Maladapt

By S. A. Barton

Maladapt is a mini-collection of four short stories totalling just under 15,000 words.
These are stories about the struggle to adapt to the coming future. About coming to terms with migrating to a robotic body, to telepresence, to universal surveillance and what it means to those of us who don't quite fit in. They're stories about FAILURE to adapt, and the victories to be won beyond failure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: S. A. Barton
• Release date: Jun 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370969586

S. A. Barton

S.A. Barton knows third person bios look professional, but he doesn't care for them nonetheless.I prefer to be more personal, partly because overcompartmentalization is a former flaw I remain mindful of. As a (recently diagnosed) autistic/ADHD human, I have many reasons to remain mindful and many rewards for doing so. I dislike the label disability but understand it does sometimes apply to me and my work–but enough about that.I live in the Chicagoland exurbs near parentals and my sole sibling and her family, where the city is in reach but the deer are closer. Like many writers I often live in my own head; I prefer to be close to nature and select humans daily so I don't stay there.My children live in Virginia with their mom and her husband. Buy more of my books, please: help finance some in-person visits because thrice-weekly videocalls are good but not the same as IRL hugs.My writing is diverse and reflects all of the above as well as roughly four decades of personal seeking and many jobs beginning with my rural Wisconsin roadside worm stand, begun to finance an RPG habit in 1981 and shut down by the state when my success began luring customers from the local bait shop.You'll find my more polished and mostly self-published fiction here; so far my nonfiction lives with my visual art and select fiction on Patreon.com/sabarton and Twitter.com/sabartonwrites :)

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License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for helping a self-published author.

Maladapt

A collection of short fiction

By S.A. Barton

Copyright 2017 S.A. Barton

Smashwords Edition

See more from S.A. Barton: Twitter @Tao23 – Seriously Eclectic – Facebook – Patreon

Contents:

License notes and title

Preface

No Echo (original for this collection)

Not The Droids (2017 edition – original 2011)

Basshole (original for this collection)

In The Automated Wind (original for this collection)

Preface

The stories in Maladapt are all directed at a common human experience: our struggle to adapt to the changes advancing technology brings to our cultures. Technological changes have been especially radical over the last couple of centuries, and we’re in the middle of a huge one, the digital/internet revolution. So we tend to focus on technology in our endless articles and essays and stories about how tough it is to adjust to modern life.

These stories are more entries in that genre, yes. But they are also stories about what the failure to adapt means, the pain those mistakes bring, and the way new technologies tease out and sometimes warp the emotional conflicts that have been with the human race as long, at least, as we’ve had speech.

Perhaps most importantly, it's about the ways in which we find peace, or at least equilibrium.

It's easy to look back on history and say society adapted to X change and Y so well – why are we having so much trouble? But the history of adaptation is really the history of maladaptation. It’s a history of trying, and screwing up, and the people those screwups hurt along the way, and how we try to set things right.

It’s easy to think of history as a straight line trending up at a 45 degree angle to the right. But it’s not.

It’s a goddamn rollercoaster, and we’re all on it, and we have no way of knowing whether the track ends beyond the next loop-the-loop or not.

So let’s go for a ride. It’s scary as hell, and it hurts. But there’s a good time to be had along the way too, if you look for it.

Also, it’s the only ride in town.

No Echo

The overhead lights turned themselves off and she gasped. For a moment the only illumination was the sunlight glow of the windows over the sink in the kitchenette and in the living-and-bedroom. Then the windows turned themselves off as well. The blackness was heavy and perfect as the dark in a cave a hundred meters deep. That cave-black flashed into Giselle's head from thirteen years past – for a heartbeatless moment she was ten. That had been the last year she was short, with skinny sticks for arms and legs, a sliver of belly showing between belt and the bottom of a DJ Kleen Entergee: Redwood Greenrap T-shirt she wore five times a week for another year even though the first stirrings of growth spurt gawkiness already made it look a bit silly on her. Next year she'd be seven inches taller yet somehow less thin, not more.

She'd been with her parents in Somethingorother Caverns in one of the Virginias, didn't care which then and couldn't remember now, and the tour guide said something corny-sounding about how perfect the darkness was because sunlight couldn't find a way to bounce down all the long twisty turns of a natural cave system like the one they were in, not one single photon.

Like she cared. She couldn't wait to get out, back to the sun, because lunch was on the far side of the tour will it never end and she wanted to find out how an old-fashioned Smithfield ham sandwich was different from a regular one. Her stomach growled. Mom and dad were listening to the spiel so hard they were mouth-breathing. Disgusting.

The tour guide warned everyone the dark was was coming, stand still you don't want to flail around in the dark and hurt yourself (she remembered rolling her eyes), here it comes, three, two, one, zero!

And the light had gone out, all of the light, and she gasped. She hadn't realized how bright the regular old dark in her room at night really was, and the dark