TWTBACD Ch.80 - The Children of 2020, Old Now

Chapter 80

The Children of 2020, Old Now

2075 — Portraits

2075: the children of 2020, old now — portraits

In 2075, the children who had been two and three years old in 2020 were in their mid-fifties. The pandemic had been their first memory. The AGI had been the defining event of their professional formation. The Great Rebalancing had been the choice they had made — or failed to make — in their most capable years.

[MILA PETROV — 57 — Sremska Mitrovica]

Mila Petrov retired as director of the Balkan Environmental Intelligence Institute in 2075 and became its founder emerita, which meant she kept her desk and her data access and her password to the monitoring network and her habit of arriving before anyone else. She had spent thirty-seven years building the institute from a single fisherman's data program into the most comprehensive environmental monitoring infrastructure in the region. The Sava River was her life's work. It was not saved — rivers are never saved, they are managed, tended, related to. But it was better than it had been. And the data existed to prove it, and the data would continue to exist after she did.

She called her father on the first day of her retirement. He was ninety-three. He was in the house by the river. He no longer fished — his body was not adequate to the physical demands — but he could sit on the bank. He sat on the bank most mornings. The monitoring network ran without him.

'I retired today,' she said.

'From what?' he asked.

'The institute.'

'But not from the work.'

'No.'

'Then it's not retirement,' he said. 'It's just a different way of doing the same work.'

[TRAVIS HAYES — 57 — Hardin County, Iowa]

Travis Hayes was fifty-seven in 2075 and had the specific quality of someone who has spent their entire adult life in exactly the right relationship to the work they were made for. The farm was healthy. The soil was deeper than it had been when he inherited it. Susan-junior — twenty-three, completed her ecology degree, back on the farm as she had always known she would be — was taking over the regenerative management programme.

Travis was not retiring. He was transitioning. There was a difference, and the difference mattered in the way it always matters in farm families: the farm is not a job, it is a relationship, and relationships do not retire, they mature.

[KWAME MUTOMBO — 62 — Nairobi and Bukavu]

Kwame Mutombo's Ubuntu AI platform served forty-one countries in 2075. He was sixty-two, and the platform was twenty-seven years old, and they were growing old together in the way that a person and their life's work grow old together: each carrying the marks of the other, each making the other comprehensible.

He had gone home to the village in South Kivu every Diwali — no, every Christmas, the family's tradition, the season of return — for thirty years. The spring still ran. The trees were tall. Amara-Céleste, Zuri's daughter, was weaving patterns that Kwame could not quite follow, which meant they were good.

[BAO NGUYEN — 57 — Daejeon and Da Nang]

Bao Nguyen's thermal architecture was in every quantum computing facility on the planet. He was fifty-seven and had fourteen patents and a quiet life and children who were both doing work he found completely comprehensible and deeply good. He visited his parents' grave — Linh had died in 2072, Tuan in 2074 — on the anniversary of each death, which he marked not with ceremony but with a specific quality of stillness that was his version of prayer.

[LUCAS VAN DEN BERG — 50 — Amsterdam]

Lucas van den Berg was fifty. The Intelligence Commons framework was the law of twenty-nine nations and the policy guidance of forty-one more. The equitable AI distribution index he had developed with Kwame was used by every major development institution. He was working on the ASI governance framework — the document that would define what principles should govern the relationship between humanity and a system more intelligent than any human. He worked on it with the same methodical precision his father had brought to risk models and his mother had brought to diagnostic medicine. He was not afraid of the work. He found it clarifying.