Chapter 3

I looked at my doctor. "How can I help you survive? I don't have any special skills. I'm not stupid, but I'm not a genius, either."

"You have two things we need. First, you were always independent. Tell me. Have you ever heard the term 'politically correct'?"

"Oh God. Don't tell me I'm going to have to put up with that crap. You'd think after 10,000 years of that shit people would have learned their lesson."

"Yes, we have learned our lesson. Unfortunately, it was almost too late. You could say we came within an inch of politically correcting ourselves out of existence."

"I don't understand."

"Take a look at it. The whole PC movement was designed to make individual people feel special at the expense of everyone else. Anything that made them part of society as a whole was considered degrading. People whose ancestors were brought over to the United States from Africa 300 years before were brainwashed into believing they were not part of the country they and their ancestors had helped build for the last 300 years but that their heritage was in the jungle. It became close to criminal to call someone from a place called Mexico a Mexican. Being sick meant you were special and not subject to the laws of the able. Being weak was looked upon as a special kind of sickness and was coddled by government and business. Those who had addictive habits such as drinking, drugs, gambling and others were put in a special class. If they didn't perform well in work because of their vices, their employers were forced to provide costly and ineffective medical care. What had called for pity or disgust a mere 20 years before was now tolerated, even celebrated.

"The races separated. Your country's greatness was in part because of the diversity of its peoples. Segregation, intolerance, racial superiority became the norm in all groups. Your Constitution had a phrase prohibiting establishing government religion. This became perverted so that any entity that mentioned, much less practiced religion was bankrupted through court trials. It was very obvious in America, but it was just as bad all over the world. Those things that had established or held countries together were pounded by the 'politically correct' until there was no common ground anywhere. Societies fell apart because there were no common goals and purposes.

"Manners dropped out of society. It started when you were young with something very simple - litter. People didn't care where they left their trash. Any celebration, entertainment event, even religious service had to budget money to clean up after their guests and that budget got higher and higher as the years passed. During the decade before your death, this lack of manners was seen most often on the roads. Road rage became a common term to describe a common occurrence - people with no manners attacking people with no manners. It got worse after you died to the point that you literally took your life in your hands every time you pulled onto the freeway. Property was not respected as such by a large percentage of society. Someone would build an aesthetic building and a week later it would be covered in graffiti. If anyone or any company was smart enough to make money, they immediately became target of every cheap lawyer and fraudulent person around as well as the tax man. They were successful so they must be unfair.

"Mankind's instinct to procreate and survive as a species was undermined by the tolerant. Children required too much effort to educate so they were allowed to run wild. More and more the solution to pregnancy became abortion. Two thousand years after your death 95% of all pregnancies were medically terminated. Same sex relations became a practice to be worshiped. You had a disease in your era called 'AIDS'. It was well known in the medical community that there were certain sexual activities that, if they didn't cause the disease, at least increased the chance that it would occur. These activities were engaged in by groups that were under the PC umbrella, so it was almost criminal to point out that engaging in them increased the chance of getting AIDS. Any who did were attacked as bigots. It became an epidemic. As groups individuated and kept others out, more and more of these diseases cropped up. Each PC group had its own designer disease and most of them were killers. We handled cancer. We eradicated Parkinsons and Alzheimers. There was no more common cold. But we couldn't keep up with the new diseases. We even came up with a new term for them - PC diseases. In order to be a PC disease, it had to be specific to a certain PC group.

"Of course, as soon as every group decided it was better than all the other groups around, war was inevitable. The more laws that were passed to remove weapons from the society, the more the criminal or warring element got hold of. You saw the use of airplanes and trains as terrorist weapons in your lifetime. It spread to ships and all other kinds of vehicles. Children and animals became walking bombs. Children were shot for playing with balls or flying kites. Anything or anyone that was familiar and could get into an area was used at some time to destroy others. I take it you've heard of evolution?"

"Yeah. It was a theory that animals evolved into higher animals over long periods of time. As things changed in the environment, animals would change to handle it. For example, those animals that grew long fur in an ice age made it, those that didn't died off."

"That's fairly accurate. The idea of one species turning into another is a bunch of crap. If apes turned into humans, why are there still apes around? However, species do change depending upon conditions. The human species finally had enough of being pulled apart, killed off and prevented from being born in the first place. A pair of mutations occurred. It wasn't noticed at first but after it spread and it was too late we spotted it. Mankind ceased reproducing. And that's why we've brought you 10,000 years into your future."

"Well, that's all well and good, but I never had any children that I know of. I was married for 15 years but my wife had children from a previous marriage and we never had any of our own."

"Let me explain. About 2500 years ago we figured out that we were not having any more children. The purpose to survive as a species kicked back in. All of a sudden it didn't matter to people what color a person's skin was, where he'd been born, how much money his grandfather had. We wanted humans to be around in the future. Our research took several paths.

"First, we did extensive research to find out why our men weren't making our women pregnant. We were able to determine that the female egg had evolved. In layman's terms, it had a tougher skin. It was more difficult for sperm to pierce the egg and fertilize it. We also discovered that males had also undergone changes. The sperm had slowed down and was weak by the time it came to the egg. It was also more fragile and would damage when it came upon the reinforced egg. The combination of these made it impossible for present day men to impregnate present day women. Experiments were made with live subjects and artificial insemination and we determined without a doubt that there were going to be no more births from any modern couple.