Thanks for all the comments on the story! It’s a delight for me to see folks reading and talking about it.

I loved Chris’s reading, but I do think it may be a hard story to figure out in an audio format, since the background of what happened in this world does emerge gradually, and in audio you can’t glance back easily.

I’ll hazard a few answers.

(These are just my off-the-cuff remarks for your amusement; the story is what it is, and in some sense your take is as valid as mine. Actually I’m a little insecure if I should even chime in; please feel free to skip this comment if you don’t want your reading muddied by my authorial ramblings.)

Basically Randbot’s take is exactly what I intended. The virus, CDAS, stopped the biological aging of basically everyone in the world.

Yicheng, they would have had to change the laws to specifically exclude people who were biologically below 18 from voting. There are people with disorders somewhat like the one in the story today; they can vote when they turn 18 in chronological terms. For the first few years, it was assumed that a cure would be found quickly; after that, a movement to disenfranchise some voters would be hard to start. (Though perhaps some tried.)

In some ways Suze and the other Nines are actually smarter than adults — they have had nine-year-olds’ very flexible and learning-adapted brains for thirty years of learning. They tend to be impatient and they have some cognitive gaps, but they’ve worked out their own coping skills for those. Nines are actually pretty rich and successful as a group — much more so than the perpetual teenagers a few years older, anyway.

There was a movement (of which Suze was part) to rescue toddlers from lives of dependence by developing
cybernetic implants for them (“those children wired up to the internet”, as the real estate lady calls them). Actually this succeeded beyond the wildest dreams, and nightmares, of its designers. Adults who got the implants relate to them as (somewhat clumsy) tools, which they use at arms’ length. The toddlers who got them were fundamentally changed by them, and in some sense merged with the global computing infrastructure into a very powerful, sort of superintelligent group mind. They are fluent in the cybernetic interfaces, the way a small child exposed to a new language becomes fluent in it as an adult never can.
When Carla talks about the future, she’s seeing it in terms of an incredibly sophisticated heuristic data analysis of the massive data stream — from swarmcams, economic transactions, millions of sensors, news, weather, etc — that she’s as immersed in as air.

I plead guilty to Carla being mildly extraneous to the story; but note that she’s also a living reminder to Suze of how her radicalism (she was on the political vanguard of the Nines, as they reached college (chronological) age, rejecting the imitation of what used to be adulthood and developing a new culture suited to them) has had unintended consequences… which maybe helps push her towards accepting Abby’s choice, in the end.

Anyway, thanks for listening everyone!

I also loved the “Ewww!” reaction.

@Yicheng: I would think that after a decade or so, the support for child emancipation would go way up. Those children all have parents, after all.

I am having a hard time with the character of Max’s sister. Why is she able to kinda predict the future? Why does she have cybernetic implants? Is everyone afraid of her because while she is powerful mentally,how I do not know, she is also prone to the temper tantrums of a 3 year old. I feel that she did not really fit into the plot line and was more of a distraction to what was really going on.

If it was a virus that stopped everyone from aging it is a very cool concept that I would like to see fleshed out more.

This story rang very true to me. Well done.

I’m also finding it extremely unlikely how/why the “child emancipation act” mentioned in the story would ever get passed by Congress, when 1) only adults can vote, and 2) the adults are in charge.

thanks