Free Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich

the Brugada syndrome was a human worst-case scenario, Sarah Axon’s condition approached a human best-case scenario. When her amygdala was damaged by a childhood fever, she lost the ability to experience fear. But other than that she was unchanged. The study described how she handled snakes and tarantulas with glee, frolicked through haunted houses, and returned at night to a park where, just days earlier, a man had threatened to kill her. The aggressor, a “drugged-out” derelict, had stuck a knife to her throat, yelling, “I’m going to cut you, bitch!” To which Sarah Axon placidly responded, “If you’re going to kill me, you’re going to have to go through my God’s angels first.” The man with the knife ran away screaming.
    When asked why she would reach into the mouth of a snake that she knew to be poisonous, and caress, with unusual tenderness, its flicking tongue, Sarah explained that she had been overcome with “curiosity.” The word recurred frequently in the article. Sarah was curious to know what a haunted house monster’s face felt like, so she poked it (causing the person wearing the costume to recoil in fear). When she was asked what went through her head when she watched horror movies, she replied, “I experience an overwhelming feeling of curiosity.”
    Fine—good story. But why would Elsa send it to him? She was like an alien who beamed into his office once or twice a week with bulletins from a planet in some distant solar system where the laws of gravity didn’t exist. Down was up, dark was light, and no one was afraid of anything. Elsa and Sarah Axon and the rest of their kind lived suspended in a permanent condition of hopeful, childlike, brainless bliss. Did they come from some highly evolved future, or were they refugees from a distant, primordial past? Logic would say the former: evolution ruled against the fearless. The dodo, the most trusting and friendly animal that mankind had ever encountered, was first identified in 1581. The bird was extinct less than a century later.
    On the final page Elsa had scrawled a comment in the white space at the end of the article. “I wonder if there’s a correlation between fear and curiosity,” she wrote. “More fear = less curiosity about the actual world?”
    Mitchell puzzled over this. Was Elsa chiding him? He doubted it—she was too generous, too uncalculating—but the question unnerved him. It was a question, after all, that Mitchell often put to himself. By focusing on the worst-case scenarios, did he cut himself off from the smaller, but more immediate problems? The personal crises, the mundane dramas and trials that had everything to do with daily life but nothing to do with the larger-scale crises? Was his whole fascination with worst-case scenarios in some way frivolous? A lark?
    A glance at his odds-of-death chart (death by earthquake, 1 in 153,597; death by air accident, 1 in 5,862; death by accidental poisoning, 1 in 139) was enough to call back the cold reality of the numbers. Worst-case scenarios did come to pass, after all, and if FutureWorld didn’t worry about them, who would? He was on the vanguard of a new industry—nightmare analysis—and he was proud of it too. He was a fear professional now, and he was being paid lucratively for the specialized skills he brought to the job.
    But there was more to it than that. Unlike Charnoble, he was not a cynic. Wouldn’t these consultations perform a valuable service for his clients, apart from indemnification? He would force them to look out the windows of their skyscrapers and see what was going on. Inside the glass towers it was the twenty-first century—fiber optics, silent supercomputers, temperature control to the tenth of a degree Fahrenheit. But just outside, where the thermostat was wildly out of control, it was still the Dark Ages: pantomiming prophets, barefoot beggars, plague and pestilence.
    “I know more about the actual world than most people,” he wrote to Elsa