This is a story about the end of the world.
This particular end of the world isn't a great one, as ends of the world go. It's not quite up to the standards of a 10th-Century Biblical Armageddon, or a 20th-Century Nuclear holocaust. We will not be snuffed by fire this time. This time, we are the fire.
It is the next thirty days preceding this particular end of the world that interest me, because my good friend Iggy announced today at Café Ocula that he is going to become a terrorist. He has thirty days to achieve this goal, more or less, so I suppose this will be an account of his efforts to that end. Naturally I wished him great success in achieving his dream, but seriously, what are the odds?
* * *
If this is to be a novel about Iggy, then I should say a few words about him to start.
Perverse. Paranoid. Impassioned. Antisocial. Diseased.
Iggy's closest personal relationship is with the carnivorous plant he keeps in his kitchen to eat the fruit flies. Ultima always yells at him to take out the garbage, or at least scrub the sticky brown spots off the counter so that he wouldn't have the problem with fruit flies, but I think Iggy secretly cultivates the flies to make the plant happy.
The plant is called a sundew, and it has these sticky hairs all over it, like a million chameleon tongues with scarlet tips. When the fruit flies get stuck, the leaves curl up around them like a lover, and Iggy beams proudly. The plant is named Lucy. Ultima suspects it is a reference to an old girlfriend, but nobody has ever just come out and asked him.
Iggy's full name is Ignatius Loyola, which is funny because there was a time, not too many years ago, when Iggy entered the seminary on his way to becoming a minister. That plan derailed when he fell in love with a beautiful woman named Yvette. He desperately wanted to marry her, but her family wouldn't consent unless he went over to Rome--which would turn him into a Catholic priest and prevent him from marrying at all. Poor Iggy had no choice but to renounce the Christian God as a sadistic bastard, and then slut his way through Zoroastrianism, Shinto, Scientology, Reform Marxism, and the Church of the Machine in search of true enlightenment, which he never did find.
Why Iggy's mother named him after the founder of the Jesuits is a mystery, because she was a Buddhist. Nobody really knows about his dad, who was killed in a jungle skirmish in the Yucatan three months before Iggy was born. Apparently his name was Alf, and he was once the Yukon log-rolling champion. Iggy inherited the trophy, which he uses as a stand for Lucy. It is a polished disc cut from the trunk of a spruce tree. If you count the rings, the tree lived for two hundred and seventeen years, which for some reason really impresses Iggy, even though it's not that old for a tree.
* * *
I had always figured that log-rolling was related to caber-tossing, until Iggy explained it to me one day. Two guys stand on a log that is floating in the water, and they try to toss each other off by spinning it under their feet.
"Can they kick each other?" I asked. "Or punch?"
"Dunno," said Iggy.
"That's a good sport," I decided anyway.
"They don't play it anymore," explained Iggy. "Because it's a frivolous use of a perfectly good log."
"Can't they use a synthetic log?" I asked, but Iggy didn't know the answer to that.
It was some time after that that I got the brainstorm of using a truck axle for a log. I was down at a scrap yard by the river, closing a deal on three quarters of a ton of polycarb that I had received in exchange for a hot tip on black market industrial lasers. While waiting for the scrap dealer to weigh the polycarb, I noticed a truck axle up on blocks. The tires were still on the wheels, and the axle still spun quite freely.
"Do you think you could use this for log-rolling?" I asked the dealer, whose name was Loo.
"What the hell is log-rolling?" replied Loo.
"I stand up on this tire," I explained. "And you stand up on that tire, and we both try to spin the axle under our feet and knock the other guy off."
"You're crackers, Doc," said Loo.
"It's a good sport," I explained.
Loo looked at both tires. "Can we chuck things at each other?"
"Sure," I said, even though I didn't know if that was in the rules.
But even with that incentive, Loo decided he didn't want to play. So I told Iggy about the truck axle, and we both went back to the scrap yard the next week and explained that we wanted to test out the axle for log-rolling. Loo said fine, so long as he could watch.
Iggy climbed up onto one tire while I held it steady, and then I climbed up on the other one while Loo held the axle steady.
"Can you spit at each other?" asked Loo, evidently glimpsing the myriad possibilities in his mind.
"No," we both said.
Loo let go of the wheel, and we both stood up there just looking at each other stupidly. The wheels weren't turning. Iggy jumped up and down on his tire, and then they started to turn slowly. We trotted along the revolving tires, and they slowly built up speed. The tires spun faster and faster, and it was only then, balanced a metre and a half above a wrecking yard strewn with scrap metal and broken glass that I realized what a spectacularly dangerous sport this really was. I was in a full-out run on top of my tire when Iggy's arms started waving and his hips started gyrating, and he started to scream "Shit!" when both of his legs shot straight out behind him, and he belly-flopped right down on top of his tire. The momentum of the spinning axle was so strong that the tire just picked him up and shot him straight out into the wrecking yard, where he hit the side of an old van.
I couldn't look because I was trying to maintain my balance as the tires spun down slow enough for me to hop off. When I eventually got to Iggy, he was conscious, but he had blood on his head and a broken thumb.
"So," said Loo. "Do you think you'll take the axle?"
"It's got too much inertia," I said.
"Eh?"
"Hard to change directions," I explained, spinning my finger one way and then the other.
"Oh," said Loo. "Sure, I can see that. You say this is a sport?"
Some months later we learned that he was running a small gambling ring based on log-rolling with car and truck axles. He had several different axles set up in a little arena, with different inertial qualities and several diameters of wheels. Spitting was allowed, and throwing things, and hitting with poles and ropes and stuff. The reigning champion got a big belt, and prize money, plus there were live netcasts, and audiences were attracted to the novelty and violence of the whole affair.
* * *
Iggy and I walked home that day after trying out the axle. I felt bad that Alf's log-rolling genes evidently hadn't been passed down to Iggy, but I couldn't think of any way to make it up to him.
"This whole thing reminds me," said Iggy as we walked past an abandoned shopping plaza, its windows all papered or boarded up. "This whole thing reminds me of that guy in Heathrow."
"What guy?" I asked.
"You remember, that guy in Terminal 6 of London Heathrow. He snuck out of his country using false documents, and then ripped them up and flushed them all on the plane. But now they won't let him through airport customs without a passport and he has no money or documents to get back out, so he has been stuck for eight years in the arrivals area at the airport, and has to beg for food from the snack bar and for people to let him use their cash cards so he can go to the pay toilet."
"Oh, that guy," I said.
"The world is seriously fucked up," said Iggy.
"How does this whole thing remind you of that guy?" I asked.
"I dunno," he said, his brain evidently not quite recovered. We walked along for a while, beneath crackling power lines, and past a tent camp set up by vagrants in an empty industrial yard. "Somebody should do something about it," he finally said.
We went back to my place where I treated him for mild concussion and set his broken thumb with a good splint.
"Thanks, Doc," he said, and then went to sleep for three days in my bed.
* * *
This is probably a good place to point out that I'm not a medical doctor. My friends call me Doc because I went to graduate school to study anthropology, and pre-industrial technologies in particular. My intention was to become an academic, a Doctor of Philosophy, but that plan was interrupted by my untimely death.
I had travelled into the high Arctic to study native craftsmanship among the Inuit who still hunted in their traditional lands. When I got there, they all had turbocharged snowmobiles with satellite navigation, drone fishing boats with automatic fish finders, and even networked uplinks to the other clans to share information on where the few remaining catches were to be found. The hunting weapon of choice was a Kalashnikov caseless semi-auto rifle with infrared smartsight. Even the traditional Inuit crafts sold to tourists on North Pole jaunts were mass-produced in Malaysia.
I decided to come home, but the bush pilot who had flown me there had been given a job in Madagascar in the meantime, so I was stuck. I tried using the clan's computers to call for another flight out, but nobody else would come without the cash paid up front, and I couldn't requisition that much cash from the University without signing for it in person. To make a long story short, I spent the winter on Baffin Island and when I didn't return on schedule, the University declared me dead and terminated my study program.
You can usually correct clerical errors like that if you catch them in time, but after a whole winter, record of my death had spread from database to database until there wasn't a computer system around that would acknowledge my existence. Re-establishing my life proved terribly difficult, because the computers all cross-checked with each other, and quickly restored my deceased status after I thought I had proved otherwise. It was like putting out a raging house fire using only a damp dishrag. Eventually I gave up.
So I never did finish my Ph.D., but my friends call me Doc anyway. My real name is Odie Gogo, but since my death I have been persona non grata and forced to make a living as a karma broker with Sexy, my lovely phone-bot. I still study out-moded technologies in my spare time, since it will all come in handy when civilization finally comes apart at the seams and there is a 500-year interruption in services. Ultima thinks that I am planning to be King in the post-Apocalyptic world, and to some extent she is right. We all have our little ways of dealing with the end of civilization.
* * *
Until today, Iggy's method of coping involved collecting stories about the end of the world. He surveyed the news and the nets and found these little gems that illustrated, to him anyway, that Western Civilization has passed its apogee and was now on a ballistic trajectory towards very solid ground.
This afternoon we were having a brew at Café Ocula, and Iggy started venting about the credit multinationals, all on account of some woman who was murdered in her car because her credit was declined by the police.
"Except that her credit was okay," fumed Iggy. "It was a mistake by the bank, so afterwards they credited her account by a million dollars in compensation."
"Well, that was nice of them," said Snuzi. "Even if it was only a million."
"Yeah, but the murderers had killed her for her wallet, so they had her credit cards and they got that money, too. And the bank wouldn't compensate again because it was her heirs' fault for not reporting the card stolen, and the bank is holding them responsible for the million dollars. So her heirs went bankrupt and were thrown in jail."
"That sucks," said Snuzi.
"By the same police that had refused the credit in the first place," added Iggy.
"I'm going to have another espresso," said Snuzi, getting up.
Iggy looked at me and Ultima. "The world is seriously fucked up," he said, which was how he ended each of his stories.
"You said it," said Ultima. "But what can you do?"
"I've decided to become a terrorist," said Iggy.
"No kidding," I said.
"A terrorist?" asked Ultima.
"A terrorist," confirmed Iggy.
"How about that," I said. "A terrorist."
As conversation killers went, Iggy's terrorist revelation was right up there. Ultima looked at me quizzically, assuming that I understood what Iggy was talking about, but this was the first I had heard of it, so I just shrugged, and we both turned to look out the café window until Snuzi came back and complained that they had Merry Christmas paper napkins in the bathroom instead of toilet paper. She pretended to be traumatized about using the baby Jesus in that way, but you could tell that she found it hugely amusing.
* * *
I broached the subject again later that evening, when Snuzi and Ultima took some time out to gamble their grocery money on the café's netlink.
"So, Ig-man. You're serious about this terrorist thing?"
"Suicide bombing," nodded Iggy.
I considered this. "Picked a target, yet?"
"Working on it," said Iggy. "Say, Doc, how would you spend your last thirty days?"
"My last thirty? How do I know they're my last? And how do I know I have thirty?"
"Because," said Iggy. "You have brain rot, and the doctors have given you thirty days to live."
I leaned back in my chair and exhaled, considering the problem. "Well, clearly everything that I have done in my life to prepare for the future is useless."
"Clearly," agreed Iggy.
"And thirty days is hardly enough time to lay some new foundations," I continued.
"Right," said Iggy.
"And probably not enough to change the world for the better using my creative powers," I added.
"Probably not," said Iggy.
"Given so little time to build, I could accomplish more toward improving the world by being destructive," I reasoned.
"Good idea," nodded Iggy.
"I'd probably have to become a suicide bomber," I concluded.
"My thinking exactly," said Iggy.
And that's how my good friend Ignatius Loyola revealed his role in the end of the world.