Some Moral Minority (science fiction excerpt)

From my 1998 short story; Some Moral Minority...

Thus Zootrope Blitzbank's desperate invention upon which he worked for years; it looked most times like an empty twenty-five gallon electro/magnetic aquarium.

Libby held the field generator. The seemingly glass walls of the aquarium brightly arranged then transformed to a literal wavering of the field of reality for-itself. Reality or re-all verbally referenced was only an appearance of the way things are for the time of perception. Yet a substance of reality for-itself did exist (in theory) to create and order the appearance of mass-energy-time for others. What once supported quarks or strings or multi-dimensional nounlets motioned itself in noumenal non-referability as something-to-itself. One attribute minimized to non-objectivity stayed to be something that was a twenty-five gallon tank.

What reality was itself as a minimized scientific-technological objectivity expanded to an extended size appearance seemingly definable as reality within reality. A technology within being is a monism within pluralism within a monism. It was a being that could have no being or meaning for others except as itself to itself. The sober tank within the social reality of San Francisco could not probabilistically be. In fact it was very flawed so what might have been knowable as a perfect, representative form twenty-five gallon aquarium tank of reality in the Pithy Junk Shop was referred to simply as the project.

The Bergybits found the clues to the construction of the monist simulator in an ancient magazine manuscript named the Parchment Chronicles from the First Republic brought in by a City cellar scavenger with some beautiful green glass cheap- wine bottles. Second Reemdpublic libation bottles were made of recycled paper impregnated with vitamins and bonded with non-soluble ceramic-glue. Libby reached into the tank and plucked cherry from a life-like cherry from a grape cluster in the tank.

The tank said; 'Thank you Libby baby.'

Libby said,"Zootrope did you here that? It talked to me!"

"Maybe it’s growing up Libby."

Libby ate the cherry and thought 'this is good.'

The tank said; "You've made inanimate matter sentient my Bergybits, whom do you think you are; Mary Shelly and Charles Darwin?"

"Um, no tank" Zootrope answered, "We're only just experimenting with methods to escape the Second Reemdpublic."

"Sentience is not the only experience of what you think of as re-all. Your all has limited borders" the tank spoke, "you should have asked me about escaping before. Ears, Aristotle wrote, are the most vulnerable of the sense organs. Libby, Zootrope, are you believers in Jesus Christ, Lord of Creation?"

“Yes, of course tank" Libby said.

"Good. Now go forth and ready for the day. The Transference-libel section of Special Branch S.F. is sending personnel to arrest you soon." The tank became quiet and reflective.

Television crystalline-silicon building panels soaking up sunshine for the S.F. grid seem a part of space with the blue sky and cloud motif. Libby and Zootrope stepped out for more secure conversation.

The planet's seventeen thousand surveillance/commo satellites and ground sensory network made up an absolute real-time bugging web with all data stored and analyzed in the unlimited computer memory and logic units. Even the molecules of the oceans were used as a computer ALU by Interpolyopoly.comm, so the couple moved to complicate monitor holism in the neural networks by conflicting command and control borders in political operation authorization.

They walked to a mag-lev tube and jumped down sliding in rapid acceleration through the field guiding their direction with fin-like motions of arms and legs clad in silicon-superconducting everwear fiber tunics.

"Libby lets buy a half case of Wrangell Dark Ale before liftoff" Zootrope said leading Libby toward the familiar Gale mini-brewery in the blimp passenger terminal.

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