Summary

In “Children of the New World,” an unnamed narrator tells the story of how he and his wife enter a virtual reality world, make two children together, find digitally-based happiness, and then are forced to reboot their corrupted system. This all sounds very common with computers today, but the difference is that the rebooting of their system means that they have to delete, or kill off, the children they have created.

The couple spends a lot of time on something called “New World.” Here, they touch each other and experience the passionate lives they do not live in person. They learn how to work the system and the wife, Mary, gets pregnant. The couple produces two virtual, but realistic, feeling children named June and Oscar. The narrator and his wife become bored and decide to explore a place called “Dark...