Virtual is Virtuous! was the popular slogan way back in the 2030s. The Chinese, with their laudable one-family-one-child policy, offered their vast computerate population virtual babies in addition to the permitted single physical offspring. Such was their automated skill at reading and blending parental DNA! Of course a sensible sex ratio was maintained. Realboy for every family, virtual girl; no no.
Virtual environments such as Celestial Empire were a home to this new virtual population with which proud parents could contentedly interact, while holography and touch-simulation let a virtual baby be paraded before proud grandparents in the material world. And all at such little cost (apart from pleasantly addictive parental time) compared with seeing a material offspring through to adulthood.
The idea caught on internationally. How planet-protectively green! How conserving of resources! And here at last was genuine artificial intelligence, albeit no cleverer than physical persons.
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Baptism for Christian virtual babies! Pope Benedict XVIII pontificated that all such infants conjoined of DNA-info had souls; thus his flock increased, especially in virtual Latin America. Virtual kids grew up, went to virtual university, had virtual kids. The deletion of a virtual citizen was ruled to be homicide.
So here we are in 2100 with a virtual global population crisis and a virtual old age crisis looming, in an existential and political rather than a material sense. Deletion would be genocide, prohibited by a virtual voting-block approaching the total number of body-persons. This summer, as usual, Anita, fleshboy Charlie and I will escape from our climatically challenged normality, to holiday as usual with V-Alexandra and her V-family in V-Florida. This year it’ll cost even more for V-Visas and V-travel-taxes which help subsidise the supercomputer networks hosting our destination. And the exchange rate against the V-Dollar has gotten less favourable.