Forever Yours
©2025 Elder Road Books - Lynnwood WA
Chapter 66: Vacation
RYAN PICKED WILLIAM UP at the airport to go see their grandson, but Dr. Mikesel, the pediatrician, had already been in to check the infant, approve the paperwork, and pronounce Lisa ready to go home. Germaine and Cassie were waiting in front of the birth center to take them home and that’s where Ryan and William met them.
“I have a namesake!” William said. “I’m glad you used the Benoit name in the middle and not Hartman. Not a bad last name, but just no ring to it in the middle.”
“And Henry after my father,” Ryan said. Everyone looked from Ryan to his son, who was quietly laughing. “And my son, of course.”
“You know, both our children have the same middle name as me,” Lisa said to the excited grandfathers. “That’s so I can use my full name and be identified as a parent.”
“Well, yes. Of course,” William said. “Still, it’s nice to have a namesake. You aren’t going to tell me that William is someone else’s family name, are you? Your father, Chastity?”
“Unknown,” Chastity said. “Less said the better.”
“Chastity is our daughter now,” Sylvia said. “And yours, of course. So, you could say William is her father’s name, too.”
“Chastity,” Bill said, reaching for her. “It makes no difference who donated to your creation. You are our daughter now. We love you like we love Lisa.”
“Thank you, Bill. I always feel that when I’m with you and Jackie.”
Of course, the grandparents all wanted to hold Cassie as well as baby Will. Cassie was not sure what to make of the new infant. She wanted her mommy, and soon Lisa had a baby at each breast.
Beau and Solange waited a couple of weeks before they flew up to visit their newest great-grandchild. They were ecstatic about having another heir, but Bill had no intentions of buying more stock to put in the trust. He did, however, stay for the board meeting the following Wednesday.
“We have developed several prototypes of the self-charging desktop,” Henry announced. “The project has yielded a dozen new patents. Two major manufacturers have agreed to license and produce the device. I say ‘major manufacturers’ advisedly. You probably won’t recognize the brand names, but we have restricted licensing to computers made in the USA. There are not that many still manufactured here. One of the manufacturers will be making a server that we have agreed to purchase some 2,000 units of over the next four years to completely re-equip Page Services’ server farm.”
“That sounds like we are paying someone to license our technology,” Beau said in the meeting.
“Yes, it does. But Darla’s group has already been circulating the specs to other server farms who are waiting to see if we are successful in making the conversion before they start stacking up orders for their own farms—and most of those farms are much larger than Page Services. We’re still a pretty small operation by global standards. The big four operators of server farms have all ordered test units. They’ve finally awakened to the reality of power consumption as a limitation to their servers. They see this as a way to break free of the power monopolies that are constantly stretched to meet needs and are continually increasing the cost per megawatt consumed.”
“Megawatt? You mean kilowatt?” Beau asked.
“When we talk about home power usage, we can refer to kilowatts,” Henry said. “Server farms are consuming megawatts. A single server farm consumes as much power on a daily basis as a mid-size city. This development will break the stranglehold of the power monopolies on mass computing.”
“Why aren’t we rolling this out worldwide instead of just to the US?” Luke asked.
“We’ll get there. We want to show a return on investment before we start farming it out to cut-rate manufacturers. Get a head start on things,” Henry said. “There are a lot of issues, which include licensing the manufacture of the fuel cells. Currently, there is only one manufacturing location, but we will not be allowed to have a monopoly on them for long.”
“One manufacturer of the servers and one of the desktop?” Craig asked. As chief operating officer, he had a much closer relationship with the nuts and bolts of the company.
“Yes,” Henry said. “And for the first time, Open Cloak optimization, power management, security, search, and fuel cells will all be included in each system. Of course, we’d like to see our own corporate office convert to the self-charging computers, but that’s an area I think we’ll start seeing a lot of interest in as soon as we can license to the big manufacturers who assemble everything overseas.”
“What’s next?” Luke asked.
“We’ve completed the acquisition of LifeStory,” Craig said. “This will enable deeper integration of the memoir questions with Forever Yours. While LifeStory will continue to be a brand with people devoted to editing and producing memoir books, it will not be a separate company. The work will be completely integrated into Forever Yours. The team is working on integrating new filter technology into the application that Henry has been spearheading. Part of what it will include is some personality testing. So, when a user sets up their singularity, they will be asked a number of questions similar to some of the big names in personality testing.”
“If I was asked five hundred questions when I started setting up a piece of software, I’d throw it in the trash,” Izzy said.
“You’d be right to,” Henry responded. “The filters will be set up so that questions will be fed to the user along with their story prompts. They won’t face the entire test in a single sitting. It would make no sense to have the filters set up before there was any content present. It becomes integral to the recording of personal history.”
Of course, none of that had stopped Henry from inputting the content of not just one, but four different respected personality tests. These weren’t tests that had the user answer a dozen questions and then pronounce him a type A personality. Henry answered hundreds of questions and fine-tuned the filters to take the results into consideration.
He took time off work to stay with his children, holding them and telling them stories, even though they didn’t understand much of what they read. It was the voice and tone. He remembered an old movie in which four men tried to raise a baby. One had told the others that it didn’t make a difference what they read to the baby. It was all about the tone of the voice. He read the sports pages, making them sound like a fantastic adventure story. Well, it worked.
Since Henry read to his children with Forever Yours recording, he developed the habit of making sure he read the whole book, and not just the pictures or the simple story. That meant he held his children in his arms in a reclining chair so they could cuddle close, and read books starting with the cover. He read the copyright and dedication, the table of contents, the text complete with chapter numbers and headings, and then read any publisher information, acknowledgements, colophon, and author info that was in the back of the book. If there was a synopsis on the back cover, he read that, too. He wanted to make sure what he read was not somehow credited to him as the reader, but to the correct author and publisher.
He also began collecting books for the children’s bookshelf, not limiting the collection to what was age appropriate, but creating shelves of books for different ages. The shelves included many of his favorite books when he was growing up.
“I’m surprised that you keep bringing home paper books,” Lisa said as they sat in the nursery with the babies. “As buried in a computer as you are, I would expect you to have everything digital. eBooks and audio books. Online stories.”
“Yeah,” Henry mused. “I have just about every book on the shelves on my tablet as well. But, there’s something special about books. It’s the ability to see what the author accomplished. That’s one of the problems of being a computer programmer, you know? People can go to Pythia Speaks and ask a question. She answers, and they are disappointed or satisfied or even amazed with her response. But no one knows how many thousands of lines of code were written to make her what she is. They see the answer to their question. They don’t see what the developer, the UI designer, the AI programmer, or anyone else accomplished.”
“Do you not feel recognized enough? I don’t think anyone would care to look at a shelf full of your code,” Lisa said.
“No. Code isn’t meant to be read. People see it in the rendition it was intended to take. A question and an answer. But that’s not true of books. They are intended to be something you hold in your hand and feel the weight of, smell the paper and ink. Or in Cassie’s case, taste it. How much does a twenty megabyte book weigh? How is it different from a one megabyte book? Maybe War and Peace is or isn’t more valuable than Good Dog Carl, but one should know when they pick it up that they are different.”
“They have a different size and weight and thickness and texture,” Lisa said, nodding her head and shifting William to her other breast. Cassie looked at her brother a little jealously, but she’d recently discovered peaches and had a full tummy.
“I can’t help but think that when an author writes a novel—or even a textbook—that they have an image in their mind of what that book will look and feel like. It probably isn’t what we see on a screen,” Henry said.
“A bookshelf—not just the words on paper—is a glimpse inside the author’s mind,” Lisa agreed. “But so many of the books you’ve put on their bookshelves are so far advanced for them, don’t you think?”
“They won’t read books that are too advanced for them. No matter what the content, a child won’t read it unless it interests them. They self-select. That’s why censorship is an idiocy. The only person censorship helps is the censor. It protects that person’s beliefs and viewpoint. It doesn’t protect children. If Will picks up a book about sex when he’s seven and reads it, he won’t understand most of it. So, he will ask questions. Of whom? Of you and me and Chas and Germaine. We’re the ones who will need to explain what things mean.”
“I don’t think being a parent is as easy as people seem to believe,” Lisa sighed.
Cassie’s first birthday was July 25. Her brother was two months old the next day. The family only celebrated Cassie’s birthday. It was her special day. They decided there would be no birthday parties until they quit counting the children’s ages in months, weeks, or days.
However, Luke, Isobel, Paul, and Grace came to the Pascal home for a nice barbecue and to let the children play together on Saturday the twenty-sixth. The families relaxed and told stories of the latest developments in their children.