Jaden comes in, but he couldn’t look sadder. He looks like he is in shock. He shakes his head and says, “This child molesting case has gone Kafkaesque. The union lawyers I worked with suggested I plea bargain. They said that it would save both time and money ... and it did, I guess.”
“Why didn’t they have you settle out of court?” asks Janet incredulously.
“Because I didn’t have insurance,” he sighs. “The plaintiffs would make no money if it got resolved that way. If I pleaded no contest, then the union insurance could kick in and the plaintiffs could get some serious cash.
“The union lawyers recommended I take that approach ... and it was fast. It was settled in a week.”
Janet blanches and mutters, “Oh no!” under her breath. She understands the full implication of where this is leading.
Jaden nods at her, “Uh huh ... What the lawyers neglected to mention was that I’m now a convicted sex offender.” He sighs. “They settled quickly and it cost the union nothing but an insurance statistic. They’re happy and their bosses are happy. It’s no skin off their back that I’m now out of a job.”
“You gave them approval to do this?” Janet asks.
“Well ... I didn’t say no. I told them I needed to think it over. I didn’t get back in touch -- it was the weekend -- so forty eight hours later they began the process ... saying because I hadn’t objected they presumed I had agreed.”
“I talked to my steward about this and he said, ‘We stand by our people one hundred percent! ... But, sorry, you’re not one of our people any more.’” Jaden barely suppresses a sob, “I’m out of the union, too.”
He looks up, “This is likely my last class ... I’m not sure what happens now.”
“You’re quite welcome to keep coming, Jaden.” I assure him, “until you can get this figured out.”
I look around, and everyone nods in agreement.
“Thank you ... thank you,” he mumbles.
“You don’t have the money to fight this, I presume?” says Janet.
“I would ... if I had insurance,” he sighs.
“Let’s get together after class. Let’s see if I can do anything to help,” she says.
Jaina thought about the Mars babies program for a couple days, and we spoke about it briefly at class. Then the next day, she texts me back, “Yeah, let’s go.” I coordinate with Anton who knows people there and I arrange a tour.
The Mars babies are a new item and they are developed and grown in just three locations around the world: Russia, China, and at a lab outside of Austin, Texas. The place is modern so we pick up avatars there for the visit.
Before we enter the avatars, we are shown a series of big views of the place so we will be better oriented after we inhabit -- it’s been found that human-side thinking is very used to approaching a destination before entering it, so it’s more comfortable in the avatar when it knows where it is.
The facility is in a research park on the outskirts of Austin. It is a hybrid creation-human place and looks well-organized and sparkling new -- I’m guessing, and not hard, that the creations are handling the layout and architecture.
Inside we meet with a human, Dr. Savannah Poombatta, who gives us a tour. “Call me Savannah. I’m an acquaintance of Anton’s, and he said you two were part of an interesting project of his.”
“We’re learning to raise babies,” says Jaina.
“He suggested that raising Mars babies may be of interest,” I add.
“I see,” she says. “That would be part of Child Champs, right? Anton has his fingers is a lot of pies.”
“That’s right,” I say. I’m a little surprised. I wasn’t aware of how many circles Anton moved in.
Savannah takes us on the tour.
She tells us, “There are many styles of dedicated humans being made these days. Basically, we modify the DNA and nanobots of the body to be dedicated to specific environments and specific tasks. What makes the Mars babies interesting is that while their physiological environment has to be adapted to a fairly narrow environmental range -- living inside a Mars habitation -- their mental environment has to be wide open -- that Mars environment is full of surprises. Designing people with this wide gulf between the physiological and mental parameters has been quite challenging.
“What do you usually design?” I ask.
“Oh ... We design people for many things. A lot are done under NDA -- Non-Disclosure Agreement -- so I can’t talk about the details on those. But as an example, we designed some people for a historic pearl diving village off the coast of Japan. These people had extra oxygen storage and more cold resistance. They looked quite human -- beautifully so, in fact -- because that was part of the lore about them. But more importantly, they could dive deeply more safely and the diving season was longer for them. In sum, they put on a better show for the tourists.
“Sounds handy.”
“That one was pretty straight forward. These Mars babies are quite a bundle!”
By then we are at the nursery. It is downstairs in the basement level and behind an airlock door system. Savannah opens the first door for us and then says, “Excuse me. I’m going to slip into an avatar, too. I’ll meet you inside.” She closes the door after we enter and goes into a nearby avatar nook. By the time pressure equalized and the second door opened, she is there in her avatar to greet us.
“You’re inside an entire floor that is maintained as a Mars environment,” Savannah tells us. “There are late-term incubators, nurseries, playrooms, and kindergarten classrooms here.”
“Will we work with the babies in avatars?” asked Jaina.
“About half the people do, Jaina. The other half bring their human bodies and wear environmental suits. You can’t feel it, but it’s winter-cold in here, and the atmosphere contains only a quarter of the nitrogen found at sea level on Earth, so this place is low pressure. There is the same amount of oxygen, though. These conditions are easier to maintain inside Martian habitations, and it’s not hard to design human and mammal bodies that are comfortable with them. Other living forms are even easier, of course.”
We start with an incubator room. The kids there look much like Earth-normal human kids lined up in a preemie hospital ward. If you look closely, you notice that there isn’t a normal amount of body type variation among them, but only if you look closely. There isn’t much to do there and creations are doing it, so we just watch for a couple of minutes, then move on.
We see an early home-care room. This is for newborns up to toddlers. Here we see some human caregivers mixed in with the creations. The creations are distinctively maternal-looking, -sounding, and -acting. We talk with a couple of the humans, and they show us their little darlings.
One explains, “I spend a couple hours a day in here. It’s important that these kids get some human imprinting.”
I look around when I hear her say that. If this is typical they are getting some, but not much. When she hears that we might be joining the program, she gets nice and bubbly. She seems to be enjoying it.
We spend some time in the late home-care room, where the kids are up and running around in their terrible two’s and three’s, then we move on to the last stage, the kindergarten.
Here the kids are now maturing enough to look distinctly different. They are short and their skin texture is ... how to put it ... super Asian. It is flexible and tough, but it has a lot of fat in it.
Here Jaina lingers. She watches intently as the kids interact with the teachers. “They seem to be pretty normal,” she finally says.
“Oh, much more than normal,” replies Savannah. “They are working on projects at a first-grade level in here. We have given them all the smarts and can-do-ness we can muster.”
“Wow! They sound like they would be a blast to work with!” Jaina mutters.
I like hearing that.
“Where do they go from here?” she asks.
“Well, this is the first batch. There are facilities being prepared for them on Mars even as we speak. In about nine months, they will be transferred there.”
“Who will take care of them there?”
“We are recruiting workers to handle that now,” Savannah says. “It will be quite different from the environment here. There these kids will be in their element, and their teachers will be the ones adapting.”
We go back to Savannah’s office and talk a bit more, then leave. It has been quite a day. There is a lot to absorb, even for me.
A week after George’s announcement, there is a video debate between Julian Homeby and George-776. I see it and here is the highlight.
Homeby: “Adrian Messenger is a good friend as well as a good business partner, but he crossed the line. His research and experimentation was in the development of thought control. He had actually created a product that could influence the behavior of fruit flies. What is the harm in controlling insect behavior, you ask? It is just fruit flies now, but it could take us rapidly down the slippery path to human mind control. I don’t care how many safeguards you pile on that invention, it’s not something we want in the human toolbox.”
George-776: “I was constantly monitoring what Mr. Messenger was doing. There was nothing hazardous at the level at which he was experimenting.
“Mind control, Mr. Homeby, is not inherently dangerous. If you wave a steak in front of a hungry dog, that is mind control: You are controlling what it thinks about. Is that dangerous?
“That is the level to which Mr. Messenger’s techniques had risen. Your reaction was a human-instinct-thinking-based overreaction. It was not based on cost-benefit thinking or risk-reward thinking or with awareness of what defensive technologies were being incorporated into the process and, as a result, has caused a lot more damage than benefit.
“Think about the benefits: What mother, what child, would not want a pill that made doing home work exciting? What person, old or young, would not want New Year’s Resolutions to come true? What person would not want the perseverance to make their heart-felt dreams come true? This is the upside potential of Mr. Messenger’s aspirations.”
Homeby: “What tyrant would not want his subjects to think he was always right? What advertiser would not want his campaigns to always be 110% successful? What cult leader would not want everyone to believe he or she had found the one true way? These are the kinds of abuses mind control tools open up. Time and time again it has been demonstrated that when even primitive mind control clashes with the harsh realities of the world, humanity loses and loses big time. We should not risk that kind of damage enhanced a thousand-fold.”
By the time it is over, I feel I have watched a good debate: I’ve learned a lot, and the right answer is not immediately obvious to me. But it sure does seem like something where a decision is important.