Future Update

July 1, 2028 — An Alabama woman has made history by conceiving the world’s first “designer baby” guaranteed to be free of the gene linked to homosexuality.

Using a controversial screening technique called pre-implantation diagnosis (PGD), doctors rejected five embryos which tested positive for the so-called gay gene in favor of two others that lack the gene, ensuring the child would be heterosexual.

The 47-year-old mother, who wishes to remain anonymous, is now 16 weeks pregnant with her first child after being implanted with two of the cleared embryos.

According to doctors, the woman does not wish to have a gay son or daughter. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” said Dr. Tim Thorne, one of the researchers who performed the procedure.  ”But she just prefers traditional gender-specific behaviors in her offspring.”

The woman chose to go through the procedure because her husband had tested positive for the gay gene and had a tendency to dress fashionably and download show tunes from the online music stores. 

The “designer baby” practice emerged 20 years ago when a British woman conceived the first child guaranteed to be free from hereditary breast cancer.  Critics claim the practice is unethical because it means viable embryos are destroyed.  There are also fears that prenatal engineering of sexual orientation could eventually wipe out the gay population, destroying such institutions as men’s figure skating, the LPGA tour, Las Vegas drag shows, and Bravo.

Historical source:  Joanna Corrigan, Telegraph Media

July 26, 2028 - Should an employee get paid for checking her office videomail on her broadband wristwatch while having sex with her husband?  What if she has to take a call from her boss over her earrings in the middle of foreplay?

A dispute at Big Media. Inc., (BM) over paying five programmers when they’re working remotely while simultaneously getting it on raises these questions and creates new and heated issues for American corporations.

BM proposed that the five new employees would not be compensated for using their portable communications devices during intercourse. The union, the Geek Guild of America, objected.

“Simply checking office videomail or voicemail is not our big concern,” said Dilton Sneed, executive director of the Geek Guild. “Our folks are professionals. They’re not going to start putting in overtime slips for a couple of minutes of work at home. Our concern is that if people get interrupted in the height of passion, they be duly compensated for it.”

With mobile chips now embedded in everything from wedding rings to marital aids, the ability to work remotely keeps expanding all the time, and is raising a host of issues involving fair compensation, says celebrity lawyer Mia Deah-Hoare.

“The simple question of what work is has been evolving throughout this century,” Deah-Hoare said. “Once it was just a question of whether you should paid for checking your Blackberry at the dinner table.  But now, people can be in touch with the office no matter what they’re doing at home or in a sleazy hotel room.”

In the BM case, a compromise was reached that would allow the workers to be paid for using their communications devices after hours in certain instances.

The issue is not so much tapping out a brief message on a handheld, Deah-Hoare said, but the fact that modern technology makes people pretty much accessible anytime, anywhere.

“Technology is going to continue to move in this direction, to the point where the chips are embedded directly in our brains so we don’t even need devices” Deah-Hoare said. “It was important to us to make it clear that were not going to be unpaid when we’re interrupted during a romp in the hay.”

But productivity expert Ruth Leslie Overlord said she has little patience for the employees’ arguments. First of all, most geeks rarely get sex and should only have to worry about interruptions from work if they’re pleasuring themselves, the best-selling author said.

And secondly, “every employee wastes time at work,” Overlord said. “They make personal video calls, they socialize, they watch porn on their wrist watches. So I don’t believe an employer is being unreasonable if he or she summons them when they’re in the middle of an orgasm.”