The Child's Garden

They are idols of hearts and of households;

They are angels of God in disguise;

His sunlight still sleeps in their tresses,

His glory still gleams in their eyes;

Those truants from home and from Heaven

They have made me more manly and mild;

And I know now how Jesus could liken

The kingdom of God to a child.

- Charles Monroe Dickinson, "The Children"

Alas! regardless of their doom,

The little victims play;

No sense have they of ills to come,

Nor care beyond to-day.

- Thomas Gray, "On a Distant Prospect of Eton College"

You may have seen them. They are impossibly beautiful, those children, and well-behaved -- oh, they might get up to some charming mischief, but that's the extent of it. (They seem incapable of mischief that isn't charming. Funny, that.) They may witness sex and violence, but somehow it doesn't seem to stick. They just don't remember it. And they're almost always cheerful and polite and obliging; almost a kind of sexually latent Bubble Doll.

One of the casualties of immortality and endless body-mod, say some in the Victorian Retrotech Collecive, is the innocence, wonder, and bittersweet ephemerality of youth. The Child's Garden, probably a VRC subfaction, therefore embodies bygone ideals of childhood.

Since there are no infant Garden Children, and no adolescents or adults who admit to having been Garden Children, it is unclear where they come from or what happens to them when they do enter puberty. Though they may be 'disobedient,' they never act out of accordance with VRC ideals of childhood -- they are uniformly sexually latent or asexual, perfectly innocent, beautiful, and generally well-behaved, despite an apparent lack of supervision. This has lead to the assumption that they must be under some form of mind control, possibly hypnopaedia, though it's unclear who exactly is controlling them. Since many are attended by attractive and appropriate pets (kittens, puppies, winged mice, lambs), there has been suggestion that the apparently subsentient animal companions are, in fact, their keepers.

Since many find Garden Children to be appealing (they are, after all, deliberately beautiful, whimsical and charming), some suggest that The Child's Garden is a deliberate attempt to revitalize the public image of the VRC -- a living set propaganda artpieces. If this is the case, it may have misfired; while many do find Garden Chldren charming, some find them unsettling, or even actively repellent. They are, after all, pressed -- perhaps forced; who can say? -- into a set of predetermined appropriate behaviors. Others merely disdain them -- to the sophisticated eye, the lace-and-ruffles, country-cottage, lambs-and-puppies mien may be at best laughable. The Children's iron-clad naivete is perfect armor against such disdain. They simply do not notice it.

Members

Garden Children tend not to last long. In accordance with Victorian Retrotech Collection ideals, they do age. Thus, the Child's Garden has an unusually high member turnover rate; any given Child will be gone to who-knows-where in the equivalent of about eight years. This is true even of Ernestine, who at first appears to be the only stable member of the Child's Garden; those paying close attention will notice that Ernestine is actually a succession of physically identical Garden Children given the same name presumably to put a friendly face on the faction as a whole. (One consistent, unaging Ernestine would defeat the entire purpose of the Garden Children.)

Garden Children tend to appear as human or very humanoid children between the ages of about three and ten. They tend toward porcelain skin, rosy cheeks, limpid eyes, and ringlets, and all wear impractical but beautiful clothing (girls in ruffled dresses and petticoats, boys in velvet knee-breeches) which manage miraculously never to get dirty.

[1] [2] [3]

• Ernestine

Home

Garden Children live in a vast, pastoral park, not surprisingly called the Child's Garden, full of flowers, green lawns, and gentle, beautiful animals to play with. Tucked picturesquely among the hills are cottages, often thatch-roofed and covered with blossoming vines. Violence and openly sexual behavior are not possible in the Garden. The Garden seems to exist in Top, although there are entrances from Charm via certain rose-gilt Charmtubes.

[1] [2]

Some Theories on Philosphy of the Garden Children

The Garden Children may well be one opinion in the 'optimal' state argument -- the best stage one exists within ones own lifecycle. While many creatures presume this to be the earliest adult stage in their lifecycle, this may well be more out of sedentary mentalities and presuppositions than actual function. Consider that the unmodified child has the highest level of learning ability, picking up languages at a rate eviable by any adult. The mental state of children seem to be open to new ideas and thinking outside of the very presuppositions that cause others to cling to their adult form. Is it possible that the creativity and sense of wonder that is present in the pre-pubescent child - necessary for survival to learn adaptions that may have not been convered by slower genetic changes - atrophies away and leaves primarily the procreative urges of adulthood? In a post-scarcity society, there is no need for this sort of "life-cycle denumont" since mortality and reproduction are no longer necessary. However, this argument really works only on the level of a post-scarcity society that does not desire the use of modifications. It's not surprising that this sort of concept would arise out of Victorian retrotech Collective principles, as only this faction plays by these sort of rules.

Inspirations

The Garden Children owe their inspiration to Nell and her Young Ladies' Illustrated Primer in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Alice of [Alice in Wonderland] was also a not inconsiderable influence; a Garden Child exploring Charm, perhaps. The name, of course, comes from Robert Louis Stevenson's [A Child's Garden of Verses].