*Featured image courtesy of MabelAmber on Pixabay*
Two men sat down to determine the future population trend of the world. The meeting took place in a secure VIP room in an exclusive five-star hotel in Davos, Switzerland. Both men had their crews of assistants and on-the-spot analysts. They both represented a collaborating syndicate of billionaires. The meeting was top-notch secretive.
One of the men had just flown in from Paris. The other had been hosed down naked in a yacht and rubbed with a soap that featured gold and diamond powder just a few hours before in an undisclosed Greek Island.
The shorter one was a Frenchman. The taller one was American. But neither of them were public figures. They were discreet operatives mostly known in the elite worlds of multinational corporations and international banking.
The question at hand was whether to put the brakes on the human population.
The organization was almost all leaning yay. The method had already been researched, delineated, tested, and approved by a secretive think-tank that did all the planning and most of the heavy lifting. This meeting was to make sure that there was a true consensus, and to figure out last minute minutia. There wasn’t any paperwork involved.
Trays of caviar and bottles of expensive wine were rolled into the room but it was waved away. Fresh Cuban cigars were offered and refused.
There was small talk at first about the latest bombshell headlines on the Financial Times, but then the meeting began. The analyst dissected their data again and again, redundantly. The prevailing arguments were clarified. Counter-arguments were shot down by leading experts with PhDs from top universities that had been sworn to secrecy. Summations were made.
The Frenchman, short and stubborn like Napoleon, put forward an American slogan: “If you build it, they will come.”
“Yes,” said the American with a stately cruelty that was soft-soaped by his American charm. “But if we tear down the barn the cows have to be put out to pasture.”
There was a laugh in the back of the room.
“It’s a matter of sustainability,” said the Frenchman.
“In theory, maybe even in reality,” said the American.
Eventually all the experts in the room agreed that a consensus had been reached. The exponential population growth of the world had to be halted. This would be accomplished by using different manners of economic pressure and other factors; and there was a way of doing it without sacrificing relative profit (a concept championed by the think-tank).
Entire industries would be manipulated towards this goal: the valuation of currencies, the prices of consumable goods, the volume of petrol available on the open market, the shiftiness of the so-called volatility index, the amount of new constructions accessible across entire continents. There was also an appendage about stacking up the news cycles with a steady stream of calamitous headlines on purpose, being that it was a known fact, according to some studies, and proven by statistics, that young people tend to have less children when the perception of the times is that the whole world is going to crap.
“So it’s a go?” asked the Frenchman in his slanted English.
“It’s a go,” repeated the American with enthusiasm.
There was a murmur of agreement in the room, as if some big victory had been accomplished, and then someone in the back of the room said, “Build the seawall!”
The room collectively giggled.
There was an official name to this project, of course, but no one dared to utter it out loud, lest there be a secret recording device in the room. People had been briefed about this, and strict steps had been taken to avoid such discrepancies.
The meeting concluded without ceremony. Everyone packed their stuff and exited the room without leaving a trace.
After everyone left, however, one of the waiters came into the room. He looked around for a while. He turned a piece of furniture on its side. He got on top of it, reached over his head, and removed a sprinkler head from the ceiling. The sprinkler head wasn’t really a sprinkler head but a state-of-the-art recording device (with audio and video) that wasn’t visible to the naked eye, and wasn’t picked up by scanners.
After the waiter had secured the piece of equipment he went to the kitchen and went out the back into the parking lot. There he lit a cigarette and admired the impressive mountain peaks covered in snow. After he had finished his cigarette he got into his small European car, which was a refrigerator. He turned the heat and placed a call to his handler in Langley, Virginia.
Albert Rodriguez is an emerging writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He has a degree from Borough of Manhattan Community College. His work has appeared in INK Pantry, The Rye Whiskey Review, and Literally Stories.
A brilliant, bravado piece of thinking and writing.