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

  There’s nothing worse than dealing with clients’ children, but this time you don’t have to because the chief epidemiologist answers for you.

  ‘No,’ he says bluntly. ‘It’s displacement activity because we can’t accept we’re all going to die.’

  ‘Excellent!’ says Donald Junior, carrying on his way with a skip in his step.

  Now what?

  → Click here to try another course of action.

  Somewhere in Kim Jong-un’s oversized head is the code that will save the world, or so you hope.

  ‘I’d like to try something called regression hypnosis,’ you tell him.

  He nods meekly. Acknowledging his fallibility seems to have really knocked the stuffing out of him.

  A party of officials is sent out to drum up someone in the city with an NVQ in hypnotherapy. A few hours later, they come back with a very nervous woman in her pyjamas who visibly whitens when she sees the Chairman, as though in the presence of a demigod.

  ‘Don’t pussyfoot around, hypnotise me,’ Kim Jong-un orders her.

  Her hands tremble on the special pendulum she waves in front of him, but soon he does indeed appear to enter a trance-like state.

  → In a low, relaxing voice, tell Kim Jong-un to start remembering the past. Click here.

  There are papers, petri dishes and unfinished experiments all over the work benches. Could they contain the secret to producing a vaccination against Virus X? Is that why the scientists were killed? Because they were getting too close to saving humankind?

  You try to read a few pages of the deceased researchers’ notes, but they’re in technical shorthand you can make no sense of. Perhaps for fear of losing their jobs, they wanted to conceal what they were doing. If you want to make sense of them, you’re going to need some expert assistance.

  Fumbling with your thick rubber gloves on the lab phone keypad, you manage to dial your boss again and a man called Barry you met at a party once. He was some kind of scientist, you’re pretty sure. You even try dialling 911, but no one’s picking up.

  That leaves one person.

  Susan.

  Pandemics are one of her areas of expertise. She wrote a column about them in Modern Apocalypse, your industry magazine, for heaven’s sake. Is it time to swallow your pride and do the unthinkable?

  → Call Susan for help. Click here.

  → No way, you’d rather accept the painful deaths of millions. Try something else instead. Click here.

  You step into the vast hangar. At the far end, panoramic windows overlook the pockmarked desert. Near them, a lone figure swipes and taps in mid-air at some kind of nifty holographic display. How the other half work, you think.

  ‘Did someone call about an impending apocalypse?’ you say, your voice echoing under the cathedral-high ceiling.

  The man does not look up so you walk over. Even as you approach, through the glass further off in the desert you see dust rise up as another huge sinkhole opens.

  ‘Mr Musk, sir? . . . I noticed the ground’s a bit unstable outside.’

  ‘I’m busy,’ says Elon Musk eventually, manipulating indecipherable code in thin air.

  ‘Can you tell me what’s going on?’ you say hesitantly. ‘I can’t help with your catastrophe if I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘I didn’t ask for help.’

  ‘Oh. Then do you know who called for me?’

  Elon Musk is so absorbed in his work you don’t think he’s heard you, but then he turns and speaks in his clipped South African accent: ‘I didn’t call anyone. Now leave me alone; you’re lowering my IQ just by being here.’

  Musk resumes swiping around on his holographic display, then seeing you are still hovering adds: ‘Or talk to my friend if you must.’

  You’re startled to see that standing slightly too close to you is another Elon Musk, this one about 20 per cent less lifelike.

  Yikes.

  The original Elon appears to have made a kind of uncanny android of himself. It looks like something you’d see at Madame Tussauds.

  → Insist that the real Elon Musk explains the sinkholes and what’s going on. You won’t be fobbed off with a talking statue. Click here.

  → Try to get some answers from the uncanny android version of Musk. Click here.

  ‘Happy New Year, you!’ Susan says brightly. You can hear a lot of voices and good cheer in the background, possibly someone trying to yodel. ‘Jamie’s family are having a Tyrolean fancy dress party. I’m a swan!’

  Oh, to be necking kirsch in some cosy Swiss bar. You consider hanging up but instead give her a quick rundown of the situation. The chatter on the line dies down as she finds a quieter place to talk.

  ‘I wouldn’t fuss around with deciphering research if I were you, it’ll take far too long; just make sure the city is properly shut down. Don’t let anyone enter or leave. That’s what we did with Sydney, New Delhi and Manchester last winter and they didn’t even make the news.’

  ‘It might already be too late for that—’ you begin.

  ‘Listen, when I’m in a tight spot at work, I remember this. There are many possible futures. All you have to do is pick the one where not everybody dies. Look, I’ve got to go; Jamie’s father is doing toasts. To health!’

  She choruses the last along with a lot of other voices, as the chief epidemiologist, on his knees, vomits inside his hazmat gear and has to lick the interior of his mask clean in order to be able to see again.

  You put the phone down softly and curse Susan’s genius. With that piece of empty advice she has snookered you. She can claim to have coached you through the situation if you do find a way out, and if you don’t, say you were too dumb to understand her.

  → Try another strategy. Go back click here.

  ‘The first thing we’ve got to do is contain the rot by stopping this meme from spreading any further than it already has,’ you tell your client.

  ‘But how?’

  The meme is out there online, on thousands of devices, being shared by the second. This is going to be like stopping rain falling out of the sky. You rack your brains for options.

  → Get hold of Mark Zuckerberg and get him to shut it down. Click here.

  → Doesn’t the EU have an emergency broadcast system created precisely for situations like this? click here.

  → Tell the bureaucrats they’ve got to develop a countermeme, fast. Click here

  You marvel at the terrible tectonic power unleashed by Elon Musk’s Really Freakishly Large Drill

  Twenty minutes later, you see a tight formation of military planes coming in at low altitude. Ma’s come through for you!

  ‘What have you done?’ say the Elons in unison.

  As bombs hit the desert, vast explosions send up mountain ranges of sand and mud and a deafening scream-like noise issues from beneath the earth.

  ‘That’s just going to make it angry,’ Uncanny Elon says.

  You feel the earth shake and tremble beneath your feet as the Really Freakishly Large Drill worms around deeper and deeper under the surface. A hundred metres ahead, a cavernous hole opens up in the dirt and a geyser of red-hot lava shoots into the blue sky. More patches of ground give way, getting closer to the hangar, and hell itself bubbles up from the bowels of the planet, instantly melting everything in its way.

  You marvel at the terrible tectonic power about to engulf you. All the way to the horizon, the desert is becoming a boiling lava field. Soon, you think, the whole of Nevada will be like this, then America, then the world.

  ‘Paedo,’ coughs Elon Musk.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You should have let me handle this, paedo.’

  You don’t love being slandered in this way completely without basis, but as the lava melts your face you have to admit this wasn’t your best move. If only you could go back click here and choose again.

  The End

  Speaking to a man as powerful as Xi Jinping, who can redirect the world’s rare earth metals with the sweep of an arm,
is a historic opportunity, even more so to have him personally video-call you from his home.

  ‘Good afternoon, President Xi,’ you greet him loudly and clearly, angling your phone so you and Prof. Wu are both in shot.

  ‘Ni hao, your excellency,’ says the lab director, bowing.

  ‘Chairman Kim tells me you have an urgent situation. I’m happy to do what I can,’ says President Xi smoothly. He really does look like Winnie the Pooh, if the loveable bear had been honed by decades of political struggle into a ruthless ursine autocrat.

  You clear your throat and speak with the zeal of a new convert. ‘Bees are in peril and China must change its ways,’ you declare. ‘The director of this lab has opened my eyes to what your country has allowed to happen to these wonderful insects and their habitat.’

  ‘There is no time to lose,’ Prof. Wu interjects. ‘We have only twenty-three hours, ten minutes and eight seconds to act.’

  You kind of thought Xi would be struck silent by you speaking truth to him, but he takes the wind out of your sails by immediately agreeing.

  ‘You’re right, comrade. Our development has profoundly affected our ecology. Did you know China used more concrete in the last five years than the entire world during the whole twenty-first century? But our might also allows us to take action on a historic scale that other regions must acknowledge: spending $350 billion on rural sustainability programmes; reducing sulphur dioxide by 70 per cent in just four years; and redeploying 60,000 soldiers to plant forests the size of Ireland every year . . .’

  Xi keeps going in this boringly persuasive way for some time and you realise that you are nodding along. Prof. Wu appears equally railroaded, trying to object but never finding an opening, and before you know it, Xi is wrapping up.

  ‘I’d like to thank you both for the opportunity to address these very important points. It’s a pleasure to address friends of Kim Jong-un.’

  And he terminates the call, having promised nothing.

  You feel as though you’ve been judo-flipped.

  Hmm, maybe there’s more to getting things done in politics than having friends in high places.

  → Well, that didn’t work. Try calling Elon Musk instead. Click here.

  → Or have a closer look at the bees in the room. Click here.

  ‘Happy Christmas! I’ve just stopped a nuclear crisis,’ you greet your boss proudly over the phone.

  ‘You’ve what? Oh yes, North Korea, I knew it’d be a storm in a teacup. Well, you’ll be pleased to hear my festive engastration was moist and tender from the outermost layer of goose through to the central baby quail. But listen, I’ve had a couple of messages from Blue Poppy’s people in Nevada. I’m sure it’s nothing but I think you should go and check it out to make sure.’

  ‘Can’t Susan do it?’ you ask.

  ‘Susan’s having a well-earned rest with her in-laws in Chamonix,’ he says smoothly.

  Grrr. Susan’s always been his favourite. Oh well, your Christmas has already been messed up so you might as well do something constructive.

  ‘I knew you’d come through,’ your boss says. ‘If you can just keep things ticking over, in terms of the world, until the end of the year, that’d give us a clean sheet, which is terribly important for the way they calculate our funding next year. But you’ll learn all about that when you step up to a management position . . .’

  Huh, sounds like that promotion could be on the cards if you play them right! You tell your boss the planet will be safe with you and to enjoy the rest of his break.

  This could turn out to be the making of you. After all, there’s less than a week of the year left. What could go wrong?

  → Head to Nevada, en route to that cushy management job. Click here.

  A more timid person would back away from such a strange encounter, but no one threatens you with such a tiny pistol and gets away with it – not even a mysterious subterranean machine many times your size.

  You fake the beginnings of a retreat, then whip out your arm, fast as lightning, dashing the gun to the tunnel floor and assuming a karate pose.

  You reckon you have bested this strange machine, but then its LED flashes in a way that you somehow intuit is its version of maniacal laughter and it accelerates forward hard, impaling you against the mass of vehicles behind you in the tunnel.

  You have just long enough before you bleed out to reflect that it might have been smart to find out what you were up against before you tried to take it on in a fistfight. And that your boss is going to be pissed off.

  The End

  Moscow, where real men make fake memes.

  Driving here has cost you twenty-five hours, enough time for the chaos meme to spread even further, infecting millions more with brain mush. But if anywhere has the expertise to help you craft a countermeme, it’s here. After the long drive, with only quick stops for petrol, you’re feeling extremely queasy as you’re directed to a palatial meeting room deep inside the Kremlin, but you figure you can sleep when you’ve been promoted.

  After one more hour of waiting, you’re finally shown to a marbled room with church-height ceilings. Just two people somehow dominate the vast space. Seated opposite you is a bald guy with a scar on his forehead. He doesn’t introduce himself, but his chunky build and poise leads you to suppose he’s an FSB man, maybe the FSB man. At the far end of the table, smaller than you’d imagined but perhaps that’s because he’s so far away, is White Rose, also known as Vladimir Putin. He appears carved out of the same stone the Kremlin is made of.

  It’s Scarface who does the talking.

  ‘I hear our comrades at the EU need our help. Most unusual. First I have a few questions for you. That is the meme?’

  You hesitate, reluctant to pass over the briefcase.

  Scarface chuckles. ‘I’m sure it’s crossed your mind that we may have been the ones who created the meme in the first place. I’m sure you’ve considered that – if we did not create it – we may be inclined to take it and reverse-engineer it in order to create powerful memes of our own.’

  Erm. These things hadn’t occurred to you at all but you’re rather flattered by how badly they’ve overestimated you.

  ‘Of course,’ he goes on, ‘you must have taken all this into consideration. So we ask ourselves: why do you think we should help you develop a countermeme?’

  You have the strong sense that, while it’s the FSB man who’s doing the talking, it’s Putin who will listen to what you say and decide whether to help you. It all rides on what you say next.

  → Appeal to Putin’s self-interest: the meme will spread around Russia, too, eventually making it ungovernable. Click here.

  → Appeal to Putin’s altruism: this is his chance to heal the world and create harmony between people. Click here.

  → Appeal to Putin’s desire to put Russia in the leading role: this is an opportunity to upstage the West and strengthen his international authority. Click here.

  Recovering in one of the last human encampments on earth, it takes several days for you to put together some of the puzzle pieces of what’s happened.

  It seems your hypnosis session, while successful in retrieving the missile’s recall code, planted a false memory in Kim Jong-un of his country being molested many years ago by the state of Denmark.

  Consumed by revenge, Kim Jong-un had his agents poison a senior Danish minister with liquid VX nerve agent, but the agents got on the wrong plane and killed a Slovenian VIP instead, which NATO misinterpreted as a territorial move by Russia, who retaliated by turning off the gas supply to central Europe.

  From there things really escalated, though you still struggle to draw a thread to the rise of the crab men, and of the order of one-eyed monks known as The Six to whom they are said to be loyal. The long and short of it, though, is that the entire world is now in ruins because you used hypnotherapy inappropriately, and your career dreams are in ruins. If only you could go back click here and snap Kim Jong-un out of his trance a bit earlier.
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br />   When your boss told you not to make the situation any worse, this is exactly the kind of thing he was talking about.

  The End

  ‘Of course I didn’t call for help,’ Uncanny Elon says. ‘I have faith that Elon has the situation under control. If you ask me, it was our head of engineering who called you. She left the organisation this morning. Said she wasn’t ready to die at this point in her career.’

  Well, now you know.

  → Click here.

  The bees in the tanks are in a pretty bad state. Some have access to the outside world but from what you can see they are queuing for the exit like scared kids on a high board. In one tank a number of bees are floating in a water bowl, twitching.

  You’re out of ideas on how to save their species, so while you wait for inspiration to strike, you decide to rescue a few of them from the bowl. They’re still not moving, so you set them on a paper towel next to a heat lamp, hoping their wings will dry out.

  As you finish your work, you notice Prof. Wu is watching what you’re doing with thoughtful interest. Without a word being exchanged, she gathers some virtually immobile bumblebees from the floor of another tank, and begins removing what look like mites from their fur with tweezers.

  The bees seem to perk up slightly, and as they do so a few of the drowned bees you saved take off and begin flying around the room.

  ‘We’ve just saved twelve bees,’ Prof. Wu says. ‘Let me plug those numbers into the Clock of No Return . . . OK, it’s saying we’ve bought ourselves an extra eight seconds before the beepocalypse becomes an inevitable certainty.’

  ‘That’s not much,’ you say, deflated.

  ‘No, but it’s something,’ she says. ‘You’ve just shown me I may have been approaching this all wrong. I’ve been searching for some big organisation to wave their magic wand and rescue all the bees. But what if there’s another way? What if little things work, even if only a little? Not just drying their wings and removing phoretic mites from their fur, but talking to local farmers about organic farming, and planting wildflowers, and encouraging others to do what they can, too. Just maybe, if we can do enough little things, we can keep that clock above zero?’ She’s warming to her theme, but if she’s right and this is an apocalypse scenario with no single solution but rather countless little ones, solving it could take a very long time indeed. Which means you have a decision to make.