The Two of Us at the End of the World

Chapter 1

The Boy and the Girl

G-Day – West Beach, Berneray, Outer Hebrides

It’s the first day in August and he has never been happier. Later he will look back on it and realise the world was already falling apart, but this day is the one when the Announcement put a name to it.

Today will come to be known as G-day, and this is Year Zero, or Year G. Either way it is the year from – and because of which – all the others that follow will stop being known as AD or BC or CE and come to be counted as AG, as in After G-Day.

He knows nothing of all that in this moment, out here in the sun on the endless white swathe of sand looking out at the islands to the north.

He’s never felt more alive or happy in the seventeen short years of his life, and he hopes she can see that, the girl on the other side of the camera, the one with the constellation of freckles splashed across her laughing face, the one clicking the button and freezing him and his dog in mid-air each time he jumps, the girl whose pictures will make sure that – in them at least – he never crashes back to earth and hurts himself, the one living person whose presence in the future that is going to be – but is not yet – uncertain will make sure that when gravity does catch up with him, he will not fall lonely and forgotten.

Later, thinking of this and taking in the reality of the Announcement, she – whose hands are always busy in service of an endlessly inquisitive eye – will stop sketching the dog sleeping at their feet in front of the peat fire long enough to snake an arm around him and ask how bad – given everyone dies in the end – can the future be?

They still have their whole lives in front of them.

“Maybe it’ll be fine,” she says.

“Maybe it won’t,” he says.

“Or maybe it’ll be something in between,” she grins.

“Maybes,” he grins back. “All those maybes. So many maybes you could drown in them.”

And he bends his neck and kisses her, and she kisses him right back and both forget the treacherousness of the sea of maybes until a lifetime later.

Because in many of the ways the world sees it, they are adults already, but they are also still children, old enough to do what they will, young enough not to have any real thought about having children of their own.

The full weight of the Announcement hasn’t really hit them yet.

In this way they’re both suspended in mid-air, like the photographs she took, the pair of them floating on the weightlessness of their own private happiness, not knowing they’re now living in the brief pause between flash and bang.

The Announcement came from the World Health Organisation, delivered in unemotional, neutral language from a rostrum at its headquarters in Switzerland.

It confirmed officially that what individual countries had already picked up on was a global, species-wide phenomenon.

They called it the Generation Crisis, not as in the crisis of a single generation, but a crisis in the act of generation itself.

For reasons as yet unclear to the world’s top scientists, people had simply – brutally – stopped being able to have children.

The socials latched on and started calling this G -Day, and web-wide the world began counting down the fourscore years and ten allotted to the last generation of natural-born humans with – at first – a perversely grim and metronomic glee.

Most people trusted science would eventually come to the rescue, just as it had done in the endless pandemic waves, more or less – “more” being in the lucky first-vaxxed rank of developed countries, “less” of course being anywhere else.

So for a long, stunned beat the majority didn’t fully take it in and just tried to get on with their lives.

Once the full existential horror of the idea had rooted in and begun to flower, people stopped calling it a generational crisis.

No one knows who first called it the Gelding, though the smart money was on it having been an AI sub-editor on one of the news-webs, but the name stuck.

They mostly forgot what that original G stood for, but the day humanity was put on notice about its own extinction remained G-Day.

“We’re unlucky dinosaurs,” the Boy said to the Girl now a woman with a splash of freckles, one day, years after the photograph.

“Yeah,” she said, getting – as she always did – what he was saying. “That asteroid. At least the dinos never saw it coming.”

She was right.

Homo sapiens wasn’t the first species to face an incoming extinction event. But it was the first to forecast it with enough granularity to schedule an actual arrival time.