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It would have been a day like any other, except on this day Oxygen became a finite resource, although no one had yet realised it. Oxygen was essential on the planet earth, due to its role in the production of energy, which allowed animals to move and fight and create. By far the most advanced, yet still the most primitive species on Earth was a race called the humans. They had found many uses for energy, most of which had destructive side effects. However, all that had changed because at this point there was only enough oxygen to sustain the planet for two weeks.
This seemingly apocalyptic change had been bought on by the sudden decision of plants to stop photosynthesising. This was the process by which plants removed carbon dioxide, which could not be used to produce energy by animals, from the atmosphere, and replaced it with oxygen instead. Had scientists been immediately aware of this random development then they would have had just about enough time to uncover vague evidence of a rogue genetic timebomb that had proliferated throughout the plant kingdom during the 1960’s when America began to test chemical weapons in the Amazonian rainforest. As it happens the only scientists aware of the development were a group of students conducting a biology practical on photosynthesis in plants that had bizarrely stopped working. Not-being scientific super-brains they had put the whole experience down to bad luck.
The first person to notice anything untoward was Francis O’Hare, a Washington resident of some 90 years. At that age the red blood cells in her body, whose job it was to carry oxygen, had begun to reproduce ineffectively, leaving her more susceptible to a reduction in the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. She was sitting in a nursing home when she started to feel unusually tired at ten in the morning; everyone put this down to her energetic enthusiasm for life. Had the nurses not forged the documentation required to work in the nursing home, they might have noticed that Francis was actually dying from a lack of oxygen. In the event, Francis’ death was recorded as entirely natural, with both nurses agreeing that she had died peacefully in her sleep, which to all intents and purposes she had.
At roughly the same time as Francis’ death a younger man was brutally murdered by a rival drug dealer. This death had nothing to do with the lack of oxygen, but was merely part of the human race’s constant need to destroy and be destroyed. Also the death was important because Chester O’Hare was both the great grandson of Francis, and the human races only chance of survival. You see Chester possessed the unusual property of not wasting any of the oxygen that he breathed in. Indeed he thus required such a low level of oxygen absorption to survive, that he would have lasted out the four weeks in which the plant kingdom seemingly went on strike, and been able to start the human race from scratch with a rather fortunate women who owned a greenhouse of untainted plants.
Francis was not a rich woman; in fact had she survived into her ninety-first year the last of her savings would have diminished, and the unqualified nurses would have cast her out on to the streets to live with the vagrants and hookers who roamed the streets. Ironically they were all the same now anyway – tramps, princes and workers – they were all destined to die in the coming weeks and no amount of riches would bring salvation. It was as if their creator, myself in fact, had suddenly broken down every barrier that they had so painstakingly erected to distinguish themselves from one another. In that unprecedented equality men and women would taste freedom such as they had never done so before with all barriers destroyed.
Such freedom was a dangerous thing though, as the head of the Chinese science program well knew. His immediate reaction upon discovering that plants had stopped emitting oxygen was thus to inform the Party leader directly. And both agreed absolutely that such news made public would undoubtedly lead to mass anarchy, which was a most undesirable thing, and in the mean time that it would be a good idea to start stock-piling oxygen containers. Before that conversation had even taken place, an American spy inside the Chinese science agency had already informed his paymasters of the news. In the backdoors of the White House conversations took place and it was decided that such news made public would undoubtedly lead to mass anarchy, which was a most undesirable thing, and in the mean time that it would be a good idea to start stock-piling oxygen containers.
Of course it is only possible to buy Oxygen in large quantities from a few places, and when these places find themselves besieged by orders from both the Chinese and US governments, their directors begin to have reservations. One particularly conscientious director reached the conclusion that some war involving mass destruction must be impending given the sudden upsurge in demand for oxygen and so disclosed that information to the world’s media, where it was dispersed around the world via satellite links and network news and such a storm of words occurred – allegations and counter allegations and affidavits and press conferences – that the Earth was left with only one week’s worth of oxygen. This was accurately calculated by scientists, because I told them to.
It was around this time that the elderly began to die en masse. Thousands feared a chemical attack and hid in specially constructed shelters, sealed to the outside. These people died too because they further restricted their oxygen supply and so hysteria spread about a chemical attack that could penetrate chemical-attack proof shelters. With the growing sense of fear in countries across the world, meetings began to take place in the Pentagon building in the United States of America. This was a building where human beings decided the best ways to cause as much damage as possible to other human beings, who were usually either Communists or Muslims. Communists were human beings who thought that everybody should be equal and so threatened to make the poor people realise that the sole purpose of their working lives was to make rich people richer and then be governed by them. Muslims were human beings who still believed in religion more than anything else, no one minded about this except that it left them disposed to disliking the godless Western culture. Indeed no on would have minded about that except the Muslims had fortuitously found themselves in possession of most of the world’s oil supplies beneath their desert lands, with which they held to ransom the West, for whom they did not particularly care. Incidentally, oil was a fuel that fed the economies of the world; oil was everything. Oil was God.
One man who owned a lot of Oil that resided under Texas was a key figure in these special meetings. He was General MacArthur, who happened to be the grandson of the same MacArthur who had danced back and forth across Korea fighting with the Communists (because they wanted everybody to be equal). MacArthur Jr stated that the whole oxygen shortage must have been a Communist conspiracy and thus the only solution was to launch a nuclear attack on the Chinese, as a similar attack was inevitably all ready in preparation by the Communists. In reality General MacArthur’s anxiety to attack China was down to his vaguely modest desire to be a legendary figure, famed for wiping out the Communists. Sat directly to his left was an elderly Jewish man because I put him there to act as a voice of reason to these lunatic Generals. He told them that a nuclear attack was out of the question because the real problem was the newly finite status of oxygen and not Communist conspiracies. Then General MacArthur said something that I did not expect, from the recesses of my mind. He said this: “Well if we nuke the Commies that’s more oxygen for us!” With dismay I realised that for him and his colleagues this was the swinging factor, and so they voted 14 to one in favour of launching a nuclear attack on China, not because they wanted everyone to be equal, but because they had a very large population and so used up a lot of the remaining oxygen.
During these discussions more people found themselves growing increasingly tired and dying. Mankind, in its infinite wisdom, was trying as best it could to keep going about its daily work. As far as most people were concerned the only the threat was one of chemical war, not of a diminishing amount of oxygen. Otherwise they would have looted shops and raped and pillaged, as anarchical humans are prone to do, fully aware that they had but one week left to live. Instead roads were as congested as ever. Roads were conduits for cars. Cars allowed humans to spend less time travelling to their jobs and so more time working in them. Those who worked the most earned the least, and made the richest people, who did the least work, even richer. The rich people owned all the land and all that was under the land and so they ruled over the poor people.
China was a Communist country. Communists believed that everyone should be equal. It wasn’t a perfect system of equality until a salvo of American nuclear warheads levelled the country and rendered the entire population equally dead. China also had nuclear weapons, but not as many as America, when they saw American nuclear missiles on their Radars, they launched their own weapons. This was an ultimately pointless exercise as it matters not to a dead man whether his opponent lives or dies. However, a short time later America was levelled too, though not as drastically as China. Millions died, but millions survived, although they would all die in 4 days anyway, from a mixture of radiation poisoning, lack of oxygen and simply from being murdered by their fellow humans.
One of the dead was named Tony. He had proposed to his girlfriend, who was named April and who worked as a stripper, and been accepted. It was perhaps due to his general good-natured outlook on life thereafter that he walked at a faster pace. To be precise he walked at 5 miles per hour, because I told April to say yes, and by coincidence this ensured that his trajectory would coincide with that of a Chinese missile. Tony was the only person in the whole of the city not to be killed in a nuclear explosion; he was killed by a blow to the head from a falling object travelling at its terminal velocity. April would have been distraught to hear the news had she not been vaporised approximately two seconds after her then fiancée died.
Elsewhere a woman with warts on her face stands in a crowded train on the London Underground. She believes in inner-beauty and true love, but it doesn’t prevent the crowd from shouldering past her angrily as the doors open at the first stop. Somebody had told her once, by the fire at Christmas time, that beauty fades into wrinkles and folds, while the heart beats on and the mind remains clear, and that all that mattered was who you are not what you look like. She had stopped crying and clung to her dream ever more. Yet as I write about her I realise that her fingers are ringless and from one of the warts sprouts a thick tuft of hair, but she still watches the grimy pipes fly past the window hiding from this brutal reality behind a dream.
At the next stop her place is taken by a fat woman carrying a large plastic bag filled with cosmetic products, the lady with warts on her face smiles at the woman sadly, not with any hint of condescension just because the fat woman lives by a different dream – that her make-up will make men lust for her. The fat woman does not notice, for she is caught in a dilemma of monumental proportions. She has nowhere to hold as the train threatens to depart, except the handle above her head. However, she is sweating profusely and certainly regretting her decision to wear a sleeveless top, but the train is about to depart and her chances of remaining upright are minimal as her centre of gravity has fallen with other parts of her anatomy. As the doors close she reaches up to grasp the handle and a large drop of sweat drops from her unencumbered armpit on to the black leather shoe of a businessman. He remains unaware until the third drop breaches his shoe’s defences and permeates his sock. Immediately he moves his shoe and glowers at the fat woman who releases her grip on the handle and topples into the business man as the train lurches to a standstill. He is still struggling to release himself from the fat woman’s sweaty flesh as my mind wonders from the train and to other places.
In this world I have created there is no longer enough oxygen to sustain life. The last days of many lives were spent worrying about insignificant details. The fat woman worried that a prospective partner would not return her call and saved desperately for a slimming plan. The lady with warts was laughed at by the only man to whom she had ever told her secret dream; she killed herself. General MacArthur slowly asphyxiated while toasting the demise of Communism with his esteemed colleagues. The conscientious director discovered the real truth and didn’t sell any of his oxygen. Instead he hoarded it and sustained himself for a full week after virtually every other human had died. After that he grew bored, because life meant nothing without someone with whom it could be shared.
Only one woman survived. She was called Grace and lived in a small cottage on her own. She had cancer of the ovaries. Knowing how finite her life was, she lived every single day of her life as if it was her last; she smoked and didn’t care, she drank to excess and she once had sex with a rock star. Those actions did not make her more or less worthy than any of the other inhabitants of Earth. She was simply the only one who wanted to live desperately, and lived as much as she could. Because of this fact I let her lock herself into her greenhouse of tomato plants, and live there happily for four weeks, nourishing herself on the tomatoes. After four weeks the plants decided to photosynthesise again and Grace could live as she had before.
I went to explain things to Grace, before I stopped writing and left her world. She didn’t ask me why or how I had allowed events to transpire as they had. She only said one thing, which made enormous sense. She said this: “Who is there left to love?”
After all love was the supreme elixir.
So I left her two things: cured ovaries and a man I wrote in called Job. Job was also the name of a biblical figure whom had had his faith tested by God through his losing everything. This Job was a man without a story. He would write his own, as would Grace. I left them there together to start a new human race because for this brief time I had that power.
This seemingly apocalyptic change had been bought on by the sudden decision of plants to stop photosynthesising. This was the process by which plants removed carbon dioxide, which could not be used to produce energy by animals, from the atmosphere, and replaced it with oxygen instead. Had scientists been immediately aware of this random development then they would have had just about enough time to uncover vague evidence of a rogue genetic timebomb that had proliferated throughout the plant kingdom during the 1960’s when America began to test chemical weapons in the Amazonian rainforest. As it happens the only scientists aware of the development were a group of students conducting a biology practical on photosynthesis in plants that had bizarrely stopped working. Not-being scientific super-brains they had put the whole experience down to bad luck.
The first person to notice anything untoward was Francis O’Hare, a Washington resident of some 90 years. At that age the red blood cells in her body, whose job it was to carry oxygen, had begun to reproduce ineffectively, leaving her more susceptible to a reduction in the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. She was sitting in a nursing home when she started to feel unusually tired at ten in the morning; everyone put this down to her energetic enthusiasm for life. Had the nurses not forged the documentation required to work in the nursing home, they might have noticed that Francis was actually dying from a lack of oxygen. In the event, Francis’ death was recorded as entirely natural, with both nurses agreeing that she had died peacefully in her sleep, which to all intents and purposes she had.
At roughly the same time as Francis’ death a younger man was brutally murdered by a rival drug dealer. This death had nothing to do with the lack of oxygen, but was merely part of the human race’s constant need to destroy and be destroyed. Also the death was important because Chester O’Hare was both the great grandson of Francis, and the human races only chance of survival. You see Chester possessed the unusual property of not wasting any of the oxygen that he breathed in. Indeed he thus required such a low level of oxygen absorption to survive, that he would have lasted out the four weeks in which the plant kingdom seemingly went on strike, and been able to start the human race from scratch with a rather fortunate women who owned a greenhouse of untainted plants.
Francis was not a rich woman; in fact had she survived into her ninety-first year the last of her savings would have diminished, and the unqualified nurses would have cast her out on to the streets to live with the vagrants and hookers who roamed the streets. Ironically they were all the same now anyway – tramps, princes and workers – they were all destined to die in the coming weeks and no amount of riches would bring salvation. It was as if their creator, myself in fact, had suddenly broken down every barrier that they had so painstakingly erected to distinguish themselves from one another. In that unprecedented equality men and women would taste freedom such as they had never done so before with all barriers destroyed.
Such freedom was a dangerous thing though, as the head of the Chinese science program well knew. His immediate reaction upon discovering that plants had stopped emitting oxygen was thus to inform the Party leader directly. And both agreed absolutely that such news made public would undoubtedly lead to mass anarchy, which was a most undesirable thing, and in the mean time that it would be a good idea to start stock-piling oxygen containers. Before that conversation had even taken place, an American spy inside the Chinese science agency had already informed his paymasters of the news. In the backdoors of the White House conversations took place and it was decided that such news made public would undoubtedly lead to mass anarchy, which was a most undesirable thing, and in the mean time that it would be a good idea to start stock-piling oxygen containers.
Of course it is only possible to buy Oxygen in large quantities from a few places, and when these places find themselves besieged by orders from both the Chinese and US governments, their directors begin to have reservations. One particularly conscientious director reached the conclusion that some war involving mass destruction must be impending given the sudden upsurge in demand for oxygen and so disclosed that information to the world’s media, where it was dispersed around the world via satellite links and network news and such a storm of words occurred – allegations and counter allegations and affidavits and press conferences – that the Earth was left with only one week’s worth of oxygen. This was accurately calculated by scientists, because I told them to.
It was around this time that the elderly began to die en masse. Thousands feared a chemical attack and hid in specially constructed shelters, sealed to the outside. These people died too because they further restricted their oxygen supply and so hysteria spread about a chemical attack that could penetrate chemical-attack proof shelters. With the growing sense of fear in countries across the world, meetings began to take place in the Pentagon building in the United States of America. This was a building where human beings decided the best ways to cause as much damage as possible to other human beings, who were usually either Communists or Muslims. Communists were human beings who thought that everybody should be equal and so threatened to make the poor people realise that the sole purpose of their working lives was to make rich people richer and then be governed by them. Muslims were human beings who still believed in religion more than anything else, no one minded about this except that it left them disposed to disliking the godless Western culture. Indeed no on would have minded about that except the Muslims had fortuitously found themselves in possession of most of the world’s oil supplies beneath their desert lands, with which they held to ransom the West, for whom they did not particularly care. Incidentally, oil was a fuel that fed the economies of the world; oil was everything. Oil was God.
One man who owned a lot of Oil that resided under Texas was a key figure in these special meetings. He was General MacArthur, who happened to be the grandson of the same MacArthur who had danced back and forth across Korea fighting with the Communists (because they wanted everybody to be equal). MacArthur Jr stated that the whole oxygen shortage must have been a Communist conspiracy and thus the only solution was to launch a nuclear attack on the Chinese, as a similar attack was inevitably all ready in preparation by the Communists. In reality General MacArthur’s anxiety to attack China was down to his vaguely modest desire to be a legendary figure, famed for wiping out the Communists. Sat directly to his left was an elderly Jewish man because I put him there to act as a voice of reason to these lunatic Generals. He told them that a nuclear attack was out of the question because the real problem was the newly finite status of oxygen and not Communist conspiracies. Then General MacArthur said something that I did not expect, from the recesses of my mind. He said this: “Well if we nuke the Commies that’s more oxygen for us!” With dismay I realised that for him and his colleagues this was the swinging factor, and so they voted 14 to one in favour of launching a nuclear attack on China, not because they wanted everyone to be equal, but because they had a very large population and so used up a lot of the remaining oxygen.
During these discussions more people found themselves growing increasingly tired and dying. Mankind, in its infinite wisdom, was trying as best it could to keep going about its daily work. As far as most people were concerned the only the threat was one of chemical war, not of a diminishing amount of oxygen. Otherwise they would have looted shops and raped and pillaged, as anarchical humans are prone to do, fully aware that they had but one week left to live. Instead roads were as congested as ever. Roads were conduits for cars. Cars allowed humans to spend less time travelling to their jobs and so more time working in them. Those who worked the most earned the least, and made the richest people, who did the least work, even richer. The rich people owned all the land and all that was under the land and so they ruled over the poor people.
China was a Communist country. Communists believed that everyone should be equal. It wasn’t a perfect system of equality until a salvo of American nuclear warheads levelled the country and rendered the entire population equally dead. China also had nuclear weapons, but not as many as America, when they saw American nuclear missiles on their Radars, they launched their own weapons. This was an ultimately pointless exercise as it matters not to a dead man whether his opponent lives or dies. However, a short time later America was levelled too, though not as drastically as China. Millions died, but millions survived, although they would all die in 4 days anyway, from a mixture of radiation poisoning, lack of oxygen and simply from being murdered by their fellow humans.
One of the dead was named Tony. He had proposed to his girlfriend, who was named April and who worked as a stripper, and been accepted. It was perhaps due to his general good-natured outlook on life thereafter that he walked at a faster pace. To be precise he walked at 5 miles per hour, because I told April to say yes, and by coincidence this ensured that his trajectory would coincide with that of a Chinese missile. Tony was the only person in the whole of the city not to be killed in a nuclear explosion; he was killed by a blow to the head from a falling object travelling at its terminal velocity. April would have been distraught to hear the news had she not been vaporised approximately two seconds after her then fiancée died.
Elsewhere a woman with warts on her face stands in a crowded train on the London Underground. She believes in inner-beauty and true love, but it doesn’t prevent the crowd from shouldering past her angrily as the doors open at the first stop. Somebody had told her once, by the fire at Christmas time, that beauty fades into wrinkles and folds, while the heart beats on and the mind remains clear, and that all that mattered was who you are not what you look like. She had stopped crying and clung to her dream ever more. Yet as I write about her I realise that her fingers are ringless and from one of the warts sprouts a thick tuft of hair, but she still watches the grimy pipes fly past the window hiding from this brutal reality behind a dream.
At the next stop her place is taken by a fat woman carrying a large plastic bag filled with cosmetic products, the lady with warts on her face smiles at the woman sadly, not with any hint of condescension just because the fat woman lives by a different dream – that her make-up will make men lust for her. The fat woman does not notice, for she is caught in a dilemma of monumental proportions. She has nowhere to hold as the train threatens to depart, except the handle above her head. However, she is sweating profusely and certainly regretting her decision to wear a sleeveless top, but the train is about to depart and her chances of remaining upright are minimal as her centre of gravity has fallen with other parts of her anatomy. As the doors close she reaches up to grasp the handle and a large drop of sweat drops from her unencumbered armpit on to the black leather shoe of a businessman. He remains unaware until the third drop breaches his shoe’s defences and permeates his sock. Immediately he moves his shoe and glowers at the fat woman who releases her grip on the handle and topples into the business man as the train lurches to a standstill. He is still struggling to release himself from the fat woman’s sweaty flesh as my mind wonders from the train and to other places.
In this world I have created there is no longer enough oxygen to sustain life. The last days of many lives were spent worrying about insignificant details. The fat woman worried that a prospective partner would not return her call and saved desperately for a slimming plan. The lady with warts was laughed at by the only man to whom she had ever told her secret dream; she killed herself. General MacArthur slowly asphyxiated while toasting the demise of Communism with his esteemed colleagues. The conscientious director discovered the real truth and didn’t sell any of his oxygen. Instead he hoarded it and sustained himself for a full week after virtually every other human had died. After that he grew bored, because life meant nothing without someone with whom it could be shared.
Only one woman survived. She was called Grace and lived in a small cottage on her own. She had cancer of the ovaries. Knowing how finite her life was, she lived every single day of her life as if it was her last; she smoked and didn’t care, she drank to excess and she once had sex with a rock star. Those actions did not make her more or less worthy than any of the other inhabitants of Earth. She was simply the only one who wanted to live desperately, and lived as much as she could. Because of this fact I let her lock herself into her greenhouse of tomato plants, and live there happily for four weeks, nourishing herself on the tomatoes. After four weeks the plants decided to photosynthesise again and Grace could live as she had before.
I went to explain things to Grace, before I stopped writing and left her world. She didn’t ask me why or how I had allowed events to transpire as they had. She only said one thing, which made enormous sense. She said this: “Who is there left to love?”
After all love was the supreme elixir.
So I left her two things: cured ovaries and a man I wrote in called Job. Job was also the name of a biblical figure whom had had his faith tested by God through his losing everything. This Job was a man without a story. He would write his own, as would Grace. I left them there together to start a new human race because for this brief time I had that power.
Very good.
'Tony was the only person in the whole of the city not to be killed in a nuclear explosion; he was killed by a blow to the head from a falling object travelling at its terminal velocity'
Funnier than it should have been.
'Tony was the only person in the whole of the city not to be killed in a nuclear explosion; he was killed by a blow to the head from a falling object travelling at its terminal velocity'
Funnier than it should have been.
I liked it
And very good it was too.
yadda yadda yadda
that wasn't the point.
Most science fiction is written by people with little scientific knowledge.
It happened because I said it did and I wrote the story so it happened that way because I said it did and so on.
that wasn't the point.
Most science fiction is written by people with little scientific knowledge.
It happened because I said it did and I wrote the story so it happened that way because I said it did and so on.
Oxygen becoming finite would imply that plantlife no longer existed, and the world's oceans had lapsed into huge pools of hydrogen, not that it would matter, because if such a thing happened, we'd be dead in days.
it's probably littered with spelling mistakes, and it liberally references/plagiarises (depending on your view point) Kurt Vonnegut. But that's because I just read one of his books.
It would have been a day like any other, except on this day Oxygen became a finite resource, although no one had yet realised it. Oxygen was essential on the planet earth, due to its role in the production of energy, which allowed animals to move and fight and create. By far the most advanced, yet still the most primitive species on Earth was a race called the humans. They had found many uses for energy, most of which had destructive side effects. However, all that had changed because at this point there was only enough oxygen to sustain the planet for two weeks.
This seemingly apocalyptic change had been bought on by the sudden decision of plants to stop photosynthesising. This was the process by which plants removed carbon dioxide, which could not be used to produce energy by animals, from the atmosphere, and replaced it with oxygen instead. Had scientists been immediately aware of this random development then they would have had just about enough time to uncover vague evidence of a rogue genetic timebomb that had proliferated throughout the plant kingdom during the 1960’s when America began to test chemical weapons in the Amazonian rainforest. As it happens the only scientists aware of the development were a group of students conducting a biology practical on photosynthesis in plants that had bizarrely stopped working. Not-being scientific super-brains they had put the whole experience down to bad luck.
The first person to notice anything untoward was Francis O’Hare, a Washington resident of some 90 years. At that age the red blood cells in her body, whose job it was to carry oxygen, had begun to reproduce ineffectively, leaving her more susceptible to a reduction in the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. She was sitting in a nursing home when she started to feel unusually tired at ten in the morning; everyone put this down to her energetic enthusiasm for life. Had the nurses not forged the documentation required to work in the nursing home, they might have noticed that Francis was actually dying from a lack of oxygen. In the event, Francis’ death was recorded as entirely natural, with both nurses agreeing that she had died peacefully in her sleep, which to all intents and purposes she had.
At roughly the same time as Francis’ death a younger man was brutally murdered by a rival drug dealer. This death had nothing to do with the lack of oxygen, but was merely part of the human race’s constant need to destroy and be destroyed. Also the death was important because Chester O’Hare was both the great grandson of Francis, and the human races only chance of survival. You see Chester possessed the unusual property of not wasting any of the oxygen that he breathed in. Indeed he thus required such a low level of oxygen absorption to survive, that he would have lasted out the four weeks in which the plant kingdom seemingly went on strike, and been able to start the human race from scratch with a rather fortunate women who owned a greenhouse of untainted plants.
Francis was not a rich woman; in fact had she survived into her ninety-first year the last of her savings would have diminished, and the unqualified nurses would have cast her out on to the streets to live with the vagrants and hookers who roamed the streets. Ironically they were all the same now anyway – tramps, princes and workers – they were all destined to die in the coming weeks and no amount of riches would bring salvation. It was as if their creator, myself in fact, had suddenly broken down every barrier that they had so painstakingly erected to distinguish themselves from one another. In that unprecedented equality men and women would taste freedom such as they had never done so before with all barriers destroyed.
Such freedom was a dangerous thing though, as the head of the Chinese science program well knew. His immediate reaction upon discovering that plants had stopped emitting oxygen was thus to inform the Party leader directly. And both agreed absolutely that such news made public would undoubtedly lead to mass anarchy, which was a most undesirable thing, and in the mean time that it would be a good idea to start stock-piling oxygen containers. Before that conversation had even taken place, an American spy inside the Chinese science agency had already informed his paymasters of the news. In the backdoors of the White House conversations took place and it was decided that such news made public would undoubtedly lead to mass anarchy, which was a most undesirable thing, and in the mean time that it would be a good idea to start stock-piling oxygen containers.
Of course it is only possible to buy Oxygen in large quantities from a few places, and when these places find themselves besieged by orders from both the Chinese and US governments, their directors begin to have reservations. One particularly conscientious director reached the conclusion that some war involving mass destruction must be impending given the sudden upsurge in demand for oxygen and so disclosed that information to the world’s media, where it was dispersed around the world via satellite links and network news and such a storm of words occurred – allegations and counter allegations and affidavits and press conferences – that the Earth was left with only one week’s worth of oxygen. This was accurately calculated by scientists, because I told them to.
It was around this time that the elderly began to die en masse. Thousands feared a chemical attack and hid in specially constructed shelters, sealed to the outside. These people died too because they further restricted their oxygen supply and so hysteria spread about a chemical attack that could penetrate chemical-attack proof shelters. With the growing sense of fear in countries across the world, meetings began to take place in the Pentagon building in the United States of America. This was a building where human beings decided the best ways to cause as much damage as possible to other human beings, who were usually either Communists or Muslims. Communists were human beings who thought that everybody should be equal and so threatened to make the poor people realise that the sole purpose of their working lives was to make rich people richer and then be governed by them. Muslims were human beings who still believed in religion more than anything else, no one minded about this except that it left them disposed to disliking the godless Western culture. Indeed no on would have minded about that except the Muslims had fortuitously found themselves in possession of most of the world’s oil supplies beneath their desert lands, with which they held to ransom the West, for whom they did not particularly care. Incidentally, oil was a fuel that fed the economies of the world; oil was everything. Oil was God.
One man who owned a lot of Oil that resided under Texas was a key figure in these special meetings. He was General MacArthur, who happened to be the grandson of the same MacArthur who had danced back and forth across Korea fighting with the Communists (because they wanted everybody to be equal). MacArthur Jr stated that the whole oxygen shortage must have been a Communist conspiracy and thus the only solution was to launch a nuclear attack on the Chinese, as a similar attack was inevitably all ready in preparation by the Communists. In reality General MacArthur’s anxiety to attack China was down to his vaguely modest desire to be a legendary figure, famed for wiping out the Communists. Sat directly to his left was an elderly Jewish man because I put him there to act as a voice of reason to these lunatic Generals. He told them that a nuclear attack was out of the question because the real problem was the newly finite status of oxygen and not Communist conspiracies. Then General MacArthur said something that I did not expect, from the recesses of my mind. He said this: “Well if we nuke the Commies that’s more oxygen for us!” With dismay I realised that for him and his colleagues this was the swinging factor, and so they voted 14 to one in favour of launching a nuclear attack on China, not because they wanted everyone to be equal, but because they had a very large population and so used up a lot of the remaining oxygen.
During these discussions more people found themselves growing increasingly tired and dying. Mankind, in its infinite wisdom, was trying as best it could to keep going about its daily work. As far as most people were concerned the only the threat was one of chemical war, not of a diminishing amount of oxygen. Otherwise they would have looted shops and raped and pillaged, as anarchical humans are prone to do, fully aware that they had but one week left to live. Instead roads were as congested as ever. Roads were conduits for cars. Cars allowed humans to spend less time travelling to their jobs and so more time working in them. Those who worked the most earned the least, and made the richest people, who did the least work, even richer. The rich people owned all the land and all that was under the land and so they ruled over the poor people.
China was a Communist country. Communists believed that everyone should be equal. It wasn’t a perfect system of equality until a salvo of American nuclear warheads levelled the country and rendered the entire population equally dead. China also had nuclear weapons, but not as many as America, when they saw American nuclear missiles on their Radars, they launched their own weapons. This was an ultimately pointless exercise as it matters not to a dead man whether his opponent lives or dies. However, a short time later America was levelled too, though not as drastically as China. Millions died, but millions survived, although they would all die in 4 days anyway, from a mixture of radiation poisoning, lack of oxygen and simply from being murdered by their fellow humans.
One of the dead was named Tony. He had proposed to his girlfriend, who was named April and who worked as a stripper, and been accepted. It was perhaps due to his general good-natured outlook on life thereafter that he walked at a faster pace. To be precise he walked at 5 miles per hour, because I told April to say yes, and by coincidence this ensured that his trajectory would coincide with that of a Chinese missile. Tony was the only person in the whole of the city not to be killed in a nuclear explosion; he was killed by a blow to the head from a falling object travelling at its terminal velocity. April would have been distraught to hear the news had she not been vaporised approximately two seconds after her then fiancée died.
Elsewhere a woman with warts on her face stands in a crowded train on the London Underground. She believes in inner-beauty and true love, but it doesn’t prevent the crowd from shouldering past her angrily as the doors open at the first stop. Somebody had told her once, by the fire at Christmas time, that beauty fades into wrinkles and folds, while the heart beats on and the mind remains clear, and that all that mattered was who you are not what you look like. She had stopped crying and clung to her dream ever more. Yet as I write about her I realise that her fingers are ringless and from one of the warts sprouts a thick tuft of hair, but she still watches the grimy pipes fly past the window hiding from this brutal reality behind a dream.
At the next stop her place is taken by a fat woman carrying a large plastic bag filled with cosmetic products, the lady with warts on her face smiles at the woman sadly, not with any hint of condescension just because the fat woman lives by a different dream – that her make-up will make men lust for her. The fat woman does not notice, for she is caught in a dilemma of monumental proportions. She has nowhere to hold as the train threatens to depart, except the handle above her head. However, she is sweating profusely and certainly regretting her decision to wear a sleeveless top, but the train is about to depart and her chances of remaining upright are minimal as her centre of gravity has fallen with other parts of her anatomy. As the doors close she reaches up to grasp the handle and a large drop of sweat drops from her unencumbered armpit on to the black leather shoe of a businessman. He remains unaware until the third drop breaches his shoe’s defences and permeates his sock. Immediately he moves his shoe and glowers at the fat woman who releases her grip on the handle and topples into the business man as the train lurches to a standstill. He is still struggling to release himself from the fat woman’s sweaty flesh as my mind wonders from the train and to other places.
In this world I have created there is no longer enough oxygen to sustain life. The last days of many lives were spent worrying about insignificant details. The fat woman worried that a prospective partner would not return her call and saved desperately for a slimming plan. The lady with warts was laughed at by the only man to whom she had ever told her secret dream; she killed herself. General MacArthur slowly asphyxiated while toasting the demise of Communism with his esteemed colleagues. The conscientious director discovered the real truth and didn’t sell any of his oxygen. Instead he hoarded it and sustained himself for a full week after virtually every other human had died. After that he grew bored, because life meant nothing without someone with whom it could be shared.
Only one woman survived. She was called Grace and lived in a small cottage on her own. She had cancer of the ovaries. Knowing how finite her life was, she lived every single day of her life as if it was her last; she smoked and didn’t care, she drank to excess and she once had sex with a rock star. Those actions did not make her more or less worthy than any of the other inhabitants of Earth. She was simply the only one who wanted to live desperately, and lived as much as she could. Because of this fact I let her lock herself into her greenhouse of tomato plants, and live there happily for four weeks, nourishing herself on the tomatoes. After four weeks the plants decided to photosynthesise again and Grace could live as she had before.
I went to explain things to Grace, before I stopped writing and left her world. She didn’t ask me why or how I had allowed events to transpire as they had. She only said one thing, which made enormous sense. She said this: “Who is there left to love?”
After all love was the supreme elixir.
So I left her two things: cured ovaries and a man I wrote in called Job. Job was also the name of a biblical figure whom had had his faith tested by God through his losing everything. This Job was a man without a story. He would write his own, as would Grace. I left them there together to start a new human race because for this brief time I had that power.
This seemingly apocalyptic change had been bought on by the sudden decision of plants to stop photosynthesising. This was the process by which plants removed carbon dioxide, which could not be used to produce energy by animals, from the atmosphere, and replaced it with oxygen instead. Had scientists been immediately aware of this random development then they would have had just about enough time to uncover vague evidence of a rogue genetic timebomb that had proliferated throughout the plant kingdom during the 1960’s when America began to test chemical weapons in the Amazonian rainforest. As it happens the only scientists aware of the development were a group of students conducting a biology practical on photosynthesis in plants that had bizarrely stopped working. Not-being scientific super-brains they had put the whole experience down to bad luck.
The first person to notice anything untoward was Francis O’Hare, a Washington resident of some 90 years. At that age the red blood cells in her body, whose job it was to carry oxygen, had begun to reproduce ineffectively, leaving her more susceptible to a reduction in the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. She was sitting in a nursing home when she started to feel unusually tired at ten in the morning; everyone put this down to her energetic enthusiasm for life. Had the nurses not forged the documentation required to work in the nursing home, they might have noticed that Francis was actually dying from a lack of oxygen. In the event, Francis’ death was recorded as entirely natural, with both nurses agreeing that she had died peacefully in her sleep, which to all intents and purposes she had.
At roughly the same time as Francis’ death a younger man was brutally murdered by a rival drug dealer. This death had nothing to do with the lack of oxygen, but was merely part of the human race’s constant need to destroy and be destroyed. Also the death was important because Chester O’Hare was both the great grandson of Francis, and the human races only chance of survival. You see Chester possessed the unusual property of not wasting any of the oxygen that he breathed in. Indeed he thus required such a low level of oxygen absorption to survive, that he would have lasted out the four weeks in which the plant kingdom seemingly went on strike, and been able to start the human race from scratch with a rather fortunate women who owned a greenhouse of untainted plants.
Francis was not a rich woman; in fact had she survived into her ninety-first year the last of her savings would have diminished, and the unqualified nurses would have cast her out on to the streets to live with the vagrants and hookers who roamed the streets. Ironically they were all the same now anyway – tramps, princes and workers – they were all destined to die in the coming weeks and no amount of riches would bring salvation. It was as if their creator, myself in fact, had suddenly broken down every barrier that they had so painstakingly erected to distinguish themselves from one another. In that unprecedented equality men and women would taste freedom such as they had never done so before with all barriers destroyed.
Such freedom was a dangerous thing though, as the head of the Chinese science program well knew. His immediate reaction upon discovering that plants had stopped emitting oxygen was thus to inform the Party leader directly. And both agreed absolutely that such news made public would undoubtedly lead to mass anarchy, which was a most undesirable thing, and in the mean time that it would be a good idea to start stock-piling oxygen containers. Before that conversation had even taken place, an American spy inside the Chinese science agency had already informed his paymasters of the news. In the backdoors of the White House conversations took place and it was decided that such news made public would undoubtedly lead to mass anarchy, which was a most undesirable thing, and in the mean time that it would be a good idea to start stock-piling oxygen containers.
Of course it is only possible to buy Oxygen in large quantities from a few places, and when these places find themselves besieged by orders from both the Chinese and US governments, their directors begin to have reservations. One particularly conscientious director reached the conclusion that some war involving mass destruction must be impending given the sudden upsurge in demand for oxygen and so disclosed that information to the world’s media, where it was dispersed around the world via satellite links and network news and such a storm of words occurred – allegations and counter allegations and affidavits and press conferences – that the Earth was left with only one week’s worth of oxygen. This was accurately calculated by scientists, because I told them to.
It was around this time that the elderly began to die en masse. Thousands feared a chemical attack and hid in specially constructed shelters, sealed to the outside. These people died too because they further restricted their oxygen supply and so hysteria spread about a chemical attack that could penetrate chemical-attack proof shelters. With the growing sense of fear in countries across the world, meetings began to take place in the Pentagon building in the United States of America. This was a building where human beings decided the best ways to cause as much damage as possible to other human beings, who were usually either Communists or Muslims. Communists were human beings who thought that everybody should be equal and so threatened to make the poor people realise that the sole purpose of their working lives was to make rich people richer and then be governed by them. Muslims were human beings who still believed in religion more than anything else, no one minded about this except that it left them disposed to disliking the godless Western culture. Indeed no on would have minded about that except the Muslims had fortuitously found themselves in possession of most of the world’s oil supplies beneath their desert lands, with which they held to ransom the West, for whom they did not particularly care. Incidentally, oil was a fuel that fed the economies of the world; oil was everything. Oil was God.
One man who owned a lot of Oil that resided under Texas was a key figure in these special meetings. He was General MacArthur, who happened to be the grandson of the same MacArthur who had danced back and forth across Korea fighting with the Communists (because they wanted everybody to be equal). MacArthur Jr stated that the whole oxygen shortage must have been a Communist conspiracy and thus the only solution was to launch a nuclear attack on the Chinese, as a similar attack was inevitably all ready in preparation by the Communists. In reality General MacArthur’s anxiety to attack China was down to his vaguely modest desire to be a legendary figure, famed for wiping out the Communists. Sat directly to his left was an elderly Jewish man because I put him there to act as a voice of reason to these lunatic Generals. He told them that a nuclear attack was out of the question because the real problem was the newly finite status of oxygen and not Communist conspiracies. Then General MacArthur said something that I did not expect, from the recesses of my mind. He said this: “Well if we nuke the Commies that’s more oxygen for us!” With dismay I realised that for him and his colleagues this was the swinging factor, and so they voted 14 to one in favour of launching a nuclear attack on China, not because they wanted everyone to be equal, but because they had a very large population and so used up a lot of the remaining oxygen.
During these discussions more people found themselves growing increasingly tired and dying. Mankind, in its infinite wisdom, was trying as best it could to keep going about its daily work. As far as most people were concerned the only the threat was one of chemical war, not of a diminishing amount of oxygen. Otherwise they would have looted shops and raped and pillaged, as anarchical humans are prone to do, fully aware that they had but one week left to live. Instead roads were as congested as ever. Roads were conduits for cars. Cars allowed humans to spend less time travelling to their jobs and so more time working in them. Those who worked the most earned the least, and made the richest people, who did the least work, even richer. The rich people owned all the land and all that was under the land and so they ruled over the poor people.
China was a Communist country. Communists believed that everyone should be equal. It wasn’t a perfect system of equality until a salvo of American nuclear warheads levelled the country and rendered the entire population equally dead. China also had nuclear weapons, but not as many as America, when they saw American nuclear missiles on their Radars, they launched their own weapons. This was an ultimately pointless exercise as it matters not to a dead man whether his opponent lives or dies. However, a short time later America was levelled too, though not as drastically as China. Millions died, but millions survived, although they would all die in 4 days anyway, from a mixture of radiation poisoning, lack of oxygen and simply from being murdered by their fellow humans.
One of the dead was named Tony. He had proposed to his girlfriend, who was named April and who worked as a stripper, and been accepted. It was perhaps due to his general good-natured outlook on life thereafter that he walked at a faster pace. To be precise he walked at 5 miles per hour, because I told April to say yes, and by coincidence this ensured that his trajectory would coincide with that of a Chinese missile. Tony was the only person in the whole of the city not to be killed in a nuclear explosion; he was killed by a blow to the head from a falling object travelling at its terminal velocity. April would have been distraught to hear the news had she not been vaporised approximately two seconds after her then fiancée died.
Elsewhere a woman with warts on her face stands in a crowded train on the London Underground. She believes in inner-beauty and true love, but it doesn’t prevent the crowd from shouldering past her angrily as the doors open at the first stop. Somebody had told her once, by the fire at Christmas time, that beauty fades into wrinkles and folds, while the heart beats on and the mind remains clear, and that all that mattered was who you are not what you look like. She had stopped crying and clung to her dream ever more. Yet as I write about her I realise that her fingers are ringless and from one of the warts sprouts a thick tuft of hair, but she still watches the grimy pipes fly past the window hiding from this brutal reality behind a dream.
At the next stop her place is taken by a fat woman carrying a large plastic bag filled with cosmetic products, the lady with warts on her face smiles at the woman sadly, not with any hint of condescension just because the fat woman lives by a different dream – that her make-up will make men lust for her. The fat woman does not notice, for she is caught in a dilemma of monumental proportions. She has nowhere to hold as the train threatens to depart, except the handle above her head. However, she is sweating profusely and certainly regretting her decision to wear a sleeveless top, but the train is about to depart and her chances of remaining upright are minimal as her centre of gravity has fallen with other parts of her anatomy. As the doors close she reaches up to grasp the handle and a large drop of sweat drops from her unencumbered armpit on to the black leather shoe of a businessman. He remains unaware until the third drop breaches his shoe’s defences and permeates his sock. Immediately he moves his shoe and glowers at the fat woman who releases her grip on the handle and topples into the business man as the train lurches to a standstill. He is still struggling to release himself from the fat woman’s sweaty flesh as my mind wonders from the train and to other places.
In this world I have created there is no longer enough oxygen to sustain life. The last days of many lives were spent worrying about insignificant details. The fat woman worried that a prospective partner would not return her call and saved desperately for a slimming plan. The lady with warts was laughed at by the only man to whom she had ever told her secret dream; she killed herself. General MacArthur slowly asphyxiated while toasting the demise of Communism with his esteemed colleagues. The conscientious director discovered the real truth and didn’t sell any of his oxygen. Instead he hoarded it and sustained himself for a full week after virtually every other human had died. After that he grew bored, because life meant nothing without someone with whom it could be shared.
Only one woman survived. She was called Grace and lived in a small cottage on her own. She had cancer of the ovaries. Knowing how finite her life was, she lived every single day of her life as if it was her last; she smoked and didn’t care, she drank to excess and she once had sex with a rock star. Those actions did not make her more or less worthy than any of the other inhabitants of Earth. She was simply the only one who wanted to live desperately, and lived as much as she could. Because of this fact I let her lock herself into her greenhouse of tomato plants, and live there happily for four weeks, nourishing herself on the tomatoes. After four weeks the plants decided to photosynthesise again and Grace could live as she had before.
I went to explain things to Grace, before I stopped writing and left her world. She didn’t ask me why or how I had allowed events to transpire as they had. She only said one thing, which made enormous sense. She said this: “Who is there left to love?”
After all love was the supreme elixir.
So I left her two things: cured ovaries and a man I wrote in called Job. Job was also the name of a biblical figure whom had had his faith tested by God through his losing everything. This Job was a man without a story. He would write his own, as would Grace. I left them there together to start a new human race because for this brief time I had that power.