Mike Tidwell's book, Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast, hints at forces unraveling the Gulf Coast, ripping away land and the cultures bound to it, faster than nearly anywhere else in North America.
For the story, I assumed a sea level rise of 20 feet. The NOAA model only goes to 10 feet, but for estimates beyond a century, assuming the worst-case scenario, I needed to go higher. If the Totten Glacier in East Antarctica and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were to melt, they alone would provide a sea level rise of greater than 20 feet. To make matters worse, parts of the Gulf Coast are sinking, particularly around New Orleans. The Louisiana state climatologist said my estimate of the climate impact on coastal areas in the story's timeframe was plausible.
I make several assumptions about future artificial intelligence technology. The first is that Turing's Imitation Game does not adequately address the problem of machine sentience because it ignores the issue of agency—self-interest and the independence of action.
Beginning with 's R.U.R., many writers, mathematicians, engineers, and philosophers have envisioned robots and synthetic intelligent systems (referred to as synths in my novel) as artificial servants. That is, they have little agency beyond the questions and tasks humans give them. They don't love, hate, or strive; they don't fight for survival or dominance; they don't weep at the loss of loved ones. To channel Jeff Hawkins' ideas for a moment, the reason for this is that these human visions of sentience are predicated on emulation of the human cerebral cortex and not the more primitive neural, hormonal, and sensory structures that lie below it. Even dogs have a doggy nature independent of their human owners. True machine sentience would require detailed modeling of the lizard brain and the biological systems it touches. This is a much harder problem than emulation of the cortex. Hawkins' A Thousand Brains assumes it can't be done. My novel posits a what-if scenario where it can be done, given an appropriate computational substrate (fast, efficient DNA-based processors).
The settings I've used in the story are based on venues that exist or have been imagined or remembered.
The headquarters for Blackbird Empathics is the New Orleans Superdome. It is not unusual for landmark buildings to be rebuilt and repurposed.
Knightly's mansion is modeled after the Biltmore Estate in Ashville, North Carolina.
The floating city of Yemaya is based on a scaled-up version of NOAH, the New Orleans Arcology Habitat envisioned by Tangram 3DS International 3D and Design Solutions LLC, VFX Motion Media Partners, with a design concept by E. Kevin Schopfer.
The swamp camp is drawn from my own experience with military "hootch" living in Thailand during the early 1970s.
For more information about the book and what's behind it, see my website,
CITEȘTI
The Pieces of My Self
SFA hunt for treasure becomes a search for self. Lillian Fray, an adjunct professor at a community college, is asked to solve a puzzle involving a cryptogram and the link to a dead billionaire's sentient avatar. Her quest is fraught with racial politi...
