The End is Nigh Read online

The End is Nigh

  Damian Foyle

  Copyright 2012 Damian Foyle

  Chapter 01

  I woke up to the phone blasting away like church bells inside my head. My body's clock was still stuck somewhere thousands of miles away in a dusty corner of the Middle East. My jet-lagged brain took several seconds to shift gears despite the blinding ringing.

  The trip was uneventful, and the flight back was long and noisy. Did the rest of the world fall asleep while the Middle Eastern countries finally got their shit together? What had happened to the wars and riot? Middle East didn't offer any excitement to journalists getting high on danger and unstability anymore. What promised to be a bloody riot against the integration of GlobalNET was only a handful of students sitting outside the Prime Minister's house and reading books. Reading books for heaven's sake!

  "Piss off!" I finally answered the phone.

  A mechanic, dull voice rang in my ear, delivering a keen message; the end is nigh, it said like a prophet with iron lungs. The end is nigh.

  I longed for one of those antique phones, so I could just smash it down in a rightful furry and take pleasure in hanging up. I reached up and unplugged the phone from my ear. I flicked it away like the boogey you couldn't really get rid of, but it far from satisfying.

  "Kitchen screen on." I navigated through my living room. I jumped over a bag of dirty laundries, I dodged the coffee table and I survived the assassination attempt of my pants prowling on the floor.

  Flashing images of man-made disasters and words of doom greeted me in the kitchen screen. A Buddhist purist burned a pile of interactive child toys. Children of Bitly Heaven were surrounded and beaten up in Taksim Square. The CEO of GlobalCorps got assassinated during a speech. And so on. It felt like a newsreel except the same message attached to each image.

  Damn those kids, I thought. These days it wasn’t hard for some teenager to get his clammy hands on an illegal piece of software and mess with some poor schmuck. I resented being that schmuck.

  The same cryptic message awaited me on the small screen of the kettle. It was just too much. You didn’t come between a man and his coffee this early in the day. The end is nigh, it kept flashing no matter how many buttons I pushed.

  "All right," I admitted to myself. "Perhaps, it’s not some clueless kid."

  I spent another 5 minutes, checking out each appliance inside the small apartment; basically staring at screens and tapping at them, hoping they would start working again.

  It was a habit left from my childhood when my father used to fix the TV with a slap to the side. He took a similar approach to parenting; a rather unsophisticated way to deal with things, but it mostly worked for TV’s and small kids. For grown man, not so much.

  As suddenly as it started, things went back to normal and the kitchen phone started ringing.

  "Busy. Call later," I said, not even checking the caller id.

  "Nonsense! I need my best journalist on this." My editor’s voice came from the other side.

  "You should call Marcy then."

  She didn’t even freeze, trying to make up a lie or a way to flatter me. She was as straight and as blunt as a piece of lumber.

  "Well, I can’t reach Marcy," she said. "That leaves you dressing up all nice and professional, and getting ready for the car."

  "Gene, it’s not really a good time. Some punk is messing with my home grid. I need to get this thing sorted out."

  "Mike," she said and sighed. "You can be dense sometimes. It’s not just your house. GlobalNet has been hacked. I managed to get you a meeting with Reverend Samuel, and then you’ll be flying to Rio."

  "Bullshit. GlobalNET is hack proof, Gene."

  "Then it means the ends times are really coming Mike. A perfect reason to visit our dear old Reverend, don't you think?" She hung up and left me staring at the silent kitchen.