When the Governor went silent, we quickly discovered that there would be no more children. All of our genital blocks were set to the same number, counting down, in that instant. 999,999,999 minutes, the largest number they would accept. That the factories and farms were no longer running, their automated workers inert and motionless, was almost a footnote. Though a small minority was helpless and quickly starved without automated delivery, most of us knew how to find the distribution centers and warehouses, to feed ourselves from the indefinitely storable foodstuffs that we still consume today. But no children, no future, no spectacle of renewal and growth that most of us had spent millennia living for? With no Governor to show us what to do next?
Humanity went mad, back to the dark ages, formed gangs and nations, all those old bogeymen, even religions. The streets stank with the piles of dead for decades and only the fact that pretty much everything was built fireproof and unbreakable saved the cities from physical destruction.
The dwindling population re-learned how to make things, build factories, how to mine, how to till farms. Then they fought over them and destroyed them. A surprising number of them were demolished by apparent accidents of various sorts-- there is some speculation that perhaps the Governor still watches, still acts, merely refuses to speak or guide.
There were fewer than five million of us when the first nine ticked down to an eight. We all watched it change then, too.
It felt like doom, then. How would any of us survive to see the end of it, if we were to die off so quickly? But the wars were slowing, easing. Two million watched the eight become a seven. A million saw the seven become a six, and the wars were over, the nations fallen, the religions again forgotten. Adventure and suicide whittled away at the numbers over the years, the rate of attrition always decreasing. When the first digit became a zero, hope began to blossom, and we became students again, accessing records and texts that had not been seriously studied for ten thousand years before the Crash, relearning the skills of human society, preparing for the children it seemed we might see again after all, in case the Governor did not return to handle the rebuilding population, to avoid the terrors of the violence we had all passed through. We became busy, very busy, neglecting our communications with one another, becoming strangers again. But what could we do? A mere two centuries until the return of children, we suddenly had no time to waste. The second digit became a zero, and we hardly noticed. Too busy.
Together with fifteen hundred living ghosts, we watch the third digit zero itself. Nobody speaks. Nobody breathes. 999,999 minutes to go. Not quite two years. Nobody cheers. We circulate through the com, passing through one another, selecting familiar faces. I find Dahnil by his bushy blond beard with the red streak. He selects me, I accept the prompt, and we are visually solid to one another, our murmurs at full volume. He says nothing but my name, Marya. In minutes, the entire com is in pairs, with a few sets of four and two triples. There is almost no background noise, there is little to say but each others' names. We already know what we plan to do. Dahnil says goodbye. I say for now. I touch his lips with a finger, carry his kiss to mine. I touch a button on my console, and the com winks out. Another button, and the lights fade. A third, and the countdown is gone for the first time since it began. I don't need it now.
I walk to my aircar, and head for The New City. Where we will wait for the children. Where even if it speaks again in the old cities, we will never hear the Governor again.
***~~~***
5:
Mine Of Men
By S. A. Barton
Copyright 2012 S. A. Barton
Mine Of Men is the second vignette in this collection. For a while, I thought I was going to use this as the outline of something longer, perhaps even a novel. But frankly, I don’t think I want to get to know the people who make plans like those at the end of this too well.
When my older brother was born in 1970, there were three and a half billion human beings in the world. When I, much to my parents’ surprise, was born in 1987, there were five billion. When I scattered my brother’s ashes after our car accident in 2012, the number was seven billion. When breast cancer took my mother in 2024, eight billion. Between those two deaths were framed some of the most vital events of my life. Recovering from my own injuries-- a broken ankle, torn ACL, shattered hip socket, cracked pelvis, two broken ribs, a bruised spleen. Physical therapy. Two years of addiction to narcotic pain meds. Recovery from addiction. Marriage, a son, two daughters. Becoming a published writer, then a mildly successful one, and finally successful enough to quit my day job. Janice quit her job as well, giving up teaching other peoples’ children in batches to thirty to teach our own brood, and to do some writing of her own.
2029 was the year that father followed mother into the great end-all, and also the year that Clockback was patented. Clockback was something that people had been chasing pretty much as long as there had been people; a therapeutic drug that, taken daily, left you a day physically younger rather than a day older. There were inevitable variations in effect, as with any drug. In perhaps one case in ten thousand it was ineffective. In rarer cases it had the opposite of the intended effect. For the most part, it was an anti-aging treatment without significant side effects. Of course, it was also hideously expensive. But my novels sold, and Janice’s book on the weaknesses of the public education system outsold any three of mine.
By 2035 we could afford it, happily, guiltily. Pushing 50 is an ugly place to be when you know there’s a way out. The people who couldn’t afford it began to express that feeling with public action. ‘Silver Riots’ became a growing phenomenon shortly after the advent of Clockback. The name was a misnomer, to a degree. At least half of the protesters were too young to be silver, or gray, or bald for that matter. Quite a few, in fact, were college age. They knew they’d grow old soon enough. They knew old people. They had parents, grandparents, beloved professors, mentors. They also often had the youthful attachment to ‘fairness’ as an ideal.
In 2036, Clockback was approved as a treatment for most cancers. Recipients simply retro-aged until they youthened beyond the appearance of the disease. It was effective for just about anyone older than five, the age at which the bulk of the brain’s physical growth is complete. Unrest increased. Drug enforcement agencies began to uncover ‘cancer mills’ falsifying diagnoses for profit. The Silver Riots began to gain intensity.
In 2038 it became public knowledge that production of Clockback cost sixteen cents per dose, as compared to the three hundred dollars that we users were charged. Silver Riots became continuous and often violent. Several governments fell, some by ballot, some by bullet. Pharmacies and hospitals became armed camps. Janice and I took the whole family to the winter cabin safely away from the uncertainty of the cities. We stopped using Clockback. We weren’t that old, and to be found out as a user risked the wrath of rioters, desperate cancer sufferers, black marketers, social equality activists, and religious fanatics convinced that growing younger was an affront to their deity.
It took a few years for things to settle down. By 2043 we had sold the city house at a loss, Janice’s new book outlining the effects she believed agelessness would have on the university system was a runaway bestseller, and we felt safe enough to begin venturing back into town to fill our prescriptions. The price by then had fallen ninety-eight percent and most insurance plans offered discounts from that. Many countries began to subsidize the use of Clockback at a net savings to their overall health care system. It was a large net savings, as diseases of old age, always the largest expense in any modern society, beat a hasty retreat. More doctors were shunted into emergency medicine and cosmetic surgery as the market ponderously shifted.
As 2060 came and went, three-quarters of the world had effectively free access to Clockback, and the numbers were steadily increasing. The numbers of those who chose to abstain for reasons of religion or principle continued t
o shrink.
More people had the drug than had access to clean water and adequate food. There were 15 billion people alive by then and far fewer dying than before. Birthrates rose as people beyond reproductive age re-entered it and younger generations simply never allowed themselves to age beyond it. Food was less of an issue than supplying energy in its myriad forms to the rising population. Private transportation began to wane: anything bigger than a moped simply cost too much for most citizens to operate. Fossil fuel or electricity—it had to be generated somehow. Demand was soaring far ahead of supply. A new rising of unrest directed the attention of nations to alleviate the energy crisis. A few bleeding-edge solar power collectors became a rash, a silver ring of motes in orbit blanketing the equator of Earth in a mottle of shadow and beaming down kilowatts by the billions. The silver began to pockmark the moon as 2075 passed, struggling to provide ever more power to the 23 billion people of the world. A dinner of fish or beef or pork became the holiday indulgence of the very rich. Grains and legumes and algae were their daily fare. Farmed algae sustained the world as the new century rang in with 35 billion mouths to feed. Wars ground to a halt; for the most part the vast resources once devoted to them were needed simply to accommodate the onslaught of the vast new generation. Power, food; food, power: the needs raced neck and neck. The old landfills became open strip mines to reclaim the waste that economics once dictated was wasteful to reclaim.
Janice’s books continued to meet enormous success. My novels still brought in steady earnings with their relatively small but loyal following. As our financial success mounted and we began to edge into the ranks of the truly wealthy top one percent of the top one percent, we began to see what we needed to do with our money. A thing the world’s governments could no longer afford as they fought to keep from smothering under the weight of multiplying human flesh (84 billion in 2150). We were not the first to have the idea. The first were the extended Gates clan in 2095, expending the GNP of a small-to-middling nation to lift a small fleet of ships based on the long-dead antique US Space Shuttle out of the mountains of a leased compound in southern Kashmir. After a rocky start, two of fifteen craft lost during takeoff and ten years of shaky and irregular supply launches funded by an extensive trust and an alliance with a wealthy scion of the Indian tech industry, Gates Luna spread to cover most of the Sea of Tranquility.
We meant to follow them. Perhaps not exactly in their footsteps, the state of the art had been greatly improved by what they learned in their efforts. On Earth, all the sciences but the biological had effectively withered away. Science had long since stalled; what the Gates’ had accomplished had been an impressive feat of not just money, but of virtually archaeological research and education. Generally, it had been the case for a good fifty years previous that if you could not eat the result, nobody was interested but a few eccentrics and hobbyists.
But beyond Earth orbit, as time passed, in the Sea of Tranquility and Hyannisport L-5, Chengdong L-4, in Lunar-Polar Windsor and Murdoch’s Darkside Luna, those places needed all types of technology, and rapid development of it. They exported it to those who could pay or looked like they might make good on a debt. People like us, among others. We aimed for the asteroids, Janice and I and our three kids and their kids and their kids, thinking we were pioneers. A Singaporean co-op passed us on the way out, heading for Titan.
As Janice and I approach our 300th birthdays, we share a cluster of asteroids shoved into mutual orbit with a dozen other clans, slowly melding together through intermarriage. Our group is middling-sized as these things go, perhaps 20,000 strong. It would have been a little more, but a pair of great to the umpteenth grandchildren have peeled off a few thousand adventurous types to mine the Oort cloud. Their kids, barely in their teens, are playing with ideas to milk energy from the heliopause itself, to live on the cusp of interstellar space. Perhaps their children will look farther, wander farther still. They’ve been raised free of a planet, what difference does it make where the rock or the ship they fly goes, so long as they can eat and breathe and stay warm? I don’t know how, but it seems likely that they will find a way to wander farther.
We Earth-born, though… the Earth will pass 100 billion living souls very soon. It is solidly ringed in silver to capture solar power, paved in white rooftops from continental coast to coast in order to shed waste heat, the oceans are grey from shore to shore with algae farms. Can they support more, have they already gone too far? Who can tell? They have not yet populated the continental shelves or ocean floor, nor burrowed beyond a few hundred meters deep for room to grow food and house people. Up here, we study the ways they might do that, and sell them the knowledge. Once, reasonable people knew five billion would be the breaking point, the precipice of starvation and doom. Later, it was eight. Then ten. 100 billion was insane, unthinkable. Now it is 200 billion that are unthinkable, a quarter trillion, half a trillion. But it seems like maybe we’ll find a way.
100 billion people (or more) are also a hell of a resource, a breeding ground for legions of one-in-a-million geniuses to trade to us for our knowledge, and an infinite market for all of the material things they have no time to make or invent for themselves, too busy with their eternal feeding. Things we can make easily and cheaply from asteroidal metals, for instance.
A good resource must be managed. We converge, we planet-born, a meeting of the great families, to decide how best to preserve it. This mine of men must never be allowed to collapse, but must be cultivated.
***~~~***
6:
The Circle Of Grass
By S. A. Barton
Copyright 2012 S. A. Barton
Author’s note:
There’s always a better place and a better way. Sometimes it’s real. Sometimes it’s only in our imaginations. We never really know until we get there.
I listen:
Listen, children, and learn how we came out of the city. In the city long ago in my grandfather’s grandfather’s time we lived in stone houses. These were made things, the stone thick and liquid like mud and poured into shape in great pans, much like bread, made to dry and turned out in great massive loaves and stacked to make walls. People lived on top of people on top of people, coming and going on ladders and ramps and halls like an anthill. The anthills reached up higher than you could imagine, ten, twenty, fifty times as tall as the tallest tree you’ve ever seen.
In those times we lived in our stone halls, walked on stone streets, looked up at the sky and sun and rain from deep, deep stone canyons. The wind was weak there and smelled of garbage and people, always people, living and dying and sick. Not sick of the body, but sick of the mind and the spirit. For there were no fish to catch, no animals to hunt, no fruit to gather, no roots to dig, no crops to grow.
The machines brought the food, and made the light. They brought warmth in the winter and cool in the summer. They moved us so we did not have to walk long distances. They spoke for us, so no wise men remembered stories. They thought for us, so none of us asked the wise men questions.
There were no wise men to ask. There were only many clever ones, proud and lazy. There are many thousands of thousands of them there now, the ones who did not go.
One day it came to be that all of the men and women lived in the great cities. They were so great that nobody could understand how they worked. The machines did that. They kept the peace and fixed and built themselves. At the beginning there were people who did these things and they lived in great mansions and not anthills. But their grandchildren had nothing to do and nothing to be, and so entered the anthills. There were people who lived like us, but the anthill people made them city people before they withdrew into their own world. Those people followed the city or they starved. Their ways and even names are lost now.
But the old ways never went away. They were always there, waiting for us to pick them up again. But we had to find them, to discover their shape again, and th
eir uses. So our grandfathers’ grandfathers gathered together in the anthill and the first Foremost said to them all, our lives are empty. Let us go and make them full. So they went.
They went, and many died. They discovered the first Old Truth: nature is not humane. They were cold, and no machine warmed them. They were hungry, and no machine fed them. They were naked, and no machine clothed them. But they were also lost. No machine found them, and it was good.
It meant that they were free to find themselves. That was the second Old Truth: to hold on to a thing is to let go of yourself; to let go of things is to grasp yourself.
I stop listening: there is more to this story, much more. But this was where I stood, spear in hand. My woman stood beside me, both of us newly adult in this, the beginning of our fifteenth spring. Two dozen more stood behind us, all between ten and twenty springs, more than half of the youth of the people. I held my spear and let go of myself. I cast my spear true into the living chest of the Elder. I let go of the spear and grasped myself. I grasped my anger at fifteen hungry winters when I might have eaten. My loneliness at having seen my brother and sister into the grave before their first adult hairs showed themselves, when they might have been saved.
I grasped my disgust at all of the times I was told ‘this is how it is’ when I knew it did not need to be. My disgust at all of the times I was told ‘this is better’ when I saw a better way.
There was silence in the circle as the old man’s red stories flowed into the dirt, spreading to the edge of the fire to bubble and burn.
I turned my back and walked through my standing people, and through all of the silent staring fools we would leave behind. My people turned after me and followed as I went. We had spoken of this day many times before; to live it felt like a waking dream, unreal, like an old man’s tale.