Standard Gauge: Chapter Three

They entered through the main door of a building that had at one time held the human administration of the University.  Since administration was one of those things AIs did much better than humans, the space was used for other purposes or empty.

The hall was wide and tall with particularly tall doorways.  They turned into a hall that was narrow and tall and then into a hall that was wide and even taller with a twenty foot ceiling.  Kenny asked his dad,

"Why are the doors so tall?  Were the people who lived here giants?" 

Hector was listening and wondered too, but he knew they were not giants.

“Light and air conditioning” his dad said, “or rather, lack of it.  In those days the windows you see over the doors could open.  I wonder,” he said, and opening a door showed a gaggle of children the wrought iron rods next to the door that opened and closed the window over the door.  “They are called ‘transoms’ and if there was any wind the air blew right through the building.   The hot air tended to go up so the lower parts of the rooms were relatively cool in the summer.  It still got awful hot.  Cooling the air in buildings during the summer didn’t become common till after the 1950s.”

Kenny looked at the grotesquely tall doors.  “I still think they were giants.”

His dad grinned and gave up.  “Well, there were a few people seven and even eight feet tall in those days; they would have felt right at home with twelve foot doors.”  He mused.  “Those people had problems with the gland in the head that makes growth hormone.  That doesn’t happen any more.”

Kenny looked at the doors again, just before they entered the dining hall.  “I wish I was a giant.” 

“You would knock your head on doorways.”  Hector told Kenny.

Dwight considered telling Kenny about the problem giants had with numb feet because their nerves could not grow long enough but decided Hector’s answer was just as good.

The dining hall was huge, reminding the parents of the scenes from the Harry Potter movies.

Serving was cafeteria style.  Kids were given the option to eat with parents or other kids.

The story of hitting the deer and repairing the train wheels had played out so Jenny and Hector had dinner with their parents while Kenny decided to eat with a friend.

"Mom?" Jenny asked Amanda between bites of a buffalo burger.

"Yes Jenny?" 

"Why didn't the people get out of the way of the Johnstown flood?"

The stop at the Johnstown station and watching the animation of the flood had piqued her curiosity.

"Two reasons Jenny."  She said.  "Fast communications were just starting two hundred years ago and word of the dam break didn't reach the people in Johnstown in time."  Amanda then sighed.  "The other is that people were just not very good at anticipating the future." 

After dinner the parents visited with the University professors who had elected to stay for the summer.  The older kids plus a few dozen local kids got to watch Forbidden Planet [6] in the University's theater.  The younger ones who were more interested in playing and a few older kids who had seen the movie and didn’t want to see it again played on the lawn catching fireflies that were winking in the rapidly darkening twilight.  Then they climbed stairs and explored till the found the University’s chapel. 

The University’s guardian AI brought up the lights when they crept inside.  It was even more impressive than the dining hall with a fifty-foot ceiling, elaborate decorations and a huge organ in the choir loft.  The AI was amused that they didn’t stay long after one of the kids touched a low note on the organ, which emitted a low groaning sound.

By the time the movie was over, the younger kids were dropping.  Even though it was still twilight, they were herded off for the adventure of sleeping on the train.  A few of the parents went with them, but most slept in the more comfortable dorm rooms at the University. 

Amanda left Dwight engrossed in a deep discussion about modeling the social dynamics that led up to the US Civil War and said she would be back.  (All the participants were pulling information out of the net and building mathematical models in real time.  The conclusion they reached was that the South could have stayed a separate country if they had had the sense to not attack the North, but that evolved human nature was such that people in “war mode” were unlikely to be that sensible.)

In spite of the non interference policy toward the temporary "tribe's" children, Jenny had only just turned thirteen and Amanda, remembering her childhood 140 years previous, wanted to be sure that Jenny's "sleeping" partners were Jenny's idea and not the result of pressure.  (She need not have worried; the kids were genetically predisposed and socialized to be sensitive to each other.)

On the way down one of Jenny’s friends asked her, "Amanda, Why do fireflies flash?”  (Most, but not all, parents insisted on being called by their first names.)

Amanda thought about it.  “They flash to attract other fireflies.  But it’s more satisfying to think they do it to delight children.”  Amanda had been raised in the West where there were no fireflies but had had one delightful firefly summer when she was eight and had been sent east to visit her grandmother.

The group walked down the winding drive, by the road tunnel under the tracks and up the north side of the tracks.  The north side of the tracks at the station was level with the road.  There had probably been a fence there at one time, but it, like most fences, had been taken down.  The train was a good deal longer than the raised section of the platform that had been built in the 1990s.

At night the kids sorted themselves out into rough age groups with the younger toward the front of the train and the ones approaching or in their early teenage years toward the back.  The adults helped the younger children make the seats into beds and bunks and only quelled the most rambunctious of the bunch.  They did not inquire about the sleeping arrangements of the older children in the rear cars, figuring they could sort it out.

The fuel cells in the passenger cars could have kept the modest power demand up over night, at the cost of being recharged by burning a little more peanut oil the next day.  Since peanut oil was more trouble then electricity, the conductor, Jim Brody, had plugged an extension cord into a socket on the first car when the engine was shut down.

It was by historical standards an awfully small cord for the amount of current it could carry, some 50 amps, and was much lighter than a metal cord.  It was made of conductive nanotubes with fifty times as much current capacity as a copper wire of the same weight.  It was also unbelievably strong by the standards of the time the locomotive was built.  The extension cord had been optimized for conductivity rather than strength, and yet it could have supported the 150-ton E8 locomotive with ease.

The electricity in the nanotube cable came through the historical transmission grid from a mix of sources, ground solar (rooftops), hydro and wind, but the majority of it came from geosynchronous orbit.  The nuclear and coal power plants had been shut down seventy years earlier as hundreds of orbital power plants and their receiving antennas displaced them all.

The grid was lightly loaded though not as much as the 98.8 percent drop in active population would indicate; supporting close to half a billion minds and keeping the associated bodies in cold storage and their memories updated took a modest amount of power.

On the way down to the train, the power sats [7] looked like a chain of beads across the southern sky.  Amanda turned to Jenny:

"Jenny, if you stay up a while, you can see power sats blink out as they enter the earth's shadow."

"Remember what I said about humans not being very good at anticipating the future?

"Yes."

"Well, there you can see it."  The chain of power sats had gaps in them.

"By the time most of them were built, the population and the demand for power were falling fast." 

"There are a few up there that were never finished." 

"You won't see it this time of the year, but in the spring, the power beams are used to warm up fields and control weeds."

"How does that work?"  Jenny asked as they approached the station with its Russian looking cupola on the top of the clock tower looming in the near dark.

"The farmers put up pilot beams in the middle of a big circle of farmland and several power sats focus their microwaves on the pilot beams.  It's just like warming up food in a microwave oven." 

Jenny had figured out microwave ovens before she was three so the concept was easy to grasp.

"And the heat kills the weeds?"  Jenny said.

"Weeds, insects, nematodes, they mildly cook the top few inches of soil."

They reached the next to the last car of the train in the growing darkness.

"Are you going to be alright?  Don’t let anyone pressure you."

"Relax mom, I’m sleeping with Beth Ann, Joel, and Jimmy tonight."  Jenny said as she boarded the train.  "Just like a pajama party at home."

Amanda started to say, "Don't stay up too late" but checked herself.  Sleeping on the train, they could wake up after it left the station.

Amanda exchanged a quick thought with Jim Brody who told her Kenny was engaged in a pillow fight and everything was OK.

She started back to Seton Hill, musing about the changes that had occurred over her life in raising children.  When she was a child it had been found that beyond about two and a half or three, other children were critically important to sound social development. 

You fed them and kept them more or less clean and read them stories, held them and talked to them when they wanted, but beyond that, socializing was largely in the hands of their genes and playmates.   Amanda could have consulted the entire literature as if it were her own memory through her interface but was more into thinking how lucky she had been with her first and musing about starting another set of kids before this batch left the nest.

Hector, who was in the rear car, Jenny who she had just left, and Kenny in the pillow fight (now settling down according to Jim Brody's quick flash) were her fourth batch.

April had been born 1980 when Amanda was thirty-six.  In spite of trying, (and two miscarriages) she didn't have another before the clinics and the physical world population crash they caused.  If she wanted, she could call up intensely preserved memories of her first child and restored video of her.  She sent off a thought and was pinged back by her oldest daughter (or an automated process her daughter had set up, it was hard to tell with those who had transcended).
 
The next child had been born right at the low point in the population eighty-one years later and thirty years after she and Dwight had gone through their first partial rejuvenation.  They had stayed outside the clinics and the virtual worlds when they became popular and were encouraged to have a much more extensive rejuvenation and genome upgrade if they were interested in raising kids to maintain a human population presence.  (The attractions of the uploaded life had turned out to be too good, and the "powers that be" whoever or whatever they might be had decided to try to stabilize a physical state human population above zero.)

Bob was a clone of Dwight, Connie was a clone of Amanda and Duncan was a clone of a friend who had died before rejuvenation.  (His DNA had been recovered from an envelope flap.)  A lot of Amanda's friends raised clones of themselves and their partners in the first years after the population bottom.  Raising your own clones rapidly went out of style.  It was amazing how annoying kids that much like you can be.

Next Page

 

Footnotes

[6] Forbidden Planet – (1956) Milestone science fiction adventure, loosely based on Shakespeare's "The Tempest." A rescue ship's crew locates the survivors of an interplanetary expedition, but an eons-old force of great power and evil may destroy them all.
http://turnerclassic.moviesunlimited.com/product.asp?sku=D25074  April 20, 2009 10:00AM EST

[7] Power sats - a theoretical design for the collection of solar power in space, for use on Earth. SBSP differs from the usual method of solar power collection in that the solar panels used to collect the energy would reside on a satellite in orbit, often referred to as a solar power satellite (SPS), rather than on Earth's surface.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_satellite   April 20, 2009 10:45AM EST

 

 

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