Grayson spent several thousand of his earned points to buy processing time for Ring to create an interactive AR genetic manipulation game and distribute it out to the Solar Wide Web. He had Egg provide the network details of all of his experiments and life designs.
Over the next few months, Grayson and Egg worked to design and build an experiment zone in the fragile South American rainforest. It would house hundreds of printers and receive input from the netizens who played his new game.
The plan was to let the printers grow miniature versions of any new designs and let them interact in this limited environment. Each creature would have a unique tag and their real-time activity would build up data to be used for a scoring system.
Meanwhile, Egg would keep track of the more promising designs and gradually introduce them at full scale into the growing modified environment Grayson was propagating. Grayson found himself regularly lost in his intense focus. He had a lot of balls in the air and he was coming to an understanding of how his parents could be so enthusiastic and driven in their work. He just had his nearby printers automatically print out a sandwich and drink at regular intervals and kept working and designing until he passed out every night.
After just under a year from setting out on the mobile base, Grayson got his first major alert. Some of the earliest humanoid wombs were ready. The embryos had been grown well beyond what human standard babies would reach before needing to be born. Grayson rushed over to the nursery and looked at the display in his vision of which wombs were ripe.
He saw within the clouded tissue sacks, suspended in artificial amniotic fluids, what looked like 10-12 year old children. They had slightly pointed ears, slender faces, and long supple limbs. The accelerated gestation and early childhood development ensured they would emerge ready to fend for themselves.
The drones had long since installed microscopic interfaces into the children via their umbilical cords. The silvery fluid substance that had been injected was a programmed matter neural lace. It would carefully squirm its way through the bloodstream and reach the brain. Then the program would respond and start slowly extending connections into neural tissue to give the child an immediate system to begin learning from. These children, Grayson knew, had been carefully instructed in simulation since very nearly their conception and would be far from naive to the world at birth.
This sort of thing would definitely be frowned on if done to humans, but Grayson was creating an entirely new population with completely foreign cultural norms. He couldn't judge. Maybe these new people would one day choose not to augment their infants or even do away with technology completely. That would have to be for them to decide.
As Grayson watched, having nothing he needed to participate in, he simply pondered where this all might lead. Several pre-adolescent elves were carefully birthed from their artificial wombs, looking lithe and agile. With their advanced development, Grayson knew they would be able to walk and even run immediately.
The drone nurses took the newborns and walked them to the welcoming chamber. There, very lifelike replicas of what these people were expected to grow into, would come online and begin caring for the youths and stimulating their bonding process.
Even Grayson thought it was all very cold, but he knew there was no alternative. Letting humans raise these first generations would negate everything he hoped to accomplish. With a little time, they would be able to raise each other and reproduce naturally. For now, genetic diversity and cultural isolation was the most important thing.
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10 years later...2205
Alistair ran through the forest lithely. He was being pursued by a wily opponent. He knew if he made a single mistake, it would be over for him. He would lose the game of tag.
He noticed the telltale warning signs of the consumption tree. The tiny clawed tracks of its drone colony. The scattered saplings sprouted from the seeds that were planted just out of its territorial range to propagate the Grove. He was too young to ward off the ever searching drones. They couldn't take on an adult, but the adults rarely went outside the community. He knew to stay clear no matter how intense the games got.
Though born at the developmental age of 10 and living 10 years beyond that, Alistair and the other elven children did not continue to develop at such a rapid pace as they did in gestation. Still seemingly at the very early stages of adolescents as a human might perceive it. The elven aging process was a slow one.
So Alistair dodged a wide path around the consumption's territory. Barely so much as snapping a twig under his feet, he moved through the underbrush like a light fog. The tree's territory had reminded him of his fruit jerky made from the fruits of that very same plant. It was a little savory, but incredibly dense in restorative nutrients, and he was getting tired. He decided to risk taking a few bites to keep him going and stay out of sight of Edith, his pursuer.
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The children played these games often. They were told they would learn best by experience. Learning to read the signs of their environments and to move with little impact. Alistair was very good at such games. His AR interface had learned much from his skills, fine-tuning the interface for all the children mostly by his efforts. He moved through the green zones in his vision with such precision that his system accuracy level had reached level 10. He remembered when he was younger, the green path was a wide avenue in his vision. Now it was a very faint green line.
He rarely lost, but Edith was his closest match. She had a 50/50 chance of beating him. They were similar enough in build, strength and ability as to be nearly interchangeable.
"Carry nothing but what you need to create what you need." His and Edith's caretaker would say. Warning them against the error of overburdening themselves with excessive reliance on possessions. Alistair was so adherent to the Principles that he even had a slight distaste for the titanium blade he carried, but even he would have to admit it was easier to build a shelter with a blade than fingernails. There were always fallen detritus on the forest floor, but not always the right size and shape.
It was getting late and the game of tag was about to move to the base building stage. He and Edith would be expected to earn points based on how good a shelter they could create in 2 hours. It was traditional to find a consumption tree sapling to build it around, leaving a sun window in the top. This would encourage infant drone lizards to adopt the sapling as their mother. They would begin to bring it offerings of food from a wide range. keeping the forest relatively clean of anything edible to the tree.
At first the process was slow. The little lizards would need to eat most of their offerings first and offer the waste to the tree until it grew sufficiently to produce the much sought after fruits. It was a symbiotic relationship designed by the Gray Son, a mysterious entity his people respected as almost a deity. The caretakers seemed to talk about him as a real being, but the children had never seen him as far as Alistair knew. They just seemed to know about him as if they always had the information.
Alistair managed to avoid contact up until the game changed phases. He immediately searched for a good location to begin his shelter, choosing from the locations marked as more challenging and thus worth more points. It was always a balancing act between challenge and speed. Take to long and his structure would not earn enough points for the modifier to help. choose too easy a location and the points would be entirely based on completion and nothing else. He knew that his mate would choose the mid range as well. They were well suited to each other.
As Alistair precisely navigated the forest, faint guiding lines highlighted the optimal path, representing the input from his neural lace. When he foraged berries, a glowing sprite appeared over the bush, pulsating brighter to indicate added points.
Alistair got to work marking the perimeter so he would have a sort of design to adhere to. His AR would maintain the image and update it as he went. He then went to work batoning the deadfall around with his blade. Using it as a wedge to then strike with a heavy stick and cut the wood handily in a few strikes.
Meanwhile, not far away, Edith had crafted a digging stick and was already hard at work excavating a shallow pit to serve as the room for her slightly subsurface shelter. She felt it was more comfortable as a defense against the oppressive heat of the equator than even the shade would be. This was not the first time she had tried this tactic. it could earn her a few point bonuses unless Alistair did the same thing.
After the two hour period had ended, Alistair had earned 192 points for his bird nest-like lean to. The wood had been carefully woven together by laying it just so in a circular sort of framework and bringing it over to almost meet at the top. It looked like nothing so much as an inverted bird nest with a woven archway entrance.
Edith had earned 196 points for her sunken cabin structure. She had gotten lucky and found an abandoned termite nest to scavenge for clay and made a simple camp stove and chimney within. The heat it produced would warm her structure a bit, but had enough draft to mitigate most of it. Her bonuses from going underground slightly and using additional materials and structure countered her lower score for the simple cabin style. After receiving her points for the night, she proceeded to make a simple bowl from a large leaf and scavenged some rocks from her rubble pile.
Edith set the rocks very near the fire she managed to build in the stove and let them warm. She then located a local vine she knew to be full of water and cut a section off to allow her bowl to slowly fill. She then prepared a bit of extra clay to plug the wound on the vine so it would not drain all of its stored moisture and die. Her system decided to award her a couple more points for that, unconnected to the game.
Once her rocks were sufficiently heated, Edith carefully lifted them into her bowl with sticks until the water was boiling nicely. she then added her consumption fruit jerky and a few mushrooms she had snagged on her chase. Then a bit of fresh fern fruit she found nearby and cooked up a nice thin stew. Edith had always looked a few steps ahead and played the long game when she and her mate did this. Sometimes it worked in her favor, sometimes not. She felt it was worth the risk to expand her skills. She was never interested in humiliating him by trying to win every single game. Not that she thought she really could. He was quite the man even if they were only 10.
The caretaker adults had assigned them to be each other's mates almost from the day they were born. They were aware what was expected of them the moment they had both come of age to reproduce. The people were few in number, only a few thousand. They needed to populate heavily for many generations. Edith felt lucky that her mate was so worthy in her eyes. She new other mated pairs who were less lucky to truly find each other desirable. Though all of the people had a pragmatic outlook. They would always use what was at hand regardless of feelings. It was known that the rewards from this view often allowed unwanted circumstances to feel rewarding all the same.
Edith and Alistair lay within their shelters staring up at the glow of the Ring above until the shadow upon it crossed a particular point to indicate how late it was. They then went to sleep comfortably.