Choose Your Own Apocalypse With Kim Jong-un & Friends Read online

  Through the dedication of many people such as yourself, and the new global environmental laws eventually secured by Prof. Wu, the world is now on a better track. Not that you take any credit. You’re just proud to have been part of a truly collective global effort.

  Since you found your new calling you haven’t been in touch with your boss. You did hear of a disease emanating from Washington DC that made you think of your old life. It wiped out over a billion people all told – to your current way of thinking a needed cull of an unsupportable global population.

  A dozen wire-tailed swallows swoop low past where you’re sitting, chasing the plentiful bugs.

  Something makes you look up.

  → If you’re feeling lucky click here.

  → If you’ve used up all your luck (be honest!), click here.

  ‘We can’t stop the rocket, but we’ve got to warn the Americans,’ you tell Kim Jong-un and his advisors. ‘We’ve still got three hours until impact. Who knows how many lives they can save if they evacuate now?’

  Some of the generals confer. ‘Marshal Chairman, we think the foreigner’s advice is wise. If we warn the Americans, they’ll know it was an accident. It could stop them retaliating.’

  Kim Jong-un signals his assent, and the officials get busy setting up an urgent diplomatic phone call. The oldest general is given the honour of being spokesman for North Korea.

  ‘Hello, Mr Vice President,’ he says warmly. ‘How is your family?’ He continues with further pleasantries for, you feel, a little too long. ‘The reason I’m calling? Well, it’s a little embarrassing, but later on today New York City is going to be hit by one of our old missiles that was inadvertently not destroyed, but I want you to know it’s a complete accident . . . Three hours . . . That’s true, three hours isn’t very long . . . Yes, I agree, we’ll try and give you more notice next time . . . No, I hope there won’t be a next time either, Mr Vice President . . . I agree, you can’t evacuate a whole city in three hours, but if we can together save even a few lives, I think you’ll agree it’s worth a try, don’t you?’

  ‘Tell him to save the New York Knicks,’ Kim Jong-un chips in. ‘Patrick Ewing, Kevin Knox.’

  ‘I can tell you’re upset. But the fact is, it was an accident . . . Yes, that’s true, we have made threats in the past . . . That was just sabre-rattling, we would never harm any of your citizens . . . That’s true, some of your hostages have been harmed, good point . . . But, Mike, I hope you agree, it wouldn’t be sporting to retaliate for an innocent mistake? . . . All right, Mike, you go and do your thing if you have to. Always good speaking with you.’

  The oldest general slowly replaces the receiver on the conference phone.

  ‘He was really nice about it. But he said he’s got no choice. He’s launched a pre-emptive strike. We’ve got seven minutes.’

  Everyone looks at the clock.

  ‘Has anyone got any jokes?’ Kim Jong-un enquires. No one speaks, so he cracks: ‘If we survive this I’m going to have you all executed.’

  Nothing left to do now but wait to die, right at the bottom of the career ladder.

  The End

  It’s 2035.

  Everyone is in high spirits as the boiled potato is brought to the table and sliced into twenty.

  ‘To our first Martian-grown vegetable!’ says Bill Gates, and the other billionaires all raise imaginary glasses while sipping electrolytes from their hydration packs.

  You were lucky to reach Nevada on the Harley just as Elon Musk was putting the finishing touches to his prototype Mars lander. He’d not been planning to set off to the Red Planet until a whole battery of tests was complete, but when you told him how hopeless the Virus X situation was, he decided to throw caution to the wind and take you with him.

  At first it was just you, Musk and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Grimes, and you always felt like a third wheel. Then billionaires Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos arrived by coincidence on the same day in separate spacecraft, adding a whole new dimension of awkwardness. But by and by others followed and, when Richard Branson stepped out of his Virgin-branded landing pod, the party really began to heat up.

  These days, the 3D-printed dome structures you all live in have become home to quite a community.

  The news you’ve been getting from Earth is pretty gloomy; while the death toll from Virus X was only a billion, insect decline and climate change have ravaged the planet. But you try not to think too much about that now. You’ve got enough responsibility here running the Mars Continuity Team, a special unit charged with preventing your pioneer civilisation from being wiped out by dust storms, super-volcanoes or space radiation.

  OK, you didn’t stop the apocalypse, but your work continues.

  The End

  Kim Jong-un’s guard drags you to a damp, windowless cell elsewhere in the palace and locks the door.

  ‘I’m not Danish!’ you call through the bars. ‘I haven’t even been to Denmark as the frequency of apocalyptic incidents in that nation is too low to warrant it!’

  You sit down on the hard floor, unsure how to feel. On one hand, Kim Jong-un said he remembered the code, so your assignment has, you hope, been a success. On the other, you have no idea what he has against Denmark all of a sudden, and you’ve definitely read stories about North Korean prisoners being thrown to packs of hungry dogs, something you’d ideally like to avoid.

  Hours pass.

  Then days.

  Now and then you hear far-off gunfire and shouting. Sometimes the floor shakes. After one such episode, a pipe in the ceiling begins leaking a steady film of water down the wall that you’re able to lick, but how long can a person survive without food?

  One day, you see a rat sitting in the near darkness of the cell’s corner. It must have come in through the ceiling.

  ‘It’s me, Dennis Rodman,’ the rat says, without moving its lips. ‘I know a way out.’

  → Follow the rat. Click here.

  → Eat it instead. Click here.

  Regular psychoanalysis, in your view, is the only way to help Svetlana dig deep and rediscover her inner idealist, so that for the first time in her life she’ll be able to create a meme that brings people back together and thus dezombify the citizens of Europe.

  ‘Therapy? Sure, I’ll give it a go. Maybe I’ll remember something really bad that happened to me, other than being born,’ she says hopefully.

  Although you have no training in this area, you fancy yourself as a natural. After all, making your clients feel listened to is 90 per cent of this job. You drag a couch over from a soft breakout area and begin the work. Nihilistic though Svetlana may be, like most people she likes to talk about herself, and it’s gratifyingly easy to get her started.

  She tells you about her childhood in Kaliningrad. From a young age she was a skilled influencer, engineering her parents’ divorce so she could get two sets of pocket money. Her favourite game was institutionalising headmistresses at the various schools she worked her way through.

  As she tells you about her early life, the TV in the corner livestreams the RT news network. From the muted images being broadcast, you can see the fabric of Europe quickly unravelling, subhuman crowds mustering superhuman strength to pull the Eiffel Tower down and surging into the Reichstag.

  It can’t be long before Moscow too is engulfed – but there’s no rushing the work of the analyst.

  → Keep going patiently. Click here.

  The chopper pilot decreases altitude and swivels so he can land on the highway on the far side of the barricade, pointing back towards the infected lobbyists. They scatter, running over the central reservation and into the wasteland on either side of the empty highway.

  You grab a stun gun from the chopper and leap onto the asphalt, unleashing a precision salvo of anaesthetic darts. THWUK, THWUK, THWUK. The lobbyists keep stumbling along, making desperate final farewell calls to their corporate clients, but they’ll soon pass out.

  You’re hauling the nearest lobbyist’s
limp body back to the chopper when you see another lobbyist running low through the gap in the barbed wire, then another. You drop the body and take down a couple of the infected, but it’s hopeless. There are too many of them, and you’re out of sleeper darts.

  If it wasn’t already, Virus X is now well and truly loose.

  ‘Told you,’ says the chief epidemiologist, who hasn’t moved from his seat in the chopper.

  With the city blockade breached and your hopes of containing the outbreak dashed, the only thing left is to return to the White House. But when the pilot tries to restart the engine, it stutters and fails.

  ‘What the — the tank’s empty! Someone must have cut the fuel line!’

  You’ve no choice but to begin the three-mile trek back to Pennsylvania Avenue on foot.

  → Continue to click here.

  You blink at the rat Dennis Rodman.

  ‘You look different,’ you tell him. There seems to be a long delay between thinking something and saying it. ‘Did Kim Jong-un do this to you?’

  ‘I know a way out,’ the famous basketball-playing rodent repeats. ‘Follow me.’

  Dennis Rodman slowly levitates and melts through the ceiling like a ghost.

  It occurs to you that you are probably hallucinating due to lack of food and resultant organ failure.

  You wonder if you would have ended up here if you’d cut off the hypnotherapy session earlier (if only you could go back click here and find out).

  Little feet scamper over your legs but you’re too weak even to move.

  Farewell, Dennis Rodman. Farewell, beautiful career.

  The End

  What just happened? Sadly you’ll never know, because you and everyone else you know have just been vaporised

  There’s no way you’re going to be the sucker who spends Christmas working while your boss indulges his culinary fancies in his no doubt obscenely large kitchen.

  ‘Deal with it yourself,’ you tell the old scrooge, and head for the exit. He calls after you – his usual guilt-trip shtick about the fate of humanity – but you’re not falling for it this time. Besides, whatever the crisis, you’ll be able to deal with it better when you come back rested and clear-headed in the new year.

  But a couple of days later, you are happily ensconced in your armchair, digesting a leftover turkey sandwich and watching a Hollywood disaster movie, when all the windows smash, a scalding wind rushes in and everything goes black.

  What just happened?

  Sadly you’ll never know, because you, your festively sweatered family and everyone else have been vaporised into your constituent atoms.

  It was a quick, reasonably painless way to go, but disappointingly anticlimactic compared to the movie you were watching, and not even as narratively satisfying.

  The End

  You tell your minder you’re going to the bathroom, then climb out of the window and make a dash for the west gate. Kim Jong-un’s sister is waiting in the shadows, her collar turned up.

  ‘Follow me.’

  A few minutes later, the pair of you are sitting in a North Korean version of Starbucks, drinking caramel macchiatos through straws beneath a painting of the Brilliant Comrade that dispenses napkins through the O of his mouth.

  ‘A lot has changed here since 2017,’ she tells you. ‘Back then, all my little brother and the gang thought about were rockets. They launched twenty in one year, every one going higher and further! We got to 3,000km above sea level, no lie. People were taking us seriously at last. We were on CNN.’ She smiles wistfully. ‘Then we tried to blow the moon out of the sky.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘The Americans landed on the moon. My brother wanted us to go one better and smash it to bits! But we lost our rocket. For eighteen months we thought it had been a dud. Then last week, we re-established contact.’ Her voice wavers. ‘We never meant to hurt anyone, just explode the stupid moon and mess around with the tides a little. I guess our eyes were too big for our bellies!’

  You offer her a napkin to blot her tears. ‘There, there, I’m sure anyone hellbent on terrifying the world into letting them continue brainwashing their people would have done the same.’

  ‘If only he could remember the recall code!’ she blubs.

  ‘There’s a recall code?’

  ‘Don’t tell him I told you!’ Kim Sol-song pleads. ‘Being his sister doesn’t protect me. You know what he did to our uncle.’

  The uncle, isn’t he the one who got poisoned at the airport? Or the one who was killed by firing squad? Your knowledge of the family’s history is sketchy. Regardless, you’ve got to retrieve that code.

  → Continue to click here.

  She smacks her head. ‘Of course! I myself helped draft the primary legislation for the EU Emergency Broadcast Protocol. It never occurred to me we might actually use it! I’ve got the software right here on my laptop.’

  She clicks and taps with one finger.

  ‘With this system I can send an SMS message to reach over 80 per cent of EU citizens within an hour. There!’

  She taps her enter key with a flourish and lo and behold, your phone instantly buzzes.

  You read your new message:

  FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY AND THAT OF

  THOSE AROUND YOU, DO NOT CHECK

  YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA

  Your heart sinks even as your thumb resists the magnetic pull of the Facebook icon. The high-ranking functionary seems to have made a basic error in human psychology.

  ‘That should stop it spreading any further,’ she says brightly, upon which, on cue, half a dozen bricks fly through the upper, unboarded part of the windows facing the street, smashing wine glasses and smacking one official in the back of the head, causing him to go rather brutally facedown into a freshly risen cheese soufflé. You peer through a gap in the boards to see a group of freshly radicalised federal police running off down the avenue.

  ‘There goes our security detail,’ someone says.

  Trying to stop the meme spreading has backfired. You’re going to need a different approach.

  ‘Can’t we do an electromagnetic pulse and wipe everyone’s phones at once?’ your client suggests.

  → Try to create a countermeme instead. Click here.

  ‘I’m going out to the corridor to make a call,’ you tell the North Koreans. The situation is worse than you’d feared and frankly above your pay grade.

  Your North Korean minder watches as you try to call your boss (he usually knows what to do in tricky workplace circumstances, slimy as he is), but he’s not picking up. You try your contact at the Pentagon instead, thinking she may have access to some kind of secret space laser that could shoot down the runaway rocket. But it’s Christmas Day and she’s not answering either.

  As you scroll through your contacts, wondering who else could help, the only woman among the officials, Lieutenant Colonel Kim Sol-song, emerges from the Ops room and sidles over. She’s brought the tray of yellow cookies with her.

  ‘Excuse my brother’s manners, we forgot to offer you a snack,’ she says loudly, and then in a whisper so your minder doesn’t hear, adds: ‘Let us talk in private. Meet me at the west gate.’

  Kim Jong-un’s sister? Curious. You thank her and take a chewy yellow disc. It sticks to your tongue.

  → Sneak out and meet Kim Jong-un’s sister at the west gate. Click here.

  → You don’t have time for this cloak-and-dagger stuff. Go back to Kim Jong-un and offer to shoot the thing down yourself. Click here.

  ‘Maybe you’ve seen the videos,’ Trump continues to the TV camera. ‘Lines of bodybags. Exploding pustules. Gushing, purple fluids draining out of every orifice until all that’s left is human jerky.’ Trump shakes his head scornfully and taps his temple. ‘It’s not real, people! It’s deep-fake footage. They want you to believe I can’t protect you. They think you’re too stupid to see that since I drained the swamp, this great country has never been so clean and disease-free. So true. Well, I think you people are a
lot smarter than that or you wouldn’t have given me the greatest victory in history over Crooked Hillary in 2016. The whole map was red. So beautiful. Beautiful victory . . .’

  As the president continues to reminisce, you notice the sobbing of the man to your left is growing louder.

  → Reassure him that it’s going to be OK. Click here.

  You take a scalpel from a medical chest, open the tent flap and advance on the ill-starred fowl. Drumstick’s trusting black eyes, framing that brilliant red snood, blink up at you.

  About an hour later, you’re covered in gizzards, blood and feathers, as well as a few scratches, but you’re none the wiser about the cause of the virus. The frank and honest truth is that you have no idea how to dissect a turkey, still less analyse the pathology of a disease, perhaps something you should have reflected on about an hour ago.

  Tears are streaming down the chief epidemiologist’s face.

  ‘We’ll all see you very soon at the big ranch in the sky, big guy. Drumstick,’ he mumbles by way of eulogy, ‘was the best turkey I ever knew. But a lousy intern.’

  You begin hosing the blood off your hazmat suit, keen to feel clean again. The sick thought occurs to you that this is the closest you’ll get to Christmas dinner this year, or maybe ever again.

  As your thoughts follow this pessimistic turn, you notice Donald Junior sidling across the White House lawn, eyeing you through his visor.

  ‘Making any progress?’ he enquires, like he’s the boss of you.