Surprises

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 8 DAYS

“Samantha gave you only part of the story behind the new number of regions,” my confidential source Sally told me when asked for comment about the status of strategy testing by WICO. “The tests revealed that regions are in the process of becoming uninhabitable, so we grew the number to include what would have existed before the process began in 2005. The number we used before was found to be the number of regions that could have been lost by 2020 if the Global Emergency wasn’t declared. We expect to save dozens by implementing the strategy.”

I asked if there were any other major surprises from the test results. “One consequence is that your nation isn’t fully in collapse,” she said. I recalled that she had made a big deal about how the U.S. was practically hanging by a thread, saved only by its relationships with the rest of the world. “The average is getting close, though, with nearly two-thirds of your people already there and one-fourth of your regions uninhabitable. Particularly surprising is its strong similarity to the world-at-large.”

Sally emphasized that a major part of the global strategy involves attempting to “recover” the so-called uninhabitable regions by making them safe for the kinds of life that we depend on to grow in them. “Anything that can’t be directly consumed by plants or animals over a period of a year or less needs to be either made so or removed. Toxic substances must likewise be removed or made non-toxic. Any transfer of such materials must be done so that no other region is adversely impacted. Of course, priority will be given to anything that reduces the habitability of multiple regions, such as climate-changing gases in the atmosphere.”

This brought up the controversial suggestion Friday by Zara Adsa that bioengineering might be used to assist with cleaning the air of harmful substances. Sally said that she doesn’t have a problem with that, as long as the impacts are well understood with controls in place before deployment. “Application of the Precautionary Principle is critical to success,” she added, “but when it attenuates response to the overall threat then the best course is to rely on the simplest and most historically reliable approaches such as assisting nature to do most of the work.”

Reality Check

While Sally’s statistics are accurate within the context of the simulation, her reasons for discovering them are contrived for the purpose of storytelling.