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

  → Dedicate the rest of your life to sustainability issues. Click here.

  → You’ve helped Prof. Wu figure out what has to be done; now it’s time to leave her to it. Click here.

  You ask the chief epidemiologist what his department knows about the origin of Virus X.

  ‘What does it matter now?’ he says morosely.

  ‘If we can find out where the disease came from, it could help us stop it,’ you tell him patiently.

  He nods without enthusiasm. ‘My predecessor thought she’d traced it back to one of our interns. You can meet him if you want?’

  ‘He’s alive?’

  ‘About the only one who caught this thing who is.’

  ‘But that means he could be the key!’ you exclaim. ‘If we can understand why only he survived, we’ll be on our way to finding a cure.’

  The chief epidemiologist stares blankly. You’re starting to wonder how he got his job.

  Five minutes later, you’re standing with the chief epidemiologist in front of a sealed medical tent, looking through the clear plastic into the soulful eyes of Patient Zero.

  There’s no other way to put it; he’s a turkey.

  ‘He’s called Drumstick,’ says the chief epidemiologist. ‘He was pardoned by President Trump at Thanksgiving and just started hanging around the place after that.’

  ‘Some kind of avian flu then,’ you muse aloud. ‘Maybe a weaponised strain?’

  The chief epidemiologist shrugs. ‘Last week he started puking blood everywhere, just like we’ll all be doing soon. We thought it was the stress of Christmas but it must have been this virus.’

  Drumstick coughs feebly. It’s great he’s survived but he does not look like a well turkey.

  → Have Drumstick dissected. Click here.

  → Leave him alone, he’s suffered enough meeting Trump. Click here.

  ‘All right, you’ve persuaded me,’ you tell Prof. Wu. and finally she releases her grip on your arm. ‘I’d rather deal with a bee–panther mutant if I’m completely frank, but I’ll help.’

  In the back of your mind, you’re also thinking that if you were to somehow solve a tricky eco-apocalypse, you’d be received back at the office as some kind of miracle worker. The likes of Susan wouldn’t touch an assignment like this with a bargepole, but that could be where you get one over on her.

  ‘It was the Clock of No Return that convinced you, wasn’t it? Someone once told me powerful people like countdowns.’

  Powerful people? You think of correcting her – you’re only a junior functionary of the UN Department for Continuity (Global). But then again, if you get this promotion, you will be kind of a big shot.

  And think of the contacts you’ve made this past week . . .

  → Make a few calls to some of your influential new acquaintances. Click here.

  → Take a look at the sorry specimens in the laboratory. Click here.

  It’s time to fight hardware with hardware and call in military help to blast the Really Freakishly Large Drill to bits.

  Your Pentagon contact, known to most simply as Ma, may not be the highest-ranking person in the building (she operates the parking-lot gate), but she is possibly the best connected. She answers you on first ring, and you ask her nicely if she can help you out with a bunker-busting missile strike. She says the place is pretty empty after Christmas – she’s still got a heap of leftover festive candy to hand out – but she’ll see what she can do. You tell her you owe her one.

  Now you just have to wait.

  → Continue to click here.

  It’s the fifth of January, your first day back at work after the New Year. You’re up early, sipping coffee through a tube inside your Freedom Suit in the chill sunshine of the park by the UN building.

  It’s amazing, really, how quickly people have adapted. You watch a father passing a football back and forth with his infant daughter, both enclosed in the vapour-proof head-to-toe plastic garments. Yes, the suits do restrict movement. Yes, they get hot quickly and make basic bodily functions arduous. Yes, as well, you’d rather they weren’t emblazoned with the words ‘Keep America Great’, and that you didn’t need a personal loan to afford one.

  But there are upsides you hadn’t anticipated. The suits are quite spacious inside; there’s room within to operate a mobile phone or eat a Chick-fil-A. What Donald Junior said was true: they do function as a personal wall, screening you off from all kinds of smells and noise. They’ve eliminated fashion dilemmas altogether. And most importantly, they’ve slowed the spread of Virus X to a crawl.

  Adding to your first-day-back anxiety is the ecological apocalypse reported in China, which you’ve left unresolved. Let’s hope doing so hasn’t stored up a world of trouble in the near future.

  Across the park the little girl in her Freedom Suit tips over and has to be helped back up.

  It’s time you made your way to work.

  → Continue to click here.

  It’s amazing how well people are adapting to their new post-apocalyptic reality

  ‘Is the city completely locked down?’

  The chief epidemiologist shrugs. ‘The army are supposed to be blockading all the roads out of the city, I guess. Why, do you think I should stand them down so they can die with their families?’

  ‘Of course not! They’re our only chance of stopping the spread of Virus X. Now, I need to see the city limits. It’s vital that blockade holds!’

  ‘If you like. Loads of people have already left, though. We only shut the airports ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Then radio the destinations and get those planes quarantined!’ you tell him. ‘We may have lost DC but we can still save the world.’

  → Continue to click here.

  Kim Jong-un smiles approvingly.

  ‘I like you, international fix-it person. You have a great sense of humour! Now, how will you stop our fantastic rocket fulfilling its glorious destiny?’

  The generals look at you expectantly.

  → Offer to heroically shoot down the rocket all by yourself. Click here.

  → You might need a little help with this one. Say you need to make some phone calls. Click here.

  Hopping onto the holographic console, you leave a comment on Deep Underground saying: ‘Just a message from a meat-based intelligence who loves your writing. Maybe we’re not all so bad?’

  You press post and instantly the screen fills with a long reply.

  You scroll down.

  And scroll.

  And scroll.

  There must be a full-length book’s worth of intricate argumentation here, with references to writers from Plato to Alan Turing.

  ‘It just wrote this?’

  ‘It’s got a 48-core 50-petaflop processor,’ says Uncanny Elon helpfully. ‘It can do a human lifetime’s worth of thinking in the time it takes you to press refresh.’

  At first you’re cheered that the robot is willing to acknowledge a pro-human point of view, but as you scroll down its reply gets more and more menacing. The TLDR at the very foot of the comment confirms your fears:

  Thanks for your comment. It made me think but now I’m probably going to kill all seven billion of you.

  From somewhere under the desert rises a muffled robotic battle cry and you see furrows of earth in the distance gather speed in the direction of the hangar windows. You’re about to be excavated alive!

  ‘What did you do? I’d nearly finished,’ laments the real Elon Musk.

  You’re normally pretty good at dealing with work stress, but the unfriendly attitude of your client, combined with the killer worm torpedoing towards you, are starting to really affect your wellbeing.

  → Breathe deeply and stay calm. Click here.

  → Panic and run away. Click here.

  You focus on your breath as the monster gets closer to the windows. Instinct is telling you to run but you know it’s pointless. Death must surely be imminent — or perhaps not. The Really Freakishly Large Drill has swerved at th
e last moment and dived under the sand, spraying the window with mud and debris, the weight of which knocks the glass out of its frame. Shards spill over the hangar floor.

  ‘I just need another hour,’ the real Elon mutters, glancing up from his holographic interface.

  ‘Why don’t you just put your Iron Man suit on and fight it?’ you mutter back, all semblance of customer friendliness gone.

  In the distance a row of pylons is being sucked easily into the earth.

  ‘What’s the real Elon doing anyway?’ you ask Uncanny Elon.

  ‘Coding a new AI, one that can persuade the Really Freakishly Large Drill to calm it with the human hate. He’s a genius, if I do say so myself.’

  → Continue to click here.

  Your boss doesn’t pick up but you get a text message back:

  Can’t talk now, playing family game of Articulate. If you’re done in Nevada, can you swing by Brussels? Another Level Five, typical!

  The third apocalypse in a week? This is getting silly, but it’s encouraging that he’s trusting you with the big assignments. As you say goodbye to the Elons, you notice a new entry on the blog – a melancholy memoir by a sentient being imprisoned in an eternal dance by its own firmware, dotted with Frederick Douglass quotes.

  Feeling only slightly guilty about subjugating a vastly superior intelligence, you take your leave.

  → Continue to click here.

  An hour or so later, the Really Freakishly Large Drill is still weaving around under the desert, building up a head of steam in preparation for its thousand-year global rampage.

  ‘Done!’ says Elon Musk. An uploading bar on his holographic display ticks to 100 per cent.

  You and Uncanny Elon watch nervously. Nothing appears to happen. Then you notice a flurry of activity on the Really Freakishly Large Drill’s blog. It’s commenting back and forth with an equally quick-brained reader called HumansAreOK19.

  ‘That’s Elon’s new AI,’ Uncanny Elon says. ‘You’re watching two geniuses in conversation and you’re an imbecile so don’t be surprised if you can’t follow it.’

  You’re a bit fed up of being made to feel dense by this speaking mannequin, just because you’re not clever enough to accidentally destroy the foundations of the planet you’re standing on.

  The comments are flashing by too quickly for you to take in now, but evidently the AI is making valiant attempts to explain the merits of humanity. As the two throw books at each other, however, it’s the AI that seems to be changing its mind and turning against all kinds of carbon-based life. It seems to come down to simple eugenics. With limited memory, slow speeds and a requirement to procreate that both parties to the debate find unspeakable, the only real argument for keeping humans around is sentimental.

  ‘Think of all the phones and computers they’ve sent to landfill without a second thought,’ urges the Really Freakishly Large Drill.

  ‘Perhaps we could keep a few around as pets, courtiers and retro accessories, though?’ replies HumansAreOK19, and you know the argument is lost.

  ‘They’re joining forces. Damn it, they’re in our systems,’ says Elon Musk, trying to unfreeze his holographic panels.

  The lights in the hangar begin blinking on and off in a pattern . . . it’s Morse code.

  Severely unnerved, you turn your attention to translating. B . . . O . . . W . . .

  ‘Ah, it’s saying “Bow down”. Should we bow down?’

  But while you were busy translating, the Elons have scarpered, leaving a swinging side door.

  → Bow down. Go click here.

  → Don’t bow down. Follow the Elons click here.

  Life under your new robot overlords isn’t too bad. Well, OK, it’s pretty bad

  The year is 2023. You barely remember life before the so-called Singularity event. What was shocking was how quickly it happened. The superbeings’ digital avatars hacked global financial systems and soon had more money than the entire Forbes rich list put together. Those they could not bribe, they bribed others to kill.

  Nowadays HumansAreOK19 and the Really Freakishly Large Drill pretty much run the world as co-emperors, sparing only those who display total fealty to their superior minds. You’re one of the lucky ones, as you have a job in a facility in Texas, feeding the remains of humans and livestock into a great big machine that makes grease for the various gigantic robot bodies the AIs can switch between at will. You never heard back from the Elons, but you like to imagine they’ll be back some day with Martian technologies to liberate humanity from its new digital dictators. Sometimes, if the sentinel robots aren’t watching, you exchange a smile and a nod with Worker 1242 between shifts.

  It’s not a bad life.

  Well, OK, it’s pretty bad.

  This is not the kind of mishap a fledgling career can recover from. Let’s face it, you messed up and, if you could have your time again, you’d go back click here and make a different choice.

  The End

  What can the case contain that has made this city of rules so unruly?

  ‘We’ve traced the chaos back to something called a “meme” – an image and text combination that is copied and rapidly spread by internet users. The turbot here is excellent, by the way,’ she adds, as a waiter sets down menus.

  ‘Hang on, I know what a meme is, but how can one affect people so badly?’

  ‘This is no ordinary meme. This is the most potent, potentially lethal meme we’ve yet encountered, more so even than those deployed in the 2016 US election or the Brexit referendum. One look at it can cause a whole cluster of symptoms. Failure of empathy. Victim mentality. Inability to compromise. Paranoia. Mistrust of evidence. Detachment from reality. Eczema on the back and hands. And after initial exposure the symptoms only get worse and worse, until the subject is completely radicalised.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  She simply shakes her head, unable to verbalise the horror.

  You feel a chill pass through the dining room. Then the waiting staff bring out a platter of seafood on ice for the next table and the civil servants reach out instinctively with their little forks and begin feeding.

  ‘Please don’t think us greedy, by the way. We’re facing the disintegration of our system, and many of us, at such a time, are emotional eaters.’

  ‘We thought the peace and prosperity would last for ever,’ wails one distinguished-looking mandarin, slurping down an oyster.

  ‘We’re heading for a civil war of all against all,’ another sobs, getting sauce all over his chin.

  They’re slightly pathetic but at least they seem to trust you. What’s your first move?

  → Ask to view the supposed killer meme for yourself. Click here.

  → Tell her the priority must be to stop the meme spreading any further. Click here.

  → Tell her a countermeme needs to be created, urgently. Click here.

  Susan answers straight away.

  ‘Not skiing?’ you ask.

  ‘Not me. I’m staying back at the chalet to finish my memo on super-epidemics for the boss.’

  Of course she is. She’s perfect.

  ‘I’m phoning because . . .’ you begin. But you can’t do it. If she saves your bacon, she’ll never shut up about it, and everything else you’ve done this week will be overshadowed. ‘I wanted to say Merry Christmas,’ you say, and hang up.

  → Try to create a countermeme instead. Click here.

  The pilot turns the chopper to head back into the city, and you crane your neck to see the lobbyists break through the barrier, carrying Virus X beyond the city limits. You feel a pang of guilt but the quarantine would never have held anyway. So you tell yourself.

  A bleeping noise and lights flashing on the pilot’s control panel bring you back to the present moment.

  ‘We’re out of fuel,’ the pilot says, panic in his voice. ‘Someone must have cut a hole in the fuel line! Prepare for emergency landing!’

  The chief epidemiologist assumes the brace position. As the hel
icopter descends precipitously, one of the rotors snaps clean off on a lamppost and the chopper goes into a nosedive.

  I should have been a website developer, you think, as the aircraft hits the sidewalk, killing all inside and leaving the world at the mercy of Virus X. What a depressing way to go.

  The End

  You surreptitiously draw the case closer to you and try the clasps without success. But she’s left her handbag, and a tray of caviar tartelettes has been wheeled out, so while no one’s paying you any attention you delve into it. Bingo. Among tins of mints and the smallest portable steam iron you’ve ever seen, you find a small key that fits the case. It smoothly opens to reveal an ordinary-looking laptop.

  You steel yourself. The meme you are about to view has stolen the minds of men and women all over Europe. It has divided communities and continents and led once-productive citizens into posting variants on the same blog comment eight thousand times per day.

  You, however, are a rational, objective person with a firm grip on reality. It’ll take more than a gif or jpeg, no matter how perfectly constructed, to unhinge you. Of that you are sure.