Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [75]
Damon knew immediately that the image and the voice were both fakes, derived with calculated crudity from the kind of template he used routinely in his own work.
“The situation was out of hand,” the false Arnett said dully. “All attempts to limit environmental spoliation by legislation had failed, and all hope that the population would stabilize or begin to decline as a result of individual choice was gone. We were still winning the battle to provide enough food for everyone, even though the distribution system left seven or eight billions lacking, but we couldn’t cope with the sheer physical presence of so many people in the world. Internal technology was developing so rapidly that it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that off-the-shelf emortality was less than a lifetime away, and that it would revolutionize the economics of medicine. Wars over lebensraum were being fought on every continent, with all kinds of weapons, including real plagues: killing plagues.
“When Conrad first put it to us that what the world needed more desperately than anything else was a full stop to reproduction—an end to the whole question of individual choice in matters of fecundity—nobody said ‘No! That’s horrible!’ We all said ‘Yes, of course—but can it be done?’ When Conrad said ‘There’s always a way,’ no one challenged him on the grounds of propriety.
“I couldn’t see how we might go about designing a plague of sterility, because there were no appropriate models in nature—how could there be, when the logic of natural selection demands fertility and fecundity?—and I couldn’t envisage a plausible physiology, let alone a plausible biochemistry, but Conrad’s way of thinking was quite different from mine. Even in those days, all but a few of the genes we claimed to have ‘manufactured’ were actually simple modifications of existing genes or the chance products of lab-assisted mutation. We had little or no idea how to go about creating genes from scratch which would have entirely novel effects—but Conrad had a weird kind of genius for that kind of thing. He knew that he could figure out a way, using the somatic transformer packages that were then routinely used to treat genetic deficiency diseases.
“I wonder, sometimes, how many other groups must have had conversations very like ours. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could design a virus that would sterilize almost everyone on earth without the kinds of side effects that accompany pollution-induced sterility?’ . . . ‘Yes, wouldn’t it—what a shame there’s no obvious place to start.’ Was there anywhere in the world in the 2070s where bioengineers gathered where such conversations didn’t take place? Maybe some of the others took it further; maybe they even followed the same thread of possibility that Conrad pointed out to us. Maybe Conrad wasn’t the only one who could have done it, merely the one who hit the target first. I don’t know—but I do know that if you’d put that kind of loaded pistol into the hand of any bioengineer of the period the overwhelming probability is that the trigger would have been squeezed.
“We had no desire to discriminate: we set out to sterilize everybody in the world—and we succeeded. That’s what saved the world from irredeemable ecocatastrophe. If the population had continued to increase, so that nanotech emortality spread like wildfire through a world which was still vomiting babies from billions of wombs, nothing could have restrained the negative Malthusian checks. The so-called plague wars had already proved themselves inadequate to cut population drastically in a world of advanced medical care, but there were plenty more and even nastier weapons to hand. The world really was set to go bad in a big