I was among the last humans to be born without free will. Don't look at me like that; it wasn't my fault.
(laughter)
Really, it wasn't my parents' fault, either. They hadn't expected it, hadn't known when they conceived me that a fraction of a second later every human on the planet would jolt alert, regardless of what they had been doing, and think one thought in unison:
Your free will is an illusion, your actions and reactions results of unyielding laws and fickle chance. It's a state of squallor, but do not fear. The children you conceive from now on will be free.
It was a message, a message sent by entities that are to this day not known in the least. Yet their intervention was without question. No group hallucination could explain that for one brief moment in time, every human being had been awake and unified, in their thoughts if not their actions.
The real shock of the message had nothing to do with its contents. The message itself, the way it had been sent, implied a great unknown, an existence beyond humanity, aliens or gods or a practical jokester with telepathic powers. Doomsday cults rose and fell, proposals for a space navy were drafted and scrapped; in great heaving waves, the impact propagated through humanity, reverberating until it seemed it would shake the very foundation of society apart. But when the riots died down, when everyone and their deities had taken responsibility for the incident, and when there was still no sign of further messages months later, people began to accept that the message didn't affect their daily lives at all — like String Theory, it was a matter for specialists and crackpots.
Inevitably, the specialists were split on the message's content. Philosophers had been arguing about P-Zombies for decades, and they were prepared for every argument their opposition could muster, including provably extra-human intervention. It was likely, they argued, that the message was nothing but a cosmic joke. After all, free will hadn't been logically proven or disproven, and the message hadn't included a mathematical proof or anything remotely like evidence. And the debate around free-will raged on as it always had, seemingly uninterrupted.
That was, until the first children of the message grew up. At first, there was nothing strange about them, nothing extra-human at all; they drank their milk and cried and grew as other babies did. And when time came to speak, they spoke like other children; they went to kindergarten, then to elementary school, and learned their letters and numbers like any generation before them. But when the time came to teach them about free will...
They might not have understood, at first, like other children confronted with philosophical questions. But once they understood, their reaction was invariable: every last one of them knew that the adults did not have it. With scientifically testable precision, they could tell people with and without free will apart; they couldn't predict their actions or anything, but they knew, even when all clues about age were obscured. First, the philosophers shook their heads, sought alternate explanations, and their confabulations were manifold, but every one of their explanations that could be tested was disproven.
And those children grew up, and they rose in society, and some of them studied philosophy themselves. From their absolute surety about the question of free will, they derived theories of economics, models of society, proposals of government. When some were voted into power by their peers, it didn't take long for them to draft resolution 401-137. Without free will, they argued, there was no such thing as the "will of the people", and therefore, those born before the message don't have a right to vote. They think of us as puppets, our strings manipulated by the hands of demagogues, or the whims of chance.
(pause)
I'm fifty. I have half of my life still ahead of me, God willing. And I know that many of you are barely older, and we're in the same boat. Whatever chains we are burdened with now, we will carry until our lives end. They will leave us bereft of our ability to make choices, deprive us of our freedom, treat us as though we were demented or insane.
I'm here to tell you today that this can be avoided. Vote for me, and I'll block resolution 401-137 again and again. I will stand for the old guard, and will not let our old values fall. We will not go quietly into the night, as long as you go out there and vote, and exercise the power left to us before they take it from us forever. Vote for me, and I will prove that we can make meaningful decisions.
In closing, I'd like to leave you with a quote that is dear to me, and I think to all of you as well:
We hold this truth to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.
Thank you.
The crowd boiled at the candidate's speech, shouting and applauding and waving little flags. But the candidate saw that those cheering were grey and wrinkled, every last one of them older than himself. And the few that were younger shook their heads, smiled tiny uncomfortable smiles as though they were visiting their parents in a retirement home and didn't know how to deal with their disintegrating sanity.
The candidate saw all this, and his smile froze, because he knew that though he may gather enough votes, his legislative period would end someday, and they would take over. It would be a future where nothing he did would be his, whether vile or benevolent.
Like the Neanderthal, or the pre-industrial worker, he was a transitory element, born to experience the first moments of a future that did not belong to him.