012719d

The Mad Scientist Tackles Overpopulation

There are just too many of us:

food running short

despite gene-tech out the wazoo,

only a matter of time before starvation

sweeps across the globe like a California wildfire,

and he really just can't stand the thought,

too vivid an imagination, he guesses.

So he works on the problem on and off, in between

tackling the glamorous issues like cloning, time travel,

you know the drill;

he skips a few Nobel Prize ceremonies

to get in the odd experiment,

and it doesn't turn out to be as easy as

he thought it would. You know, some virus

that simply reduced female fertility to about

5% of the natural state

would probably do the trick,

But no, any virus that was reasonably effective,

also seemed to affect racial groups differentially.

well, we can't have that:

too reminiscent of "The White Plague."

male fertility could be precisely altered

without ill effects for some reason,

but that just doesn't do any good. Even if 98% of

males were completely infertile,

the population of any polygamous society

would rise exponentially almost without limit.

(and wouldn't they all become polygamous

under those circumstances?)

In the end, nanobots were the only practical answer:

they could evolve faster than biologic systems,

and even though they were larger than viruses,

the new types were not much larger.

Of course, they got a little out of control

when they spontaneously formed communal groups

that achieved artificial intelligence,

self-organized cells like a miniature al qaeda,

but luckily by then he had perfected

time travel and could go back

and warn himself

to abandon that approach.

And wouldn't you know it: the mega-nanobot

had also developed a working time machine

and sent some units back and tried to kill him,

and what a mess that created!

humanity was expunged from at least

30 million world lines

before all was said and done;

in some the Earth itself had to be destroyed

in order to protect it,

and the Mad Scientist,

in all his incarnations,

was pretty nearly gone.