Ximena’s cheeks are on fire. She tries to smile, and fails.
“I would like a word in private after the seminar, if you don’t mind.”
“With… with me?”
“Yeah, there is something I stumbled on during my research that might interest you. But more of that later.”
Miyagi turns his face to the stupefied students. Even Mark looks at Ximena like she had just turned into crystal.
“This seminar is not just an academic event, people,” Miyagi says. “The Global Program is first and foremost an intercultural exchange.” He claps at Ximena. “Bravo, you totally embraced the spirit by sitting with the Lundev gang. You should all heed Ximena’s example, and mix more, people. Now, Ximena, please, answer the question. Why the selective pressure for earlier sexual maturity?”
Ximena clears her throat. Twice. “Yes, Professor. Before that, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the truth is that I arrived late, and this was the only free spot.”
“Really?” Miyagi laughs, together with most of the students. Oh Goah, Ximena thinks. Ground swallow me up. “Well,” Miyagi nods at her in appreciation, “I have to apologize then, I didn’t want to put you on the spot. Love your honesty, though. Perhaps the most important trait of a historian. Now, your take on the sexual selection?”
“Yes, Professor.” Ximena clears her throat again. “The selective pressure began in the 2080s, as the first collapse gained traction. More than a billion people were killed in a single generation.”
“Tell us about that, Ximena. What killed them?”
“Hmm,” she raises her thumb in the air, “the immediate cause was the environmental breakdown, especially in the tropics, which then,” she raises her index finger, as she counts on, “precipitated famines and migration waves like never seen since antiquity. That in turn,” she raises a third finger, “wrecked the global and national networks of trade,” another finger, “collapsing country after country into smaller nativist grouplets. And the cycle repeated: more famine,” she keeps raising finger after finger, “more xenophobic massacres, more splitting into ever smaller groups. And on and on went the first collapse, killing millions upon millions of people.”
“So you’re saying,” Miyagi asks, “that it was the higher mortality that created evolutionary pressure for earlier sexual maturity?”
“No, no. Not the higher mortality. Rather, the earlier mortality.”
Miyagi smiles. “Please clarify.”
“Yes, Professor, er, it was the Dem-Pandemic, of course. Dementia Furiosa has always been killing people, even before the first collapse, but it has always been in a relatively small scale, and only affected the most elderly. But all that changed with the high mortality of the first collapse.”
“How so?”
“Hmm, the more people died in the first collapse, the higher the proportion of Dementia Furiosa that affected the elderly. Nobody knew why back then, but soon everybody over eighty perished from Dem, which then began spreading through those in their late seventies. And when they in turn were dead, Dem began to ravage those in the mid-seventies, and so on it went, killing the oldest humans alive, and killing ever younger, mostly hidden from the public view behind the curtain of the horrors of the first collapse. Until, at some point, there were no elderly left in the world, and Dem kept killing on and on, relentlessly.”
“Can you give us some numbers?”
“Not from the top of my head, sorry, Professor. I only know what everybody knows: that the human lifespan shrunk rapidly during the twenty-second century.”
“I’ll give you some numbers, people.” Miyagi paces the stage while speaking. “Lifespans went down from sixty years in 2100 to forty-five in 2120. Can you picture what that does to a civilization? And it didn’t stop there. Dem kept ravaging the oldest layers of society, decade after decade. The second collapse, indeed. Billions die as the fabric of society dissolves simultaneously worldwide. First go the nation-states, then the cities and towns, then even the timeless institutions of tribe and family begin to falter. Which brings us to one of the key human adaptations that allowed us to survive.” He turns and points at Ximena. “Which is…?”
Ximena clears her throat. “Er, earlier sexual maturity.” Miyagi nods and keeps his gaze locked on her. Oh Goah. “Er… Yes, just natural selection at work, Professor. Shorter lifespans create pressure on the reproductive cycle. Early breeders have higher chances to pass their genes to the next generation, so after a few generations, uh…” She clears her throat again.
“Perfect. Thank you, Ximena.”
She sits and draws a deep breath.
“Well done,” Mark whispers with playful tone. “But you got to work on that thing you do with your hands while—”
“Oh, shut up,” she says, and mocks a slap on his shoulder.
Miyagi is pointing at a pretty South Asian Lundev student that is raising her hand insistently on the front bench. “Yes, Sky?”
She is frowning. “Makes little sense, sorry, Professor. Even with all that dying… There were still a few million survivors.”
“You are right. Most of them in North America, about fifty million, where Townsend was already spreading the Gift of Goah. But there were only fifty or sixty left in the rest of the world combined.”
“Still,” Sky spread her hands, “plenty of people to keep civilization running, I would think. That’s what I don’t get. Even if everybody dies young, so what? All our knowledge and technology—it doesn’t disappear from one day to the next.”
“That,” Miyagi points at her, “is a great question. Nice, Sky. Anybody care to…? Ah, Cody, great. Happy to see our Townsend University friends more active. Keep it up. What do you have to say to Sky?”
“With all due respect to my esteemed fellow,” Cody says with slow, studious tone, “what good is a quantum field theory manual to a farmer that can barely read?”
“Oh, come on, GIA,” Sky says with an exaggerated roll of the eyes. “Not all remaining millions are farmers that can barely read.” Ximena doesn’t like her tone.
Cody’s kind expression remains stoically unmoved by Sky’s reply. Always the attentive debater, Ximena has seen him in action before. “I am sorry if my metaphor was too simplistic,”
