Before I return to my series on consent, this is a side post for the holidays.
I was encouraged (read: backed into a corner - thanks… and you know who you are!) to write a treatment for a book for a literary competition today. The rules required that we pre-register, then recieve the keyword or topic that must be in the story at midnight GMT, and we had until 23:59 (24 hours) to return a 2-3 page treatment for a book we would propose to write.
The topic we were given was “save the world” and I am absolutely certain the judges were after some net zero climate woke puffery about how we are currently in carbon meltdown.
But given my analytical and sceptical mind… that just isnt me.
I present here the treatment I wrote for the competition.
Tell me what you think in the comments below. If enough people want to see it fleshed out as a serialised book built on real and current events and reasonably grounded science, and taking their outcome to reductio ad absurdum, then I may consider making it a weekly paid subscriber channel - much like Andy Weir did with his original The Martian story.
I now bid you welcome to… Future World
The Setting:
Under the influence of ideologies and globalist agendas during the early 21st century, the Earth has become a dying planet of two peoples.
The Many are two billion highly regulated and surveilled human-like clones. They are the extreme outcome that resulted from the transgender and ethnicity, diversity and inclusion agendas that proliferated the second and third decades of the 21st century. Genetically modified, they start life as unremarkable homogeneous beings with pale grey skin lacking any physical differentiation or identifiable outward sex characteristics. As CRISPR-cas9 and other genetic engineering technologies improved, the requirement for these changes became law. Rather than being allowed to procreate and produce offspring as humans had for hundreds of thousands of years, couples must wait until they are assigned the right to have a child. At that time the mother is implanted with a cloned egg. On reaching ten years of age the minor clone attends special classes intended to aid their selection of the sex they would like to live out their life as. A retrovirus is injected that rewrites the 23rd chromosome and over the course of several months, the obvious primary and secondary sexual characteristics develop. Puberty then occurs in the largely familiar way and completes by the time the child is 15. However, the clones all remain pale grey and within this class the racial distinctions common in previous millennia no longer exist. The clones lived to work and worked to live. While they could accumulate meagre possessions, they could never accumulate wealth as everything about their daily lives was heavily regulated.
The self-appointed Few number less than fifty thousand and are the last remaining true humans. Descendants of royalty and the mega-wealthy from the early-to-mid 21st century, they continue to be born, grow to adulthood, meet, marry, and procreate in the same way that their ancestors did. The artificially enforced imperative for families to retain their property, power and status led to in-family marriage and a resurgence of familial genetic weaknesses that had been common to the inbred royal families of earlier ages. Haemophilia, learning difficulties, vision and hearing loss, sterility and difficulty conceiving were commonplace and meant that the few were a population rapidly on the decline. The heads of these powerful families were becoming ruthlessly single minded, each in a power struggle without realising it. The pursuit of wealth had given way to the retention and abuse of power. After all, it was difficult to find new sources of wealth when your family owned and controlled everything within your city limits, including the cloned workers. Instead, these petty tyrants descended to new depths of savagery and depravity. They cruelly abused and slaughtered clones for pleasure, believing the clones were not human. They thought of them as possessions, in much the same way that you owned a robot or a mobile communicator. And the sexual tastes of some of the Few had become the stuff of legend, stories told to excite or elicit abject revulsion in others. Eventually one would be the final remaining family and at that time would control the entire planet. Each year around fifteen families died out, their properties and assets fought over, carved up and consumed by those remaining around their borders.
Politicians had not only radically altered the human race, net zero carbon and other virtue signalling environmental policies had limited the movement of people and shifted power generation from fossil fuels and other carbon-rich sources to thousands of local nuclear reactors. Millions of tonnes of nuclear waste ate its way through plastic and metal barrels stored in vast underground vaults, seeping into the rock and eventually, after several hundred years, into the water table. The populace were punitively penalised for any infraction of the carbon code and as increasingly more wasteful and poisonous ‘carbon-neutral’ solutions were required, the planet became increasingly more toxic. When humans and animals returned to being the primary sources for carbon dioxide the plant life that consumed that carbon dioxide and, through photosynthesis, turned it into sugars, began to die off. Small pockets of greatly manicured green spaces remained around the human and clone settlements but, as less and less plant life grew, fewer animals survived and eventually they too began to die out. The Earth was dying.
During the later half of the 21st and early 22nd centuries, and while true humans still lived among the new clones, groups of dissenters formed small separatist colonies in remote areas. Eventually, as it became possible to move into small orbiting stations and colonies on the moon and Mars, they left the earth to the increasingly communist-like globalists and their clones. The humans that lived in these off-Earth colonies continued to live largely as humans had for thousands of years, except without the tyranny of enforced poverty and medical and genetic oppression that those who became parents to clones suffered back on Earth. While medical and scientific knowledge was fast becoming the realm of a small few of the privileged elite on Earth, it flourished in the off-Earth colonies. Individual health improved, new technologies like nanorobotics made life safer and easier, and life expectancies once again began to increase. In stark contrast to the dying Earth and the depression and futility felt by the vast majority of its inhabitants, those in the colonies thrived and began looking outward to the stars.
The Story:
By the year 2900 the new ice age scientists predicted in TV personality Leonard Nimoy’s ‘In search of the coming Ice Age’ documentary in 1978 had arrived, primarily as a result of blind adherence to net zero carbon policies. Arctic ice had crossed the 45th parallel north, invading northern Spain and parts of New Hampshire in the USA. Similarly, the Antarctic ice sheet now extended across the southern oceans up to the 50th parallel south, making it possible for intrepid explorers to walk from the southern tip of Chile all the way to the south pole. Parts of the remaining planet are unliveable due to the seepage of nuclear waste from facilities in Finland, Germany, and Nevada, and the more recently commissioned central Australian Deep Underground Nuclear Containment Establishment (DUNCE). Most of the planet was given over to desert or grassland, with the only remaining trees growing within the heavily curated wilderness zones around the human cities.
The remaining people, both the more human Few and the cloned and considered less human Many, live in enclosed cities, the oldest being Saudi Arabia’s The Line. These cities had been self-sustaining for several centuries, producing oxygen from hydrolysis of desalinated sea water, growing food in vertical farms and vats, and fulfilling any material needs from largely automated manufacturing facilities. However, the cities were gradually beginning to fall into disrepair. Automation and perdurability over several generations had left people ignorant of how many key life-sustaining technologies functioned, their design and construction described only in long-lost blueprints that few would have recognised even if they had forethought to seek them out. The enhanced cellular mitosis cloning process used to create the Many, essentially making them all copies of copies of copies, was succumbing to the inevitable genetic degradation. A significant percentage of new clones failed to survive to maturity sufficient to undergo sexual assignment, while many of those that did died in their 30s and 40s due to genetic disorders that caused cancers and organ failures. When the automated pharmaceutical plants stopped producing the weekly vaccinations the clones had long been dependant on, many also died from even seemingly minor infections and injuries. Several cities had already fallen, the powerful Few fleeing to become a second class in other cities, dying out, or being overthrown by the clones that eked out an existence in the rapidly decaying ruins. As systems began to degrade and the Many of several remaining cities began to rise up, the Few swallowed their pride and reached out to the leaders of the off-Earth colonies for help.
Thomas, the current chief technologist at the lunar colony, is despatched to Earth city Aurora. Constructed as a domed fifteen minute city over the remains of Vienna during the 23rd century, Aurora had lost four out of its five water treatment plants and its nuclear reactor had a minor containment tank breach forcing the Few to euthanise radiation-affected clones that had lived in that part of the city. Even without those deaths, the clone attrition rate meant fewer than one in every twelve clones survived to maturity, and of those that did, only two in ten would live to see their sixth decade. The situation for the Few and any remaining flora and fauna was barely any better. No member of the Few was born now without one or more serious hereditary disorders, and the remaining animal species would have been unrecognisable to humans from the previous millennia. The request Thomas had received from the Chief Arbiter of the Lunar colony had been short and direct. Fix the cities, heal the people and then, if sufficient resources or technology exists, try to heal the planet and encourage those that remain out of Few-imposed captivity. He had his work cut out for him.
As Thomas rushes to solve the problems of ancient nuclear reactors threatening to explode and contaminate almost one third of the remaining habitable zone of the planet, a lucky find could potentially save the entire biosphere. A magnitude 6.8 earthquake centred about half a kilometre below Weinerwald, in the Vienna Woods, caused catastrophic damage to areas both around and under the Aurorean dome. While digging for survivors through the collapsed labyrinthine sub-basements of old Vienna under the main dome floor that had fallen during an earthquake, members of Thomas’ team of assigned clone workers came across a storehouse of old patents, blueprints and textbooks lost in a bank vault for several centuries. Within these records Thomas finds designs for original 21st century era nuclear reactors. He also finds the original writings and public documents that established what had been the communist globalist dark age of the last almost 9 centuries. When Thomas begins investigating what caused the planet’s biome to die, he finds that the initially gradual, and eventually rapid, depletion of carbon dioxide and several other trace gasses in the atmosphere had largely been to blame. On establishing that these were the result of net zero carbon policies in the 21st century, he sets a plan in motion to correct these atmospheric imbalances.
Later, while seeking a solution to the genetic degradation of both the Few and the Many, Thomas discovers that he shares direct familial DNA with the family of the last remaining Few in Vienna. In effect, they had a common ancestor almost nine centuries earlier. With the assistance of reproductive scientists and geneticists from the moon and mars, eggs were harvested from willing subjects and sent to Earth to be fertilised with repaired DNA taken and merged from couples that had formed from the remaining Earth-based individuals. For the first time in almost 900 years, children with DNA from their parents were born on the planet’s surface. In the old documents Thomas found mention of a seed bank under the permafrost of Svalbard. An exploratory team is despatched to locate and assess the viability of it’s contents. Thomas met and fell in love with Jenelle, the youngest female descendant of the Vienna Few. As the last of Jenelle’s family died, Thomas was selected by the Many to assume the role of Chief Arbiter of the cities Jenelle’s family controlled. The story ends as his children and the children of several families of the Many play together in a new park dedicated to the survivors of humanity’s darkest age. The scratchy and broken voice of a now octogenarian Thomas can be heard on every communicator and viewer in the country reciting the Thomas Proclamation. His final gift to the people of Earth... was the Earth itself.
Excellent story - thank you!
Great work! I enjoyed that… probably not too far from the truth…