Assorted Shorts

Playing it Safe

"If you say so, dear."

Nothing made Miriam Tanner feel grown up quite so much as using expressions first heard on her mother's lips. Her husband, sitting across the dining room table, had stopped speaking long enough to sip from his morning coffee. She had used the opportunity to offer this piece of wifely encouragement.

They had been married for nearly two years now, just long enough for Miriam to build up a catalogue of certain faults in her husband's make up. Minor things of course. Nothing important. Even endearing if you made the effort to think of them in that way. And she did. There was his tendency to bring his work home him, for example. He was a lecturer at the university.

He swallowed the coffee and continued, "But think about it. The human race staggered into the twenty-first century war-worn and weary, and yet there was a sense of optimism back then. The Berlin Wall had come down a mere decade earlier. Technology and the internet were still racing along at full tilt. Vast swathes of Asia that just a few decades earlier we'd all but written off to communism – we were belatedly discovering they were better capitalists than we were. None of these things lasted, sad to say. But our century started well, you can say that much for it. The way things are falling apart now, if we can only get to the end of our own century in anything like the same shape we entered it then posterity will have reason to be enormously grateful to us..."

The house where Miriam and Peter lived was what a real estate agent might call a luxury executive residence, and what the rest of us would call a McMansion. It even had a picket fence. Miriam needed only look up to see it outlined through the gauzy curtain of the dining room window. There was a garden, too, looking almost tidy from this distance.

"... History is approaching the point of inflection, you see? The point at which, instead of speeding up, things start slowing down. Peak oil, peak carbon, peak people. It's the eye of the needle. If we can survive this, get through the next fifty years or so, then everything will get a lot easier. So that's all we owe to posterity – just to survive in more or less one piece."

"You don't make it sound like a good time to bring a child into the world." Miriam viewed childbirth as an amalgam of mild terrors – the physical indignities of the act itself through to the loss of freedom that was assumed to follow. Of course, she also expected these to dissipate rapidly once the choice to procreate had been made. In the meantime, she was not averse to picking up excuses for her stance if they happened to be in the air. Nor to injecting the subject into the conversation. If there was any contradiction between these two policies, she didn't feel it.

"A bad time for children? Not necessarily. Not if you are an optimist. You know, I think that's why they picked me. If you are going to ask someone to develop a scenario for how to get humanity through the next fifty to one hundred years or so, you want to pick someone who believes there really is a future to be had."

"They want you to map out the entire future of humanity?" Miriam tried not to sound too sceptical. "Isn't that a little ambitious?"

"Well. What they really want is for me to build a set of psychological profiles."

"Oh?" Miriam looked up from buttering a piece of toast to prompt her husband with a complaisant smile.

"They used the example of a mission to Mars. Imagine it: you'd need intricate preparations. You'd need to calculate the trajectory, exactly how much rocket fuel is required, how much food and oxygen to take. But you also need to plan the psychology. If you're going to have this bunch of people stuck inside a small spaceship for a long period of time, you need to make sure they are compatible. But you also need a range of types – leaders and followers, the right mix of extroverts and introverts, creative and practical types. That's where I come in."

"I see."

"So what they have asked me to do – it's just the same idea on a slightly larger scale. Spaceship Earth."

"But what use is that? People already are what they are. Aren't they?"

"Oh, it's just a research project, a thought experiment. Imagine designing a society from the ground up, purpose-built to face the challenges of the future. Doesn't that sound interesting?"

"I suppose so. But who are these people?"

"The Sanderson Institute? A think tank. Funded by a loose affiliation of billionaires, as far as I can make out."

"Do you know what they plan to do with these profiles? Once you've provided them?"

Peter shrugged. "Who can fathom the motives of billionaires?"

"But you still intend to go ahead with it?"

"Whatever they're up to, there's a lot of money behind it. My being involved – it can't help but shore up my position in the department. With backers like that behind me, they can hardly deny me tenure any longer can they? Could turn out to be a good time to think about starting a family after all." He looked across at his wife and winked.

"If you say so, dear."

Miriam got up and began clearing away the breakfast things. As she carried the dishes across to the sink she paused, looked thoughtful.

"Peter?"

Her husband looked up. "Yes?"

"These psychological profiles you're making for them. You'll include profiles that cover you and me, won't you? You know. Just to be on the safe side."