Priya and Sophie accepted the lifetime achievement award in genetic engineering, in a ceremony at the old Genomaly headquarters building in Palo Alto. They celebrated the award and Priya’s birthday, with family and friends at Priya’s rebuilt house in the Santa Cruz mountains. Her first house was destroyed a few decades ago in the great fire of October 2315.
“Blow out the candles,” Sophie said.
“I’m getting too old for this,” Priya said. “There are too many candles.”
“You say that every year,” Sophie said.
Priya shook her head.
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do,” Sopriya said. “Here’s a video my mom made on your 31st birthday. You said it way back then even before I was born.”
They watched the video for several minutes. Priya started to cry.
“I miss Amy.”
Sopriya teared up.
“Me too,” Sophie said. “Amy was so smart and full of life. She was our best friend.”
“Yeah,” Priya said. “I feel like she was just here a few days ago.”
“Mom died over 150 years ago,” Sopriya said, wiping away some tears.
“I know, but the years pass by more quickly as you get older,” Priya said.
They continued to watch the video for a few minutes. Nisha playfully hugged Quinn.
“Look at Mom,” Priya said, tearing up. “She looks so young. I still miss her, and Dad and Sanjay. I wish I could go back in time and hug them again.”
She stopped to compose herself.
“I’m glad we were able to extend Mom’s and Dad’s life long enough to see their grandchildren grow up. I can’t believe they’ve been gone for almost 170 years.”
They continued watching.
“Warren, you look young too,” Priya said. “Look at your wild hair.”
“And you look like a little girl. Well, we were only 31 going on 16. What did we know? When are the kids coming?”
“They should be along in a few hours,” Priya said.
“I hope so. This is a big birthday.” Warren said.
“It’s not as big as 100 or 200,” Priya said. “After a while, a birthday is just another day. Your 300th is coming up soon Sophie.”
“Don’t remind me. Why do people make such a big deal about birthdays?”
“For legal reasons,” Pablo said.
“You think everything is for legal reasons,” Sophie said. “When are our kids coming?”
“Later this evening.”
“What about your kid?” Sophie said to Raven.
“What did he say?” Raven said to Oyuun.
“He’ll be here later too.”
“That’s okay,” Priya said. “It’s just us. Like the good old days.”
“These days are the good old days,” Raven said. “There were so many problems back then. Things are much better now.”
“I know,” Priya said. “When our extra-long lives were in front of us, and future was unknown. It was like an adventure. But yeah, people aren’t trying to kill us anymore.”
“That’s because the people trying to kill us are nearly extinct.” Warren said. “There are only a couple million of them left and 15 billion of us.”
“I like the peace and open space,” Sophie said. “No wars. No delusional beliefs based on nothing. We can travel to any place on Earth without fearing for our lives. More people but no urban sprawl.”
“Yeah, the good new days,” Raven said. “We can thank the Omanji for our megacities and more open spaces. Bok is coming, right.”
“Yeah, soon,” Priya said.
They continued watching the video.
“There’s the oak tree in the backyard of my old place. I don’t know how it survived the fire. It looks much bigger and more picturesque now than 269 years ago.”
“That’s when you know you’ve lived a long time Oyuun said. “When you live for a substantial portion of the lifespan of an oak tree.”
“Tell me about it,” Raven said. “Look at us back then. We looked like we were on top of the world.”
“Yeah, but we had tough times. Somehow, we survived,” Oyuun said.
“Barely,” Raven said. “How many AI singularities? How many attempts on our lives?”
“Yeah,” Pablo said. “How many attempted rewrites of the US Constitution did we survive? Eight or nine?”
“Ten I think,” Sophie said.
Priya raised an eyebrow.
“Well,” Sophie said. “When you’re around a lawyer for 269 years, you remember lots of odd things.”
Priya smiled.
“Apparently so.”
They continued watching the old video.
“Warren, are you glad you made it to 300?” Priya said. “You didn’t like the idea back then.”
“I’m all for it now. How did we ever feel happy, living for only 90 or 100 years? That’s too short.”
“Yeah, but not for our teeth,” Priya said. “I’ve had three sets of new teeth from tooth bud implants because they wore out.”
“That’s true,” Raven said. “The Omanji thought of almost everything, but human teeth wear out in about 100 years no matter how long you live.”
“I can’t imagine growing old and dying at 100,” Sophie said. “Just when you’re getting smarter and wiser, you die. Every time a wise person dies, that information is lost forever. That’s a loss for society. Now we have lots of older and wiser people, but they’re not stuck in the past. They still help society. We don’t have the rigidity of having lots of older people.”
They continued watching.
“I think we adapted to change pretty well considering how different life is now,” Priya said.
“No way.” Sopriya said. “You’ve never even been to Mars.”
“There’s nothing interesting there. Just a few microbes deep underground that aren’t much different than what we have on Earth anyway. Anyway, it’s too volatile ever since Mars declared independence.”
“Admit it aunty Priya,” Sopriya said. “You’re afraid of outer space.”
“I am not.”
“Then why is it that every time you have a chance to take a trip, you somehow get out of it? I can understand you not wanting to go to Proxima Centauri or further out, but still.”
“I’ve been busy,” Priya said.
“You missed our trips to the Jupiter Moons and the rings of Saturn. The incredible Europa geysers. Smoggy Titan. Even several trips to Mars. You won’t even go to the Moon or the space stations. You don’t like auto-music. You don’t use the auto-labs.”
“Well yeah,” Priya said. I want to understand how something works before I use it. Nobody understands how any of those auto-things work. AIs make the best decisions about medical care, and most other things, but we often don’t know how they came to those decisions. We blindly accept them. We often don’t know why cars stop for no reason or a scanner orders a procedure on you for no reason. Usually even the doctors can’t tell you why. We go along with these invisible decisions for our entire lives. As for not going on your trips, okay, being weightless freaks me out. But I’m no Luddite. I like the new mind-music and the dry bathing. I use the auto-lawyers and the home physicians.”
“But AI makes better decisions than we do,” Sopriya said. “At least for most things. It’s not like the old days when my mom made this video and she had to figure out everything herself.”
“I guess it’s hard to adjust to change. It sneaks up on you over such a long time,” Priya said.
“People still work and have careers,” Sopriya said. “It’s more about guiding AIs now.”
“I know,” Priya said. “Each person now does the work of hundreds of super smart people. I just like getting my hands dirty. Running those tests myself and all that stuff. Working at the root level.”
“Even back in our day, most things were automated,” Sophie said. “We didn’t have to sequence the DNA manually. Over time, more of the mundane things have been automated, and now we just do the top-level things. We knew this would happen even back then. Software programmers back in 2040 didn’t understand how their code was converted into machine language. They just entered their commands one line at a time and the compilers and AI-bots did the work without the programmers understanding.”
“We’ve built each layer of complexity on top of the old,” Sopriya said. “Then we climb on top and make the next layer. We just know the lower layers work, like those old-time programmers.”
“You’re so analytical,” Priya said. “Just like your mom. Look at her.”
She teared up again as she watched Amy in the video laughing.
“I’ll never get over her being gone.”
She wiped her tears away as they continued watching.
“Amy knew back then what AI would do,” Raven said. “But we didn’t know how it would shape our lives. We design and build our own houses with no expert help. We do our own health care with no doctors usually unless surgery is required, which is mostly done with robots.”
“Genomaly is automated,” Sophie said. “It develops drugs and genomes on its own now. We just monitor it.”
“Yeah, but we still need the advanced knowledge to guide it,” Priya said.
“Remember the old energy companies?” Oyuun said.
“Yeah, they made sea level rise by two feet before it dropped back a foot,” Raven said. “Only because you figured out the fusion conundrum and solar and wind power got cheaper.”
“I figured it out by setting two AIs against each other to solve some problems. Even though the AIs solved them, I knew what needed to be solved. You did that with your drones.”
“True,” Raven said. “They learned from each other, but I don’t know how they did it. That helped when we had to move that asteroid that would have hit Earth about 50 years ago.”
“Yeah, what would we do without AI?” Sophie said.
“We’d be back in the dark ages,” Pablo said.
“Yeah, the age when we had real human lawyers.”
Priya said.
“I resemble that remark.”
“We know,” Sophie said, smiling.
Bok landed in Priya’s front meadow. Priya’s front door monitor recognized them, let them in, and guided them to the back-yard barbecue.
“Bok. I’m so glad you could come,” Priya said.
“I barely made it back in time from our Titan base,” Bok said. “Beedee won’t be back for another week. She needed to make some adjustments to the heating units. She’s always working on something. These days I like to relax more.”
“Me too,” Priya said. “Even with a long lifespan. I feel like I’m 70 in the old paradigm.”
“You’re still beautiful,” Warren said. “You don’t look a day over-”
“200, I know.”
They laughed and continued watching Amy’s old video.
“Oh yeah, Bok, you couldn’t make it to my 31st birthday party because the Singleton was forcing its way into your colony.”
“I was worried about the Singleton,” Bok said. “It could have done anything it wanted to us. But it just sits out there watching us.”
“For 269 years it’s been doing almost nothing,” Raven said. “I guess time doesn’t matter to it. It just waits for threats and eliminates them. So far, I guess we’re still no threat.”
“Fortunately for us,” Bok said. “We might not be here otherwise.”
“Speaking of survival, I just finished my latest survey of earth-like planets,” Raven said.
“What did you find?” Sophie said.
“Within a 5000-light-year radius, which is 1/20th the diameter of the galaxy, there are about 600 million stars. That’s mostly our part of the Orion arm. We see about 50,000 earth-like planets in or near the habitable zone of their stars. We’re estimating about 50 of those would be suitable for us to live on.”
“Why so few?” Sophie said.
“Remember how the Omanji had to move? Part of the reason was the chaos that was happening, and AI-1. But a bigger part was they had trouble breathing our atmosphere. Even with perfect temperatures and other factors, atmospheres vary so greatly that we could comfortably live on only about one out of every hundred earth-like planets. Even Oma has a caustic atmosphere for us.”
“We still have trouble breathing on Earth, despite our modifications,” Bok said. “The Omanji finally found a good planet. But we’re having trouble finding another one.”
“The closest planet for humans we’ve found is Kepler 62-f. But that’s about 1200 light years away. We finally made it to Proxima Centauri which is only 4 light years away. Only microbes there. We have a long way to go.”
“How many planets have life?” Sophie said.
“Right now, we’re guessing about 2000 have life based on atmospheric readings. At least 50 seem to have or had intelligent life, but we’re too far away to know for sure.”
“That correlates with what we found,” Bok said.
“There’s-”
“We know,” Priya said. “There’s hope for us yet.”
They laughed.
Priya walked over to the big old oak, running her hands carefully over the pebbled bark.
“I can’t tell where it got burned. Or where the branch broke in the earthquake. It healed itself. I want to live as long as this tree.”
“They can live to be over 600 years old,” Raven said.
“Sounds good to me.”
“I don’t know if I would want to live 600 years.” Warren said.
“Why not? I would,” said Sopriya.
“You said that about 300 and now you’re glad,” Priya said.
“Yeah, but 600? That’s too long,” Warren said.
“Warren, I want you to live forever. I want us all to live forever! I have some ideas.”