A Quickie at the End of the World

A science fiction short story

Background

I was a “full time” freelance writer in Chicago for most of the 90s, in the sense that I wrote full time, mostly for free. As a staffer and photographer for Tracy Baim’s OUTLINES / NIGHTLINES papers I actually made some money during that wild decade, supplemented by moonlighting as a medical writer, bartender, and nightclub manager, never a dull moment.

One random week I got invited by colleagues from the paper to do a Sunday afternoon reading at The Red Lion bar on Clark Street, not far from the infamous Biograph Theatre where John Dillinger got gunned down. The theme of the show was “The Strangest Place or Circumstance I’ve Ever Had Sex” or similar. Like Gore Vidal, I would never miss such an opportunity.

Given only a few days notice, I could have tweaked a short piece already in the bag, but saw it as a creative challenge, and decided to write all new material. Although a far better content creator than content marketer, I leaped on any opportunity when it was handed to me, especially when it came with a chance to perform it. Ta-da, out popped these ~7,500 words.

Artists often reminisce how some of their best work erupts spontaneously, inchoate within their initial inspiration yet already not far from the final cut. Scientists have shared similar “Aha!” moments, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. The short story shared here had a similar birth, popping into my head, then compulsively pouring out onto the page.

Two prior ideas drove the keyboard frenzy: 1) Exploring the irony of preventing our extinction by ridding the planet of nukes, only to make humanity defenseless against a species-killing meteorite or comet; and 2) Speculation around when the country would elect its first female, minority, then transgendered president. Mashing these concepts up, off I went…

Far as the tone goes, I chose a first person narrator-protagonist best suited for a live reading in a bar: Bigoted, faux intellectual, whiny bullshitter, like the drunk regulars lurking a few feet away. Although the short story was rather long, I remember getting into the character, and gunning it through to the end with maximum gusto. The small audience didn’t fall asleep.

Despite the rush job, the piece still holds together surprisingly well. Resisting the temptation to edit the whole thing and rewrite parts, I’m leaving it verbatim aside from typo fixes — and toning down the narrator’s over-the-top and, given today’s Woke standards, gratuitous outpourings of racism, homophobia, and misogyny. They worked then, but won’t fly now.

Reformatting and posting it here, I recall sitting on that stool, reading those pages as if it were yesterday and a million years ago. Since then we have yet to even elect a female president, but at least most of us are still alive. As the French say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose — one step forward, two steps back. Let’s hope some day we might actually take that leap.

Here goes…

A Quickie at the End of the World

A science fiction short story

The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the human race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all means just so it can enjoy the show.
— Jean Baudrillard

It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice, there are two other possibiliites: One is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.
— Frank Zappa

During the age, of Empire, of seated Caesar and sweating centurion, of sweeping Imperial supremacy surging through the plains of Panacea, vanquishing Gaul and Druid beneath the protective wings of Falcon-crested Victory staff, Romanic rule established their totalitarian precedent for two thousand years of Darkness.

Within those shadows of transmillenial oligarchy, of grape vine and tortured slave, the worshippers of Apollo celebrated their oppression with the orgying of Dionysis. Romulus and Remus, suckled by she-wolf and raised by shepherd, were imbibed and nourished by the inherent duality of Nature, a tradition reinvigorated by the bureaucracies of Vespacian and Claudius, engendering a respect, an implicit understanding of the mechanisms of control, of the politics and pageantry of Power.

Sun in Leo, urgent bank of Enola a harbinger of the end to a gay day for that harbor city off the Inland Sea — a Flash! — Sonic concussion followed by roar of flame, fat droplets scorched to Hiroshima city streets a fitting, feisty farewell to an aeon of sovereign Kings and Courtesans. That a Viconian Cycle would demarcate its shift into Democracy with but a nanosecond of
isotopic splendor seemed an appropriate end to an era — that the Universe herself would impose an introduction into Chaos little more than two centuries later remains confusing.

Unexpected yet inevitable, early yet long overdue, we have tracked the trajectory of our Armageddon from Jupiterian flyby, to imminent terrestrial impact, tomorrow morning, a Monday, just before dawn.

Since flicked from the Kuiper Belt, cruising the plane of the elliptic as tumbling mass of rock and ice, our cometary horseman, veiled in a gaseous hub spanning ten Earth diameters, trailing her gown of misty, solar wind-blown debris for a quarter billion kilometers, she now spans our skies for more minutes of arc, than we have minutes left to live.

As strength begets strength, so weakness begets weakness: Worldwide disarmament precludes any attempt at intervention. The titanium casings of launch vehicles now ground down into mascara and paint for the faces of starlets and the easels of artists, warheads disassembled and ceremonially buried beneath fast food joints and sex shoppes, our Enlightenment, our respect for, as some have put it, “Planetary Hygiene,” has inexorably led to our demise.

The causality is sound, even if the result cataclysmic and ironic, idiotic laughter in the dark: A minor salvo of hydrogen flake and fusion between India and Pakistan, the cousins of Han, provided the sanctimonious impetus for another skirmish between North and South Korea… Before radioactive fall out could bring snow to Paris in July, China quickly settled their dispute with Taiwan, and Argentina finally brought closure to the Falklands Crisis.

Cities obliterated, the planet on the brink of nuclear winter, an international conference in Greenwich established the terms of a New Peace that brought a temporary hiatus to hostilities, and would eventually bring universal equity and genuine fair play but six years afterwards, and to this fateful moment: Tomorrow morning, a Monday, just before dawn, we will all perish.

Some blame the eastern darkies for starting it in the first place. Others the zealot pacifists of Greenwich, mistaking madness with meridian, as if boundary were a “bad” thing, as if lines of tangent, code of globe, Reimann geometries and historical topology could ever succumb, could ever be swept away as arbitrarily as they were created!

Mappers of nothing but they’re own shortsightedness and dread, these progressive pacifists of Greenwich committed the only illegitimacy of diplomacy, that of gross naivete: Only fools forgive them, even though fool, forgiver, and foe, forgotten, will all simultaneously share tomorrow’s feisty orgy of fire delivered down by ice.

Others, sterner, stricter, cite the paradox of History, duality between aristocracy and democracy — while still others, those crass opportunists who fall between soldier and martyr, scramble for the twelve remaining Shuttle seats, a Willy Wank lottery to merely postpone the inevitability of shared oblivion, democracy of destruction. Nice view for the lucky fuckers until the oxygen runs out in the Space Station, as below, the explosion, equivalent to over one hundred teratons of TNT, erupts into the placid skies of Metropolis, the atmosphere ripped open, enthusiastic calling card for the slow labors of a fifty year Cold & Dark, the entire planet enveloped tightly in a blossoming, dusty shroud of Silence and Death…

A stirring, almost a flutter in the compartment awakens me from my euphoric, annihilatory reveries about The Great Extinction — Our Own. I check my retinal Timex, yep, less than an hour, we’re gonna die all right, but I want to be well-DOSed-out before the big Boom-Boom. Now I’ve gotta deal with it, all the bullshit having to do with the End Of The World. Can’t we all just peel out like a civilized doomed species?

He always wakes me up during the best parts of my DOS-trips, anyway, and I just know he’s working me for another practical joke. I keep one eye plastered shut, the other a tight squint, hazy light barely leaking in. This one had better be good, no second chances, no follow-ups, no apologies.

“Don’t know ‘bout you, but I’m goin’ out with a Bang, man,” Zim tells me, my feigned hypnogogic just a soporific intro for him to start fucking with me.

Dressed in his prankster clown drag, part Court Jester, part Swiss Guard, he packs up his shit nonchalantly, as if tonight’s score would be just another deal, on just another early Monday run. Now I know somethin’s up.

“I’ve always asked myself,” Zim continues, as if sensing my thoughts, the rude DOSer, striking again, “if I know that I’ve only got an hour to live, what the fuck I’m gonna do?”

“And what the fuck are ya gonna do?” I can’t help but ask, my velvety retinal haze diffusing into the tacky wallpaper. “What the fuck are all of us gonna do?”

Telebroadcasts have ceased, or have been subverted with inconsequential programming, an attempt at mitigating the panic. Sudden uselessness of the advertising dollar’s more like it. Besides, at this point, what the hell else is there left to say?

“I’m gonna take me a serious motherfucken overdose of the DOS, man, until my brains blow out, and then get laid, man,” Zim sez, grabbing my favorite syringe, vials of my remaining stash.

He sees me flinch, takes it all anyway. “Like you’re really gonna have much more use for this shit… “ he sez, rationalizing his thievery like he’s rationalized everything else in his life, and between us. He laughs hysterically, the portal whisking shut behind him.

“Yeah, and like you will?” I yell after him.

The wallpaper vision now displays a subtle shade of fuchsia, bursting in nonlinear chaotic tendrils, infinite in resolution, downward, at least, since toplevel will soon be the rotting mulch of all civilization, adios everybody.

I stare at the portal: That queen, that annoying, nellie-assed homo. As if he staged even this part of this morning’s fun. Zim, or Zimbo, or Zimmie, or Bo, Bo-Zim, or whomever the fuck, remains, first and foremost, deep down and way out, fundamentally just another particularly mean-spirited Person of Color and degenerate to boot, even on this last day for all Humanity, no respect at all. He’d be an epic junkie, if you could even be an epic junkie these days. Then again, so would I. So I follow the asshole. I figure, you know, if he’s buyin’…

The tessellating pattern of the hallway carpeting rolls beneath me like a conveyor belt into madness. But I’m fleeing from yet another madness, that most wonderful of deoxymadnesses, so I pay the optical discomfort no mind. Deoxy-serotonin, since its fabrication but a decade ago, was first hailed as the ultimate recreational drug: Neither a hallucinogen nor narcotic in the strict sense, neither a stimulant nor a depressant, Zim liked to say it “did ya sideways,” whatever the hell that meant.

But wonderful, oh so very wonderful the DOS — as the underworld called it — was and remains: No known side-effects, completely non-addictive, no build-up of tolerance, the only factor preventing FDA approval was the very mystery surrounding how it works, why it could do what it does, and not display any toxicity or induce dependence.

That mystery remains, as strong and fast as the inevitability of imminent global destruction, while governmental approval never did arrive, since despite it being chemically safe, freaks such as me and Zim ended up taking the stuff at the cost of productive life, and livelihood. Who would want to work, deal with the endless stresses of life, when the immersion of deoxy-serotonin dream could fill not only a boring Sunday afternoon, but populate the rest of one’s days with infinite glee and gladness?

Not a high, you could never crash; not a low, you could never bottom-out; not a hallucinogen, you could never freak; not a narcotic, you could never get hooked. The drug’s non-addictive, all right, but people just couldn’t stop taking it.

The epidemic became worse than that of opium or heroine: For me and Zim, well hell, at least it sustained our bond, one of need, more than familiarity. The totality of our existence revolved around his connections and my connections, and our shared disconnection from the world-without-deoxy-ser, all along two freaks sustained by his sense of humor, and my willingness to put up with all the bullshit.

Tonight, unfortunately, my negro has left me no choice. LoveMe Avenue, the main thoroughfare between Here and There, is crowded, but not what you’d expect given the circumstances. Clunky Chryslers and jalopy Fords hover above, the superconducting monorail station is full, probably due to malfunction more than anything else. When human extermination was first confirmed and announced less than a week ago, fools rushed to megamarkets, hoping to stock up for the tough times.

After a few days, however, when the realization finally settled in that those “tough times” would last only long enough for the mile high tidal wave to wash the entire city away, people oscillated between paralysis and hysteria.

The stages of mourning were typical, boring in their systemic concreteness. Following the initial shock and excitement, then the buying frenzy, an almost comatose melancholy became pervasive. Then, religious fervor took over like clockwork. Mass suicides, pilgrimages to Mecca, Jerusalem, Bill Gates V’s grave and the Rock ’n’ Roll museum, the high, the low, the sacred and the profane all blending together in some post-post modern smorgasbord of cowardliness and bad taste.

After that, an indulgent societal chaos, a communal “who-cares-about-anything-anymore, we’re-all-gonna-die-anyway” attitude that led to individual hooligans and roving gangs murdering, raping, and pillaging with abandon, knowing that they, too, would soon be dead. Soon after the G came down hard, blackout curfews, mass arrests, public executions through torture were necessary to prevent complete societal breakdown. In this sense, Zim’s enthusiasm seems slow on the take. Then again, the fucker’s been so zonked out of his mind for the past week, he probably didn’t find out about the End of the World until tonight.

Zonked right along with him, I feel it’s my responsibility to continue the pursuit: I could sit back, and just wait to die like everybody else, but there’s still an hour left, and all my deoxy-serotonin is gone. Besides, the world’s a tough place, even on the brink of its end. And who’s gonna look out for a mean-spirited DOS junky right before it’s all over?

I can feel the warmth flowing into me, through me, into me, filling my mind with the feeling, with the idea, with feelings and ideas about Power…

“Hey, Zim, man, wait up!”

With an insane giggle, he doubles time up the avenue, not hard to spot wearing that funny hat, bangles, taffeta skirt with leggings. What’s the hurry? Then again, he’s got my piece, the bitch owes me at least a couple micrograms.

“Stop! Queen!”

I’m relieved having something to do, great way to kill time before we’re all killed.

He uses the teeming, seething crowd for cover, darting like some prissy, half-pregnant ballerina between throngs of protesters in front of the expressionist steps of City Hall, the artfully broken choreography of tasteless 22nd Century architecture, and now the apocalyptic soap box of fools who feel compelled to fill their last breaths with last words for Last Men, as if vindication could be found in the raw finality of it all, as if the denouement of History could hold the asses in the seats for one last curtain call.

If no one gave a shit before, why would they now? And since when has protest amounted to much of anything but Marxism and scholarly headache, the force of bored pedantry no match for the momentum of coin, the power of cashflow, the give-and-take not so much of capital per se, but of the lowest common denominators of passion and instinct, the greed and garrulousness of masses who wish only to fuck, and be fed.

Sandwich boys of scholarly slush are nothing but placard-bearing anachronisms, taunted by the holographic advertisements suspended above, projected onto the sides of the buildings. Around them is the white noise and jeering created not so much from endless content, the pornographic promotions for herbal medicinals and the infra-red ads for fried foods, the marketing campaigns you can feel as well as see and hear, but from the holo-ads’ punctilious persistence, the entertainment loops endlessly replaying themselves in 12 minute intervals, the medium indeed the message as the moguls of marketing having days ago abandoned their polymer desks, and now kill each other for those few remaining Space Shuttle seats.

Zimbo, the junk freak, blends in effortlessly with the information freaks, the neo-Huguenots burning multigraphic copies of the Edict of Nantes, pseudo-Canadian irredentists claiming Mason & Dixon were Jesuit spies, and the phalanx of Jews resplendent in skull cap and S.S. paraphernalia. They goose-step while chanting the Shemah Yisrael, as if that juxtaposition of diametric opposites could somehow save them, bring back their gassed, burned and pillaged brethren — not to forget, indeed, for how can anyone sleep through genocide, how can anyone whine and complain through Armageddon?

Damn them, damn them all to hell: What has happened to winner-take-all? What has happened to courage and calamity? Can our only redemption be through an icy, fiery death, hurled from the sky?

Goddammit, I need, some, of the, shit. Non-addictive my ass. We are addicted to only two things in this life: Hunger, and death. With death imminent, I hunger. Only deoxy-serotonin can sustain me now.

How fitting that a black, spineless, chickenshit cocksucker would be in possession of that which I need, that which I must have, and the device for its delivery? That I am now tested as the world has been tested, only to fail, I must not let myself fail, for to surrender at the moment of mass surrender is to capitulate not only to my own weakness, but to the depravity of two centuries of error, to succumb not only to collective malfunction, but to thermodynamic law. Uncaring physics, the celestial mechanics of Kepler and virginal Newton can vanquish me only in the end. Until then, personal biology must take me elsewhere, the politics of lateral motion. So long as there’s movement, there’s some hope.

Zim cascades through the throng, across the street, and rushes for minor calamity, the immediacy of human misery made utterly inconsequential by the grand cataclysm only minutes away: A large hovermobile has lost control, smashed headlong into a skraper, shards of plummeting polymers and glittering glass the twisted wreckage of airframe and bodies trapped below.

Gravity has overtaken them, a fully functional force-vector that reminds us of our universal fate, the forces of Nature still operative, healthy, robust, penalizing absentee traffic wardens, their glowing terminals vacant, punishing the hapless victims of that bureaucratic neglect, as evinced by the mortally wounded, crawling on pavement and pavilion.

Using the smoke and screams for cover, Zim dodges and darts between this epitaph of crash, this tombstone of technology. An Olympic symbol, the multi-colored, intertwined rings, is visible on a piece of wreckage as I enter the smoke and steel. The Games of 2184, scheduled for later this summer, have been “indefinitely postponed” given the celestial circumstances, the athletes being ferried from a training camp in the suburbs to some unknown destination, now unanticipated yet demonstrably conclusive at my feet: One of the clones of Jesse Owens, amazingly well-preserved given the circumstances, tries to stand, and for but a moment I mistake him for my man, Zim. I almost stop to ask him for a dimethyl-steroid, before I see Zim making his way deftly into an alley.

Around me stand and lie, living and dying symbols of the lies of contemporary sports, more a contest between rival international genetics laboratories than the bravest and best of the nation’s amateur contenders. Amateur? Clearly, one must be considered a professional runner, having the grafted legs of a gazelle, the coded musculature of a bison for shotput, the bone-structure of a bird to pole vault, the fins of a fish to free-style the 500 in record time.

Critics have suggested that since splicing human code has already been made obsolete, why not take humans out of the mix entirely, and just optimize the animals themselves? While others, more astute to the dynamic of demos, the media of masses, have observed that by-passing the human source code entirely would somehow diminish the emotional intensity of the games, would make identification and association too much a challenge, misspelling the nucleotide alphabet somehow superior to speaking in a new tongue altogether. After all, we create heroes if only to watch them rise, summarily to fall, a dynamic made difficult if we consider them beneath us all along. Besides, interviews and athletic bios would be impossible, too much holographic airplay already devoted to the scientists themselves, the creators superseding the created…

But now this team has all fallen, never to rise again. Red and blue flashing lights, the drone of sirens fill the air. Public servants, the mercenaries of the municipality, are always the last to resign themselves to revolution or any radical change. Their pay checks guaranteed even if their tenure is not, cops and medics approach, as the smoke around me begins to clear with the suction of their propjets.

Not only do I have a private mission this early morning, for scoring, but a public warrant for my arrest, for selling. I leave the genetic Olympian freak show to their endorphin pain killers and water-stretchers, and resolutely pursue my quarry, my own killer, to the brink of oblivion.

Zimbo enters a freight elevator on the far end of the alley just as I enter the narrow walkway between buildings from streetside. Before the doors shut, he waves my syringe, a lavish vial of my deoxy-serotonin, and gives me the finger. By the time I reach the small, jutting alcove, the lift has already made midpoint up the building’s surface. The only unit Zim’s ticket to ride, a gaper block already forming at the mouth of the street, an exposed fire escape seems my only recourse. For some reason, however, the 114 stories seem slightly daunting.

Back on the street proper, I push through the crowd. In this age of computer-generated entertainment, athletes perhaps the only remaining celebrities, ambulance attendants and medics have some trouble getting to these victims, bigger gaper blocks than for the comet. In the commotion, a medical hovermobile floats idly, emptily, beckoningly by the perimeter of the throng. I slip inside the air-ambulance. Flipping this switch and that, the hatch slides shut, the propjets charge, as a disembodied voice fills the interior quads.

“Voice print identify, please.”

“You idiot!” I scream, “Dontcha know it’s the End of the goddamned World?”

“Voice print identification, incorrect. Please supply password override to gain clearance. “

Hmmm, I figure that I’m totally screwed when the hatch suddenly opens, and an orange-garbed medic enters towing a water-stretcher. It bears the inert body of what must be an Olympic boxer or wrestler, the hairless gorillalike body a relatively easy give-away.

“Who are you?” the medic exclaims, stabilizing the stretcher against an inertial restraint mechanism.

“I’m your driver,” I concoct. “Get him stabilized and let’s fly.”

“I’m the driver, you moron,” the medic remarks.

“Voice print identification confirmed, “ drones the voice.

“Proceed to Emergency Evac Coordinates, immediately.”

Some appropriate lights and numbers flash on the viewscreen. Fuck the autopilot, I’m in charge here.

Given the circumstances, I decide to be diplomatic. “Get out of this hover, you asshole, or I phase-shift your face,” I suggest, pointing my snub-nosed particle beam pistol at his head.

Make guns illegal, and only the criminals will have them. But I’m no criminal: I just love my deoxy-serotonin, and this day-glo jerk sure as hell isn’t going to keep me from it, whether or not the whole planet’s about to be hammered.

Come on, fucker, come and get an anti-proton beam, right between the eyes.

“Move! Now!”

He complies. What’s he gonna do, give his life up for a goddamned gorilla? Some DNA spliced ape in biodrag?

With a whir the machine rises into the sky. On manual, I maneuver the craft straight up the side of the skraper, dodging the area of smoke and dangling debris at the impact site, about twenty stories up. As we zoom vertically, I gaze back at my passenger. Figures that this gorilla freako would have survived the crash in fairly good shape, muscles rippling amid the mass, this guy could probably bench press a thousand pounds. I only hope the beast doesn’t wake up.

“Hungry!” he suddenly exclaims, eyes shooting open, the inertial restraints buckling under the brawn. “Hungry!”

Oh, Jesus. As we zip along the skraper face, rows of abandoned offices flowing by like stacked movie sets, I look about the compartment. Opening a med-kit, I scope some endoendorphin, glowing pale blue in 20cc vials.

“Relax, George,” I suggest, prepping a suction needle.

“Hungry!” my buddy grunts again. “Horny!” he clarifies, or maybe adds to his growing shopping list, his breathing spastic, excited.

“You’re looking at the wrong girl, friend,” I remind him.

Breaking over the top of the skraper, all that’s visible is an empty hoverport, exhaust vents still smoking. Zim must have copped himself a ride, too. Checking the scopes, looking for a suspicious tag number, spotting Zim’s craft proves remarkably easy. The grid is a-buzz with the traffic violator, ripping through unauthorized routes, bobbing like a fucked up duck from one cruise-plane to another.

Punching the dopplers, I lock onto Zim’s hover, program the machine to pursue and overtake. I might be a deoxy-hop-head, but at least I still know how to work all the techno-bullshit.

Unfortunately, so does Zim. Streetwise, with 3-D skywisdom, always count on an addict to get around. We might not be able to tie our own shoes, but nothing and no one can get in the way of our one goal, The Stuff. Surely, the end of the species might be a minor obstacle, but twenty minutes remains an eternity for those feeling The Need. We might all soon be dead, but at least I’m gonna be DOSed.

“Feed me,” blurts my ape friend. I pop all 20 into one of his pecs, the tissue so tough the vacuum almost doesn’t connect. The brain drain hits his bloodstream, but no effect. “Stockholm! 2184! We kick ass!” he screams. At least King Kong here has managed to change the subject.

“Yeah, Stockholm, you guys kick ass,” I concur, grabbing another vial. Pfftth, in she goes, ahhhhhhhhh, about time.

“Going for the gold!” apeman here continues. “The gold, and then my Nike promotion!” I can’t help but check out the guy’s shoes, eeeee-normous.

“What size are you, anyway?” I inquire, making some conversation before the brain drug does her magic — Hopefully.

“Stockholm! Gold! Nikes! Horny!” he grunts. At least he’s stopped tugging on the straps.

Altitude increasing, every wavelength crowded with complaint, the cityscape unfolds beneath, the weather clear as crystal, perfect morning to die. Halgon searchlights criss-cross the hub of sky, as if humanity could somehow better illuminate the lovely instrument of its demise, suspended now breathlessly, a majestic halo of vapor surrounding a mountain-sized kernel of tumbling rock, all glowing across the eastern horizon.

Spaceports flash with civilian launches, as every craft capable of orbital travel carries their human cargo into space, last ditch attempts to prolong life, for at least the length of an oxygen allotment. Surely, they cannot be blamed: To live but an extra instant is to somehow transcend the overall finality. But what succor, what pleasure to be gained in being a firsthand witness to the death of 20 billion souls?

To share in life is to share in death: To breech that treaty seems a violation, however justified. To hold fast to honor, whatever honor entails, is perhaps to willingly descend back into primordial, eternal deep with the sinking ship. Not to fear death, not to despair over providence, but to defy it with an almost willing submission.

We are all destined to die: That we should all of this particular generation be fated to die together infuses us with a sense of community unknown to any historic or cultural precedent. That I, perchance, choose my death to be a deoxy death is my own decision, is my own luxury, is my own sense of validation. That I have a goal, that I have a concrete, practical mission at this penultimate moment, brings me a joy almost as profound and intense as that anticipated rush of deoxy-serotonin pleasure. I will not be defeated, even if all humanity, myself no exception, is about to fall.

Zim’s craft has entered visible range. A reddish utility vehicle, Zim zigs and zags, but makes no effort to block my tracking, his antics merely more showiness, the necessary and fitting dramatic choreography to a chase that can only become meaningful at its unsuccessful termination.

As we skirt the city limits, his destination looms ahead like a Count’ s Castle, lost in the mists of mountain, hugged by valley village. Only in this case, the neo-Gothic splendor is that of The Observatory, shrouded in the sprouting, frothing waves of nearby Ocean, pulled from the depths and invigorated by the tidal forces squeezing Earth and her ever-approaching Nemesis. The insectlike structure of Observatory Complex and its contained reflecting telescope hug not Transy vanian furrow but the shores of a jutting promontory, a synthetic peninsula constructed to study the stars.

With an unobstructed view of the cosmos, flying above presents an equally lavish view of the structure’s brilliant white dome, hundreds of meters across, and the few support buildings, splayed like spots on a mushroom. An enchanted enclave, the sprawling structure is designed to further enchant those whose eyes peer upward, away from human limit, mortal passion and misery, and up up up to the infinite, all the hidden mysteries of a vastness that contains yet somehow transcends the life huddled so helplessly within itself.

Zim’s choice of such a destination is irrelevant when conjoined with the knowledge that his destination has been identified. Where I find Zimbo, I find my deoxy-serotonin, to the end of the world I shall go.

With all the commotion downtown, with the anticipation of planetary fait accompli, the otherwise heavily populated promontory, replete with an international host of technicians, scientists and even tourists, seems abandoned.

Zim’ s craft hovers momentarily, locks onto the nearest landing pad, and smoothly docks. Jamming the throttle, smoke rises past the viewport as I park the gene-tweaked gorilla and myself but a few meters away. Zim’s gangly, almost gelatinous body effortlessly disappears into the closest support building, an annex located just west of the main Observatory Globe.

At first I decide to pump Kong here with another 20cc’s and pursue my destiny unaccompanied by this hairless ape in estrus. Vial in hand, I suddenly realize that having a trusty assistant, particularly a 300 lbs. genetically engineered Olympic calibre gorillaman-boxer-wrestler motherfucker, just might come in handy.

“Hey, George,” I say, gripping the release mechanism of his inertials. “You wanna come along? Food, primate pussy, gold, prime time spots. We might even be able to pick your ass up some sneakers, quality shit?”

“Stockholm?” George here inquires, looking about.

“Yeah, Stockholm — But only if you behave yourself, you got that?”

“I am a conditioned athlete!” George grunts, as if by rote. “I was created at GenoGen Laboratories, of Kenosha, Wisconsin, on June 7th, 2170 — “

“Yeah, whatever,” I add, unhooking the device. Releasing him, I dart back, fearing the worst. The worst is, of course, a relative concept, as George here leaps out of his water-stretcher, and proceeds to give me a hug that completely knocks my wind out.

“Are you my new trainer?” his breath like a compost heap in hell, its waft enveloping me with straw, bananas, dimethyl-steroid, blood, sweat, a hovermobile wreck, dead teammates, and what can only be described as gorilla poon.

“Take it easy, Chim-Chim,” I gasp, somehow freeing myself. At least his numbered jersey and light blue sweat pants are still intact. “Yeah, I’m your new trainer. Come on, let’s go find some deoxy-serotonin. You get some too, okay?”

I open the hatch, and we scramble out.

“Stockholm!” George yells, waving his arms up and down, jogging along beside.

A tight path, flanked by topiary bushes leads to the annex, the door teetering open, beckoning. Suspense thwarted almost immediately, as said entry produces Zimbo, on the other side of a hallway, glaring at us. Somehow noticing my new assistant, Zim mimes a chimpanzee, laughs, stands again, and proceeds to inject himself with a healthy dose of DOS. I can almost see his pupils dilating from 10 meters away. Zim smiles a lavish deoxy-serotonin smile, gives us both the finger, and disappears behind yet another door, slamming shut behind him.

This door proves to be locked. “George, will ya open this for me?” George works the handle. “Locked,” he grunts.

I point to it. “Other side — Stockholm!” I scream.

As the door is cleaved from its hinges, darkness overtakes us. Somehow, the lights from the hallway have also been suddenly extinguished. Popular with the Chinese Opera, this Fight In The Dark offers a decidedly new twist. I can hear Zim, laughing a few meters to the right and back.

“George!” I try to command, “as your trainer, go get that lanky fool and bring him to me!”

Luckily, the creature’s sense of smell has been heightened in direct proportion to commensurate body mass and musculature, as a few more grunts, some movement, is summarily followed by the unmistakable shriek of a Zim. Groping in the dark, I find the light switch, and indulge all our curiosities.

A small laboratory space is illuminated, Zim and the Olympian revealed on its far end. George has pinned his captive to a table, whose one free arm is now used to inject himself and the Beast with my shit. Mission accomplished, Zim tosses syringe and empty vial into his satchel, open beneath them. As I approach, animal aggression yields to what can only be described as affection, instantaneously transforming into an utterly repugnant display, right before my DOS-deprived, leering eyes.

“Oh, Mr. Man,” cries my roommate and fellow addict, mesmerized, reaching around and actually fondling the hunk. “You one big, Big Daddy!”

Disgusted to the verge of physical discomfort, I scowl, grab the satchel, the clink and clamoring of several remaining vials my only reason to continue, and run for yet another door, on the far end of the lab. Bolting through the portal, I dash up a seemingly endless series of steps, round and round, up and up, anteroom of the Underworld, my sexually perverted Anubis now satiating himself with the baboon incarnation of Thoth.

I finally reach, exhausted in mind and body, the threshold of Inner Chamber, the top level of Observatory.

Osiris, escorting the Sun on its night barge journey along the river beneath the world, has given way to bright white globe of Observatory, its now-stationary multiple-mirrored reflecting telescope poised at the glowing cometary Chariot, here to reclaim the species to the God of the Dead’s resolute, eternally patient kingdom below.

Standing on the catwalk that runs along the shell’s perimeter, I see dozens of computer monitors, processing and displaying variants of the cometary trajectory, the bulb of creative destruction filtered along distinct wavelengths, from infrared to ultraviolet. The actual anomaly, visible through the dome’s slanted opening, is mirrored now and projected into a hundred faces of Janus, all staring at me, yearning, oh so very eager to capitulate to its own annihilation, the consumption of everything we have ever come to know and experience.

“I never thought I would have company,” says a voice from below, sitting at the very base of the mammoth telescope, tweaking the controls. “I thought I would have this moment all to myself, but now that you are here, would you care to join me, party with me at the End Of The World?”

I somehow recognize that voice, its strange intonation. I make my way toward a ladder, try to get a better look.

“The comet is very beautiful, isn’t it?” the voice continues. “I have worshipped beauty my whole life, the politics and biology of beauty. I think it somehow fitting that now, in the end, will I witness the very incarnation of it. Come here! Hurry! We don’t have much time...”

I descend the vertical steps. What the hell else can I do? Amazingly enough, the shock sustained in the laboratory annex, this voice, the impending doom, so lavishly displayed on all these monitors, has made me forget about the gold I carry in that small satchel. As I go down to the floor of the Observatory, to directly confront this bizarre yet familiar voice, it continues, as if to taunt me, as if to ensure my continued attention before all attentions cease.

“Nature knows no death, only transformation,” it goes on, as I reach the floor of the Observatory. “I have known so many transformations, internal and external, social and political. I have accepted them as my destiny, as I accept my destiny now, poised at the brink, a communal transformation, yet personally shared only with our cometary guest — and now with you, my friend.”

“You fucking cunt!” I yell, the words erupting from my mouth, as if they had a life unto themselves, as if my sole life’s purpose has been, from the very start, to utter them, at this very instant, locked like the stars, in time, forever.

Of course! How could I be so stupid? So naive? That voice. How could I not have recognized it? For here I stand, an arm’s length away from none other than President Lorelei-Lee — that name, that position, that face, that body.

Yes, President Lorelei-Lee, Chief Executive Officer of the United States of America, chief architect of the Greenwich Treaties. The one and only President Lee, hailed as the greatest diplomat and negotiator of the 22nd Century, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize of 2180.

Stockholm my fucking ass, this transgendered bitch has singlehandedly brought the entire human race to Oblivion. I can’t even believe this …

She sits, utterly non-plussed.

She wears a stunning, glittering gown, covered in jewels, latticework of the cut crystal reflecting the eerie, cometary light in all directions. Her hair is long, jet black, flowing, free, accentuating the subtle yet defined areas of cheekbone, jaw, penetrating deep blue eyes. Her ample breasts, full hips, soft thighs, whether real or synthetic, whether bioengineered or grafted, are sumptuous, insufferably gorgeous.

Her only facial response is a dull stare, followed by a hand-gesture, pointed above, beyond the reflecting mirrors, outside the dome, and directly toward the comet — which suddenly erupts in a spectacular, fiery explosion of rocky debris, icy vapor, and immense concussion.

“The tidal forces have just broken up the primary mass,” she says calmly, studying the scopes. Her voice, her demeanor are resolute, so collected that my released rage echoes uselessly through the dome.

“Instruments indicate that four major units have now formed into a train of debris, in addition to secondary and tertiary components,” she continues. “Time of initial impact, now recalculated, is five minutes, twenty-two seconds hence. Punctuality, after all, is the politeness of queens. Would you like a cocktail?”

President Lorelei-Lee.

In this era of brain-shunted virtual entertainments, instantaneous communication and globally networked connection, nobody reads. And even if they did, what’s in a name, what could that name really mean? Lorelei, though, you know for a fact that this bitch reads — just as you know for a fact that her name was chosen, much like her transgendered biostatus, even if her ethnicity, a composite of black and white, West and East, was more a consequence of her will than consciously selected. As if her soul, seeking a receptacle, chose this ultimate composite to realize herself as the final archetype of all transformative, all-encompassing principles and powers.

You can hate her with finesse, you can love her foolishly, but you can’t deny, that this apocalyptic bitch knows, and has it going on.

Finally, in the end, I am just beginning to understand. Considering ourselves center, solipsism as natural, as inevitable, as simple a reality as we can possibly stand, we ascribe meaning to that which happens to us, to that which we, in our self-centered delusions, conclude that we create. That I would suffer under political incompetence, that I would inadvertently precipitate biological atrocity, now becomes apparent to me, as I stand facing, President Lorelei-Lee.

Chromosomes describe, they don’t prescribe. They offer a potentiality, not a rigid blue print. The West, relying on reduction, analytical principles, the synthetic a priori, concludes that only by breaking down and breaking apart do we come to understand the operating rules of this world. Perhaps. The East, taking a holistic approach, sees the organism as a totality, one part, however supposedly “integral,” undifferentiable from the rest. Forces become a central concern, then, their control and demarcation fundamental.

Yet any one force is inseparable from its own opposite; dichotomy does not imply inherent, rigid duality. To contemplate yin, one must experience yang; to indulge the male, one must appreciate, consider and even partake in the female. As communication, economic contingency have unified the world, admittedly in a web of greed and reluctant cooperation, a conjoining of essences has proven to be an inevitability, if not a more realistic and pragramatic scientific and sociological necessity.

The transgendered, whether gender crossing in behavior, biology, or both, has historically been ostracized, excommunicated from the hierarchy of patriarchal standard. Universal unification, however, has compelled the opposites not only to attract, but to consider each other in the mirror-light of undifferentiated experience.

A sign of the times, as much a product of culture as culture became a product of her, Lorelei-Lee learned to work herself, work that culture, so that the fallen child of one age became the very Master of the next. Sign of the times, product of culture, Lorelei’s ascendancy and eventual dominion seemed as natural, as organic a reality as the forgotten reign of Augustus, as the theocratic empires of Babylon and Egypt.

Sexuality remains the first and last stage of liberation: Throughout her own reign, to the members of America’s Senate and House of Representatives, to all those youthful, publicly elected scoundrels, hooligans, anarchists, and degenerates, President Lorelei-Lee, with all her flash, good looks and brilliance, was just another fucking drag queen.

But as always, power is power, and power commands subservience, if not respect. That unspoken supremacy of naked strength remains the way of this world, be it ruled by man or woman, child or slave, fantasy or freak. And now, that world, that reign, and all that they represent, nears its close.

“What are you having?” Mz. President offers, gesturing to the wet bar next to the reflecting telescope control and monitors.

“I’ll have a vodka-rocks-lime,” I say. Indeed, I have become rather thirsty.

She makes me a cocktail, makes herself one, and we toast.

“To the End Of The World,” she sez.

“To the End Of The World,” I say.

Clink, clink.

We drink.

She looks at me, and smiles, her first openly displayed emotion.

“You and your kind will never change,” sez President Lorelei-Lee. “I have done what I have thought best, and I have succeeded in doing it. That, as a human being, is all that I can do, is all that I have ever hoped to do.”

I watch her, mesmerized.

“You and your kind will never change,” continues President Lorelei-Lee, “but I have come to accept and appreciate that I get my way of things. The Universe has offered me that, and the Universe has now offered me you. I get my way of things, and now, before the end, I will have you — you, and all that you represent.”

She reaches into the satchel, removes my favorite syringe, and two unopened vials. She fills the syringe, injects me, fills the syringe again, and then injects herself. The deoxy-serotonin flows through us, magnificently.

The first, and largest, chunk of the comet has entered the outer atmosphere, as revealed by the sudden burst of light, the inflaming of the misty shroud. The disruption of the ionosphere has produced a sudden power-outage, all the lights, equipment, monitors and computers now gone dead, now silenced, forever.

As Lorelei-Lee pushes me down to the floor of the Observatory, as I willingly, enthusiastically relent, I gaze up at the sky, exploding with ten thousand colors, an alien dynamism the vault of heaven has not known for 60 million years. Humanity, in moments, will follow the way of the dinosaur.

Our culture, our accomplishments, everything we have known, discovered, invented, tried to destroy and re-create, will be left as mere fossilized curios for the Age of Capricorn, when other sentient beings, walking the face of their own brave new world, will recapitulate in their own turn, in their own time, all that has come before.

Lorelei-Lee takes me — and in that moment of rapture, I worship her.