Has The World Ended Yet?

by Peter Darbyshire

  But then other things came out of the pipe. The ghosts of all those who had died at sea. They got caught in the containment booms and nets, and their cries drove the whales and dolphins up onto the beaches. That’s when we knew we had to do something. Our tourism industries were in trouble. No one wanted to walk on sandy beaches covered in rotting blubber. So we turned to desperate measures. We dropped gravestones into the pipe to contain the dead, and then poured in concrete after the gravestones. We threw some bibles in from all the religions for good measure. We said goodbye to our fortunes and stopped the oil, the oil that would have saved our economy, the oil that would have saved the world as we knew it then.

  But it was too late. Other things seeped through the layers of concrete and gravestones and bibles and petroleum-eating bacteria. Like ghosts but worse. Our forgotten memories. The time we stripped naked for each other at summer camp. The time we looked away when the boy across the street was getting mugged. The time we drove across that dog on the country lane and saw the puppies moving in its stomach and kept going because there was no one else around to witness it. Until now. Now they poured out of that ruptured well and bobbed there at the ocean surface for everyone to see. And we thought it couldn’t get worse than that.

  And then it got worse than that. Then the fantasies came bubbling out. The secret things we thought about each other. The secret things we imagined doing to each other. The secret things we imagined being done to us. And we looked at each other with shock and awe, wondering how we could have thought the things we thought. So we lit the ocean on fire to burn it all away. But that just turned all our fantasies into ash that rained down on us for weeks afterward, reminding us every day of everything that was wrong with us.

  And then the same thing happened at other wells. Pipes ruptured and our nightmares spilled out. A spectral Lenin wandered the frozen steppes, hawking Pepsi to every living soul he encountered. Our future ghosts dug up the graves of our parents and had sex with their corpses. Our houses and office towers caught fire and burned without consuming anything, without going out. The smoke cast a shadow over our lands, a shadow that never lifted.

  And so we were faced with a choice. We could live with it. We could live with ourselves – our true selves – flooding the planet. Or we could end it. We could destroy every oil facility and pipeline on the planet with nukes and whatever else we had. We could end ourselves.

  And we thought this. This. This is what happened to the dinosaurs.

  The Calling

  OF CTHULHU

  I tell my clients everyone goes through three emotional stages after losing a job: denial, rage and acceptance. I tell them they won’t be able to find a new calling until they move on to the third stage. I tell them world destroyer, god of war, gateway to the apocalypse and earth devourer are no longer acceptable callings.

  Most of my clients went through the denial stage centuries ago, when people lost faith in them and the other gods. The rage stage? Well, you could blame a lot of the bloodshed of the last few hundred years on that. My clients may have lost most of their powers along with their followers, but they still know how to work people behind the scenes. Things have been quieter lately, though, thanks largely to the agency’s placement rate. Eighty percent, if you don’t count the Great Old Ones. We try not to count them because they throw the numbers off.

  Cthulhu was a perfect example of that. He skipped denial entirely and went straight to rage, and he showed no signs of moving on.

  A National Geographic sub woke him when it was looking for shipwrecks and lost planes in the Bermuda Triangle but found his sunken city instead. All those aircraft and ships that went missing in the region over the years? That was Cthulhu sleepwalking. He would have destroyed the National Geographic sub, too, if not for the giant squid that had happened by at the same time, drawn by all the commotion. He was in a much better mood after he’d had something to eat.

  I didn’t see any signs of trouble in our first meeting. Cthulhu sat hunched over on the reinforced bench in my office, an airplane hangar converted by Thor and his company – because some of my clients, like Cthulhu, need the space. He didn’t do much but ooze slime on the floor and glower at the photos of Percy on my stone desk while I filled out the forms about his next of kin (Shub-Niggurath, but if it wasn’t available, any of the Mi-Go race would do), employment history (architect of nightmares) and hours of availability (one eternity is as good as another). I offered him a chocolate from the bowl on my desk but he just slapped his tentacles together and said he was trying to cut down.

  He did get a little testy when I asked him what kind of work he was interested in. He said he’d like to turn all of humanity inside out and chain us up in his sunken palace so the kraken could feast on our entrails. But he quieted down when I told him we’d already found work for the kraken in the Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea attraction in Tokyo Disney. Then I told him about the three stages and sent him to a job laying telecommunication wires for Google along the ocean floor. I figured that was the end of it, but the sisters whispered disagreement in my head. I should have listened to them.

  I didn’t have time to think about Cthulhu for a while after that, because one of my other placements, Prometheus, was causing problems.

  Prometheus worked in the new Mount Sinai Hospital (also built by Thor and his construction company). I’d found him a job as an organ donor. Specifically, as a liver donor. A team of doctors took out his liver for a transplant every day. It was so routine they didn’t even put him under for it. They just cut it out of him while he lay in bed watching movies. A new one was usually growing back by the time they stitched him up.

  The head of Mount Sinai had once told me medical experts figured one in two liver recipients in the country had Prometheus’s liver in them. And a Harvard economics prof had emailed me to say Prometheus’s livers were good for the economy. Liquor sales were up nearly twenty percent since his livers hit the market. It was called the Prometheus Effect. There was even a brand of tequila named after him.

  But right before I’d met with Cthulhu I had received an email from head office in Atlantis saying Prometheus was refusing to provide any more livers. I met the hospital’s CEO in her office. Her desk was very modern, all metal and glass. There were no pictures on it, but there was a bowl of sugar cubes. She kept glancing at the door that led to the private balcony off her office while she talked to me.

  “Prometheus is on strike,” she told me. “He won’t give us any more livers unless we give him a cut of the profits from our transplants.”

  “How big a cut?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. He signed a contract, and the contract doesn’t say anything about cuts. If we were to give him a deal, then everyone would want one.” She took a sugar cube from the bowl and studied it. “The head surgeon just wants us to grab security, put him under and go back to slicing. I thought I’d give you a chance to talk to him first.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” I said.

  She got up and opened the door to the balcony. A winged horse stepped into view and she fed it the sugar cube. The sisters hissed at it, but I cleared my throat to cover the noise.

  “We’re looking at expanding the Prometheus program,” the CEO said. “We want to move into other organs. Eyeballs, lungs, maybe even heart transplants. We need him to agree to that, too.”

  “He’ll definitely want a cut of those,” I said.

  “One of your hair clips is loose,” she said, kissing the winged horse on its nose.

  I saw myself out. I found a washroom and refastened the clip. I hummed a song about blood and vengeance to the sisters until they settled down. Then I went to visit Prometheus in his private room.

  He was lying in bed, watching old Wile E. Coyote cartoons. He wore a hospital gown but I could see the bandages on his side through a gap in the fabric. “And I thought I had it bad,” he told me, still watching the cartoon.

  “Where did you get this ide
a for a strike?” I asked him. There were a couple of chairs in the room but I didn’t sit down. I wanted to be free for action in case he tried anything.

  He switched from the cartoons to a news show about labour troubles at a shipyard in India. I’d already received the memo about it. The shipyard specialized in breaking apart old tankers into scrap metal. But it had been shut down by a general strike, led by Shiva, the god who used to have four arms until he’d lost one of them in an on-site accident.

  Shiva was speaking into the camera now. “Our demands are simple: full medical and eighty percent dental.” Behind him, undestroyed ships clogged the shipyard and surrounding bay. “The theists of the world must unite,” he added. I was glad he wasn’t my placement.

  “You signed a contract,” I said to Prometheus.

  “I can still feel all those livers I’ve given away,” Prometheus said. “Every drink everyone takes. That should be worth a cut.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “When someone with one of my livers has a drink, I get a little bit of their buzz. I’m drunk all the time. I think it’s some sort of quantum effect.”

  “What do you know about quantum anything?”

  “I saw a show about it on the oracle box,” he said, nodding at the television. “These people know things that even the gods never learned.”

  “That’s because the gods were too busy destroying everything to bother understanding how it worked,” I said. “Anyway, we’re here to talk about you, not the gods.”

  “They’ve had their time,” Prometheus said, nodding in agreement.

  “Maybe they can give you a drug for the liver thing. You don’t need more money. What would you do with it, anyway? They take care of everything for you here.”

  Prometheus switched the show to some sitcom. He muted it but kept watching. “Everyone lives in nicer places than me. Even the people who aren’t real.”

  I looked around the hospital room. It was a private room, but it was still just a hospital room.

  “You want your own place,” I said.

  “They can operate on me in it – I don’t care. But I want furniture and a bigger oracle box and all that.” He nodded at the sitcom. “Everything everyone else has.”

  “They want more of your organs,” I told him. “They want your eyes and your heart and whatever else they can take.”

  “Not a chance,” he said. “You have no idea how much all this hurts.”

  “You let them take a few of those from time to time, and I can get you your place.”

  He thought it over. “And a cut.”

  I opened the drawer of his bedside table and looked inside. It was full of magazines, candies, bloody scalpels, cellphones – you name it. Prometheus had always been a klepto. I took a bag of potato chips and went over to the window.

  “What are you doing?” he asked me.

  I opened the window and dumped the chips on the ledge. I only had to wait a few seconds before a crow landed on the ledge and started pecking at the chips.

  Prometheus shrieked and pulled the covers over his head. The sound and movement startled the crow, which flew off with a chip, but Prometheus didn’t see it go.

  “Close the window!” he cried. Crows were his weak spot.

  “No cut,” I said. “Do we have a deal?”

  “All right,” Prometheus said from under the covers, then added, “but I want all the windows sealed.”

  I went down to the parking lot and called the CEO on my phone rather than go back to the office. I didn’t want to see that winged horse again.

  “A place of his own?” she said. “Why didn’t he just ask us?”

  “His kind aren’t used to asking,” I said.

  “I’ve got my hands full with just him,” she said. “I can’t imagine what it’s like working with entire pantheons.”

  “Some days are better than others.”

  My day didn’t get any better. I got home just in time for the latest episode of Legendary Date. I let my hair down, then settled on the couch with a glass of wine and watched as a six-hundred-year-old vampire named Artalia went on a date with an accountant named Erin to a restaurant. It didn’t start off well.

  “You’re looking at the waitresses more than me,” Erin complained, folding her arms across her chest.

  “I’m just hungry,” Artalia protested. He looked at her and licked his lips. I was hoping he’d spring across the table for her throat, and maybe she’d stab him with the steak knife. You know, a real date. But that was all I got to watch because, just then, Mercury knocked on the door. “We have a crisis,” he called without waiting for me to answer.

  It had to be serious, indeed, for head office to send Mercury out at night. His overtime was a killer. I sighed and put my hair back up and turned off Legendary Date, which prompted a chorus of complaints in my head.

  “Oh, you already know how it’s going to end,” I told the sisters. “They’re going to go back to her place and she won’t invite him in, so he’ll go stalk some neighbourhood cat instead. Nobody gets any real action on these shows.”

  I let Mercury in and he looked at the photos lining the front hall while I changed in the bedroom.

  “It’s Cthulhu,” he said, but I had already figured that much. “On the way to his undersea cable job he sank a convoy of cargo ships carrying Hyundais to Brazil. Hyundai is going to sue.”

  “Aren’t they insured?” I asked.

  “The insurance company is invoking some clause about acts of gods,” he said.

  I came out of the bedroom dressed in my work suit and the sisters all bound up. Mercury still didn’t look at me.

  “Is this picture of Perseus with the sword from the old days?” he asked, nodding at one of the photos. “Those rocks look like your old hideout.”

  “Let’s keep our work and home lives separate,” I said.

  “I’m just wondering how you got a photo of back then,” he said. “Did the oracle take that?”

  “Let’s go to the office so I can get to work,” I said.

  Mercury whisked me back to the office in his arms, which was much less comfortable than a limo or helicopter but much faster. He had the good grace to pretend not to notice the sisters trying to squirm free to snap at him.

  It was a long night of phone calls, including one with Google’s head of HR. “Not a good fit,” she said. “We’re cancelling the contract. You understand.” And I did.

  When Mercury brought Cthulhu back to see me just before dawn, I didn’t speak. I stared at him from behind my desk. I wanted to see what he had to say for himself. Mercury muttered something about going for a coffee and disappeared. Cthulhu waved his tentacles at me for a moment, then said, “The silent treatment won’t work on me. I’ve spent eons in the deepest silence imaginable, so far down that your screams would take a thousand years to reach the surface.”

  “Couldn’t you hear whale songs down there?” I asked. “I read somewhere that they reach every part of the oceans.”

  Cthulhu sighed. I gagged at the stench, but he didn’t seem to notice. “They need to sing about something else besides fish,” he said.

  I sighed myself. “I thought we had the perfect match for your skill set,” I said. “What happened?”

  “It was my eldritch powers. I couldn’t help but hear every call on those undersea cables. Read every email. Every attachment.” He slapped his tentacles over his eyes and the oozing holes on the side of his head that may have been his ears. “It drove me madder.”

  Well, I couldn’t argue with that. I scanned my file of recent job postings. “How do you feel about working in cold water?”

  “I did destroy the world once with an ice age,” he said. “That was a long time ago, back before I killed the dinosaurs, but I think I could do it again. And I’m good with tidal waves. And whirlpools.” He flapped a different tentacle each time he spoke, as if ticking off positive traits about himself. That was a good sign, but it was clear he still ha
d a long way to go.

  “Those all very impressive skills,” I told him, “but there are more efficient ways to destroy the world now. The mortals can manage it all on their own with bombs and carbon emissions.”

  Cthulhu dropped his tentacles to the floor and sighed once more, so I steered the session back to the positive. Once I could breathe again.

  “You’re on the right track,” I told him. “The Canadian government needs a new icebreaker to patrol the north.”

  Cthulhu lifted a tentacle in my direction. “An icebreaker?”

  “An ice destroyer,” I said, trying to encourage him.

  Cthulhu lifted another tentacle. “To destroy the north,” he said.

  Small steps, I reminded myself.

  He took the bowl of chocolates from my desk with another tentacle and dumped the whole thing into his mouth, glass and all.

  “Do they still have those little white whales up there?” he asked. “The tasty ones?”

  Mercury came back with coffee for him and me, and I had him take Cthulhu to the new work site in the frozen north. Mercury was only gone for a few minutes before he came back.

  “Better keep yourself on call,” he said. He glanced at the puddle of slime Cthulhu had left behind on the bench and floor. “I don’t think you’ve seen the last of him, and head office is watching this case closely.”

  He disappeared once again, and the sisters hissed at him. I longed to set them free but what kind of example would that send to my clients?

  Instead, I went online for an update on the Shiva situation. The strike was spreading. Shipbreaking yards all across the continent had closed. Shiva was talking to a reporter about the possibility of workers starting communes.

  “Imagine if we were all shipbuilders instead of destroyers,” he said.

  Thor wasn’t going to like that competition.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon making routine placements: a couple of Valkyries as pilots with Virgin Airlines, some satyrs as tree planters. Things went so smoothly I left work early and hurried home to try to watch Legendary Date again. In this episode a ghost named Huntley took a librarian named Ashley to a sports bar. It didn’t start off any better than the other date. Huntley levitated a couple of beers from a nearby table over to theirs, and the owners, a pair of men wearing baseball caps, came over to reclaim them.