The End of the World, or, Another Day in the Life of Steve

I wrote this for my English class senior year. It was a science fiction class, so the assignment was to write a sci-fi story. Some of the jokes are inside jokes from our class, like Steve's full name and the comment about the movie Equilibrium.

Written in May, 2006.
About ten and a half pages, double-spaced, in Word.
Deviantart Mirror.

The End of the World

Or: Another Day in the Life of Steve

George Crake Hackworth, or Steve, as he liked to be called, awoke to the late morning sun. He tossed and turned, trying to fall back asleep; it was his day off! But once that sunlight trickled in through his window in the morning, he could never fall back asleep.

Finally he sat up, rubbed his eyes, and looked at his watch. 7:30 AM. That’s strange; the light usually didn’t hit his eyes till eleven or so. Even stranger was the red light his watch was bathed in. Much different from that whitish-yellow sunlight Steve was so used to. He stood up and walked to his window to investigate this curious red light, and was relatively surprised by what he saw. The sky was a mix of black and blood red, and meteors rocketed to ground. Many people were in disarray below his apartment, and some fires burned in the distance, spewing thick black smoke.

“Hm. It wasn’t like this when I went to sleep…”

Surprised isn’t really the right word. Steve was… mildly interested. The Apocalypse. Wow. He guessed he always expected it to come eventually; the hobo outside his apartment had to be right someday. How ironic too, the Aztec calendar had been off by only two days, though the difference between December 19^th and 21^st, 2012 probably didn’t seem too significant well over a thousand years ago. Someone had probably forgotten to carry the one.

Steve carried on with his morning normally, until a meteor vaporized his Insta-Meal machine. It probably was a poor investment anyways, as all he ever ate was cereal, and who needs a matter-compiler for that when you can pour it out of a box?

While he grabbed the box of cheerios, his mind wandered on the topic of the matter-compiler. Only a few years ago there hadn’t been such conveniences, but since the time travelers had arrived, society had progressed leaps and bounds. Planes, personal computers, cell phones… all these things had quickly become obsolete after that fateful week in early 2007.

Steve flicked on the plasma TV – an antique – and began munching on his cereal. He flipped through channel after channel of somber faces, fields of fire and frantic masses of people, every once in a while mixed with static. He finally settled on the weather channel; 110 degrees in Los Angeles, 112 in San Diego, 20% chance of rain, and so on. It always had that nice, serene music playing in the background.

He thought back to the time travelers, and noticed a discrepancy. A glaring one. They had arrived in 2007 and the world was ending now, in 2012. How could they have made such incredible leaps in science and technology in only five years?

This troubling problem stirred Steve out of his weather-channel trance. He got up, stretched, and began clothing himself for work. Wait, why go to work? It was his day off, after all! Well, there wasn’t much else to do, he thought, and it’d be a waste to spend the end of the world glued to the TV. If they had nothing for him to do at work, he could always go for a nice walk around the city. He carried on his routine. Black pants. Starched white shirt. Navy blue socks and shiny black shoes. Blue… no, red striped tie. Finally, his worn black jacket, and Steve was stepping out the door.

As he walked down the hall to the gravity beam (man, the classic names like elevator had been so much better!), he figured out the time traveler problem. They must have traveled back many times! Every time the world was about to end, they’d get all the technology they could and send it back to 2007. The world must have ended several times for them to accumulate the level of technological development the world had now.

Steve exited the building onto the street and began his walk to work. He had never trusted those teleporters, and it was a tad inconvenient today anyways what with the meteor storm destroying the teleporters near his building and trapping their travelers in deconstructed particle form in null-space. He walked with a bounce in his step as he was happy for having discovered and solved the Mystery of the Implausible Time Travelers. He loved finding and thinking about inconsistencies; he’d had a field day watching Equilibrium back in the early 2000’s.

Steve worked as a secretary at the box factory four blocks from his apartment. It was a tough job, especially nowadays with the development of anti-matter storage space in the imaginary dimension. It was hard to compete with the infinite space such creations offered, and boxes and other empty-space-utilizing-objects just couldn’t keep up. It didn’t help that his boss was a Taoist at heart who loved the concept that what made a box so useful were not its cardboard limits but rather the empty space inside, but that, without the cardboard, the space would be worthless. He’d had a mental breakdown when the imaginary space storage pockets had come out – no limits, all empty space, but it’s still useful! – and had since locked himself in his office, turning boxes inside out and back, trying to find the imaginary space that was missing.

A sudden explosion to his right brought Steve out of his thoughts and back into the real world. The street was in disarray; the blast to his right had been a car, and several people were running away screaming. There was a large group of Satanists to his left, standing around a painted pentagram on the ground. They were lighting candles and chanting, and the ceremony was only interrupted by meteors occasionally taking out some of the followers. Far of in the distance, Steve could see several winged figures picking people up from the ground and carrying them off. Angels, he guessed; after all, it was the Apocalypse. Through the red haze Steve could make out the outline of a giant scale resting on the top of a mountain, probably for the weighing of souls.

He rounded the corner onto the street of the factory, where there was even more going on. As he walked down the street, four guys on horses galloped past him. They all, except for one, looked like normal guys: a couple wore biker jackets and one had on an argyle sweater, and all three had gray beards and balding heads. One held a bow and wore a crown and another wielded a sword, but aside from that, they seemed like average, generic people. You know, the types of people that like to gallop horses down busy city streets in the middle of the end of the world. The fourth horseman was a bit different; he wore a black cloak that covered his face; in fact, the only visible parts of his body were his white, bony hands. Or, perhaps they were just bones. That would make sense, Steve thought. Death. He was Death.

After the four horsemen had passed, Steve noticed several people frantically running back and forth to his left. Behind them stood the machine he’d seen so many times on television; it was the time machine! The time travelers were loading everything they could into the machine and getting ready to jump back in time.

As Steve continued down the street, an onslaught of angels arrived to carry people away to have their souls weighed. People ran in all directions in valiant-yet-hopeless attempts to escape, occasionally being knocked down in their tracks by meteors.

Steve began to whistle The Entertainer.

A man ran straight towards him, tripped, and was picked up by an angel while screaming at the top of his lungs. A woman, across the street, pulled out a handgun and aimed for a nearby angel, but was knocked down by another angel before she could do anything.

Steve smiled. He just realized that, by seeing the time travelers leaving, his theory had been confirmed.

Suddenly, an explosion knocked Steve to the floor. After a few moments, he stood up, bewildered, and shook himself off. He looked up ahead… the box factory had blown up! His boss stumbled out onto the street, dazed and a little beat up, wearing his white boxers, blue socks, a dark five-o’clock shadow and a box around his neck. He was promptly picked up by an angel.

At this point there probably wasn’t much for Steve to do at work, so he decided to stroll around town for a little while. While he was thinking about where to go, a body hit the ground next to him and laid there for a few moments before the angel who had dropped it swooped down and picked it up again. Steve figured out his destination of choice – the public gardens – and headed off.

During his stroll through the bloody haze and angel attacks, a booming voice was suddenly emitted from the clouds. “Welcome to the Apocalypse,” it said, in the soft, feminine voice of an automated answering machine. “We are currently in the process of weighing all of your souls. If you have chosen a life of kindness and goodness, and have repented for your sins, you will be directed to Heaven. If you have chosen a live of anger, hated and evil, and you refuse to apologize, you will be led into the care of Satan. To speak to a customer service representative, please contact your nearest angelic servant.”

Steve didn’t really have any questions, so he simply continued on his walk, awaiting judgment. Wait, he really was going to be judged. That hadn’t really occurred to him before. He wasn’t sure why; it seemed to make sense…

Oh, that’s why! He had thought this was an Aztec Apocalypse; after all, the Aztecs had foreseen it. And he really had no idea if people were “judged” in Aztec belief. But, as it turned out, it was a Christian end-of-the-world; that explained all the angels and the four horsemen and this whole judgment thing.

Steve walked through the front gates of the public gardens just as another explosion to the west let out a huge stream of jet black smoke. A few people with torn, bloody clothing ran out through the gates, two holding rifles. They were immediately picked up by a squadron of angels, and Steve heard a few gunshots go off amid their screams of terror. His clothing was still intact; he tightened his tie and brushed some ash off of his shoulder.

How could the Aztecs have been so far off? They were spot on with their math; only a couple days off. Yet their religious beliefs were miles off target. Perhaps their theologians weren’t as talented as their mathematicians and scientists. Or maybe the religious leaders knew the true belief and hid it from everyone for their own selfish reasons. But then they’d go to hell for purposely not helping others. Damn, the whole matter was far too inconsistent. And Steve loved it.

The gardens were beautiful in the deep red afternoon light. Steve grabbed a hot dog from an abandon vendor stand and began a calm stroll around the park. Winter was usually not the best time for horticulture, but there were several in seasons plants to look at and the warm temperature was perfect. Steve stopped to gaze at a couple of slowly burning trees, and started ripples in the pond by poking the belly-up fish with a stick. He stood a few yards behind a painter, furiously painting wilting flowers growing through charred grass, and watched for a short while until the painter was picked up by an angel.

Once he’d finished his leisurely walk around the gardens, Steve decided to head home. He could catch a few TV shows, cook himself some pasta and await the end of time while listening to some Kenny G.

On his way home, Steve caught some people looting the Radio Shack, ironically sealing their fate a few moments before being carried away by angels. He also stopped and watched as a man, dressed as an angel and wearing a jet pack, tried to talk his way out of being taken by a real angel. Once it became clear that he wasn’t fooling anyone, he tried to fly away but was promptly crushed by four-foot meteor and was soon after taken away to be judged.

From outside his apartment building, Steve saw a spaceship plunging, out of control, right overhead. As it zoomed by him, he read the ships name off its hull – Mars Spacelines – right before it took out three blocks down the street. Steve sighed and walked in the door of the building.

He ascended the stairs slowly – the gravity beam had disintegrated – and walked down his hall. The rooms nearby his were all abandoned; several doors were open and Steve could see inside each one to the frantic clutter left over from people trying to quickly escape. Steve turned to his own door, unlocked it, and stepped inside. He put a pot of water in the Quick-Kelvin machine and the dumped some noodles in to cook. Finally, he kicked off his shoes and settled into his favorite chair to watch some TV.

After a good few minutes of the weather channel – 90 degrees and dark red clouds in Chicago, 92 and, what a surprise, raining in Seattle – he switched over to FOX news. And there was Jesus, with his white robe, brown beard, halo and everything, talking to Bill O’Reilly. The audience was cheering, but Bill cut them off. “Ok, ok, so down to the meat of the issue here. What is going to happen to the liberals that inhabit our fine nation?”

“Actually, Bill, you’d be surprised,” Jesus responded, “a good percentage of them are going to heaven, it seems. Let’s check the tally.” A blue and red screen appeared with white text and at least three animated American flags. Liberals and conservatives were about even in the rankings: liberals had 54.2% going to heaven, and conservatives had 53.8%.

“Ok, granted, I know plenty of good liberals. Some of them are fine, patriotic people. In fact, I have several good friends that are liberals. But what about the bad ones? What about the Clintons, John Kerry, Howard Dean, the liberal administration at Brown University, et cetera?” The timer on the pasta started ringing and Steve jumped up to get it quickly so he wouldn’t miss anything.

“Well, I really shouldn’t disclose the fates of particular individuals, but I will say that the Clintons are actually very nice people, and that Brown has a fine faculty and quite a few very intelligent and capable students.” Jesus paused to take a sip of water, which miraculously turned to wine right before it touched his lips. “I am willing to say, though, that you, Mr. O’Reilly, are not a good person. Your fate is sealed.”

At that moment, a legion of angels stormed in from offstage and grabbed Bill, the television crew and the audience members. Steve saw only a few moments of the scene before the cameraman was taken and the screen cut to static.

“So did you like that performance? I’m particularly fond of the ‘your fate is sealed’ line.”

Steve jumped at the sound of a voice behind him, and spilled a little pasta sauce on his nice white shirt. “Dammit,” he said, as he turned to see Jesus standing in the doorway.

“Oh shit, oh, um, no, um… I’m really sorry for swearing in your presence, sir!”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. So did you like the show? You’re the only one that got to see it, so obviously your opinion is important,” Jesus replied.

“I thought it was good… nice delivery on that last line… but wait, why am I the only one who saw it?”

“Because you’re the last person alive on Earth. Everyone else was frantic and scared and got themselves caught. You stayed calm and were not worried, and thus you went under the radar of all of the angels. But, of course, we have ways of finding everyone left, and we found you, the last person, sitting at home, watching TV and eating pasta.”

Steve fell back into his chair, a little stunned but getting back into his normal groove. “Does that me you can see what I’m doing all the time?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Even…”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Oh boy. This is awkward.”

“Don’t worry about it; it’s the same for everyone else,” Jesus replied. “Anyways, I’m here, making a personal appearance at your apartment – quite a privilege for you, let me tell you, this doesn’t happen to everyone – to tell you your fate. As I’m sure you know, good, repentant people go to heaven. The humanitarians, the pacifists, the guy down the hall who’ll always lend you his stuff; basically, the kind and caring people from around the world. And, of course, the evil, unrepentant people go to hell. People like Hitler, Stalin, Walt Disney, and Bill Gates. Lawyers too, and those authors who fill page after page with one-word dialogue and meaningless jabber.”

“Like ‘um’?” asked Steve.

“Yeah, and ‘oh’.”

“And ‘yes’.”

“‘No’ too.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Mhm.”

“Jeez.”

“Dude.”

“Hey.”

“Hi.”

“Yo.”

“Wow.”

“Whoa.”

“Ok, that’s enough of that,” said Jesus. “As you are the last person on Earth, we at Christianity Ltd. decided that you get to choose your fate. Here, let me get out the form.”

Jesus ruffled through his pockets for a moment and produced a slightly wrinkled piece of paper. He began to read aloud.

“‘Dear George Crake Hackworth’… wait, why do you go by Steve? Why not George orr Crake or Mr. Hackworth?”

“It’s a long story. Let me just say that I had a really awkward English class my senior year of high school. Anyways, continue?”

“Yes, of course:

‘Dear George Crake Hackworth,

As the last man on Earth (Last Man Standing, formally), you have the option to choose your own fate. You may go to Heaven if you so please, or to Hell. In fact, you may do whatever you wish; your choice is not limited to Heaven or Hell. Please notify us of your decision as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

The Christianity Ltd. Staff’.”

Steve sat for a few moments, pondering his options. He then looked up with a small, simple smile on his face. “You know, I don’t really need a change. I’d be happy to stay here for the rest of eternity. I mean, it’d be nice if you guys could fix my Insta-Meal machine and maybe get rid of the red sky and all the meteors, fires, blood and stuff.”

“Um… really?” Jesus replied. “You’re sure that’s what you want?”

“Yeah, that sounds nice to me.”

“Alright then. You know, if you ever change your mind, just give us a call, 1-800-4-C-H-R-I-S-T. Seriously. If you ever reconsider. Even in, like, five minutes. It’s cool, ok?”

“Sure. Thanks a lot, Jesus. It’s been nice to talk to you. I’ll give you a call if I have any questions.”

“That’s cool,” Jesus replied, “See you later!”

Steve and Jesus then performed one of those hip hand shakes involving “pounding” each other’s fists, and Jesus walked out the door. Steve picked up his pasta again and flipped the TV back to the weather channel. The red glow outside faded to whitish-yellow just as the smooth jazz background music kicked in on the TV.

50 degrees and cloudy in San Francisco, 45 in Sacramento, with a 35% chance of rain…