Welcome back to my post-post-apocalyptic novel, Ada’s Children, and thanks for reading! If you’re new to the story, please don’t be surprised that it’s paywalled. The Prologue and first three chapters are free, and you can start reading them here. The previous chapter, “Angel of Wrath,” is here.
The last time we were with Carol, nuclear war seemed imminent and she’d just discovered she was pregnant. Improbably, she decided to keep the child. Now it’s eight months later, the nuclear exchanges never materialized, and baby Alice is two months old. This is the rare chapter that I’ve split into two, since it’s nearly 6,000 words. Part two will appear on Sunday.
NOVEMBER 2043
“You don’t say! I’ve never thought of that before.”
“Goo-goo, ahh!” baby Alice replied with a giggle. Her eyes gazing up at Carol’s, fascinated, rapt, just as Carol was. It was love, Carol was sure, though she didn’t know if a ten-week-old had the capacity for such an emotion. But it was clear Alice worshiped her, as she worshiped Alice. It was the most complete, absorbing relationship she’d ever had. How could she have hesitated to bring this little being into the world?
Nothing was as difficult as she’d feared. Mainly, the 2.5 UBI she was making, thanks to Cass’s recent Baby Credit, allowed her to take these six months off as maternity leave. No dealing with demanding students wanting her to rewrite their papers. No worries over bills or the rent. She’d even saved a bit for when the extra money stopped coming. She was glad the Cass administration had been shamed into showing it cared as much about life ex utero as in. Yet it was hard to stomach the eugenics implicit in a policy that benefited mainly white people, along with the few Asians left in the country.
Her social life had improved as well, thanks, surprisingly, to Megan. The young woman had come by the day after the demonstration to see if she was all right—an old-fashioned gesture, part of this generation’s rejection of digital communications. Maybe Megan would have left a calling card if Carol hadn’t answered the door.
But it was more than a gesture. Megan really seemed to have taken a liking to her, Carol wasn’t sure why. Maybe she’d managed to impart something valuable of her own activist experience? Or maybe Megan was looking for clues to navigating life in this radical gig economy (or conversely, how to avoid becoming a washed-up, redundant academic). Whatever, they’d had coffee several times before Carol revealed she was pregnant. Megan’s look of disbelief quickly changed to one of fascination. A baby was a rare thing anywhere, but especially in their university neighborhood, home mainly to students and a few retired or redundant profs, the young academics having disappeared as the AIs came in.
Megan had offered to help with whatever Carol needed while she was pregnant, but there was little to do. Carol’s apartment was too small to offer the opportunity of painting a room for the baby, and an IRL shopping spree for infant clothes was a thing of the past. Megan had to satisfy herself with helping pick out a crib from the panoply of options online, wondering if the monitoring features were truly necessary or just more spyware.
And with Megan had come a host of her friends; the prospect of a baby in the neighborhood was that intriguing. And it only helped when they learned who Alice’s namesake was: Alice Paul, a prominent twentieth-century feminist and proponent of the never-passed Equal Rights Amendment. Carol foresaw as much babysitting as she’d ever need, once she was able to let Alice out of her sight. Probably not until she turned ten.
As Carol didn’t have the time or inclination to check her newsfeed, Megan was her main way of keeping up to date. And here, too, events were turning out better than Carol had expected. The world was no longer on the brink of nuclear annihilation. The Arctic Powers had agreed on a detente, apparently brokered by Canada, in which the US and Russia would remove their tactical nukes and China would withdraw from its base in Greenland. The details of the accord were murky, as were the motivations behind such rapid shifts in policy. But at least Alice was safe from that threat, which was the only thing Carol really cared about these days.
Some of the other news Megan related was more unsettling. First, there’d been a rash of unexplained power outages around the world. True, infrastructure wasn’t keeping pace with the stresses of extreme heat and natural disasters, but such a high number in only a couple of months was unsettling, especially when few had a clear explanation.
More disturbing, military bases around the world had reported an unusually high number of training accidents. But these “accidents” involved hundreds of deaths at a time, and the worst ones Carol could remember from the past had numbered in the low double digits, at most. And since autonomous weapons systems had begun to replace human soldiers, that number had dropped in recent years. The media were equally mystified, but according to Megan, none had been able to get more than the PR officials’ vague explanations.
Most shocking of all was the mass murder at an AI research firm in Palo Alto. Dozens of the best minds in Artificial Intelligence had gathered for an interdisciplinary conference, then were slaughtered by a rogue bot. The highest executive left standing, a VP of Human Resources (which some were calling an ironic touch), explained it as an experiment gone horribly wrong. But Megan said this wasn’t the only such event. A similar attack had happened on the same day at a neural network institute in India, but it took days for the news to filter into the nonstop coverage of the Palo Alto tragedy. No one was sure if either of these was related to the arrest of another AI researcher, a Dr. Sapowski, on vague charges of terrorism involving AIs.
In former days, these were the kind of events that would keep Carol glued to her handheld between classes. But what could she do about any of it, especially rogue bots? Alice was her whole world. Carol would do anything to keep her baby safe—if she only knew how, or exactly what the threat was.
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