Every 30 million years, the sun’s orbit around the core of the milky way causes the solar system to pass through the spiral arms of the galactic plane; within these arms, in contrast to the emptiness of deep space, lie the vast clouds of loose cosmic matter from which comets are born. Billions of these objects are captured by the sun’s gravitational field during its oscillation through the spiral arms, ranging in size from the tiniest dust mote to objects the size of our own moon. In their inert state, between the outgassings that give the comet its distinctive tail, these can be some of the blackest objects in the solar system, reflecting as little as 4 percent of the sun’s light.
It was during one such period that the apocalypse took place. The collision happened almost without warning, the object having only been detected half an hour before impact. Astronomers at the obscure mountain observatory of ---- elected to say nothing. The comet crashed into the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, instantly sending half its volume into the atomsphere as water vapour, drowning those who did not succumb to earthquakes and tsunamis. Most of those who did survive, and they were few, were soon disheartened and died out, much in the way indigenous societies are devastated by the swift destruction of ways of life they have known for millennia. In any case, dense fogs rendered agriculture and hunting almost impossible.
The exception were the bog dwellers of remote northern Europe. A hardy people, used to sodden atmospheric conditions and marginal existence, they hardly noticed the apocalypse.
*
Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that the apocalypse was staged. Humankind, in its instatable desire for drama, tragedy, and excitement, had reached the point where it became necessary to plan and stage a vast apocalypse. This concept, once introduced, proved wildly popular - although at least initially, it was not without its opponents, who compared it to the lottery: millions disappointed, a handful ravaged by their new found bounty. But like the lottery, the apocalypse somehow resurrected the previously dead concept of hope.
After many intrigues and skirmishes, control of the apocalypse was put in the hands of an international consortium, which in turn delegated local responsibilities to a multitude of associate directors and their subordinates in an attempt to ensure each member of the populace performed their role correctly. It resembled nothing so much as a vast bureaucracy. Computer projections were used to plot out the event - the consortium claimed this was to ensure ensure fairness, but in all likelihood it was due to the superior creativity inherent in computer solutions. The results of these projections were naturally not released to the public except in the form of highly selective trailers for the actual event - these only served to generate endless rumours and speculation, which is merely another way of saying that public interest was intense. People attended the endless rehearsals with great enthusiasm, even though they had little idea of the overarching plot.
In private, however, the architects of the apocalypse were deeply disturbed by the computer projections - no matter how the machines were reprogrammed, no matter how the data was changed, the results were always the same: an empty, barren, sodden planet sparsely populated by tiny bands of mute bog dwellers. No less disturbing was the projected fate of the computers themselves as crude blocks of animal fat containing in their molecular structure almost infinite knowledge. These were to be carted about the deserted landscape by the bogdwellers for no discernible purpose.
When the fateful day arrived, the apocalypse went off without a hitch. There were those who wondered how the consortium had managed to lay on a comet, or even whether the entire episode was a random event that the consortium had used to create the necessity of its own being. But in any case, it hardly mattered.
*
In actual fact, there was no apocalypse. The majority of humankind simply decided to up and leave, and like many great societies (the Maya, the Etruscans, the Anastazi) left behind no reason for having done so. It would be perhaps more accurate to describe it as a mass migration, but a mass migration to a sister world, a world that overlaps this one almost exactly, but contains within it an unbearably irresistible attraction, some infinite promise that cannot possibly be described or communicated except by direct experience, a direct experience that transforms a person so completely as to preclude the possibility of ever returning to the world which one formerly knew to communicate it to those who have not undergone it. Imagine the mass exodus if a device were created by which that which could not be communicated could be communicated. Perhaps such a vehicle might resemble a block of lard.
Why then the apocalypse? Perhaps it is just a rumour, a myth left behind by the survivors of some momentous change that occurred in the distant past, like the biblical flood. Certainly the mute bogdwellers reveal nothing of the events that led to their current condition.
*
In a certain sense, it is irrelevant to speculate on the origins of the bogdwellers because they have become free of the tyranny of history. For this reason traditional written and spoken languages have been abandoned in favour of obscure non-hierarchical acts; in the grand scheme of things, the moving of a stone from a bleak hillside to a gloomy valley a long distance hence has more significance than that of a stupendous invention or the invasion of one territory by its neighbour or even than that of the apocalypse itself. Within this schemata, the pursuit of personal comfort or happiness are unknown, and thus so is too is crime and evil. It could be said that the the bleak world of the bogdwellers is an eden, a paradise, a return to man’s natural state before the fall, but this would fail to portray the almost infinite darkness that permeates the brooding silences of their world. In fact, the bogdwellers resemble nothing so much as a people waiting for the apocalypse to be visited upon them, left mute in the face of its inexorable descent. Following on from these observations, it becomes impossible to say whether these men with their blocks of lard are those who have attained that knowledge which cannot be communicated and found it dark, or those who have rejected it and are condemned to carry its vehicle as their penance. But perhaps it does not matter: free of linear thoughts and actions, of the wheel of cause and effect, the bogdwellers are masters of time, and thus it is unimportant whether the apocalypse is before them or behind them, in the future or the past. Rather, like the gain and loss of momentous knowledge, the realization of great desire or the loss of all hope, they bear the weight of the apocalypse in each moment they are alive; each rock they move, each lard block they carry, simultaneously causes and averts the coming catastrophe that is now past.
