‘Knock knock!’ called a voice.

The old man at the desk looked up over the rim of his glasses from the papers he was reading and stroked his long, untidy, grey beard. He was just about to speak when the door to the office creaked open, revealing a tall figure with long slender wings, dressed in what appeared to be a flowing robe. It stood momentarily in the doorway framed in the yellow light from the corridor, a semi-translucent flickering blue shape like the vision of an angel, before striding purposefully into the room.

‘There’s no point in calling ‘knock knock’ and then just opening the door and coming in anyway is there?’ said the old man rather scoldingly.

The new arrival looked uncomfortable, became a little more solid, and tried to fold its wings up a bit closer to its body. It was carrying some kind of tube in its hand, which it attempted to conceal behind its back.

‘No, er, sorry,’ he replied nervously. ‘It’s just something I’ve got used to doing. People don’t usually expect me to knock, you see.’

The disapproving gaze said everything.

‘Yes, well. Come and sit down Number One.’

‘Thank you, Sir,’ replied the apparition, shuffling awkwardly towards the ornate wooden desk.

‘So, it’s about this latest report you’ve sent me,’ said the old man, waving the document in the air between their faces before placing it on the desk in front of him. ‘This world that we apparently forgot about.’

‘Yes, Sir. Although there’s nothing actually wrong with the world itself. The problem is the people in it.’

The old man looked down at the title on the front page.

‘It’s a very thorough report, I have to say, but I don’t really understand it.’

‘Well, it’s very simple Sir,’ said the figure, dragging an empty chair away from the desk with a screech and sitting down with a thud. ‘They’ve always liked to fight and squabble and kill each other, but now it’s really becoming an embarrassment.’ He placed his hands around the edges of the seat and bounced up and down on the chair, clattering the wooden legs on the stone floor as he edged it forwards until his knees were almost touching the front panel.

The old man shot him a fiercely disapproving stare. If looks could kill he would not only be dead now, but his lifeless body would be nailed to the opposite wall.

‘Please don’t do that Number One,’ said the old man, trying to sound kind but failing. ‘So… pray continue…’

‘Ah well Sir, the last hundred years or so have proved very difficult for them, and they seem to be intent on destroying their entire world.’

The old man sucked the end of his pen and thought about this briefly. He recalled seeing similar behaviours in other worlds. It was nothing new.

‘That’s nothing new,’ he replied, dismissively. ‘Life is life. It kills things, and sometimes it kills itself. It kills to eat. It kills to reproduce, and it kills because dying is the only way to evolve. That’s why we made it, to increase entropy.’

‘Very true Sir,’ said the figure softly, in the way that a mother might comfort a confused child. ‘We know life gets very destructive from time to time and feels the need to destroy things, but it doesn’t usually develop a desire to destroy everything.’

The old man was riffling through the pages of the report, pausing now and again to examine something more closely over the rim of his glasses.

‘Isn’t this that odd world with those creatures in it that don’t belong there?’ He paused and looked up. ‘The ones like hairless apes?’

‘Indeed, it is Sir. The one that we seeded with human beings. Most of the world is too cold for them, the rest of it is too hot for them, and they wear clothes all the time anyway because they’re embarrassed to be alive. It didn’t get off to a good start if you recall.’

‘I see. I do vaguely remember seeing something about that in your previous reports. But why do they want to fight each other? Didn’t we make them all the same?’

‘Yes Sir… and No Sir,’ came the cryptic reply. ‘We originally made them all the same, but they became bored and started to kill each other. So, we got rid of them and made new ones that were all different, but then they started to kill each other because they weren’t all the same.’

The old man appeared confused, and somewhat irritable at the idea.

‘But I thought they were “technological” now,’ he replied, holding his hands up at eye level and making little squiggles in the air which were supposed to represent quotation marks.

‘That’s true Sir, and that is the other problem. If you’ll look at section two of the report Sir, beginning about halfway through, you’ll see what I mean.’

The old man dropped the report onto the table with a dull thump, raising a flurry of dust motes which sparkled in the sunbeams that shone through the little round window on the wall behind his head.

‘How about you just explain it to me?’ he replied.

‘It’s very simple. They’re buffoons, Sir. They elect leaders who lie to them because they don’t want to hear the truth. Twenty percent of them own eighty percent of the world. They won’t share anything with each other. They increasingly demand their privacy, however everybody wants to tell everyone else what to do instead of minding their own business,’ he wailed, breathlessly. ‘There are countries where there’s no food and water, so their children die in thousands, but the inhabitants still make more. No-one knows why. They don’t take any responsibility for their own actions. Everything is always someone else’s fault or someone else’s problem. The list goes on, and it doesn’t get any better,’ he scolded. ‘The other animals are fed up with them Sir!”

The old man was trying to look interested. ‘Who cares?’ he ventured, with a dismissive wave of his hand.

‘Well that’s the whole point Sir, nobody cares. As you say, they are highly technologically advanced. They have portable communication devices that allow anybody in the world to talk with almost anybody else in the world. They have flying machines. They can send rockets to other planets. They can turn sunlight and wind into electricity. Truly magnificent, Sir! You would think it would be a perfect world.’

The old man appeared thoughtful.

‘Sounds pretty good to me. Don’t their communication devices solve all the conflicts, I mean if they can just talk to anybody they want it seems like that they could resolve their differences.’

‘I agree Sir,’ replied the slender creature. ‘But they use them to play games on, or to send each other silly jokes.’

The old man fixed him with an almost catatonic gaze.

‘It’s probably best if we don’t get involved,’ he said eventually.

‘But don’t you see Sir?’ replied Number One, wringing his hands in utter dismay. ‘Don’t you see the problem? In the old days people used to behave. There were rules to follow, or we smited them.  The inhabitants were expected to have respect for each other and for their world. But now everybody thinks that having freedom gives them a right to do whatever they like, and nobody cares about anything except themselves. Someone should have been there decades ago, to make sure that everything developed properly. The world doesn’t work anymore. It’s all a terrible mess and it’s probably our fault!’

He looked pleadingly at the old man. ‘What are we going to do about it?’

‘Why don’t we just get rid of it?’ he replied. ‘Doesn’t it have a self-destruct sequence?’

‘Of course, Sir!’ replied Number One. This was the awkward bit that he hadn’t been looking forward to. He shuffled uncomfortably in his chair and made a conscious effort to tuck the tube he was holding further behind his back. ‘We never made anything that didn’t have a self-destruct sequence!’

The old man began to smile.

‘Oh, that’s grand then. That solves our problem,’ he said, starting to look happier. ‘It’s time we had a good apocalypse. The Grandchildren love a day out. They’re getting bored and I’ve been looking forward to taking them somewhere nice this weekend.’

He glanced across at the semi-translucent figure, whose outline was now beginning to flicker again. Everyone enjoyed a well-planned apocalypse. It was good to see that someone else was excited by the idea as well. He sat up straighter, as a storyteller might when about to narrate a particularly intense scene, and continued. ‘We’ll start with the big drum roll, and the flashes of lightning. Clouds will tumble across the sky and boil away into the sunset.’ He made a wide, sweeping motion with his arms for effect, and looked at Number One with a face like a thunderstorm. ‘And then,’ he roared, ‘the leaves will rustle, and the ground will begin to shake. The forests will tremble, and the armies of squirrels will come riding across the land on the backs of millions of pigs and devour everything in sight…’

He paused, wide-eyed, to take a breath. ‘The children always love it, especially if the squirrels have their little goggles on!’

‘Ah, yes. Well. There are two problems with that Sir?’ replied Number One rather sheepishly, losing some of his colour and becoming a little more solid again.

The old man appeared somewhat deflated.

‘Why do there always have to be two problems? Can’t you ever just come here with one problem?’

‘Horsemen Sir,’ he replied, ignoring the rhetorical questions.

‘Horsemen,’ repeated the old man.

‘Yes Sir. You see I was looking at the documentation before I came. It’s all actually in the back of the report Sir if you care to… er…’ He caught the old man’s withering gaze. ‘Maybe not. Anyway. It’s a very old world, one of the first prototypes, and the creator had a kind of penchant so to speak, for literary dramatic effect, so he specified that the end of the world would come in the form of horsemen.’

‘Horsemen?’ repeated the old man again, weakly.

‘Yes Sir, men on horses. Four of them. But not really,’ he added quickly, seeing the expression. ‘It’s an exercise in symbolism, so that people can imagine what will happen. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse you see – War, Famine, Pestilence and Death – the harbingers of doom to destroy all life and bring about the day of reckoning. A sort of parable but without the moral undertones.’

‘I see,’ said the old man after a moment’s thought. ‘Doesn’t sound as spectacular as armies of squirrels and millions of pigs, does it?’

‘No Sir, that’s why we changed it in the later models,’ he said. ‘Feedback is a wonderful tool in marketing and product development. And er, no drum roll either I’m afraid.’

‘No drum roll?’

‘No, Sir. A trumpet Sir. The Archangel Gabriel must sound a big blart on his trumpet!’

The old man thought about this for a few seconds.

‘With the mute in or out?’ he asked.

‘I believe with the mute out Sir,’ came the uncertain reply. ‘It doesn’t exactly specify…’

‘Otherwise it would just sound like an elephant fart, wouldn’t it?’

‘Er… I suppose so. I have to confess Sir that I’ve never actually heard a trumpet with a mute in it.’

The old man considered the implications of this revelation for a moment, before appearing to rally somewhat.

‘Never mind, it still shows promise though. Just re-imagine it as you described! The trumpet will sound, beginning with a sigh, as a whisper of wind might drift through the trees. Then the blast will commence. War will appear on his mighty horse and rear up against the darkening sky, and the armies of the world will charge. Empires will crumble and fall, cities will burn…’ He glanced across at Number One, who appeared somewhat apprehensive, and wasn’t flickering with excitement this time.

‘Yes!’ he continued, in an attempt to instil some additional drama into the new vision, ‘I can see it! The smoke of destruction will fill the cities and Death will stalk the earth. From the festering bodies buried in the rubble Pestilence will emerge on a scale hithertofore unimagined in the history of the world. The sick will crawl to their beds and holes to die in agony!’ He thumped his fists on the table with glee. ‘The light from the fires on the horizons will surpass even the glow of the sun! The mountains will crumble, and the seas will boil into the sky. Terror and destruction will ravage the earth and its creatures! Futile screams for the saviour of their souls will be heard for a thousand miles!’

Their eyes met and the old man’s gaze slowly fell towards his assistant’s fidgeting hands. ‘What’s that you’ve got, and why are you trying to hide it?’ he said, sternly. ‘Have you just graduated again in some new discipline that I know nothing about?’

‘Oh! This?’ replied his assistant, producing the tube he had been attempting to conceal inexpertly throughout the meeting. He looked at it rather awkwardly as if he’d never seen it before. ‘I thought it might come to this,’ he said slowly, pointing it directly at the old man’s face. ‘So, I brought some biscuits.’

#

The two figures sat in silence, broken only by an occasional slurping sound as the old man attempted to recover an errant fragment of soggy biscuit from the bottom of his teacup with a spoon.

‘But you know Sir,’ said Number One eventually. ‘It isn’t going to work.’

‘How so Number One?’

‘Well Gabriel doesn’t work here anymore Sir.’

‘Ah. I thought I hadn’t seen him around for a while.’

‘He ran off with the sandwich lady. We haven’t seen either of them for weeks now. Finance have taken them off the payroll Sir.’

‘I see,’ said the old man. ‘Well, it happens I suppose. Has someone appointed a new Archangel?’

‘Yes Sir.’

‘Good. We’ll send him then. First time out, eh? Nothing like a nice bit of heralding to get into the feel of the job.’ He dunked another biscuit into his tea and sucked at it quickly before it disintegrated.

‘I’m afraid not sir. The documentation actually specifies a name. It says “…the Archangel Gabriel…”.’

The old man spread his hands out on the desk and tapped his fingers.

‘And I’m guessing the new Archangel isn’t also by happenchance called Gabriel?’

‘Er… No Sir.’

‘But he could go and play a trumpet, and nobody would know, would they? I mean, no-one who’s still alive has ever seen Gabriel. They’re not going to rush up to him and demand to see some identification before they allow themselves to be destroyed.’

‘Well, perhaps not Sir. Except we can’t find the trumpet. Gabriel must have taken it with him.’

The old man raised his head slowly towards the ceiling and closed his eyes. It was not unusual for him to sit through a period of intense frustration in this way. After a few moments his lips began to twitch and his eyes could be seen moving, as if living through some vivid scene in a nightmare.

‘Are you alright Sir?’

The old man’s eyes popped open, his face a mask of horror.

‘Yes. Thank you,’ he muttered, re-composing himself. ‘I was just trying to imagine what Gabriel could possibly be doing, perhaps even as we speak, with the sandwich lady and a trumpet.’ He sat upright in the chair and gave himself a shake. ‘Take some petty cash and go buy another trumpet. There must be some old trumpets in the charity shops!’

Number One looked momentarily terrified at the thought, before adopting one of his more exasperated expressions.

‘It’s not going to work Sir!’ he pleaded. ‘And I don’t think he can play one anyway.’

‘Well doesn’t the new Archangel possess any other musical talents?’

The slender figure twitched its wings in mounting frustration.

‘Yes Sir, he does. However, the scripture in this case is very specific. It calls for the end of the world to be heralded by the Archangel Gabriel sounding a mighty blast on his trumpet and, on hearing this, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will mount their steeds and ride out across the land.’

The old man was watching him impatiently.

‘It’s a highly stylised exercise in literary symbolism Sir. This is what they are waiting for. This has been the entire purpose of their existence since the time these beings were formed from the ethereal dust when the world itself was created. They are waiting for the time when the Archangel Gabriel appears in the sky and blows his trumpet. Nothing else will work, Sir.’ He fixed the old man with a solemn gaze. ‘The closing days that mark the end of the world cannot be heralded by Gary appearing in the sky playing the piano. And anyway, how would he get it there? I mean you can tuck a trumpet under your armpit, even when you’re flying, but a piano isn’t exactly transportable. We’d need to get three people and a chariot to move it, and then it would need tuning and…’

‘So, you’re saying we can’t destroy this world,’ interrupted the old man, finally beginning to accept the futility of his plan.

‘I don’t believe so Sir. Not without a lot of arguing and fighting and trouble. However, they’re doing a pretty good job of that by themselves.’

‘So maybe we just leave them alone, and they’ll do it for us.’

‘Could be Sir, but we’re supposed to be looking after them, helping to guide them, teaching them how to live a worthwhile and rewarding life. That was the original promise, and we can’t do that now because they don’t care anymore, and they hate each other. But then the original idea was that we could put them out of their misery whenever we wanted, and we can’t do that now either, so maybe the deal is broken on both sides.’ His outline glowed a little with excitement. ‘But do you think the idea of just leaving them all to kill each other will meet with God’s approval?’

The old man thought for a moment.

‘The one thing you should have learned in all the years you’ve been here Number One, is that you should never ask an important question like that unless you know in advance what the answer is going to be.’

‘So…?’

‘Let’s just not ask her,’ replied the old man.

An expression of smugness crept over the assistant’s face.

‘Good plan Sir, if I do say so myself. But what about entertainment for the weekend?’

‘I’ve been thinking about that. It’s a long time since we went to a decent live show and it’s very disappointing that this won’t work. I’d got myself quite excited about it. Go and fetch the list of worlds that we don’t want any more Number One’.

‘Ah yes, Sir,’ he replied, pushing back the chair with a squeak before standing up and shuffling his wings. ‘Armies of squirrels and millions of pigs Sir? Mountains melting into boiling seas? People screaming and wailing?’

‘See what’s available.’

‘Yes Sir, I’ll go and look. Another biscuit Sir?’

‘Thank you Number One. Oh, and while you’re at it, pop down to maintenance and see whether they know anyone who owns a chariot and can tune a piano. I still have a feeling it’s worth paying a visit to that world,’ he chuckled. ‘The look on their faces will be priceless, regardless of whether it works or not!’

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