To my surprise, South Sudan stays in the news for weeks. Apparently this unrest is the start of a social revolution, not just another coup d’etat that would change ruler names but little else.
Before class starts, I ask Ben how he feels about what is happening there.
“It’s big, all right,” he says, “and it’s making a big difference. The people who are now making this happen have a lot of creation backing. This is a first for South Sudan.” He pauses and frowns a bit.
“That’s not good?” I ask.
“Oh it’s good,” he says, “but it’s making such a difference and so fast!
“Before now, when the government was mostly human, it was also quite corrupt and quite tribal. The government played favorites and took cheap shots all the time. And that’s why we NGO’s were so important. We provided some rationality instead of superstition, some fairness instead of favoritism, and we got close to the people. We could really help.
“Now, according to my friends, the government really is shaping up. They are using a lot of creation help. With that, they are making the government work effectively for the first time.”
“What about the imprinting? Wasn’t that making the creations help the locals? That’s what you said when you came back,” asks Jaina.
“Then it was. But they’re changing the imprinting. You may not be able to change a leopard’s spots, but you can certainly reprogram a cyber! And apparently they have done a lot of drastic changing in the local cyber programming. Plus they have brought in new ones, a lot of those, and the old ones, those that have kept their old programming, are now pretty clearly obsolete.”
“How could they afford this?” asks Adrian.
“South Sudan has resources. They couldn’t afford new stuff before because the corruption was so horrendous. Now they are at the beginning of a virtuous circle -- a believable one -- and it’s clear to foreign investors that they can afford a lot more. The change is amazing. So now investors are willing to finance this massive cyber upgrade to government. Most impressive. I congratulate these new rulers on that. Those clinic burners and witch hunters who drove us out were the last of the old guard. They’re gone now.”
“Sounds great! What’s the problem?”
“The problem is the NGO’s are now obsolete. The government is doing, or close to doing, all the stuff the NGO’s did for the people.” He looks around, “It’s great for the people of South Sudan, but Janet and I are now out of a job, and our NGO is closing down.”
“Ouch!” says Adrian.
“Mmm ...,” agrees Ben, “and Janet and I don’t reprogram as fast as a cyber. And there aren’t that many primitive places left on Earth. We’re going to have to do some serious retraining now.”
“Could you work for the new government?” asks Adrian.
“Perhaps ... but we aren’t South Sudanese, and don’t want to be.” He laughs. “And it’s not clear what advantage we could offer that their new cybers can’t.”
“So, what’s your follow-up to that UNMSG gig?” asks Jaden when Ruby comes in.
She pulls off her glasses and smiles at him, but it is not the smile of triumph. “Nothing lined up yet.”
“Wow! You looked so good at the UNMSG I’m surprised to hear that.”
“I am too,” she says. “In fact, I’ve lost a gig. It seems the Justice Sisters have taken my place at the Miami Vice commemorative.”
“The Justice Sisters! ... Aren’t they -- ”
“Yes they are: avatars.” She sighs. “But they move like they drink python juice every morning, and they’ve gone from viral to mainstream now.”
“Couldn’t you avatar?”
“I could, and I do for some occasions, but that’s not what I’m in this for. I’m in it to express myself and get sincere appreciation for what I do, not what some stylized impression of me does.”
“Spoken like a true artist,” says Adrian.
Ruby laughs, “It sounds like it, doesn’t it.” She thinks, then says, “I guess I’m not the ambitious Ruby I was ten years ago. I sold my soul then. Now ... I’m not sure it’s mine to sell any more.
“And ... those Justice Sisters are so derivative!! God! They don’t have a single original move in that entire routine!” She shakes her head. “People want to pay good money to see that sh -- stuff? Why not rent a Michael Jackson video if that’s what they want to see! He did it first ... well ... near first, and with a purely human body.”
I’ve never seen her like this before.
She settles down immediately and the gracious smile comes back, “Ah well ... nothing ever stays the same in entertainment, but nothing ever changes, either.”
And with that, I start my class.
At break she tells me more.
“I have been offered something, but it’s ... I’ve been offered a gig as chef on a cook show. Jeremy Clautz, the big afternoon show producer, thinks I’d be a hot item as a gladiator chef. The idea is I costume up like a warrior maiden and combat something in a gladiator arena. After I defeat it, I cook it up as something tasty.”
I kind of smirk at that. “Piranhas and pirouettes, can it be that bad?”
She smirks back. “It can. Food is so irrelevant these days ... at least I think so. Except for taste, smell, and texture, it’s all up to my nanobots.”
“So it’s all entertainment.”
“It is. But I want to do real entertainment. Traditional entertainment, I guess I should say -- singing and dancing to tell a story. Swooning over what’s in a fry pan is ...” She sighs. “If I take up on this, I really will be selling my soul twice. I’m not sure Mephistopheles would be pleased with that.”
“Somehow, I don’t think he would mind.”
“He might not, but I sure will.” She sighs again. “I feel like I’m getting old, Dahlia, I’m thinking more about dignity than opportunity. It’s kind of spooky, and I’m sure it’s going to cost me.”
She brightens and asks me “How’s progress coming on your Baby Front?”
“Slow ... slow.” I sigh, “I’m still thinking about your offer. Thinking hard. But it’s so different than what I had envisioned. I’ve also been talking with Adrian.”
“He would be a catch!” Ruby admits.
“He would be, if I caught him. But right now he has his eyes ... elsewhere.”
“Geisha?”
I nod my head.
“Not a big surprise there. He’s high tech and it’s sure a high tech solution.”
She puts her arm around me in a reassuring way, “Even in this day and age we still play Heartthrobs and Headaches, don’t we. We sure need a pill for that!” She gives me another hug, “Even if we don’t set up anything formal, I’m sure you’re going to be there when I need you, right? After all, that’s why we’re all in this course, isn’t it?”
She is right about that, and I am happy she is being so easygoing about this. I give her a sweet hug back. “Thanks. I’ll keep you posted.”
About three quarters of the children raised today grow up with their parent or parents and become part of that family in the traditional legal and social sense. These days there are also a whole bunch of children that are raised for other destinies.
Most of these other children are sponsored by various governments. They are grown because a community has a need for human beings to do specific tasks, but they can’t find enough traditionally raised children to fill the demand. Historically, if a community needed more warm bodies, it was either just a “too bad -- live with it” situation, or the need was filled spectacularly by conquest and slavery, or more quietly by immigration.
Now we have new ways to fill the demand, and ever since these new ways have become possible, they have generated a lot of social heat. I’m sure you’re all aware of that. But let’s review a bit so we all have some common perspective to base our further discussions on.
Those who are dead-set against government-sponsored babies like to bring up the experience of the antebellum American South. After importing slaves was prohibited in 1808, some owners made a practice of growing their own -- essentially setting up breeding farms. Modern day objectors see too much parallel with that experience to condone modern baby growing methods. They see this as neo-racism: that we are making a new slave society, and that we are going to burn in hell for doing so.
Some of the parallels are real: The government sponsored babies are not expected to grow up with the same lifestyle as privately sponsored babies are. They are being raised to live in different places and do different things during their lives. This causes great concern because both the American South and its island contemporary, Haiti, suffered from a damaging social stasis for five to ten generations after their slave liberations: They lagged way behind their North American contemporaries in adapting to industrialized ways.
And there are some legal parallels as well. There are still a lot of questions as to what rights various government sponsored babies have, and will have, compared to the rights of a privately sponsored baby.
At other times in history, governments have sponsored population growth by encouraging family and baby making. The most conventional way is starting with some government propaganda for everyone to experience, and giving tax breaks to those who actually do have children. Many totalitarian nations did this during the Great Unrest of the twentieth century.
We are not experiencing that kind of deep social and economic crisis today -- thank goodness! -- but we are experiencing a steady decline in human population. These days the whole world is not producing enough babies to keep up the population -- some people cheer this, and others worry. The worriers support government-sponsored babies.
Adrian is not happy either when he comes to class. His smile is turned upside down.
All through class he is quiet and distracted, rather than engaging -- something is up. I text him as class breaks up, “What’s up?”
“Meet me for coffee,” is the terse reply. I wrap up my post-class work, push through the zombie pack in the corridor, and head to the Starscents. Adrian is already at a table, with coffee for both of us, and off in the ozone making contacts. He waves me over and motions for me to sit. This is not the usual engaging Adrian. I am patient.
It isn’t long before he gets to me, still with no smile.
“They have raided my workshop.”
“Who?”
“The DEA with an attached media circus,” he sighs. “According to my lawyer, there’s a fifty-fifty they will come for me and let me do my premier performance of the ‘perp walk’. He’s keeping me posted.” Then he grins a gallows grin, “I’m dusting off my old soft shoe routine.”
I think my jaw dropped. I know my eyes widened, “What’s this all about.”
“Word of my fruit fly flea circus got to some alarmists -- some alarmists with serious teeth. They convinced the DEA that ‘there was a serious possibility that I was developing dangerous drugs without proper review, and what I was doing could be imminently hazardous to the community,’ as their investigator put it to me in the warrant. I passed that on. That part is now at the lawyer-lawyer stage.”
“Are they there now?”
“See for yourself.” He is near tears as he brings up the news channel doing a real-time report on the search. George-776 is standing immobilized in a corner of the office while DEA people search the cluttered tables. They aren’t being delicate. Meanwhile, other DEA people in bunny suits and hazmat creations are swarming around the workshop area spraying stuff -- probably sterilizers -- and hauling stuff out -- probably as evidence.
I look up. Adrian’s face is a mask -- the sort of look one sees on people hauling bodies out of a newly discovered mass grave. He says quietly, “Fuck. Years of work. Fuck. All they had to do was ask politely. Fuck.”
I put my hand on his arm in sympathy.
He looks at me, and somehow the look gets even scarier. “What’s even worse is that Homeby, my partner, is likely the chief squealer.”
“Why!”
“He thinks I’m being the mad scientist -- exploring where man was not meant to explore.
“We’ve had our creative differences on this for a while. ... I guess he got sincerely scared and decided to call in the cavalry. ... FUCK!”
Adrian gets up and walks around in frustration. He comes back and sits down.
“The years this is going to take to work out! The years of distraction. Plus, it’s not going to help Gene Editors one bit! Who’s going to invest in a mad scientist who’s half a step from getting thrown in the slammer for a crime against humanity?” He adds, “This is killing Homeby as well as me. What was he thinking!” Adrian rolls his eyes again.
“If he had just talked to me! ... Well, I guess he did. He warned me. I just didn’t believe he’d go this far. It’s insane.”
“What will you do now?”
Adrian looks into his hands, “I don’t know. I’ll survive. I’ll adapt ... somehow.” He looks up, “It’s too early to tell.” He smiles at me like something funny just came to mind, “But I think the geisha is out of the picture now.”
I laugh with him at that. I still like him. I hold his hand, “I’m still with you.”
He holds mine back and looks deep into my eyes, “You should know: That’s very important to me and has been for some time now.”
Then he looks distracted again, “Excuse me. It’s my lawyer-bot.”
He wanders off into the ozone, and so do I.
Dahlia, I’ve failed. 487/800.
-- J
It is a terse text message from Jaina, and my heart goes out to her. I connect back to her with voice. She is still in the test center building, walking out.
“That’s not a fail, Jaina, it’s just below average. You can take it again and do better.”
She sounds so sad and discouraged, “Oh ... I’ve spent so much time on this already! This is not going like I hoped at all. Who’s going to let me raise a baby with a score like this one?”
Jaina is my “cow’s tail” student for good reason. She distracts easily, and no one has ever pushed her successfully to overcome that. Plus, she decided to take the test without her cybertutor. This outcome is no surprise -- to me anyway -- so I am prepared to give her my next suggestion, “You can raise a baby for the government. We’ve talked about this before in class.”
“... A Mars baby?”
“Uh-huh. Let’s get face-to-face.”
We meet at the Starscents. We review her e-resume.
“You didn’t do well on the PAT, but you’ve got some good education to fall back on.”
“Yeah. I hated school but my folks were pretty insistent. And, since I didn’t care one way or the other, they had me take ‘good’ subjects.” She sighs a bit, “Maybe they will finally pay off.”
“They may, indeed. You have the math, biology, and environmental science background to be interesting to the Mars Permanent Colonists program.”
“The Mars kids,” she confirms that she knows what I am talking about.
I bring up a video and we watch. The narrator intones:
“The Mars Permanent Colonist Program is designed to build a colony of humans on Mars that will be comfortable spending generations there.
“As Martian inhabitants are famous for saying, ‘Mars is not Earth.’ It’s a rocky planet, but that’s about all the two have in common. It’s smaller and colder. Its gravity is one third of Earth’s, the temperature is cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide into dry ice at the poles, there is little water, and the thin atmosphere provides little radiation shielding -- UV ionizing is a standard part of Martian surface conditions.
“As a result, it’s expensive to build human-compatible habitation on Mars, and the humans who live there long term find their health stressed by the low gravity.
“Modern biology can help. Thanks to our understanding of the processes that control growth and development, we can now create plants, animals, and humans who are better adapted to Mars conditions. They can’t live outside yet, but they can thrive in a lower gravity, lower pressure atmosphere and in smaller workspaces. There are numerous other changes: The Martian bodies are well-adapted to having nanobots inside, and they can handle things such as metabolizing most vitamins.”
Some other professor-type talking head announces enthusiastically, “This is evolution-on-steroids. We are accelerating humans and other kinds of Mars transplants through millions of years of evolving so they are well-adapted to their new living condition.”
“Yup. Mars people,” comments Jaina as she watches.
The video concludes with pictures of people who are dwarfs by Earth-human standards. They are on Mars, and they look happy and comfortable. They are pictured in some kind of farm dome with lots of plants and animals around them. These are also miniatures, and they look happy, too. Nice looking, but the caption at the bottom points out this is an artist’s conception.
Then she shudders because I bring up a second video which shows the Mars babies in a special kindergarten facility here on Earth. It shows many of the kids wearing leg braces, and their teachers are dressed warmly and wearing masks so they can deal with the low pressure, low nitrogen atmosphere that the babies are more comfortable in.
“One of those will be me?” she looks up questioningly. I don’t know if she’s repelled because of what the kids look like, or what the tenders have to wear to deal with them, or both. I know it’s a pretty strange sight for me, and I’m happy I don’t have to consider this as one of my alternatives.
“One could be. The job pays well, and you’re caring for children -- human children. The people who run this program know how strange this looks to most people, and they also know that these kids need to be brought up quite differently from earth-bound kids. They are going into a frontier world, not a safe, civilized one. They know that science knowledge is a necessity, not a luxury, for these kids. ... You might fit in quite well.”
Jaina keeps looking. The display is showing real-time, so it won’t end until she’s ready to stop looking. I figure the longer she looks, the better it’s looking to her, so I’m patient. Best I can figure, this really could be a good match for her.
After about four minutes, she pulls away and says, “I’ll have to think about it.”
“Would you like for me to arrange a tour?” I ask.
“... I’ll think about it.” She gathers up her stuff and stands up before she says, “Thanks, Dahlia, this is making me feel better.”
As she walks out, she’s looking better.
Two days after the Fruit Fly Raid, I get a text from Adrian.
D-
News 3443, 2PM, something you really want to see.
-A
I pick it up. It is a strange sight. George-776 is standing behind a lectern and facing a small sea of human reporters. The last time I saw him was in that breaking news video at the lab. He had been immobilized at the raid -- something deeply scary for a creation. I thought he would end up spending years in some evidence room and then be declared defective and get recycled.
But now he has been released, and I guess the lawyer bots have clarified where all parties stand because here is George-776 giving a press interview -- most unusual for a creation.
This only happens when a creation needs to communicate something to lots of human strangers. Creation-creation communication is handled by different channels, ones that few humans pay attention to.
At the interview he announces:
“This incident is most disconcerting.
“I’m a good creation. I know the charter and I follow it. Assisting Mr. Messenger in his workshop occupies only two percent of my average monthly work allotment. I assist and supervise in many other East Jersey Creationland projects. The one that keeps me the busiest is coordinating the specialty equipment used in loading and unloading ships with unusual cargos such as zoo animals. I am quite familiar with oddball equipment and techniques.
“To find myself immobilized like some corrupted and off-program Trojan is an insult! And something is quite wrong with the system if that happens to a creation such as myself.
“To find that I’ve been immobilized and accused of not following the charter is actionable: I have not crossed the line, and my human associate, Adrian Messenger, has not crossed the line. It is the human accuser, Julian Homeby, who has crossed the line. This raid should not have happened. How he made it happen is what needs to be investigated, not the experiments of Adrian Messenger.
“It would be excellent if Julian Homeby could learn from this incident ... learn and understand ... learn and understand that his poor, panicked, judgment has caused a blunder, and that blunder has caused huge damage.
“But given the nature of human thinking -- its hardwiring that is so well-adapted to Stone Age living -- that is unlikely to happen. Because of the human emotion content in his choice, Julian Homeby will remain convinced of the rightness of his actions for a long, long time.
“What is possible, and what should happen, is that those who are watching him must learn of the huge damage caused by his blunder. They must learn of the hurt he has caused so that they will recognize when blunder potential is rising up in their own lives and decision making. They can recognize and avoid it.
“This -- learning from the mistake committed here -- is the goal of the actions that I will now take.”
George-776 now pauses. ... He’s been assimilating some drama coaching it seems.
“I now challenge Mr. Homeby to a debate. Let’s face this crisis the proper way -- with talk, not door-bashing, lab trashing, and creation immobilizing!”