Everything always finds an eventual rhythm and the end of the world is no exception.

The sky is now so black that day and night are only useless memories of a time.

Before.

Where once beautiful clouds thrilled their audiences by floating low and slow across the city and then out to sea they now lay sullen and black and heavy and still.

There is only rain now. Hateful hellish rain. And winds strong enough to make you walk double as you go about your pitiful business.

Imagine a single pleading stream of hopeless angry frightened desperate voices captured and then eventually set adrift across the darkest darkness of Time and Space forever more.

‘We are very sorry.’ ‘Isn’t there someone who can stop this?’ ‘We wanted to grow old together.’ ‘I can’t find my mammy.’ ‘I don’t want to die.’ ‘Can we talk about this?’ What did we do to deserve this?’ ‘How dare you!’ ‘Please don’t do this to us.’ ‘My wife died this morning.’ ‘We’re not afraid.’ ‘I think my parents are still alive.’ ‘I refuse to say anything.’

Like a nation forced to sign its own book of condolences the video testaments continued relentlessly. Even on the happiest of occasions a camera’s lens can make you feel tongue-tied but imagine how it would make you feel at a moment like this.

Whole families standing before it.

Orphaned children.

Weeping parents.

Single men and women.

New-found friends clinging together.

Confused.

Dazed.

Uncomprehending.

Everyone waits in line for their turn.

 

 

In the contemporariness of the modern world we have all become accustomed to uploading all of our thoughts and dreams for the attention of the sometimes watching world and so the process started here wasn’t anything new but in the hands of the NotBeSpeak this recording and cataloguing of personal content was the cruelest of practical jokes to be played on the doomed world as they knew full well that once the planet was destroyed this content would still live on somewhere for someone or something or nothing and no-one to discover at some time in the future and be amused by or simply delete.

The city continued to be pulled apart and as it was so the significance of records and metrics came once more to the fore. It wouldn’t be a genocide without the concomitant cataloguing and noting and so the task fell to an army of hastily-appointed trustees with a civil service background to collect the last will and testament of every citizen.

Like the ultimate reality television show everybody began to be forced at gunpoint to leave a record on video of who they once were. Once their message was recorded they were herded back to whichever landmark they had been assigned to destroy and the process continued.

Mac moved slowly now, shuffling in his ragged, filthy suit. The front of his brogues were worn through and if you took the time you would see a grimy toe poking through the broken leather. His hair was matted and streaked with dirt. Wispy strands of silver hair hung lank and long from his chin to his temples. The sort of beard from a fairy tale that would likely house a mouse.

Mac spoke to no one as he made his way to the canal in the morning and back to his bed every night. He took no part in any activities and looked straight through anyone who tried to engage with him.

Barometric in his bearing now, Mac embodied the dying of the world.

‘But,’ said the refugee, ‘everything is ending now and soon there will be absolutely nothing left.’

‘And what should we do?’ asked Iseult. ‘Sit around and weep for what was once our world? Or resolve to do all we can to keep moving forward somehow.’

Iseult put her hand on the refugee’s shoulder and smiled.

‘We are building something here. In spite of everything that has now occurred we still have something to build on.’

Iseult pointed at the filthy chaos of the courtyard.

‘Even ordering this disorder is something to live for.’

‘I was part of the team that toppled the Spire,’ continued the refugee. ‘Hundreds of people kept at the thing until finally it fell, crushing forty people as it did so.’ The refugee shook his head.

‘I have no family left so was able to flee in the confusion without fear of reprisals.’

‘You are welcome to stay here with us,’ said Iseult kindly. ‘We could use the help.’

‘Help you with what?’ asked the refugee incredulously. ‘There is nothing left.’

‘Actually,’ replied Iseult, ‘there is everything left.’

Gilly was really worried about his wife and waited patiently each day for news that she might have been interred somewhere else in the city. Aoibhinn was one of the country’s leading landscape artists and so he could only imagine that she had had to endure the same fate as him, only with paintings instead of books.

‘Her poor heart must be badly broken,’ Gilly said to himself.

Gilly kept busy by trying to focus on the fact that he was actively resisting the end of the world by nursing books and pamphlets back to health.

But what else he supposed to do?

The alternative was to forever imagine the torture and deprivation that Aoibhinn had most likely endured.

Gilly spent his days trying to make sense of the destruction he had taken part in. Following his and Mac’s earlier subversion, Gilly was now able to find almost-whole books in the courtyard and bring them into a large shelved storeroom which was now their library. A long row of tables in the middle of the room allowed broken books and other ephemera to be carefully examined and catalogued. Single pages were reunited with their chapters and slowly the shelves around the edge of the room began to fill.