‘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.

As global life entered its final phase the denizens of the Player Wills Factory now found themselves occupying a strange peace. So rapt was the city in its own destruction that aside from the occasional helicopter sweeping the city at night looking for absconders, Iseult, Gilly and the others were left alone and so settled into a gentle routine.

Iseult spent her days now running the camp, managing the occupants with the day-to-day business of trying to survive in a derelict world. A nearby warehouse was discovered containing a vast range of supplies that were never delivered to the local supermarkets and these supplies were transferred into the camp and catalogued accordingly.

As the swollen waters passed in front of him Mac saw hope and despair in every single ripple.

Originally he understood enough to know that what he was doing was sheer folly but as the first hours passed and turned into days Mac truly believed that were he to take his eyes off of the water then he would miss the very thing he was looking for.

And so our once proud academic has now descended deep into the kind of daily darkness that very few people ever truly return from.

As the camera moves slowly upwards and backwards in a long and mournful digital dolly the audience is left with nothing now but the view of a tiny broken man dwarfed by and alone in an enormous broken world.

Though it pained Iseult and Gilly profoundly to see, there was nothing that either of them could do to get through to Mac, who now spent his time standing by the side of the swollen canal that passed close by the factory staring at the fast-flowing floodwater.

Mac stood stock-still all day in the exact same spot and then at night walked slowly back to his bed in the corner of the courtyard. He barely touched the meagre meals that his friends left out for him and would fall asleep each night with the plate full beside him.

Iseult and Gilly were thrilled to find the same plate empty the next morning until the day they disturbed a well-fed rat helping itself to Mac’s supper.

Under the tender guidance of Iseult, the new owners of this gulag set about making the factory and its environs as hospitable as possible.

Some started creating living quarters for everyone inside the empty broken buildings. Others gathered all the written material they could and brought them into a warehouse where Gilly led another team charged with the task of cataloging and compiling.

By the evening of the first day of their liberation, everyone was now able to find shelter and warmth inside for the first time since they had arrived at the factory.

Only Mac was unable to settle into this new-found freedom and despite each and every request, still chose to sleep outside, huddled beneath the dirty tarpaulin that he had come to call his home.

From the time that society realised that there was more to the world than the basic boundaries that limited it to the edges of the dark, it has been the need for or fear of knowledge that has driven the world to discover or deny the very facts of our existence.

At the cosmic level of this story, this thirst for facts doesn’t even register except for the wholly alien pleasure so plainly to be found in erasing all those facts already discovered and thereby preventing a whole planet from spinning any more.

But we as humans are present at a much more personal level and so once again we are confronted by the simple truth of one man who only knows one thing now; that everything he has ever known is wrong.

A simple truth indeed.

‘But that’s insane,’ said Gilly after Mac had recounted his conversation with the thugs.

‘Indeed,’ replied Mac, ‘but that is exactly how They want it.’

‘They?’ asked Iseult. ‘Who are They?’

‘Now we are at the heart of the matter,’ said Mac gravely. Mac sat down and the others joined him.

‘In the course of my life’s work I uncovered what I believed to be a cosmic plot intent on destroying the world.’

‘A cosmic plot?’ repeated Iseult. ‘Whatever can you mean?’

‘Exactly that,’ said Mac. ‘And nothing more.’