A Reasonable World

The twentieth century was one of great change and turmoil. The First and Second World Wars claimed 87 million lives, both military and civilian; in the Spanish Civil War and in the Second World War, for the first time in the century, civilian populations were strategically targeted. One hundred, thirty-five thousand perished in the fire-bombing of Dresden, 110,000 more in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mortalities in the nuclear destruction of Tel Aviv-Jaffa totaled 500,000. Counting lesser conflicts in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, the death toll was 92 million.

During the same period, the population of the world rose from 1.5 billion to 5 billion. It had been projected to reach 6 billion by the year 2000, but fell short of that mark by reason of the famines, pandemics, and world-wide economic collapse of the late nineties.

Nevertheless, extensive ecological damage had already been done. Acid rain from industrial and automobile emissions had destroyed many of the forests of Europe and North America. The deliberate deforestation of the Mato Grosso had turned that area into a desert; together with acid rain and other deforestation around the globe, this led to extensive changes in global temperature, weather patterns and the oxygen content of the ocean and atmosphere. Many perished in floods, typhoons and hurricanes, or starved as a consequence of flood and drought in unexpected places.

In the last year of the century a new challenge confronted the world: McNulty’s Symbiont, named for the physician who discovered it aboard the ocean habitat Sea Venture. It was later determined that MS was a coherent energy system, possibly of extraterrestrial origin, capable of intelligent action and of taking human beings and other animals as hosts. Its influence on human beings was alarming: former hosts exhibited a strong tendency to break their vocational and emotional ties, leading to a crisis for industry and government. As they proliferated through the population, using rats and other small mammals as intermediate hosts, the symbionts began to interdict most acts of violence on the part of human beings.

By the year 2005 the world was in the grip of sweeping change. For the first time in centuries, there was no war or threat of war anywhere in the world. Other changes, at first imperceptible, were altering human society in unprecedented ways.

The Twenty-first Century

by A. R. Howarth and Lynette Ford