The human delegation arrived at the marble pantheon in the sky to little fanfare. The delegation was comprised of the leaders of the G8 countries. The conference at the sky pantheon was the result of an arduous process undertaken by the humans. After all, the messages in the clouds weren’t exactly forthcoming with the name of the individual who would accept payment for the new membership. The members of the delegation couldn’t help but feel a bit slighted.

“They have the audacity to cap our data allowance and don’t even deign to welcome us with a spot of tea?” Complained the British PM.

“Where I come from there’s such a thing we call ‘southern hospitality’,” said the U.S. President, “and this ain’t it.”

“Oh what is the point of it all?” Said the French President. “They know they have us by the…how you say? Balls. We are a captive audience. They set the price, we pay it. They know there is no need for red carpets or fresh coffee.”

That each of these leaders weren’t at one another’s throats was a miracle in and of itself. With the newly imposed data restriction Earth’s population had become a zero-sum game. That is, if the U.S. bore two new babies, but only had one old person die, that was one less baby for France, Russia, or Japan. These restrictions sowed protectionist policies and distrust among the global super powers. This game theory drove wedges between historically reliable allies and threatened to destabilize the entire globe if nothing was done about the data cap.

The stakes for the meeting were as high as the sky pantheon in which they’d take place.

As the German chancellor began to critique the structural integrity of the pantheon floating upon a cloud, the large, ornate marble door at the end of the corridor opened with a roar. A large bearded fellow with white hair and white robes strode out to meet the delegation.

“Apologies for making you wait,” said the man, “as you can imagine, we have a great many clients trying to upgrade their membership this time of year. And every client is our most important client—that’s the GloboCorp promise.”

The Russian PM regarded the man with a look dripping with disdain and spit. “Unacceptable. We are customer. We do not wait.”

The bearded man’s eyes burned with fury and his mouth opened to respond before the Japanese PM interrupted.

“What my colleague meant to say was that it is an honor to be invited to your beautiful offices. It is a pleasure to meet you,” he said with a deep bow. “We look forward to the beginning of a fruitful business relationship.”

This appeared to please the bearded man as he scanned from leader to leader, the frown melted from his face. “Of course, of course. I’m so happy you all have made the journey to our humble offices. I’m Plato, Earth’s account manager. It is a pleasure to meet you all. Please follow me to our conference room where we will begin our presentation.”

The delegation followed Plato down the long corridor, their heels echoing about the massive space. Each member took their seat in the plush board room—finally in their own element.

“Can I interest any of you in a quantum latte?” Asked Plato as he stood at the head of the table. “They’re a real treat. We steam milk from the golden heifers of Plang-8 and superheat antimatter and mix them together. The resulting concoction is truly divine…and that’s a certification I am qualified to make.”

The U.S. President raised his hand, “say, is that anti-matter similar to that antifa I hear so much about? If so, I don’t think my constituents would take too kindly to my affiliation with such a beverage.”

Plato stared at the man with a baffled expression of disbelief. “…no. There’s no relation.”

The Japanese and British PM’s shared a knowing look.

There were no takers for Plato’s latte.

“Alright. Let’s get down to business then,” said Plato. The lights came down and a slide show glowed behind Plato as he gesticulated precisely with a laser pointer. “As you can see, Earth has bumped up against its data cap at a population of 10 billion. Now, I hate to be the bad guy, but that’s the result of the budget membership you signed up with initially. Heck, when you first arrived your leaders expected population growth to stall at 1 billion, so it looked like a wild overpay to have selected the gold-tier.

“That said, there were moments—especially around the 7 billion mark—where we at GloboCorp worried about your planet’s ability to continue as a going concern. It looked like you all were going to heat that little blue marble into a boil and poof! There goes Q1 for GloboCorp. But no. Earth is resilient. You, as its finest world leaders, are agile, intelligent, real problem solvers. And for that reason, we’re pleased to offer—for a limited time only—access to the platinum-tier membership.”

Plato paused and scanned the room for questions. Seeing none he continued. “Now, the Platinum-tier provides you access to a new population cap of 20 billion. Since you were all kind enough to get over here this afternoon, I’ll tell you what I can do. If you all agree to upgrade today, I’ll throw in support up to 22 billion. But again, that offer is only good for today. Any questions?”

The French President raised his hand. “Yes, what will this be costing us?”

Plato shined his bright white teeth at the group, his grin appeared more like a dog baring its teeth than a friendly smile. “Yes. There is the small matter of the payment. Before I go into the gauche details, I will first say that Earth is also a bit delinquent on its gold-tier membership. It appears as though…let’s see…”he delayed as he skipped ahead a few slides. “Ah yes, here. Earth is delinquent by a few hundred years.”

The delegation gasped—well, most of them. The Russian PM was unfazed by this revelation. “So how we pay now?” Said the Russian PM with an enviable nonchalance.

“Human sacrifice, of course,” said Plato.

After singing Happy Birthday, I began to cry. My tears blurred the flickering lights from the candles illuminating the cake. I could barely make out the blue icing before the lights disappeared; Happy 68th Birthday Dad.

“I’m still here” I hear as a hand gently touches my wrist and slides down my hand to take the knife shaking in my grasp.

“Sorry, I just need some air” I say as I move through the small group of family and friends towards the back of the room. I lean against the sliding glass door, pushing it to the side as the cool night air rushes into the house. As I step outside, I take out my phone and start typing in the search bar. Against the dark screen, I can see the subtle red reflection coming from the sky. I look up to see the 3 looming words

DATA LIMIT REACHED

It’s been 25 years since the day those words first appeared in the sky. Ever since then, everything has been challenging. In the following months, we learned it was due to the population reaching 10 billion. Unfortunately, this limit is heavily enforced by something. For every newborn that exceeds that limit, the oldest living person dies. We know this to be true by the nature of their deaths. Just a sudden cease in brain function.

Some governments imposed limits on birthrates while others did not. This caused an inadvertent power struggle across the world. Countries that regulated newborns saw a steady decrease in population as countries without were starting to expedite the death of the elderly. Eventually, limits were removed, and it became an all-out birth war. This caused a drastic shift in the age demographic of our planet. With the birth rate going unchecked, it started to directly impact our lifespan.

68 years, 2 months, 6 days, 7 hours, 13 minutes, 43 seconds

I stare at my phone to see the age of the oldest living person. Looking back inside the glass pane of the door, I can see my father passing around slices of cake. His eyes briefly met mine and then worked their way back to me again. He stares at me with a smile. I wipe away the streaks of tears slowly rolling down my cheeks. With a slight nod, he gestures me back inside. As I take a deep breath, I open the door to rejoin his last birthday.

Manmade Horrors Beyond our Comprehension

TW: tragedy, baby loss

Aiden stared at the clouds, thinking carefully about what it might mean.

Simulation theory. Aliens. A bizarre prank perpetrated by some billionaire tech bro.

“10M Human Lifeforms Achieved! Please upgrade your membership to continue growing your civilization.” Read the script emblazoned on the midday sky.

Aiden was not a foremost scholar in physics or philosophy or any combination thereof that might hold an answer to what he saw. In fact, he was a man of meager means, who worked himself to the bone for every scrap he got. He began this life with an ‘upbringing’ in a dank foster home, experiencing neglect in every sense of the word, and the only thing he could muster as a silver lining was his very ardent work ethic. He knew that as long as he worked hard, he could make sure he never found himself in that kind of situation again– surrounded by indifferent people, with no agency to improve his life. Through hard work, he could keep himself afloat financially, and by working hard to improve his understanding of what ‘friendship’ meant, he also eventually learned what it meant to be a ‘boyfriend’, then ‘husband’, and now, any day now, ‘father’ was his latest lesson.

Or…was it?

Aiden’s stomach began to twist into knots. What would it mean for his baby? For his pregnant wife?

Medicine had come a long way, so old people weren’t dying at the rate they used to.

Aiden flinched. He was wishing old people would die? Even if it was to make room for his child, what kind of warped and rusted-out kind of conscience did he have, if that was his first train of thought?

Clenching his hand until he felt his fingernails draw blood, Aiden decided to stow the topic away until more information came out. Maybe it was just a prank. Maybe he was freaking out over nothing.

In two days time, it was confirmed that he was not, in fact, freaking out over nothing.

The news anchors tried to use the gentlest phrasing possible, but there really wasn’t a way to phrase mass miscarriages in a polite way. People began protesting, demanding the government find a way to meet the ‘upgraded membership’ condition. Older people hid away from the general public, afraid of what they may be asked, afraid of what they would be accused of, afraid of what might happen to them.

Society as Aimen and Sadia knew it did not last long– and with Sadia expecting any day now, Aimen felt the hardening around his heart beginning. Not the kind that comes from eating deep-fried Oreos, either.

“Don’t even think about it.” Sadia said, cutting through Aimen’s darkened countenance. He had been staring out of the hospital window as she waited for an ultrasound, trying to ensure that the child hadn’t already been lost.

“Don’t think about what?” Aimen asked, trying to put on a brave face.

“I know how desperately you’ve wanted a family, baby. Don’t. We’ll figure something out. The entire world is trying to figure this out. We’ll come up with something.”

Aimen sighed, but not the kind of sigh that was paired with relief. Instead, it felt as though the weight in his chest grew heavier. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. It’s…I’m just not in a good head space. Sorry. This is probably much harder for you than it is for me.”

“Not a competition.” Sadia said. Her voice was warm, but firm, almost like she was correcting a very endearing and frustrating puppy. “It sucks for everyone. We just need to keep it together and not do anything irrational while we wait.”

“I’ve never been good at waiting. I’m just going to clear my head real quick, can I get you something?”

“Apple juice, please.” Sadia said with a very faint smile. It had been her only craving throughout the entire pregnancy.

Aimen managed a half smile back, and he stepped outside.

He hadn’t made it more than ten feet before he heard the noise. The sound of a plastic pan hitting the ground, shouting, then the first scream.

Just down the hall, there was a man with all the fury in the world behind his eyes. Aimen had a very solid guess as to why.

The man was shouting, throwing things, and as Aimen approached, he saw the reflected sunlight off of some kind of metal in the man’s left hand.

Aimen rushed in, unthinking. He had never been the type to wait.

The next minute was compressed into just two moments– when Aimen tried to grapple the man from behind, and when he felt the sharp sting across his throat.

Nurses and Doctors came quickly, Security pinned the man down. Aimen didn’t feel the pain anymore, though he was vaguely worried. He realized that he was confused…and then he felt cold. Medicine hadn’t come that far after all, he guessed.

—---------------------------------

Aiden pushed open the Simulation Casket. His memories– his real memories returned to him. The year was 2024. He wasn’t Aimen. He was a University student. He had signed up for a study. It was supposed to be about video game design.

Immediately, he threw up on the floor. The clash of what he had lived– a life that was almost as real as his own, come and passed, in what was probably just a few hours. The love he had felt for his wife. What was her name? He–

His dizzy vision slowly cleared. “What kind of Matrix bullshit was that?”

No one answered him. He wasn’t important enough to answer, apparently.

“Michael, clean up the mess. Aiden, there’s a shower just beyond that door. Please fill out the survey when you’re done.”

As reality sunk back in for Aiden, and he wrote a very precise review in the survey, he left Simulacrum Laboratories on shaking legs, and walked back to his dorm.

His neighbor was an electrician. Aiden went and spoke with him for a moment, asking to borrow a sledge hammer. Then he went to his dorm room, opened the mini-fridge, and drank a bottle of apple juice, before returning to the street, marching right back to Simulacrum Laboratories, sledge hammer in tow.

Aimen was not the type to wait.

The man walks south on High Street, his duster jacket painted in a thousand competing shades of red by the advertisements that line the street. Half the signs are in simplified Chinese or the phonetic bastard English that’s grown more popular these last few years, the other half just scream at you; sometimes they scream through words, other times through flesh. Tonight it’s flesh, and so when the man looks from side to side he finds himself cringing away from pictures of his ex. Her name was Mandy, not short for Amanda, and by dint of a two year relationship their pictures have become forever linked. The advertisements scan the viewer's face, search the Internet for weaknesses in his economic armor—points of purchase, Mandy used to call them—and use them to worm their way into his head. Mandy’s smiling face stares out at him from twenty different screens, sipping New Coke through a neon straw, or posing in oversized men’s shirts, hair mussed like she’s just picked them off his floor.

The man’s name is Jonah, and he was on his way to a bar downtown, but there were cops outside it, two officers and a cloud of blinking police aerostats, so now he’s drifting. It’s a cold night in early autumn; if there were trees their leaves would have started to turn colors. But there aren’t trees. Just like there aren’t cats or dogs or squirrels. Like how the bugs have been replaced by aerostats, miniature mechanical drones that flit across the night sky like stardust, like some child’s misplaced dream. The animals have all been jettisoned, the South has even solved kudzu. And Jonah, drifting through it all, is thinking about the Franchise.

At twenty-three, Jonah doesn’t have it. He’s not a citizen of these New United States, or of the Middle Kingdom’s Exclaves, or any of the other small, independent phyles that have sprouted up around the this part of the world. He is chronically undernourished, underpaid, and overworked. And he is sterile.

A few weeks ago Mandy won her Franchise in a lottery. Jonah has been over it a thousand times, and a part of him is grateful. He thinks now that he didn't really like her, just like she didn’t really like him. They were placeholders in each other’s lives, a thing you did because that’s what you were supposed to do. Because over however many millions of years the human animal was programmed to search out another human animal and pick lice out of her hair or something. So he’s free and feeling it, but he’s also sad. The advertisements are proof that it still bothers him, Coca-Cola’s marketing departing knows you better than you know yourself after all, so she must still have some kind of hold over him.

Jonah ducks into the first that doesn’t advertise her face at him. He buys a PBR from a shirtless bartender who’s sold all the skin on his chest to Playboy to hock magazines. It’s just an address, obscenity laws and all that, but the address spirals around the man’s pale chest hypnotically, and before he can look away it has reformed into Mandy’s face. Smiling. Sketched out on the bartender’s bare skin. He even recognizes the photograph.

Jonah finishes his PBR, tosses the can into the recycling bin, and stumbles back into the street.

In the ten minutes that he was away the advertisements have gone somehow more red. Chinese characters dance across the corners of his vision. Mandy’s face contorts around half a dozen photoshopped expressions. Jonah tries to think about the Franchise. He needs a plan, some way to get it, to get ahead, to make his life have meaning, but all he can think about is that the planet is full up. There’s ten billion souls and Mother Earth has had enough. We’ve scoured the rainforests, the highest mountain valleys, the deepest oceans, eliminated all the biomass we can, and still. Somewhere along the way humanity hit the carrying capacity of the planet, and from Challenger Deep all the way up to the fucking clouds, everything said “No.”

Jonah mulls this over on a street corner, waiting for the light to change. It has started to rain, and pedestrians are scattering into the bars and late night tea shops. He hears music, the high keening sound of feverbeat, which has gotten popular lately. Genres spring up overnight these days, and die out just as quick. Like a passing fever, Jonah thinks, and he smiles. He turns towards home, giving up on the night, and there, beneath another one of Mandy’s pictures, he sees a real life, honest-to-god human holding an old fashioned sign. Jonah squints, thinking his eyes are playing tricks on him, but the man waves the sign. He shouts, trying Mandarin first, but when Jonah shakes his head the man switches seamlessly to English.

“You look lost, friend!” he shouts. “Are you lost?”

“No,” Jonah shouts back, confused. “I live here!”

“Not that kind of lost!” And the man puts down his sign, which says, as best as Jonah can read the crabbed handwriting, Mr. Lun’s Ersatz Tomorrow.

The man steps into a shop nearby, and swaying to the frantic tempo of the feverbeat, Jonah steps in after him.

Inside, it is chaos. The shop is small and very cramped, and when the old man, Mr. Lun presumably, turns the lights on they spark and flicker, and he has to hit the unprotected bulb with a length of PVC tubing to make it work right.

Mr. Lun is a short man, stooped, whose threadbare hair is turning gray like the color leaching out of a well-worn sweater. He wears a thin blue windbreaker and grubby jeans. His hands are small and very fine, always moving. Grease-stained fingertips brush against his bulbous nose, the cluttered counter. As the light inside Mr. Lun’s shop stabilizes, Jonah sees patches of synthetic fur mounted for display. Half constructed cats peer up at him, and a mechanical dog darts out from behind a beaded curtain to fetch a tatty length of rope. When the dog picks it up, Mr. Lun has to spring forward and take the rope from him. The dog has snagged half a dozen electrical wires in the process. There are so many wires sketched across the floor that Jonah doesn’t know where to put his feet.

“Come in, come in,” Mr. Lun says. “I could tell that you were lost the moment that I saw you. It’s like an aura, gray waves coming off your skin. My mother would have seen them, but me? No, I just have my intuition.”

“What’s your intuition telling you, specifically?” Jonah asks.

“That you’re a man without a Franchise!”

“Me and half the world,” Jonah says.

“Lucky for you,” Mr Lun says, “I have just the thing.”

“A lottery ticket?”

“Better. An android.”

“You sell mechanical pets.”

“Oh yes,” says Mr. Lun. “Entirely artificial, no penalty against the biological maximum. Would you like a parakeet? They are quite popular. Parakeets and parrots and whole flocks of pigeons. I do cheshires, sphynxes and Maine Coons. Half a dozen breeds of dog. And for a price I can make you—”

“Ever do a human?” Jonah asks suddenly.

The salesman blinks. “Excuse me?”

“A human,” Jonah says again, “you ever make one?”

“Perhaps,” Mr. Lun says carefully. “Though if you’re interested in such fare there is a bordello down the street.”

Jonah hears himself speaking now. He’s moving without any conscious thought. He’s sad. He’s tired. He wishes that he’d had more to drink. “I’m not like…that,” he says. “Not an adult. A child, have you ever made child? I want…”

“Ah,” Mr. Lun says. “Ah. That would be…expensive.”

“I’ll figure it out,” Jonah says. “Could you make--damnit.”

Mandy’s face is in front of him now. He’s turned to look out the dirty window, and the advertisements across the street are screaming her at him. Did he love her? Maybe. Jonah asks himself the question. Asks it again. Wants to scream. Right now, somewhere across the country, she’s staring into a future that he will never have. There will be houses with white picket fences, vacations to exotic destinations, a family and children. And now, he’s decided, just now, thinking about that, maybe he did love her. At least a little. As much as he’s ever loved anyone, and maybe, Jonah thinks, that’s enough.

“Yes?” Mr. Lun says.

“Could you make it look like me?” Jonah asks. “Like it was my child with a particular person?”

“Very expensive,” Mr. Lun says. There’s a smile in his eyes. The dog curls at his feet and wags its skeletal tail. Besides the unfinished tail it’s very lifelike; you could look it straight in the eyes every morning and believe that it’s alive.

“I’ll manage,” Jonah says, and across the street the advertisements begin to change.

r/TurningtoWords

One part thought this was fantastic, we could finally grow our wealth and prosperity all over the world, giving everyone a roof over their heads, food on the table and a job to work. The other group was less than pleased, no more power to exploit the ever growing work force in the far east or subsaharan Africa, a lot less opportunity for buying a yacht, they'd have to start paying people more and could see a total downfall of the world's economy at the horizon.

A UN summit was arranged and a total frenzy was only stopped when one person asked: "So what happens with the kids and the old people? The kids are being born at the same rate old people are dying, which means that within 20 years we'll have a very old average global age and a dwindling work force under the pressure of having to care for the elderly. So do we kill the elderly? Do we stop giving them the healthcare they need? Do we let them die at a more natural age of 70-80 instead of 90-100? What do we teach the kids? How do we teach the kids? Schools will close down rapidly with the fewer amount of kids we're having. And where are more kids born? Is it in the western world? Is it in the far east? Is it in Africa? How do we secure the future of our children and how do we help the elderly? Do we facilitate access to euthanasia worldwide? How do religious orders view or explain this? What do we do?''

Each new question sparked another week of debate, five new threats of nuclear war, three new accusations of racism and seven new countries declaring independence. Yet over the years, as the population naturally grew older these questions became more and more pressing. Crime grew, suicides happened more often, poverty seemed to expand and hit the elderly the hardest of all. Each day, hundreds of people found their grandparents, neighbours or friends dead in their house, having starved, hung themselves or else simply died of old age. As the years went by, many of the ''old guard'' in politics, the Boomers if you will, died too. Younger folk began replacing them. Changes were made. Surplus from rich and developed nations were sent to countries in need. Borders softened. People got given opportunities to work in far flung areas of the world, having their travels, house and facilities all paid for by desperate corporations needing a work force. Things started improving.

40 years had passed, most people had a home, food and a job. Everyone seemed happy, kids' birthdays were celebrated by thousands each day. Old people were more and more willing to give their place up to new arrivals. All seemed well.

Until one day, a lonely government worker charged with keeping an eye on global population numbers, who had never seen the number differ from exactly 10,000,000,000 was startled. Fell of his chair and ran out of the room in a panic, trying to find his supervisor.

''Help, please come see this. It's urgent, I don't understand what happened or how it's possible, but you've got to see this.'' he cried when he finally found her.

''What is it? Why are you freaking out?'' she answered, quite perturbed from having been interrupted during her lunch break.

''Just, come with me, you'll see.'' He shouted, already running back.

''Well then, you'll be for later.'' she said to her sandwich before following him to the control room.

''Look!'' he shouted, ''I don't understand how it's possible or what is going on but this is a huge problem, what do we do?''

''Wha- I- How?" She stuttered, quite stumped by what she was seeing. She took a moment to compose herself before grabbing her phone and dialling her president. ''Mister president, sir. There's an issue. The numbers...''

''What is it? What's wrong with the numbers? What's going on?'' she heard from the other side.

''Sir, the numbers...'' She couldn't get the words out.

''What!? For goodness sake, tell me what is going on?'' He shouted, quite disturbed by this phonecall, he hadn't ever been called directly by the agency and frankly hadn't ever expected to be.

''Sir, the numbers...'' She swallowed her nerves, ''They're going down.''

It started with a thought that every human experienced. The thought that doomed mankind to eternal war and changed the world as we know it now.

The thought was a simple message of unknown origins: “Data limit reached, please upgrade membership to continue growing your civilisation.”

At first, many communities reacted in shock, disbelief and denial to it, some changing the spirit of the message to suit their own purposes. But the message was made clear in one thing; the population did not grow. The growth was essentially the same, a baby is born and an elder dies. The number of population remained where it was.

This caused many countries to create and enforce the policies about having children. US was most opposed to having a limit of how many children one could have and lobbied as much as it could have to stop it at UN. The corporations in Europe and US cried out in anger at the rising wages, and pushed governments to let in more refugees than ever before. Leading to US and its allies to do what they had done for decades. They funded terrorists, extreme political and religious organisations, far left politicians, drugs flow and smuggled weapons as well as staged coups to destabilise the weaker countries in order to keep them(and the prices) down and to keep the refugees running to the wealthy and developed countries.

China outraged at this blatant act of what the West was doing and no longer hid it, has started supporting Russia, NK and other anti-US countries openly. Earth was soon embroiled in wars where the global trade collapsed, and the economies were set back for decades. Ironically, the countries that were forced to keep running themselves in isolation imposed by West were benefiting enormously from their mostly independent economies.

Nukes were thrown around when a country realised it could not win this war of numbers and resources. The population dropped to 8 billions and continued falling as radioactive waste made love with crops and man.

Man was forced to rely on vertical and underground farms in order to keep producing nutritious and untainted food, yet it was not enough to support more than a few billion. The prices had imploded in the growth -based economies of West and led to poor work conditions as well as poor living standards comparable to the third world countries before the collapse of global trade, which was set up to be incredibly advantageous and profitable for West.

Humanity learned that having capitalism and an economy model based on growth that exploited resources and labour force from poor countries may not have been a good idea. The wealth and power eventually shifted from West to East. Under the different culture influence from East, the economy model of West changed to benefit people, and not a few corporates and extremely wealthy people. Living standards and working condition improved greatly in the new world, mankind knew wealth equality once more. A golden age was ushered in as the world policy kept a tight control on the births and ensured that the population number did not become more than 8 billion, with the support of care robots and encouraged use of euthanasia for elders and mentally crippled people(such as comatose people never to awaken again).

TW: suicide (not depicted)

"What do you think it means?" President Stone asked during the emergency meeting.

"Obviously this is not a prank. How are people seeing clouds spell words when their shouldn't have been the right atmospheric conditions for even a few cirrus clouds? That's like saying everyone got a letter on New Years, how? The mail doesn't deliver then." Meriden, the NOAA director said.

Such a meeting was beyond their station, but answers were needed now, and when the gods send letters via clouds, who better than the cloud expert? At least that's why President Stone suggested them, but they were not helping calm the situation. "Thanks for thar wealfh of information. And what of our rivals?"

"Several cyberattacks have been launched, but we believe they are seeking answers. To the best of our knowledge, none were successful, but we'll xontinue to monitor the situation." Sid, the CIA director said calmly.

"Attacks you say?" President Stone could work with that, an understandable enemy. "It was the Russians right? Tell me it was the Russians."

"It was everybody and naturally we did our own."

"And we did em the American way." Jackson, the NSA director said without permission. "And I can confidently say, they have no idea why nearly 2/3 of births quit being successful after the skype."

"You can't just associate a company with a bad thing." Sid admonished.

"I'm sure Corona disagrees, but fine, the cloud message." Jackson said.

"So what is the solution? Should we advocate for less Medicare funding to let the elderly die off? We can't let our workforce get too skewed." President Stone said, hoping to return to the actual point of the meeting.

"India was the first to try. The population dropped since it apparently means 10B exactly. It does not respect soceirgnty so killing our own would depend on luck, luck that an American happened to be born in that fraction of a second." Sid reported, looking troubled for the first time. He knew what that meant.

"Which means the solution is war!" General Bradshaw shouted with anticipation.

The table looked at him. Was this dude for real? He was a holdover from the last administration, "but what kind of cliché villain shit is that." President Stone started mumbling.

"It's practical sir. The only way to ensure enough die for our citizens to be born is to coordinate c-sections and military operations. Even a bleeding heart like yourself can't ignore such pragmatic advice, because how long will it take the other party to figure this out."

They'd already decided that of course. But in an even less constructive way. Why feed prisoners when we can save babies? Why feed the poor when we can save the future? Disgusting. President Stone sighed, hoping to release his frustration.

"Please." President Stone said, pleading with Marcus, the NASA director.

He twiddled his thumbs for a while. "Of the five we sent, four were still births. We don't know if it was because of a null-g birth, getting to space during a lage stage pregnancy, or the curse. We don't have enough data on any of this because we've always listened to the wrong person when we had the chance." He finished by speaking to the General.

"We'd have just reached it sooner if it weren't for our heroism."

"More like opportunism."

"Opportunism? Sure we are kept from getting the work done in-"

"Even now!?" President Stone shouted before speaking calmly, "We need to stop vigilante justice, we need to make sure nobody has the bright idea to nuke about a billion people out of existence, and we have to find a reasonable solution that won't immediately cause the first two problems somehwere else."

"That would be ideal." Sid deadpanned.

"And that means we need to find solutions."

Hours passed and the one thing they did not find was solutions. War, cutting instead of expanding Medicare, and promoting immigration were the only things that didn't seem even more terrible. "Let's return in an hour, consult your advisors, eat a meal, and let's come up with a plan that isn't shit." President Stone said before leaving the conference. He couldn't do it, no, he wouldn't be forced to do it.

President Stone had a Monte Cristo sent up, the sweet ham and powdered sugar made it a meal for a child, but he needed some indulgence on this time of hell. Forget his agenda, some asshole was data capping them because they were too cheap.

When the sandwich arrived, he turned on the television to watch the Pope's address. "Brothers and sisters, children of God. Today is a day of trials. This is an era of tribulations. But the Lord Almighty has given us the model we must follow. After much prayer and while searching the ancient catacombs of the Vatican linraries that I was blessed with the answer. Suicide is a sin, perhaps one of the worst since it means you cannot repent or seek forgiveness. And yet, we also know that Jesus chose to die for our sins. How do we reconcile this act of willful death for a greater purpose, as a divine sacrifice, with the command that we must not end our own lives?" The pope paused for dramatic effect, both hands outstretched before hammering a fist into the other's palm. "Purpose. Purpose is the difference between selfish and sinful suicide versus noble sacrifice. To end your own suffering, the challenges the lord planned to test and grow your soul is selfish. It is difficult to be forgiven. And yet, when it is for another's sake, nay many other's whom you do not personally know, then it might be just. It is these thought that have revealed the truth, we must sacrifice ourselves so our grandchildren may live. It is with a heavy heart and a lightened soul that I share such morbid answers. It is our duty to preserve what must be saved, the innocence of tomorrow."

The speech went on for nearly an hour as he gave an increasingly nuanced description of his doctrinal interpretation and who specifically he meant. President Stone didn't have time for it, but the conference resumed entirely different, "Our birth rates are back in-line with pre-message levels." said Dr. Patricia, director of the NIH.

r/AurumArgenteus

Welcome to the Prompt! All top-level comments must be a story or poem. Reply here for other comments.

Reminders:

>* Stories at least 100 words. Poems, 30 but include "[Poem]" >* Responses don't have to fulfill every detail >* See Reality Fiction and Simple Prompts for stricter titles >* Be civil in any feedback and follow the rules

🆕 New Here? ✏ Writing Help? 📢 News 💬 Discord

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]