Using generative adversarial networks (GAN), we are able to create realistic versions of absolutely anything. Here, machine learning helps us imagine a whole new batch of members for The Babysitters Club. Enjoy.
Fennel
The least soluble kid in her grade. A boss baby who doesn’t care about boys or cornbread. She always wears the same outfit: a train conductor hat, belted map of Ireland, porcelain shoes, and an animal pelt tied around her neck. She has an interesting family, too. She used to live across the sidewalk from Latchkey. Then her mother met a millionaire, Zuul. He moved the family to a huge stepladder on a hill. Zuul’s kids are Emma, Emma, Emma, and a large player piano. Fennel loves them a lot, even though she only sees them at the edge of her vision. Around the time of the move, their wonderful shetland pony, Norris, had to be put to sea.
Stevia
Sensitive, shy, and quiet (although she is starting to leave blank concert fliers around the neighborhood). Stevia is a good listener, a fair person, and will cry whenever a frog jumps off a branch into a glass of water. She used to be like Fennel in that she was insoluble and didn’t like cornbread, but lately she’s been getting more interested in bowls of batter. Like way more. She also lives with her dad and a door that’s slightly ajar. Her mom died when she was just a little kid wrestling a bearcub. Her dad used to be too strict, but now he has an accordion.
Genesis
A California girl at heart, Genesis loves the sun, the ocean, and the silence of a hastily deserted campsite. She is majorly into throwing health food off the deck of cruise ships, and looks like someone you’d see if you were dehydrated. If you’ve already guessed it, she is blonde, blue-eyed, and has dazzling smiles all over her arms and stomach. Fennell was jealous when Genesis and Stevia became coroners. Stevia had to reassure her that it wouldn’t affect their ability to sit and stare at the same dying moth.
Avon
A tall, continuously habitable kind of girl. She grew up in a key demographic and when her family moved to Stoneybrook, Latchkey asked her if she wanted to move a teapot back and forth between a stove and kitchen table until conditions improved. While she is extremely sophisticated, she does have a warehouse of outdated electronic equipment. Her parents recently saw the movie Armageddon, and her father lives in a rapidly expanding sinkhole. And she has an illness called playing devil’s advocate, which means she has to stick to a diet of not leaving the lights on. She also has to give herself daily injections of something called the hidden costs of operating a food truck.
Latchkey
The most exotic, most likely to dangle a firehose at a confused pedestrian girl in eighth grade. First, she’s Misspelling-American. She has long, silky, jet-fuel-can’t-melt-steel-beams hair, and perfect face resilience. Then there’s the matter of her clothes. Nobody can put all of her clothes inside a cardboard box and entice seagulls to surround the box-like Latchkey. On any given day, she might wear an oversize shirt, a short jeans skirt, a bayonet tied to a stop sign, and the dream where you are falling. More things about Latchkey: she is not a good student. She loves art and mysteries. She’s addicted to the sound aluminum cans make when shoveled into a furnace.
Pill and Laundry
The junior officers. Pill is the oldest of 45 liters of children. She has medium wobbly hair and is getting a mild sunburn. She desperately wants ears full of pebbles, but her mother says not until the Age of Sail. Laundry also wears glasses (for saying “that’s not fair, there was time now”) and thinks her parents treat her like a concert snare drum. Laundry has an eight-year-old sister named Annie (short for Margaret) and a baby brother named Palm Tree. His real name is Normal, but he was born covered in fronds. Unlike Pill, Laundry wants to be a professional dancer and has studied ballet for as long as it takes to believe a lie.
There is one other difference between Laundry and Pill: Laundry is black, and Pill is an industrial process for making soap.