(no subject)
This is not the future I asked for.
My future, the one I always thought of in my head, looked more or less like the present -- some ways better, some ways worse, but recognizable. Sure, the net was in everything, flexible displays and glaring advertisements and commercials on the sides of buildings. We used different fuel sources, ate a mixture of genetically engineered and organic food depending on the day I was imagining it, and watched our kids agitate over how to settle the asteroid belt when there was so much less free energy there. Childhood influences, part Gibson and part Cadigan and part Heinlein and part hope.
I'm eighty-five years old. The memory's going, so I dump it to a shadow box every week to get the important bits reinforced while I sleep. Last week the agent that sifts it for me got infected by a surrealist virus and I almost got committed for sudden-onset senility before I managed to make the problem clear to tech support. My eldest daughter is finally rethinking her position on children and considering conception for other than medical purposes. My youngest daughter was born eight years after her father died; she's an awkward tube of organic mush soup spiced with computer chips of types I can't even describe, but her avatar is so detailed, so perfect, that in combination with my late husband's cheerful, outgoing manner she chalks up a dozen new suitors a day. She's still never tried polygamy -- I think. Some things kids still don't tell their mothers.
I've had an offer to remarry myself, but I turned it down. He lived in Singapore, and even if I've half lived on the net since I was sixteen, I'm still old-fashioned, I suppose. My daughters tell me I'm crazy; no-one, it seems, actually lives with their spouses these days.
Yesterday I saw an advertisement for an off-switch for menstrual cramps.
I like this future more than mine.
And I love you all - but not in the way that the cybersex world-record contestants do. As I said, I'm old-fashioned.