by Ashly Graham
At Central’s Department of Human Bondage, a disgruntled Chief Operator Ian “Iron Fist” Glover 7171C was called at one o’clock in the morning from a Murphy bed in his office and the embrace of a male intern, Pecto Mussellini 4013P, to listen to a replay of the transmission; following which Vignoles was traced, by a much larger and much more intelligent but much less winsome satellite than Lassie, to the Sidcup garden shed.
Plucked from the arms of his weeping mother at the shed door—for his parent remained respectful to the last of her son’s stricture regarding his privacy—Vignoles 0281V was taken by State police to the “Bowels”, or Central’s London debriefing centre, formerly the Elephant & Castle tube station. There Ian “Iron Fist” Glover 7171C, in his dressing-gown, extracted a full confession with the aid of a simple but effective invasive contraption that tap-danced on the internal organs while playing Irving Berlin’s Puttin’ on the Ritz.
After returning to an empty office, and checking his messages to learn that a miffed Pecto Mussellini 4013P had departed to console himself elsewhere for Ian interruptus, a now unable-to-sleep Chief Operator Glover, having been advised on his mobile that Vignoles was still alive, ordered his gonads connected to enough volts to keep Lassie howling for a century; and sent a communication to another youth, Florian Montacute 9357P, an epicene contrast to Pecto Mussellini whom Glover had encountered while on holiday on Uranus, offering him a job as his new intern.
The following morning the expired Rupert Vignoles 0281V was turned over to the Department of the Environment, where he was shredded, bagged, and tagged for delivery to his mother with Central’s compliments and a suggestion that she recycle the contents as fertilizer on her rose beds.
Now that Central’s machine had taken over from such inspired amateurs as Madame Flahita and Rupert Vignoles, a committee of Central’s most over-qualified science laureates signed a statement attesting to their finding that: “At some supervening point either sooner or later, the impact of so many cluster-condensed masses as are anticipated to make landfall within a given area inside the Earth’s circumference, such area being defined as excluding only that other area that lies outside it, and which shall also enter those areas at present given over to water both saline and fresh, will effectively negate the planet Earth’s viability, along with that of all other environments that the Central State is cognizant of that it either has already, or could now or in the not too distant future, have under its control, in offering the prospect of constituting a reliable ongoing post-calamity-situation domicile for a Human Race that, to all intents and purposes, will no longer be in need of accommodation and means of subsistence for reason that it will no longer exist.”
‘Or, more poetically,’ said Ian “Iron Fist” Glover 7171C to himself, as he wept over two pictures of Pecto Musselini that he carried in his trouser back pockets, of the pair (Ian and Pecto) on the beach at Central’s R&R atoll, Shakei-Tabout...quoting Cymbeline…‘Golden lads and girls all must, |As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.’
Ian had further reason for despondency: not only had Pecto advised him by text message that he had accepted another internal job directly underneath Iron Fist’s immediate superior, Bruce Nance 6978B, replacing Pecto’s friend, Cupid Stunt 0291P, who was having sexuality issues; but Florian Montacute 9357P had turned Iron Fist down in favouring a much more senior officer, an A Class, with his favours; and Ian, who instead of feeling like an iron fist in an iron glove was now feeling like a velvet glove without a glove, on account of his having been assigned a distinctly un-golden girl intern from the office pool; which meant that Iron Fist was not going to get his sooty chimney swept for the unforeseeable future, and maybe never would again.
Central, intent upon preventing outbreaks of dole and dissipation, issued an injunction forbidding Dionysian revels and drug-induced comas. People were expected to maintain a Cromwellian sobriety, and, to keep them busy and productive, it was announced that each was to be assigned a role in a massive cooperative effort to find a panacea for oblivion. Everyone was charged with coming up with at least one idea, and entering the details on a form, from the rich retired Central officers who were holed up in their second and third homes on private beach-in-space platforms, to the geriatrics in extraterrestrial colonies where they had been sent to reduce overpopulation.
No one was exempt. Even the convicts and felons on far-off stars, who were digging up rocks containing the minerals of which Earth had been depleted, were roped in, harder than they already were.
Submissions were processed by the Department of Desiderata, which was under the aegis of Inman Tray 9230, newly promoted from B to A because his job was so more important than before, when there was so much less to desiderate. Executive secretary Mercedes Stamp 2020K’s staff, increased from fifty to a thousand, assigned each incoming form a reference number, before passing them to Central’s Chief of Research Ida Checkitt 7012C’s ten thousand-strong Indian subcontinent outsource network, for processing and classification.
Those premises that seemed budding with the most promise were to be dispatched to Inman Tray 9230A’s in-trays, for the Department of Desiderata’s assessment as to whether they might bear fruit.
A weary Ida Checkitt went home every night and informed her partner that, potentially fruitful or not, every grape would be a raisin by the time it got passed up the line, and they would be toast; and Checkitt’s partner, Random Pickett 0548E told Ida that she smelled of curry; and Checkitt told Pickett that she was not surprised, because she spent her whole day talking to members of her work force in Bombay and Calcutta whose numerics, after their names had been subtracted from them because they were so long that they slowed down the computers, ran to fifteen decimal places; and that if she had to expand her outsource network by one more person she was going to have to assign him the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, Π, or π, or pi, being the mathematical symbol denoting the value of the circumference of a circle to its diameter; which, last time Checkitt checked, was approximately 3.141592653589793 and counting….
So far it was a very one-sided Star Wars, and amongst the professionals the scientists, flummoxed, spouted saliva and jargon, and fogged their glasses with frustration. They knew of no material with which they might construct an Achillean shield to ward off the meteorites; no engines or lasers strong enough to repel them; or bombard them like giant kidney stones; no means of setting up a battle amongst them, as Medea did to help Jason, and Athena, Cadmus, by throwing the rock that started a fight to the death amongst the warriors that sprang from sowing the dragon’s teeth; no alternative orbit, or stratospheric zone, out of their path into which Earth might be propelled by jet- or rocket-powered thrusters. There was no known chemical formula produceable in sufficiently concentrated quantity to dissolve them; no known medicine that would quell them; no cryogenic means of freezing them to a standstill.
Every atomic theory of fusion and fission from Fermi, Oppenheimer, and Teller onwards was re-examined, in the hope of coming across something that had been overlooked. Designs for giant interceptors equipped with optical electronics to deliver molecule-busting rays; hydra-headed hydrogen bombs; factory-sized magnetic resonance emitters; search-and-destroy systems capable of pinpointing everything from missiles to the armaments, personnel, pocket handkerchiefs, and inhalers of the smallest terrorist cells; prototypes, and rejected patents; miscellaneous gimmicks, gismos, and gadgets; a suggestion that a thousand-person orchestra try to lull them to sleep with a rendition of Brahms’s Lullaby; another proposing scaring them away by playing the Sex Pistols punk rock at extra mega-volume...none of these or even a combination thereof was considered likely to work against so large and dense an assault, or even feasible to bring to bear.
Though it caused a brief stir at Central, the possibility of cloning a community of Humans—a Masonic handshake by-invitation-only private party community of As, Bs, and Cs—by extracting pluripotent stem cells from their own blastocysts, and shooting them to Never Never Land in capsu
les, was rejected as impractical on the grounds of impossibility.
Despite an ecstatic moment on the part of estate agents, after it was rumoured that the Red Planet, Mars, might be outside the scope of the onslaught, their hopes for a massive escalation in prices for airquake-proof Martian condominiums, and an increase in lease-to-own purchases, were dashed.
Innumerable individuals professed or confessed or alleged that they had, or thought they had, or thought they had the potential to have, extraordinary powers over natural and unnatural forces, and of divination. Magic and spells were dug out and written and shouted and sung and muttered by all denominations and types of magus and magician—black or white or multi-coloured magic, what did it matter? and those skilled in gramarye: wizards, warlocks, sorcerers, necromancers, shamans, conjurors; enchantresses, pythonesses, fairy godmothers, and those who, like Macbeth’s Second Witch, understood that “By the pricking of my thumbs, |Something wicked this way comes”; seers, soothsayers, sibyls, savants, prophets, psychics, mediums, mystics, clairvoyants, and fortune-tellers; druids, and obeah men and women; plus those who claimed to have connections with afreets, marids, jinn, and peris.
It seemed that, come the end of the world, when the cows were in the byre, and the chickens had come home to roost, and all was done and dusted, and cut and dried, and put to bed, for the last time, no normal folk would have been affected.
Units under the direction of Homer Farfrae 2829B took the depositions of the most unlikely sources, with orders to be patient with them, and put up with their outlandish behaviour. Central dispensations and pardons, and permits, for the public sacrificing of goats, chickens, and sheep, even Human beings, were handed out like sweets to children.
Another team was sent to the Duke Humfrey’s Library reading room in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, charged with calling up mediaeval manuals from the stacks, and making a note of ancient medical prescriptive compounds and components, the “inscriptions” comprising a basis, or chief ingredient intended to cure, curare; an adjuvant to assist its action and make it cure quickly, cito; a corrective to prevent or lessen any undesirable effect, tuto; a vehicle or excipient to make it suitable for administration, even pleasant, jucunde, to the patient—anything and everything that they might come across that might be cobbled together or doctored or cut-and-pasted or translated or updated into anything resembling relevance to the matter in hand.
Rewards were offered for anything, anything at all, that might prove efficacious in reasoning with, placating, appealing to, or shooing off the great lapidary menace. Advertisements went out for exorcists, practitioners of the occult arts, night-hags, and lamias. Leaflets were circulated at witches’ covens, offering substantial fees for spells, incantations, abracadabras, bewitchments, curses, hexes, runes, hocus-pocuses, mumbo jumbos, and fee faw fums. Voodoo, hoodoo, jadoo…no category was ignored or dismissed.
Diviners, augurers, visionaries, and prognosticators; compilers of almanacs and astrometeorological and astrological forecasts; bibliomancers, or those who foretold the future by interpreting a randomly chosen passage from a book; chiromancers, or palmists; geomancers, or diviners from handfuls of earth; psychomancers and necromancers, or those who conjured or communicated with spirits and the dead; gyromancers, or those who divined by walking around a marked circle until they fell down from dizziness; sortilegers, or those whose predictions came from a card or another item drawn at hazard, or by casting lots; oneiromancers, or the readers of dreams; readers of avian auspices and omens and portents; funfair and boardwalk fortune-tellers—all were courted and encouraged to apply themselves to their specialties with vigour and vim.
Scryers peered at crystal balls, and haruspices pored over the entrails of cattle. The leaves from thousands of cups of loose tea, consumed by tannin diagnosticians until they keeled over from caffeine poisoning, were examined.
In the Department of Determinations and Exactitude, Gideon Armour 0783A’s people were occupied in ascertaining the day and precise moment when Earth would cease to exist as they cared to know it. Cross-referenced calculations and recalculations were made amongst a chaos of mathematicians, physicists, chemists, geologists, astronomers, astrologers, and philosophers.
Eventually, Giddy Armour 0783A’s secretary, a former clergyman’s housekeeper called Maur Teevicker 8889T, whose number the statistical stickler Armour could never call to mind, though he knew that she was a T Class, when she brought her boss his afternoon tea with four sugars, handed it to him and drew his attention to the piece of paper tucked between cup and saucer; which, she said, someone had given her on the way in, and she had only glanced at it, but he should be sure to read it because it said when they were all going to die; in consideration of which, although he was usually a one-cupper would he like a second, and should she put five sugars in it instead of four if there was still enough room for the tea, alternatively she could go and look for a larger cup or even a mug.
Gideon Armour 0783A drank his tea, which had been steaming when it came in but was now stone cold. He declined the offer of a second cup. Then, taking up and unfolding the piece of paper, and holding one hand over an eye, he peeked between his fingers and read the fateful Date and Time at which the Curtain would Come Down on the Cosmos.
Not only was the tea cold, but it had been established that all people that on Earth did dwell, as in the hymn with words by William Kethe, would be eliminated on Friday 13th April, 2033 at 16:17:12—at one six seventeen hours and twelve seconds on the underground twenty-four hour clock, formerly otherwise known as military time, or Continental time, or railway time.
Which, given that it was now mid December, 2032, meant that the Big Lights-Out was only four months away.
There it was, to the day, the hour, the minute, the second, soon to be mentally graven in the world’s minds in three-dimensional numbers as large as the statues of former Eastern bloc dictators, or the Moai monoliths on Easter Island: the point after which there would be no more history for the books, no books in which to enter the history, and no more After.
Thanks for the notice, Bucko.
Well. Since outlaw Time was the nub of the problem, Time was what had to be knocked on the head once and for all; and that was why the Exeat Institute’s plenipotentiary, Director Hugo Bonvilian 4285D’s researches into mortality and immortality at were now even more vital than they had been. For if Time could be stilled, then so could the meteorites; in which event the exultant subjugator, CENTRAL! would use them as foundations to erect more buildings on, driving the pilings deep into their stony hearts.
Chapter Fourteen
When news of the timing got out, Central was dumbfounded by world reaction. The calming effect of certainty was extraordinary: people believed what they were told, and appeared even to welcome the prospect of annihilation. In a curious way, now their lives, their miserable protracted lives, had acquired context and meaning. The knowledge of a sudden and painless death, a commutation of misery, was comforting; per Macbeth: “…that but this blow |Might be the be-all and the end-all—here, |But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, |We’d jump [risk] the life to come.”
The populace jeered the crackpots who had now returned to the streets carrying their old signs, with a key word carroted in so that they now read, “The end of the world is not nigh after all”.
Those who suspected that the madmen might be genuine soothsayers, decided that they wished to be proved wrong.
There was a pre-order demand for 2033 diaries and calendars, so that the appointment could for tidiness’ sake be written in on the last day. To save paper they would be printed for the first four months only, with the last half of April left blank…thus eliminating [Western] Easter Sunday: presumptuous Easter Day, being a moveable feast that had been calculable for every year since 3rd April, AD 326 as falling sometime between March 22 and April 25 in the Julian calendar, had previously taking the liberty of pencilling itself into people’s expectations for the 17th April, 2033.
The As, Bs, and Cs, who had the most to lose because of their status, were less sanguine, as they did their best to spin the situation by putting it out that salvation of a Central kind might still be possible. But regular folk, especially those registered in the lower half of the alphabet, were not swayed. They were elated at the prospect of a change for the better in their lengthy lives, which they suffered rather than led. There would be no blindfolds for them as they stood before the firing squad; none of that Sydney Carton “It is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known” crap from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities; no drawing of weary arms across the brow with a pale Pre-Raphaelite glance heavenwards before being cast from the Delacroix precipice.
Foreknowledge was romantic, and the non-As–Bs–Cs and their less-immediate juniors did not envy the dumb beasts who knew nothing, at least most presumed that they did not, of what was going down. They were united in a common spirit of courage; and now that everyone’s existence was definitely definitively defined by finity they were prepared to side with the prosecution in Central vs T.S. Eliot, in maintaining that the world would end in a grand finale: with a bang and not a whimper, as the poet’s Hollow Men had asseverated: “This is the way the world ends |This is the way the world ends |This is the way the world ends |Not with a bang but a whimper.”
For hoi polloi it became a point of honour, now that their mortal state had been afforded the luxury of context and meaning, that their upper lips not quiver; and that they should so bear themselves that, even if Earth were only going to last another week, Men would say, had there been any around to echo the Churchillian phrase, “This was their finest hour.”