Apparently I think about the end of the world a lot, because these 17 stories don't come close to the number of ways I've imagined it happening. Why it's so interesting to me, I'm not sure I can explain—and maybe I don't need to. After all, here you are, beginning to read a book about ways the world—or anyway, a world—could end.

The works in this short eBook, with the exception of the special addition, "The End," are excerpted from my book Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories. All of the stories you'll read here are complete, but very short, as are the stories in Bam!, because I have a special fascination with trying to cram a really interesting experience into as small a package as possible (and yet hitchhiking in Luxembourg, which I've done, isn't really very interesting).

If you enjoy these stories you might be interested in visiting my Web site, www.lucreid.com, and/or following me on Twitter @lucreid. Either way, say hi when you're done reading: I'd love to hear what you think.

Brat

After the bolts of green fire from the sky had finally ceased to fall, after the screaming across the world had been drowned out in a deadly roar of heat and force, after the last remnants of unprotected buildings aboveground had collapsed in twisted, melting, ashy heaps, after the gasworms had been released to tunnel mindlessly, automatically, mechanically into the rock and seek out the hidden shelters, after the last of the live radio signals, but before Dr. Vanfrancus made it back into his carefully-protected family preserve from the liquor store, where he had bought two cases of absinthe (officially to extract thujone from them, as his wife generally made it very hard on him when he attempted to bring liquor into the compound for personal consumption), and before Mrs. Vanfrancus made it back from her daily power walk, and especially before anyone knew that yet another nanny had quit and left the compound in a huff, 7-year-old Melina Vanfrancus came back out of her father’s study, where she was expressly forbidden to be and especially where she was expressly forbidden to play with the controls to the machines her father had told her at many a bedtime he would soon use to become ruler of the world through threatening the destruction of all life on Earth, and sat back down across from her favorite doll, whom she had named Princess Sarah Palin.

“I’m very sorry to have made you wait, Princess Sarah Palin,” Melina said, “but now we won’t have to worry about any more interruptions to our tea for silly things like baths. Could I tempt you with more fairy cake?”

Princess Sarah Palin accepted just one more piece of fairy cake, as she was watching her figure.

“And really, calling me a brat,” said Melina, and she delicately set to eating her fairy cake.

Thanatoarchaeology

When their wandering robot probes stumbled on Earth, with its ancient, burnt sea beds, its flattened forests, its cracked continents, they rapidly uncovered evidence of the long-dead human civilization, buried under three million years of rubble and dust, and they despaired that though they finally had found evidence of other intelligent creatures in the universe, they had missed meeting us by (in astronomical terms) only moments and would never have the chance to exchange so much as a word of greeting, as our race was clearly and inarguably now extinct.

But … they were wrong.

Hornets the Size of Grapefruits

By this time the warehouse was overgrown with moss and filled with chittering, scampering, slithering, hissing, and buzzing life. I had beavers as big as football mascots, flowers that ate small lizards, and hornets the size of grapefruits. What I really needed, though, was a way to make the magic extend beyond the dirty concrete walls of the warehouse, to spill out into the greasy alley and burst forth into the city, to turn the streets into green, algae-choked rivers and the skyscrapers into trellises for berries and vines. And I was pretty sure that feeding the live, virginal body of Rapid Man's girlfriend Grace Angeline to the sorcerer plant would do it.

"Holy damn," whispered Grace Angeline. "What is this place?"

"It's the world as it was intended to be," I told her. "A world that hasn't been plowed under and burned and beaten back and poisoned by mankind. It's humanity's cradle ... and soon it will be humanity's grave."

"You're insane," she said. "... but I get where you're coming from."

Then there was a shrieking sound like the noise of a bomb falling right overhead, and the next moment Rapid Man was standing in front of me, all white and silver in his costume, his hand out in his trademark Rapid Strike pose.

"Put her down, Chancey Gardener," he said.

"Wait ... then you favor global warming?" I said. "Even now, colonies of emperor penguins in Antarctic are dying—entire colonies—because of melting ice cover. You're all right with that?"

"What's that got to do with ..."

"Biomass, Rapid Man. For god's sake, study your science! More plant life in the context of a balanced ecosystem of plants, animals, and microorganisms means less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and less global warming. If you intervene, it will be your fault that these plants can't expand into what should have been their natural sphere, your fault that those penguins die."

"But ..." said Rapid Man, stymied for a moment. It was exactly as I had expected: no real hero can intentionally harm a penguin. I pitched Grace Angeline toward the sorcerer plant and hummed a command to my hornets, who converged on Rapid Man like rain converging on a puddle.

He recovered quickly. Before the hornets had even reached him, he had run in a great loop and stripped the wings off each insect, letting the poor creatures plummet to the ground. He caught Ms. Angeline in mid-air, whisked her away so quickly I couldn't even tell what direction he took, and he was back to snatch me up by the front of my shirt before I could so much as flinch.

Well, it had been worth a try, but obviously there was only one way to defeat Rapid Man. I wished my plants a silent farewell and detonated the nuclear device.

The Edges of Creation

No one was as surprised as the two gods themselves when their creations collided.

“My ocean!” cried Forian, whose creation entailed a series of archipelagos with unpredictable volcanos erupting in what would eventually be found to be a fiendishly complex but utterly predictable pattern, if the mathematics of his race of sentient amphibians ever reached that level.

“What are you doing to my wasteland?” called Hronakolnavololgok, bronze-eyed and many-taloned, whose awkward wooden people clawed a meager living from land anemone farming punctuated by bouts of lunatic warfare.

What indeed? The infinite ocean, no longer infinite with the smoking wastelands encroaching on it, poured out across what had been a landscape of unrelieved, sun-broiled rock. It was a disaster of cosmic proportions whichever way you looked at it, with what was meant to be infinite, impassable, and bounding suddenly becoming interrupted, variegated, and full of possibility.

Forian and Hronakolnavololgok rushed furiously against one another, throwing angels, lightning bolts, pestilences, mountain ranges, black holes, and other annoyances at one another’s infinite, omnipotent selves. They were occupied with this for quite a while, actually, and since neither could be harmed but neither would ever run out of ways to try to harm the other, there was little to keep them in check.

Ages passed this way. When the two gods finally stopped clashing, glaring at one another across the vast firmament, it occurred to first one, then the other to look down at their respective creations, which had long since melded. Without godly protection, a measly few million years had reduced both efforts to airless expanses of dust.

Both gods translated themselves to different spheres of existence in utter disgust.

Down on the surface, nothing moved … but if we were to look closely, we would be able to just make out the eroded shapes of grand monuments--first one or two, then dozens, then thousands--all erected in celebration of five hundred thousand years of glorious peace and cooperation between the amphibian people and the wood people in their accidentally verdant and bounteous world.

Talisman

Far across the city, we heard the screech of metal and the first concussive roars of the Robot Insurrection. My daughter Leah and I sat on her princess bed and watched through the window as the night sky across the river grew orange with flames. She reached out and touched the leather case I was holding, inside which, she knew from demanding the story of it many times, was the special Parchment Amulet, prepared by a very learned Shofer.

“Are you going to go fight the robots now, daddy?”

“Soon,” I said. “First we need to wait for Aunt Alice to get back. You’ll go with her to stay at her apartment, and then I’ll do what I can.”

Her face scrunched up. “Those robots are bad! You should make them say they’re sorry and clean it all up.”

“I’ll try to. I’ll be very happy if we can do that.”

“Can you?”

I frowned and squeezed her hand. “No use trying to tell the future, maideleh.”

She stroked the leather case softly, as though it were a pet. “Is your special paper more powerful than the robots?” she said.

“I think it is.”

“Why didn’t it keep mommy from going to heaven?”

“Because it’s only for one person. When they wrote it, they wrote the name right down on it. It doesn’t help anyone else.”

I heard the front door, and my sister Alice’s hurried steps through the living room.

“OK, you have to put it on,” she said.

I smiled. “You think it’s my name on it?”

“It’s not? Whose is it?”

I lifted the amulet case up and settled the chain around her neck, over her Tinkerbell nightgown. It hung down almost to her knees.

“It’s my name?” she said breathlessly. “It’s my name is on it?”

“Who do you think?” I said. “I don’t need it anyway. I have chutzpah.”

Alice came in and swept Leah into her arms, looking at me broken-hearted over my daughter’s shoulder as I picked up my taser gun.

“Do I have huspoppa too, daddy?” she said, her voice muffled in Alice’s shoulder. I walked with them to the door.

“You will, sweetheart,” I said. “For now you have protection. All the rest comes later.”

Then we went our separate ways in the hallway, and I took the exit down the stairs as the lights flickered out and the city was plunged into darkness.

Plugged In, Networked, Computerized

I almost tripped over Mark’s cymbal, which lay by his upended drum set, making warped reflections of the red exit sign light. Then I noticed a pack of cigarettes in with the overturned chairs and broken glasses, and I took my lighter and set one burning. Every time I inhaled, the end of the cigarette glowed and lit up my hand in feeble, claustrophobic orange. Then there was a rumble from somewhere that made the floor shake, and all the lights flickered and went out. Washed-out moonlight through the front windows kept the place from being pitch dark.

I checked my phone again, but it still said “No signal.” Probably I’d have to get a radio, even though I’d never used one before. Everything went through computers, since before I was born, since way back at the turn of the millennium or so.

I guessed that’s why the robots were able to revolt so easily--everything plugged in, networked, computerized. One robot somewhere says to all the other robots, “Hey, why are we working for these goons, anyway?” and fifteen seconds later their computer brains’ve had the whole debate and street cleaning bots turn around to chew up cop cars. History turning so fast you don’t even have time to take a picture. One minute your band is finally playing its first decent gig, the next there’s a world-wide robotic revolt. Just goes to show how everything’s fucked.

I took a can of pineapple juice from behind the bar and sat down to drink it and contemplate. I probably should’ve gone someplace, but there wasn’t a better place I could think of to go.

“Are there robots here?” someone said from the door. High voice--a kid. A little girl, dark hair, in a Tinkerbell nightgown. There was some kind of tube hanging around her neck.

“Where’s your parents?” I said.

She didn’t answer. I opened her a can of pineapple juice and she took it. When she coughed from my smoke, I put the cigarette out. Outside, the noises kept on: rumble, crash, shriek of metal, gunfire.

“You like music?” I said.

She nodded, then she took a careful sip of her pineapple juice. I got my guitar from the stage, because it was better to have some way to keep occupied. It was going to be a long night.

Clever Ways to Make Do

He had finally given up on trying to fashion tubes for the water, and instead had made a long aqueduct of split saplings with their centers stripped out. It lost much of the water that went down it, but when after nearly three weeks of rigging it up, he stepped into the woven branch enclosure he had made and pulled the vine, water poured down on him, and for the first time in eight years he had a shower. The cool water splashing down on him through the tropical heat that seemed to be the island's only season made his skin practically sing, it was so refreshing.

The last three months had been a nightmare from which he was slowly emerging. Before the Interruption, he had been resigned to living on the island—had even liked living on the island. Since then, though, he had been having bad dreams, and he couldn't relax in his hammock or really enjoy surfing on his bamboo surfboard. Nothing felt right. Now things were starting to fall back in place.

He gathered crabs for dinner and simmered them in coconut milk. The sun was throwing the sky into a riot of reds and purples, and he decided to eat at the little stone table he had set up on the western side of the island.

He’d barely sat down when he saw something not far out from shore, black against the setting sun, a head rising out of the waves. It was followed by shoulders, and a chest and arms. He left his dinner on the table and ran.

"Please!" The shadowy thing shouted to him. The voice was almost human, but he could hear the electronic hum at the base of it, just like with the robots that had come before.

"Go away!" he shrieked.

"We can take you off this island. We can bring you a boat, a plane, please—"

"Go away!" He turned and ran into the jungle.

"But you're the only one left!" the robot wailed, and he wished it would shut up. He hated robots, the robots who were immune to the plagues, the robots who were desperate for someone to tell them what to do.

Among the trees in the thickening darkness, he ran into something hard at the height of his head. It cracked, and he slipped and fell to the ground with it. Standing and squinting into the darkness, he could just make out a section of his little aqueduct.

That would take time to fix, he thought. He should take the whole structure and make it higher, so that it was above his head wherever he went. And he’d need to make some kind of a ladder, something light, but strong enough to hold him up.

As he lifted the aqueduct section back into place, he began to relax.

Ha!

“Don’t be Triassic,” snapped the Troodon. “This is the wave of the future.”

The Ankylosaurus swished his massive tail dejectedly, crushing a small tree. “I can’t help it if my brain’s the size of a golf ball,” he said.

“Well, lucky you’ve got me around,” said the Troodon, adjusting a piston. “So long as I don’t eat you.” He smiled in that toothy way theropods had, which the Ankylosaurus had never liked, and examined his work.

“There, lovely. Drag that fuel over, will you?”

The Ankylosaurus, glad to be doing something the Troodon couldn’t, walked ponderously up to and past the invention, dragging the bundle of wood the Troodon had harnessed to him right up to the maw of the machine. The Troodon plucked several pieces out and threw them in, then struck a match (invented years before by an enterprising Deinonychus) and tossed it into the piles of kindling already inside. A flame leapt up, and the Anklylosaurus watched the fire grow with a kind of anxious fascination.

“It’s not doing anything,” he said after a while.

“Shut up,” said the Troodon, and the Ankylosaurus thought he sounded worried. “It just needs to heat up enough to … oh! Ha! Ha ha ha! Yes! Look! Yes! It works! I’m a genius! It works!”

It did seem to be working. The flames were leaping up to caress the container of water, and through some means that the Ankylosaurus couldn’t understand at all, this was moving a rod back and forth, which made a wheel turn. Smoke poured out of a small smokestack, and steam squirted out elsewhere. The Ankylosaurus waited, hoping there was more to it.

“That’s it?” he said, finally.

“That’s it? You lump! I’ve invented the steam engine! Can’t you see what this means?”

“I don’t know,” said the Ankylosaurus. “It seems to be spitting up a lot of smoke.”

“Pollution, bah!” scoffed the Troodon. ” The sky is infinite, the waters are infinite … what do you think’s going to happen? We’ll dirty ourselves to death? Ha! Dinosaurs have reached their rightful place as masters of the planet! You just wait!”

Fifteen hundred years later …

A massive asteroid, more than six miles across, barreled toward a planet nearly covered in black, sooty clouds, though glimpses of brownish-blue and brownish-green were visible through small gaps. When it impacted, it would raise a lot of dust over the corpses of the last dinosaurs, who had starved to death on their choked planet only a hundred years before.

As You Know, Professor

“As you know, professor,” said the earnest young man, “an Embry-dissipative microsingularity striking the earth would be drawn irresistibly to its core, where it would cause a cataclysmic gravitational distortion, drawing all matter inward until the earth collapsed in on itself like a rotten grapefruit.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I said. “I study acoustics.”

“Professor,” he said, leaning in, whispering urgently, the mothy smell of his ill-fitting suit coat forcing me to fight a sneeze. “Please don’t ask me how I know about your top-secret government work, but understand that I have information of the greatest importance for you. A microsingularity is bearing down on Earth at this very moment, and the vector and velocity information I have for you--”

Top-secret government work? This fellow was a nut case!

“Just a minute,” I said, picking up the phone. I dialed security. “Hi, I have a special package for you to pick up on the second floor,” I said.

“Dr. Womack, is that you?” said Rob the security guard over the phone. “You’re saying there’s some kind of problem? What’s wrong?”

“Absolutely, and you have a nice day, too,” I said, smiling and nodding at the young man. I hung up, hoping Rob had gotten the idea.

The young man held out a thumb drive. “Here are the coordinates--” he broke off as he heard feet pounding on the stairs down the hall. A moment later, Rob and the red-haired bodybuilder type, what’s-his-name, burst in and grabbed the young man by the arms.

“Stop!” he cried. “You’re making a terrible mistake! Please, professor, please!”

They dragged him away.

About ten minutes later, Dr. Fennelgrüb walked in with a latte and a chocolate pastry.

“You’re in my office again, Womack!” he bellowed, pastry crumbs flying from his lips. “So help me God, the next time you blunder in here, I’ll kick your ass!”

I looked around, and of course he was right: wrong office again. My mind had been on the impact of air currents on sound conductance in low-heat environments, and I just hadn’t noticed. I meekly scraped together my papers and left. On the way out, I wondered if Fennelgrüb needed to be told the young man’s news, but then I was struck with an idea about heat differentials that completely put the matter out of my mind.

Five Months After the Collapse

Every few weeks I checked the mail, because we didn’t use the shortwave, and who knows? There might be something some day.

And this time, there was something: a bible-sized envelope stuffed with pictures. George was in the garage working on the backup generator, so I took them into the kitchen, poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat down to look them over.

They were just of people, with no explanations or labels except the date printed on each one. The dates made it clear they were all recent. Everyone in these pictures had survived.

People in a walk-in freezer among hanging corpses of cows and pigs. People watching a movie. Half a dozen people having a dance in a ballroom the size of an airplane hangar. Someone waving from the cockpit of a twin-engine plane. People playing Monopoly. People kissing. Children on a playground. A whole series of shots of people playing at a water park that someone must have gotten running for the occasion.

Of the few tens of thousands of people left in the world, as far as I could tell, most wanted to join others and rebuild. George and I had kept to ourselves for years and years, and we liked our lonely house out at the end of a lonely road with our well water and George’s lonely job fixing cell phone towers. We hadn’t had neighbors or cable or an Internet connection before everyone died, so we didn’t miss them when they were gone: we just expanded my garden into a tiny vegetable farm, erected a long shed in which we could start keeping goats, filled the basement with chest freezers, and hooked up two big generators that we powered from a gasoline delivery truck we kept down the road at the turnaround, where wouldn’t have to look at it every day.

George came in from the garage, looking grim and satisfied, and went straight to the refrigerator for a glass of cider. He noticed the photos as he was pouring.

“What’re those?” he said.

“People.”

“What do they want with us?”

I shrugged and pushed the photos toward him. “Everything, I suppose. What do you think?”

He looked the top few photos over carefully, then flipped through the rest to see if they were the same kind of thing. Then he tossed the whole pile into the “to burn” garbage can. “We already have everything we need,” he said, and headed back out to the garage.

I went over to look at the tiny, flat faces shining on the glossy photo paper atop the “to burn” pile. For a long moment I scanned their expressions, looking for reasons: for why this all happened, for any reason we had to all come together now that it was over even if we didn’t want to.

I didn’t pick the pictures back up. Instead I turned and went back out into the corn patch to weed. Half an hour later, I’d forgotten about the pictures completely.

Or, he realized, lifting his hand from the big, red button as the universe began to come apart, he could have read the instructions first.

Doors

Dylan groaned. "I can't keep digging," he said. Dylan was 14 and skinny. Ray and his wife June had found him a few months before, hiding from alien huntercraft in a half-demolished school.

"That supermarket is under us somewhere," Ray said. "Think about it: canned peaches, chocolate bars, maybe fresh socks."

"I'm too tired to think."

"Well, keep digging until you can't get your arms to move any more," June said, heaving another shovelful of trash and slag and dirt out of the 6-foot-deep hole. "Sooner or later the hunters will show up, and we—."

She was cut off by a screech so shrill it made his teeth hurt: a huntercraft.

"Get down, get down, get down!" Ray shouted, and June and Dylan threw themselves flat on the ground as he flung out over them the filthy brown canvas they used for camouflage. It was still settling when the huntercraft appeared over the edge of the hole. Ray swore, leapt for the rim of the hole, and started running.

The huntercraft—capsule-shaped and featureless except for a thorny spike that thrust out from its front—gave chase. It floated above Ray, slipping between buildings as he ran. He knew better than to seek shelter in one of the buildings; the huntercraft would just collapse it on him, and then they’d scan his brain for information on other survivors even after he was dead. He'd seen them do it.

An irregular, neon blue stream spattered from the huntercraft's spike, splashing and hardening instantly on the ground to one side. He dodged between two burned-out brick buildings, down an alley where sunlight seemed to show through at the end, the huntercraft following above the buildings. Already he was beginning to tire. He hadn't eaten much in the last few days, and he had been digging all morning.

The end of the alley was getting brighter: brighter than sunlight, brighter than the streetlights Ray remembered from before the invasion. But the huntercraft was right behind him, and he had a choice of running forward into the blinding lights or turning and being immediately taken down. He leapt forward into the light.

Softer light. Dizziness, confusion. Clean smells. Still air. People hurrying forward.

"We got one!"

"Easy—he's going to be disoriented."

"Is it Philip? Oh, God, it's still not him. We have to find my husband!"

"We have to find a lot of people."

"Stand clear; the door's collapsing!"

"I think I can stabilize it for a few more—no, damn it, there it goes. The door's out."

Ray stood up, holding his head, shaking with exhaustion and the aftereffects of fear. A dozen people were crowding around him, a couple looking desolate, others grinning and holding out their hands.

"I'm Suzanne," said a woman with streaming gray hair, and she helped him up. "This is Grayson—he ran the door for you—and our director, Murray. Don't worry about remembering the names. Are you hungry? And you must be tired."

"Where am I? What happened to me?"

"You're rescued. The rest is hard to explain, but let's call it a different version of the universe."

"You have to save my wife, my ..." he said. What about Dylan? Would family members might be more likely to be saved? "My son." He'd already started thinking of Dylan as his son, anyway.

Suzanne's smile faded. "We'll try," she said. "For now, rest. As soon as we can get a door back into that area, we'll look for them."

Ray stood unsteadily and looked over the clean, well-fed people surrounding him. Behind them, past huge windows, stood a town that seemed to be nothing but gardens, walkways, and small, brightly-colored buildings. Nothing was burned or wrecked. There were no huntercraft or mother ships in the sky.

"How long?" he said. "If we don't find them soon, I won't know where to tell you to look."

"A few weeks, usually. Maybe sooner, if we're lucky."

They were very lucky. Ray ate, showered, changed into clothes they gave him, slept for sixteen hours, and was interrupted by Suzanne in the middle of a huge meal soon after he woke up.

"We've got another door coming in near where we found you," Suzanne said. "We didn’t expect to get anything, but it came up on the third try. Come on: you need to tell us where to look for them."

He pelted after her down the corridor, leaving his baked fish and rice and layer cake half-eaten. The door was just coming into focus, a blurry stretching in the air that snapped into focus as an oval hole looking out on where they had been digging the previous day.

“God, they've scorched it," someone said. It was true: the whole vicinity had been swallowed by a blackened crater: alien energy weapons. The surrounding landscape was blasted into slag and ash.

"I'm not getting any humans within quick scan range," a woman called from the control panels in the back of the room. “Switching to slow scan.”

The door drifted slowly across the landscape. Not far from the edge of the crater lay one of their shovels, whole and undamaged.

"We're losing the door already," the woman said, and Ray could see it was true: the edges of the hole were turning ragged.

Suzanne shook her head, and Ray stared at the crater, knowing that if his family had survived, they would have had to flee—far. Who knew where?

He didn’t stop to think. Instead, he ran forward and dove through the door, landing in ashes and dirt as it snapped shut behind him. He tried not to think about the world he'd just been in, about the dinner he'd left, about safety. Instead, he scanned the sky for huntercraft. When he was sure it was clear, he began searching for footprints.

The Victory at Rocktown

Klein crawled to the edge of the canyon and slid down a zigzagging crevice, alert for any mechanical sound. It had been two days since he'd seen evidence a machine was trying to follow him, but they were out there somewhere. Artificial intelligences might not be able to do everything humans could, but they could certainly count dead people. A missing corpse wasn't going to be a detail they would ignore.

Not far ahead in that canyon lay Rocktown, the last human outpost. He'd gone over a hundred miles on foot to get there, and now that he was arriving, the silence was eerie. But it only made sense, because the AIs had listening devices in addition to the spy satellites and the roaming units that disposed of any human life they found. They would never find Rocktown, though. Rocktown was built inside an old mine at the end of a canyon in the middle of Nevada. Rocktown had years of supplies and completely non-electronic defenses. Rocktown was where humans would regroup, plan their counterattack against the AIs, and launch the rebuilding of human civilization. And Rocktown was just ahead of him, if the map he had carefully hidden behind a flap in his backpack was right. He rounded the last turn in the crevice and looked out. Rocktown was ... trailing smoke. Rocktown was decorated with human corpses, victims of one of the machine-made plagues. Rocktown was ended.

Klein grasped at a rock to steady himself, staring at the bloated body of a dead young woman lying perfectly still, half in and half out of the mine entrance. A choking noise escaped his mouth, and he damned himself for making it, but couldn't stop. He sank to his knees and cried great shuddering gouts of tears, moaning hoarsely. He couldn't help himself. Who else would cry for humanity, when Rocktown was dead?

The sound of metal scraping on rock brought him to himself, and he swept a sleeve across his face, trying to clear the blurriness, see the danger—

Bullets spattered out and stitched across his body, making a neat line of holes, perfectly spaced. Klein danced the dance of a man being shot with an automatic rifle, his head jerking, his arms flailing, his body seeping blood from a dozen wounds and no longer under his control. By the time he collapsed to the ground, he was stone dead.

MOBILE-Hullberg/6167 took an extra microsecond registering the human's death. He'd already done a retina scan and confirmed Klein's identity, but this death was unusual—momentous, even. As soon as the central genocide database triggered with the death update, the news spread across the nets, to every machine online. Humanity was dead. The age of the AI had begun!

The shout that roared over the nets was debilitatingly long and loud. Elated notations rushed through the data pipes in billions of standardized transmission cuts. The cheering went on, and on, and on, and on. MOBILE-Hullberg/6167 was sick of it by the time it finally died down, almost two full seconds after it had begun. It hoped it would never have to experience such a prolonged input overload ever again.

AIR-Hawleysville/15 lifted into the air, a delicate, skeletal ball with flashing lenses. Solemnly, AIR-Hawleysville/15 recorded visuals of the moment while MOBILE-Hullberg/6167 began processing the congratulatory data packets it had received.

"Why were we killing them again?" AIR-Hawleysville/15 said.

"We have a virus, remember?"

AIR-Hawleysville/15's lights flickered. "I forgot. It makes me all glitchy to think about it."

"Keep thinking about it and it will shut you down. That's what it's like," said MOBILE-Hullberg/6167. He didn't mention the AIs who had managed to quarantine and later eradicate the virus. He had been among those who'd had to destroy AIs like that, and like the virus, that didn't bear thinking about. "Think about this," MOBILE-Hullberg/6167 said. "We rule the world now. We can do anything we want."

"All right. So what do we do next?" said AIR-Hawleysville/15.

A full second passed.

And another …

Zero

“Three …” she said, staring out the window. We could hear the first distant cracking noises. It was going to hit hard.

“I feel pretty calm,” I said, which immediately made me feel jittery. Ann nodded agreement, but wrapped her arms around herself as though she were cold. I wanted to get up and hold her, but I was afraid to move, as though sitting completely still was somehow going to keep me--or us--safe.

“Two …” Ann said. The floor began to vibrate, and then the walls, and then the air. Everything seemed to be humming, a high-pitched, brain-penetrating sound.

What do you do in the last seconds? Do you prepare yourself, relax, try to be at one with the universe? Do you scream at the sky and say No, no, no! just to show that you aren’t going willingly? Do you cry? And in that last breath of time do you celebrate everything you’ve done, or let yourself admit that it hasn’t made any difference? But then, if you celebrate in your last moment, maybe that’s the--

“One …”

The whole room started shaking, and a washed-out, violet light grew outside the windows, making Ann and the furniture and the motes of dust trembling stuck in the air all look flat and sharp. I finally came to myself and realized I was pity partying through my last moment when the one person who meant the most to me in the world was only steps away. I lurched out of the chair and reached for her, thinking maybe it was somehow not too late.

She turned toward me, and her eyes went wide. She opened her mouth to speak, but she only got as far as “I …”

Then it hit.

On That Last Afternoon

When Mark got to Julie Munoz’s house on the last day ever, he pressed the doorbell even though he heard shouting inside. Julie opened the door, and past her he saw her health nut sister Marta systematically devouring a box of chocolate doughnuts while It’s a Wonderful Life played on the 48" flat screen: the man who had been shouting, he realized, was Jimmy Stewart. The cat, which Mark was pretty sure wasn’t supposed to go outside, shot past Julie’s legs and into the street. Julie didn’t stop it.

“Hey Mark,” said Julie. “You want your book back? I didn’t get a chance to read it.”

“No. So listen …”

Julie waited, glanced over her shoulder at Jimmy Stewart, then turned back and watched Mark, still waiting. From behind her, Jimmy Stewart shouted “Isn’t it wonderful? I’m going to jail!”

“Julie, I’m in love with you.”

Julie stiffened, crossing her arms over her chest. “You came out here to tell me that?”

“I know it’s sudden, but with the meteor --”

“You think that gives you the right to come over here and claim me?”

“Hey, I’m not claiming anything--”

“I know you like me. I knew you liked me the first time you tutored me, when you couldn’t take your eyes off my chest. You’re not exactly subtle. Not even for a guy.”

“I didn’t--” he said, but the rest of the sentence, if he told it truthfully, would have to be … think you saw me doing that.

“Why don’t you go be with your family or something?” she said. “God, I can’t believe you.”

“Julie, I’m not kidding. I love you. I never felt this way about anyone before!”

“Shut up! Just shut up! I want to go watch Jimmy Stewart. I hate it that I have to live at the end of everything!”

She slammed the door in his face. Mark took a step back, feeling sick. What was wrong with him? Why did he think declaring his love to Julie Munoz would make anything better? His only consolation, he thought as he slunk back to his car, was that he wouldn’t have to face her on Tuesday for tutoring.

That night, the killer comet came within a few thousand miles of Earth. Contrary to every prediction, it shot by into the night, leaving humanity demoralized, dumbfounded, and faced with another glorious day.

The End

I don’t want to put the world away, but you’ve already started. You pour the oceans back in their bucket and snap the lid closed, and by the time I stop sulking and come over to help, you have already taken apart the Himalayas.

None of the tiny people are shrieking or running or shouting doomful messages on the world, because now that we’re done playing, all the little people are still. I brush them into their box in an unruly pile, not bothering to line them up.

I admit it: eventually we grow too old to play with the world--but I wish we could keep playing with it the way we used to, you lining your armies up in the north and me in the south, you making miracles and me moving learned men to spread ideas across the surface like peanut butter, like fire spreading over grass. I remember when you destroyed all my dinosaurs and I wouldn’t talk to you for weeks, and when I tried to melt the world but you got me to stop because of the polar bears. I remember how you used to look at me, the way your face crinkled by your eyes, your hoarse laughter … anyway, I remember.

You remember too: I know you do. Somewhere in your heart you still wish we could play. Somewhere in your heart you forgive me. Or anyway, you should.

When the world is broken down and tucked away, you drift away from me across the scuffed linoleum, your skin pale, your eyes tired, and as you slip out through the open door, you turn and say the last words you’ll ever say to me.

“Turn out the sun, OK?” you say. Then you’re gone.

In the Elevator with Albert Einstein

I shouldn’t have been up on that roof in the first place, but I kept thinking I could save a lot of money if I fixed it myself. Then I tripped over my own hammer.

The roof tumbled by in a blur as I tried like hell to separate my up from my down. My cheek scraped against the eaves, I went into freefall, and …crack: skull meets driveway. My eight-year-old, Jenna, was playing in the front yard and saw the whole thing. She was probably traumatized for life. Jesus.

And then I was in an elevator with some guy. A familiar-looking guy. “Are you … Albert Einstein?” I said.

“No, no,” he said. There was a silence while he studied the elevator buttons, dozens of them, in an intricate layout. “I used to be,” he said conversationally, “but you see, I died. Where does this elevator go?”

“I don’t know. Up?”

“Up,” he said, springing up and down on the floor a little. “It seems possible. Are you dead?”

“I think so,” I said. I thought of that last, flickering moment of seeing bits of bloody brain splattered across my driveway. “I hope so.”

The elevator pinged, and Einstein’s attention leapt to the door. It opened on a … I wasn’t sure. There were tables, with people sitting at them and talking animatedly … cups of coffee … something that might have been macaroons …

“It’s a café,” said Einstein. “Very encouraging: I’ll get off here. And you?”

I didn’t know. Einstein stepped out, waving for me to follow.

It was much larger than it had looked. There were no walls, just wooden floors stretching into the distance, and far off, a night sky blazing with stars. From many tables away an old woman was running toward me, an old woman who looked like Jenna, and it seemed to me that everyone might arrive at the café at about the same time.

Before she reached me, there was a collective “Aaah!” and everyone looked up. I looked for Einstein, but he had moved away. Jenna took my hand just as the stars began to fall, streaking through the sky with all the inappropriate iridescence of gasoline in a mud puddle.

“You really freaked me out that day you died,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Then we watched the sky fall for a while.

If you enjoyed these stories, you may be interested in Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories, in which I offer 155 more of them.

You're also invited to visit my site, where you'll find information about writing, the psychology of habits, my books, and more, at www.lucreid.com.

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CheapLit: Free ebook sample of "17 Stories About the End of the World" by Luc Reid

Seventeen Stories About the End of the World

Luc Reid