The world ends in a little over two years. I’ve seen it happen five times. I’ve managed to change some details, but the outcome has always been the same.

Time travel is impossible. I should know, I’ve been to the future. You see, I discovered how to create a time loop. I’m not going to tell you how to do it, but suffice to say it works by changing a quantum event in the past. It’s not actually time travel, it’s more a reset to a certain point. Like a saved game. It turns out that the consciousness of the user gets transferred back to the reset point. I have it hooked up to a heart monitor. A dead man switch.

I know you probably think I’m acting strangely today. The simple explanation is that the day that took place yesterday in your timeline took place about fourteen years ago in mine. I want you to help me this time. I can’t change things enough by myself. Or, if you don’t believe me, I want you to tell me why you don’t believe me. Tell me how I could have convinced you. I need your help, and I’ll reset as many times as it takes to get it.

We open on a cup of coffee. The cup lifts out of shot and there is a sipping sound.

The camera pulls back, bringing with it a slightly grungy rock bassline, to reveal the sipper. It is MUG. He is driving a car; the car is a November ’86 model red car that goes fast.

The camera pulls again to reveal that MUG is also engaged in a swordfight out the open window of the car with the heavily mustachioed GENERIC EVILDOER IV, who is on a motorbike. Power chords ring out. Sparks fly. A mobile phone rings. Zoom. It is MUG’s phone. He answers.

MUG hangs up and the camera pulls back to the wide shot.

MUG tosses his coffee, cup and all, in the face of GENERIC EVILDOER IV. While G.E.IV is distracted, MUG slashes his front tire, rupturing it and causing the bike to crash, slide, roll, then explode. The camera pulls back and up as MUG hooks his car around a corner and out of shot. Cue electric guitar solo. The title is revealed:

It was dark. There was the impression of giant things moving around them, kicking up eddies in the air, but making no sound. There was a cold in the air, too. A cold they could feel in their bones, but not one that came from all around. It radiated from some point ahead of them, where the darkness seemed somehow thicker, as if that were possible. They could each hear the breath of the other, and their own, but no word nor shout nor scream could they force past their lips. Their hands tightened their grip on each other, but with a sickening lurch that grip was torn away, and they were alone in the darkness.

The snowfall was light at first, settling on leaves and branches and making its way through to the ground in the occasional wisp to melt away quickly on the dirt or leaf litter. We walked for miles that afternoon, faces apple-red and breath hanging in the air between us. We walked not to get anywhere, but in the thrill of exploration. We shared the secret spaces inside fallen logs and beneath the undergrowth.

By the time the sun neared the horizon the snow was heavy enough to push through to the forest floor, and we had both been caught under drifts shed from branches high above. We crunched softly back to the cabin, where the banked coals kept the edge of the cold at bay. We stripped of our wet clothes and lay them on the hearth to dry, then set about building a fire.

The weather, whilst for the most part extremely pleasant, was prone to occasional unexpected extremes of heat or cold or sleet or wind. The response of the denizens had been to build the entire thing indoors. There were courtyards and cloisters open to the air scattered liberally throughout the city, with grass and trees and pools and fountains, but everything else was indoors: streets and alleys and town squares and footpaths, all under the one stretching, arching, undulating roof.

Kat lay on her back amongst the stacks, watching the rain spatter in small drops against the large skylights. When the drops got large enough they would cascade down the gentle curve, pulling others in as they went sliding down into the catchments and away out of sight. Whenever it rained she tried to find somewhere to watch; if she didn’t think she’d be missed, sometimes she even headed for the nearest courtyard and just stood there as the sky emptied over her.

The city stretched for miles and miles in every direction, and Kat had lived inside its walls and under its roof her entire life, never once venturing outside its confines. At times like this, though, she fantasized about scrambling up and out onto the wide open expanse of the rooftop and running free.

Joshua got a job driving one of those scooters with the signs on the back.

It seemed more productive than quietly raging about them.

It wasn’t a case of “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”, though, he figured that he was doing some good. Rather than using it to contribute to air pollution, noise pollution, visual pollution and traffic, he would drive to a nearby park, throw a tarp over the sign and sit under a tree for a few hours. Then it was just a matter of winding the odometer forward, siphoning the petrol and dropping the scooter back at the depot.

He wasn’t particularly concerned about taking money under false pretenses from people who couldn’t be bothered even researching their target demographic when they could just throw cash at the problem instead.

For nine years his name had been growing in infamy. For the last five almost every soul on the planet had known who he was, and almost all of them feared him. It had been bank robberies at first, but soon that wasn’t enough. He needed more than he could buy with money.

Now the world was at his feet, but the world didn’t know why. People thought that the slaughter and the iron fist were the means, and that power was the end. Power was the means. Not a single person still alive knew his origin story. They wouldn’t feel differently if they knew. Maybe a little pity, but he didn’t want that. Besides, they shouldn’t feel differently. It didn’t matter. The time machine was almost ready. Soon.

Björn Hammerson was a dwarf. It was genetic, which is to say he was actually a Dwarf.

He worked construction in New York, and had always liked doing basements the best. Although he had no real fear of heights, when standing on a girder on the sixtieth floor of some new building frame there was something that popped its head up out of the primordial sludge of ancestral memory and said “Wouldn’t you much rather be underground?”.

At first glance most people assumed he was heavily into hip-hop, but the bling was again the influence of that ancestral voice, this time saying “Shiny!”. In actual fact he rather liked melodic death metal.

The lagoon was still and clear, protected from the ocean by a rock wall stacked loosely enough to let the tide through, but high enough to keep the waves out. The wall didn’t look man-made, though it was hard to imagine such a perfect spot occurring by chance.

The lagoon was perhaps fifteen metres across, in an almost-perfect circle. Half of it was sparkle and light and colourful little tropical fish that had run in with the tide playing in shoals. The other half was tucked under the cliff, a cool cave where the slap of water sounded almost wooden and bigger fish drifted lazily. There was a ledge at the back of the cave: just above the water line at high tide, and large enough for two. We could lay there and watch the light throw reflections on the roof, and hear the echo of our breathing and the muted sound of the waves beyond the rock wall.

Sally had heard of a boy in Omaha who could see through walls. There was a girl in Los Angeles who could fly, and one in London who could turn into a liquid.

Scientists were talking about ‘artificial evolution’, though nobody was sure of the cause. Sally knew that what they really were was mutants. Last week she had discovered that she was a mutant, too. It was less exciting than she had hoped.

Her power didn’t make her invincible; in fact, it was difficult to imagine any circumstance where it would help her fight crime. She could identify birds without ever having seen or even heard of them before. It was hard not to feel ripped off.