Doctor Paul Romero—or Uncle Paul, or just Paul—co-directed a project with Dad that they called “Prospecting”. The team looked for ways to build relationships with people who lived outside of WISE tribes.

At that time, an estimated eight million lived in “transitional tribes”; tribes that were on the path to incorporation and received medical supplies, other material support, and defense but had not committed to WISE. The rest of the world population—another one-hundred million or so—lived entirely disconnected from WISE. The Prospecting project focused on this last group.

# dictation interrupted #

I clear my throat. “Your father and Doctor Romero were two of the founding members?”

“Oh—yes,” Liam says. “Dad transitioned out of mechanical engineering into assisting Paul in the Civil Engineering department shortly after ‘The City’ popped up. To build a city for millions of refugees in a matter of months put his mechanical engineering to the test. After that, they needed something different.”

“How was your dad involved with building the city?” I ask.

“Dad was on the team building temporary structures. He wasn’t educated as a structural engineer but understood it well enough to help.”

“They were quite shorthanded at the time,” Abigail says.

“Definitely. When the build slowed down, he crossed the hall and asked what he could do to help. Uncle Paul was leading the team tracking and counteracting violence. He told Dad to volunteer for The Guard. Much against my mom’s wishes, new baby and all, he did just that.”

“Had your dad been in the military?” I ask.

“No. They weren’t sure what to do with a book worm like him. They handed him a printed badge and assigned him a patrol in a residential zone,” Liam says. He smiles. “Dad was a problem solver.”

“Is that not what an engineer is?”

Liam’s smile broadens. “Dad would say ‘See a problem, solve a problem. This mindset is what makes an engineer.’ The problem he saw was that the city he’d helped to hastily plan and build was too centralized. Hundreds of thousands of people flowed into one area during the day and then dispersed back to their residents late at night. Widescale theft by day in the residential zones; sexual assaults and other violence by night. The anonymity granted by the crowds made it difficult to prevent or investigate.”

“How did he solve the problem?”

“Dad went back to Paul and told him about his observations and suggested a solution: planned communities. They spent weeks reading through civil engineering books and studies. They also recruited leaders within the self-forming refugee communities and drew up plans with their help. The result was to loosely define hundreds of communities inside The City based on foot traffic patterns. They divided the three distribution centers into over four-hundred small community centers—mostly large tents. Each operated and secured by those within the communities they served.”

“These were the first five-hundred and seventy-nine defined tribes,” Abigail says.

“The tribes helped, but they were still too close,” Liam says. “A few months later, Dad and Uncle Paul headed the first program to move people out of The City. Five villages were built and forty-seven communities were moved into them. Four of the villages focused on families with children of similar age who were already interacting. The fifth was an all-female village with a dynamic intended to give space for healing and mutual support. Minnie once told me that this village is what saved her life.”

Abigail displays aerial photos of the city. “It was only seven more years until The City was virtually empty. An extraordinary undertaking.”

Liam nods his head. “It was only possible by machine learning. The identification of micro-communities within the obvious demographics was pivotal in designing the tribes.”

“The program’s biggest failures were due to the very same machine learning,” Abigail says. “Phase three had to find ways to promote tolerance between these groups. This made the previous two phases look easy.”

Liam shifts in his seat.

# begin dictation #

Once at dinner, Paul said, “Start with the youth. All of our models suggest that Liam and his generation will be the ones to bridge the gap.” Being only 10 or so at the time, I didn’t understand what he’d meant.

As a young adult, I once worked at Conference as a Nutrition Facilitator; a fancy term for someone who opened boxes and distributed pre-packed meals. Half the time I didn’t even do that. Some of the teens volunteered to do the job and we were encouraged to let them.

“Some kids enjoy the sense of having a job and others just need a break from the feeling of being free,” my trainer told me. I understood that. Hell, I wished that I’d thought of that at their age. The subjective chaos was both exhilarating and exhausting.

But within that perceived chaos was the genius of Conference; a weeklong “anti-prejudice” exercise designed to make every miniscule interaction an opportunity for cooperation, empathy, or intimacy.

It wasn’t so simple for the generations who’d lived through the wars. Race, religion, and even defunct nationalities made any “Conference” with adults impossible. Rather than the petri-dish approach used on the teens, WISE encouraged inter-tribal art exhibits and educational programs. One such educational program is how Mom, an atheist white woman from the former United States, met Minnie, an agnostic black woman from former South Africa. Arguably their friendship developed after I and Minnie started hanging out.

However, my generation kept up a modified Conference we called “Rave”. We didn’t just borrow the name from pre-collapse culture; we borrowed the music, lights, costuming, and even some of the drugs. Thousands of young adults meeting in the desert to experience a microcosm of everyone’s favorite part of Conference, nights. As the youth aged out of Conference, they got invited to Rave.

Eventually, Rave’s size decreased year after year until it faded out of existence. I’d stopped going long before the last full generation cycled through—Rave was for young people—but I was sad to hear when sterility caught up to it. I imagine one day, when there are enough twenty-somethings to really do Rave right again, that it’ll come back.

I once was invited by my tribe to an event they were calling Rave. They held it the same week as Camp and Conference which meant the kids weren’t home. They had the part where for a one-night event you bumped against people while intoxicated. They missed the part where it was best done with strangers.

I didn’t go to their Rave; I just found an excuse to pass through the village that night to see what it was. A fog machine had been devised which made for a cool effect. At the center, about 20 naked and nearly naked bodies moved to pounding music on a laser-lit dancefloor. The flyer’s guarantee of ecstasy was not an empty promise.

I watched the purity of it for a few minutes but the risk to my reputation was too great; imagine if they’d got the impression that I wanted to be friends with any of them. Besides, like I said, Rave was supposed to be for young people.

# dictation interrupted #

Abigail, dressed in revealing Rave gear, taps her foot. “I know you’re fond of ‘Rave’, but do you want to get back to the point?”

Liam breathes through his teeth and clears his throat. “My point? My point was that Paul and Dad helped create the model that eventually resulted in the penultimate version of WISE. The same algorithms that engineered our happiness were also facilitating the end of all sorts of prejudices.”

I grinned. “It just so happened to promote a lot of sex... Or was that part of removing the prejudice?”

“More a result of several socioeconomic barriers being removed,” she says and shifts to wearing a 17th century waistcoat and apron. “The model of paternity helped to keep some very puritanical views of sex in the mainstream even after chemical birth control and mechanical contraceptives were cheap and widely available. Plus, humans had always desired it to be this way but diseases were a very real risk.”

“Point taken,” I say.

While Abigail frequently changes scene, costume, and hair—she nearly always represents herself with the same face and voice. If you’ve seen Aladdin, it might be only a slight exaggeration to say, “Abigail is Genie.” She doesn’t play the characters strongly—not that she couldn’t—it’s more like she’s an actor that plays herself in every movie. Everyone loves Dwayne Johnson, but “The Rock” has only one role.

She waves a black, leatherbound book at Liam. “You missed some very important points in the transition from warring nations to peaceful, sexy little tribes. But we’ll leave that to the proverbial ‘text-books’.”

“Peaceful, sure. But there was more work to be done,” Liam says.

“When did you start calling Doctor Romero ‘Uncle’?” I ask.

“I don’t remember him not being ‘Uncle Paul’. Dad and he worked on the tribes project while I was a baby and Paul joined us for dinner all the time.”

Liam chuckles lightly. “I remember he took me to see an airplane. I’d seen quadcopters. I’d even seen an old-school helicopter. But the airplane he took me to was old. It was a drone designed to carry weapons. He called it a ‘Predator’. I’ve seen them in movies since then but at the time I just couldn’t imagine what it did. He tried to explain that it was used to protect the tribes from bad people. I’d thought to myself, ‘predators don’t defend, they eat meat’.”

Abigail, who’d been showing an image of the sleek aircraft, returns herself to screen. “Defense, sadly, sometimes requires the capability to strike first.”

“I’m sorry, Abigail, I didn’t mean…” Liam says, reaching out towards her face. “I know that you, WISE, Dad, Paul—all of you did what was necessary at the time.”

“We’ve come so far,” Abigail says.