Quebec was still part of Canada; the secessionists were now a tiny but ever-vocal minority.
In 2019, South Africa completed, at long last, its post-Apartheid crimes-against-humanity trials, with over five thousand people convicted. President Desmond Tutu, eighty-eight, pardoned them all, an act, he said, not just of Christian forgiveness but of closure.
No one had yet set foot upon Mars — the early visions that suggested the contrary turned out to be virtual-reality simulations at Disney World.
The President of the United States was African-American and male; there had apparently yet to be a female American president in the interim. But the Catholic Church did indeed now ordain women.
Cuba was no longer Communist; China was the last remaining Communist country, and its grip on its people seemed as firm twenty-one years hence as it was today. C hina's population was now almost two billion.
Ozone depletion was substantial; people wore hats and sunglasses, even on cloudy days.
Cars couldn't fly — but they could levitate up to about two meters off the ground. On the one hand, road work was being curtailed in most countries. Cars no longer required a smooth, hard surface; some places were even dismantling roads and putting in greenbelts instead. On the other hand, roads were getting so much less wear and tear that those left intact required little maintenance.
Christ had not come again.
The dream of artificial intelligence was still unfulfilled. Though computers that could talk existed in abundance, none exhibited any measure of consciousness.
Male sperm counts continued their precipitous drop worldwide; in the developed world, artificial insemination was now common, and was covered by the socialized medical programs in Canada, the European Union, and even the United States. In the Third World, birth rates were falling for the first time ever.
On August 6, 2030 — the eighty-fifth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima — a ceremony occurred in that city announcing a worldwide ban on the development of nuclear weapons.
Despite bans on their hunting, sperm whales were extinct by 2030. Over one hundred committed suicide in 2022 by beaching themselves at locales all over the world; no one knows why.
In a victory for common sense worldwide, fourteen of North America's largest newspapers simultaneously agreed to stop running horoscopes, declaring that printing such nonsense was at odds with their fundamental purpose of disseminating the truth.
A cure for AIDS was found in 2014 or 2015. Total worldwide death count from that plague was estimated at seventy-five million, the same figure the Black Death had killed seven hundred years previously. A cure for cancer still remained elusive, but most forms of diabetes could be diagnosed and corrected in the womb prior to birth.
Nanotechnology still didn't work.
George Lucas still hadn't finished his nine-part Star Wars epic.
Smoking was now illegal in all public areas, including outdoor ones, in the United States and Canada. A coalition of Third World countries was now suing the United States at the World Court in the Hague for willfully promoting tobacco use in developing nations.
Bill Gates lost his fortune: Microsoft stock tumbled badly in 2027, in response to a new version of the Year-2000 crisis. Older Microsoft software stored dates as thirty-two-bit strings representing the number of seconds that had passed since January 1, 1970; they ran out of storage space in 2027. Attempts by key Microsoft employees to divest themselves of their stock drove the price even lower. The company finally filed for Chapter Eleven in 2029.
The average income in the United States seemed to be $157,000 per year. A loaf of bread cost four dollars.
The top-grossing film of all time was the 2026 remake of War of the Worlds.
Learning Japanese was now mandatory for all M.B.A. students at the Harvard Business School.
The fashion colors for 2030 would be pale yellow and burnt orange. Women were wearing their hair long again.
Rhinoceroses were now bred on farms specifically for their horns, still highly prized in the East. They were no longer in danger of extinction.
It was now a capital crime to kill a gorilla in Zaire.
Donald Trump was building a pyramid in the Nevada desert to house his eventual remains. When done, it will be ten meters taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza.
The 2029 World Series will be won by the Honolulu Volcanoes.
The Turks and Caicos Islands joined Canada in 2023 or 2024.
After DNA tests conclusively proved one hundred previous cases of wrongful execution, the United States abolished the death penalty.
Pepsi won the cola wars.
There will be another huge stock market crash; those who know what year it will take place are apparently keeping that information to themselves.
The United States will finally go metric.
India established the first permanent base on the Moon.
A war is under way between Guatemala and Ecuador.
The world's population in 2030 will be eleven billion; four billion of those were born after 2009, and so could never have had a vision.
Michiko and Lloyd were eating a late dinner in his apartment. Lloyd had made raclette — cheese melted and served over boiled potatoes — a traditional Swiss dish he'd grown fond of. They had a bottle of Blauburgunder with it; Lloyd was never much of a drinker, but wine flowed so freely in Europe, and he was at the age at which a glass or two a day was beneficial for his heart.
"We'll never know for sure, will we?" said Michiko, after eating a small piece of potato. "We'll never know who that woman you were with was, or who the father of my child was."
"Oh, yes, we will," said Lloyd. "You'll presumably know who the father is sometime in the next thirteen or fourteen years — before the child is born. And I'll know who that woman is whenever I do finally meet her — I'd certainly recognize her, even if she were years younger than she was in my vision."
Michiko nodded, as if this were obvious. "But I mean we won't know in time for our own wedding," she said, her voice small.
"No," said Lloyd. "We won't."
She sighed. "What do you want to do?"
Lloyd lifted his eyes from the table and looked at Michiko. Her lips were pressed tightly together; perhaps she was trying to keep them from trembling. On her hand was the engagement ring — so much less than he'd wanted to get her, so much more than he could really afford. "It's not fair," he said. "I mean, Christ, even Elizabeth Taylor probably thought it was 'till death do us part' each time she got married; nobody should have to go into a marriage knowing it's bound to fail."
He could tell Michiko was looking at him, tell that she was trying to seek out his eyes. "So that's you're decision?" she said. "You want to call off the engagement?"
"I do love you," said Lloyd, finally. "You know that."
"Then what's the problem?" asked Michiko.
What was the problem? Was it divorce that so terrified him — or just a messy divorce, like the one his parents had gone through? Who would have thought that such a simple thing as dividing up community property could have escalated into out-and-out warfare, with vicious accusations on both sides? Who would have thought that two people who had scrimped and saved and sacrificed year after year to buy each other lavish Christmas presents as tokens of their love would end up using legal claws to pry those presents back from the only person in the world to whom they meant anything? Who would have thought that a couple who had oh-so-cutely given their children names that were anagrams — Lloyd and Dolly — would turn around and use those same children as pawns, as weapons?