Nigh

By Alan Miller

We’re not getting any older...

An extraordinary event at the genetic level changes everything - the world didn’t see it coming. It takes time for people to adjust to waking up to smoother skin and better health. Vices and addictions can now be taken up with abandon as cells repair themselves on the slow but inexorable path to youth and infancy.

A global spring clean begins, a purge to free the planet of parasites. In the first week of what came to be christened ‘God’s Boomerang’, confusion and fear gripped the world. Over decades, countries and societies radically change and through the experiences of a reporter, a doctor, two couples and an ancient Iowan farmer, we hurtle through this maelstrom of upheaval, shepherding humankind to its ultimate destiny... A very human apocalypse...

A new end is beginning...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alan Miller
• Release date: Jun 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310704987

Alan Miller

Alan Miller has been writing professionally for the film and television industry for three decades. He spent many years writing, directing and editing documentaries and features. His principal passion is writing. Obsessive about cinema, he writes articles and reviews for cineoutsider.com for the sheer love of it. He lives in the UK, reads more than is good for him and is known to be irrationally terrified of selected vegetables and utterly in awe of evolution. NIGH is his first novel.

Book preview

PLANET EARTH 2116 AD

Well into the twenty second century, animal life on planet Earth is all but over.

In fewer than twenty years all animals will have disappeared from the planet leaving the Earth very much alive with its less complex life forms. The Elysium Fields will grow again unencumbered by the actions and inactions of governments, commercial agencies or any of the other resource depleting activities foisted on the Earth by the human race. Environmentalists may have seen this as a positive development. Without humankind to exploit and deform, the world would be able to start anew. Others had believed, with breathtaking arrogance, that the ‘end of the world’ scenario simply meant the end of human existence.

Neither ignorant politicians nor nuclear warmongers had eradicated this fragile planet’s fauna. The rapacious human being was, for once, blameless. The cause of this mass and undeniably selective purge was neither the result of a specialised virus unearthed by the unwary, nor any extra-terrestrial invasion. The agent of transformation was more terrestrial than anyone had first imagined. Earth was being divested of its tenants by the very thing that initiated them and drove them forward thousands of millions of years ago.

When amino acids formed Earth’s first protein in the murky soup where life was born, they may have believed that they were on to a good thing. The metaphorical God was in His metaphorical Heaven and in the beginning was the word.

The word was ‘life’. And it was spelt with three letters.

What humankind came to christen as DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, the building blocks of all living things, had almost entirely spiraled back into nothingness. No one could have known why. Could it have been disappointed in its transport mechanisms, the rich variations thrown up by humankind and animal life? Simpler life forms had escaped the ravages of the phenomenon. It was as if the Earth was being made ready for another cast of creatures, all able to appreciate and value the Eden that once was and, in time, may exist again.

Could DNA have simply taken a wrong turn? Was humankind a mistaken creation that had turned on the very gene that gave it life and held terrible sway over the atoms that created it? The discovery of the gene in the mid-twentieth century changed entrenched theories of evolution. Animal behaviour was seen through the slender tube of genetic logic. Was it so far fetched to believe that DNA had other microscopically hidden agendas? Could AIDS have been its first line of defence? Humankind was on the verge of finding a definitive answer to that most feared of viruses. Perhaps the phenomenon’s timing was not entirely capricious.

The chain of life had simply changed direction from a prompting beyond any one person’s capacity to understand. The flummoxed human race could monitor it, witness it and endlessly discuss it but no one could ever truly understand it. It was as if DNA had acknowledged a genetic cul-de-sac. At a certain time almost one hundred years ago, a genetic switch was thrown leaving humankind, and indeed, all complex life, hurtling towards infancy and extinction. And during this maelstrom of change, self-pollinated flowers blossomed and the trees grew and looked down with disinterest.

That the flora escaped genetic retribution was thought by some to be the key to unlocking the deeper mystery of the phenomenon. It soon became clear that any life physically wedded to the Earth was immune to the reversal. Like a wet dog shaking off water droplets, the planet was ridding itself of hangers on, leeches, users, consumers. Life forms without such a green immunity were at the mercy of primal DNA that had suddenly been activated by what many believed to be an act of God.

When it began on the 6th September 2016, the Earth’s populace was naturally confused and disoriented. Humankind took months to understand its effects and many years to accept them. It was given a name, attributing the phenomenon to a figure that could safely be blamed but never persecuted. It was christened ‘God’s Boomerang’ and in the year 2116, the metaphorical angled piece of wood was twenty years from ending its momentous return flight.

Months after the 6th September 2016, Earth’s largest concentration of scientific minds had announced what its future effects were likely to be. None could propose even a workable theory as to its origins. Few made the attempt to reverse the now irrevocably reversed. Religious minded people saw it as divine retribution, a purge of humankind. Although fleeing the floods in a giant wooden ship made more allegorical sense written down and re-told centuries later, the effects of the Boomerang were no less consequential. The prevailing wisdom saw the Boomerang as a hyper-virulent, global virus invading every living animal. This was a far easier conjecture to live with. If it were proved to be anything other than a parasitic microorganism, humankind would have to accept that there was nothing, scientifically, they could do to retard the process. There was nothing they could do except grow younger but they had to believe they could do something. It was enough that that something was simply nurturing the deluded belief that they could make any difference.

The flora prospered and the fauna joined humankind towards adolescence and nothingness; the animals were less culpable than human beings in the grand scheme of Earth management but if DNA had chosen to spring clean, it was doing so with ruthless and all-consuming efficiency.

Before the phenomenon had finished with the planet, it had to pass by the last human being alive. The organic clock continued to tick anti-clockwise. What would be the last member of the human race had nineteen more years before extinction, and he was, quite predictably, writing his autobiography.

PART I

FUTURE’S END

1 - IN THE END WAS THE WORD 2116

Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Ezekiel Stoat had been a farmer in Iowa. To look at, Ezekiel wasn’t an extraordinary man except perhaps for having a mole in the shape of Alaska at the base of his spine. Endless legs, thick as stunted saplings, tolled in his voluminous dungarees. He wore no shirt and his leather-like, tanned skin seemed at odds with the head that sat on bronzed, muscular shoulders. It was as if all the separate components of Ezekiel’s face had been nudged diagonally. One eye sat lower than the other, while his bulbous nose, curiously healthy looking despite a history of severe alcohol abuse, often looked as if it were steadily invading the flesh usually reserved for his upper lip. In the maw that was Ezekiel’s mouth should have been a patchwork textbook of the last two hundred years of American dental history; his teeth were perfect. Physically, Ezekiel appeared to be an odd looking eighteen-year-old with parts of his body defiantly resilient against the forces that were propelling him into adolescence and infancy.

Bony hands wrapped around an old whisky bottle as he poured himself four fingers. He gulped down two as if he were immune to its detrimental effects. In this particular case, he was. Getting drunk was now free from any side effects, long term or otherwise. Humankind had paid an exacting price for that one small respite.

He stared intently through old lens-less bifocals even though he didn’t need their services anymore. Habits over two hundred years old were hard to break. He had had to take the glass out as his eyesight was now as good as it had been when he was first physically nineteen long ago, in the year Queen Victoria died.

Ezekiel was unmoved by the accomplishment of living through some of the more famous human historical events. This was less to do with him living in Iowa and more to do with the fact he was Ezekiel Stoat. Haven was not a place where even the spare parts of history were manufactured. The most exciting event in Haven’s three hundred years of existence was that John Wilkes Booth once ate a cake in Haven’s tea room. It was a testament to the desire for fame that even his visit was celebrated and commemorated by a plaque even though Booth went on to assassinate his own president. Some even doubted it was Booth. He was only fifteen at the time but he had signed the visitors’ book.

Ezekiel’s lanky frame was now engaged in sifting through a small mountain of printout. He sat on an old wooden stool looking like an indiscriminately dressed wire coat hanger had been bent around a cork. He hummed quietly to himself, occasionally brushing a few stray locks of hair from his face. If someone cared to do so, they could have counted each strand in just under thirty minutes. His domed head bobbed up and down on a long neck that seemed to suggest that this was how Ezekiel provoked thought. It didn’t seem to be working. Ignorance was inbred into Ezekiel at an early age but having lived two lifetimes, there was only so much ignorance a man could realistically retain.

Looking back up at a huge, filthy computer screen, Ezekiel manoeuvred his ancient mouse over a mouse pad that was considerably less smooth than the forty-eight inch square of table that it covered. Touch screens were for the young, an irony surprisingly not lost on Ezekiel. Accumulated dirt around his workspace was ignored as he found himself finally coming to terms with the modern age. Much to his surprise, Ezekiel had taken to the computer even though he would never have been able, or inclined, to configure software to obtain access to what was recently re-christened the Legacynet. He had found his computer equipment in the home of a man who had long since reverted to the very atoms that gave him life. Ezekiel had been very careful to unplug everything, making a rough diagram of which lead went in to which socket. He was amazed to find that everything worked when he got it home. He had seen the man (physically now a child) many years ago click on just one screen icon and then had watched fascinated as a screen with a simple space invited a search request. Ezekiel only had to type a word in that space and then images and information lined itself up on the screen for his perusal. Despite there being few people still alive, the computers were still powered up and millions of servers all over the world were humming and blinking for the benefit of one man - Ezekiel Stoat, soon to be late of the planet Earth.

Giving a silent prayer to whichever ex-employee of the phone company had left his line open (Ezekiel had not needed to pay a bill for over sixty years), he turned to his papers and ringed a word with a many-refilled red marker. It said ‘Eden’. If he was going to write about humankind’s demise, he wanted the document to be suitably biblical in nature, prophetic even, despite there being no future to prophecise - at least none involving the human race.

The oldest man took another swig from his glass that was near an ancient telephone. He watched a screen of twenty items, out of a possible two hundred and seventy million results, line up in front of him. He craned forward and enjoyed the little rush he always experienced when his archaic web browser delivered something to his dim, thunderbug-infested screen. He contentedly double clicked his way through this gargantuan library of free information.

Eden… believed to be in ancient Mesopotamia, he read softly to himself. Was that anywhere near Iowa? He continued to scroll down the list on the screen cross checking with the paperwork on his desk.

Ezekiel was, on record, the oldest human on Earth. On that fateful September of 2016, Ezekiel was just a few months short of his one hundred and eighteenth birthday. On his Iowa farm, relatives had been planning to have a huge party. One of Ezekiel’s friends was approaching triple figures. Archie Mott’s reaching one hundred was less of a feat than Ezekiel’s impending one hundred and eighteen but all the same, one hundred was neater to celebrate.

Having been born a few years after the invention of the electric light meant that all Ezekiel could do to join in was try not to urinate every time someone shook his hand. Inside the wizened frame was an enthusiastic and active mind but not, sadly, a very intelligent one. His body had long since given up any form of animation (except those unbidden and usually acutely embarrassing). He was wheeled around by an underpaid nurse like a decaying mobile trophy and children would tell tall stories of old man Stoat in their one wheelchair town of Haven.

Ezekiel was just thankful that he was treated with some reverence despite having done nothing except grow old to warrant it. God knew he had tried to die when all of his friends had done. He had been a chain smoker and drank bourbon as if his liver was protected from the inside by a glaze of alcohol repellent duck down. His sexual exploits were legendary in his hometown for being so short in number. Ezekiel ‘ain’t doin’ with all that nonsense’ after falling in love ‘sumthin’ fierce’ with a childhood sweetheart at the age of sixteen. Unlike so-called normal folk, he never grew out of that imprint of teenage infatuation. He pronounced that Carolyn was female perfection and never wavered in that belief despite the fact that Carolyn openly despised Ezekiel calling him, not kindly, a ‘gangling loon’. That ‘gangling loon’ worshipped Carolyn to the degree of erecting a small personal shrine to her beauty and soul after both attributes had been ripped apart in a surreal accident involving a speeding sports car, an idiotic boyfriend and an intractable combine harvester.

All those years ago, the man was physically rotten but a spark of life still raged on inside him. The thread by which his life was hanging was not measurable by any human tool. Just before the thread had to break, the physical laws of the world changed around him and Ezekiel came to understand that he had almost one hundred and eighteen years of life left in him. If he could have comprehended that he would not only have been the oldest man alive, but also one of the happiest. At the time he was too busy trying to aim his drool away from his crotch. He still had some dignity but it only extended as far as to wish that people would not think of him as being terminally incontinent.

From September 2016, Ezekiel Stoat, and the rest of all animal life on Earth, started to get younger at the same rate. DNA was recalling all models. In the year 2116, its job on the human race was eighteen years from completion.

And there it was again.

A horribly familiar sound pierced the air. Ezekiel sat bolt upright in his chair.

Aw, no. he whispered to himself. Archie.

This particular sound never failed to cut an icy slash through his stomach, the location of Ezekiel’s emotional barometer. He had vowed when it began to occur at a more frequent rate that he could do no more to help those unfortunates after years of attempting to be a saviour of sorts. Ezekiel was a kind man but one driven to manifest insensitivity by the character of Mother Nature’s new order. The sound became insistent as Ezekiel found the page he was looking for. With one long outstretched arm, he took a final gulp from his glass and located his ancient, jerry-rigged smartphone’s house Hi-Fi app. Speakers hummed into life. The incongruous sound of a man mourning his lost love filled the room and more importantly it drowned out the sound Ezekiel could no longer bear to hear.

Ezekiel stared at the page of text next to the keyboard. It was an account of his last year on Earth and all the horrors and unexpected joys that he had experienced. It didn’t help his thought processes that he was experiencing one of the former right at this very moment.

Archie, I figured you’d be back, he whispered to himself.

He turned towards the computer screen that glowed softly in the dimly lit farmhouse. Ezekiel quit his web browser and opened the latest draft of his magnum opus. He had learned quite a number of new skills in his two hundred and seventeen years but typing was still a skill performed with very basic digital dexterity. As he typed, his hands gave the impression of two large birds pecking for seeds.

Ezekiel was determined to leave some sort of record for who knew whom to find. Someone had to chart the decline of all life on the planet and even though Ezekiel was as literary as a rusted pitchfork, he was going to give it a try. His great work would be a personal one but tinged with poignancy as befits the work of the last man alive on Earth.

The song came to an end and Ezekiel stood up. There was silence - just for a moment. He walked over to the window and against his better judgement opened the shutters. What he saw was ghastly beyond any degree of barbarism but it was now horribly natural and Ezekiel could do nothing to change what was happening all over the world. He could just discern a small figure crawling towards the only refuge it knew; Ezekiel’s farmhouse.

Aw, Archie. I can’t help ya. Go on home. Ezekiel whispered to himself.

The figure’s tiny knees and forearms were scraped and raw from the dusty road. Its piercing yell accompanied its piteous effort to move forward. Ezekiel had seen this before and in the past he had been moved to action. This only served to make him feel worse when the inevitable natural forces took a life. A small part of Ezekiel’s resolve went with it. Baby Archie was in the final stages and fully and awfully aware of his own pathetic predicament.

As Ezekiel sat, teetering on the verge of a fit of ungovernable weeping, the sound started up again, a mournful, sad little sound that easily perforated the silence. He typed furiously making several mistakes but the manic clicking of the keys was a far better noise to hear than what was drifting in from outside.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

2 - A LONDON HOSPITAL - A CENTURY EARLIER - 2016

I don’t believe in love, he had said to her.

It was an unwelcome thought that pricked at her memory. Michael had gone on to justify the rather callous remark with an intellectual rationalisation, but the effect on Gillian was immediate and as soothing as sharing a sleeping bag with a sunburnt scorpion. Over the past four years, sharing Michael’s professional and personal triumphs and failures, the recent sorry-grateful joys of co-habitation and the despised medical emergencies, Gillian had the devastating feeling in the pit of her stomach that this was indeed ‘it’. Standing in a deserted, light green hospital corridor, anxious beyond coherence, Gillian tried sitting down. Nothing on her reassuringly expensive smartphone could derail the one thought that sat in her mind like a bloated spider; ‘Tonight, my lover will die.’ At least alone in this emergency situation, she wasn’t forced to wear her social mask, the one that Michael had often noticed when her shields snapped up just before an argument over something as trivial as pastry that needed a forklift to make it rise. She let her feelings well up, whilst trying to stifle the more urgently vocal and dramatic ones. Alone in the corridor, she sounded like she was trying to regurgitate something unpleasant, a tangible shard of poison that had been coerced from its warm slumber in Gillian’s belly. She tried to focus her mind but her emotions were too strong. For an instant, she hated, despised, loathed Michael for making her feel like this, so helpless and impotent.

I don’t believe in love, he had said. He was quite serious.

She ran Michael’s rationalisation over in her mind, anything to make her feel more human and less like an android programmed with over active guilt and grief software. She wanted to analyse the incident, to get inside the memory that was adding pain to considerable anxiety. Someone had taught her to face the black mire of her experience, accept it and get inside it. By doing this, she was told, she would ‘disappear’ the particular ailment. Gillian could never bring herself to wholly trust anyone who turned a verb inside out to nurture a mid-Atlantic credibility. But she had to admit, the technique worked for headaches. Knotting her eyebrows, she saw the template of the incident in her mind. Slowly she took up an imaginary and, she hoped, objective brush and palette and began painting the past.

It had been late 2015. They had been seeing each other for four years and a few months earlier they had just taken the logical step of sharing a house. For Michael it had been psychologically terrifying. He had stalled, but had been understandingly persuaded into the move by Gillian. Her pragmatism had eventually won Michael over. They both had well paid jobs but, like the majority of London’s multicultural population, they were also both in the freelance market, living from contract to contract with as much job security as a two-timing, sexually deviant minister of the crown a month before a general election. Two incomes, if shared, could make for a very comfortable lifestyle, even in the avenues of Crouch End. London was merciless to poverty. Michael had to yield to the logic of the situation but it took him several months to feel comfortable. Gillian sensed that Michael was living around her. It was quite sweet, the many different ways in which he could subvert his own personality to make Gillian feel more at ease. In this respect, Gillian was similar to her partner. The result of this usually ended in what they coined ‘the escalating cob-on’, the inevitable storming row that grew from two people being inordinately nice to each other. Apart from the weekly heated disagreements, the co-habitation was working. They could both feel it. It was when Michael returned from France a few years ago after his accident that their lives irrevocably shifted.

Gillian suppressed a sob. That was not the purpose of her reminiscence. She shook her head as if the motion would throw the thought of Michael’s accident out of a mind already cluttered with overwhelming sorrow. She forced herself to get back on that sofa with Michael, to re-enact his rationalisation.

Gillian Boden was a media producer. Her tiny independent company currently existed from the profit of a single light entertainment project on an obscure digital channel. It had been a hand me down from an ex-colleague at the BBC. Having worked in that illustrious organisation for eleven years, she had won the respect of her peers ‘going indie prod’ but also she had garnered umbrage from the same colleagues, a vicarious, vampiric resentment that leaks out towards someone actually doing what others don’t have to the courage to do. Gillian often wondered if she’d rather had been one of those disgruntled staff members at the start of her company’s business. Professionally she was feeling a little more confident. The series she had produced had been moderately successful. It had even scooped a European award, good for her ego but hardly a Dom Pérignon moment. She had been commissioned to produce the second series, enough work for her to begin her worrying in four months, rather than the usual four minutes.

A year older than Gillian, Michael Cables had nothing to do with the media. His occupation was a little more esoteric. He restored ancient buildings, or more accurately, he restored the artistry inherent in the architecture itself. He found himself mostly working on churches, forty feet up on a wooden balcony with a magnifying glass sheet and specialist tools. It wasn’t a profession that made gutter journalists hug their notepads with anticipation but Michael travelled. The world loved its past and Michael was its sentinel, its guardian of all that was for the appreciation of all who came after. It was an infrequent but well-paid job that Michael did exceptionally well. He took great professional pride in the fact that he’d never been asked back to the same site. He inspired a series of glowing references made from the mosaics of the past speaking out over the centuries. Like any artist, Michael felt compelled to leave his signature. This was usually in the form of an anachronistic knick-knack cunningly interwoven with the art he was commissioned to salvage; a coin; one of Gillian’s ear-rings and even on one occasion, a tiny Mickey Mouse pencil eraser. This was by no means Michael’s flippancy at work. Michael’s feel for the past was not encouraged by days spent poring over library books. He was an active historian, a sort of mild-mannered Indiana Jones, with tweezers and glue instead of a bullwhip and a revolver. Michael’s signatures were his subtle messages to the artists he encountered on his travels, his own ‘Kilroy was here’ destined to be seen by no one except perhaps someone in his own profession three hundred years after he had become a mouldy spoke in the organic life cycle.

He was leaving metaphorical ‘post-it’ stickers via the past into the future. It made Michael feel as if he had accomplished something and that he was able to prove it. His dream was to work on the ‘ceiling’ as he called it. His near-namesake, Michelangelo (curiously one of the few historical figures known by his Christian name rather than his surname Buonarroti), was the one artist Michael admired above all others. Michelangelo had lived in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, a time ripe with artistic expression. And in those days, thought Michael, people actually demanded art. His hero was obsessed with the artistic representation of the human form but it was ‘the ceiling’ that took his breath away. Michael often thought that with over six thousand square feet of it, there must be some restoration work to be done. Michael had visited the Sistine Chapel eight times. Each time he struck up a relationship with the person currently employed in maintaining its integrity and beauty. When he visited it as a professional, he was able to leave a business card. Michael’s life was waiting for a call from Rome. In the meantime he enjoyed his work, hoping that he would get a shot at the title. It looked as if he was being denied that chance.

Gillian held her head in her hands and mouthed a silent prayer to anyone who was more in control of her fate than she was. She could live without Michael, just very, very badly.

It had been a cold November evening, the branches of the gnarled oak planted many years ago tapped up against their window. At first the couple thought they might have to prune the incorrigible twig, a nightly interruption prompted by the slightest breeze. Michael had very strict rules about extraneous sounds in his living room. Like most thirty-six year old mid-income males, his toy collection was a large one. It consisted of Hi-Fi equipment stacked so high, one expected a certificate of approval from Peter Gabriel to be hanging next to one of the many shelves. CD space had long given way to a series of genre-divided iPods tinkered to maintain the highest CD quality. Michael had an ear attuned to sound enough to know the difference between an AIFF and an MPEG. A large plasma TV replaced what was the hearth of the living room, surrounded by speakers that you could comfortably get buried in. Despite Michael’s genuine passion for antiquity, he loved his modern toys. There were tell–tale signs of his profession in and around their detached house but to a casual observer, the living room was the battleground between chintz, wow and flutter.

They had been wrapped around each other watching a film on television. She remembered the film - ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ - simply because it affected her slightly less than Michael’s remark. The conversation was instigated by a supine Gillian, deliciously mellow after sharing a rather expensive bottle of Chablis. She turned to face her partner, watching him screw up his nose in distaste as Mia Farrow ate a steak that was not so much rarely cooked, but hardly cooked at all.

I love you very much.

Michael kept his eyes on the Devil’s pregnant mother, and then he snapped to attention, difficult after Chablis and being entwined with Gillian.

I don’t believe in love, he said. He wrestled Gillian off him and sat up. Gillian was shaken.

What?

No, I mean it.

What exactly do you mean?

Well I say ‘I love you’ and I mean it, but I don’t believe in love.

That doesn’t make any sense.

Michael sat up and took her hand. He was an imposing figure in a debate and from very early on he learned that he had intimidated Gillian in their many arguments. Holding on to her hand was his compromise. He didn’t feel like holding her hand. To him, an attractive satanic mood had been rent in two by the axe of maudlin sentimentality. He wore a slightly frustrated smile that said many things to Gillian, so sensitive was she to his looks and moods. As Mia Farrow’s physical condition deteriorated in front of them, Michael launched into what Gillian recalled as either the ‘Cables Rhetoric’ or in the more heated discussions, the ‘Cables Polemic’.

Hang on, hang on. Gillian’s face imperceptibly hardened. To Michael it was as obvious as the Daily Enquirer’s interest in a Royal divorce. No, please don’t get stroppy. Hang on. He kissed her. It helped only to convince him that this explanation better be a good one.

Look, all I meant is that I don’t believe in love, in the sense of ‘belief’. I think love is bloody terrific! he said a little too enthusiastically making Gillian’s ‘maudlin sentimentality’ seem like an execution order from Attila the Hun’s older brother. Michael began protesting too much. It’s probably the only thing on this planet that keeps us going, but I think if you believe in something, that something becomes your own warped fabrication of the ‘truth’ and it ceases to be what it should be, uh, which is… which is what it is!

‘What was this nonsense?’ thought Gillian.

She tossed a coin in her mind: Heads rhetoric, tales polemic. The coin landed on its edge. Result? Peace keeping speech. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Like a little girl pointedly ignoring bad news, she said;

Don’t care, love you.

Yes okay. You do know I love you too, okay? Can we watch the film now please?

Gillian held out her arms and her relieved and reprieved partner joined her back on the sofa. It was a scary film, but it wasn’t the Devil that made her dream that night.

The hospital walls almost throbbed with stolen emotion. How many had sat where Gillian was sitting now, pouring out one feeling after another, her only visible target a light green section of concrete that needed some serious aesthetic attention?

Then out it came and she could no more stop it than cut off her own arm.

3 - THE ACCIDENT

The horror of the accident turned two healthy lives into one death sentence and one case of serious neurosis. There was something, ‘human’, Gillian thought, about a physical accident; a car or lorry crashing into you. There was a reality in that event that was recognisable, even acceptable. But there was no humanity or fairness in what had happened to Michael, simply weary indifference. He was a victim of a virus that swept through his body destroying any natural immunity he enjoyed from the constant bombardment of infections and diseases that human beings safely navigate through every waking moment. This virus was an act of a psychotic god. Michael wasn’t sexually prolific, gay or an intravenous drug user. In the not too distant and casually horrifying past, the media had presented all three as human chaff to be cut away with the never-mentioned sub-text of ‘It serves them right’. But Michael was particularly susceptible to HIV having been brought low by other annoying but survivable medical disorders in his past. Michael had quite innocently provided the virus transport as if he had innocently stopped to pick up some deranged hitchhiker whose sole purpose in life was promoting death. Michael never knew how he contracted the disease. Being a regular blood donor a few years ago, he was free from the virus and then three months later he was infected. Despite the best medical science could provide he quickly deteriorated. Gillian believed that she was being ravaged by unfairness, molested by the cruelty of it all. Some thing had invaded her lover, some thing too small to see, an enemy it was impossible to fight.

Over the last six months, the symptoms of the virus had been impossible to conceal. Unlike Mia Farrow’s physical deterioration, Michael’s had been frighteningly swift. Friends fearful of infection had stayed away from what was once the Royal Box at an active social arena. Michael, through no fault of his own, had been awarded pariah status and Gillian had suffered by default.

His body became shrunken and emaciated and a few hours ago he had barely enough energy to punch in Gillian’s office number. When she had arrived, he whispered into Gillian’s ear, I think this is it. She held his hand in the ambulance feeling every irregularity of the road surface. As the shock absorbers dealt with the lion’s share of the road’s inadequacies, the bumps and lurches they couldn’t fend off caused Michael pain evident in his strained features. Gillian lurched in sympathy as if in spasm. Her entire life was connected to this wraith whose hand she was holding, a gesture of support. She was now simply a companion on the journey to hospital that may well have been a ferry ride on the river Styx.

Gillian stood up in the corridor of the hospital. She could bear it no longer. She’d been waiting for over an hour. It was nearly midnight on this Tuesday night. More work tomorrow, God, no. The after closing time night fighters had been stitched up and sent home. All that remained was not hope for a cure; it was that their parting be bearable. She steeled herself against the wall, clenched her fists and repeated her personal mantra to herself.

Follow the yellow brick road, she repeated over and over.

Then the door of the emergency ward opened.

She wanted to scream, she wanted to prove to whatever was destroying her partner that there was life in her and she would not be defeated. Every one of her thoughts seemed to push Michael further and further away until there was no one left in her mind except her own lonely self. She turned to face the middle-aged surgeon.

Dr. Pamela Gregory held out two hands to steady Gillian.

‘No’, she thought.

Not long now, I’m sorry. Dr. Gregory said.

Can I go in? Gillian managed without gasps of breath interrupting her words.

Yes. But I don’t think he’s going to be able to talk to you.

That’s all right, she smiled a sad smile. I’m used to that.

4 - BOOMERANG - 11.32 PM SEPTEMBER 6TH, 2016

Imagine a second - a unit of time.

Imagine a ball being thrown in to the air.

Imagine the fraction of a second it takes for that ball to stop in mid-air before falling back to Earth.

The switch was about to be thrown.

The Boomerang was about to begin.

As Michael’s life signs grew weaker and weaker, the Boomerang snapped on. It happened in a fraction of a second that was resolutely impossible to calculate with the most sophisticated technical equipment. That fraction of a second - one quadrillionth - was the precise time of Michael’s death.

It wasn’t a ball that was thrown into the air before returning to its previous point in time and space. It was the very building blocks of animal life everywhere. DNA - deoxyribonucleic acid - was on its way home after being let out to play for three and a half thousand million years. It had enjoyed itself immensely. It had found many varied and interesting shapes in which to transport itself around the Earth. It had even created new forms of life, supplanting even the imagination of its creator - whoever He, She or What it may have been. DNA had been proud and amused at the duck billed platypus, overjoyed at the mammoth and a little taken aback at Homo erectus. Unleashing the forebears of the human race on the planet was not so much a mistake as it was a calculated risk. As the first recognisable human’s spine straightened, it was if DNA itself thought Hmm. We may need some insurance against that…

If DNA were human, it would be pacing around feverishly trying to work out why people hadn’t returned to the trees. It would be astonished, and amused in equal measures. DNA knew that the orgasm was the only natural joy for the human being. Instead most humans had conditioned, and thereby perverted, that rather natural ideal into, firstly, being varyingly dependent on something called love - a wholly human concept. DNA could not begin to fathom why they had done that. The attainment of an orgasm seemed to be linked inextricably to one’s power over others, another human conundrum that DNA would have been well advised not to cogitate on too profoundly. This facet of human behaviour was linked with the acquisition of money, a sort of social agreement on the subject of value, or worth, human and material. This was puzzling to DNA. All DNA wanted to do was to have orgasms and make more DNA (with an option to mutate and evolve). Outside of the orgasm, human life had no other meaning. Why were people behaving as if their lives were meaningful? DNA would be driven to alcohol by the absurdity of human existence, and eventually would suffer a fateful decline brought on by circular logic characterised by the conundrum that humans’ actions never quite resulted in any form of contentment.

What was love? What was power and wealth? What were these manufactured constructs compared to the power of creation? It was true that few humans had developed sophisticated genetic mapping techniques (by their impossibly primitive standards). The results of the Human Genome Project had started to yield some extraordinary advances. Mapping the genetic code contained in the estimated three billion base pairs of nucleotides that make up DNA meant that certain diseases could be screened out, switched off or fought by the introduction of healthy DNA in place of the mutated genes.

They were too late. God’s Boomerang was doing just that - and more. In that femtosecond, the Boomerang had achieved what human scientists were predicting would take most of the twenty first century to fully interpret.

If DNA were human, it would be a human wishing to be DNA - the real power, with ultimate mastery over all life on the planet.

DNA was a much more ingenious animal than its