Hello everyone and welcome back to Ada’s Children, my post-post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel. If you’re new here, you can start at the beginning with the Prologue or find out what my Substack is all about with my Welcome post. You can also go back to Chapter 1 to refresh your memory about what Sila and Jun were up to at the beginning of their story line.
This chapter is the beginning of Carol’s story line, which takes place in 2040, when just about everything is falling apart. If you’re worried about climate change, or about AIs taking over every creative outlet (not to mention more mundane jobs), or about the upcoming US presidential election, then you should be able to relate to Carol’s predicament. I’ve also adapted this chapter a bit just for Substack.
Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far. I truly appreciate it!
NOVEMBER 2040
“I can’t believe it,” Carol Marsh said. She wanted to throw her drink at the largescreen, but it belonged to her friends, Shondra and Michael. “Walker was supposed to be running away with this election.”
“It’s looking bad, but I’m not surprised,” said Michael, returning from the kitchen with a fresh Scotch, his frame nearly filling the doorway. “Nothing in this fucking country surprises me.”
Shondra, sitting next to Carol on the couch, stared at the screen, probably adding up the poll results from different states scrolling across the bottom. An analyst gestured enthusiastically at a tiny spot on the Pennsylvania map, his lips moving without sound. They’d long since turned down the volume; the talking heads had no more idea who would be the next president than they did.
“I just thought we were better than this—that we’d become better than this,” Carol said.
Shondra mimed an explosion with her hands, adding “Kaboom!” for a sound effect. She gave Carol a sympathetic smile.
“I know,” Carol said. “Another white liberal illusion up in smoke. I thought we’d stopped the fascists and white supremacists for good back in the twenties—or at least driven them into a part of the country hardly anyone cares about.”
Shondra’s smile turned wry. “Out of sight, out of mind, right?”
“Ha! If only,” said Michael, glaring at the screen. He stroked his closely trimmed beard the way he did whenever he was worried.
For months, the country’s media had been flooded with images from the Interior Northwest Semi-Autonomous Zone, the base from which Richard Cass had launched his improbable run for president. The spots were filled with shots of happy tech workers, healthy people outdoors, and the vibrant nightlife of Boise—all completely white. “No riots here!” was the message that didn’t need to be said out loud. Along with the racist dog-whistles and outright bullhorns, there was plenty of Russia- and China-baiting, pledges to rebuild the nuclear arsenals, and a determination to go back to coal and oil for fuel, despite the destruction the climate crisis had already wrought.
Carol never thought the rest of the country would fall for it. She’d been too naïve. Her friends knew better, especially Michael, a former professor of Black History at the same liberal arts college in Minneapolis where Carol had once taught. They’d originally bonded over their shared activist background, his in the racial justice movement, hers in the George Floyd protests her senior year in high school and later with the Extinction Rebellion occupations.
On the screen, Florida switched from gray to red. “Shit,” Michael said, coming over to sit next to Shondra on the couch. He set his drink down hard on the glass coffee table, sloshing a few drops. “Walker was supposed to carry that state.”
“Too bad the whole place didn’t just wash into the Gulf of Mexico,” Carol said. “I’d gladly trade Orlando for New Orleans.”
“Carol!” Shondra glanced back at the screen. “I didn’t know enough white people still lived down there to push Cass over the top.”
Carol looked from Michael to Shondra and back again.
Michael appeared to choose his words carefully. “Babe, they’re letting them vote in Florida even if they’ve been back in New York or Michigan since Miami went under.”
“Sorry. I guess I’ve been…busy.” She looked down at her drink.
“It’s all right,” said Carol. “We know you don’t have time to follow politics like we do.”
Carol had lost her teaching post two years before, but she tried not to envy her friend’s continued employment. As a leading AI researcher, Shondra was secure in her position at the University of Minnesota, the irony lost on none of them that her work had indirectly led to Michael and Carol losing their jobs to instructorbots. They’d both managed not to hold Shondra’s work against her, or at least Carol thought they had. Shondra would tell them, “Whatever humans can do, we will do. So if there are going to be AIs, Black folks better help create them.” A racist robot overlord was the last thing they needed, though Shondra always insisted they’d never have to deal with an AI apocalypse. Life wasn’t a sci-fi movie.
AI overlords or not, Michael and Carol both wound up at the end of a long list of those made redundant by automation and artificial intelligence: assembly-line workers first, then truckers, wait staff, retail clerks, call center workers, line cooks, janitors, voice actors, personal accountants, half of all lawyers. All now eking out an existence on Universal Basic Income, which wasn’t truly universal and hardly covered the basics. It was hard not to feel resentful, if not toward Shondra, then toward AI in general.
Fortunately, Michael had landed on his feet with his political podcasts, quickly earning more than the equivalent of two UBI units. This was called “shooting the donut hole,” since the government took away fifty cents of UBI for every outside dollar earned. Carol, laid off a year later, had taken longer to make the adjustment. Now she scratched a living with tutoring and a few scraps of curriculum design. These side gigs would never allow her to reach the magic double UBI marker, but with her clients paying in crypto under the table, she’d managed to stay out of the donut hole.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Shondra said. “Carol, how’s your novel coming?”
Carol shrugged. Writing fiction was her way of pursuing the self-actualization awaiting the masses once they were released from drudge work. “I try to get in a thousand words every day. I’ll soon have a hundred thousand words to shove in a drawer—or post on Writers and Readers, same thing. It fills the time between tutoring sessions.”
“Oh, come on, it’s going to be great. Better than anything an AI can produce, right?”
Carol could barely remember when that statement might have seemed like a joke. Of course she could write better than an AI! But that was before AustenBot. For a fleeting time after the release of the large language models, the human novelist had struggled to hang on, becoming more AI content manager than writer. But with the advent of AustenBot, readers simply entered keywords and answered a few questions, and the service would spit out whatever number of novels they wanted, all for a low monthly subscription price. No writers needed, just coders and accountants. These days, even human self-fulfillment was outsourced to machines.
True, some writers had found followings on platforms like Writers and Readers and Substack. If you could find “a thousand true fans,” then you could earn a living. But the amount of online interaction developing that kind of following would take—she just wasn’t made for that.
“Better, yes. More marketable? I doubt there are many readers left who can tell the difference. Besides, who reads books anymore?” People were too busy with their MINDs—Multimedia Interactive Narrative Devices. Carol had avoided them like heroin. She’d seen the blank looks her former students wore after they’d spent too much time at a game farm, the imprints of the VR headsets still visible around their eyes.
Shondra, as always, pushed back against her pessimism. “Honey, it’s like I keep telling you, bots may technically be able to do a job, but people are still going to want the human touch in certain areas.”
“You betcha they will,” Carol said, employing her mother’s best Minnesota accent. Sometimes she just couldn’t help herself.
Shondra glared sideways at her. “Professions, you know what I mean.”
“Come on, babe,” Michael said. “Blondie’s right, that’s not even true for sex anymore.”
Shondra gave him a playful slap on the arm. “Carol, I can’t believe you let him call you that.”
“He’s the only one who gets away with it,” she said with a smile.
Shondra wouldn’t be distracted from her point. “It won’t be long until people wake up and realize they want interactions with real, conscious humans—at least until AIs become conscious themselves, which is years off. Look, just the other day I was down at the coffee shop, and you know what I saw?”
“A human serving coffee?”
Shondra looked at Carol as if she’d suggested driving herself to work. “No, of course not. A singer, a real human singer, with a guitar and everything. And she was singing a song she wrote herself.”
“Maybe she can get a gig at the Smithsonian. ‘Diorama with live singer-songwriter’.”
“Human singer-songwriter,” Shondra corrected her, “but yeah. Or like that writer, Justin Tovar. Maybe you could get some billionaire to give you a gig like that.”
“Maybe, but I doubt I’d do very well ensconced in a glass office, with a bunch of the billionaire’s rich friends gawking at the quaint writer at work. He’d probably want me to give weekly seminars, glimpses into the life of an anachronism or something.”
“Shit, there goes Virginia.” Michael was still paying attention to the results while they tried to distract themselves. Shondra looked at the screen, getting that abstracted look she had whenever she ran numbers in her head. Except now, Carol thought she looked more worried.
“Michael, you don’t think Cass is serious about these voluntary racial homelands, do you?” Carol asked.
“It would be suicidal to think anything else. And ‘voluntary,’ my ass.”
“But he can’t get away with it,” Shondra said. “We’ll still have the House.”
“Oh, then no one has anything to worry about,” said Carol.
Michael was leaning forward, elbows on knees, gripping his empty glass in both hands. “He’ll just declare a national emergency and claim extraordinary powers. He’s already said that’s the first thing he’s going to do after the inauguration. He’ll probably include it in the inaugural address.”
“But the courts…”
Michael gave a derisive snort.
Shondra glared at him. “Your activist friends at No Escape sure gave him a boost. It’s probably why he’s winning.”
“No Escape is a tiny fringe of the Majority-Minority Power Movement,” Michael said. “Cass is only using it as a pretext. If it wasn’t that, he’d find something else. Besides, they didn’t do that much damage to EarthXit’s facilities.”
“Enough to scrub flights for the rest of this Mars launch period. They put the colonists’ lives at risk.”
Michael got up, pacing in front of the screen. “Black and brown lives are at risk every day. Those rich white folks helped make this bed, they should have to lie in it.”
Shondra shook her head. “What a way to give power to our enemies.”
This was the latest round in an old argument for the couple, one that went right back to the day they’d met. Carol never got tired of hearing that story: Michael protesting outside a police technology conference, Shondra on her way in to present a paper on bias in facial recognition. When another activist got in Shondra’s face, making comments about her straightened hair, Michael used his imposing presence to screen the guy out of the way. He escorted Shondra the rest of the way in. By the time he came back out, they’d exchanged numbers.
Carol couldn’t imagine life without either of them. After her layoff, she’d thought for a minute or two about applying somewhere out of state, but that would have meant leaving these friends. Now that she had little reason to visit her former campus, they had become her entire social circle. At least, that’s what she told herself. But really, she just didn’t have a knack for keeping people in her life. She’d learned early on that she was alone in the world, which made it hard to let anyone get close. Except for Michael and Shondra—they were the two who had stuck.
On the screen, the analyst at the map gesticulated while the hosts behind the desks remained serious, even grim.
“What do you think, Ms. Human Computer,” Carol asked, “is Cass going to win?”
Shondra nodded and took a long drink. “Maybe one of the western states will surprise us.”
“What will you do, if…?”
“Fight like hell,” said Michael.
“Michael…” Shondra said. Carol didn’t like hearing the fear in her voice.
Carol stood up. “I can’t take this. And I know you have to teach early tomorrow.” She gave them each a long hug, then hailed an autobot. She left them standing stiffly in their apartment doorway.
The election results were playing on the taxi’s TV when she got in. “Turn off the news, please.”
“Would you like kittens instead?” came the cultured male voice as the vehicle pulled away from the curb, slotting itself seamlessly into a line of autobots traveling in the same direction.
“Sure, why not?” She didn’t particularly like cat videos, but some people found them comforting. Maybe it would work for her this time.
She did feel more relaxed when she arrived home, but the effect was short-lived. She was ready for her door’s retinal scan when her handheld spoke from its slot on the side of her purse.
“Carol.”
She reflexively looked down to pull it out. Bad habit from her youth.
“Scan error,” said the door.
“Yes?” Carol said.
“You wanted a notification when the presidential race was called.”
She took a deep breath. “Okay.”
“CNN has called the presidential election for Richard Cass. Walker leads the popular vote but has no chance of winning the Electoral College.”
“Fuck.” The tears surprised her.
“Scanning again,” said the door.
Damn. She’d never get inside at this rate.
What do you think? How far are we from some sort of novel jukebox that would allow readers to input keywords and comps to their favorite novels, then receive a stream of similar books on a weekly or monthly basis? (And who wants to bet that Amazon will be the one to create it?) Leave your answers in the comments section.
Here’s a shoutout to the folks at Authorstack for inspiration. This post made me think more about exactly how Austenbot would work, and also about why Carol hadn’t been able (or willing) to go the Substack/Patreon/Kickstarter route.
Come back on Sunday for Chapter 3, “The Hermit,” in which Jun goes in search of the answers to his questions about what lies beyond the borders of the Land. That will also be the last chapter available for free.
If you’re enjoying Ada’s Children, I hope you’ll considering giving this post a like, sharing it, or even becoming a subscriber. Thanks for reading!