"Is it?" I asked. "Tell me about it." I knew that Tuck had plenty of experience studying extinctions, so I wanted to hear what he had to say.

"They'll need to ensure that they can maintain a birth rate above the death rate. This isn't so easy because humans can die pretty easily, they're not very good at cranking out lots of babies fast, and kids take a really long time to grow up. They'll also need to ensure that they have sufficient genetic diversity. Otherwise, normally rare recessive traits will be greatly magnified in the population, and they could be plagued by serious genetic disorders within a few generations. To create a healthy, sustainable population, they'll need an absolute minimum of 23 individuals - 16 female, 7 male. And that assumes that everyone's fertile, that all the females are of childbearing age, and that they've chosen all these people extremely carefully. Do they know this?"

"I have no idea," I answered. "I don't know who they have in charge of survival planning. Come to think of it, I don't even know who's in their group besides Ivana and the late Morty."

"Well, even if Morty comes back to life, if he thinks two people can repopulate the Earth, he's sorely mistaken. There are probably more than just the two of them, but I got the feeling that they don't have anybody outside the town of Mesothelioma Lawyers, New York. If that's the case, then there probably aren't too many of them. And even if they have enough people to handle the reproductive issues, there are still other kinds of survival issues. If they decide that they don't like Morty being a dictator, how will he maintain order? Can they survive a civil war? Will they have adequate medical care? Are they going to keep the utilities running? How are they going to get food? Did they think this through? Or were they too busy planning how they were going to kill everyone?"

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