Clockwise Millennium

No human being will GO - in the physical sense - ever again. The action of GOING will soon be obsolete - it will, in a nutshell, be the death of GO. And when humans stop altogether, moreover, when BONE stops growing - there will be no coroner alive able to give a full explanation. If a ghost happens to be around after the extinction of mankind - phone in hand, all it will be able to hear, of course, will be the dialling tone of non-existence.

It was backbreaking work being 8-billion skeletons. And no, a sabbatical was out of the question because BONE had already decided to retire. Animals and insects were going to be just fine, said BONE - there were a number of reasons why and those reasons were nobody's business!

But what if, by some wild feat of evolutionary compensation, the human brain sprouts eye stalks - a walnut-shaped mollusc roaming the metropolis covered in a latticework of tendrils and weeds? RIDICULOUS! What if BONE is really an alien and WE are the spacesuits. BONE, after all, wears our muscles, wears our height and weight - STOP IT! What if our brain - our mind - is really a case of mistaken identity? Perhaps bone marrow is really BONE'S brain and we are just some meaty projection - ENOUGH OF THIS NONSENSE! The clock is ticking . . . people and their theories! Anyway theories are a complete waste of time, said BONE, not theirs - because very soon they wouldn't have any - but just a waste of time's. Speculations, theories - whatever brother - are just abstract sounds in the coming eclipse of inevitability!

Some extremists suggested killing themselves, proclaiming the act of suicide was some kind of clever stalemate - but this fool-hardy attempt at a protest pre-empted BONE in to putting the 'unspecified time' forward. IDIOTS JINX THE REST OF US! slammed the newspapers. The global populus - spooked by the headlines - went berserk, trying to squeeze as much existential calamity in to their lives before the End of Days. BONE quickly intervened with some telepathic advice: I WOULDN'T SNAFU IF I WERE YOU! Sadly its good intentions fell on deaf ears.

As a riposte to the growing sense of nihility, people worldwide would just stop whatever they were doing and exclaim with both arms raised: I FEEL LIKE AN UNPERSON! Then later on they started referring to themselves as the collective 'post-I' as well. Even grave diggers went bonkers, unearthing femurs - and in their desperation for answers - used red felt-tip pens to draw hearts on the bones so they could attempt to resuscitate them.

Elsewhere, a fire engine surrounded an angry mob - hosing them in with a moat of quicksand. The protestors watched their little island of terra firma shrink in size around them. Passersby pointed at the advancing edge of gloop as it forced the anxious huddle into a tightly-packed conglomerate of human sardines. Finally the tarmac around their feet disappeared - so did their feet and legs - enveloping, last but not least, a cackle of drowning heads. In other areas, police with shields and batons were pelted with Molotov cocktails. BONE, on moral grounds, maintained its role as 'conscientious objector' - but victims caught in the crossfire of the riots were not so dismissive. In their opinion, BONE was the reason for all the strife. Anatomically speaking - it was - they said, guilty of 'passive cooperation.'  BONE remained aloof - sending all its detractors to Coventry.

Sitting on a high wall - overlooking the diorama of the city in the distance - two teenagers share a bong. She holds his hand and looks at his spiralling eyes. He, in the midst of telling her about the telekenisis of uncanned rhubarb above a manhole in a suitcase, watches the saucepan sky empty its fill of aurora borealis like a slow-motion splat of bubbling nougat over the heads of puffy clouds. Tiramisu - his girlfriend - squeezes the end of his nose and calls him a 'space cadet!' She laughs and shouts:"Hey, Lazuli, at least we're still young!" They high five and she asks him to tell her a story. Sorry, but we never see these two love birds ever again!

I am the narrator and even I am at a loss! Same predicament as my characters - I walk the tightrope of being an unperson. Maybe not all of me will die. Perhaps the cognitive octopus of the post-I will, with one of its transparent eight arms, try to grasp what is left - salvage what can be sown into the DNA of possible future generations to come. The experts - scientists - have always said there is about a billion years left before our sun finally says good night! Hopefully - scores of aeons after the Great Demise - a bolt of lightning will strike Earth's slime bogs of lipids and amino acids, activating cell division . . . and the reproductive fizz spawning Man's resurrection into flesh again?

Now is the time to drink . . . now is the time to dance footloose upon the earth - but not if you find yourself surrounded in quicksand! My collywobbles dumb-waiter themselves into the upper storeys of my cerebral panic. All this Sturm and Drang is turning all my fond memories into sushi! I feel like the lead boots of Captain Nemo's diving suit would help me counter the weird increasing feeling of gravity somehow becoming a lot more buoyant. I have to continue with this swansong exploring the notion of the unperson and post-I - because soon there will be no terrestrial consciouness left to reflect on its own mortality.

I am jealous of those two teenagers playing cellophane KerPlunk with boiled spaghetti straws and marbles made of blancmange - in the amusement arcade of their conjoined minds. Ironically the Michelin Man has a puncture - so just before he deflates, he speaks from his new-found position of fleeting wisdom: live life in the fast lane . . . fuck stopping at the red lights! Bibs has a few bats in his belfry pooing upside-down onto his brain!

In a cupped palm of aqua regia, a clockwork bead of liquid gold spins on its axis, dissolves and disappears in a miniature vortex of smoke. Sired ingots decant from the infernal womb of a dragon's belly furnace - and trespassing each glowing oblong hide, is the instantaneous sizzle of falling rain reduced to puffs of steam. Inside oven skulls, pairs of eyeballs - like goose eggs - fry! Pay the ferryman his shilling - but the world's greed takes the long way round; through quagmires and will-o'-the-wisps.