It all began on a Tuesday, one of those damp February Tuesdays that caused every soul to slip into a reflexive coma, and it must have been somewhere around three o’clock, possibly a little later. It began with a strange sensation permeating the air, causing everyone to shift a little in their seat or to pause mid-stride and ponder. It was not as if there was merely a sudden deafening thunder clap, merely a slight groaning at the universal seams.

 Nobody noticed the initial cracking of the wall plaster, save for those few who happened to be in the trade and were suddenly confronted with hours of labour being ruined… and even they just put it down to the subsidence or damp that must have stealthily corrupted their own particular wall. As the scale of the distortion grew worse, most still believed that it was their particular problem or, preferably, their boss’s. Staff gradually began to pause and stare at the office walls, pedestrians began to watch the paving slabs rising, and drivers cursed the council for their obsession with sneaking new speed bumps onto perfectly safe roads seemingly overnight. A few van drivers fished out their cell-phones and began to scan the radio dial for a talk radio station on which to air their views.

 A slight panic began to rise amongst those few who really cared to pay attention to the world but most of their friends, if they had any, chose to root blindly behind sofa cushions for lighters while leafing through the phonebook for a building contractor whose advert struck them as containing a hint of respectability yet still being crudely constructed enough to imply affordability. They then growled in frustration at the engaged tone and made a mental note to badmouth that particular firm to their neighbours if ever a conversation slipped within close enough proximity of the subject to allow it without them appearing like a crank. When they had exhausted the page they tried to phone around, deciding that it was now probably enough of an issue to merit them dialling up those people they reserved for bitter ranting and little else. When the caller found those people engaged, just as those people had found them engaged, they would slam down the phone and decide to risk going round to the house of that ever so helpful, but oh so dull, neighbour and try to recoup the investment they’d made in the Christmas bottle of wine that they had so dispassionately pulled from the rack.

 It was at just at the moment that the world was busily explaining to their neighbour quite how busy they were at that particular moment that the sigh sounded. It was a drawn out echoing sigh that caused every soul on the planet to snap away from their preoccupations, the vibrations in their marrow causing a hundred million mugs to drop from a hundred million hands and smash to pieces on just as many floors. A large percentage of those people looked around for someone to blame, their eyes desperately searching for the one colleague who was sporting a malicious grin and if they had found what they sought they would have felt so much better. Yet all they say were a sea of confused faces and a growing feeling of unease. Some people may have crossed themselves but religion had become so passé over the last few decades that they were discounted as flighty Jesus Freaks seeing the devil in any strange occurrence. Everybody did their best to reassure themselves that it was somebody’s fault and that they knew that that particular somebody would be fired. As the minutes ticked by it gradually became harder for the population of the planet to placate themselves. The cracks in the plaster began to worsen, the walls beginning to buckle and overlap as if a vice was tightening upon them. Carpets and tiles bulged and distorted, causing the elderly to trip and stumble and the drunkards to curse the landlords.

 The second sigh sounded just as they were demanding a replacement drink or reaching feebly for their panic buttons to signal disinterested relatives with little intention of dropping round unless they happened to be passing on the way to the gym. It was a sound that could be perceived as similar in species as the first but it carried a weight and a perceptible frustration that filled the dogs of the world with whimpering foreboding. Things only went downhill from there.

 The office workers staring in fascination at the crumpling walls had no chance, those unlucky enough to be sound sleepers and living in an unfortunate time zone had no chance, in fact, not many people who were indoors on that day stood any chance. When it came, it came near instantaneously, walls slamming together with a frightening force in all directions, blowing out windows, popping tiles into the air with the sudden pressure. An unpleasant echoing squelch rang around the First World nations as eighty percent of their population suddenly discovered what it felt like to be a spider slammed in the pages of an Atlas.

 While office life may have offered protection from the rain and the dirt, it was the lowliest peasants of the fields who suddenly became the most affluent people on the planet… although any aspirations towards mobile phone ownership were somewhat curtailed by fact that all the major phone exchanges, companies, and call centres, were now staffed by a viscous, unpleasant, red pulp. The farmers didn’t have a great deal of time to rejoice though, having suddenly to cope with the ground around them rippling and creasing around them, new hills springing up at random before breaking like waves upon them. In one interesting example, a man contemplating a suicidal leap from the cliffs at Dover after discovering his wife’s infidelity with the local vicar was greatly surprised to see Calais colliding at high speed with the base of the cliff before he was promptly run over by a high speed train headed for Brussels.

 It was not a good day for humanity… especially for the well-heeled, the agoraphobic, or the Chinese. A few billion people stopped breathing the air in ender an hour, either crushed by their surroundings, killed by resulting explosions and floods, or by the odd few dozen nuclear weapons deciding that being squashed really hard, really quickly, gave them enough of an excuse to go pop and irradiate Eastern Europe, Asia, a fair chunk of North America and, to what would have been to the UN’s surprise if it still existed, a penguin colony. While the explosions would have killed millions of people alone, it did not help when a few other continents decided to get in on the fun and tried to wedge themselves into the radioactive areas. The red pulp of a population didn’t have to worry too much about radiation sickness as most of the world’s surface hurriedly disappeared beneath the seas, the water suddenly finding its shrinking oceans a little too confining and promptly moving on to pastures new. By around six o’clock GMT the planet was one third of its original size and boasted a population consisting of thirty-four people, most of them clinging onto the mountains that they had been standing on at the time or watching the mammoth desert that they had been staggering across rapidly reducing to the size of a sand pit. About five minutes later the desert dwellers discovered that water is an overrated quality and proceeded to bob to the surface.

 There were, of course, hundreds of planes buzzing through the skies and their occupants probably assumed that the bizarre drama taking place below them would not be much of a concern until the fuel began to run out, by which time the worst would probably be over. Sadly these people had failed to realise that the shrinking of the planet caused their comparative altitude to increase somewhat drastically, and as a result, causing the air-pressure to drop… Despite the realisation that they had been blessed with a rare chance to travel in space, most of them had surprised and upset looks on their faces as they popped and ruined the first class interior… it wasn’t what they had paid a premium for.

 About half an hour passed and the grinning accountants perched on the top of Mount Everest were disappointed to find themselves floating into the cosmos. Matters were not helped when a satellite that had previously carried a pornographic television network enjoyed by millions of bitter loners smashed into them and they suddenly developed strong views of the invasion of smut into popular culture. Just to make their deaths all the more aggravating the mountain, under immense pressure, grew another five inches and thus gave the climbing record to a small dumpy Sherpa with a larger lung capacity and a better grip. Sadly Everest promptly fell over and he did his best to challenge for the fastest descent record as well.

 By seven-thirty there were two people left alive on the face of the planet. By some freak set of circumstances an amateur hang-glider pilot from Wales and a small, miserable, woman, who had been in the process of throwing herself out of a hot air balloon when things went pear-shaped for the planet, had both survived against almost overwhelming odds. Nigel, the unimpressive accountant from Swansea who all his colleagues secretly hated for reasons to indescribably dull and petty to go into, had been in the process of very slowly crashing into the Atlantic after a freak gust of wind blew him off course, found that he was descending at a rate almost perfectly in sync with the shrinking of the Earth and, as a result, managed to avoid freezing, popping, just plain asphyxiating, or plummeting into the sea. He had watched as his apparent watery doom rigidly refused to rush up and slap him in the face and began to become convinced that he was the greatest hang-glider ever to have existed, especially when he saw the East Coast of America appear below him. He knew it must be a record and began to make a loud whooping noise, unknowingly inhaling a fair amount of vaporised fellow humans and wildlife in the process, and proceeded to reach for his mobile phone.

 He planned to call Derek at work and point out that he’d saved the six-hundred-odd pounds plus tax that he knew Derek always grudgingly laid out for a return ticket when he wanted to take Nigel’s wife to Florida. Nigel intended to especially emphasise the tax part… he knew that a rich vein of humour could be found in breaking it down into airport taxes, VAT on the tickets, on the train to the airport, on the miserable sandwiches, on the tiny can of coke bought on the plane, and so many more… He imagined the joyous and admiring looks on his colleagues’ faces as they watched him tear Derek’s world apart. They would point and laugh until Derek began to cry and finally admitted that Nigel’s wife Nora always told him he wasn’t as good as her husband in bed after every exceedingly brief bout of lovemaking. Nigel knew that it would only be a matter of time before he took Derek’s job and company car… and then he opened the door to his new office he would find Nora waiting there, prostrate upon the desk, ready to welcome back the man she loved… Nigel looked down at his phone and it decided to tell him that there was no signal. He also noticed what appeared to be the West Coast of America shooting by.

 Nigel began to get slightly worried… for one thing he had noticed that America had really gone downhill since the last time he’d seen it on Kojak and also that it seemed to have suddenly sprouted a lot of very large lakes and occasional piles of rubble. He encouraged himself by remembering that he had refused to pay attention in geography class because he had been shouted at once for explaining quite why nature was pointless because of it’s randomness. He had even made a graph that resembled a crack-addict’s spirited attempts to fill in an insurance form while wearing a blindfold. This random collection of lines and squiggles, he had clearly explained to the class, proved that there was no point in studying something that was always changing and thus would require drastically different bookkeeping standards every year and in turn make it impossible to tally the sparrows onto a spreadsheet database if “…the bastards keep breeding in inappropriate locations that we are unable to audit…”. So, as far as he knew, America really was just a big soggy dump with rubble and an eerie green glow around certain parts of it and thus wasn’t really worthy of panic. He was, though, worried by his sudden realisation that America was probably quite a large place and the fact that he had passed over it within fifteen seconds meant that, according to his f-grade physics O-level, he was rapidly approaching the speed of light.

 His comrade in existence, if not for long by the look of things, was Doris, a woman who clocked in at a mighty four feet and nine inches in height, although the last four inches were largely comprised of a tangled mass of hair that bordered on fur. Throughout her entire life she had been perpetually clad in the same set of clothes and they now served mainly as a crude loincloth. The locals in her small village had long refused to face her when, through lack of practical alternatives, they were forced to visit her dilapidated grocery store. The sight of her pendulous breasts casually resting on the counter served to reduce the average weekly food bill by around fifty percent and a backward child worshipped her as a bizarre pagan idol, regularly laying offerings of tinned fruit at her feet. Many blamed the nearby nuclear plant for the high incidents of both shortness and idiocy amongst the villagers, although others chose to blame the equally prevalent inbreeding that served to warm the chilly nights.

 Technically Doris should have drowned when Norfolk neatly folded itself into Cardiff, but physics disliked her almost as much as her parents and she was engulfed in a swarm of turkeys. Lack of exercise and large quantities of growth hormones had reduced the turkeys to a near-gelatinous substance that acted as a giant poultry airbag and served to cushion the enormous pressure. Once, as physics dictates, the pressure had reached an appropriate level, Doris was fired vertically upwards to a height that, for convenience’s sake, allowed her a relatively comfortable landing in the Pacific Ocean. Once partially submerged, her large bosom served as an effective lifejacket and the currents began to tow her out into relative obscurity in the grand scheme of things… at least for the short while it took for every other woman on the face of the planet to dramatically surrender their places ahead of her in the queue for Tom Jones’ affections.

 Doris failed to appreciate the fact that she was now the most beautiful woman on the face of the planet… she was like that. When her loincloth caught on Mount Kilimanjaro it was the closest Doris had ever come to the physical act of lovemaking and, to be frank, she found it a disappointing experience when compared to her previous best of trapping her left breast in the cash register. A few inches to her left the last remaining mountain goat on Earth realised how lucky it was to be in the process of being swept away. Ever since it had seen Doris approaching on a crest of the wave he had begun to envy the dead.

 Fate hates the vast majority of those unfortunate enough to clamber from a womb… and this simple rule gleefully applied itself to Nigel as, after navigating the planet four times in increasingly rapid succession, his hang-glider smacked into the small pile of damp boulders a few feet to the left of Doris. The Welshwoman was thoroughly unimpressed as precision engineering quickly transformed itself into a mass of twisted metal pipes and torn fabric. She considered the whole affair to be posing and, despite the fact she had never seen such bright colours before (in fact she had never known that yellow could ever be a different shade from that of the fingers and sheep of her home town), rapidly discounted the wreckage as unworthy of her attention. The waves tugged at Doris’s gusset.

 “A little help here?” asked Nigel as he tried to extricate himself from the remains of the hang-glider. He was starting to grow mildly nervous as, defying all sound logic, there was a smell of petrol, a sound of dripping, and a lot of sparks emanating from somewhere. He loudly cursed the gods of dramatic tension for making his life unnecessarily complicated merely for the opportunity to include a tense scrabble to break free followed by a lot of leaping in the air while a slow-motion explosion used up the majority of the budget. Nigel turned his head to the heavens. “This doesn’t even make sense. I hate to break it to you, but I have always prided myself on examining the detail of life, and there is no damn way you can suddenly make this thing explode.” He found himself wishing there was some way he could grass the cosmos in to the Inland Revenue and arrange a rather nasty audit of quite where everything from the Big Bang went. They wouldn’t, he chuckled to himself, be able to use their debit card for quite a while.

 What occurred next shocked Nigel somewhat and, rather surprisingly, prolonged life on the Earth for a little while longer… and thus, disturbingly, made Nigel one of the greatest heroes ever to have lived. The planet took a breath. The sudden silence was more of an aural shock than resting your ear against a sonic boom. The creaking and groaning of rock under unimaginable pressure was stilled in an instant, the great waves that had been resolutely battering the mountain top steadily receded to gentle breakers and then to nothing, the oceans becoming an immense, silent, pool.

 The few birds that had been committed enough to keep flapping away regardless slowly began to glide down to land upon the stub of mountain and soon a blend of every continents fowl lined the summit, their beady eyes fixed on Nigel. A penguin arrived late and somewhat embarrassed, repeatedly flung itself against the rock in an attempt to sneak in with as few noticing as possible. The other birds refused to move over for him.

 There was next a great turmoil in the water, the ocean bulging dramatically and then breaking open to reveal the backs of dozens of whales glistening in the sunlight. Around them clustered countless dolphins, seals, and sea bass. They all poked their heads above the surface and regarded Nigel with great interest. Nigel began to realise that something amazing must be about to happen… had the universe finally paid attention to his plight and decided that enough was enough?

 The music was spectacular; it burst from the skies and rippled the water with achingly beautiful vibrations that, when looked upon, enabled you to read the meaning of every note. A blinding shaft of sunlight burst from nowhere and fixed itself on Nigel, making the wreckage glow with an eerie brilliance. Doris noted, with a distinct lack of surprise, that it completely ignored her. She stuck her thumb in the blowhole of a nearby dolphin to make herself feel better. The dolphin began to inflate.

 Nigel gazed up into the light which, despite its staggering brightness, did not blind him. Being a humble man he decided that he’d probably been chosen from the whole of the corrupt planet to repopulate it with honest, decent people, and who would make it a glorious new utopia amidst the ruins of decadent Man. He felt he must take this moment to ask Man’s key question to God.

 “Can I have a new Eve? That one’s rough as hell.”

 There was a cosmic cough. Nigel felt he may have misjudged the situation. He was just about to try and reason with the mysterious light and point out that if he could just have a different body on her he could always put a bag over her head, when the glowing hand mysteriously appeared before his eyes. It was beautiful beyond comprehension.  He watched in awe as three of its fingers curled until it was pointing straight at him.

 “You choose me oh Mighty One?” asked Nigel, trembling slightly. The finger wagged in a negative fashion. Nigel decided to try again.

 “You wish to show me something oh Mighty One?” He received a quick thumbs-up. The hand began to move, gliding with an unimaginable grace, Nigel’s eyes following automatically. It drifted down in a gentle curve until the finger was pointing at something lying on the ground amidst the wreckage. Nigel noted with surprise that it was the lighter he had so enthusiastically filled that morning. It appeared to have broken apart by the impact and a trickle of lighter fluid was being steadily absorbed by the material of the hang-glider. The finger began to move again. It drifted in a casual spiral to the point where it was able to indicate the dripping hip-flask hanging out of Nigel’s pocket. Nigel began to feel a bit depressed. Finally, and with a little twirl that struck him as a tad too smug, the finger came to rest upon the sparking remains of Nigel’s archaic mobile phone, the phone that he’d been meaning to upgrade for the last decade but had resisted on the theory that he was a tight bastard. Considering its age and the fact that he had bought it from a Russian mail-order catalogue, it could be nuclear powered for all he knew.

 “Fair enough…” said Nigel, with a hint of annoyance. The light disappeared, the creaking began again, the fish, with the exception of the dolphin floating upside down near Doris, swam away, the birds took to the air, and, in a final flourish before disappearing, the hand gave Nigel the finger. Nigel reluctantly began to scrabble free, chewing rapidly at the crumpled wing, until, in a predictable fashion, he just managed break loose before being forced to leap into the air as the hang-glider erupted in a fireball.