Society has fallen. The nuclear alarm sounds. Fires rage across the face of the Earth as devastation is wreaked by earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis. A fleet of aliens has landed, from a distant and, apparently, far more evolved corner of the solar system. They understand not only our languages, but our thoughts. They roam our cities, huge tentacled beasts with endless teeth and eyes. All seeing, all knowing.
But they’re only the penultimate stage of a long coming decline. Society had already evolved itself out of fertility. Thanks to pollution, or an act of God. Who can say? The end, it seems, is in sight. And then, worst of it all: news reaches me, in my underground concrete bunker, that the Oxford English Dictionary has decided, after a public vote, that its word of the year will be “goblin mode”. Finally, the four horsemen thunder ferociously across the sky.
