science fiction

“It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.”

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I must have been about ten years old when I picked up the book, The Wind from the Sun. I must have nearly fallen over twice on the way to the librarian’s counter, hand eagerly holding my library card and waiting for that particular ringing-thud sound of the date stamp stamped on that flimsy card glued to the inside back cover. Two weeks was not nearly enough; I watched the dates slowly accumulate as I’d return to the library again and again. By the time I was finished, the book was nearly mine.

It’s a “boy” thing, I think (as I let myself lapse into gender bias), to be interested in both history and science fiction. I was certainly caught up in the imagery of massive spaceships, distant planets, and of course, by HAL 9000. Yeah, I was a computer nerd then, as I am (more or less) now.

But, like catching a peek is something more interesting than seeing the whole thing, a lesser known story caught my interest more than the red unblinking eye of the massive supercomputer HAL 9000. It was titled “Dial F for Frankenstein” - a nod to Hitchcock’s “Dial M for Murder” in title alone (I think) - and as short as it was, it held my interest and refused to let go.

To be brief, “Dial F for Frankenstein” was a hypothetical future, one where the entire planet’s phone systems were connected and interconnected - the largest and most complex network of connections ever made or possible - and suddenly, an intelligence was born. The analogy was to that of a brain; after the network was put in place, every phone in the world suddenly rang - the idea being that all the neurons had somehow fired and the network was suddenly “alive” in the sense that the brain had fired itself up for the first time. Stereotypical chaos ensues.

Of course, the telephone analogy pales to the reality of inter-connected-mess that is the Internet.

To me, though, the idea still strikes me with the same amount of intrigue - in the possibilities, and perhaps the fear, of a suddenly sentient being. Of a creation taking a life of its own, where it grows and learns and becomes more than what you had left it.

Writing, to me, is much the same thing.

The story I wrote was titled “Type F for Frankenstein,” so really it’s an homage to an homage where the idea is yet again twisted. I typed it up during the blitz of writing I did to get six stories out for Halloween, in the infancy of my writing. It remains one of my favorite pieces of fictional writing.

Beneath the surface of what is clearly a piece of erotica, there lie a few salient ideas, and those are the ones which I think about most, picking them up like fancy trinkets in a display case, rolling them between my fingers and my gaze, before placing them back down. I’ve offered a peek, a short story (where the questions can often outweigh the answers), and revealed just enough to move the plot. To keep my own interest, as I can only hope that I’ve kept the reader’s. To provide a fantasy where something is placed, let sit, and then, hopefully, takes on a life of its own.

And so, even though there are questions raised, of life and death, what really I wanted to explore is what really happens to the thoughts after they are placed on the paper (digital or tangible). It’s a phase change, the thoughts and ideas dormant, escaping from one mind, and lying in wait until they are picked up by hungry eyes, a willing mind, and an imagination ready to make some kind of connection.

I imagine, for a moment, watching someone read what I wrote for the first time. I imagine seeing the gears turn, the mind whirr, and the expressions escaping onto their face. I imagine, then, rubbing my hands together and cackling (in my mind), “It’s alive!”