Chapter 9: Birth of a Nation

THE STOCK MARKET ‘CRASH’ was more like an amusement park waterslide. It looped up and around, diving steeply and then going airborne on a rise. But ultimately, you knew you’d hit the bottom and hoped there was enough water left in the pool to buoy you up a little.

“This is all your fault, Smith,” Derek Goldman yelled across the newsroom office. Derek covered the paper’s finance pages and was clearly unhappy. “The market is down another thousand points today. You just had to come along and announce the world is doomed and now everyone has started selling off their stocks.”

“I don’t think it would have been better if people just found out for themselves,” I called back with a glance toward Ed’s office. Everyone looked that direction whenever their concentration on whatever story they were working on was broken. Displayed above Ed’s door were new digital clocks where the traditional analog clocks had displayed the time in different cities around the world. Now, each digital clock was counting down the population of that city’s country. “New York” was clicking down a number about every ten seconds and had just turned from 400,000,001 to 400,000,000. The whole office watched as ten seconds later it dropped to 399,999,999.

Worldwide, the population had dropped over twelve million since the last baby was born. I ran the mental calculation as I did every time I looked at the clocks. If the rate remained constant, it would take 160 years for world population to reach zero. But no one lived that long. Average life expectancy was about eighty with extended longevity still just over a hundred. If there were no accidents and no wars, and everyone lived to natural old age, today’s babies would be the last people on earth in 100 years. What people didn’t realize was that the rate of death would accelerate over that time. Thirty percent of the US population was 25-44 years of age. In twenty years, that bubble would hit as the largest age group moved into their senior years.

I started my next article, looking up demographics. I checked in with Randy Miller at worldpop.io to make sure the graph was correct, projecting the death rate out for the next hundred years. My stories were page two news now and I was struggling to find anything new to add to the community’s knowledge.

The President’s next press conference was more of the same bullshit with a nice dash of opposition bashing. There’d been a lot of criticism about how he handled the whole national emergency, many claiming that if he’d announced a quarantine as soon as he knew about the satellites going to war, they could have saved half the males in the world from sterilization. That wouldn’t have made a difference, of course, but the president was an easy person to blame. He decided to hold a press conference.

This virus is bad. Real bad. Took our manhood is what they say. But most of what you’re hearing is just media hype. Look around you. Nobody’s sick! We’re having bigger orgasms than ever. We’ve got scientists, the best scientists, working on a cure. But the media is full of doom and gloom. We don’t need that.

It’s always been that way. Longer than I can remember. And my memory’s good. Real good. Take World War II for instance. No, my memory’s not that good, but I read about it. Read a lot. I probably know more about World War II than anyone alive. And it was all media hype.

One good headline and before long, there were shortages of tires, gas rationing, lines a mile long to sign up for the army. The media blew it all out of proportion and we just went about our daily lives, living with the hype and trying to buy our ration of sugar. Everyone was in a panic, dressing up in helmets and practicing duck and cover drills.

And what happened? Nothing! Not one enemy ever came to America! It was all hype and was confined to a couple of places in Europe and Asia. Why should we start stockpiling dish detergent? Yes, maybe in fifty years, if nothing happens—and it will happen, I promise you—in fifty years there could be a shortage of people working in the detergent factories. But we won’t have that many dishes to wash, either.

Go out and buy stocks. It’s a good time to get in on the ground floor.

There was more, of course. He was calling for funding of another new agency focused on getting women pregnant through in vitro fertilization. The agency was to be called the National Insemination Project. Their slogan, already announced, was “NIP this in the bud!”

“Have you seen this, Rams?” Elizabeth called from her office as I puttered in the kitchen making her favorite Saturday morning omelet.

“Come to the table and tell me all about it, love.” I flipped the omelet and slid it out onto her plate, adding two slices of lightly buttered toast. The lovely Elizabeth moved into her seat as I set the plate before her with a flourish.

“Such a lovely meal,” she sighed. “It’s a wonder I don’t weigh two hundred pounds.”

“We’ll just have to go back to Smith Stadium and play until we work the calories off,” Ramsey laughed.

“There is that. Oh, I was just reading an article about that guy who wrote The Singularity is Near. The author of the article claims Kurzweil never died but is now housed in a computer server farm in Idaho. He just changed bodies. He holds that the whole sterilization of mankind is simply a precursor to moving into the singularity and that people should begin transferring their memories and philosophy into some specially built computer where they can live forever.”

“Sounds to me like he’s been drinking Dr. Mott’s Fertilization Compound. It’s 100 proof! Every crackpot has a solution and none work,” I said as I sat opposite my wife with my own version of the Smith Omelet—a little spicier than hers.

“I’m sure you’re right. There’s an ad at the bottom of the page for a device that allows you to upload your personality into a computer,” Elizabeth continued.

“What would you do if you bought a new computer and discovered it was really Melvin Skinner from across the street. It’s hard enough to deal with the man as it is!” We laughed at the news and Elizabeth turned to the new ‘Sex and Living’ section of the newspaper. My news had fallen off completely and the old society pages editor had quickly transformed the ‘Modern Lifestyles’ section into a life after sterility section of the paper.

“Did you see this? There’s a battle arising at the Capital already between the NRP and the NIP. The President has come down on the side of the NIP. It seems the NRP ruled that President Muffley’s daughter did not have the correct genetic markers to preserve and was thus ineligible for in vitro fertilization. The National Insemination Program has been fighting to get control of the sperm bank stock and Muffley signed an executive order giving them half the stock. It came with stern words to the NRP that they need to get their focus on revitalizing the male reproductive system instead of designing a supposed super race.”

“I’ll bet that went over well.”

“Oh, yes. Listen to this quote from the President’s speech.”

People are afraid—women really—women are afraid of this process. It’s invasive. They’re going to harvest your eggs and put the sperm with them. Then they’ll stick it back ... right up inside your ... where you carry the baby. Kind of a reverse abortion.

I know this is worrisome. So, I am offering my daughter. She volunteered. She’s a beautiful young woman. And smart. Maybe the smartest woman on earth. So beautiful and so smart that I’d get her pregnant myself if it was legal. So, she’ll take one for the team and get pregnant through this in vitro thing they do, just to show all women that it’s okay. She’ll be first. Carry the flag, so to speak.

“An entire agency created, just so the president can get his daughter pregnant. That was pretty disgusting!” I took a swallow of coffee to wash the taste of those words out of my mouth.