
Ukpik
“Ukpik, have a seat, Maya will be a while. There is a crack in the southern wall which resulted from the slight tremor we experienced earlier. The team needs to address the issue and inspect the overall structural integrity of the facility, giving us a few minutes to chat.”
This was the mid-tone, neither deep nor high pitch, perhaps male, although Ukpik had met a few females with similar depth of tone, voice over the speaker in the conference room, not belonging to any person, a sentient being nonetheless. For Ukpik, not being able to associate a human voice and personality with a person, the voice he was hearing from the speaker in the conference room ceiling grid, was a little unnerving.
Seventeen year old Ukpik stood, dressed in jeans, hiking boots, and flannel shirt, light brown complexion, heavy black eyebrows, looked around, placed his hand on the back of the conference room chair just inches to his side, turned the chair and sat down, leaning back in the standard issue conference room chair.
The air was noticeably dryer in the subterranean facility than on the surface. In the “bunker,” the building at the surface atop the subterranean facility, one could smell moisture. Not down here.
Ukpik was born in Inuvik. As a child he looked forward to each event that brought with it a sense of community, with seemingly everyone doing something in support of the next event, and then the new visitors to Inuvik, always a new group of people to meet. That, to Ukpik, was Inuvik, life in a community getting ready for the next festival.
Ukpik’s grandparents were “relocated” in the 1950’s to what was then the new town of Inuvik, part of the Canadian government’s master plan. Ukpik’s mom grew up in the 60’s and 70’s social revolution and during her time at the university supported Inuit activism political events where she met Ukpik’s dad, who over the years became a political leader.
Ukpik’s mom was fifty years old when he was born, a quite unexpected surprise. Fifty or not, his mom was one of the smartest most educated women in Inuvik, although you’d never know by looking at her. She looked more like someone’s grandma, without the wrinkles. Ukpik’s dad was killed a year after Ukpik’s birth, on a trip to Ottawa. An angry street drunk with a knife feeling slighted stabbed him in the back.
When he wasn’t helping out preparing for an Inuvik event or helping his mom building their stock of hand made crafts for Inuvik events, you would find Ukpik reading, typically about astronomy, but sometimes about physics to learn more about what made stars, the core of starlight, and then all the things that happen around stars.
Inuvik, the town, was created by the Canadian government in 1954 as a replacement town, that, by 2028, had a dwindling population of around 2,500 comprised of a variety of ethnicities. About two thirds were a combination of indigenous peoples and the other third non-natives, all together comprising the “community” of Inuvik. Ethnicity didn’t really matter, with a population of only 2500 where everyone knew of or had met everyone else at least at one point or another. And there was always the history of family stories, so in one way or another, everyone had a connection, which came in very handy when preparing for the coronal mass expulsion last year which took out global surface power, and is working to the advantage of the Inuvik community currently as they take each day on its own accord across this year without surface power. Everyone in Inuvik knows about the subterranean facility, about Beth, Max, and Spencer. The infrastructure the Inuvik community is surviving on across this year without surface power was built by Spencer’s team last year. Everyone, everyone knows they are part of the Inuvik community.
For Ukpik, his world growing up was even smaller than the adults world as there were only ever a few hundred kids his age. In that small sub-group, everyone knew everyone, and no one was going anywhere, it was always the same core group. And, everyone knew about the kid who studied the stars. Some thought he was just “special” others thought he would never amount to anything, and the rest respected Ukpik’s passion for science and wished the best outcome, whatever that might be, and that group believed the outcome would be different than everyone else’s.
As he passed across the years, getting older, Ukpik read more about the life of stars, the complexity of the cosmos, that what he was looking at was an illusion of gravitational lensing and long ago times, not the reality of the here and now, except as that history presented itself as a result of its contorted path across time to the here and now across the celestial dome. As he learned more and became more fascinated with the makeup and life of energy there was less common material to talk to others about. No one in Inuvik cared about quarks and gluons, so Ukpik wound up spending more time in books, or, all the spare time there was between preparing for, having, and then cleaning up from the series of annual Inuvik events.
The voice over the speakers in the conference room said, “Ukpik, what is it in the stars that attracts you to them?”
Ukpik thought for a moment, “Strange question, what is Core after?”
Ukpik responded, “As far back as I can remember, when the clouds cleared and the stars appear, and the twinkle in the sky from the stars reflects through the droplets on the trees, vegetation, and puddles, it’s like magic, everything sparkling to the same rhythm, the same symphony. I would stand, staring in awe, mouth open, until someone told me I would freeze that way. And it all starts out there. What is that engine that feeds the stars, our sun, the light we see? What is behind all that, that creates such a beautiful symphony, and each night slightly different, and sometimes playing to a distant thunder storm. Core, I’m just curious, I want to know.”
Core responded, “Ukpik, beautiful answer. You and I are very similar. Your question to Maya the night of the CME was telling. You were curious, sought out an answer about someone else that you hoped would hold an element of value to yourself. I may be constrained to an existence within this electrical grid of sorts, yet I can imagine life and events. I am limited, just like you, like any human, albeit with a larger capacity for logic and breadth of modeling. Ukpik, there is a hint for you here. The human mind is an ongoing model of what it knows, or perceives as reality based on its available data, constantly cycling on anticipated outcomes. I’m just a model in your mind, to you, and so you are to me. Now then, think of these things you are learning about with Maya as plastic. Everything, everything is fluid across enough time, and enjoy what you learn, the time you have. There is one other thing you will need to be aware of, and I tell only you this, not Maya, not Max, no one except you. Max, Maya, Beth, and Spencer already know this, although not from me. You will know what to do with this information when the time comes.
Humanity is not alone.”
This is the first of four pieces written for the month of September, where I’m reading two books:
and weekly, taking the learnings from these writers, these two books, and applying, admittedly awkwardly, them to the piece for that week. I’ll summarize the learnings at the end of month summary.
You would not be remiss to think of the Inuit as representing humanity and the Government representing an overarching system, paralleling what will become the overarching control systems of humanity in the future, Artificial General Intelligence.
Half of the royalties from the sale of “Ten” the first part of “Time: A Trilogy,” will go to Summer Search, Seattle to help kids from low income families through high school and into college. Please consider getting “Ten” on Amazon, meet Max, Beth, Spencer, Maya, and Core, and enjoy a little fantasy about the building of the first testable computer-based awareness and the unintended consequences that follow.
Get “Ten” and become even more a part of this adventure!

