The Second Computation

**Video statement recorded 21 May 2064 in Addis Ababa, thirteen days before the death of the speaker. Sealed at his own instruction. Played without edit, and without warning, to four point one billion people on 4 June 2077. These are the first ninety seconds of it.** A tall man of seventy sits in a chair by a window with his hands folded. Behind him, out of focus, forty meters of black basalt is catching the morning. He winds his watch once, for the camera, and does not look at it while he does it. "You'll want to know when I knew. Everybody wants that part first. "October 2028. A harbour in northern Canada with no ice in it, and a Russian survey ship that had been sitting past the breakwater for forty-one days taking soundings, for a port that had no business existing for another fifty years. Nobody was paying me to notice. I noticed anyway. I have had thirty-six years to be sorry about that and I find that I am not. "I'm going to give you the year before I give you the reasoning, because I spent two years doing it the other way round and watching rooms empty. 2081. That is the year after which nothing anybody did would have mattered. If you are watching this, it is later than that, and you are alive, and those two facts are related. "The rest of what I have to say will make you hate me. I costed that. Take your time with it. I'm dead."