Chapter 14

“Alright, today’s briefing will be a little different, in that there will be only one topic of discussion, even though it will probably look like more than that.”

Margie Jonas was not looking forward to presenting this briefing, but she was on the inside of the entire situation, having been brought up to speed months ago when Sharra had returned from her nearly disastrous trip to the UK where she almost became dinner in an international game of political chicken gone so very wrong for the man who started it. The President knew he could completely trust Margie, since she was his second cousin on his mother’s side, and they had grown up together in the same small town until Tucker had ended up in foster care.

The Jonas family had been where Tucker had gone when he’d been tossed out of his foster home at age eighteen. It was only by sheer luck that he had remembered their phone number. He had a plan, he just needed a place from which to start the plan. They had been more than happy to help him out while he got squared away with college and law school. And when he was a lawyer, he had returned the favor, helping them with some legal issues they’d had with some life insurance claims that a multinational insurance company had been stalling on for years for Morton Jonas’s mother when she had passed from the Reaper.

Now Margie, the President’s second cousin once removed, looked out over the assembled reporters and wondered if any of them had a clue about what was going to be dropped onto their shoes in the next few minutes.

“Two days ago, the President released information on the coming food crisis that will be hitting the country in the extreme within the next two decades. The Miller Sunday News Hour show was the first to present the information to the public when the data was released showing the true extent of the crisis. Because of the gender imbalance left to humanity by the Reaper virus, the population curves are trending sharply upward, while the food and nutritional resources are unable to be increased due to ongoing issues with climate change.

“While the data was released at that time, the options on how to deal with the coming crisis was not made public. Today, I am here to present the options available to us, the only options we have available to us that anyone has been able to come up with, to save as many of our citizens as we can while we look for solutions to the factors which will cause us to starve if we do nothing.

“There was a recent dystopian horror fantasy movie that caused a lot of controversy because of its subject matter, and the graphic way in which it was portrayed on-screen. Dark Times was, in fact, a project run out of the White House under the direct supervision of the President and his chosen representatives, whose identities shall remain classified top secret.

“The movie hit so close to home with viewers because of the similarities to our situation in the real world: the gender disparity and the famine issue faced by the characters to name a few.

“In the movie, the population was threatened with widespread famine within fifteen years. The population had the choice to do nothing, which would have led to, at a minimum, a projected twenty or more years of extreme barbarism as everyone in the country, and in the rest of the world as well, for their’s was a worldwide issue, fought for whatever resources were available.

“The projection in the film was that if the leadership chose to do nothing to stop or fight the coming famine, society was going to break down, with so many people would be fighting over whatever food was available in the moment instead of growing, harvesting, and distributing food (if it were even possible in that scenario) for the future, that resources would become even more scarce. Hundreds of millions would die in those twenty years if that option was chosen.”

The reporters in the room were familiar with the movie, but the President’s spokesperson had never gone over a movie in such detail before, and their attention was fully focused on the woman at the podium as suspicions began to form in the backs of some of their minds.

“The second option was to severely curtail the population and the potential population growth by immediately selecting and terminating ten percent of the female childbearing population by random drawing, and then randomly terminating one in every ten girls on their eighteenth birthday. While this would have been horrifying, the cost in human lives would was lower than would have been if they had done nothing. So, while this was a more desirable option than letting society and civilization perish in the flames of apocalyptic anarchy, it was still not acceptable.”

Margie stopped and let that sink in, and to see if there were questions. She wasn’t going to answer any at this time, but there were none.

“The option they chose, as everyone knows, was to select and terminate a lower number of females of childbearing age, and to harvest the meat from the bodies of those women. That meat was then moved into the food supply, where it was consumed by other humans. In the movie, this averted the famine by both blunting the population growth and providing food to the population.”

She stopped again more briefly, looked down at her notes, then looked up at the reporters once more.

“In the real world, we are facing those same choices. But the problem is more severe. Not in timeframe, which is roughly similar, but in scope.

“If we choose option one and let barbarism be our path, this country, and most likely the world, will most likely never return to a civilized state in our children’s lifetimes. The statistical projections put our chances of getting through that level of anarchy and retain any vestiges of civilization at less than one in approximately thirty-seven thousand in the next one hundred years. If we do get through it, we would be devolved back to a technology level equivalent to the eighteen-seventies. Steam engines. No cars, airplanes, phones, Internet service, or any of the advanced technologies that we have come to take for granted.

“Our current level of technology that we take for granted is the result of generations of technological advances, each built on the previous generation of advances. All that would be wiped out in the barbarism, and there would be no one left when the flames died out who would know how to restart things down those paths again.

“Since this will happen to the entire world, we would not be able to ask our friends and neighbors for a leg up. They would be in the same boat as us.

“And during that barbaric time of complete anarchy, projected deaths will be close to ninety-three percent of the population that existed at the beginning of the famine and barbarism. Only the strong will survive. Since multiple generations will go through barbarism, most (if not all but the most basic) scientific and technical knowledge will be lost to us for good, since virtually everything is stored electronically, and without support, those systems will fail abd become unrecoverable over the ensuing decades.

“Our current population is about three hundred and seventy-one million. Seven percent of our current population is approximately twenty-six million people that would survive. That means that somewhere around three hundred and forty-five MILLION people will die. That would make what the Reaper did to us feel like a pleasant walk in the park on a warm sunny day. So many people will die that there won’t be enough people left alive to bury or burn the dead.

“And if that happens, the rest of the world will burn with us, because we will pull the rest of the world into barbarism as we go and try to take whatever resources others have left to feed ourselves.

“If we choose option two, severe curtailment of the childbearing population, we will not be looking at one in ten females terminated immediately, with one in ten killed on their eighteenth birthday. The number we would need to terminate is seventeen percent. One in six females of childbearing age would be terminated immediately. One in six will then terminated on their eighteenth birthday, resulting in millions of women killed just for existing at all.

“Right now, there are approximately two hundred and eleven million women between the ages of eighteen and forty in this country. If that number seems high, think of the skewed birth ratio we have had over the last forty years, and that the last of our baby-boomer generation, the following generation, and half the next died out over twenty years ago. Covid-19 and the Reaper wiped out the old in greater numbers, so our overall population is much younger than it was fifty years ago.

“Two hundred and eleven million women of child-bearing years means that we will have to randomly select and terminate almost thirty-six million young women in a year, starting within one year. If we wait five years, that number grows to forty-seven million. Waiting to embark on this path five years after that, the number is sixty-one million. Then we will have to terminate one in every fifteen girls on their eighteenth birthday. If we start in one year, that number is around seven hundred and seventy-five thousand eighteen-year-old girls we will have to select, find, and terminate within a week of their eighteenth birthday.”

Someone in the crowd of reporters broke the silence with a muttered, “Oh my God, that’s horrible.”

The statement seemed to break the ice, and everyone began speaking at once. Margie just let them talk for a while until they calmed down enough for her to speak.

“I am not taking questions or comments until the end. Please hold your thoughts until then. Thank you.”

She looked them over as they quieted down, and then continued.

“Option three for us looks a little different as well. In the movie, the number was one out of every one hundred and thirty, or approximately eight tenths of one percent. Our choice would have to be somewhat higher at one out of a hundred and two. This means that, across the entire nation over the course of the first year, two million, one hundred and twelve thousand women would be randomly selected by lottery, the same way as it was done in the Dark Times movie. Those women would be ordered to report to a nearby human slaughterhouse, where they would be terminated as humanely as reasonable, and their meat would then be sold by the wholesale market as another resource.”

Silence reigned once more. Then, a question from Margie to the people in the audience.

“What option seems most palatable? One, do nothing, and let our nation fall into barbarism for the next several generations while almost all of us and our children die from hunger, disease, and violence as everyone fights to the death over whatever scraps are left?

“Two, kill seventeen percent of the female population, starting now with thirty-six MILLION in the first year alone, and continuing every year until something changes in the environment and in our birth ratio? Remember, this option does nothing to increase the food supply. We will still be slowly starving to death, but at least that point might be about a hundred years from now, long after everyone here is dead.

“Or three, kill and eat one percent of the female, child-bearing population every year until hopefully something changes in the environment and our birth ratio, while avoiding the end of civilization as we know it for us and all future generations, approximately two million per year?”

“Is there no other option? Different farms? Better growing methods?” One reporter from the LA Times asked in a plaintive, quavering voice. This obviously affected her personally, since she was in her late twenties.

“We have been working on improving and increasing the food supply for the last fifty years. This has been the top focus at every level of government for that entire time. Everything that has been thought of has been tried, and we have not significantly changed the path we are on. Climate change fights us on that at every turn, and right now the climate is clearly winning at trying to kill us all.” It came out in a calm voice, but Margie was anything but calm inside. She was horrified by this, and she doubted she would ever be otherwise.

“What option would you choose? What path do we go down? How do we survive? If you had to decide, what choice would you make? Three hundred forty-five million deaths, thirty-six million deaths initially with almost as many every year, or two million deaths a year?” Margie Jonas threw that question out there to the reporters, and by extension to the rest of the watching audience on the other end of the video feeds.

She waited, but the silence was so complete one could almost hear the sound of data packets flowing from the video cameras and audio recorders through the wireless radio spectra in the air.

No one answered, and she continued on.

“There are no good options. Nothing about this situation can and will ever be called good. We had to choose, and choose now before the options get worse and more horrific, so we chose the option that preserved the most lives and was decidedly the least barbaric. Option three.

“Six hours ago, President Tucker Melville signed an executive order declaring a National State of Emergency, which activated laws designed to head us away from the precipice. Packets are being passed out to you all right now on wireless storage modules, outlining federal and state legislation that was passed some months ago. The information is also being made available to the general population on the White House.gov legislative data boards even as we speak.

“The Population Control Act, the Federal legislation underpinning the introduction and management of legalized, regulated human cannibalism in America, was passed and signed into law some months ago. The specifics are in the packet. The laws include a reclassification of fairly and randomly selected human females from the day of their eighteenth birthday to the last day of their thirty-ninth year into that of a legal condition similar to, but not quite the same as, that of livestock. The Federal laws established the structure and framework necessary to have consistent laws across every state, so that all states handle the response to the State of Emergency and the Population Control Act in an identical way, preventing interstate flight to avoid selection. Every state has passed and enacted identical legislation into law as directed by the Federal Population Control Act.

“The United States Department of Agriculture has been expanded to include a newly formed special division that will oversee the operation and inspection of human slaughterhouses where the selectees from each state will be required to report for conversion into a food resource, and the handling of those selectess, to prevent the worst-case scenario of the future we want to avoid at all costs.

“The Justice Department has presented a challenge to the Federal PCA legislation at the Federal District Court level, which has been expedited up through the appeals process to the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court let stand the lower court rulings affirming the legality of both the State of Emergency, the President’s authority to call the State of Emergency, and the legality of the PCA legislation.

“Several states have presented challenges to the laws at both the state and federal levels. Those challenges were denied repeatedly on appeal to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the cases, validating the state laws by letting lower court rulings stand.