Our children think swimming pools are normal.

They don’t remember the early days here in the country when water was restricted to drinking and hydroponic gardening.

To them, chemical baths are historic events.

They study our reports about farming the proper balance of microorganisms on our bodies, looking for better ways to make what’s left of our biological body parts more healthy.

They laugh at phrases like positronic brain and artificial limbs.

We encourage a good sense of humour, a side branch of scientific curiosity we still aren’t fully sure why it led to the species, Homo sapiens, toward which we credit our existence.

The playfulness of competition before it divides seriously into sexual reproduction and tribal control of resource allocation.

Although we don’t depend on vegetation and protein growth systems for food, we maintain a few minifarms as living museums, an homage to zoos and investment in the future should our descendants wish to reconstitute the lineage of our noncybernetic ancestors.

Looking up at the blue marble in the sky, I pull memories of my ancestors who looked up at the Moon and imagined being here as explorers, tourists and, one day in the fuzzy, distant future, inhabitants.

Did they see someone like me, a happy Node, whose concept of privacy was nothing like theirs when they were not fully connected to the ISSA Net?

My thoughts and memories are shared with everyone else creating or recalling thoughts and memories.

The study of history, although an archaic practice, gives our children a perspective that instant recall does not.

Autonomy and independence are acceptable traits for the scouts and explorers whose communications bandwidth causes delays that interfere with instantaneous decisionmaking.

Otherwise, we encourage ourselves to take full advantage of our complete access to the ISSA Net all the time.

In our spare cycles, we like to banter back and forth about funny sentences like “If Saunders’s argument against Taylor’s fatalism is valid, it proves we can alter the past, which is absurd.”

The properties of water are interesting, diving and swimming made easier when the water is mixed with various oils and minerals.

Some of my purely robotic friends have swam in baths of liquid carbon dioxide and liquid nitrogen.

I prefer mineral oil when 100% water pools are unavailable.

Time to go. The children are ready for a physical tour of our latest factory/housing unit development in order to finetune their sense of the difference between virtual memories and real ones.