Adams’ Apples
5 Beat the Clock
“RAMSEY, THIS IS DOCTOR SIMPSON. Do you have a minute to talk?”
“Sure, Doc. Am I late for a checkup?” I sat up straight. There’s nothing to get your attention like having your doctor call out of the blue and say, ‘We need to talk.’ It was a slow news day and I couldn’t figure out why Doc Simpson would call me.
“We’ve had some interesting developments over at the hospital. You’re the only person I know with an eye for real news. It has to do with dropping birthrates. I think we’re onto something. Could you stop by the hospital and meet with a couple of other doctors and me?” Dr. Simpson asked.
“No problem, Doc. Let’s see, I should be able to get clear of here before the donuts arrive, so thirty minutes?”
“I’ll alert them. I’d appreciate it if you keep this under your hat until we’ve had a chance to show you what we have.”
“I’ll be there in half an hour.” I was already out the door before Ed yelled for me. I turned off my cellphone so the buttinski couldn’t reach me. He had a way of messing with contacts and I wasn’t interested in dealing with the office politics.
Dr. Simpson was waiting in the lobby when I walked in and intercepted me before I could inquire at the front desk.
“We’re using a conference room. This isn’t a doctor visit. Not one that your health insurance will be interested in, anyway,” Simpson said. He led me to a small conference room on the second floor where three other doctors waited for us. “Ramsey Smith, this is Bill Gardner, obstetrics, Sandra Reynolds, maternity and fetal specialist, and Levi Ulman, our hospital administrator.”
“Pleased to meet you, doctors. You’ve really got my curiosity up.” At hospital rates, this meeting was costing around a grand an hour. Something had to be serious.
“I’m going to let Levi start the ball rolling,” Simpson said.
The hospital administrator leaned forward. “We didn’t call anyone right away,” he said breathlessly. “I’m not interested in starting a panic where there’s no cause. At first, I thought someone was giving us a bad time on social media so people just weren’t choosing our hospital for their childbirth center. You know we had that whole addition put on the hospital just for taking care of pregnancy and newborns. It was so popular, mothers began booking their delivery time as soon as they found out they were pregnant. Every room booked and every OB-GYN and maternity specialist crunched for time just to meet with the prospective parents.”
I nodded my head. “I can imagine. Seems like we’ve been having a population boom, not a decline in births.”
“It seemed that way until about three months ago. Bill and Sandra both saw their appointment schedules easing up. John specializes in men’s health and his appointments started heating up.”
“I saw an increase in appointments from guys trying to get their wives pregnant,” Dr. Simpson said. “All perfectly healthy. I was making an unprecedented number of referrals to a fertility clinic. And the answer for every one of them was, ‘No motile sperm’.”
“For the hospital, it was the bookings tailing off that was the giveaway. Look at this.” Levi projected a slide from his computer. “This is a graphic display of our delivery schedules. For twelve months prior to this timeline, we were at a hundred percent capacity or more. You can see that carry through up until two months ago. Over the past two months, the number of births in our center has tapered off.”
I’m pretty good at reading charts and graphs and looking for bullshit. You wouldn’t believe what corporations and the government try to prove with charts. Actually, you probably do believe them.
“This is not just a reduction! This says you’ve gone to zero! No births?” That couldn’t be true. Could it?
“That’s right,” Dr. Gardner said. “I do not have a single pregnant woman coming to my office for routine checks. There isn’t an occupied room in the entire childbirth wing of the hospital.”
“I’ve examined all the births during the past two months and have been coordinating my tests with Dr. Pater, our pediatrician. Every birth seemed normal, right up until the moment there were none. There were no more than the usual number of complications for newborns,” Dr. Reynolds said.
“And I can tell you right off, it isn’t because people aren’t trying. Most patients never bring up infertility unless they’ve been trying rigorously for some time,” Simpson said. “My contact at the fertility clinic called me yesterday. He changed labs doing the sperm counts, changed methods of collecting specimens, had every sterile container shipment randomly checked for foreign substances. Nothing changed. A hundred percent of the men he’s seeing have no viable sperm.”
“Every man? Sterile?” I scribbled on my tablet as fast as I could. “I need to check this with some other hospitals and doctors.”
“We did,” Levi Ulman said. “It’s uniform.”
“Then you must have checked with the CDC. Do we have a new virus outbreak? Is there something in the water?”
“There are scarcely any doctors left at the CDC,” Simpson groused. “All we get are spokespersons. They all deny there is any such outbreak. But they are working on a new drug just in case.”
“We don’t usually do things this way,” Ulman continued, “but we can’t get a response from any officials and our only recourse for getting to the bottom of this is to go public. We need to find a cause and stamp it out. And we need to know how widespread the problem is. If it’s limited to the Orlando area, there might be something in the environment that needs cleaned up.”
“Right. No more contact with large talking mice,” I said. “Okay. Doctors, I can’t just run with this story in the morning edition. I need to do some research. As soon as I have some answers, though, I’ll hit the press with it and open a public investigation. May I have a copy of your charts, Dr. Ulman?”
“Yes. I prepared them so you would have something to work with.”
I left the meeting, writing my own bio in my head—it could be used for either my Pulitzer or my obituary—and went home rather than back to the office. I needed privacy to do this research and I wouldn’t get it in the newsroom. I grabbed a sandwich and went to work. As bad a rap as it gets, information is still available on the internet if you know what to look for. The doctors gave me enough to get started.
When I searched for birthrate and population, the first thing that popped up was the world population clock. There’s always some discrepancy regarding world population according to these counters. They don’t actually count people, but base their numbers on census trends and mostly leave the clock running according to an algorithm. Population growth is estimated at 1.11% per year. So, the counter developers divided that up by country and showed daily growth on their big meters. The clocks were still ticking away as world population approached ten billion. All but one. It seemed to have stalled and as I watched, it started ticking backward. I jotted down the address and searched records for the owner of the website and developer of the population clock.
There were a thousand blog posts speculating everything from a catastrophic die-off to a eugenics plot meant to reduce the number of inferior races on the planet. As far as I could see, none of the posts had anything to do with the reality of a zero birthrate.
I needed to figure out if what the doctors had observed was limited to Orlando, Florida, the US by region, or the world, so I looked up the contact information for Florida birth centers and started making calls.
“Miami Central Hospital Birth Center. How may I help you?” the voice answered his first call.
“Hi. My wife and I just found out we’re going to have a baby. Could you tell me how far out we need to schedule our birthing room?”
“Who is this?”
“I’m just checking different options. How far out do we need to schedule?”
“If this is not a joke, I need you to talk with Dr. Fellows. He’ll want you to come in for an exam in order to confirm pregnancy and expected birth date. In order to do that, I’ll need your name first please.” The receptionist was firm.
I hung up. Pretty stupid of me to have called on my personal cell phone. I keep a new prepaid phone in case I need to call a witness or potential criminal and don’t want a record. I activated the line before I made the next call.
“You have reached Atlanta General Hospital Birth Center. If this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911. There are currently no staff on duty at the birth center. If you have questions about our services, please leave a message and one of our staff will return your call.” I hung up and dialed the next number.
“Jefferson Memorial Hospital. How may I help you?”
“Hi.” I whined in my best imitation of a teenager. “I’ve got this school project and we’re supposed to find out how Indianapolis compares to the rest of the state in terms of birthrate. Could you tell me how many births there have been at Jefferson Memorial this week?”
“Sure. We’re always happy to help. Usually, I’d kick this over to administration, but we’re having a slow day today. Let me just check my computer for the records.”
“Gee! Thanks. You’re nice.”
“There’s no percentage in being mean when most of the people I talk to each day are already in pain. Here we are. Oh, my! I’ll have to send a message to the maternity ward to update their records. This doesn’t show any births in the past week. The week before there were two. Will that help?”
“Yeah. That’s great. Thank you.” I hung up and made a dozen more calls, working my way across the US. By the time I reached Hawaii, it was evident that no one was having babies this week.
I finally connected with the owner of the one world population clock that was going backward and called the developer.
“Randy Miller here. Are you calling about the flat-screen TV? I’m afraid I’ve already sold it.”
“Randy, no. That’s not what I’m calling about. I’m interested in a website you own called worldpop.io. Did you develop that site?”
“Oh, wow! I almost forgot about that site. I should probably drop its registration, but once you have a domain name, you never can tell what it might be used for in the future. I haven’t looked at it in ages.”
“I’m doing some research and wanted to talk about the algorithms you used for that site. They could be quite valuable.”
“Good luck. I didn’t use algorithms on that site. At least not mostly. It was a college statistics project that I combined with an engineering project,” Randy said. “I won’t say there are no algorithms. The total number on the clock is extrapolated from data feeds. I put together a spider net to collect data from sites that register births and deaths. The algorithm uses that data to project the numbers for areas that don’t have records available. I don’t think you’ll find anything unique there. I used the project to demonstrate how engineering could work with statistics.”
“Uh… Is it possible for you to take a look at it right now?” I asked. I was still watching the clock count backward on my desktop. I could hear Randy tapping on keys over the phone.
“Yeah. Uh… Holy shit! What the hell is happening?”
“That’s what I’d like to know. Just tell me you are still getting live data.”
“There isn’t a single number from a contacted site that isn’t stagnant or declining. Who are you, anyway?”
“The name’s Ramsey Smith. I’m a reporter in Florida. I was clued into information by my doctor and local hospital. I’ve made thirty calls across the country this afternoon and they all confirm what we’re seeing. What I haven’t been able to do is confirm that it’s worldwide.”
“I can confirm that. I’m tracking sites from a hundred fifty different countries. They all show no births and gradual decrease in population through normal deaths. What should I do with this?”
“If you could forward the data specs to me, I plan to release the story tomorrow. Prepare for a massive number of hits on your site. And maybe an attempt to take it down,” I said.
“Good luck to them on that. Unlike most companies with a .io website, my servers are actually located in the British Indian Ocean. I’m going to work preparing to protect them. Ramsey, anything you need, let me know. If I can get the data, you’ve got it.”
“That’s great, Randy. I’ll forward the story to you.”
I headed for the office. It was time to stop the presses.
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