By David Scholes
Canberra
Australia
2075
The first inkling was an announcement on the Citizen Communication channel — the only free-to-air channel left for people like me: the government urging us to check bank account balances. I guessed it was yet another Russo-Chinese mass scam, maybe infiltrating the Citizen Channel as they had infiltrated everything else. Still I checked it out.
Curious. I now had a credit balance of $1,372.91 in my main account. It should have been no more than about 3 bucks fifty. My Visa card, which should have been maxed out in the red at $2,000, was actually in credit to the tune of a buck fifty. For thoroughness I also checked three small overdue bills. All mysteriously paid. Not large amounts of money to some, but to me lifesavers.
Soon came an announcement by the big Australian banks. All monies deposited in citizen bank accounts had been checked and were genuine transactions.
Later the Australian Government — then the UN — made their own announcements. It was estimated that someone or something had injected $A13.5 trillion into the world economy over about two days. The money went entirely to the destitute and poor on some sort of sliding scale based on perceived need.
Who had done this? Who had made it possible?
The atheists among us could only assume it was the same near omnipotent force that had recently anonymously annihilated a stream of large meteors heading towards Earth.
The mysterious help continued. Great slabs of international aid appeared right where it was needed.
Later, millions of seriously ill patients began to mysteriously recover. The World Health Organisation announced the disappearance of malaria.
Then came the day nobody died.
And the next day, and the next day nobody died.
* * *
The good news kept coming. People wondered if there was a price to be paid for it all.
Amidst all the good news it took the world’s media a while to cotton on to the disappearances.
People started to disappear. Not so many at first but it snowballed till it became a lot of people. The final tally: around 17.5 million — the population of a megacity or a small country.
Further study turned up patterns: murderers, rapists, child and spouse beaters, other violent criminals, scammers, the list went on. Narcissists, anybody with aggression issues, a fair sprinkling of politicians and real estate agents.
If there is a price to be paid surely this isn’t it.
I am reminded of Biblical references. Is this the meek inheriting the Earth? Or —
About The Author
David Scholes
David has written over 180 short stories and published eight collections of short stories and two novellas in the 9 years he has been writing speculative fiction. All of these books are on Amazon.
He has been a regular contributor to the AntipodeanSF, Beam Me Up PodCast, and Farther Stars Than These sites. He has also been published on a variety of other sci-fi sites including Bewildering Stories, 365 Tomorrows, the WiFiles, and the former GoldenVisions magazine.
He is currently well progressed with a new science fiction novella expected to be published later this year.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
David Whitaker is originally from the UK though has travelled around a bit and now resides in India. He has a degree in Journalism, however decided that as he’s always preferred making things up it should ultimately become a resource rather than a profession.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).