The Secret Ingredient
It is the year 2076 and there are one billion people left on Earth.
Where did the other five or six billion go? You may well ask. Well, a chain which, for copyright reasons, we will call MacDonalds, put a special ingredient in their special sauce that made about 4/5 of the population sterile. Nobody really thinks Ray Kroc’s descendants were behind the scheme, the likely candidates all have pharmaceutical companies and bought stock in BK.
Why nine in ten? You may well ask. I don’t know, however. Four out of five people, black or white, short or tall, dwarf, hermaphroditic elf or giantess are rendered sterile by the secret ingredient, give or take. The reason for the immunity in the tenth is not known to me and may not be known to whoever planted the ingredient, just as it is unknown why one in a hundred members of the Negroid race are immune to the HIV virus. Or it could be known, like why one in a hundred members of the Caucasoid race are immune to the HIV virus (two defective Chemokine-Receptor 5’s).
Speaking of HIV, after much of the world mated and bore no heirs the population suffered a steep drop to say the least. Then it was discovered why and shortly after a lot of people had a lot of sex. Fertile with Sterile for obvious reasons, Fertile with Fertile for reasons which may be guessed but which will be elucidated shortly, and Sterile with Sterile for any reason at all: comfort, shock, masochistic self-flagellation. In any case, the majority of this sex was unprotected and now even of those that survived the first generation (the ingredient hitting the shelves in January 2003) and have continued to breed AIDS is widespread.
More interesting: more or less the entire generation that was born sterile has died off. It is not unusual for people to live far beyond 73 years; this generation simply never seemed to have a particular reason to do so.
Left with around 1,000,000 still capable of breeding, why, if it has been such a bareback love-fest, has the Earth not replenished its choking supply of humans? Because, with a nod to Mendel, sterility is recessive. Why hasn’t it been bred out? I can find no reason for that except that it doesn’t seem to want to be.
Immediately after the news hit Fertiles everywhere were working away at a kid-a-year plus. They were on a personal mission to repopulate the Earth, but they’ve only managed to tread water. Actually, "personal mission" seems the wrong phrase, as the real reason for the kid-a-year regimen, if you ask me as you may, is the same reason as before the reproductive inoculation: religious factions are engaged in the reproductive twin of the arms race. If there are born 100,000 Catholics and only 50,000 Protestants we’re looking at a sparkling new Vatican.
Yes, birthing hips have returned to style, those wishing to acquire them can be found at BK.
What is the world like with one billion people? It is frantic to teem with too many god damn people once more. Maybe the entire world is still supposed to be like Tokyo at rush hour and the Hamburglars actually messed with the order of things. To be honest I wasn’t surprised it came from MacDonalds, I have always believed Hamburglar to be an escaped Nazi war criminal from his disguised appearance to his inability to say anything but, "Rommel! Rommel!"
Should you wonder how Big Mac avoiding Aborigines were struck as well as Peta-supporters (not that they couldn’t have eaten a Big Mac safely) the obvious answer is that even the immune could communicate it to others. There was a lot of adoption before people found that out.
Many wonder what the sterility bug came from originally. Some argue that it was within the MacDonalds system itself, in the soyburgers, the beetles that become strawberry shake coloring or the legendary maximum allotment of earthworm. Other plain-sight theories supported LA tap water. No one ever found out, as no person or group ever claimed responsibility.
The worst of it was after the news broke and billions of people were walking around, sterile.
"Je suis sterile?"
"¿Soy sterile?"
"I cain’t have kids?"
"There are to be no little ones?"
These were the questions heard round the world.
Then came the great fear of death.
Fertile children teasing sterile children on the playground. Fertile wives leaving sterile husbands and anger against the millions of homosexuals that just wanted to adopt anyway and weren’t really that put out. And the fear that you could do what you wanted to yourself, contract whatever you wanted without fear of passing it down to future generations, but when you died it became all too clear: that was it. Four-fifths of the world was suddenly terminal. A funeral would mourn a whole family line.
When we leave this world we leave behind two things: children and trouble. More than four billion, unless their virile days were past, left only the latter.
As it was before the special sauce we were killing ourselves with smoke, each other with guns, and the world with oil. Smoking became a crime after enough powerful Steriles equated it with murder of the species. Guns are finally out of homes, human life now seeming at least nominally dear enough to prevent bringing the race closer to extinction. Punishment for killing a Fertile was much steeper than the reverse. There was also a sort of return to the Amish for many of those afflicted, they sought to avoid the thousand deaths afforded by modern living: cancer from cell-phones, carbon-monoxide from cars, Los Angeles. Ironically, many of the would-be homesteaders met their maker ahead of time by not pasteurizing their milk or not following Jewish dietary law (that sneaky trichinosis).
Some Steriles killed themselves. Many sat about morbidly waiting for the reaper to show up. Many have written all sorts of things and go desperately about door to door trying to get people to read them, hoping to live on somehow. Some listened to Antony and went the road of what lives on, committing acts of bioterrorism especially targeting maternity wards (sour grapes if you ask me, as you may). Some of those struck sterile that were rich and powerful enough had their genetic material transplanted into someone else’s semen. Isn’t that a song from "Chess"? "Someone else’s Semen"? "One Night in Bang Cock"? Their eventual offspring proved, as their progenitors, sterile.
Struck barren and the clock is ticking. T-Minus sixty years and counting, with no hope of passing on your genetic material. Sixty years left until zero. You have a fatal disease called life. Better write a poem or paint a picture, better make it good.