It's been about 200 years since the Lotteries picked up. The first couple of generations were understandably resistant and the draconian measures taken to enforce the Lotteries were...harsh. Usually the severity of punishment doesn't really have much bearing on whether the punishment will affect future breaches, but there are times when I think people lack imagination. There are ways, and there are ways to make people regret their transgressions, and some of those ways really make an impression on the witnesses. When the government controls your education, your employment, even your reproduction, their scope for retribution against malefactors can be pretty broad.
How the dissolution of human society happened at first was not much. People were still starving. People were still standing toe to toe. Cities were big and getting bigger, farms were enormous and growing to encompass entire counties as agricorps swelled to ever larger proportions to exercise economies of scale that kept food growing while keeping it affordable. Same as last year, last decade, last century. So to try to reel in the seemingly unstoppable expansion of human population, a worldwide Reproduction Lottery was adopted - yes, I use that word with my tongue firmly in cheek - and enforced, like I said, harshly. In general you have about a ten percent chance of winning the right to have a child. Not in any one year, ever. And of course, you can't have a kid by yourself. You have to find someone else of the opposite sex to have a baby with you, and it helps if they're compatible with you, and you can see how this could really pare down the birth rate. And it did. But the population wasn't really going down very fast.
Thousands of years of medical science will do that. Humans live pretty long lives anymore. With sufficient food, shelter and access to necessary care, you can just putter along, getting older and older but never really dying.
Then after about four generations of Lotteries - call it a hundred years, that's close enough - we started to see some changes.
The population started to really fall off. Not the little half percentage or so you'd expect in a year, but one-and-a-half, then two, then suddenly three percent. Three whole percent of the entire human population died in one year! In one hundred years of Lotteries, the human population had stopped growing, but it wasn't until just a hundred years ago that the trend had really started to move in the other direction, and suddenly it wasn't just a trend.
Three percent of thirteen billion people is nearly 400 million. Four hundred million people dying of various causes - mostly old age but not exclusively - is about eight times what it was in, for instance, the year 2000.
Some things got cheaper. Food got a lot cheaper for a while, but then the agricorps started to lose cohesion. Three percent is a lot in one year and you kind of expect it to be an outlier, so you absorb the losses and keep on going with your usual production except there's another year, and another, and another with the global population shrinking to the tune of an entire large country's worth of people not being there anymore and when you're a global agricorp, there are no other markets to expand to. The entire planet is your customer.
So the agricorps start digging into each other's market shares. Things get heated and pretty soon it isn't just corporate espionage we're reading about on the newsfeeds, it's corporate incursions, corporate assassinations and even outright corporate warfare, a strange, mostly bloodless war that doesn't assault humans but the fleets of rolling stock that sow and tend and harvest the world's food. The biggest corporations have all the money and are de facto governments, controlling the flow of the most basic staples that feed entire continents.
And in the face of these conflicts, the Lotteries continue. Fewer and fewer babies are born, people continue to age and die at the rate they have been for decades. The median age of a human being is about fifty-eight years old, which I'm told is downright alarming.
Healthcare was, if not a growing field, then a field whose share of the job assignment market was growing. There weren't as many healthcare job assignments needing filled as there used to be, but there were substantially less of other roles. The proportion of the population that is too old to care for itself was growing fast; even as the oldsters were dying off by the millions there weren't anything like that many babies being born to grow up and mature into the job market. So more and more of us got slotted into the role of taking care of our burgeoning elder population.
When the last global agricorp had won its decades-long war against its remaining competitor, it filed bankruptcy and dissolved less than five years later. Faced with monopolistic control of the entire market, the last agricorp decided it could charge whatever it wanted, learned the hard way that it couldn't, and was violently dissolved by enraged governments. But before they fell, the company's leaders destroyed the factory that built new harvesters and completely scrambled the control network for the existing ones. The bastards.
There's a small but vigorous group of hackers struggling to work their way through the palimpsest of security measures and obfuscatory code that makes up the control systems to get even one harvester working. A single harvester could do the work of a hundred strong workers. But the security codes are self-adjusting and the hackers have to do their regular jobs too. They say they're a couple of years away from cracking the codes, but they've been a couple of years away for about twenty years.
So now we skip ahead another few years and here's where we find ourselves. For every able bodied adult currently walking around on this planet, here's about fifty-sixty senior citizens unable to provide for themselves . A lot of manufacturing is automated, thankfully, so medicines and geriatric care equipment isn't dependent on there being enough of us youngsters to crank out walkers, wheelchairs and Lisinopril. You can live a long, long time and that's your right as a citizen.
You're also guaranteed your right to food. That's where I come in.
This is the other sector of the assignment market that's gaining share. As the world still has to eat, and there aren't enormous robotic armies of seeders and sprayers and cultivators and harvesters to produce the food, there have to be enormous human armies of workers to tend the fields. There aren't many kids being born though because even now the Lotteries are still in effect, so there aren't many new, young backs coming on to help share the load.
I'm a pretty smart guy and I could build a tractor, given the time and equipment. It doesn't even need to be good equipment. It wouldn't be a good tractor that resulted but it would be sufficient to replace me and probably about twenty other workers. But the Assignment Bureau doesn't have a job labeled Tractor Builder or Factory Builder and frankly they're so swamped with everything else I'm not sure they could spare the time to create the occupation. Because the need for food never really goes down, you see. People age at the rate they always have, but new workers to replace them aren't appearing at anything like the same rate.
These are the things I think about in the endless days of hot sun, dragging plows, swinging hoes, toting baskets, pulling carts. A radical shift in the balance of birth and death has skewed everything else. As people get older and leave their old jobs, their burden on the means of production that keep them alive continues, but there aren't enough workers to take up those tasks. And now we, the workers, suffer the real hell that is 100% employment. We go where we're sent, and can't question the sending.
And it will only get worse. As long as the Lotteries continue to skew the birth-death ratio, the weight of the preceding generations will continue to pile ever more heavily on increasingly smaller subsequent generations, eating and eating.
This is the future that stretches out before me. This is the future that stretches out before the unborn baby represented by the slip of paper in my pocket. The Lottery announcement that congratulates me for being selected completely at random to produce a new person to slot into my old job, to prop me up, me and a dozen of my fellow former producers.
I can't think that this is the kind of future a human being is supposed to have, to work endlessly, nonstop until they're too old and infirm to work, and then to just...hang around...until their body finally stops working. Surely we're meant for more than this? Looked at one way, knowing without question that you will never be unemployed is a balm of sorts. I've seen some of the old videos, read the accounts. Economic disasters the result in businesses failing, people losing their livelihoods and subsequently their homes. Despair brought on by destitution, crime, drug abuse, suicide. All of it ghastly.
As awful as that is, there's a certain level of passion to be seen in those old stories. People vie, they fight. They struggle. Sometimes they fail and their lives go wrong, but generally everyone gets by, more or less, well enough that they are, if not happy, then satisfied enough at the ends of their lives.
Now? Well. I will never be homeless. Even as the population leveled off more tower blocks were being cranked out by the factory builders. Even as the population shrank, the tower blocks remained. Forget suburbs, those were outmoded as a wasteful luxury a century ago; we live in towers. All towers, all the same, a hundred stories of identical flats, a hundred towers surrounded by scores of square kilometers of growing fields. Each block contains 380,000 living units, all exactly the same. At one time each living unit would house as many as a dozen people. Now they mostly house only couples and singles, except those units that are set aside for the very aged. For efficiency and ease of serving them, those generally house four or five at a time. But suffice it to say, there is plenty of housing. There are empty units everywhere, sometimes even entirely empty towers.
And there is always work to be done. Aged citizens to care for, food to be grown, equipment to be repaired. Endlessly. Forever. I know more about the human body than I ever thought I would, from having to care for so many others besides my own. I know so much more about machinery than I ever thought I would, cajoling rickety equipment down one more row of beets, of peas, of soybeans.
The dust of the soybean harvest can drive you utterly mad. If you can avoid it, do so.
There is no time left to be human. There is only work, eat and rest, endlessly, until you cannot do those things for yourself anymore, and then you stop working and wait to die.
Endlessly.
I shouldn't have read the stories. I should never have watched the videos. As desperate as some of those lives appeared to be in the old days, the days of wages and poverty and uncertainty, there was usually some kind of hope, too. A fully employed populace, a long-lived populace with no new babies, doesn't have much hope. Each new person's future is cemented as soon as they're born. What is there to hope for?
The fellow in the row next to me pauses to lean on his hoe.
"You ever wonder if you're lucky to have been the product of a Lottery birth?"
"No. I know."
"Pretty cool, huh?"
"Sure."
I take the Lottery ticket out of my pocket and look at it.
"Hey, is that what I think it is?"
"Yeah."
"Congrats, man, that's great."
"Sure."
He goes back to hoeing. When he can't see me, I drop the slip of paper into the soil, till it under, and keep working.
Congratulations, kid. Your luck just changed for the better.
