Children of Silicon
by
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Starlight energy raged from a distant inferno and rocketed outward, following gravities ever contoured spacescape, into a timeless infinity. The luminous power traversed tens, then hundreds, of light years, screaming silently as a ghost through the ether’s gauntlet. Now tamed, after expanding through the farthest reaches of space, a tiny sliver of the light was near travels end. There would soon be a long gap, a sickle of darkness, in the otherwise expanding bubble of energy from its source. A slice of its light would be missing, intercepted by the sweeping orbit of a minor planet called Earth, of another fireball sun. A tiny arc of the interrupted starlight, still traveling at 186,000 miles per second, struck two upturned, diamond hard lenses, as gently and coolly as falling snow flakes. The captured light shot through the eye-like lenses and imploded its compressed energy into the top layers of a bank of retina-like silicon sensors. Now controlled even more severely, constricted into a roller coaster of fiber optic tubes just microns wide. The light was relentlessly reflecting, bouncing off the glass fiber walls and forced into hard, tight twists and turns. A dramatic change from the gentle tugs and distant swells of gravity exerted over the cosmic seas of space. It was no longer diverging naturally from its source but converging and being harnessed, controlled and used. A mere flicker of its former fury, and now captured, by a Companion Robots upturned eyes, it was journey’s end for this dim starlight. So, when she and Locknut finished their greeting and she flowed over to him like a container of some exotic material; even though his emotions were radiating like a quasar, he simultaneously had an internal crew squelching his feelings with a fire hose. Consequently, he started to meet her exuberance with a composed professional air and was prepared to give her a standard business like greeting, usually reserved for companion robots one did not know very well. But, somehow, she instantly sensed his coolness was a protective armor, a shell, and shattered it unmercifully. It was not, however, a replay of Locknut’s loud and joyous greeting. Instead, she instantly became sober and walked professionally towards him pointing her finger at him and saying, as she came, "We have talked very little, but Mess and others have told me all about you," as she pressed her hand slowly against him, then slowly and seriously reached down and lifted his other hand and pressed hers against his while she said, "They say that you are very scientific and too serious," as she turned their hands together and pulled him gently to her. She was looking him directly in the eye now and whispered, "They also say you have some very interesting ideas." Sensing his reluctance to loosen up, she slid her left hand over to his neck and pressed his head forward until their foreheads touched. As her skin gently rolled over his, melting his rigidness like a steam iron straightening wrinkles, he felt her radiant eyes close around him, enveloping him. "You must meet with us and share some of your secrets," she whispered so low he wondered if she had really said it, and did not reply. As their foreheads, nose and cheeks gently rolled, somewhere off in his subconscious the broken shells of words like ‘cool’, ‘professional’ and ‘composed’, tumbled chaotically without meaning, and the virtual world of all that she was in his mind, washed like a tsunami over the sands of his silicon consciousness.
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About the Book
This novel, Children of Silicon, explores a slice of your far future. If you had to live and work in this age with robots how would you feel? There is no answer until a multitude of other questions are asked and answered, right? How safe and how intelligent they are come tome to mind immediately, among many others? However, if at this future time a decades long study had been completed called, ‘The Model of the Human Mind’, and if a conscious, electronic mind had been forged from their Human Brain Model, not a software driven computer mind, and packaged in a human-like frame, assuming ‘it’ was safe and of equal intelligence, would this help your comfort level? Would you feel more ‘comfy’ if you knew it had fully functional genitalia and a full range of emotional responses or would you rather it didn’t have any of either? Would you care if ‘it’ vied for your girl/boyfriend or job, or loan, or home site? If so what hierarchy, limits and restrictions would you impose on this new human? Perhaps your future kin will opt to make them aids or slaves? Do you suppose some of these limits could affect negatively the desired result of building a compassionate human companion or might ‘it’ become too ‘alien’ for you to empathize with (i.e., just another mechanical robot – a machine!)? If you have thought deeply about these questions you will realize the difficulty ‘your’ future generations will experience when they face the most sensational and transitional of all future events; the face off between the two ‘human’ minds, the organic biological human mind and the electronic silicon chip human mind. Read Children of Silicon and see if you agree that I’ve picked a most likely scenario for this precipitous event.
About the Author
Born in Seattle, Washington and brought up rurally in the Puget Sound area, I became profoundly inspired by the natural world. My wife Mary and I have two children, Mark and Yvonne. We moved our family to Chicago where I graduated from DeVry Technical Institute. We then traveled to ‘Silicon Valley’ where I worked for Lockheed and GTE Sylvania, while pursuing my engineering degree at San Jose State University. Homesick for Puget Sound we moved back to Washington where I worked for The Boeing Company, until my recent retirement. Even though an Electronic Engineer by profession, I have always greatly admired artists and the arts. My interest in writing stems in part from being ‘forced’ to read, Jack London’s, ‘Martin Eden’, the story of a struggling young writer, which I enjoyed tremendously. My English instructor, Mr. Burroughs, wrote on my analysis of this story, ‘If this is original, it’s good’. After I recovered from the insinuation, I have wanted to become a writer ever since. The idea for this book, Children of Silicon, arose around 1986 from my habit of keeping a patent journal while a practicing engineer. It has taken me through the year 2000 to learn the ‘art’ of writing to the point of submitting my work. But realizing the transition from engineer to author would likely not be smooth, I was determined to enjoy the process of writing, which I have. I hope my joy in the writing of Children of Silicon will have culminated in giving you, the reader, joy in the reading.