Squid Ink Incorporated

After three psychedelic years of college, I had little to show for my education save for £50K of debt and a modest collection of stolen street furniture. £50K being one hell of a debt mind you and to make matters worse I had absolutely no intention of working year in year out to pay it off. Having postponed an ‘honest days work’ for three years, I was committed to delaying it further or bypassing it all together, what I wanted was a get rich quick scheme, and I mean really rich.

I realise that this may make me sound a little lazy, perhaps, but trust me, that is the least of my crimes, for you see I crossed a line.

I formulated a two phase plan, I was lazy yes, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t ambitious. I had my first brainwave while watching the movie ‘Trading Places’ (for my money Eddie Murphy’s second best film after the ‘Golden Child’). Unlike Murphy I didn’t have an insider tip on the crop report, what I did have was access to a number of economically savvy students who were reliant on me for the supply of another type of crop. Said students were more than happy to give me a few tips in exchange for the remainder of my stash.

One £25K post-graduate loan and some keen investments later, made a killing on high-risk far-east investments, my temporary sobriety giving me the edge, I was a one woman bull market in a china shop.

After rectifying my sobriety, I trawled the internet for inspiration for phase two of my plan. It was the recent contact with extra-terrestrial life on Europa that caught my eye; the powers that be were looking to the private sector to provide an ambassador ship to Europa, large contracts abound.

As my degree was in Film Studies, my only knowledge of space rocket construction was from watching ‘The Explorers’ what I needed was a rocket scientist. Placing a personal ad in ‘Soldier of Fortune’ magazine I hooked up with an ageing ‘Aeronautic Specialist’, lovely bloke, German accent, like a sweet old uncle, or so I thought.

With my rocket scientist in place I needed labour; rockets don’t build themselves you know and I certainly wasn’t about to. Perhaps it was wrong of me to source labour from the third world, at the time I thought it had been altruistic of me, fair trade and all that. In hindsight, the ex-army General that had originally contacted me via a spam email hadn’t been the best person to assemble the work force.

I swear that I wasn’t aware of the enforced child labour that went on during the rocket construction, and if I had had the time to visit the worksite, those deaths could have been prevented. Sadly, I was too busy sourcing the plutonium for the rocket engines, what with all those trips to the Middle East there just wasn’t the time.

For a while things were good, champagne, cocaine, hot young film stars and wealthy politicians clamouring for my attention. I had my picture on the front of The Economist, The New Scientist and even my local paper: ‘Romford Girl Mercer to Greet Europans’. I was hailed as an entrepreneur, adventurer and an ambassador for the human race. It was a lot to live up to and, to be honest; it wasn’t a surprise I messed it up.

As it turns out I’m not the most indulgent of people, not too bad a thing under normal circumstances, however, when greeting an extra-terrestrial race, especially one whose etiquette is based upon displays of aggression, macho posturing if you like; my impetuous nature was perhaps less than appropriate. You could argue in hindsight there was no need to mount guns on my space ship, but they looked so cool.

Upon my approach to Europa, I had been met by some rather threatening looking Europan interceptor ships, I now understand that it was just for show, it’s not like I simply ordered ‘Open Fire!’ without thinking it through. I did try to be diplomatic; I fired some warning shots first, unfortunately the problem with untested weaponry is that you don’t know what it’s capable of until you use it.

Perhaps it was then I crossed the line proper, or perhaps it was on my return journey.

I had been trying to think of a foolproof excuse as to how I had come to accidentally bring an entire race to near extinction. Thinking on my feet, I tried to make it look like there had been an attempted Europan attack on Earth. I hit somewhere, which I thought would have minimum impact on Earth, and then let off a few explosions in the sky, as if I had vanquished the invading alien hordes. I would then return home a hero and no-one would know any different. Admittedly it hadn’t been fair to pick Australia as a target, ok so I don’t like the accent, but I had only aimed to take out a bit of desert, like I say the capacity of those guns was quite surprising.

Of course if it hadn’t of been for that old Nazi bastard, my rocket scientist, going on TV to grass me up, no-one would have known. That sod just wanted to exonerate himself with his talk of how the damage radius of the blast was incontestably caused by my laser cannon. It was also around that time that the whole enforced child labour thing came out; you just can’t get the staff.

So now I am floating in the somewhat re-arranged orbit of the Earth, my plutonium cells depleted, that’s ok, I’m not in any hurry to get back to Earth. Well, not since the International (now Interplanetary) Court of Justice had put a warrant out for my arrest, crimes against humanity and extra-terrestrial life they say.

It’s not really until now that I have had time to think about it, that I realised that I had crossed a line, the thin line between ordinary girl and perpetrator of genocide. I had had it all, and now I was disgraced, hunted, and still not a penny of my student loan paid back.

X flicks a disposable lighter in front of his eyes obscuring the starlight with a bright orange flame. The echo of ignition leaves a visual echo of light across his retinas.

‘Stars’

Flick

‘No stars’

‘Stars’

Flick

‘No stars’

X’s girl D joins him in the garden she wears heavy plastic clogs and drags her feet in a way that her mother would have hated. D watches X repeat his star blanking ritual several times before interrupting, ‘got a light?’ she asks, planting a cigarette between her thin lips.

X lights her cigarette, then pulls a cigarette from behind his ear like a cut-price conjurer palming a coin, ‘ta-da!’

‘Your full of tricks tonight’ D mumbles from behind her cigarette.

‘It’s a magical night’ smiles X, he traces a figure of eight in the air with his finger, ‘behold’, a small spaceship appears on the palm of his hand. The ship is bright yellow with white go-faster stripes, the ships jets glow with a warm red light, illuminating his handsome face.

‘Cool ship, where’s it going?’ asks D.

‘The Cephalic region’ X asserts, pulling the car back as if primed to launch from an invisible catapult.

‘What’s Cephalic?’ D asks.

‘It means on or near the head!’ exclaims X launching the ship toward D’s head.

‘Hey!’ squeals D, the little ship bounces off of her head and ricochets off into the night sky.

‘That wasn’t very nice’ she said rubbing the side of her head, ‘no nookie for you tonight’.

On board the DSS Cephalic Rover warning sirens blare and red lights flash, plumes of smoke fill the bridge.

‘Damage report’ Captain Tomaso coughs into the comms mic.

‘Lost port engines in the collision sir, we can’t maintain containment stability’ Petro the ship’s engineer yells back through crackles of radio static.

‘Initiate emergency landing procedures’ the Captain cries, sweat pouring down his face. All Captains undertake emergency scenarios in training, but on such a cushy routine flyer, he had never expected to put his training into practice.

‘Emergency landing procedures!!’ Petro barked his orders across the engine room, ‘all crew to positions’.

‘All crew to positions’ the Captain re-affirmed, the crew stopped running chaotically around the bridge and braced for an emergency landing.

Duck tentatively slid his hand across the frost-stiffened grass toward the small of Karen’s back. This had been the first time they had been alone together, and where better than to be smoking dope on Perry hill. The hill he had always thought of as his special place away from the world.

Karen breathed a contented sigh, expelling a vast cloud of hash smoke into the cold air, this is the moment Duck thought, it’s now or never.

‘Captain, it’s Petro, the landing gear is blown, it’s going to be an uncontrolled land…’ Petro’s last words were snatched away by the roar of the ships engines exploding. The comm cut to a deathly silence.

‘Petro… Petro?’ The Captain strapped himself in, he had to be brave for his crew and for himself. The last seconds of your life are no time for cowardice. Taking a deep breath, he activated the comm. ‘Ladies and Gentleman, our engines and landing gear have failed, we are going to crash, may I say it’s been a pleasure serving with all of you… may the Gods help us’.

The explosion that had begun in the engine room shot up through the engineering ducts of the DSS Cephalic, engulfing the ship in a brilliant white fireball.

‘Karen…’ Duck edged closer to her, the alcohol and dope had fuelled him with an inflated sense of bravado and optimism. The voice of his consciousness had lost all sense of polite inhibition and now screamed at him ‘DO IT NOW, NOW MAN, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!’

Duck drew his arm back in preparation, poised to swoop around Karen’s shoulders in a grandiose romantic gesture. He would draw her to him in one swift and passionate movement, they would look into each other’s eyes, smile at each other and then…

‘Fuckin’ hell! Duck look at that!’ Karen shot to her feet excitedly pointing at a bright white light trailing across the night sky.

The light shot across the inky blackness and disappeared beyond the horizon of Perry hill.

‘Duck a shooting star, did you see? You have to make a wish Duck’. Karen waved her spliff maniacally in the air, showering the pair of them in glowing orange hot rocks.

Duck had already made his wish, but it hadn’t come true. It was in that moment that he knew their relationship would forever be platonic.

‘Buck up Duck!’ Karen laughed, thumping him on the arm, she passed him the joint and grinned, in the way only Karen could.

Perhaps, thought Duck, nursing the bruise forming on his arm, that’s a good thing.

‘Smoke some more fags’ my colleague urges me, ‘the ash makes it burn slower’.

My colleague and I are smoking z grade crack from a pipe fashioned out of a plastic coke bottle and a foil kit kat wrapper.

We are holed up in a cheap hotel in the crappy end of Kings Cross. Our crack smoking is interspersed with cheap booze, plus copious amounts of fags, joints and the occasional blackout.

It hasn’t always been this way, only a few years ago my colleague and I were in the peak of physical and mental fitness. We were corporate astronauts on a sponsored mission to Phobos. Hailed as the last true pioneers, explorers into the furthest reaches of space, heroes. That was until that whole thing.

As I start to remember the events that led us here I quickly down half a can of syrupy lager. Sensing my pain, my colleague hastily skins up.

Down on the street below the sound of the mob grows louder, jeers, the roar of flame, policemen shouting through megaphones, trying in vain to control the murderous masses.

‘Turn the TV up again’ suggests my colleague; shuffling over to the portable, I spin the volume knob as high as it will go.

The repeat of the comedy panel show we had been watching is interrupted by a news flash, we see our photos on the screen, shots of the mob outside.

The newscaster recaps the history of our mission, the launch attended by thousands of cheering people, our sponsors eagerly telling viewers that we are the pride of the nation. As the newscaster goes on to retell of our misfortune on Phobos, his face drops into a scowl.

‘Turn this shit over’ mutters my colleague, ‘and pass us the stuff’.

My colleague loads the pipe while outside the noise grows louder. I hear windows breaking downstairs, the police had lost the battle, or just given up, the mob were now entering the building.

‘Fuck it mate anyone can make a mistake right?’ says my colleague exhaling a lungful of smoke. ‘Here, try not to think about that whole thing’.

I smoke in rapid bursts, coughing hard, a deep bark that makes my eyes water. Regardless I smoke more, we had been abusing ourselves like this for about two months now, ever since we returned. A desperate bid to try to quell the nausea we had felt since the breakout, the breakout that we had inadvertently caused.

I toke deeply, holding the smoke in my lungs for as long as I can. Perhaps when the mob get here the narcotics might deaden the pain of a thousand angry Londoners beating the living crap out of us.

If only we hadn’t if only we had gone East instead of West, not found that box, not brought it back with us, not caused the…

‘Don’t, don’t think about it Ad, we couldn’t have known, it’s just one of things… shit happens mate’. My colleague snaps me out of the sickening spiral of thoughts that have looped endlessly around my head ever since we opened the box.

The voices grow louder now, I can hear footsteps thumping up the stairs, soon the room door will burst open, the mob will flood in. Any minute now the vengeance of many will descend upon us.

‘I think were out of fags Ad’.

Shit happens.

I have a confession to make; I collect science fiction novels.

My obsession began around five years ago when my friend demanded I read Philip K Dick’s ‘Time out of Joint’. From then on I was well and truly hooked, my conscious floating deep somewhere within the universes of Messer’s Banks, Harrison and Lem. A constantly changing SF Masterworks cover had appeared where my face once was.

Sci-fi itself was nothing new to me; my childhood memories are punctuated by ‘2000AD’, ‘Planet of the Apes’, ‘Logan’s Run’, and Disney’s ‘Black Hole’. But my lifelong fascination was polarized when, after moving house aged 10, I inherited a left behind copy of ‘Spacewreck’. A glossy hard cover of crashed space ship illustrations, each image suggesting a wealth of untold narrative, which is forever etched onto my imagination.

It is perhaps due to the hours spent endlessly thumbing through my copy of ‘Spacewreck’ that I have always enjoyed eagerly browsing the crates of sci-fi novels that sat outside the second hand bookshops in Charing Cross. Each book preceded by the sometimes surreal – sometimes cheesy images, which suggest a narrative often more engaging than that which lay beyond the cover.

The Amazon sponsored credit card bill that had resulted from my new fiction addiction, had now given me a legitimate excuse for taking home a handful of these dog-eared curios.

Like all good acquisitive hobbies, my sci-fi novel collection has mutated into a fairly un-healthy obsession. Now the second hand bookshop is a mandatory part of each and every excursion, shopping trip and even holiday.

I have developed a set of terminal collector’s symptoms, cold sweats, racing pulse and excessive salivation now occurs on contact with the second hand book emporium. I have even worked up a system for my crate rifling. First running through the author’s names to pick out any of the highly prized items – the endless back catalogues of Pohl and Harrison or anything by the Strugatsky Brothers (my current holy grail). Then picking books by age, publisher and finally randomly browsing the selection by grabbing a handful at a time and shuffling through them like a deck of cards.

Ideally there should be a fusion of both intriguing story and fantastic cover. But the ‘cover is king’ and quite often just a wild image and back cover synopsis to suit is enough for it to become part of my home dominating library.

Recently I was lucky enough to go for a holiday in Vancouver, where my
understanding girlfriend, (herself partial to the odd Harrison or Wyndham), allowed me to hijack a few days of our precious holiday in search of second hand bookshops.

Oh, and I found some. This is a shot of the sci-fi section of ‘pulp fiction books‘ in
Vancouver, just one of a number of the number of treasure troves I found while I was there.

You will have to excuse the shaky focus, that’s me quaking with excitement.

Cutting to the chase, here are some of the books I picked up both in Vancouver and in my more recent bank holiday trip to (the slightly less exotic) Kent Coast, which have got my heart pounding. These covers and tag lines also tie in quite neatly with some of my current sf writing obsessions…

‘Joymakers’ by James Gunn

Pleasure was the hedonists business. Hedonics Inc., started small. All you had to do was dial P-L-E-A-S-U-R-E. Then everybody wanted it.

‘Lathe of Heaven’ by Ursula Le Guin

George must dream and dream again, forever seeking utopia, until the fabric of the existence must itself collapse…

Skylark of Space by E.E. Doc Smith

With his cold intelligence and the backing of a giant industrial combine, DeQuense and three others – two of them women – were marooned, countless light years from Earth, with only one chance in a million of ever returning…

Fourth Mansions by R.A Rafferty

a weird over-view of reality, in a story of:

Seven very special people blending to create a higher form of humanity;

A laughing man living alone on a mountaintop, guarding the world;

The returnees, men who live again and again, century after century;

A dog – ape plappergeist who can be seen only from the corner of an eye.

My scifi flash ‘a girl in every port’ has been published on 365tommorrows – http://tiny.cc/kewse I have also entered this as my #Fridayflash if you want to comment please do here.

The kids are playing with their ray guns again, running around the house in noisy circles. This weeks noises are a series of short, sharp ‘pi-hews’, replacing last weeks ‘doo- doo-doos’.

‘What are you shooting at?’

‘Invaders Dad, they’re called the Gak’ is the answer I’m given, complete with an unspoken ‘obviously!’

Reluctantly I think to myself, Tam was right, she said we shouldn’t have given the kids guns. Well, at least it’s better than the lightsabers, I had visions of them prizing each others eyes out with those things.

I can’t help thinking though, Max looks a little subdued, ‘What’s up doc?’

‘We’re loosing’, he said somewhat downcast, ‘we tried to rally them on the stairs, but they got the better of us, we lost the ground we made earlier this week. Another few stairs and they’ll be in the hall’.

‘It’ll be alright tiger, how about an ambush? You could hide in the cupboard under the stairs, pop out and shoot them through the bannisters’.

Max considered this, then briefed his sister, their faces stoic, serious beyond their years. ‘That’s it!’ exclaimed Polly, ‘We could slaughter them!’ She takes after her Mother that way.

That night when I (finally) got back from work, the kids looked exhausted, they were stroppy with us and bickering with each other, all the usual signs of being over-tired.

I put them to bed early in an effort to sustain peace. As I tuck them in, Max asks me, in deadly earnest, ‘Dad, is it wrong to kill? even if those you kill, well, even if they’re bad?’

‘It’s always wrong to kill Max, even if the people are bad’ (In the moral spotlight now, gotta perform). ‘Even if people do bad things, you shouldn’t kill them, you should be forgiving, understanding’.

‘What if they wanted to hurt a lot of people though? What if they wanted to enslave everyone, us, you and Mum, if we had a chance to kill them all, wipe them out, shouldn’t we do it?’

Sometimes the kids scare me with their sincerity, where did they get a word like ‘enslave’ from?

‘You should always try to understand other people’s point of view, even if it doesn’t seem right’ (There, that’s good Fatherly advice, isn’t it?).

‘Hmm, ok Dad’.

With that I was off the hook and off to the fridge for a well earned beer or two, as I walked downstairs I could hear the two of them mumbling to each other.

That morning, Max and Polly were waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, ‘Are you sure Dad? About what you said last night?’ Polly asked.

‘Yes, of course, we should all be understanding, being understanding and forgiving is what makes the world a better place’. (Nice, there’s a philosophy we can all benefit from, wise words from the father figure, high five!).

Max looked at Polly, Polly at Max, ‘Ok Dad, if your sure’.

‘Sure I’m sure’.

I returned home from work that evening to find Max and Polly, my children, in chains at the foot of our stairs. They had been condemned to slavery, this I soon learned was the first decree of the Great Gak. Considering the genocide my daughter had planned for them, I guess it could have been worse.

Despite our rational protestations and our subsequent irrational escape attempts, Tam and I were clapped in irons at the wrong end of a long spear.

Some painful and gruelling weeks later, the two of us, exhausted beyond description, are chained to a work gang in Crystal Palace. Barbed Gak whips crack around our heads as we are forced to shunt vast pyramid building blocks across South London, forced to construct a pyramid in honour of the Great Gak. This was the second decree of the Great Gak, the leader of the invading alien forces that had arrived through a portal at the top of our stairs. The same invading alien forces who could have been scared off on their arrival by two fierce looking children with plastic ray guns.

As the chains bite into my skin, continually drawing blood and the weight of the huge stone block breaks my back, I think to myself… I really should keep my big mouth shut.

I finally have to admit it to myself, the job that started out as a stopgap has become my career by default. I can still remember my interview.

‘So Miss Mercer, where do you see yourself in five years time?’

Myoko my flatmate, as volatile as the volcano that was her namesake, demanded that I find employment or else lose my overpriced and undersized laminate floored bedsit. Reluctantly forcing myself out of months of dope inspired agoraphobia and daytime tv addiction, I squeezed on my court shoes, printed out my wildly exaggerated cv and hit the  agencies.

Settling for a position (well I say settling, I was hardly flooded with opportunity) with DeAth, DeAth & Quim Holdings, I was assigned a number of ‘administrative’ duties. That is to say, tea making, filing, scanning and the occasional brush with the executive washroom.

Some months into my job I had progressed to data entry, I was a mouse jockey, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v….

I would console myself with the mantra ‘Everybody’s got to make a living’, like the sample in that old eight-ball garage tune. But the slow and systematic mental abuse of sheer mundanity had begun to take hold. Where did I see myself in five years? Not still here that’s for sure.

Two years in, every day the same now, project upon project, deadline upon deadline, every one seemingly the same. The mad rush to submit on time and the hollow feeling you get in your gut when you realise that no-one will ever read that report you stayed late all week to finish.

By now I had surpassed the early days of employer suspicion, internet use monitoring and  wristwatch tapping after fag breaks. As vocationally unskilled as I was, I had tentatively carved myself a niche, a position of trust.

Three years in, I had responsibility, my own staff, workers, duped by their own belief that this was only a stopgap while they worked out ‘what they wanted to do when they grew up’, suckers!

It was during the fourth year of my internment, the long and repetitive days stretching eternally before me, that I had my epiphany.

In a moment of insufferable boredom and unrelenting fatigue I tore my right eye out with a staple remover. As the blood seeped between the qwerty letters on my keyboard, the intensity of my pain brought about a new clarity to my career development. I began to take an active interest in the company, attending board meetings, reading stock reports and studying investment performance. From my escalated position I set up some investments on my own initiative, insolvency buy outs, sponsored celebrity breast augmentations, arms dealing and the odd coups d’etat, the bloodier the better.

Five years in, I sit at the head of a boardroom table carved from virgin Amazonian timber, in a chair fashioned from whalebone and ivory. Human skull paperweights sit atop piles of unpaid vat and corporation tax bills. My staff have developed into a crack team of corporate cut-throats, ruled under my iron fist. No-one fucks with the bitch with the eye patch! Least of all the former Company owners DeAth, DeAth and Quim, who were given a buyout offer they simply couldn’t refuse.

Ask me again where I see myself in five years time, go on! I have a five year business plan in place now. Phase one, the the purchase of worthless deep space real estate. Phase two involves my private army of mercenaries, armed to the teeth and stationed at key strategic points throughout the world. A few governmental takeovers later and bam! The subsequent inter-continental wars that I have programmed will ensure that the worthless rock I own on Mars and Titan will become prime, radiation free habitat.

Give it another five years who knows?

Magpie’s hobby was rebuilding video arcade machines; that was one of the reasons we liked him so much. His apartment was always full of huge cabinets covered in cartoon space aliens and tactile buttons. We would stay well into the small hours, our fingers hammering away on some of Atari’s finest.

To fuel his obsession Magpie would scour jumble sales, skips and tips for the electronic parts, which he would cannibalise for the guts of his cabinets. We were with him when he found the machines. He was ferreting excitedly through a box of wires and circuit boards when he found two flat plastic discs covered in tiny rocker switches, dip switches as Magpie pointed out. They looked pretty cool, but as to their function, even Magpie was at a loss.

Magpie set about dissecting, testing and randomly flicking switches, trying to work out their purpose. Knowing them as we do now, I shudder to think at the untold amount of damage he might have done. We are still trying to remember if there were any strange or catastrophic stories in the news at that time, I guess with all that goes on in the world it would be hard to tell if Magpie had been the cause.

The day we finally discovered what the machines did, we were sitting under a tree in the park. Karen and I were randomly flicking switches when the tree we were sat under disappeared. Magpie spotted the missing tree, which had materialised in the middle of the tennis courts, it was then we knew we were onto something.

It took us a while to learn how to control the machines; we started by moving little things, trees and street furniture. We began to realise that when we moved things like lampposts and telephone boxes they continued to function. We weren’t simply moving objects; we were re-configuring the landscape around us.

Before long we had moved our house from the centre of London to a private beach in Cornwall. If we wanted to pop back to the city, we simply re-configured our home back to its original plot in the city.

After a while the three of us began to use the machines to play huge scale practical jokes, making trees appear in the middle of concrete shopping centres or arranging buildings in the shape of male genitals. Karen moved her work’s office deep under the Atlantic Ocean, she was sent home on one sunny morning, her place of work having mysteriously disappeared over night. Karen spent that whole day laughing maniacally. It occurred to me; perhaps this might be how super powered villains in comic books get started.

For balance I tried to use the machines for good, breaking up urban conurbations with extracts from dense forests, I called it my ‘urban re-forestation project’. Despite my good intentions, I couldn’t escape a constant nagging thought; nothing good can really come from having such unlimited power.

Soon we became more adept in the use of the machines, our activities stepping up to the next level. Magpie moved the Statue of Liberty to the centre of Baghdad, the last word in satire he told us proudly. Not to be outdone Karen and I began a complex campaign of re-arranging famous landmarks, Nelson’s Column to the middle of the Gobi desert, the leaning tower of pizza to the centre of Tokyo, Tokyo Tower to Paris and the Eiffel Tower to the centre of Trafalgar Square.

Perhaps the funniest thing about these little pranks was the way that everyone else had responded, or rather had not, its funny how people tend to skirt over things that they don’t understand. Our global planning was complained about much in the same way as people would grumble about a rain shower or a Monday morning.

It was around that time that I stopped sleeping, I would lie awake thinking about the machines; how did they work? What had they been made for and more importantly who had made them?

Karen was the first of us to find meet Dr. Laurence David McKenzie, a name we will never be able to forget. She had taken one of the machines to generate a mountain range to replace Deptford. As Karen was configuring the dip switches the Doctor had approached and introduced himself by name. He was calm at first, pointed to the machine he asked her to kindly return his property.

Karen managed to get away by setting the rockers to displace the ground under the Doctors feet. The Doctor had broken her nose and several ribs; I will never forget the way I felt, the mixture of fear and anger gnawing at my stomach.

Magpie was the next to meet the Doctor; it was only by watching the TV news days later that we found out he had been murdered. By then we were already on the move, before Magpie had died he sent us a warning written in the landscape. Magpie had created a series of high dunes on our usually flat beach. The dunes were clearly curved into a word, what we later found out was his last word. ‘RUN!’

We ran; we are still running, we know McKenzie must have taken Magpie’s machine as each time we change our location, move city to city, continent to continent, he alters it, bringing us closer to him.

my flash The Bone Street Kids has been published on microhorror.com frighteningly good *eerie theremin noises*

5) Stipend, Stipend & Reimburse Limited

The Managing Director of the self proclaimed ‘devil-may-care’ brokers Stipend, Stipend & Reimburse Limited prided themselves upon their knack of turning jaw dropping profits from ‘ethically challenged’ investments. Their portfolio comprised an array of Companies whose legitimate services were a thin veil for a wide range of nefarious activities, including organ trading, human trafficking, piracy, drug running and arms dealing.

Come that fateful day when the seas rose and the streets flowed with magma, the Directors of Stipend, Stipend & Reimburse Limited elected to protect their assets from the uninsurable calamity by calling in a few favours from their global interests.

As the London streets burned with the orange flames of riot and arson, the pirate ship ‘Our Feisty Emissions’ (salaried by one S, S & R Ltd) docked adjacent to Stipend, Stipend & Reimburse Limited’s Thameside offices. Dropping a series of gangplanks between the ship and the offices, the Directors loaded the ship’s hull with share certificates, bonds and IOUs.

With their assets aboard, the management team of Stipend, Stipend & Reimburse Limited quickly reached the open sea, destination ‘Fiscal Haven’, the private island owned by Managing Director Tony Cunningham MBA. Once safely anchored at ‘Fiscal Haven’, the management team would sit out the ‘storm’ and wait for interest to accrue. Sadly for the Directors of Stipend, Stipend & Reimburse Limited, ‘Our Feisty Emissions’ never reached Port.

Owing to a series of cruel and horrifying typhoons, the ships navigational equipment was destroyed and the rations were lost overboard. Faced with starvation, the pirate crew turned on the Directors, who despite desperate barging pleas, were roasted alive over a fire fuelled by share certificates, bonds and IOUs.

4) J. Recap & Sons

Jonas Recap began trading around a quarter of a century before the end of the world, established with money stolen from a terminally ill houseguest. Although the bad tempered, penny pinching and cruel Jonas enjoyed his reputation as the world’s least trustworthy businessman, it was his sons, Laurence, Robbie and James who were the real malevolent power behind the organisation. Their fierce tenacity and cutthroat capitalism was matched only by their sexual deviance.

Young Laurence Recap, a notorious peeping tom, would often be exposed drilling holes in the gentlemen’s toilet cubicles of ‘Jonas House’, their twenty-seven-storey office block. To evade the inevitable harassment suits, a number of ‘mysterious disappearances’ of the Company’s more attractive male employees was commonplace. This in turn would aid the satiation of older brother Robbie’s rampant necrophilia.

The potentially disruptive actions of the two younger Recap brothers meant that their older sibling, James, a devout abstinent, paying out of court settlements, shredding H.R. records and even disposing of bodies in the immaculately manicured office courtyard ‘Jonas Gardens’.

To keep James’ blackmail threats at bay the Brothers carried out James operational demands with tooth and claw, mercilessly shortcutting and sharp dealing in the name of the Family business.  Their trademark window dangling, kneecapping, poisoning and drowning became feared throughout the Square Mile.

It was when James discovered his Father’s sexual proclivity for the ‘younger generation’ that things began to go wrong at ‘Jonas House’. With James’ powerful grip on the business now complete across the board, the rest of the family joined forces against their blackmailer.

Without sexual impetuous and renowned for his physical resilience, neither slander nor pain could be used against him, James only Achilles heel was money. So it was that Jonas and younger Sons set about exploiting this weakness by making the worst business decisions conceivable. Gambling their fortune on ludicrous patents and marshland real estate they gleefully frittered the Company’s assets away. The plan of course was to make James beg for mercy, to surrender his hold over them before they financially destroyed him. However, so impressive was the threesome’s ability to make wildly destructive financial errors that within a matter of days, much to their surprise, the Company had completely succumbed to their reverse gluttony.

As a result of this abrupt liquidation, James leapt from his office on the twenty-seventh-floor of ‘Jonas House’, landing in a crumpled heap in ‘Jonas Gardens’ below. James’ suicide came only two months before the world ended, which the Father and brothers watched from the grubby windows of low rent brothels.

3) Fogbow Plc

Fogbow plc, under the leadership of CEO Jason Thoebald Cluttebuck II, were the cruellest of employers, chaining their unfortunate employees to their workstations and selling their souls to faceless fiscal deities. During his thirteen years as CEO Clutterbuck had learned to summon countless demons to provide him with insider tip-offs in return for the occasional sacrificial temp.

Under advice Clutterbuck invested heavily in the development of ‘dark’ technologies, the curse-o-matic™, the luck adaptor© and the blame gun®. Subscribing to the school of Voodoo economics Clutterbuck saturated the market, making Fogbow the last word in domestic fate enhancing appliances.

Like many of the great inventions of the twentieth century, the filter cigarette, Zyklon B, asbestos and the mobile phone, Clutterbuck’s infernal patents went on to significantly impair the well being of those unfortunate enough to be living contemporaneously to their use. The blame gun® in particular has been cited as one of the principal causes of the riots that spread throughout the Western World during the great cataclysm.

Unlike other businesses listed here, Fogbow plc didn’t see out the end of the world in receivership. In fact I hear tell that Clutterbuck died with a smile on his face, lighting his huge cigar on the flames that licked his boardroom table, while the rest of mankind was purged for his sins.

2) S.M.E.E Corp had made an art form of tax evasion, be it VAT, Corporation tax, Income tax or PAYE their Teflon accountants ensured that not a drop of profit was spilt into the revenue man’s cup.

The HMRC were of course all too painfully aware of the liberties taken by S.M.E.E corporation, for no dishonest trader was truly above the law. As a last gasp attempt to close their account before the sun’s dying light finally extinguished forever, the Customs and Revenue appointed their most formidable revenue inspector, Peter Quibble. Quibble’s one scrupulous eye was infamous for his ability to spy even the smallest chink in an accountant’s administrational armour.

Day in day out the inspector would tirelessly audit and monitor. In his vigour, Quibble would go through bins, casting aside used tea bags and spent printer cartridges in search of evidence. He would painstakingly sello-tape together shredded documents, scratch tipex from the surface of documents, all the while knowing that Managing Director, T. Billings would be happily double entering, claiming expenses, fiddling the books and opening Swiss bank accounts.

The day the world shifted on its axis S.M.E.E submitted their end of year accounts, declaring not a penny of corporation tax. This was the last straw for the beleaguered inspector. As meteors showered down from the sky he exercised full powers of inspection, making his own double entry into the T. Billings’s skull with a S.M.E.E branded glass paperweight.

1) Info Assurance Inc was by far the most sinister Company of the ‘Big Five’. Their office walls were lined in leather panels crafted from human skin, their desks carved from the timber of the last remaining tree in the Amazon rainforest. They scratched out the letters on their keyboards, their printers were filled with cursed ink and their file prefixes were rooted in evil numerology.

Info Assurance Inc dealt in Crisis Management, their servers allegedly crammed with the amassed knowledge of mankind, the military, scientific and political, all instantly downloadable in the event of a major emergency.

As the streets ran red with blood and the hopes of mankind began to die along with their finest engineers, scientists and mathematicians, all eyes turned to Info Assurance Inc and the information held within their vast hubs.

Sadly for the fate of mankind the data cupboard was bare. Info Assurance Inc had long ago exhausted their client’s money on hookers, firewater, lawsuits and esoterica, thereby failing to invest in any back-up provisions. As the Earth cracked and crumbled the remaining leaders of the world were shocked to find the emails they sent to Info Assurance Inc bounced back, their phone numbers to be unobtainable and their fax machine number not recognised.