Chapter 16: Concerns of the Progenitor
The Year Five
Andrew’s Story
Our little head-to-head confrontation with the government, fleeting and ethereal as it was, has finally opened my eyes. Emmy almost brought down the entire US government and she didn’t even try hard. I asked her to zap the A.G. and zap him she did.
In the meantime she was still trying to hit the tennis ball closer to the net, training the puppies to be guard dogs, doing essentially graduate work in six different languages, taking her naps, annoying everyone who came in contact with her, and watching her anime cartoons.
The Flash, Green Lantern, the Incredible Hulk and the Silver Surfer combined didn’t have such power. If Lex Luther was as smart as he thought he was, Superman wouldn’t have lasted a week.
But Emma is smarter than I’m capable of understanding. It’s like trying to envision 65 million years. Dinosaurs died off 65 million years ago, but to my brain that number means nothing. To me it takes an eternity waiting for the water to boil.
I understand intelligence and its degrees. I can look at an Einstein or a Jefferson and can pretty much imagine how smart they were in relation to other people. JFK once gave a dinner for Nobel laureates at the White House. In his opening remarks he noted that ‘there hasn’t been so much brilliance at this table since Jefferson dined alone’ – or something like that. Jefferson was smart, very smart. But at least you can compare him to other people.
To date I’ve been unable to calibrate the difference in intelligence between a really smart
h Sapiens
and New Man. There is a gulf there that defies my imagination.
Our girls are babies – five-year olds. Elle sits at her workstation and makes decisions affecting millions of dollars while sucking her thumb! Edie has to choose between writing the best code in the history of computing or playing on the swing.
We haven’t begun to see the limit of their abilities. And that is just individually. What can they do together, knowing they communicate telepathically? Is it possible that their brains can be cumulative? Can they add their brainpower together? Is it a network of minds, or can it become one super-mind? Even that begs the question. Individually each is a super-mind. What do they get if they can add them together?
I’ve been having these crazy thoughts ever since Emmy snapped her fingers and the government rolled over. For a while there we had this ‘us-versus-them’ mentality going on here. It was our family against the world.
But I’ve had the fleeting thought that maybe the ‘us-versus-them’ scenario might start to involve one species against another. Right now it’s six billion against two hundred. Could the six billion win? More importantly, should they win?
It all boils down to ethics. Are my little munchkins sheep dogs or wolves? That is the question. How did this evolutionary thing work related to their take on the world? I’m not sure that compassion is something that can be legislated or even taught at this level. It better be home-grown.
We may be able to teach the kids our values or not. But how their brains are pre-disposed to work is going to be the determining factor for the future of
h. Sapiens
. I suppose there is nothing to do but love them and hope they love us back.
The children can’t teach themselves everything, even with the internet. There are facts and concepts that they need to be taught. It isn’t all instinctive, even with my little Einsteins. So the wives started to home-school the eGirls before they turned four.
One of the nice things about Statesboro is that it is a college town. We engaged some graduate students from Georgia Southern to teach the kids their particular specialties, first languages then things like calculus, physics and economics (I handled the computer programming education myself – at least I’m good for something around here), and suddenly we had our own little school.
None of the IAM kids will ever fit into a normal school environment. Talk about disrupting the curve! Now that Elle has earned some big bucks we’ve decided to address the educational needs of all the members of the next generation by creating our own college.
This is going to require that Elle earn a lot more than fifteen million dollars. But once we have a proper endowment, we can create a place where all of the children of the next generation will fit in. I mentioned it to her last week. I said that if she could maybe grow her personal fund to more like fifty-million we might have a use for it.
It isn’t selfishness on my part. What does Elle care what we do with the money? From her point of view she’s just playing Monopoly only with real cash. I’m telling her to get Boardwalk and Park Place and then put a dozen hotels on them and hope someone lands there. If we are going to build New Man University we can’t do it on the cheap. Maybe next year.
The Year Six
Deirdre’s Story
Sometimes we’ll watch the news as a family. We don’t allow a lot of television in our house. Andrew watches certain sporting events, we watch old movies (though usually on tape or CD), and then we select shows that are acceptable for the family or just the children to watch. Occasionally the news is one of those shows.
We never watch the local news, since it is driven by violence and fires. Ratings dictate that it not be ‘news’ but ‘entertainment’. A sad number of
h. sapiens
finds disastrous occurrences to their neighbors to be entertaining, but we are not among that number.
We
will
watch the world news sometimes, though Andrew prefers to watch BBC World News, claiming that coverage provided by American networks is often ‘influenced’ by the government. Perhaps he is being paranoid.
We were watching the news when the very, very British announcer noted that “the Ambassador to the United States from Botswana has visited the US Secretary of State, requesting that US aid in the form of wheat shipments be halted for the remainder of the year. It seems that the warehousing capability in that country has reached the limit of its capacity. There is no where else to put the wheat. Sources claim that a ‘computer glitch’ had increased the grain due to go to Botswana from 50 million to 50 thousand million dollars worth.”
The girls were lying on the floor watching the news. I heard Emma comment, “I sure hope they like sandwiches in Botswana. Maybe they could use some peanut butter and jelly.”
Everyone laughed when she said that except for Andrew. I was surprised when he said, “Emmy, lay off of the State Department, do you hear me?”
She looked back with her innocent eyes and said, “Yes, Daddy.”
The news continued. After a few minutes, Andrew, whose eyes never left the tube, said “How much?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. I asked, “How much what?”