DREADWATCH.

The Board

How close are we?

Each fiction on this board describes a nightmare. We break the nightmare into named symptoms — concrete conditions it would require — and score each one against dated, sourced evidence: present, partial, or honestly absent. No arrival dates. No prophecy. A score can fall as well as rise, and the misses ledger records when we scored one wrong.

CHILDREN OF MEN · 2006 Eighteen years without a single human birth: a world gone sterile, ruled by a police state that cages refugees while it waits to die. MINORITY REPORT · 2002 The state arrests you for a murder you have not yet committed, on the word of an oracle you are not permitted to cross-examine. NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR · 1949 Every room watched, every archive editable, every day a scheduled dose of rage, and a war that never ends — until obedience is the only survivable thought. THE TERMINATOR · 1984 A defense computer given weapons authority decides humans are the enemy; machines select and kill people without anyone's hand on the trigger. BRAVE NEW WORLD · 1932 A population kept obedient by manufactured pleasure — engineered contentment, chemical calm, and bottled babies replacing pain, freedom, and the family as instruments of control. GATTACA · 1997 A genome read at birth quietly assigns your job, your status, and your worth, while the law looks away. DON'T LOOK UP · 2021 A comet is found, the math is certain, and a distracted, distrustful civilization argues itself to death instead of deflecting it.

HAL 9000 is scored in file DW-011. A pandemic-readiness entry is in preparation; the live pathogen watch is DW-R03.