It's Great Being Sweet Sixteen!

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It's Great Being Sweet Sixteen!

Tomorrow is my Sweet Sixteen! The first day of the rest of my life!

Being sixteen is like, so kewl. I get to do things with my boyfriend. If I was fourteen, people would look at us weird. I mean, I'd still be cute and everything, but they would look at him like he's a pervert or something.

At sixteen, I'm still real cute, but I'm old enough for all that fun stuff. He's like twenty, so he's an expert. He knows how to make me scream.

He says that he's too cool, but I know how to make him scream too.

If I was, like, eighteen, people would expect me to adult. But I don't want to adult. It's way too fun to just be sixteen.

My boyfriend calls me a snowflake. That used to be an insult back in the days when people actually had to work to make a living.

Now, we just tell the Santa Clause machine what we want, and we get it. If it can't make it, it sends out for it. The only thing we can't get is things with lots of gold and stuff because that still costs money. My boyfriend says that's gonna change soon because they're figuring out how to get gold out of the sea.

I'm glad some people like to adult. It would be terrible if we didn't have at least a few people who like to adult. If there wasn't, nobody would be inventing new things and the world would stop getting better and better. It would still be good forever and ever, but I like it to get better each year.

It would be awful if some people liked to adult, but there was no way to adult. But those that want to can adult, and those who don't want to don't have to.

And I don't like to adult. So I don't. And everybody is happy.

I went to the mall with my girlfriends today to kinda do some birthday shopping for myself. The mall is like it always was, except you used to have to pay money for the stuff you bought. Now you just go there and grab what you want and the robots will carry them home for you. There are some people there to help you, too. They do it for fun, kinda like people used to play Farmville and Cafe World and stuff like that on Facebook just for fun.

A few times, I dressed up and played waitress at some of the restaurants. One time, I wore a bunny suit. Another time, I wore a French maid costume. And mini skirts with halter tops are always fun!

I love being a sixteen year old girl! I can wear all that cute stuff and it looks cute and sexy, but not slutty. If a twenty something wears that stuff, it looks slutty, and like they're trying to get back their lost youth.

My apartment is getting ready for the party tomorrow. The housebots threw all of the furniture and stuff into the recycler, and they are getting party furniture out of the Santa Clause machine and also putting up decorations.

My boyfriend and me, we were making plans last month. We had to figure out who to invite to my party, and we had to design the decorations and figure out my look.

I have to look just right for my Sweet Sixteen, you know?

I went over to my closet and took out my party dress. I held it up to me, but didn't put it on. I'm not allowed to put it on till tomorrow, when I'm getting ready for my Sweet Sixteen party.

The Santa Clause machine took some time to make my dress. It's gorgeous! It's all made out of neosilk and doesn't have seams and it's spun all in one peace.

My boyfriend told me all about how they make neosilk, but I don't know how all that stuff works.

Actually, I do, but I kinda like to pretend I don't.

Neosilk is made out of the stuff that real silkworms make real silk out of, but the fibers are way finer than real silkworms make. They are way stronger and stretch just exactly now much and how strong you want them to stretch because they have diamond nanothreads woven inside each fiber.

So my dress has diamonds in it!

Not really, but it's kewl to think so.

My dress also has little micromachines inside to keep me clean, no matter how much I sweat when I'm dancing at my party. I could run a marathon and put it on, and it would clean me better than the best shower.

And I could totally run a marathon in this body, but I don't. It doesn't sound like much fun to run a marathon.

I hung up my dress and ordered dinner from my Santa Clause machine.

The Santa Clause machine food is kewl because it's like having snack foods and pop for dinner every day and not feel guilty. It makes whatever I want, but it makes sure that it has all the perfect nutrition that my body needs in it.

My mom likes food that's grown from real plants and cut from real animals.

Yuck!

I like berries and stuff like that, but I don't want to eat any dead animal! I would rather eat the stuff that the machine makes for me. Like neobacon and neoburgers.

But I ordered lots of stuff from the community hydroponic gardens for the party. No dead animal, but I got lots of nuts and berries. And broccoli and cauliflower and baby carrot sticks and mushrooms for the old folks that like stuff like that.

It was looking like the housebots were getting finished with the party decorations. I checked the instructions we wrote up for the housebots to make sure everything was ready, then went to bed.

I laid down on the autodoc and let the cover go down over me. I fell asleep right away.

~~~~~~

I woke up when the cover of the autodoc lifted. I yawned and stretched and got up. Even though the autodoc made sure that I was even cleaner than a shower gets me, I went to the bathroom and crawled into the tub that was already waiting for me with lots of sweet smelling bubbles.

I soaked until I was almost pruned, then I got up and rinsed off and dried off with a big, fluffy towel. I sat down under the hairdo machine and let it do up my hair just like my boyfriend and me designed.

Then I looked at my bare naked self in the mirror. My new body was just like my boyfriend and me designed. I just keep getting cuter every time.

This is my fiftieth Sweet Sixteen. I still remember the night before my first Sweet Sixteen when I crawled into the autodoc as an eighty-seven year old man.

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Comments

Utopia or Dystopia?

laika's picture

I was wondering where you were going with that blog. This is a kewl story. The robots read it for me. I would so totally love to get sweetsixteenized in that auto-doc thing the grownups made. They're always making cool stuff so we don't hafta. But I think you could be like sixteen forever and still want to know stuff and stuff, you know? Cuz one day it could be all "Oh no the machines stopped and we can't find the adults + here come the Morlochs!"

Total technocracy is like a self-driving car. Part of me wants to hop in and let it take me to nonstop Party Heaven, especially as a pretty, nice-smelling young girl, but part of me is going "Do I really trust this thing?"
~hugs, Ronni

Do I trust this thing?

With a self driving car, you can only go by past experience -- by the statistics generated by the cars that are running around right now.

As for the technocracy, it really isn't a technocracy. The machines aren't ruling. They are servants.

The secret is that there is no infrastructure. Everything is distributed. There is no way to suborn all the machines. There is no way to install malware into all of the computers, since they are open source, and there will at least as many varieties as there are currently distros in the Linux community.

There will still be evil people, and I hope someone writes about them. They won't have the force multiplier of a scarcity based economy to work with. They won't be able to hire or bribe people. They won't be able to keep people unempowered by keeping them poor.

I also hope someone writes about a credible way of trying to break the system down.

Thanks for your comments!

"This is my fiftieth Sweet

Donna T's picture

"This is my fiftieth Sweet Sixteen" - Sure wasn't expecting that. Interesting twist.

Donna

The future

I'm glad you like it because, unless it gets scuttled by those currently in power in the world, it's very likely to happen.

Thanks for your comments!

Still in Sync

terrynaut's picture

We must still be in sync because I saw that ending coming a mile away. Still, it was fun, or I should say, it was fun to read. I wouldn't want to live in a society like that. It sounds far too hedonistic. Of course it's a small sample size so perhaps enough are adulting. You just never know in your worlds. Heh.

Thanks and kudos (number 23).

- Terry

Plenty are adulting.

This is actually my best guess about what the future will be like. I plan on fleshing out the universe and opening it up.

Remember that the first great scientists were either nobility or clergy. Everyone else was out in the fields from sunup to sundown. Now, there are more available to lend their creativity to the building of the future. In the post-scarcity era, even more will be able to do so. Some will live the hedonistic life forever, but I expect that a lot will get bored with it after a while.

Did not see that coming !

Did not see that coming ! Great ! I guess being 16 forever is sweet.

Karen

Adorable!

What an adorable short story! As I truly am 87 years old -- and having been wishing for years that I was a teen girl turning sixteen -- this story was so me! Thank you, Ray

Thanks!

Thanks for the comment.

I'm writing this series to give people hope. All of this is sooner than we think. In less than a decade, they'll start printing replacement parts. Eventually, they'll be able to print an entire body from cultured cells.

I can't wait!

Life or simply living

Jamie Lee's picture

The ending was a surprise, though having been 87 he would have eaten meat.

Many things simply given takes away the knowing how it came about and the enjoyment of bringing it about.

It also breeds the attitude this girl has, Peter Pan in Never Land, never growing up. She isn't living life, she's just living. She wants no responsibility, no employment--playing at a job for fun once in a while isn't the same--she's nothing more than a leech, taking what she wants but giving nothing back.

A society where takers are supported by givers can only last so long before the takers out number the givers and the system crashes. Grinding to a halt because not enough givers can support takers.

Others have feelings too.

Taking

This is set in the post scarcity era. One might complain about her taking without giving as readily as one might complain about her breathing without replenishing the oxygen herself.

As for meat... After fifty years of eating what is essentially vat meat, she might have a different attitude. Especially if all her meat came from the supermarket in the first eighty-seven years of her life. People who don't hunt or raise their own meat can easily ignore the fact that it is cut from a formerly live animal.

But read the next one. She isn't as much of a leech as you might think. And the one after that... But I haven't posted it yet.

Retired...

Another way to look at it is that she has earned her retirement.

I love the ending

WillowD's picture

It suddenly shoots the story off in an entirely new direction.

Direction

When I post the story for the muggles, I change the last word to 'grandmother.' I am carefully wording the rest of the story so that it fits either way.