text: Mr Pritt took to the podium with the air of a politician addressing a nation. “Parents, good morning. I’m Mr Pritt and I’m the headmaster of this school. Your sons and daughters made it through what was considered by some to be an overly-stringent selection process. We have great plans for our students and this requires them all to possess a certain level of intelligence, highly-functional social skills, and a strong sense of self. They will leave here and contradict every one of us, questioning the fundamentals of our principles and values. And in doing so, they will be the leaders of tomorrow, pushing us aside when we fail to perceive our own obsolescence and moving society in the right directions. We will take care of their education and the development of their minds as well as some aspects of their physical wellbeing. All our best efforts are useless without your help. If you aren’t prepared to carry on the good work, nutrition and exercise that we have proven to give a child significant advantages over others, then you might as well place them at any other school. They will have breakfast and lunch in school. Our food follows every aspect of nutrition that we now know to lead to significant physical and metal gains. In our lifetime we have seen that decades of demonising sugars has given us a generation that has, on average, 32% more stamina than we have and at least 15 percentage points more IQ than we do. We now know the benefits of dramatically reducing salt from a healthy diet. As we continue to make new inroads, we will adapt the diet accordingly. Your children will be fed up to twice as healthily when they leave school at the rate that our programme is learning and implementing changes. It has access to live health and nutrition data of over half of the planet’s population and is designed to evolve as it assimilates new information. In short, we are helping to formulate a super-species, the highest ideal that our genetic makeup can possibly attain. For the last 30,000 years we have not seen an ‘upgrade’ to our genetic composition so we can assume that our physical abilities have plateaued. But the expansion of the mind, especially within a significantly healthier body, can help us unlock parts of our species we’d only ever read about in comic books. This is the second fundamental pillar of our cooperation. A child developing skills and abilities that others can only dream of is enticing. However we need to make sure their power is channeled in the right direction. A solid moral compass is built into the educational system here - we expect you to continue to guide your children towards the light when they’re in your care. This might sound like a tall order. It may also sound like much more than you’d expected to have to face by the time your children were six years old. But you will appreciate that if we started any later, we wouldn’t stand a chance.” *The year 2042.* The fuge was a uniquely sordid contraption. It did get the job done however. In the right hands, it could separate a human body into its constituent molecules in just over 14 hours. Two years prior, this was not even considered within the realms of possibility. Once described by an influential journalist as an ‘evil device, the malignity of which was unprecedented, and that was in effect a giant centrifuge’, it had been dubbed the fuge by the starving masses that fell prey to its dispassionate dismembering. Soon after the catastrophic economic collapse that ravaged the planet during the third decade of the 21st century combined with a critical over-mining spurt to push the value of metals and rare minerals to such value that the manufacture of consumer electronics all but ground to a halt. The ultra-rich, of course, could afford wild extravagance and didn’t care that a handheld device could cost as much as most would pay for a family home. These hoarders of wealth had barricaded themselves in enclaves of opulence that could put entire civilisations of old to shame. The rest of the world lived in abject poverty, with vast swathes of what was once the middle class forced to scratch out an existence by squabbling over an enormous black economy that covered everything from electricity supply to food rations and fresh water. When the initial post-collapse frenzy subsided, 96% of the population of the planet had resigned itself to a bleak and odious existence but this numbness did not last long. An obscure scientific paper, meant to nestle under the radar within the pages of a specialised journal, leaked into the main information channels and had covered the globe within 12 hours. The paper had, in brief, put forth the maths to show that the content of a human body was, at current metal prices, valued at sum large enough to buy a decent apartment. Within weeks, the now-burgeoning homeless population started to thin. The fuge had been hacked together from separate bits of equipment, each designed to perform a very specific function but never designed to work as part of a system so the labs that processed bodies looked as though they’d been assembled by the kind of mad scientist who was more interested in the output than the aesthetics. This was a pretty accurate representation of the facts. Disused abattoirs were raided for their meat and bone separation machinery. Designed to dismember cattle at high speed and with great reliability, the first part of the process was gruesome but spotlessly clean. After all, butchers didn’t waste so much as a drop of blood when eating meat had been affordable and acceptable. The line fed into a variety of grinders and sieves and, finally, to the centrifuge stage that was where most of the magic happened. The fluids that left the centrifuge were fed into what looked like an elaborate meth lab. Purified water was bottled and sold to those who were at the top of the pecking order of the great unwashed. The remaining components emerged packed in compressed nuggets of calcium, phosphorus, potassium and the like. Smaller ‘coins’ of rarer metals like zinc, copper, and magnesium were also minted by the fuge. The amount of each of these in a single body is negligible but the sheer volume of bodies that made it to each fuge was staggering so that anyone who operated it had a steady supply of nuggets and coins to deliver to the manufacturers of all the playthings that the rich revelled in. There were two prevailing narratives that intersected at the fuge. The rich asked why one would value a single human life. In the grander scheme, there is no difference between a human, a cow, or a tree. Every life form is transient, there to perpetuate whatever species it happened to form part of. Ever since we had located consciousness and understood its biochemical nature, we had ceased to consider human life above all others. After all, the notion of humanity’s elevated importance, seeded by the large religions millennia ago, had contributed strongly to the ultimate undoing of the planet and of civilisation. The fuge and its produce were therefore considered legally and morally sound by those who made the rules and who benefited from the fuge’s operation. The poor experienced the other side and had little by which to influence the outcome except by using their own bodies. They had figured that life is not worth living when suffering and hunger and humiliation are the only conditions known. If a mother could, quite literally, sell her body in advance to a fuge operator, being certain that the value of her component parts would help her children survive another year, then she might as well do so. In time, this was expected by teenagers who, when struggling to feed themselves, turned to their parents and expected them to give themselves to the fuge as they would, in turn do, when their own kids came of age. *The year 2062.* Mr Pritt addressed the elders. Well, they didn’t look old and neither did he. They had lost their physical eyesight decades ago but no one relied on biological input any more. Living was experienced in the mind after all, and this is all they’d bothered preserving. If we are to get spatially technical, they weren’t in the same room. Nor were they in a room at all. But here they met, in the shared simulation of a boardroom from the distant past. The mid-century design was an affectation of Mr Pritt and they allowed him the indulgence. The elders represented what was left of the human elite, the fraction of a percentage of the population of the planet that still lived in relative liberty and unmatched riches so long as they could afford to. The extent of one's life was determined purely by the resources one possessed. In fact, the length of one's life became the measure of that person’s economic success. “We are here to discuss the issues we are having with planned ends. I understand that running out of resources puts one in an awkward situation. But you know my position on planned ends - it is unnecessarily thinning our population. There are ten million people on the planet out there, scratching a miserable existence because they can’t get round to organising themselves. And here we are, wealthier than the gods that humans had created, and there is a comparative handful of us. We are the future of the human race. Those miserable beings out there are the modern successor of the Neanderthal, destined to eventual extinction and, while it pains me to say so, the quicker they bring this about the better. Even I pity how drawn out their end has been. We need to find a way to at least maintain our numbers. I’m aware that sharing our wealth amongst ourselves is an act that violates absolutely everything we stand for. We are here today, after all, because we have individually amassed our own personal capital. Seeing that some of us could easily live for decades based on their current worth, we must look at a very distant future, one that could become exceedingly lonely. Some of you have remarked that I don’t value our continued refusal to collaborate but I do - I know as well as you do that our fierce individuality has been instrumental in our phenomenal success. There comes a time, however, when one has lived long enough to envisage a very distant future and I am by far the oldest here. I have you to thank for that. You valued the education of future generations above all else and it has paid off for all of us, myself in particular. I will outlive most of you. Of course, I say this with all the pride and conceit I have earned. I also say this remind you that I am the person with the least interest in the matter I am presenting you with. I don’t specifically care about the individuals amongst you who, when their funds run out, plans a spectacular exit. I enjoy the parties more than most. What I am doing, and I seem to be alone in this, is looking out for our collective existence. It is tempting for me to do as all of you do and simply exist for my own pleasure until the day I decide I’ve had enough. Do we want to simply watch as those around us vanish? Do we look forward to living as a handful of simulacra in a vast and beautiful universe of our own creation? Is it even right that we can see our own survival as a species under threat and live like every one of us has a universe to themselves?” Mr Pritt looked around and saw that there was hardly anyone left. Bored and indifferent, all but a handful of elders remained. These were the ones who were nostalgic enough to smile at Mr Pritt and nod as he spoke. When it was evident that he was awaiting a response, they said their goodbyes and quit the meeting. “Well, then.”, said Mr Pritt. *The year 2122.* It is eerily still.