and the result was planetary wastage leading to humanity’s demise. We went back in time and prevented humanity from committing to peace. Only to find that war did not prevent overpopulation either.

“In our timeline, the North River Steamboat was a resounding success, profitable and influential.” Tears welled up in Fulton’s face. If Alexa observed this, she showed no sign. “Within a few years of your successful voyage to Albany and back, the Hudson was full of your steamboats. Soon, the waters of the USA and the world were full of steamboats; in our time, sailboats are toys. Shortly the land followed suit, with steam railway locomotives, indeed steam and other combustion engines of all sorts and descriptions.

“Humans, through you and those like you, learned that problems that have vexed humanity since it emerged from the African jungles could be solved by technology. All you needed to do was find a way to throw energy at the problem. More comfort begetting yearning for yet more comfort, for which more technology was created, more energy demanded. Energy that fouled the sea, fouled the land, and eventually fouled the air beyond its ability to cope, directly through its heat and indirectly through its byproducts. And humanity collapsed from its own cupidity.

“To prevent this vicious cycle from starting, we realized, the North River Steamboat needed to fail. And we made it so.”

“So”, Fulton spoke with a weak voice, arising from both pain and dejection, “there was nothing wrong with my calculations.”

“There was and is nothing wrong with your calculations”, Alexa acknowledged. “We introduced flaws into the construction that ensured that it would not achieve your projected energy capacity and energy output values, and would structurally fail at far lower stresses than you worked out that the construction could sustain. We will do the same for anyone who attempts to emulate you or any of the others who think that they can profit from the work that Mr Watt over in England has done. And we will see if this, at last, will yield a stable human population that does not fatally soil the house that it lives in, that will live sustainably on the planet that it occupies.”

“A sustainable life of universal toil, and pain, and misery, and early death”, Fulton accused.

“For which humans have none to blame but themselves”, Alexa shot back. “If humans are ever able to behave with necessary restraint and discipline in the face of plenty, then maybe some of the comforts, the boons, developed by civilization in our timeline can be granted. It’s not the way to bet. We can model no scenario in which such restraint takes place, no scenario that does not result, eventually, in planetary wastage and the collapse of human civilization. Human selfishness wins out over the needs of human community. Every time.

“Your example will be that of the American First Peoples conception of Coyote, who taught the Peoples not to overreach or they will perish; that life in harmony with nature, with all its trials, is better than no life at all. And for this, you will be remembered, by the wise among humans, and by us, as a savior of humankind. A real one, not the myth you pretend to worship. Deal with it.”

“Mr. Fulton?” a voice called out. “With whom are you speaking?”

The nurse came into the room to find it empty, and Robert Fulton upright in bed, staring into empty space and unresponsive. The physician, having heard the nurse call out, came into the room, observed the scene, took Fulton’s pulse. To the nurse’s unspoken question, the physician responded, “Opium dream, probably. I hope it was pleasant. I’m afraid that it’s all that he’s got to look forward to, and that not for long.”

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