‘Enough’ said a distant voice deep down inside the hole that is Mac’s heart and the old man surprised himself by smiling. ‘You foolish fool,’ he sighed. ‘Still doing what you do best, I see.’

For Mac had inherited a sceptic’s eye from his father but time and habit and heartbreak had forced this eye in on itself where it had eventually transfigured into solid doubt.

‘And what are you going to do now?’ Mac asked himself. ‘Enough with your standing and waiting and watching.’

‘Enough.’

As the loop plays out across the sky people stop working to stand up and see themselves magnified across the heavens as they plead and weep and cry before a lens that doesn’t care. The canned laughter and syrupy music only serves to make the humiliation ever more complete were it even necessary for that to be so right now.

Iseult and Gilly watched in wonder as they stood under shelter in the courtyard of their gulag.

‘What on earth can all this be?’ asked Gilly with a tremble. ‘I cannot begin to understand.’

‘And that is exactly why we should focus on the things we do know,’ said Iseult. She put her hand of the old man’s shoulders.

‘Why focus on the darkness when it is the light that keeps the night at bay?’

The film cuts again and this time an image of Stooky Bill materializes in an enormous close shot and, like the worst excesses of popular television from a time way gone, begins to sing in the most mocking and creakiest of voices;

‘There is no Future now

Nor was there ever before

And with the Past behind us

There is now just Nothing evermore …’

Cut once more to another staple of popular television, the ultimate heart-string-tugging telethon as the video statements made by the doomed begin to play across the sky on a celestial loop accompanied by teary, swirly music and peals of canned laughter.

The streets began to fill with professional comfort-givers; priests, nuns, politicians and television personalities – now with no recognized formal function but determined to try and maintain some claim on events as they unfold.

With a permission based solely on the same cosmic perversity and absolutely nothing else, these comfort-givers were given special dispensation from the labour at hand in order to offer empty promises and visions of a future that cannot possibly exist now. Walking among the weeping, toiling crowds.

Hand-wringing.

Glad-handing.

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.