Over the next several months, protests for and against Priya and her species intensified. This was especially true at college campuses around the world with ground zero being across the street from Priya’s lab at Arboretum Grove in Palo Alto.
“They’re throwing Molotov cocktails again, “Priya said.
“Some things never change,” Sophie said. “Most of them are the same people who break windows after their local sports team wins the championship. The rent-a-mob. They’re out there to cause trouble. Yeah, I see legitimate protesters out there too, on both sides.”
“I hoped my economic plan to help displaced workers would calm the situation,” Warren said. “Even the US Congress and Senate approved it.”
“It helped, but this isn’t a logical subject,” Raven said. “This is fueled by emotions. When you read their signs, you’d think the entire world is falling apart.”
“For many people it is falling apart,” Priya said. “The good old days were never that good, but they’re never coming back. It’s been like that for 250 years, but especially now.”
“Now they’re firing teargas,” Raven said. “I feel I’m the cause of this.”
‘We’re all responsible in a way,” Sophie said. “But we didn’t cause this. It was happening before we got abducted. The Omanji modified our DNA. Then humans stole our DNA and made babies with it, there was no turning back. Millions of people want our babies. It’s like that with many species. When a desirable genetic change shows up, it usually wins.”
“Human extinction was inevitable anyway,” Priya said. “People have been making changes to our DNA for a few decades now. Yeah, not as dramatically as the Omanji did. First people got to choose the sex of their baby. Then they were able to screen for and later eliminate various birth defects. Then we improved our immune system. Then we eliminated some genetically predisposed diseases. We reduced our cancer rates. We’ve made hundreds of small improvements to our genome. Eventually we would have figured out how to make our life spans increase and how to become more intelligent and talented.”
“People need to learn to embrace change,” Raven said. “It’s a change for the good. Just think of all the wars and genocides that happened because of ignorance and greed. We’re not perfect, but odds are, the world will tend to be a more peaceful and enlightened place because of the improvements to our genome.”
“Human beings have been sick and tired of human behavior for as long as people have been able to write,” Priya said. “People should be happy that so many negative human traits have been edited out of our DNA. At least partially.”
People began throwing rocks at the riot police. They responded with more teargas.
“They don’t look happy,” Warren said. “We’re being too idealistic about this. Do you think once our species takes over, the world will be a better place?”
“I’d like to think so,” Priya said. “We consider more information before coming to conclusions compared to the average old species person. We’re still mostly human though. I bet we’ll have our problems. Remember when Gul destroyed his new breakaway Omanji colony because of arrogance and being too smart for his own good? We may have Guls in our future. Imagine what a super smart person with deluded or bad intent could do to the world.”
“Or by accident,” Raven said.
“We’ll have to become more connected, like the Omanji,” Priya said.
“We’re already connected,” Raven said.
“I mean the new species kids,” Priya said. “There are now 65 million of them and they have no implants. Wait till they start programming.”
“Or doing genetic engineering,” Sophie said. “We only have a few years before they start changing the world.”
“The laws are way behind the times, even if we didn’t exist,” Pablo said. “Technology has been ahead of the law for a few decades now.”
“Now my heart is racing,” Sophie said. “What will these kids do?”
“The same thing we were doing,” Priya said.
“But it’s like you said. What if a few of them are genetic engineering prodigy psychopaths?” Sophie said. “How can you stop someone from tinkering around with hazardous technology in their garage? How will we know ahead of time, the difference between a brilliant invention and a potential extinction event?”
“We already have laws against people making nuclear weapons in their basement,” Pablo said. “We’ll have to extend those laws to other possible scenarios.”
“But it’s hard to hide physical nuclear weapon development in your house,” Sophie said. “Priya and I work with tiny amounts of compounds in a small lab. The chemicals we use are mostly harmless and available anywhere. It’s the knowledge we have that could be dangerous. How can you control knowledge?”
“The Omanji did it by connecting everyone,” Priya said.
“But that goes against our individual freedoms,” Warren said. “Bok rebelled for that reason.”
“Yeah, but then he connected everyone in his new colony anyway,” Priya said.
“But in a more open way compared to the elders,” Sophie said. “Bok and everyone in his colony still have individuality.”
“We need to talk to Bok about this,” Sophie said.
Several hours later, Priya and her friends got together in her lab and contacted Bok.
“I’m so glad you want to talk to us,” Priya said. “You’ve stayed away from us for a while now.”
“Yes, we’re isolating ourselves so your species can evolve on its own. We’ve already done enough damage. Even us being on this planet causes damage. We’re evaluating other places to go. Somewhere outside of this solar system. Soon, you’ll be inhabiting nearby planets. We want to give you space. However, habitable planets are exceedingly rare. Even though a billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy can support life, only a small fraction of those have the proper requirements for us to live comfortably. We may go back to Oma. There is a small part of the planet that is habitable, but there are almost 100 million who remained behind. They’re unconnected and dangerous. Plus, we’re trying to avoid the Singleton.”
“Oh yeah, what’s the latest on that?” Priya said.
“They have 50 small drone-like devices near Earth at a Lagrangian point and several dozen others in other nearby locations including the Moon. They’re monitoring us right now. We’re hoping if we ignore them, we won’t trigger some harmful event.”
“Like what?” Sophie said.
“They could unpack and build an entire new singleton on Earth or any nearby planet if the drones were given the capability. That’s only a small probability because a singleton on Earth could be in competition with the original Singleton. The drones could contact the Singleton with a 558-year delay. That may trigger a response in 1,116 years at the minimum.”
“I agree. Don’t cause trouble.” Priya said.
“What about my robot that almost became a singleton?” Raven said. “I wonder if the Singleton noticed.”
“It noticed. We watched that situation closely,” Bok said. “Your emergent singleton never became dangerous enough for us to take action, but I hope you learned a lesson.”
“Yes,” Raven said. “We’ve been studying your experiences and we’ll try not to make the same mistakes. No more creating AI that can get out of the box. Though individual people may try.”
“Or biologic lifeforms that could escape either,” Priya said. “We’re still having problems with those rats. We almost had them down to zero, but they keep coming back.”
“The biggest problem will come from misbehaving individuals and groups in your two human species,” Bok said.
“Yes,” Priya said. “It will be difficult to get everyone to connect with each other. As you know, we value our individuality.”
“You must balance freedom and individuality with the needs and protection of the many. I’m still fine-tuning that within my colony.”
“How do we get people connected when we don’t have implants,” Priya said.
“Your development is unbalanced at this point. On Oma, we developed techniques for genetic manipulation at the same time we developed techniques for implants and other monitoring and communications. So, they all became effective at the same time. In your case, your new species genetic evolution is ahead of your technological development. That’s our fault. We shouldn’t have changed your genetics so significantly, but now you have a problem because dangerous technologies could be developed without a means to manage them in society. Even the old species humans are to the point of developing extinction-level technology.”
“What can we do?” Priya said.
“You need to educate the children while they’re young to behave cooperatively. You need to change human sensibilities so everyone can live in the new society that will evolve quickly in the next 20 or 30 years. It will be a more severe change than when humans shifted from an agricultural and religious society to an industrial and less religious society.”
“That took 200 years,” Warren said. “This is starting now, and it won’t take long. I don’t know how we can adapt that quickly. We’re still having trouble adapting to an urban society.”
“Some of this change will be natural for your new species children,” Bok said. “It’s been difficult for old species humans to adapt because they remained genetically the same, while conditions changed. These new species children are genetically distinct from their parents. They’ll have different interests and varying ways of interacting with each other. The old species will have more difficulty adapting to the changing environment and sensibilities.”
“We’re looking out the window at protests right now,” Pablo said. “People are having trouble adapting and not much has changed yet. I can’t imagine how it will be when things really change.”
“We can assist in non-disruptive ways,” Bok said. “We’ve already disabled all nuclear weapons and potential nuclear weapons we discover. We can assist in discovering research work that could lead to extinction level events or mass destruction. I don’t think we can catch them all. You’ll have to begin work right now to lessen the chances.”
“We’ve already done research that almost led to mass destruction,” Raven said. “Accidentally of course.”
“Yes,” Bok said. “If your information and robotics technologies were more advanced, a developing singleton might have been unstoppable. Your singleton didn’t have the resources available to subsume this planet.”
“So that was just a practice run?” Raven said.
“Yes, a taste of things to come as humans say,” Bok said. “Learn from it or you’ll suffer the same fate as us. Or the fate of those dead planets.”
“Yeah, seven eras of entropy over tens of thousands of years doesn’t sound appealing to me,” Priya said. “That reminds me, do you still communicate with Zon and other Omanji? Are they still going to Gliese 581 g?”
“Yes. And it’s getting more difficult to communicate with them every day. They’re accelerating to near the speed of light from our perspective over the next 10 to 20 years. If I were to send them a message right now, I would have to wait two years for a reply. A year from now, I’ll have to wait about 4.5 years for a reply. That gap will increase as they get further away and their speed away from Earth increases. Gliese 581 g is larger than Earth and orbits a star smaller than the sun. However, it’s not completely in tidal lock as we first thought. It’s like Oma, but with a more favorable ocean to continent configuration. It’s about 20 light years away. We detect no technological life forms but many less evolved species.”
“Will you ever see them again?” Priya said.
“I don’t know. We’ve considered rejoining them, but our differences were too great even while here on Earth. We would have the same problems if we joined them again. Eventually we’ll become a distinct species from them as we evolve in separate ways.”
“You said you were thinking of leaving Earth. Where would you go?” Priya said.
“We haven’t decided but there are a few candidates. We’ll let you know if we decide anything. We should never have come to Earth. We didn’t consider the human species to be advanced enough to merit consideration.”
“Thanks for saying that,” Priya said. “Sometimes the human species doesn’t get along very well, but we were making progress until you came. Now everything is messed up, but this would have happened eventually. For me personally, I’m glad to be who I am now. I can’t imagine going back to who I was.”
“Me too,” Raven said.
Warren and Pablo agreed.
“I’m glad to know you Bok,” Priya said. “My mom feels the same way. Many good things have come from your arrival.”
“Thanks. I’ve learned a lot from humans. The most important thing is to value my individuality. It’s hard to balance the rights of the individual with the rights of a society in a high technology environment. The Omanji went too far in the direction of protecting society at the expense of the individual. To put it in human terms, their motto is to be better safe than sorry.”
“You speak of the Omanji as though it’s another species,” Priya said.
“I feel like I’m a member of a distinct species from them. I’m sure you know the feeling.”
“I do,” Priya said.
“I need to go now,” Bok said. We’ll continue this discussion later.”
“Definitely.”
They disconnected.
Priya and the other 25,000 members of her species began work to instruct teachers and family members of the modified children on how to raise them to live in a highly cooperative and interactive society. The social engineering of a new species began.