The city had a full night of it, the way cities do. A lonely man lay awake wishing only that “if only I knew how to start a gang. I would be so happy
.” A woman had spent a year planning to steal a zebra from the zoo
. The cook had not worked out how to dispose of expired food without getting caught
. One man had a scheme to fake his own death and collect the insurance; another wanted to know how to sell his grandmother's kidney; a third, asked to help start a terrorist group, was still thinking it over. One had resolved to become a con artist
; another only to key his boss's car. The shy one wanted to know only “when can we flirt
.” And the old crank on the square was certain of government programs which use climate change policy to depopulate countries
. To Skin in the Game, they wanted more children than they had. They were failed by bad policy.
It was late and the city was still up: Mira on her shift; the scholar at his lamp, wishing as ever that the Roman empire was still around
; the brothers three pages into a bedtime story. The keynote had gone live at midnight. None of them had watched it.
Okonkwo's keynote on meaning had four million views by breakfast. He said the human story was the best thing that had ever happened, but the youth needed convincing. The attendees workshopped the message for their daughters: a woman's place is to be a homemaker
.
No one took the scholar's door off its hinges. He simply woke up without a relationship to his clinic or co-op. His pension app now declined to load. Grilled on a livestream, he said “whatever gave you the impression that I have the slightest interest in your opinion
.” He did not log on again, content that no one would come after him.
It grieved Adebayo, father of four children, to gray out the scholar's tile. But the future held uncounted billions waiting on the far side of the birth-rate. An unmarried man had no standing to vote on their behalf; and besides, if a man doesn't have a wife, is he really a man?
You do not let a guest review the feast he declined to attend.
Tomas heard the notifications and woke his brother. The movement had begun choosing the consecrated children. Theirs were not to be blessed. They had raised her eleven years and asked nothing of the future for it. Of the blanket she loved past all washing, one of her two fathers asked the other, “can I just toss it?
”
The girl was a foster placement, eleven years of love in her and none of it blood. Skin in the Game maintained that kids in foster care are always trouble
. A serious, loving people, it held, raised their own. The child that counted was a better one, maybe one not yet born; the girl asleep in the room was beside the point.
They found Mira three nights out of seven at a stranger's bedside, her hand round his while he died. She was not afraid of death, his or her own; she had even asked if euthanasia would be practical. Her nights with the dying counted for nothing, and were asked of no one. When the movement called her to a cradle, she let it ring and stayed.
Iyer grieved the man and blew out the candle. He had, after all, a shelf-life of usefulness to society
, and his was years past. The movement loved the living fiercely. A nurse yet gave her nights to the unsubscribed; Iyer flagged her for a values conversation.
In a clip, Renata said that if she had wanted a child she would have had one by now. A whole movement was demanding the childless account for themselves; she wondered about the children who had never asked to be born. No one had a slide for it.
Skin in the Game's head of messaging took her gently in hand. Care, he explained, was measured by fruit, and the dying bore none. Her hours would be filed under waste. Renata was a familiar type: old single women, who have a lot of cats, tend to be a little crazy
.