Priya, Sophie, and Amy were up at 6:00 a.m. making breakfast.
“You guys are up early.” Quinn said as he walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. “Do you guys ever need any sleep?”
“Sure, we need at least four or five hours,” Sophie said.
Priya smiled.
“Yeah, we slept in until 6:00 a.m. because there’s no school today.”
“You guys are crazy nuts.” Quinn said.
“No Daddy, we’re normal girls.”
“Yeah right. So, what are you ‘normal girls’ doing today?”
“We’re heading back up to school and Amy is going to be working on some improvements to our network.”
Nisha walked down the stairs, still looking sleepy.
“Good morning, Mom. Do you want your broccoli and spinach no-egg yolk omelet?”
“Sure Pree. Why are you up early? How much sleep- “
“Don’t ask Neesh,” Quinn said. “They’ve evolved beyond the need for sleep.”
They laughed.
“So, what’s happening with Bok and his colony?” Priya said.
“He’s happy now,” Nisha said. “His colony is developing the way he wants. He has firm restrictions on AI, so hopefully nothing will evolve out of control like it did at Gol’s colony. He says he worries about human made AI. He thinks it’s getting close to a tipping point. He’s renting out some of the extra space in his unoccupied towers to humans and selling electricity into the power grid to get extra money to buy raw materials. He still wants to modify Venus for a home planet, but he knows Mars is better. He’s building a space platform.”
Priya laughed.
“You thought we were crazy nuts? Bok is much crazier.”
“Perhaps a little crazier, but not by much,” Quinn replied.
Priya smiled.
“How’s Yoova?”
“Oh, she’s fine too,” Nisha said. “She wants us to come up and visit. Everyone loves the design of the colony in the redwoods. See what they’ve done?”
The colony appeared in 3D in front of them.
“That’s beautiful. It blends in perfectly with the forest. I wanna go.” Priya said.
“We’ll visit sometime,” Quinn said. “When should we drop you off at the Hyperloop?”
“We should leave here before 10:30. We need to be up in the Bay Area by lunch time and there’s a Hyperloop leaving downtown LA at 11:15.”
“What are you doing at lunch?” Nisha said.
“We’re going to meet up to get ready for the first day of college courses tomorrow.”
“How exciting.” Nisha said. “Don’t worry Amy. You’ll be in college soon enough.”
Amy looked down as she moved the food around her plate with her fork.
“Do you know what relative deprivation is?” Nisha said.
“No,” Amy said.
“That’s when we judge ourselves by comparing ourselves to our immediate peers. Someone might make $10 million a year, but if their friends make $100 million, they think they’re poor. You’re highly intelligent, but you should not compare yourself to Pree or Sophie. Comparison is the killer of joy.”
“You’re right,” Amy replied. “I’m working on getting over this inferiority complex. I’m getting used to my two best friends being super geniuses.”
They smiled as they ran upstairs to check on their social network.
“They’re growing up fast now,” Nisha said.
“Too fast,” Quinn replied. “I guess we can’t stop it.”
“This may seem like a strange question.”
Quinn smiled.
“That never stopped you before, has it?”
“Well, I noticed that Amy— She seems to be, um, maturing more quickly than Priya and Sophie. Do you notice that?”
“No, I’m too busy imagining Pree being still six years old wanting piggyback rides,” Quinn said. “The other girls are way too old for her.”
“Well, it’s a mother’s job to notice, and Amy is growing up faster. Well, Amy is developing normally and Pree and Sophie are developing slowly or not at all. There’s something wrong.”
“Oh Neesh,” Quinn said as he walked over and gave her a big hug. “You’re probably imagining it.”
“No. Study these pictures from a year ago, immediately before they were abducted.”
“Okay, they seem normal to me.”
“Now, here are recent photos I took in the same place with the same light.”
Quinn examined the photos.
“Hmm, I hadn’t noticed, but Amy has become more mature. Pree and Sophie seem to be the same, or even younger.”
“I think the effect is so gradual you don’t notice until you browse through old photos.”
The silence lasted for a while.
“Should we say anything?” Quinn said.
“Um, I don’t know,” Nisha replied. “Let’s think about this for a while. I keep forgetting one of the genetic modifications they made will enable them to live a long time. Bok thinks they may live to be 300 years old or older. Maybe they’re aging more slowly as part of their new natural life cycle.”
“You might be right,” Quinn replied.
Soon, they dropped off Priya and Sophie at the Hyperloop. Thirty minutes later they emerged from underground at the Palo Alto station, 350 miles to the north. They walked back to their apartment.
“Hey Pablo, are you ready for tomorrow?” Priya said as they walked into their apartment complex.
“I am. Did you hear the news?”
“What?” Sophie said.
“Remember the Mongolian guy we knew when we were in the Omanji Colony? He’s the one where he wants to attend our school, but his parents want him to work on the pasture because the family needs the money?”
“Oh yeah,” Priya said. “His name is Saikhan Oyuun which means fine mind, but he calls himself Oyuun. He said Mongolians don’t use last names. Instead, they put their father’s first name in front of their own first name. I would be Quinn Priya in Mongolia. What’s happening with him?”
“You’re so thorough. Anyway, he’ll be attending school here,” Pablo replied.
“How did he do it? He had no money,” Sophie said.
“Well, that’s the big news. He found the money.”
“How did he do that?” Sophie said.
“It’s a long story. His neighbors couldn’t have a baby, so he donated cells to make a reproductive stem cell line. His neighbors gave him some money. The word got out in his community and soon many couples who were infertile wanted his DNA because he’s smart. Demand became high and he made over $1,000,000 on his reproductive stem cell line.”
“That’s great news,” Priya said. “I’m glad he’ll be able to come here now. I remember what a nice guy he was.”
“Well, there’s more,” Pablo said.
“What?” Sophie said.
“You know how quickly news travels within our telepathic network. Many of us live in lesser developed countries who are poor. Soon afterward, many others donated cells to create reproductive stem cell lines for splicing into an egg.”
“Oh. Like how many?” Sophie said.
“Out of the 10,000 who want to come here but are stuck in their situations at home, 3,000 of them donated cells in the past few days.”
“Let me do the calculations,” Priya said. We can repopulate the world with our DNA many times over, using artificial techniques.”
Pablo said, “Yeah. Many couples who are having trouble having a baby would love to raise a smart child. Even many of those who fear us or hate us would want a smart child like us.”
“Oh, I see,” Sophie said. “Like when you’re homophobic until you learn your child is gay, and then you’re okay with it.”
“Kinda like that,” Pablo said. “The news is getting out onto Twitter now and you can bet that this is going to cause problems for us.”
“Pablo, you better get that law degree fast.” Sophie said. “Maybe you can focus on passing the Bar Exam straight out.”
“Yeah, that’s a clever idea.”
“Don’t get too cocky though.” Sophie said.
Pablo smiled and shook his head.
“You like that, don’t you?”
Sophie shrugged in mock disgust.
“No.”
“What countries do the donors come from?” Priya said.
“They come from every country. I’ve been on our social network the past few days. I like the improvements. Anyway, things are desperate for many of us, and they desperately needed the money. So, they created stem cell lines of their own.”
Nobody spoke for a long time.
Priya wrinkled her nose.
“So, it’s out.”
“What’s out?” Sophie said.
“The genie in the bottle. Our genes. They’re out in the world. There’s no way to go back now. I hope the babies are born normally with no birth defects. Bok said they would be fine, and all traits are inheritable, with the normal variation we see today. I guess we’ll find out.”
“Well, you two better get your genetic engineering degrees,” Pablo said. “We may need you.”
“Yeah, we all need each other,” Sophie said.
Priya and Sophie spent the rest of the day getting ready for the first day of school.
“I love these classes Pree,” Sophie said as they walked out of genetics class on a warm early summer day.”
“Me too,” Priya said. “I want to do this for a—”
“Hi guys,” Warren said as they crossed paths on the way to their next class.
“How are you?” Priya said.
“I’m doing okay. I browsed around on the social network last night and you made some great improvements. I’m glad you improved the encryption. I hear hackers are probing the site.”
“Yeah, Amy told me about that,” Priya said. “The attacks started a couple of days ago. We need the strongest security possible.”
“I’ve been thinking about our site,” Warren said. “I want to help. I want to put my money to effective use. Someday I’ll donate the money to charity, but for now I want to protect us. So, I’m giving you five million dollars to hire some security experts to train us, and you can pay Amy what’s she’s worth. We should physically locate the servers here, and we should make ghosted backups in several secret locations instead of in a cloud somewhere.”
“Thanks,” Priya said. “That’s a great idea. Oh, we need to get to our next class. We’ll figure out the details soon.”
They spent the rest of June studying and setting up the new server arrays and building a heavily defended system.