The O.D. (39 page)

“Effective and fair Dismantlement can only be achieved through consensus, as I said before. And the mechanical intricacies can be mastered only by people fluent in those fields included in the Dismantlement agenda. For example, the motor industry can only be dismantled by the motor industry itself, and the –”

A hoot of derision sounded from somewhere within the US delegation. A US Congressman of twenty-six years’ service to his State, Country and Self, was finding Pilot’s words tantamount to blasphemy. He was not an environmentalist at heart and had manipulated his appointment to the Congressional Committee on Environmental Projections not through altruism, but as a way of heading off any Federal controls that might curb the interests of his select friends in commerce and industry.

“When we say dismantle the motor industry, we don’t mean they should stop making vehicles,” Pilot said, throwing his words in the general direction of the heckler. “Your blue flashdrives contain a number of novel concepts in transportation solutions, co-authored by some of the motor industry’s most creative and innovative strategists during visits to Eydos.
Road
trains
, for example. Through the introduction of road trains, powered by a new breed of hybrid engine adding human muscle power to the mix through hand and foot pedals, there will be better transport efficiency, greatly reduced emissions, no traffic jams – not to mention their impact on obesity.”

“The fat guys will just let the healthy ones do all the work,” Reuters said to Associated Press. “Lonnie Pilot has no understanding of human nature.”

“Yeah, but the fat guys’ll die first,” AP replied.

“Another idea currently in development is the
Mus
,” Pilot continued, “an inner city muscle-powered bus driven by as few as fifteen medium-fit passengers out of a seating capacity of forty-five. Any shortfall in the power generated through the pedals is made up by the vehicle’s battery. The Mus has a top speed of fifteen miles an hour and will operate on any incline under one in twelve, even when pulling its trailer of light-weight bicycles. The same technology is being used for the Domestic Energy Table, or DET, around which families can sit and have quality time together as they charge their home generator through pedals under the table. The family stays healthy, enjoys valuable together-time and makes electricity all at the same time. Half an hour around the DET generates enough power to run their lights and computers for a day.” Pilot stole a quick glance behind him and drew strength from Lim’s eyes. Above her, the giant video screen displayed a moving image of someone who looked just like Lonnie Pilot.

“The brain power and financial resources that
could
be thrown at our problems are enormous, and our projects are only scratching the surface,” he said. “Dismantlement isn’t all about the salvation and restoration of Homo Sapiens, though. It’s about returning wild animals to their original status by restoring their wildness… by dismantling the zoo and creating mega-reserve
s−
not of tens or hundreds of square miles, but of
thousands
of square miles. And not in the world’s most remote countries and places, but right in the middle of the most developed ones. Once the borders of these mega-reserves are drawn, the gradual removal of the human footprint can begin. As the land demands of humans decrease as a result of the most important single Dismantlement, which I will come to shortly, our presence within the mega-reserves will shrink correspondingly.”

Pilot looked across at Mara, who was signing the letters E and X. He had almost forgotten. “As I said before, all of these proposed dismantlements have to be adopted by global consensus. The O.D. is not a Dictatorship. The O.D. is an
Exemplarship
.” Pilot allowed time for the word ‘Exemplarship’ to be translated, which was no mean feat. “The Greek word eîdos is defined as
the
distinctive
expression
of
the
cognitive
or
intellectual
character
of
a
culture
or
a
social
group
. The character and culture of Eydos can act as the model, or
exemplar
of change.”

Pilot shook out his legs the way footballers do during national anthems, but less obviously. He’d been standing for quite some time. No one was prepared for Pilot’s next bombshell.

“Now we arrive at the most important Dismantlement of all. If we succeed with this one, then everything else will follow like a Jacob’s ladder. But… IT IS THE SINGLE MOST DIFFICULT TASK WE FACE.

“We’ve cured cancer and AIDS. Now we have to treat that most threatening of conditions,
pregnancy
.” There was a collective intake of breath which Pilot sensed immediately. He was ready for it. “While respecting the gift of pregnancy and the wonder of new life, we have to begin
rationing
it to protect those very lives we are creating. Only by halving our rate of regeneration can future life be safeguarded. The gradual, systematic dismantlement of the human population is the most important Dismantlement of all.” Pilot waited for the hubbub invoked by his words to die down.

Please,” he said pushing down with his hands to signal silence. “The old concept of zero population growth is not radical enough to achieve what we believe to be the optimum global population of nine hundred million by the year 2275. That’s a reduction of
ninety
percent
off today’s number.”

Four thousand people in the Mother Dome were stunned to silence.

“The human world is like a business that has grown too big and has failed to adapt to market changes. ‘Go Forth and Multiply’ was written when the global population was less than 230 million. We are grossly over-manned and have to make large-scale redundancies if we are going to stay afloat. I use these market economy analogies to illustrate the point because, for many people out there, it’s a language they can easily understand.

“Before we explain how to make these cuts, let me tell you why they are necessary. Most of you sitting here already know, but for many watching this live on their computers, TVs and phones, it would be a serious omission on our part to speak as if all the problems are universally understood, because they are not.

“Let us take this auditorium as being the Earth. It has four thousand seats and, as you can all see, today we’re full. It took around a hundred and fifty thousand years, from modern Man’s supposed beginnings up to the year 5000 B.C. to fill just the first eight
seats
of our four thousand seat auditorium. By the time of Christ, this had doubled to sixteen seats. Fifteen centuries later, when Columbus landed in America, 200 seats, or the first
two
rows
only
of these forty rows, were occupied. By the time of the American Revolution, just three hundred years after Columbus, this had doubled to four rows. By the beginning of the 20th century there were still only six rows occupied. Six hundred seats out of four thousand.” Pilot turned to the Chair and extended his hand. “Within Lim Lin Hok’s lifetime, the population has doubled
twice
– to two thousand seats, now to four thousand. That’s every last seat in this hall. In just twenty years’ time there will be
two
people occupying every seat… in thirty years,
four
… in thirty-five years,
eight
. Not only is the auditorium full as of today, but it was really only built to house four hundred people comfortably at most. Each person needs at least ten seats – four to stretch out on at night and the other six for their possessions, work, gardens, recreation etcetera. Occupying all available seats does not worry us here today, because we have somewhere else to go afterwards. But if this dome were the earth, there
is
nowhere else.”

Pilot’s mind went blank at this point and he signalled Macushla to turn the light back on. She slid her finger slowly across her throat. Extermination. It had been one of
her
ideas.

“Sticking with the seats analogy, although it has taken us over
a
hundred
and
fifty
thousand
years
to fill the auditorium, it is sobering to think that we are never more than
fifty
years
away from emptying it completely. And before I get back to the finer points of Population Dismantlement, I will tell you how the human race can be quickly and efficiently eradicated from the Earth.”

‘You’ve gone too far now, Lonnie Pilot,’ Austin Palmer thought. Len Wenlight merely clung to a blind hope that Pilot wasn’t about to hang himself.

“If, starting today, we had the wherewithal to begin administering a potent sterilization agent worldwide, and no antidote were discovered for at least fifty years, then, when the last of today’s female babies reaches menopause, the human race in its entirety will be doomed. Another fifty years after that, with no way to reproduce its kind, homo sapiens will have disappeared forever from the Earth. We will have achieved
total
dismantlement of the population from nine billion to zero in just a few generations.

“Now I will explain
how
this can be done. Three years ago, we secretly commissioned a sympathetic research chemist in Cheshire to develop a chemical agent that would make any male who ingested it irrevocably sterile.”

“DISONORARE SU LEI,” an Italian delegate shouted above the uproar Pilot’s pronouncement had triggered. Seconds later, it entered Pilot’s earpiece as ‘Shame on you.’

“No,” he said after the noise had died down. “There is no shame in issuing a warning. If we, for a modest investment, could develop the chemistry to cause irreversible sterilization, then so could others. More important and ominous is the fact that a delivery system also exists.

“The way global distribution is structured today, we would be able to reach three-quarters of the Earth’s population just through normal commercial channels. Our tasteless, colourless chemical agent added to a popular soft drink at its worldwide bottling plants would sterilize sixty to seventy percent of this number within twelve months. We have identified fifty other routes, from chewing gum to chicken nuggets, that would account for the rest. It can even be absorbed through the skin through shower gels, deodorants and after shave. The remaining billion or so males outside this net – most of them in Asia and Africa – could be targeted by other means like crop spraying and doctoring the drinking water.

“A small country, a medium-sized corporation, or just a well-organized group of fanatics with the intent, chemistry, strategy and finance, could sterilize ninety percent of the world’s males within two years, and the remainder within five. And that would be it – apart from whatever life could be produced in the laboratory.”

A blanket of silence fell over the delegates. This was
not
what they had expected of Eydos, but Pilot saw no reason to hold back. “There are enough radical groups out there, harbouring enough diabolical purpose, to make the scenario I’ve just described a reality,” he continued, Charles Williams’ wrathful stare still strong in his memory. “And the odds of it happening will shorten as more and more people fight for less and less of everything.”

“CHANTAJE,” a Costa Rican delegate cried, echoing a second later in Pilot’s earpiece as, ‘Blackmail.’

“This is not blackmail,” Pilot shot back at his heckler. “It’s a warning that if we do not
voluntarily
reduce our numbers starting today, someone else will institute a programme of
malevolent
population dismantlement tomorrow, with the danger that they’ll take it all the way. Failure on our part to act will increase human suffering to dimensions most of us cannot comprehend.” Pilot felt it was time to head to quieter waters, if there were any.

“The population-resources issue falls into two halves – one developed, one undeveloped,” he said. “Both sides are killing the world in different ways. The industrialized, consumption-based developed nations are eating the planet alive. For good measure, we’re poisoning it at the same time, accounting for over two-thirds of the greenhouse gases and most of the poisons in the sea.

“The undeveloped third world, on the other hand, although barely making a scratch on the surface in terms of its consumption of resources, is suffocating the Earth through sheer numbers. Because they outnumber the rich by ten to one, some will argue that Population Dismantlement across the board would be unfair to developed countries. The answer to that is that one rich man does as much damage to the Earth as ten poor men.” Pilot waited for the scattered applause from the delegations of Burundi, Liberia, Haiti, Ethiopia and Burkina Faso to die down before resuming.

“Some developed countries have already reached zero population growth, resulting in an inverse pyramid. The broad base at the top represents older people and the narrower part, those of childbearing age and younger. So, in these countries, more people will be taken off the top than will be added to the bottom, with the obvious result that the populations of the developed countries will fall faster than the populations of the third world, where the ratio of young to old is about equal. This creates the worrying disparity that it would largely be the educated people in the developed countries who would be dismantling their populations. With their numbers steadily halving, in contrast to the doubling, trebling and quadrupling of the uneducated, distracted poor, it wouldn’t take long for reason and commitment towards a better future to be drowned by their exact opposites. One way to correct this would be to link foreign aid to population reduction. Other possible solutions to this problem are detailed in the purple flashdrives. Put your collective minds to this disparity and balance can be achieved.”