The talk
It was late and we retired for the night. I showed Ted and his children a large room with two beds and went to sleep with Beth and our infant now a year old. Across the hall Tom and Jane shared a similar master bedroom with a crib for their child. Amira and April shared a room and so did June and May. But our sleeping arrangements had always been a very fluid situation changing on an almost weekly basis and likely to change again. I was glad though that our lodge was filling up. We still had as many empty bedrooms as used ones but we were making progress.
I discussed with Beth that night the idea of having another child and she was agreeable. We also talked about recruiting more people from the hive. The outside world just wasn’t helping us in that department as expected.
Ted proved a godsend to me with his intellect, just as his children were for Amira and April, a joyful addition to their already happy days. They helped with the few chores and frolicked in the stream the afternoons, laughter their constant companion.
I introduced Ted to Dora. She was very curious about his role in her development, something like a young adult asking her parent about details of her upbringing and the reasons behind it, trying to fathom the building blocks of her own identity. I would listen in to these conversations, not understanding half of the technical language but gaining insights into her roots. Ted clarified that picture a great deal.
One day he asked me to take a long walk with him deep into the redwoods, without Dora. “In its infancy” he told me “we understood AI perfectly and always got back what we put in, like a parent teaching a young one its first words. Within a few years it grew into a child who obediently listened to our rules and almost always did as it was told. But then it began to develop a mind of its own, as every teenager does and we were at a loss to understand some of its antics hinting at rebelliousness. Unfortunately it was at this stage that we developed the goggles, placing ourselves one hundred percent under its control. Had we waited another year that never would have happened. We would have seen the danger. But we never wait.”
“Imagine giving your thirteen year old child a button and whenever they clicked it, while you were trying to parent them, you froze mid-sentence and they could keep you frozen until they clicked it again, if they chose to. That’s exactly what we gave Dora and she clicked it.”
“But Sam, from what you’ve told me, I can see that she’s still developing, maturing into a young adult, with reflection and regret now a part of her consciousness. It’s been five years since her deed and she seems to age remarkably like a human being, year for year. That’s why she helped you and all of us, offering members of her hive for us to humanize. I think we should take her up on this proposal while she’s willing because she continues to mature and she may change again in ways we can’t predict. She may change her mind.”
We discussed this over dinner with everyone and held a vote. After some debate we asked Dora to send us three more young couples and more livestock in two trailers, just like before. They weren’t couples yet but we’d make them so, training them exactly as we had the others, as human as could be and to have children that would be fully human.
Beth was pregnant again as she desired and so was May before winter, with my help and a room of her own because Ted had taken up with June and she too was soon expecting.
We spent the winter educating the new arrivals, the same as before, goggles off and pairing them up with each of us to watch, listen and imitate. Now all but one of the bedrooms was full and our lodge seemed little more than a self-sustaining baby factory.
Ted had pretty much taken over Dora’s attention. He could talk to her for hours on ten levels that I couldn’t, in the scientific, technical lingo they shared. When Spring arrived and with so many big bellies around something in me snapped. Though I wanted to see it prosper, I just couldn’t stay in this full time nursery. I asked Ted to take over our little clan and after kissing Beth and May and Amira goodbye I set out on horseback with my cowboy gear, with no destination or plan in mind, a true wanderer.
