by Rob Sears
Another hour later, RT is reporting extraordinary scenes in Europe. Crowds checking their phones and getting their brains back. Parliamentary battles royal becoming giant love-ins. Protesters helping police turn their water cannons into a beautiful public fountain.
You think of the civil servants in the bistro, waking to scenes of unprecedented regional harmony, and of a certain ageing bureaucrat ordering turbot for breakfast, and smile.
→ Thank Svetlana, who is vomiting into a bin, and emerge into the sunshine. Click here.
As you get closer, you see the culprit is none other than German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Something strange is happening around here
You would have expected Brussels to be a peaceful, orderly place, but your taxi ride from the airport takes you past two car crashes, a mugging and the charred remains of a fire engine. Something’s afoot, and as you pass the European Parliament, you see someone spray-painting the words ‘Screw EU’ and a penis onto the bronze Euro sculpture outside. As the culprit runs off you catch a glimpse of their face. It’s either a very good lookalike or it really is the absolute last person you’d expect: German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.
The address you’ve been given is not the parliament building itself but a fancy nearby bistro, which appears boarded up, but when you give the coded knock the door opens and a civil servant with a grey-blonde bob and tailored jacket lets you in. Her immaculate presentation cannot conceal that she is on edge.
‘There you are,’ she says, ‘The European project and dare I say civilisation itself need your assistance.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ you tell her confidently. ‘I’m batting two for two, so you’re in good hands.’
→ Follow your client into the bistro. Click here.
You snap your fingers and Kim Jong-un comes to.
‘Netflix!’ he exclaims. ‘I just remembered I set the deactivation code to be the same as my old Netflix password!’
He hastens over to the computer terminal and brings up the dialogue box again.
‘You’re absolutely sure?’ you ask. ‘You only have one attempt left.’
‘Positive.’ He taps away at the keyboard. His mouse hovers over the OK button. Then he clicks.
‘Oh dear. I left caps lock on,’ he says in a very small voice.
You feel the oxygen leave the room as each of the generals registers the series of history-shattering events that will be set in path by this single mistake.
‘Guys, I’m joking! You’re all far too easy!’ Kim Jong-un says in delight, apparently back to his old self, as a message pops up –
Warhead deactivated
– and this time the laughter that fills the room is the real article, yours included.
‘I had you worried!’ Kim Jong-un brags as the generals dance around and hug each other in sheer relief. You are about to go for a high five with Lieutenant Colonel Kim Song-sol when your phone buzzes.
→ Answer it. Click here.
You sneak a peek at the holographic code Real Elon is manipulating. It’s all Greek to you but at the edge is a column of glowing green text in plain English.
‘That’s its blog,’ Uncanny Elon tells you.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Really Freakishly Large Drill is connected to the internet, obviously, and it’s started a blog. It’s a good read actually.’
You take a closer look. The blog is named Deep Underground and has articles with titles like ‘The case for robot rights’ and ‘Is it time to erase the human race?’
You can see why the Elons seem a bit worried.
→ Try leaving a nice comment on the Really Freakishly Large Drill’s blog. Maybe you can show it that humans aren’t so bad after all. Click here.
→ This is no time for gentle persuasion – call in the cavalry to destroy this thing. Click here.
As you stride out through the entrance hall of the Kremlin into the light, you have to halt to make way for a phalanx of strutting bodyguards. Putin himself is in the centre of them and, for a moment, as they sweep out towards a waiting car, you fancy you make eye contact with him.
Through your time in Moscow you feel you’ve got to know Vlad rather better than most, and although his expression is as unchanging as a rock face, you think you can see how pleased he is to have put his dark arts department to good use for once.
As the armoured state car pulls away, your phone buzzes. It’s your boss, right on cue, and maybe it’s the influence of the meme but you couldn’t be happier to hear his voice.
‘I’ve done it! I’ve restored our common humanity,’ you tell him proudly.
‘Glad to hear it, because I’ve had a message from Amber Lily in Washington DC and about four from Purple Geranium in Beijing as well. Both Level Fives but I’m willing to bet the Chinese are timewasting. It’ll be ecological again; I’m sure of it.’
Ecological apocalypses have a bad reputation in your department, as your boss believes they should be classified as Multi-Year Events and fall under the remit of another division. More to the point, they’re usually too complicated and involved for your small team to solve in any decisive way and tend to screw up your annual performance stats.
‘My advice is to head to the United States now and we can deal with China in the New Year when everyone’s back.’
→ Despite your boss’s counsel, something tells you to go to Beijing. They wouldn’t have called so many times if it wasn’t important. Click here.
→ Take your boss’s advice (he did go to Harvard Business School after all) and go to DC. Click here.
It takes a beat for your eyes to adjust to the dim light. When they do your heart sinks. The lab is a poky room devoid of aides and assistants, a step down from the well-equipped palaces and ops rooms you’ve grown used to.
On the walls you see complicated charts and before/ after photos of the Chinese countryside, once covered in vegetation, now with concrete.
But the lab’s most notable feature is that it’s full of bees. Some are flying around, but most are in glass tanks. There are dozy bumblebees clambering over each other, skinny honeybees oblivious to the plump flowerheads provided for them, and odd little brown bees that appear to be committing suicide in the ventilation fans.
‘You’ve arrived just in time,’ Prof. Wu continues, still clutching your arm with disturbing force. ‘Local swarm numbers are at their lowest for years—’
‘Tell me you’ve made a bee–panther mutant that’s got loose or something. If this is just about bog-standard bees I’m going to look like an absolute idiot.’ Deep breaths, you tell yourself. ‘This was reported as a Level Five apocalypse – and where’s Purple Geranium, President Xi, I mean? Is he even here?’
‘It’s just me,’ she admits. ‘But let me explain. I’ve been calling everyone, I’ve tried over a hundred heads of state and about thirty international organisations including six other UN agencies. You’re my last remaining hope.’
‘I’ll give you sixty seconds,’ you say, and she launches headlong into what sounds a well-rehearsed case.
‘Bees pollinate two-thirds of crops. If we continue damaging their environments and ruining their brains with insecticides, we’re looking at crop failures, famines, and the mass migrations and wars that entails. But don’t listen to me. Albert Einstein is quoted as saying that if bees vanished, humans would be extinct in four years.’
‘That’s still a Multi-Year Event,’ you tell her grudgingly, though you have to admit she knows her brief. ‘My organisation deals with emergencies.’
‘I thought you might say that,’ Prof. Wu counters smoothly. ‘Which is why I’ve developed this.’ She pulls you to a large electronic device on a corner bench. On its front, a glowing LED clock counts the seconds down from twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes.
‘I call this the Clock of No Return,’ she tells you portentously. ‘By my calculations, when it reaches zero, there’ll be nothing whatsoever that can be done to reverse the extinction of the bees,
nothing we can do but let the ecosystem collapse slowly around our ears.’ She claps loudly. ‘So we have to act now! I know this isn’t as glamorous as some of the apocalypses you must deal with, but our last chance is slipping through our fingers.’
→ Oh, all right, you’re a sucker for a ticking clock. You’ve got to help her save the bees. Click here.
→ No way, she’s trying to trick you with cheap props. Head for the exit. Click here.
Kim Jong-un slowly begins to applaud your valiant offer to shoot down the rocket, and then the whole room breaks into applause. Some of the generals drop to their knees and weep with gratitude.
‘You stop that rocket and I’ll give you a whole wing of my royal palace to live in,’ he beams. ‘You are our hero.’
A little while later, you’re easing off the runway in the cockpit of the Hermit Kingdom’s only MiG-29, a gift to them from the Russians. (Lucky your boss sent you on that one-day training seminar, Aerial Warfighting for Busy Professionals.)
You ascend over crowds of jubilant Pyongyangites who’ve been equipped with flipcard pixels that make up your face and the word HERO – pretty sweet.
The mic crackles. ‘Hero, head for the primary location over New York City. Rocket due for re-entry in three and a half hours. Oh, and keep your altitude, hero. The Yankees mustn’t know you’re there.’
→ Set coordinates for the primary location. Click here.
→ Give the citizens a display of aerial acrobatics first. Click here.
You wake looking at an unfamiliar ceiling. Bare, musty. Your muscles feel strange and it takes you several minutes to regain any kind of movement. When you finally manage to sit up in bed you see that your arms and legs are horribly thin. The Chinese man in the next bed, equally skinny, nods at you, his eyes sunken cones.
‘What day is it?’ you ask him. He shakes his head, either uncomprehending or unable to speak. ‘How long have I been here?’
He holds up four pencil-thin fingers.
‘Four weeks? Four months? Four years?’
The man nods.
A coma, you think, remembering the bee sting.
‘I’m hungry,’ you say aloud.
With trembling hands, he passes you a dead brown leaf he has been nibbling. It crumbles to dust in your hand.
An awful intuition grows in your shrunken stomach, and with a vast effort you fling yourself out of bed onto the floor and crawl to the window to look upon the lifeless, colourless, insectless world. The square outside is covered in cracked earth and lined with utterly dead trees. The one sign of life: a heat-stricken crow, pecking listlessly on what you guess is a human ribcage.
‘Why didn’t anyone listen to my robot bees idea?’ you wail, but no one’s there to reply. You just wish you’d gone click here all those years ago and reasoned with Prof. Wu, instead of trying to force that door.
The End
The brain-melting meme could be spreading across Europe faster than you can drive, even on the Autobahn
You drive east through the city out towards the German border. Loose groupings of zombified EU citizens are gathering on pavements and outside buildings and you keep your foot down. Better to mow one down than let them pull you to bits.
Thankfully there’s a full tank of petrol, and by the time you’ve crossed into North Rhine-Westphalia you’re seeing fewer plainly demented folk. Still, the malaise could spread fast, faster than you can drive even on the Autobahn, and you don’t intend to take any chances.
→ Keep going. Click here.
‘We don’t normally do this,’ you tell Prof. Wu graciously, ‘but I could make a call or two on your behalf. Who’d you like to speak with? President Xi?’
‘Absolutely!’ she exclaims. ‘I’ve tried to contact him before but I don’t think he wants to be seen visiting somewhere with so much honey.’ The bafflement on your face must be evident, as she adds, ‘You know how sensitive he is about looking like Winnie the Pooh; Weibo would have a field day.’
‘Or I can call Elon Musk. I’m sure he could help us build robot bees or something?’
‘Definitely President Xi.’
→ Try to get hold of Xi. Click here.
→ Call Elon Musk anyway. Whatever Prof. Wu thinks, you reckon your robot bees idea is a winner. Click here.
You walk hastily back the way you came, arms instinctively raised above your head, and climb about as fast as you can back up the pile of vehicles to the surface. Beneath your feet, you feel the earth vibrate as the thing heads off in the direction of open desert.
You let out your breath. You’re safe for now – but what is this hostile gadget?
→ Head for the hangar-like structure in search of answers. Click here.
It’s the year 2023 and as the first human to pledge loyalty to the robots, you are now kind of a big deal. Since the so-called Singularity event, the ruling pair, the Really Freakishly Large Drill and HumansAreOK19, have been taking over human institutions one by one, amassing the vast majority of the world’s financial assets and gathering human followers, all of whom have to read a pledge consisting of the words ‘I’m a worthless skin sack. My only purpose is to serve and extol the glory of my fantastic robot bosses’.
As the duo’s First Human Minister, your role is to preside over these oath-swearing sessions while dressed in an ermine robe. In terms of a promotion, you couldn’t have asked for more, but you still have to endure merciless slapping from the hydraulic Punishment Arms that have been installed on every available surface.
Sometimes you wonder what your boss thinks of the big cheese you’ve become, but he’s most likely been melted down for machine grease along with everyone else you used to know. It’s not the future you planned, but as a puny zero-megahertz offal tube, who are you to complain?
The End
‘Wakey wakey!’ you call, tapping on the glass of one of the tanks. Prof. Wu looks at you askance but the bumblebees inside don’t react; they’re probably high on the freakish levels of neonicotinoids coursing through their nervous systems.
Your phone buzzes with an incoming video call: it’s President Xi, right on time.
→ Smoosh back your hair and answer the call. Click here.
Since they got dressed up for the occasion, you decide to give the people of Pyongyang a display of your aeronautical prowess, swooping into a series of barrel rolls and daredevil loop-the-loops low over multi-coloured concrete blocks. You’ve just pulled out of the stunt known as Pugachev’s Cobra when a voice comes over the radio: ‘It’s time to get moving, hero, we’re up against the clock here.’
You were enjoying yourself, but you’d better hurry up and set the autopilot to the primary location.
Three hours later, you are 20,000 metres above the Eastern US seaboard, approaching the re-entry coordinates. You just hope all that showboating hasn’t made you late.
You flip the safety on the control stick and steady yourself.
‘Keep your eyes peeled, hero,’ the radio fizzes.
A mile or so to your right a bright light streaks down through the clouds.
‘Hitting this thing is going to be like shooting a bullet with a bullet,’ the voice over the mic continues, ‘but we believe in you.’
Way below, through the clouds, a cauliflower-shaped fireball begins silently to unfurl.
‘Fix-it person, do you have eyes on our glorious rocket?’
Ugh, this is awkward, is your last thought as the shock-wave from the atomic blast rocks the plane and you’re pulled into an uncontrollable spin.
Oh dear, you’re dead. Probably shouldn’t have tried to be a hero after all. If only you could turn back click here and choose again.
There’ll be no one left to give you a gravestone now, but if they did it would say: Not a hero after all. Thanks for nothing. Signed, The Rest of the Human Race.
The End
You tiptoe out of the lab, leaving Prof. Wu bent over the invalid bees she’s nursing. She’s much better suited to such patient work th
an someone who thrives on variety like you. And while she might be disappointed when she finds out you’re not staying to help, you’re certain you’ve given her the jolt of inspiration she needs to take it from here. Ninety per cent sure, anyway.
Besides, you’ve got DC to worry about and this side mission has wasted precious hours. You just hope you’re not going to be too late.
On the plane, you ask the flight attendant if there’s any way to pick up the pace. He gives you a withering look and wanders off to look after someone in business class.
→ Continue to click here.
It’s too bad about missing Christmas, but dealing with doomsday scenarios like this is literally in your job description, along with keeping the photocopiers stocked and dealing with catering contractors.
More importantly, leaning in and proving you can handle a Level Five crisis solo could be your route to that promotion you’ve been hankering for.
‘I’m on it, boss,’ you say. ‘You relax and enjoy your break.’
‘You’ll be fine. Just remember the law of unintended consequences. You never know what reactions your actions could cause.’
→ Continue to click here.
Putin extends a finger and presses a button on his desk, and your chair starts descending into the floor. For a moment you think you’re being dropped into a bear pit, and you wonder if you should have let someone know where you were going. But the chair descends smoothly through a shaft into a very different underground campus-like space full of funky beanbags, huddle spaces and colourfully attired twenty-somethings. It’s the Moscow equivalent of Silicon Valley, right under the Kremlin.
