User blog:Bfoxius/Low-Flying Aircraft (Short Story/AH Scenario)

I'll be doing periodic short stories and posting them onto here. This isn't really a short story, more a pseudo-timeline/scenario based on the JG Ballard short story "Low-Flying Aircraft". Please don't sue me, ghost of Mr. Ballard.

Low-Flying Aircraft (A Scenario)​



It is the year 2029 and the world is quiet. Throngs of birds crowd the rejuvenated beaches, devoid of all humanity’s accumulated detritus. In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion may not sleep tonight, but it sure will tomorrow, as populations of large predatory animals begin to uptick as they wander into the crumbling cities of yesteryear, their new breeding grounds. It is a quiet world and with the predators still reeling from their losses, the animals that they prey upon have come out of the woodwork to claim the world in their brief zenith before they, inevitably, are cut down to size. It is a world suddenly caught in an interlude between a chaotic past and an unexpected future. For the last people alive, it is a dying world.

The predicament began, like many things, just after World War II. It manifested itself as a simple dip in the birthrate statistics of newly-liberated Ethiopia at least, in what birthrate statistics actually existed. News of it was lost in all the postwar hooplah and posturing for a new and much colder form of war. It was one of these meaningless statistics that are only seen as relevant all-too-late. The governments of the world hardly noticed it, burying themselves in Cold War hijinks for many more years before anyone had any idea what was up.

Only in the early sixties, when National Geographic sent a team of journalists and photographers into East Africa to run an article on Prester John and his Coptic legacy were they forced to note the oddly high number of childless mothers and, even more disturbing, the disproportionate amount of families with deformed children. Nat Geo decided to run the original article, but the unsettling demographic trends beneath the surface were packaged up and relayed to the CIA, who were supposed to be taking note of this stuff. The CIA obliged, grudgingly of course. This was the early 60s and the CIA was busy trying to destabilize some Central American junta or spy on the damn commies or something, not monitor demographic trends in fucking Ethiopia of all places. They took the compiled info on the situation and dumped it in an archive next to the dead body of Rafael Trujillo somewhere, where it was promptly forgotten.

However, post-war Neo-Malthusianism being what it was caused the Washington Post to eventually get ahold of information regarding the population decline in Ethiopia and print it. On one of those cold news days sandwiched between a regime change in South America and a nuclear submarine standoff, the Post printed the discontenting headline

FUTURE IN PERIL, BIRTHRATES PLUMMET THROUGHOUT EAST AFRICA, with one particular smugly-grim academic proclaiming:

“If the population decline manifest now in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Uganda continues unabated, East Africa will become depopulated by the year 2000.” This prediction alarmed concerned news readers nationwide, who wrote to various branches of the US government asking it to do something, or at least to keep their eyes peeled on the unfolding situation. The government responded with something along the lines of “okie doke, we’ve got it all covered,” which of course they didn’t. They had more serious things to do than to look into alarmist population decline crap. Even if they tried, information of any sort coming out of East Africa was nebulous at best, as decolonization and its discontents were in full swing there. Revolutions and counterrevolutions were the norm, not the exception in 1960s Africa. However, a small group of CIA agents were assigned to gather data on Ethiopia, but they promptly disappeared into the woodwork and the US realized that they had bigger fish to fry when Castro rose to power.

On the other side of the world, the Soviets, of course, were looking deeply into the situation and had been doing so ever since the late 50s when Comrade Ivanovich, gunrunner-in-chief to a growing band of Communist revolutionaries, was noticing a distinct shortage of idealistic, impressionable youths to carry glorious Soviet arms into battle against decadent bourgeoisie Ethiopian regime. Namely, what few children were born now were deformed to the point of having no working arms, or limbs for that matter, and were thus put to death by their superstitious family members. Confused and vaguely disturbed, Ivanovich wired his findings to the big shots in Moscow who, also confused, suggested a preliminary coup to install a more friendly regime where detailed research on whatever was plaguing Ethiopia could then be done.

The failed socialist coup-turned-general revolution snapped the American public interest to East Africa, where the US sent troops to back the suddenly-very-pro-democracy Ethiopian Empire. By now, it was beginning to become clear to anyone who looked into the matter that population throughout all of Africa was doing crazy wonky things when people expected it to be rising quickly. The FBI task force assigned to the area had uncovered little, besides what they already knew. They were promptly recalled, due to destablization in Ethiopia. The US, anxious to combat simmering public discord about the African situation and figure out what the hell was actually going on there sent an olive branch out to the USSR in order to “combat escalation and work towards peace in the region”. War, of course was war, whether cold, proxy, or regular, and the proposal was quickly rejected by the Soviets.

America had now forced herself in a corner. A rapidly escalating guerrilla war against the Ethiopian government forced the US to further involve herself to check the spread of Communism into Africa while exposing American soldiers to the abandoned villages, deformed children, and average citizens doubly screwed by the war and the tentatively-christened Gondar Syndrome, the elusive disease/condition/syndrome/whatever that plagued considerably deformed children born to seemingly healthy parents.

The bubble burst in 1972, with a student protest at Duke University by a coalition of counterculturists and black nationalists suddenly turning violent, forcing the US to gradually phase itself out of East Africa and abandon Ethiopia to the guerillas. And so the grizzled partisans, hiding in the caves and rifts of Ethiopia and her neighbors, emerged to inherit a nation simultaneously familiar and alien after the war. Among them were no children.

By now, the demographic crisis was in plain sight. African nations, stricken by cases of shadowy Gondar Syndrome, fell further into war and chaos for seemingly no reason, following the Ethiopian path of a devastating, all-consuming war following a population drop. As the war ended and a new day dawned on the depopulated fields and forests of Africa, the official American explanation for the syndrome (napalm used in bombing campaigns in Ethiopia) looked more and more shaky each day.

The rest of the world was not immune to whatever was going on. Mothers began to give birth to heavily deformed children across much of the Southern Hemisphere and the citizens of the world now had every reason to believe that a major disease was on their hands and the world governments were doing everything in their power to suppress knowledge of it. Explanations were drafted, tensions rose and crested, cumulating in riots from London to Tokyo.

The governments of the US and USSR looked sheepishly at each other and both stated that they had a major crisis on their hands and that they maybe didn’t take much time to learn about it before it became a big deal. A confused array of government-sponsored biologists, social scientists, psychologists, hell, even the odd theologian were dispatched to the depopulated Ethiopian People’s Republic by both sides, desperately working together to crack the code of Gondar Syndrome. They carried the hopes of an increasingly scared world that this crisis could be solved.

As the seventies began to drift into the eighties, the world could do little besides watch as cases of Gondar Syndrome gradually drifted to the unaffected portions of the world. Sobbing mothers in hospitals after they realized that their children would never be able to talk or live as we know it became an everyday sight. An intense debate emerged on the ethics of aborting the afflicted fetuses, with Roe v Wade put under the spotlight again and again. The tipping point was reached when Cathy Samson, stylish and flamboyant First Lady of the United States found herself clandestinely diagnosed with the syndrome. Her subsequent secret abortion was snooped out by the media and made front page headlines. The following emotional testimony by her on live television about the mothers and children forced to deal with a horrific condition that is still mysterious to science won over the hearts of the nation, and abortion laws were relaxed across the US. The rest of the world soon followed suit.

In 1983, after countless sleepless nights by top government officials, diplomats, and population scientists thinking over the best way to break the news to the world, the UN Special Report on Gondar Syndrome was released, and it confirmed what the masses had been hinted at for years. Every effort to find a cure, much less the actual cause of the syndrome, was in complete vain. Gondar Syndrome was not a genetic disease, or even a regular disease. It was something completely unknown to man and, handily enough, was effectively incurable. An even more cheery chunk of information was also released, echoing news articles of years past, by stating that at the current rate of proliferation, the entire world population would be-more-or-less unable to give birth to healthy babies by the year 2000, and the entire human race would have scarcely a generation left to live. Of course, following this report, research into the syndrome would continue, but more to ease the world population’s fears than to actually try to get anything done. The world’s reaction to this was, to say the least, vexed.

Not since the Black Death had an inexplicable scourge turned the previously-proud human race into a divided and squabbling mass of finger-pointing and scapegoating. The two most popular targets were the big blue and red punching bags known to most as the US and USSR. Many people, unable to come to terms with science’s failure to explain the disease, remained convinced that the global elites, fat cats that they were, were holding the cure back from them, intent on killing off the 99% to smoke cigars on the beach or dance on the graves of the masses for eternity. The fact that the “global elite” were just as unable to conceive healthy children as the rest of the world did not matter, and despite constantly showing that their pockets were empty, the governments of the world and the rich and powerful were hit with a mass wave of populist anarchist violence never before seen in the entire history of the world.

Others saw Gondar Syndrome as a divine punishment levied upon all of mankind and it would only go away if the chosen folk would rise up and kill all the [insert ethnic/religious/whatever group here] and thus restore the righteous balance of life or something of that sort. As such, genocides and ethnic cleansings were widespread and, in many cases, happened right under the nose of the UN and other supranational bodies that were supposed to prevent them, as they kind of had their hands full at this point.

Most worryingly, some people managed to blame the opposite sex for their inability to conceive/give birth to healthy children. This normally wouldn’t be much of a problem, but with world population counts wavering and healthy babies beginning to become an endangered species, traditional gender grievances were turned up to 11. Many radical feminists and this timeline’s equivalent of MRAs sequestered themselves apart from the general population in remote compounds, plotting their revenge.

The powers that be were not surprised by the general finger pointing and skullduggery of this time, but as the 90s came, the collective rage had mostly burned off or had been swept under the rug. People began to wisen up and realize that killing your neighbor because you couldn’t conceive a healthy child was a pretty stupid thing to do. Alongside this, much of the general population finally realized that the human race was actually kind of screwed, there was nothing they could do about it, and they might as well make the most of what time they have. As such, a decade of war and chaos abruptly transitioned into another decade of partying and vacationing as people began to quit their jobs and move to Hawaii or the Canaries to live the lives that their kids never would. The governments of the world at first frowned on this, but later began to accept this “vacation economy”. As the population of the world began to tick downwards, more and more resources were left over for the survivors, allowing them to live lazy but comfortable lives without hampering the global economy. Besides, money was the last thing on most peoples’ minds then. What actually mattered was getting back to making healthy babies again. Most experts at this time recommended getting the birthrate up as high as possible to maximize the amount of births, healthy or otherwise. They were under the impression that if 100 kids were born and, say, 3, were born healthy, that would be better than 25 kids being born and not one being healthy. The population scientists gave themselves a pat on the back and passed their genius plan to stave off extinction for as long as possible to the UN, which was taking up much of the slack left by the crumbling governments of the world. The UN shrugged, said “might as well,” and the Global Population Stabilization Initiative (GPSI) was born.

The GPSI was a futile undertaking, but one that kept big-shot academics and twitchy public servants busy until the end. Early on, they found an unlikely ally in most major world religions, which quickly waived restrictions on premarital sex and stuff of that sort. At the same time, they doubled down on restrictions against contraception. After all, doctrine could be bent and messed with, but whatever deitie(s) that are out there still need people to worship them, amirite? The GPSI embarked on various population-increasing schemes, some more wacko and morally questionable than others, but the universal symbol of the millennial era was the “Venus Hotel”. One part an exercise in state-sponsored fornification, the other part an effort for the GPSI to weasel its way into the vacation economy, Venus Hotels were vacation palaces designed for prospective couples to engage in their craziest and most depraved sexual desires while trying to ratchet up that all-important birthrate statistic. As the population continued to plummet, entire countries were abandoned for the torrid coastal dreamlands-turned penultimate boomtowns of humanity, ones that hosted hotels and businesses that would make a Vegas prostitute blush, all dedicated to the now-futile effort to keep the human race running. As the eternal vacationers sank further and further into depravity, the original purpose of the whole program became lost in the lust that permitted crazier and crazier sexual activities to take place. Eventually, the worst obscenity of all became a healthy child with a healthy family, striking jealousy and even anger in the hearts of the masses. As the percentage of babies unaffected by Gondar Syndrome sank to 1 in 100, 1 in 500, 1 in 1000, a discreet market for quick and easy abortions, covertly funded by the GPSI, emerged in the hazy cities of sin, employing those not directly connected to the GPSI and keeping them out of trouble. A new sort of cosmopolitanism emerged in the cities. Carved out of depopulated Third World countries and populated by people all around the world, people, especially the burgeoning prostitute class, more or less abandoned racism and old national prejudices, as there simply wasn’t enough of them to go around, and they might as well have fun before they all die off. A halfbaked political philosophy began to emerge, centered around constant sexual pleasure and the vacation economy, before it was throttled in the grave when the generation of libertines began to grow old.

As the GPSI and its collection of sin cities fiddled while Rome burned, the last children that would ever be born (so sayeth the news), now teenagers, looked discontentedly at their society’s case of government-sponsored baby rabies. With many of their births televised as news events, the shrunken generation that, in another timeline, were known as Millennials, had grown up in a world obsessed with both them and their desperate attempts to avert extinction, the Millennials (“Penultimates” here) were the first and last generation to accept, and even embrace in some cases, the coming extinction of humanity. In a collective phase of teenage contrarianism, young people worldwide flouted their parents’ desires for them to go to the Venus Hotels and instead embraced stoicism or celibacy, running off to hidden monasteries to join forgotten religions preaching brotherhood and solidarity in the face of sin or, for the truly edgy, joining anarcho-primitivist death cults roaming the overgrown cities and fields, intent on ushering in a new era of ecological harmony and stability, stragglers be damned. Many of the remaining Moral Guardians lamented the fact that the teenagers were actually taking society back to the Dark Ages, but the efforts of the aging Casanova Generation would fall flat against the old-school warlordism of many of their children.

As the GPSI began to burn itself out and the Venus Hotels lost their patronage, the now aging lovemakers and bureaucrats who used to rule the world looked disdainfully at the young’uns who were supposed to be the last hope of humanity before packing up for Cincinnati, Geneva, or Kathmandu, the last remaining cities with any sizable population whatsoever. Crazy animal lust having burnt itself out amongst them, society became positively Victorian. The GPSI was quietly discarded, and the beaten and worn vestiges of society looked out at their empire of dirt, now mostly having reverted into pastoralism with a couple Krazy Kults, private empires, doomsday preppers, and stuff of that sort dotting the land between the old peasants who never bothered to head up to join the rest of the UN-protected “civilized world” in the US, Europe, or the Himalayas, the last places where modern civilization, courtesy of a token UN maintained by an army of stiff-upper-lipped clerks who have accepted that this is the end. By then, almost no children were born, deformed or not. A final spasm of violence as everything settled into entropy emerged when a nuclear weapon stolen from the unguarded Indian nuclear stockpile was detonated in the middle of Kathmandu by a Buddhist nihilist anarchist cult, or was it? Nobody took the time to figure it out, and the last old city-dwellers looked at the event with a mix of nostalgia for the bad old days and a reminder that they too will die as this world slowly wastes away…

EMPURIABRAVA, 2029. The city is quiet, too quiet, as they said in the old movies, years ago. In this timeline, though, they stopped making movies a while back. Everything is quiet here, all of the time. A buzz is heard along the horizon. It turns to a hum, then a roar as a beat-up old airplane growls over the wave-combed beach. It passes over the town, a colorful agglomeration of everything from medieval to modern architecture, all rotting away. A sudden spray of metallic silver paint emits from a hidden nozzle in the rear end of the aircraft. The plane flies off, pulling itself upwards above the overgrown hills and into the crags and valleys of the looming Pyrenees, its gleaming spray marking a silver road through the hills. A lone calf on a slope spies the plane and the shiny trail that follows it.

The pilot smiles, glancing down at the animal, and flies on. It follows. Soon it is joined by another. Then another. The plane lurches over the final crest of the mountain below it, bare of snow for the summer. Below is a massive herd of stray cattle, interspersed with the odd pig or donkey. They are no doubt let loose by the dwindling population of Spanish farmers, no longer able or willing to maintain their vast herds. The pilot flips a lever. The plane stops spraying paint. He turns the plane back and, for a second, he can see the trio of cattle he lured up the hill with the paint, crest the mountain. Soon they will make it to the herd. The pilot turns back towards the valley, cutting low over the heads of the cattle. As the herd thins out, an old manor house comes into view, abutting a postcard-perfect lake. The plane swings around, finding a flat patch before landing. The pilot rises. Next to him is a baby-shaped bundle, cooing and clicking in an off-kilter halfhuman way. The pilot picks up the bundle, hops out of the plane and walks over to the chateau, knocking on the door. A moment passes.

The door opens and an old woman peeks her wrinkled face out of the door. Her eyes are milky-white. She is blind.

“Yes?” she croaks in the local tongue, forgotten to all but her. Without a word, the pilot gives the bundle to the woman. She looks up at him, little more than a half-forgotten reflex due to her blindness, and she nods. The bundle, silent for quite a while, lets loose a wail, equally human and alien, but completely full of emotion and sadness. The pilot gingerly puts his hand on the bundle. The sobs fade out. The child will be fine. He knows it. The pilot closes the door and flies off.

Not all is lost. Humanity’s birthrate has not declined since the emergence of Gondar Syndrome. Rather, it has skyrocketed. However, virtually all babies born now have been hideously deformed by the mysterious syndrome and are killed out of mercy by the family. Very few survive.

In the hills west of Girona, a retired beatnik doctor obsessively hoards stray cattle and artifacts in the hopes of jumpstarting a future civilization one day. Alongside him lives the next humans, raised by a blind old woman, once a champion Olympic skier from Andorra. They are not alone. In the caves under the Painted Desert, a group of eco-feminists raise their children to eventually emerge and inherit the Earth, the harbingers of a new humanity. And on a remote Pacific island, an eccentric Indonesian billionaire instructs the children he saved from certain death on the islands the ways of shipbuilding, in the hopes that they will be the seed of a new empire, worshipping him as a god and letting his spirit guide the new men and women of the Earth to the stars.