TWTBACD Ch.83 - The Fifth Generation Arrives

Chapter 83

The Fifth Generation Arrives

2078

2078: generation five — they walk the restored land

[ALL FAMILIES — New Children]

In 2078, the fifth generation of the seven families was coming of age.

Susan-junior Hayes-Kowalski, twenty-six, was managing the restored prairie acreage with the precision of her father and the patience of her grandmother and the ecological knowledge that four generations of careful attention had deposited in the family's collective understanding like sediment in a river delta: slowly, layer by layer, each layer the foundation for the next.

Kamala Sharma, twenty-seven, had become the most important river scientist of her generation — not because of her technical sophistication, though that was exceptional, but because of the quality of attention she brought to the river, the quality she had learned from a great-grandfather she had known for only eleven years but who had given her, in those years, everything he had spent a lifetime accumulating.

Amara-Céleste Mutombo, twenty-three, was making kuba cloth that people could not look away from. She had found, in the language her great-grandmother had given her, new things to say — things about the machine intelligence that was approaching, about the world her generation had inherited, about what it meant to make a thing with your hands in an era when so many things were made without hands. The patterns were like nothing that had existed before. They were also entirely kuba.

Lan Nguyen, twenty-eight, was a materials scientist who had spent three years at the Daejeon facility where her father had worked, understanding the thermal architecture that bore the Nguyen name, and then moved to Lagos to work at the African computing centre where that architecture was the foundation of the fastest-growing quantum research programme in the world.

Ming-Li Chen, thirty-two, was expanding her food systems research kitchen into a network of twelve urban farms and eleven research kitchens across the Yangtze Delta, demonstrating at scale what she had argued since she was eleven: that the food system of the future was possible, and it was delicious, and it was here.

Lucas van den Berg's daughter, Nora, born in 2060 and eighteen in 2078, was studying philosophy — specifically the philosophy of mind, the place where the question of what it meant to be conscious had been circling for three thousand years and was now circling a new object. She was her father's daughter in her precision and her mother's daughter in her care for the human consequence of abstraction.

They had inherited a world that was better than it had been at their grandparents' births and worse than it could have been if different choices had been made. They were making choices now that would determine what their grandchildren inherited. They were, each of them, fully aware of this. The awareness was not paralyzing. It was instructive.