Wake of the Wanderer by Benjamin Kamphaus

Author:Benjamin Kamphaus [Kamphaus, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PatternShift
Published: 2020-03-10T22:00:00+00:00

Hector walked from the noodle bar to the hospital with Tandra and Asumi. The lights become less flashy and more functional as they progressed. This was only the third time Hector had been to the hospital in Darklight City. Its bones were the oldest buildings on Prime. Portions had been rebuilt and extended multiple times: patches of stacked corrugated plastic marked the boundary of the earliest construction, separate extensions of wide, cylindrical concrete the most recent.

Hector thought back to the two times he had come before. The first time he had been much smaller. He came with a few other children and adults from his city of New Basra. It had been his first rail trip, his first glimpses of the older and different Darklight City and its people. He remembered walking the halls where the Renouncer had done his work. He didn’t understand the story and its importance to Prime then—had wondered more about the odd familiarity of the lights and beeps.

He hadn’t counted being born here in his tally of visits, he realized. Not an event he had any memory of, of course—nor did it seem right to think of it as a visit. He had been transferred away when he aged out of the intensive care of infancy, sent to join a mixed family of adults and other children in New Basra. One placement among many by the machines and their algorithms.

He missed them.

His… parents? Siblings? There were five adults and seven other children in his family group. The few he was closest with: Mei, Amani, Farrah, Conor, their faces in his memories of them... those memories felt they were from a stranger. In his year away he had developed an analytical distance from his life before. Once the relative health of the adult populations had stabilized, the machines placed children into mixed age family groups like his. These were modeled on the anthropological concept of microbands, larger than the nuclear families more typical of Earth’s previous era—a mixed group of aunts and uncles moreso than a mother and a father.

New children were added to families at an age spacing of two to three years. The groups were not genetically related—unless a member of the family opted for a natural child (it was rare, but it did happen). Phenotypic traits converged due to shared environment, but a family unit was still a random bag of physical traits: skin, eye, or hair pigmentation, stature, and other superficial morphological characteristics. Family selection seemed more based on a complimentary collection of propensities, and the family units formed a natural organization for collaboration on projects, the adults and older children offering a chain of mentors for various practical skills.

Not all adults lived in such families—some opted to live alone, and not just among the Renouncers. But Hector suspected that the machines had shaped things through their influence—wielded in control of both genetics and the environment—such that most would prefer this arrangement. It was critical to their mission of growing the human population, after all.

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