Credit: Jamie Tufrey

The stage two stork came through the wormhole at the assigned moment; the Regency Stork guided it in. Callisa couldn't believe that 17 years had passed so quickly. Bloody hell, she thought, I'm getting old.

A man exited the doorifice, tall and handsome and utterly confused. "What is this place? Where is everybody? My Stork started chatting with the Regency AI, and decided I was better off waiting until we'd docked."

Stork smiled at Callisa. "Shall you tell him, or shall I?"

"There's always the museum," Callisa said.

She'd tried to gather them together, but her kids were so flighty. Well, you couldn't really call them kids any more, but that's what they'd always be to her. She didn't know if any other entire population had been raised largely by AI before this.

By the time they were three, they were fluent in eight languages, two of those binary based. Stork was a good teacher; if their joint parenting skills were somewhat eccentric, well, they'd done the best they could.

When the children were 11, they constructed Regency City, but quickly grew bored with it. The sky was the limit and the sky was what they sought. In their early teens, the kids had wrapped the planet and inner and outer systems with wormholes, then started exploring other worlds.

Even now, a few of them were racing toward Earth, desperate to check out the old world, maybe pass on some of the new tech.

One of the things her kids had constructed was the Regency Memorial, the story of the ship and her crew. That had been the singular event that set them off with all the determination of kids and teens, to explore and to do it right. Their craft were weird combinations of technology, elements of the Stork's thrusters and magnetic propulsion devices, new redundancy systems, new ways of dealing with radiation.

"Yeah, let's start with the museum." She grabbed the midwife's hand. He was gorgeous, and it gave her pleasure to hold an adult's hand. "It's a sad story, but it's not all grim. Only at the beginning. The kids, they've gone exploring. Not all of them, though." "Who's going to raise my embryos?" the midwife demanded, and then it seemed to sink in. "Oh."

Callisa smiled. "Just you and me and the machines, kiddo, maybe some of the more mature kids of the first gen. You see, out here, maybe in most parts of the galaxy, the midwife's job doesn't stop with the Delivery."

The midwife turned toward her. "Surely at least a few of the children wanted to see me," he said, his tone faintly nettled.

"Of course, of course – but it's only nine in the morning here. You'll get to see some of my kids soon enough, when they get out of bed." She shrugged. "Teenagers, what are you going to do?"