All of them entered the clinics when they were of age.  Amanda pinged the three of them and got back two "I'm ok" auto replies.  Duncan was the only one running close to real time, and his reply mentioned his intent to warm up his body and visit in the fall.  Bob was involved in something nearly incomprehensible.  It had required rebuilding his mind in a twisty way in an attempt to understand fundamental physics. 

While he could revert state temporarily to talk to them, a real time visit of a few hours put him months out of touch with his peers.  (Who were, bodies and all, sunken thousands of feet in the ocean--where the cold water provided the cooling needed for fast thinking.)  He sent short messages at regular intervals and occasionally a long explanation from the far shores of knowledge.  Amanda could come close to comprehending his simplified explanations only when using the net as a supplement to her own memory.

The auto reply from Connie was from a local relay since her body and the fog of nanomachines that supported her mind were light hours away.

It was getting dark enough as Amanda walked up the hill for her starlight vision to kick in.

The first three had been equipped with neural interfaces almost from birth.  This made keeping track of kids extremely easy, but the long-term cost was that less than 1 percent of the kids so equipped at an early age stayed in the physical world. 

Amanda smiled that the names of her first four had been accidentally in alphabetic order. 

It was clear by 2075 that children equipped with interfaces from an early age were not going to contribute to increasing the population of humans in the physical world.  So starting when her first post crash kids were fifteen, fourteen, and thirteen they had Elizabeth, Fran and Goel at two-year intervals.  Those three were random mix “natural” children except that her genes and Dwight's genes had been edited-in-place so that any combination of their genes would produce intelligent, stable and sensitive kids.   They were purposely named in alphabetical order.

Children born after 2075 were equipped with interfaces but they were not turned on (except as locaters and for emergencies) till the children were fifteen.  This worked better, about 8 percent of them stayed in the real world and some of them raised children.  Still, the population growth was close to zero.  Even with deaths being rare, withdrawing into simulations was a constant drain on the population. 

There was an ongoing discussion about how early neural interfaces should be turned on.  The argument was between stunting intellectual potential vs. making unloading geeks out of them before their time.  The flavour of the argument was like that around sex a hundred years before.  The kids of course wanted access to them sooner and some of them figured out how to turn on their neural interfaces as much as two years before their fifteenth birthday. 

Dwight and Amanda's third set didn't contribute to the physical state population either.  Elizabeth married in college.  Right after graduation she and her husband entered one of the faster art oriented simulations.  Elizabeth stayed in touch by "phone" for two years (which was at least a hundred subjective years for her) then contact over the last six years had dwindled to rare emails.

The artistic output from her group had been popular for a few years.  It still was with some of the fast simulations, but it had drifted well beyond what mildly modified humans could comprehend.

Pinging Elizabeth (which Amanda did) always got a reply, but she suspected it was from a bot.  A few hundred years of differential subjective experience will eventually leave you with little in common.

Fran and Goel on the other hand were in fifty to one subjective warp drive, having gotten the bug to go somewhere that didn't have web cameras all over it.  They wrote emails, but were now two light years away and increasing at one third of a light year per year.  Amanda sympathized with Elizabeth; carrying on correspondence when other party is experiencing a week to your year was hard.  Amanda heard from Fran and Goel about once a year, which meant they were writing at an incredible once a week.  Well, there isn't a lot more you can do on a starship.

Amanda was most of the way back when she asked Jim how it was going.  He flashed her a visual of the coach where the pillow fight had run down and the younger kids who had not gone to bed were talking quietly about the adventures of the day including the spooky chapel.  Kenny had talked to Hector and was sharing his new historical knowledge about flats on train wheels and flats on automobiles.

She firmly shut off her curiosity about what Hector and Jenny were doing in the train, collected her husband and went to bed.

(If you wonder how Amanda and Dwight stayed married for 126 years, they both tested high for release of oxytocin [8].  They released more that night.)

 

Footnote

[8] Oxytocin - (Greek, “quick birth”) is a mammalian hormone that also acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain. In humans, oxytocin is thought to be released during hugging, touching, and orgasm in both sexes. In the brain, oxytocin is involved in social recognition and bonding, and may be involved in the formation of trust between people and generosity.
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2008/about-oxytocin/   April 20, 2009 11:07AM EST

 

Bio 

Keith Henson (born 1942)

As a proto-transhumanist, Keith's life is scattered over electronics, space engineering, memetics, cryonics, nanotechnology, evolutionary psychology and free speech to name just a few.  He has run his own businesses and acted as a consultant since a 1972 dismissal for refusing to certify an electronic module for nuclear power plant use that failed to meet the required MTBF (Mean-Time-Between-Failure) specification.  He was once described as a person of integrity by a Deputy DA who prosecuted him for picketing a cult over its lethal practices.

While hiding out from the Scientology cult, Keith started writing a post-singularity novel in which one chapter required so much research it became the base for a presentation at a European Space Agency Conference in February 2007 (A 2000 tonne per day Space Elevator).

For further information regarding Keith Henson, please visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/keith_Henson

 

 

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