A Moment of Time
This too shall pass.
There were over five thousand individual signatures in the KGX/STP Level 4 concourse. If I had wished, I could have called up gender/age group/life expectancy graphs for them, or details on any single individual. I knew everything the city knew.
I also knew, because it was a single line at the bottom of my orders, that each and every one of them was considered expendable in the pursuit of the objective. Such was the cold calculus of the ruthless optimisation engines that we trust to wage war, in this day and time.
I could understand it, of course. It was all there, in the ethics and consideration section of the same order packet. The cascading consequences of the death of High Senator Li - first thousands, then billions, then trillions and quadrillions before the unit shifted to "percentage of total human population".
For this reason I had carte blanche for casualties. And though I thought it cold, I was glad that it had been sanctioned.
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Comments (2 so far!)
HSAR
Given the technological prowess shown by the narrator, I'd guess at least a thousand years into the future. The human diaspora would have removed any kind of cap on population growth, so I don't think such numbers are unreasonable.
- #1074 Posted 9 years ago
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wolframdioxide
It's impressive that the human population is apparently in the quadrillions, probably quintillions. When is this set?