Not the End of the World by Christopher Brookmyre

times, in fact. Jesus, these days who didn’t? Poem was written way back at the other end of this century, she told him, after our last collective bout of cataclysmic heeby‐
jeebies. This stuf this end‐
of‐
the‐
world‐
as‐
we‐
know‐
it stuff, had all happened before. It was normal. It was natural, even. Individually, you get nervous about anything new: new job, new house, new city, new date. With a new century, everybody gets nervous about the same thing at the same time. It infected the cultural consciousness, Sophie said. Zeitgeist was the German word for it. Happened to an extent after WW2. The whole country, maybe the whole world, has occasion to think ‘Where do we go from here? What happens now?’, and a lot of folks get scared because they don’t know, can’t see, can’t imagine.
    Larry, of all people, knew how that felt.
    But 1999 wasn’t just the end of any century, it was the end of the twentieth century. Not only was that the end of a whole millennium, but it was also the end of a century that had a conceit of itself like none before it. No previous century could possibly have had such a confidence in its own modernity, with a widespread tendency to view all the previous ages of man as steps on the road towards this apotheosis. Us citizens of C-Twenty thought we were the cat’s pyjamas, basically.
    Science had never advanced at such a furious pace, far less had that pace ever accelerated at such a breathless rate, and no civilisation had ever become so intoxicated by the capabilities of its technology. Certainly every era must have taken pride in its achievements and liked to measure its progress against the culture and learning of its hundred‐
year predecessors, but surely none had indulged such a sense of climax.
    Hence the omen‐
peddlers.
    This was the It century. Time of the biggest, smallest, fastest, slowest, longest, shortest. The conceit of zenith meant that the twentieth century had failed to inherit from its forebears the words ‘so far’. Whatever we achieved, these days, instantly became the defining superlative, which was where the doomsayers came in.
    We had put men on the moon. That was, of course, a fuckin’ omen, as it was some sort of ultimate in travel and exploration. If we had put men on Mars, then that would have been the ultimate in travel and exploration too. If we had only put men in orbit, guess what?
    Then there were the twentieth century’s unprecedented acts of evil, most notably the attempted systematic extermination of an entire race of human beings. Our number must surely be up because, as we approached the end of the millennium, man had never been so base, so without conscience, so inhuman (whatever that meant).
    Except that he had.
    Larry had read all about it, a previous holocaust, near the other end of this same millennium: the Albigensian Crusade. The successful systematic extermination of an entire race of human beings, in this case the Cathars in France. By command of the Church, around a million men, women and children were slaughtered because they were preaching and practising a different version of Christianity, the spread of which had been a threat to the Holy Roman Empire. A long way short of six million, numerically, but given the contemporary population of Europe, proportionally an even greater genocide than we had managed in the supposedly superlative twentieth century.
    Seemed we had forgotten the word ‘since’ as well.
    This self‐
satisfied century was coming to an end: this time of extremes and ultimates, of unrivalled progress and unparalleled decay, when man had ascended to heights beyond the planet and plumbed depths below mere sin. This age with its arrogant delusions of culmination.
    And the problem with such delusions was that they were incompatible with the concept of succession. So, effectively, the world was supposed to end just because some folks couldn’t imagine what might come next.
    Which was pathetic.
    Larry knew,