"Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present."
The year is 2120. Day 36,500.
Twenty thousand miles up in the Earth’s lower geosynchronous orbit, Apocalypse Daddy is sitting on a sofa in the living room of the Apocalypse Space Station. The ambient air is silently disturbed as the door slides open. Alice walks into the room, flips the gravity off and Apocalypse Daddy, Alice and Luca – who has been crawling around unnoticed – float gracefully into the air. Alice and Luca laugh as they twist and turn and roll around the room.
“Alice,” Apocalypse Daddy says, swimming over to the gravity switch by the slide doors. “You had your one hundred and fourth birthday yesterday, aren’t you a bit old for this?”
“It wasn’t me,” says Alice, going into a full quadruple triple axel on her horizontal axis. “It was Luca.”
“It wasn’t me,” says Luca, who, now being one hundred and one, can talk fluently in six-eight tongues.
They found a cure for Covid-19 a long time ago. It took longer than some expected but by the Summer of 2023 a vaccine was finally available to all the inhabitants left on planet Earth. A mutation in the structure of the virus late in the Spring of 2020 was quickly followed by a third mutation later in the year. Government failures to hem in the pandemic, calm or inform the population or coordinate a united front against the spread pushed the human race to the edge of extinction.
The world struggled to adjust to complete lockdown. Virologists, immunologists, and epidemiologists battled with side-effects and the rapidly mutating genetic sequences of Sars- CoV-2 to try and find a cure. Conventional vaccine development was eventually dropped in the Summer of 2021 for a more controversial but, ultimately, effective method of fusing RNA with nano-technology and then using an outdated bio-hacking trick to re-code the DNA, merging it with existing viral drugs and unleashing it on the general populace without human trials. The vaccine worked. With two major side effects: It didn’t cure children and you stopped ageing.
The lockdown continued. For 100 years.
“Alice,” Apocalypse Daddy says. “Meet me in the kitchen with your brother so we can do the happiness diary. I have a call with your Mom.”
Alice runs over to the gravity button and turn off the gravity. Everyone floats into the air.
“Kitchen. Now. And turn on the gravity.”
Alice turns it on and Apocalypse Daddy falls to the ground with a thump.
Apocalypse Daddy says, “I should have got the hang of that by now,” mostly to himself.
A hologram of Apocalypse Mommy appears in the centre of the room, she is half-way between crow and flying crow pose.
“I’ll be back for lunch,” she says, as she continues doing her yoga class. “I’ll pick something up on the way. Only twenty eight days to go. See you later.” And then she vanishes.
Alice is grateful for anti-gravity, making Daddy fall from the sky and space cakes. Luca says he loved learning about the morphology of a once extinct species of wild horse, Star Wars reboots and also space cakes. Apocalypse Daddy says he is grateful they have found a cure for the ageing genes in the latest Covid-19 update and life can go back to normal and the kids can go back to school.
After a decade of lockdown the tide began to turn in favour of the human race. The shackles of fossil fuels, office work, an education system built and floundering on an industrial revolution mindset, war, military, political corruption, financial corruption, the cult of personality and corporate scandal began to fall away. Slowly at first, but then, over time, a landslide wiped away the thinking of the Old World. And a New World was born from the left over primordial energy.
Technology was the first to respond with a tsunami of advancements, wave after wave of updates so mesmerising in their scope and vision that, if it had been done at the same speed, the previous fifty years advancements would have been carried out in a week. Technology was not held back, global mega-corps joined forces. There was one device with one name and it was updated every second of the day with no down time, no changes to your display, no loss of data and no new charger was required. All trade shows and exhibitions were cancelled and business leaders were no longer heralded as gods. If you couldn’t go out, the technology made it unnecessary to go out. Virtual reality advanced to be indistinguishable from reality by the end of 2040. By 2045 it was indistinguishable from magic.
The baby-boom after the initial (and doomed) ending of lockdown caused the population of the Earth to spring up to 14-billion in a matter of nine months and one day. When the first round of vaccines put an end to human ageing, the population rose to nearly 30-billion by 2034. With the abolition of fossil fuels and the increased time for home research and development the human race was able to start work on the first low orbit orbitals as the global population reached 35-billion. The seventeen orbitals are now home to some 233-billion people. In twenty-eight days a new, updated vaccine will be released, erasing the need for lockdown, once and for all.
"Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."
Apocalypse Daddy, Luca and Alice are floating, their faces glued to the ceiling window. Before them stretches a huge metallic structure, curving upwards towards the man-made heavens. Down below is Earth, radiant in its blue and green casing. The orbital spins in the reverse direction to the Earth.
“Luca it’s your turn,” Apocalypse Daddy says. “Where are we above?”
Luca dribbles on the window. As there is no gravity it falls back onto his face. “I would say we are somewhere over Asia, perhaps China.”
“Daddy,” Alice says, “when is the next Frozen out?”
“Another one?” Apocalypse Daddy says. “I’ve only just come around to the idea of the first one. Your Grandad was right, I had to face my enemy. It took many years. Orbital, when is the next Frozen released?”
The voice of Elsa from Frozen comes from nowhere and everywhere at the same time.
“The latest instalment of Frozen will be released on the first of May, 2121. It will be the fifty-sixth sequel in the world’s longest running and most successful…”
“Please stop Orbital,” Apocalypse Daddy says.
“Orbital,” Alice says, “please play The National Anthem.”
The Orbital starts singing Let it Go from the first Frozen.
As Alice and Luca dance across the room, Apocalypse Daddy swims over to the door and turns off the gravity. The music stops and Alice and Luca fall to the floor.
“Daddy, “Alice says, “I wish this could last a little longer. I really enjoy homeschool.”
“Don’t you think thirty six thousand days is enough?”
Alice did a handstand, then did a triple somersault out.
“Has it been that long?” she said, bowing to an imaginary crowd. “It feels like only yesterday that this all started?”
“In a way,” Apocalypse Daddy says, “it was.”
And, as if indistinguishable from magic, Luca is sick.