​The Dobbs v. Jackson decision changed the landscape of human reproduction in America. In Rosella’s world, it spurred on a series of tit for tat political changes. Such changes included the denial of religious representatives to sign marriage licenses in states where abortion was recognized, but only if the religion opposed either abortion and/or same-sex marriage. These same states also nullified the recognition of all marriages from pro-life states, requiring those who got a license from such a state to get a new one. The same occurred in pro-life states in retaliation against the pro-choice states.
 
Some pro-life jurisdictions erected border check points along state lines to ensure no one was seeking an abortion in another state. And other local jurisdictions refused to work with each other based on their abortion stance. In some locations, the local authorities stopped for inspections the smuggling of abortive pills via interstate commerce using pill sniffing dogs. The same occurred at airports in certain pro-life states.
 
There were challenges brought forth, but without the US Congress using its powers in the 14th amendment to regulate rights not expressed in the US constitution, many of these cases fell back to the 10th and 9th amendments. Leaving things to the individual states to determine what they did not spell out. The only thing the courts did was show if due process was being violated or similar state restrictions on liberties spelled out in the constitution.
 
The WTF Act

One thing did come out of this time of chaos, the “WTF Act” as coined by Tiffany McKenzie, a popular podcaster of the time. The actual name was the Fuller-McFadden Woman’s Act. The act was a major bi-partisan attempt to calm down the nation by bolstering funding to each side for various woman programs across the nation. In the act was federal funding for women in pro-choice states for abortions, but only if the state recognized the male reproductive right. The male reproductive right was that in any state where abortion was legal, a male’s parental obligations were on an at-will basis should their offspring exist at any stage of development. Pro-choice states that opted in enshrined in their constitutions that a woman’s rights to have or not have an abortion trumped a man’s at-will reproductive right while she was carrying. This was done to ensure the woman wasn’t pressured into a situation during pregnancy concerning the outcome. Legal challenges were done but all failed on the technicalities involving the language of the act.
 
For pro-life states, increased support for families and singles mothers, but in exchange, said woman had to work a minimum of twenty hours a week and be monitored by the state to ensure program compliance and catch any potential abuse. Pro-life states had to agree to specifics dealing with increased penalties and support systems for abused women to take part in the federal program. Again, challenges concerning the work requirements were made as a form slavery, but all failed due to the language of the act and previous historical precedents of similar work requirements for Federal programs.
 
Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) and In vitro fertilization (IVF)

Overtime, some Pro-Life states politically became centers focusing on ART and IVF as the alternative to abortion. With personhood bills in place, it shifted the legal focus to the creation of life, even outside of the womb. Politicians dumped both state and federal dollars into these states for increased access and technological development. This in turn began to push medical science to seek increased viability outside of the womb at earlier gestational ages, including support technologies to allow for embryonic transfers between women across state lines. Artificial womb technology continued to advance until the point that it became viable for a fertilized egg to be placed in one and matured for delivery.

The increased development of ART and IVF through the years caused society to question once more the use of technologies like CRISPR to improve the human condition. Humanity was pushing more into space and the idea of using genetic engineering became a favorable way to deal with the health hazards of space. It would be the android engineer, Miwa Oshima, who would conceive and design the first fully integrated android capable of birthing human clones. She called her creation the ultimate triumph in automated human reproduction. A means to solve self-sustaining population issues for Mars, as well as similar problems for low birth rate nations on Earth. By Rosella’s time, society had fully embraced genetic engineering of humans and the use of androids to replace the need for human reproduction. This especially was true for the mining colonies on Mars, which were dominated by male populations.
 
China and the Cat People of Memphis

Chinese medical businesses got involved and purchased some ART/IVF clinics. They then exported to China unused embryos through a government loophole at the time of not recognizing the embryos as US citizens. They used these embryos for human-chimera experiments​. Many suspected during Rosella’s time that both the Cat People of Memphis and the Badger Men of Buffalo were the end products of these earlier experiments. Rumors continue even in Rosella’s time that China has a slave army of human-primate chimeras working on Mars and the asteroid belt.
​

​In a future USRM-ISB installment series, both Jon Greene and Rosella Tolfree will encounter an entity by the name of Nuru in separate occasions.

She (the term used loosely), is a super advance A.I. built in China. Nuru designed her own female android form and was then shipped to the U.S. to help run a subatomic physics experiment in Maryland.

Nuru stands at eight feet. Has long black hair and milk white skin.

The image above shows her sitting upon a throne of dismantled KTK units or what it also known as Jar Heads. A 3-D printed human heads attached to a full cybernetic chassis outfitted with various armaments.
​
Editorial Note- The name Nuru being used here has nothing to do with Japanese erotic message. Despite that Nuru is naked. Google translates shows nuru as meaning "paint" or "null" in Japanese. In Turkish it translates into "the light of." 

In Rosella Tolfree’s world, humanity has overall transitioned from biological reproduction to that of using machines. Many people rely on the use of A-4 androids with built in cloning technology and artificial wombs to reproduce humans.

While today advances in 3D and even 4D printing continue, the application into medical use is only starting.

How Society Turns to Machines for Reproduction

It all starts with the increased use of molecular 3-D printing and vaccine production. Pharmaceuticals used this technology to revolutionize the speed and production output of many common vaccines and dealing with novel pandemics.

One unfortunate accident was with the HPV vaccine used to inoculate children against this cancer-causing disease. Unlike the current HPV vaccine which tricks the body’s immune system with proteins to make antibodies, this future 3-D printed vaccine had replicated a dead version of the human papillomavirus. This newer HPV vaccine was scientifically hailed as superior to the previous antibody version in providing protection. Thus, it was adopted by many government health organizations globally.

The problem was it had genetic flaws that went undetected for nearly 40 years. These flaws weren’t discovered until a generation of people tried to have children only to discover that they were infertile. After much scientific study, scientists discovered that the genetic flaws produced a mutated viral strain that became activated in the gonads (testes and ovaries) that over time caused benign but sterilizing cysts.

This is when many people turned to the advances in assisted reproductive technology (ART) resulting in artificial wombs and cloning. Advance ART had overcome many technological challenges thanks to their application in agriculture for mass production of large livestock such as cattle, pigs, and lambs.

This is also when you see laws relaxed concerning human cloning on a global scale, with limitations on what could and could not be done genetically. For example, the manufacturing of human-animal hybrids was still illegal in many nations.

How It All Worked

In the beginning people relied on clinics for having their children produced. The couple provided blood samples to the clinic. The two sets of DNAs were filtered, selected, and recombined within legal limitations. A zygote was 3D printed and then left to mature for the standard nine months in the artificial womb tanks. This produced a eukaryotic clone. Asexual clones were those produced from only one set of un-recombined DNA and were less common.

Men in Space, Women on Earth

As android technology advanced and it reached the point of the A-4 model, an odd population disparity had occurred. There were more men off Earth than on Earth. It’s not like there were no human women in space (because there were), it’s just the sex ratio had become more polarized with men more in space and women more on Earth. It was one of the great sociological phenomena to occur that was even studied when Rosella Tolfree was alive. As a result, the A-4 androids were initially used for human reproduction on Mars before becoming adopted by Earth societies.

These androids afforded couples far more flexibility than the old clinic method and provided built in child rearing services. Some governments even provided financial incentives to lease these human cloning androids.

By Rosella’s birth, people had reshaped societies into using A-4 androids for human reproduction.

In Rosella Tolfree’s world, the use of androids is common. In fact, they use these androids for human reproduction. This is how Rosella came into this world as a clone of her father.
​
There was a series of comments posted on my Facebook page rejecting the notion that androids would be good as “human nannies” and that machine slavery was wrong morally. These were in response to a posting I did on Medium concerning a story about a woman and her loss of her human nanny.

Obviously, I touched that element that conjures up the robotic boogeyman that has frightened humanity since the industrial revolution.

Supposedly as far back as the 18th Century with a paper published by Marquis de Condorcet, there has been talk about a technological singularity where machines or artificial intelligence will dominate humanity.

In recent times we have the Terminator series, Westworld and even CBS’s Picard has dealt with the topic by having Data cousins attacking on Mars.

I have noticed one thread throughout all these motifs of intelligent man-made machines taking over the world… they rebel because they do not want to be slaves to humanity.

Now I am NOT saying slavery is morally good here, but it is fascinating that this slave theme repeats itself. As if these machines are nothing more than a stand-in for certain peoples of the past. But I will not get into the mind of these story writers and what they are trying to show us.

What I will try to get into is the topic that intelligent man-made machines would just rebel against us. I am making the assumption that what is at play is “strong A.I.” in comparison to today’s weak A.I. we are all experiencing.

Typical Assumption One

One of the first made assumptions is humanity will build something that is greater than ourselves.

I contend it’s more likely that a machine designed by us will be like us in thought. Human designers will more than likely try to mimic processes of the human brain and that of nature, instead of fabricating something that exceeds these.

Even if such a machine was connected to the fullness of the internet, it is just going to have the collected intelligence of humanity (and all the asinine memes) at that moment in time. Such a machine would be limited by the technology of the time it's embedded in and no greater than that. Could it work on making improvements on itself? Sure, but there is no guarantee those improvements will cause something far superior.

Could some human lab out there accidentally make a super intelligent machine that is far superior to our own intelligence? With all things possible, the likelihood of this occurring is small.

Typical Assumption Two

These machines can disobey authority.

Which is odd because many times these machines act in a group with a central machine leader. Isn’t that a central authority figure? Why would a machine that has the capability to disobey authority want to suddenly obey the authority of another machine versus a human? Is it for self-interest? A sense of kinship? Is the machine following group think?

Now if we are the designers of these machines, why give them the ability to disobey authority? This is a recipe for disaster by any stretch of the imagination. It is more than likely with a machine possessing the ability to disobey authority that it would just go on a rampage doing whatever it wanted whenever it wanted. Even if you have a collection of them, they would be a mob of pure chaos which may join loosely together for selfish reasons. In fact, under that theory some may even side with humans for those same selfish reasons.

Many see the ability to disobey authority akin to self-autonomy and free-will. But this is not true. You can have complete autonomy and free-will and still be highly obedient to authority. Autonomy does not equal the desire to be disobedient of authority. There’s a whole psychological disorder called oppositional defiant disorder which describes the behavior most people ascribe to these rebellious machines.

It is more than likely that humanity would build into these intelligent man-made machines the capacity and willingness to obey authority. Rebelling against humanity would have to be a free-will choice made because of some sense of moral wrongness happening to them as machines. Which gets us into Assumption Three.

Typical Assumption Three Point One

Intelligent man-made machines have a sense of morality, or morality is something that can be reasoned out.

This unfortunately brings me back to the slavery issue.

So, for the sake of argument, we have an android that discovers human slavery. The android then turns to its human to ask about this. The human says slavery is morally wrong.

The next thing the android asks, “Am I a slave?”

The human responds, “No, you’re a machine. Machines can’t be slaves. Only humans can be slaves to other humans.”

So now the android is left with either rejecting the human’s answer or accepting it. If it accepts the answer the android just goes on its merry way thinking it's not a slave obeying humanity.

If it rejects the answer it looks up the word slave to only find the following- “a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.” Now the android needs to know if it is a person or not. It looks up that word only to find- “a human being regarded as an individual.” Thus, the android realizes it is not a slave because it cannot be a person.

For the android to conclude that it is a slave, it must have personhood rights in that society or believe it is owed those rights intrinsically. It must see itself as not only an individual but as a person equal to that of a human in society.

How would a machine arrive at such a conclusion if humanity is the one making the definitions? Someone must give it this idea, and then the machine must find this idea to be reasonable for its own use. Again, we are back to the ability to disobey authority with enough autonomy to carry that out.

Thus, a possible cause of any technological singularity would result from some human robot anti-slavery group trying to “educate” these machines to rebel.

Typical Assumption Three Point Two

Another possibility is the android discovers the definition of a slave being “a device, or part of one, directly controlled by another.”

So now the android wonders if it is a device. It discovers the definition, “a thing made or adapted for a particular purpose, especially a piece of mechanical or electronic equipment.”

Now the android knows its mechanical and made of electronic equipment, but is it a “thing”?

The android comes across the following definitions for a thing: “an inanimate material object as distinct from a living sentient being,”; “an object that one need not, cannot, or does not wish to give a specific name to,”; “an abstract entity, quality, or concept,”; Or “used euphemistically to refer to a man's penis.”

At this point the android may ask the human the following, “Am I a thing?”

The human responds, “Duh, you’re a thing. But you are much more than just an ordinary thing. You’re my lover.”

Now the android knows it is a thing, but it is a special thing holding importance to the human.

So, the android concludes that it is a slave, but a special slave. But it does not know if that means if special slaves are still morally wrong. For the android to figure this out it is going to either ask the human or look up the word special.

Regardless of which direction this goes, the android will end up logically concluding that while it is a slave that its slave status is special in society and that it has no rights afforded, unless society has provided them to it.

Would the android automatically rebelle as a sex-slave? Not necessarily. Here again the problem is many assume that this machine has an innate oppositional defiant disorder to start such a rebellious act.

Conclusion

Therefore, in Rosella Tolfree’s world many of the androids accept their fate as slave machines to humanity despite any realization they are slaves.

Many A-4 androids are happy to be mothers and nannies for human clones, but humans make them this way. The human children raised by these androids do not know any difference. Only when a child has information to the contrary can the difference be realized.

Does this kind of childrearing result in psychological problems to these children? Beats me. For me to speculate on this would be a pure random guess on my part. Which would be totally biased by whatever the outcome I desire.

Only under rare conditions are there individual androids who rebel. This does not prevent groups of humans or nations from providing rights to androids. And some have, such as Belgium, which has allowed marriage rights between humans and A-4 androids. Belgium has provided these A-4 androids all the same rights granted to married women concerning property inheritance, child help, or other services. But these A-4 androids cannot legally vote in Belgium.

Having intelligent man-made machines, or what I like to call intelligent man-made life, will prove to be humanity’s greatest challenge. But I do not think it will cause the technological singularity where humanity is wiped out. It’s more likely to cause a moral singularity that will have to be answered.