Michael Siemsen: Exigency

The cursor bobbed in the air before her: deep purple_ foliage. She opened her bio eye and unblurred the background in her prosthetic fone eye. Paragraphs of text floated with Minnie’s gaze as she studied the view from her cabin’s patio. Blue salvia shrubs flanked the shaded cobblestone path from the bottom of the patio stairs, all the way down to the lake. Just above the distant hillside vineyards, the sun shone at late afternoon, its rays bouncing from the lake’s mellow ripples to the blossoming flowers.

Among all the pristine scenery, the salvia stood out to her. Blue flowers— blaue Blume —symbols of hope and beauty, of love and desire, of the infinite and unreachable. Yes, blue would work much better than purple. A smidge transcendental, but screw it. If Minnie’s readers caught it, great. If they interpreted the color as arbitrary, so be it. The rest of her essay should prove explicit enough for its intended audience.

Minnie rested her head against the lounge chair back and closed both eyes. The doc re-sharpened before her, cursor still bouncing: deep purple_ foliage. She selected purpleand recursed for each instance.

Behind Minnie, beyond the wide-open threshold leading into her cabin’s living room, wee nails tik-tik-tik’d across the hardwood floor. She turned just as her pet ferret, Noodle, skittered onto the patio’s decking, and leapt up onto Minnie’s lap.

Noodle wriggled his pointy face into her neck and said, “Are you still working?”

Too ticklish, she pulled him back down to her legs and stroked his back. “Yeah, I have to get this essay done before group. At least the first draft.”

“What’s it about?”

“Context, perspective, and scale. I think it’s pretty solid so far, but who knows if anyone will actually read it.”

Uncharacteristic silence from Noodle. He rested his chin on his fist. Curious, Minnie glanced at the clock in her fone and waited while rubbing his ears. His anthropomorphized face conveyed deep contemplation.

He finally broke the silence. “So you’re feeling down about that?” He nodded encouragement, brow furrowed: This is a safe place for sharing .

Minnie smiled and went along with it. “Well, Doctor … I wouldn’t say down. Just, I don’t know, more wondering than anything else, I guess. I’m supposed to produce these things bimonthly.”

“And you came here to work,” Noodle went on, a flit of his tiny paw toward the lake and mountains. “Not so confined as the station?”

Minnie’s amusement hiccupped. What the hell was Noodle going on about? Since when did he give two licks about the station? Confined? And then she realized exactly what was happening.

She rolled him onto his back and glowered. “ Et tu, ferret?”

“I’m sorry!” He pleaded. “I couldn’t help it! It wasn’t me! Some trigger… You must’ve said something flagged!”

“I’m going to go work in peace.” She pulled up the game’s main menu. “You know, what I came here for.”

Noodle attempted a final apology as he, and the rest of the game app, dissolved before Minnie.

She opened her eyes. The lights in her quarters undimmed.

Sliding out of bed, she growl-sighed. Was nothing sacred? With all the assessments and measures in place, did the station’s psych monitors really need to be invading her personal game? Hijack one of her pets? She was the last person on the station to consider at-risk.

Plopping down at her desk, she pulled on her headphones.

She wondered, had it been an automated psych probe talking through Noodle, or had John set it up? If it was automated, fine. At least it wouldn’t show up on some report. More likely the case. Though she could see John sitting in his command office with nothing better to do than setup new monitors: Minerva Sotiras - monitor for signs of depression, cleithrophobia, and full-blown eye-twitch spacewack.

Poor Nood, she thought. He thinks I’m pissed at him.

Later. Noodle would have to wait. The essay was almost done, and just north of fifteen minutes remained before her weekly group session.

She grabbed the stereo lens from her desk and popped it over her bio eye. The doc opened before her, floating in the recessed nook above her desk, flanked by her preferred editing tools. Movement caught her eye and she shifted focus past a patch of text in her second paragraph. Beyond her desk window’s frame, starry black space gave way to the browns, teals, and pinks of Epsilon C’s dominant landmass. Within seconds, the planet eclipsed Minnie’s view of open space.

“No thank you, Northern Hemisphere.” She said, and blurred out everything in the doc’s background.

Revision mode enabled, Minnie picked up where she’d left off back on her patio.

Where was I? Ah, right… blue flowers.

“Edit all. Purple to blue.”

She reread the passage.

Pointing downward from low orbit, a scope provides a bird’s-eye view of a gently sloped hill, its surface blanketed with deep blue foliage half-lit by a setting sun. A tranquil scene.

The scope zooms out, revealing the blue hill is the last of its kind. The surrounding area is blackened by fire, dense smoke billows westward, and orange flames rapidly converge on the lone blue circle. A scene of destruction and potentially imminent extinction.

The scope zooms back in, beyond the bird’s-eye view, to a microscopic level, exposing a deadly toxin hidden in the lovely blue flowers’ pollen. Pulling out again, this time to a few miles overhead, a group of intelligent beings is revealed to the east, torches at their feet as they stand upwind, watching the last of the deadly blue flowers blow away as distant smoke. A scene of survival, of controlling one’s destiny, of tragedy aversion.

Focus shifts west, to another people, dead and dying from the poisonous smoke unleashed by their enemies. A war scene.

And finally, zooming out once more, out beyond even the scope, a vast planet is seen teeming with life, two moons circling, along with a looming space station full of scientists from a distant solar system. A scene of learning—of discovery.

Scale. This is what Foster Dill Norte referred to when he coined the term scientific depth-of-field. What we now call simply dof. As a mental footnote, you may wish to commit one of my favorite FDN quotes to memory: “Context is everything, context can be nothing, scale is infinite.”

Minnie saved her work, set the stereo lens on the desk, and then navigated to the playback options in her fone. She selected the Sindy voice to read it back to her. Minnie had always wished she could pull off Sindy’s smooth, authoritative-yet-dispassionate tone. Instead, she thought her exhilaration always made her sound like a looner.

Minnie selected her desk speakers for playback.

Like all of the synthetic voices, Sindy’s Modern English was impeccable. “It can be challenging for observers to fully see the cosms, both micro- and macro-, and so one must always predefine the scale of a particular research set—the focal length of the scope, the depth of the optics, the time period with hard-start and hard-end, etset. And they must always account for themselves , the observers. It’s all too common for the researcher to exclude herself from a cosm, as if she’s but an intangible set of eyes absorbing information, identifying patterns, performing measurements, recording statistics. In example two-point-seven, a hypothetical researcher attempted to pluck individual factors from the chaos and arrange them into an order that she understands. This very act marries the observer to the recorded cosm.”