The God Complex: The Book Of Alan, Destroyer Of Worlds

Chapter Three

"BREAKING 'S NEWS' ALERT: President Abaddon leads heroic search and rescue across the devastated region. Announcing this morning: "As long as there is still hope, I won't rest until all survivors are found." Next article: Twenty times President Abaddon heroically delayed mankind from extinction."

Gabe put his phone back in his pocket and left his building in the direction of the Underground, the dry heat of the morning already burning his lungs as he shook the distant echoes of despair from his head. When he could muster the energy, he had nothing but disdain for President Abaddon.

In six-months the world would come crunching to a halt and half would fall into a deep arctic winter and the other burn to a cinder. He expected to feel a pang of fear and despair. He used to. Once upon a time. It had now been fifteen years since they first announced it was the end of the world. Natural disasters had started occurring more frequently, with each one superseding the last as the biggest, strongest, or most devastating on record. Eventually, once they had exhausted every storm name in a single year, the world's governments went looking for answers, but by that point, on the eve of Storm Stormy-McStormason it was too late. humanity had simply taken more than it was owed and tipped the scales past the point of no return.

To begin with, they gave the planet about eighty years or so, but with each new natural disaster, that estimation had to be adjusted. Overnight, gyms and insurance companies shut down and became obsolete. The cost of a chocolate éclair skyrocketed through demand; pound for pound they were more expensive than gold. Companies that still advertised started developing a conscience: those diet pills you were taking were just sugar-coated laxatives, and it turned out your dentist never recommended that toothbrush.

Gabe crossed the park and made his way south towards the tube station. The skyscrapers of Canary Wharf cast their long shadow across the streets of east London. Somehow, they had avoided the worst of the natural disasters over the years, there were the odd tremors and flash floods, but London was still pretty much as she'd always been, well apart from the self-imposed segregation. You haven't seen weird until you've observed a society struggling to come to terms with its own fragile mortality. Gabe grew up as entire towns and cities segregated themselves into the five stages of grief:

The 'Denialists' took up a large part of the South West and committed to carrying on as if nothing had happened, still saving for their retirement fund, still separating their recycling. Home of the last travel agent in the known world.

The 'Angry' took up residence in the North of the city: These led the first waves of protests until their numbers dwindled, now they mostly exist on online chat rooms and Twitter comments. Not somewhere you want to go after dark.

The 'Bargainers' stayed central and threw themselves into each and every religion ever created and some that weren't (just to hedge their bets). Beautiful architecture but a bit much on a Sunday.

The 'Depressed' moved as far east as they could go. You didn't really see many of them as they tended to stay in-doors. Lovely place to visit for a little peace and quiet.

Finally, the 'Accepting': these smug few still spend their days enjoying the beauty of the countryside, savouring the taste of food and generally trying to cheer everyone up. Gabe tried to avoid these at all cost.

Frankly, it was amazing civilisation hadn't completely crumbled, replaced by a lawless anarchy. For a long time, it looked like it was heading that way, but then people just seemed to get on with their lives, realised it was their own time they were wasting looking for someone else to blame, and that's when the real apathy kicked in. It turns out there's only so long a person can permanently live in fear of death. Gradually, that sharp pang Gabe felt every time they shortened his life expectancy dulled, little by little, bit by bit, until it just became normal. The paradox of living at the end of the world is that just as you stop fearing death you have no more time left to live.

Gabe walked along the platform just as a tube pulled up. He waited patiently for a man to finish handing everyone flowers, wishing them nothing but peace and tranquillity during the final few months, before boarding the carriage and taking an empty seat. He found himself staring at the single white daisy he was given; how each perfect petal rested against the next, he imagined the sunkissed open field it once sat in amongst thousands of its kind, once alive and vibrant, but now clipped, Its life arbitrarily cut short and in decay. He flicked it to the floor and got far too annoyed at just how accepting the 'Accepting' were about their own untimely death.

When he first moved to London, he used to love watching the other passengers at rush hour, he found they fell into two distinct categories. The perpetually angry who would treat every passenger boarding that carriage with the same contempt as a child killer, politician or children's TV presenter, and the perpetually apathetic; those who could just stand there and take it; they'd have a face full of armpit, someone in Media throwing up on their shoes and they'd still be the one apologising. Now rush hour didn't exist and everyone had bigger things to worry about, he felt it had lost some of its charm.

Gabe's phone continued to send through new S News alerts, mostly centred around the only man, as far as Gabe could see, who was able to profit from the end of the world. The owner of Serpentine Media, President Buzz Abaddon. When everyone else saw the end coming, they all did the same thing: realised the insignificance of material wealth on a dead planet, re-evaluated their lives and decided to spend their time on what really mattered. Not Buzz, though. He bought it all up, stripped it all down and put himself at the centre. When that wasn't enough, he bought himself an election or two in most of the countries that still existed and declared himself President of Earth. It wouldn't have been so bad but it was Abaddon industries that, at the turn of the century, monopolised the extraction of all of earth's natural resources for production, whilst simultaneously lobbying against any climate change legislation. A real forward thinker.

That's how the movement started. They called themselves 'Justice for Earth.' Made up of prime ministers, presidents, statesmen and royalty who'd banded together after their roles became obsolete to fight for justice for their broken planet. Smart enough to know they couldn't fight Abaddon head on and important enough to still sway the tide of public opinion against him. They were determined to see Abaddon face justice before the end. Gabe would often see their leaflets and posters, he even went to a few gatherings. They were clever, they stayed away from the media and instead went from region to region building a grassroots network of followers in support for bringing Abaddon to justice. They got as close as anyone to making it happen, but they got too big too quickly. When a couple of million turned up to one event it hit the news and that was it, those speaking were decimated by Abaddon's social assassins and Serpentine media went on a sustained PR offensive. Justice for Earth went underground, never to be heard of again.

Gabe left the darkness of the underground and climbed the stairs towards the deep crimson sky baking the cobbled streets beneath it and tried to remember what it once looked like before. Tried to recall the wispy-blue of the early mornings, the all-consuming grey of winter against the London skyline or the intricate blended sunsets of a mid-summer spent by the coast. Nothing. The seasons had vanished about two years ago, now there was only crimson or black.

Today Gabe worked for a major pharmaceutical company. It wasn't a glamorous role, it wasn't even an important one, and by now someone should have realised his role was entirely obsolete, but then with only six months left to live who wasn't? He didn't get up each morning and make the journey into work because he loved his job, far from it, he got up each morning because it kept him sane. It was his last remaining strand of normality in a world fighting its own mortality, it was the last fragile piece of string connecting him to how life used to be. That might not sound like much, but in this world it was invaluable.

Gabe knew he should have never ended up at YAMA. There was hope once. There was EDEN: humanity's last great hope of survival, the final time the planet rallied together to look for a solution, a way out. A desperate act of a desperate planet. EDEN sent up hundreds of manned exploration shuttles, each sent out to look for habitable planets while they continued to work on the technology to sustain the rest of the population. Small crews of the best and brightest young students were rocketed out to explore the furthest reaches of the universe, tasked with testing soils and reporting back to earth. They were still out there somewhere. Exploring. Surviving.

As he neared the reception of YAMA Pharmaceuticals, he fumbled his pockets for his ID. Yep, this life was over and there wasn't a damn thing anyone could do about it, which, if he was being honest, irked him somewhat, especially as he was all set to escape Earth on one of the EDEN shuttles, but instead he walked away from the programme, never to return.