2033.

• Author: Earle, Robert
• Position: Short story

If he had been asked to predict the ten most significant events that would transpire between 2013 and 2033, Trace would have taken a shot at it. But they asked Callista Morellos, whose predictions soon were forgotten.

"Will wonders never cease?" she chuckled. "And I worked so hard on that!"

Now he happened to be drinking a glass of water when someone at State or the Intelligence Community (who could tell the difference) he was called and asked to look back twenty years and list the ten most significant events that really had happened since 2013.

If it weren't for that glass of water, he might have said no, but he said yes on the condition that his list didn't have to be in ranked order. "Just the ten most significant events."

They agreed. Apparently, they really wanted someone who had been around in 2013, but now was out of the loop, uncontaminated by the received wisdom. He was out of the loop all right. Eighty. Read, watched movies on his projector glasses, listened to Brahms and Penderecki and other threnodists while lying back in his sound chair, walked a bit on his rebuilt hips, and so forth, but not in any loop.

He looked across the ragged tree tops in Rock Creek park, transecting Washington. Still vaguely green, the decades notwithstanding. He looked at the nicked windowsill with the bottle of Mont Blanc ink collecting dust on its shoulders. He pulled open his drawer and extracted a brownish pad of legal paper.

Sal heard him rustling and stepped into his study. "Everything all right, Trace?"

"Yeah, fine." There was a certain youthfulness in that "Yeah" of his. He'd been worn down but wasn't quite blunt yet.

"I heard you talking to someone," she said.

"Oddball little project someone wants me to take on."

"Oh, good." She was glad when he had something to do. In her opinion he was no good at doing nothing and worse at deciding what to do about it. Just sat there, thinking, arriving at no conclusions, listening to the saddest music ever composed. People they used to call Hungarians, Poles, and of course, Germans. All those Germans. "I'm meeting Terri in the lobby. She's bringing William and Robert. We're going out for coffee and cake."

She asked if he wanted to join them but for the first time in weeks, he was "busy" and not prepared to give that up, even for grandchildren (who bewildered him; he didn't know what to make of loving someone--at least in principle--but having no relationship to hold that love together.)

The apartment door clicked shut, and he dealt with the inchoate irritation of having been tasked with something, even for good money. Come on, Trace. Get with it. For hours every day he looked out at the scrappy treetops stretching up and down the park and either drifted mindlessly or put himself through drills remembering words in Spanish, German and Russian. Memory exercises, pools of potential thought into which he couldn't dive very deep anymore. Old age was a prison, basically. Ni mas, ni menos.

2033, he wrote, and then drew an arrow backward to the year 2013.

1: Worldwide water shortages led to fifty million dead from drought and starvation across Africa and Asia. That's where his glass of water came in, which he sipped again. He could sip water all day long, but hundreds of thousands and then millions and tens of millions expired in the searing deserts where no one and nothing could reach them with enough potable water. They just marched along, fell by the wayside, covered themselves from the sun, and died, died, died. Somalia, of course. Then Rajasthan, maybe the second worst place place in the world. Who knew if it was fifty million? That's what was said. But who knew? Who counted every single seared soul?

2: Irony of ironies: climate change-driven sea levels submerged Bangladesh. One flood struck after another and before you knew it, Bangladesh was soup. The Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban (Louis Kahn's masterpiece national assembly building) just melted, taking a defiant parliament with it, sinking them in tons of sludge. The crust of Bangladesh that survived was annexed by India out of pity more than greed, but no good deed goes unpunished.

3: Pakistan attacked India over having helped itself to the remaining four million Muslims of Bangladesh (who until 1971 had "belonged" to Pakistan) and the two countries had their long-awaited nuclear exchange, which spilled over to Kabul where the Indian-backed government fell...