1 Missed Call

You have

1 Missed call from PAUL

1 New Voicemail

Diane looked at her phone for a long time before dialling the voicemail.

You have one new voicemail. Press 1 to –

She pressed 1.

“Hi babe. I’m stuck in traffic. I’ll try and make it up on the way, but hold off on dinner for a bit, will you?”

Press 1 to hear the message again. Press 2 to save it. Press 3 to delete it.

She paused, and then hesitantly pressed the 2 button before finally sorrow and relief overtook her and she burst into tears.

The hospital had called her on the landline, and she hadn’t seen the missed call until after they confirmed Paul’s death. The car had been hit by a truck less than a mile away from the house.

Her first thought, even though it sickened her in a way, was that she was free.

Free from the last fifteen years of marriage. Free from the manipulation. Free from the verbal abuse. Free from the disparaging remarks about her appearance. Free from the violence that he subjected her to every time he got drunk, and free from the inadequate apologies the next day.

She supposed she’d loved him but that feeling had been overtaken by fear a long time ago.

She went through the motions of a funeral, and the proper show of the bereaved wife and then moved to a new job and new life.

One night, she called up her voicemail. She decided to hear his voice one last time before deleting it forever.

You have one saved message. Press 1 to –

She pressed 1.

“Babe? Babe, I don’t know what’s going on. It hurts so much. I keep saying hello to you, but you don’t respond. What’s going on, baby? We can work this out.”

She deleted the message with a hand that hadn’t been shaking a minute before.

She didn’t sleep that night.

A week later, she checked her phone again. She must have been dreaming.

You have one saved message. Pre –

“Why aren’t you answering me, Diane? I said sorry last time. I meant it. Why aren’t you answering? Baby?”

She deleted it and threw the phone down.

The messages didn’t stop. He was always confused and always slightly scared. They came through about once a week at most, and once a month at least.

She changed phones, but they kept turning up. Changed numbers, to no avail.

Eventually, she met Mark. A nice man, this time. A quiet one. He respected her. Loved her.

The messages changed.

“Who the fuck is he, Diane? I saw you with him. Saw you. I will beat you until you can’t fucking walk.”

She stopped owning a phone then. Moved in with him. It worked.

Until he was hit by a car.

She was given his belongings by the hospital. Including his phone.

She looked at the screen.

You have

1 missed call from PAUL

1 new voicemail.

The Secretary - Short Story

The most important thing you need to know about me is that “secretary” is just a job title. I have levels of clearance within this government that are higher than most people know exist. When the Prime Minister wants information regarding the department I work in, he calls me directly and it is down to my discretion whether or not I tell him.

My predecessor committed suicide before she turned fifty. So did her predecessor. I didn’t ask any further back than that. This job has unique benefits but also unique pressures. This is why I am retiring at a young age. I do not intend to kill myself. So I am training my replacement and then I am walking away.

I was psychologically evaluated by the age of fifteen. I had seduced my headmaster to improve my grades, and was implicated in his divorce. Due to my age, it should have been something which he was seen as being more responsible for, but for the fact that I was caught sleeping with his temporary replacement two months later in an attempt to improve my chemistry grade. Add in a little matter of compulsive theft, and my mother became concerned and sought professional help.

I maintain that she felt threatened by me. By the time I was a teenager, I had a way with men that she had never been able to compete with. Perhaps if she had been more concerned about the way my stepfather had attempted to assert his dominance over me, it may have been more useful.

It was actually a relief when I was diagnosed as sociopathic. It made sense to me. I was also described as being intensely manipulative, which I didn’t particularly see as a bad thing.

I got into trouble again when I was in my late teens. My ambition was not high, and my social opportunities weren’t many. I’d become involved with gangs, and ended up playing two East London gangs against each other. I had a rival, who had tried to spread rumours about me, and they almost got me killed. I was more efficient in my response.

I was told my mother wanted to see me. I didn’t care. I was old enough now to be sentenced as an adult, and had my own problems to deal with.

It was around then that she came to see me. The most amazing woman I ever met. Katherine Pettaval.

“We’ve been watching you for some time,” she said.

“How?” I asked.

“We work closely with psychologists who deal with children and teenagers.”

“Why?”

“So they can alert us to promising recruits.”

I looked her up and down. She looked strict and harsh at first, but when she smiled at me, I felt accepted for the first time. I felt an aching for her in every part of my body and my soul.

“Promising in what way?”

“I’ll teach you to be like me.” Katherine said.

I wanted that more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life.

“What do I have to do?” I asked.

“You sign your life to us, and we’ll compensate you. You’ll be educated, trained and given every benefit the British Government can. Then you do what we tell you to do. Primarily, you’ll be taking care… very particular care… to one of our biggest assets.”

I expressed misgivings about working for “the establishment” like that. Well, I was young.

She laughed. “The establishment is very different when you’re on this side of it. Believe me. I’m offering you the Golden Ticket.”

I accepted.

The training took years, but I came out of it as someone who could walk into any meeting room in the Civil Service and take control of it. I came out of it as someone who could convince someone to do what I wanted them to, and also have them utterly convinced that it was their idea in the first place.

I raced up the ladder, and excelled at every part of my role.

Eventually, I was called in by Katherine, as I had been judged ready to learn about their secrets. Only Katherine and the head of the Service, who everyone called “Mother” were there.

I was handed a file. It was thick. “This,” Mother said, “is our secret weapon.”

“We find suitable agents,” Katherine said. “We then manipulate them to see the world in a certain way.”

“In our way.” Mother said.

“In our way, yes.” Katherine agreed. “It means that their life completely revolves around the job that we send them on. Everything they think, everything they want… their reaction to everything around them has been planned to the smallest detail.”

“You mean you brainwash them, ma’am?” I asked. It was impertinent, but I knew when to cut through the bullshit.

Mother looked at Katherine for a moment. A brief glance that most would miss. But, as I said, I was trained very well. “Yes,” Katherine said. “That’s exactly what we do.”

I opened the file, to see pictures of a man. He was tall, muscular and slim, and most would think of him as being attractive. I hated him at first glance. I didn’t know why. That was just the first though. There were others too.

“There is a down side to this kind of programming, though,” Katherine said.

“They don’t live long,” Mother said. “They’re put into very, very high risk situations. We trust them implicitly to use their own judgement, as they’ll use the judgement we train them to.”

“How do you find suitable candidates?” I asked.

“The same way we found you,” she said. “Psychological profiling. Both of these roles require very… specific criteria.”

Katherine elaborated. “Part of the way we do this is to have very specifically designated relationships. Mother becomes the most important thing in the subject’s life, and pleasing Mother is always the one thing they strive to do.”

“So where do we come into it?”

She smiled, and while I still felt it deep inside, I’d been taught to contain it now. “We’re the life they can never have.”

“Is that important?”

“It’s vital. They’ve got to have the dream that this is just temporary, and that they can some day give this up. You’ve got to be the one they’re in love with.”

I tilted my head to the side. “How much of a relationship are we talking about here?”

“Oh, don’t worry. You won’t actually have to do anything.” She laughed. “They’re designed to see women purely as something to rescue, kill or fuck. They’re users by design.”

“And we’re different?”

“Oh yes. You’re the one he never gets to fuck. You’re the one he never gets to have. You’re the one who always promises more. You’re the relationship he desperately wants, but never gets.”

“And that works?” I asked.

“It’s worked beautifully so far. We’ve given them the appropriate memories, so their upbringing, their defining experiences….they’re all planted.”

I continued looking through the file. “All the rest got killed on duty. How come this one,” I asked, pointing, “committed suicide off-duty? Did something go wrong?”

“He fell in love with someone.” Mother said. “We cut ties after she died.”

“He begged to come back,” Katherine said. “But the programming had been broken. We actually incorporated the dead wife into their back-story. It worked, as it gave them something extra to obsess over. It actually made them better agents.”

I laughed. It wasn’t intended as spiteful. It just seemed so absurd.

I wasn’t able to be part of the meetings with him. I had to content myself with watching camera footage in another room of meetings, in order to learn about him. The room itself had to be perfectly maintained. The placement of everything, the smells, the visuals…it all had to feed into the programming. Complement it.

I hated him. Immediately, I hated him. The way he carried himself, the way he spoke. I couldn’t define it, but I hated him.

I told Katherine about it when she came to see me afterwards.

“I hate him too,” she said. “It isn’t important. Don’t think of him as a person. He’s a weapon. That’s all. Think of him as machinery.”

I watched those meetings until he died a few years later, shot through the head while on assignment.

Mother told me, also letting me know that the next one would be ready for assignments in two years time, and that he would be mine, not Katherine’s.  I was given a codename.

The next time I met Katherine, she was distraught.

“I miss him.” She said. “I wasn’t expecting to. I hated him so much, but so much of my life was spent being his life. I was the closest thing to a relationship that he ever had, and he was the closest thing that I ever had.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She killed herself a year later. I had somewhat expected it.

My assignments went mostly well. I actually oversaw a few of them over the years. Bringing them in, being the woman they wanted to spend their life with, smiling at them and flirting at them, and loving them with my eyes and sending them to die.

It takes a toll. Of course it does. So I finally got to select and train my replacement.

I sit back in the same room I did when I watched Katherine. I feel pride watching her.

I see her preparing. Practicing the surprised turn from the filing cabinet. A gasp with a perfectly rounded mouth, followed by the warmest smile you’ve ever seen since mine. Tits and teeth, darling.

The door opens, and he walks in. I watch the monitor carefully. This one doesn’t walk. He prowls, like an alpha male lion, all muscular brutality and lethal intent wrapped in a designer suit.

She hits it perfectly. The turn, the smile and the warmth. I see him fall in love with her.

“Hello James. M will be ready for you in just a minute.”

Short Story - The Happy Pills

Note - I've noticed an increased number of people finding this story by searching for 'pills to make you happy' or similar. This is a work of fiction, and not what you're looking for. If you are feeling particularly vulnerable, I strongly recommend you speak to The Samaritans (UK) or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (US). I hope this isn't taken as patronising, and I hope that you find whatever works best for you.

I bought my first packet of the Happy Pills two days after they became legal. I'd have bought them on the day itself, but they'd sold out everywhere. And walking down the street, you couldn't really tell. People were still working, were still rushing, but there was a slight change. Barely noticeable at first, but the closer you looked...the more you noticed that there was a bounce in more peoples steps. There were slightly more smiles on faces, slightly more animated conversation. The mood was almost infectious. 

The Happy Pills fired synapses in your brain that, normally, needed stimuli in order to fire up hard enough to push your mood. The kind of stimuli that would be caused by those few hours spent in the park, basking in the good weather with no pressures at all. The kind of stimuli that would be caused by totally unexpected, really good sex. No, you didn't feel like you'd been doing those things - but you got the same kind of good mood that I can only describe by relating it to euphoria.

It wasn't euphoria though. Euphoria tends to lead to you losing some element of control. It doesn't always, but it can do. The Happy Pills didn't. They had absolutely no negative side-effects whatsoever. They just put you in as good a mood as you could possibly be in. That was it.   

At the time, Karen and I were having problems. We'd been married for eight years, and it's fair to say that the passion had long, long since died. Sex had been non-existant for the three years prior, and it hadn't been much present after we became parents anyway. And while Karen and I were best friends as well as lovers, eight years of cabin fever were beginning to cause their problems. There was still love in our marriage, but it had been a long time since we were in love. We'd tried things to get the romance back into our lives, but it just wasn't happening.

And then the Happy Pills came out. We talked about it, about trying them. We thought they might help. And so, two days after the pills came out, we tried them. Both of us. And then we waited.

It wasn't something that happened immediately. It wasn't that noticeable, because it was subtle. We were sat talking, and after a few hours, we realised we were laughing more than we had done in a long time. It didn't seem artificial either. It was just like we'd remembered things that we liked about each other. It didn't sort everything, not immediately, but it was fun.

We took the pills daily. That weekend, we went out and just walked around Hyde Park for a few hours. It was the site of one of our first dates, and we hadn't done something like that for a long time. Just enjoyed each others company for the first time in years. The park was packed, but there was no hassle. Everyone was in a good mood.

The longer you took the pills, the more you noticed the change, and - conversely - the less it mattered. The pills had a way of just clarifying everything. It was like realising that, for the last however many years of your life, you'd been suffering from a constant migraine that finally lifted.

Within two years of the pill being launched in public, they were selling on a similar level as bread. Everybody bought them. And there were new kids turning eighteen every day, so it was an evergreen product too. A product base that was only growing.

It wasn't just Britain either. The Happy Pills were worldwide. And it was making a difference. It took a while for the wars to finish, but they did. Suddenly, religious and cultural differences stopped mattering. It was difficult to find the emotion necessary to kill someone when everyone was in a good mood.

Crime was down too. Not actually zero, but certainly at the lowest it had ever been. Perhaps it was because poverty wasn't as big an issue any more. People were happy, and didn't feel quite as much of a need to prove themselves through money any more. As a result, there were record amounts being given to charity. Although the pills made you happy, the happiness meant that people were more productive. People either found the joy that made them want the jobs they were in in the first place, or they felt more confident bout themselves, and went after the jobs they actually wanted. And rejections were a lot easier to deal with when you felt good.

And the sex. Oh God, the sex. It was amazing. And every time was good. Karen and I were back like we were in our first year of dating, rediscovering everything about each other. It was fun, it was happy.

Last year my mother died. She was in her late sixties, and she had died in surgery, in an attempt to remove a benign tumour. An infection led to her contracting an illness, and the illness killed her. The funeral was a beautiful affair, full of joy and love, as we all remembered everything that had been good about her as a person, and how much she enriched our lives. The only tears that day were tears of laughter. She would have loved it. We grieved. Of course we grieved, but it wasn't as important as remembering how wonderful her life had been.

The world had become a wonderful place. And not artificially either - the mood may have been caused by the pills, and maintained by them, but it wasn't just them. Once you were up and running, the pills just helped you keep to a certain level. The real highs were natural, and the real lows just didn't happen any more.

It was a utopia. A real utopia, right here on earth.

And then it ended.

We didn't realise that the synapses in the brain would wear out. We didn't realise that, one day, they would just stop working. It wasn't one day, all over the world or anything like that, but rather a little over six years after you started taking them.

Nobody realised for a while. The suicides of the original scientists, and the chairman of Abblexcon were puzzling, but nobody understood. They didn't tell us.

As a result, it took time for it to spread, and for people to realise what was happening. But all of a sudden, there were two classes in the world. There were those that were happy, and those that weren't. Those who had been poor in the past were still happy, since they were generally the last to start taking the pills. Those that were the first - those internet buyers - were the first large group to be affected.

There were murders. Lots of murders. There's nothing worse than watching other people constantly being happy when you're not. And there were a lot of suicides. The death toll, as it stands, is in the millions.

There are riots on the streets. Unhappiness and depression, and anger towards those that still were happy. Watching it happen was horrible, and we empathised, but we didn't understand what it felt like any more.

Until it happened to us. You remember how I told you that it felt like a migraine had suddenly been lifted? Imagine getting the migraine back, and realising that it was never, ever going to stop again.

Imagine spending the best six years of your life, and realising that the rest of your life is going to be spent living with the memory of all the good feelings, all the happiness, and realising that it's denied to you forever. Because you used a pill to burn out the part of your brain that makes you happy.

You can't understand, David. I don't expect you to understand, and I hope to God that you never understand. I need you to keep the next sentence in mind for the rest of your life. Never take them, no matter how good you're told they are. Because I love you, son, and I never want you to feel like I feel right now.

Your mother killed herself two hours ago. We had an argument and we fought. It's all my fault, and I love her, and I miss her, and I miss feeling like we used to feel, and I miss being who I was when I was with her, and I miss how much I loved her, and I miss how much she loved me. I miss my mother. I miss my wife. I will miss you so much.

My body will be upstairs, David. Don't look. Call the authorities, they have enough practice in dealing with it. Just know that it didn't hurt. And it's the only thing that can stop me feeling like this. From knowing how much I've lost.

You will never fully know how much I love you.

Your father.

Motion Blur

I was sitting in the pub, quietly sipping a pint of ale when Blur came in and sat at the table with me.

"Did you see it?" Damon asked, his eyes shining with an excitement that belied the aged skin around it.

"What, you guys at the Brits?" I asked. "I actually did. Well done, that was a good show."

"Yeah. Yeah, it was. And did you see that we're on the Olympics closing concert as well?" He asked, nudging Alex James.

"I did. Congratulations. You must be very excited."

"We are." he said. "We're totally excited. We're not messing around this time. No new stuff. Just wall to wall, balls out, classics."

I realised that I wasn't going to get to drink my ale in private, so I put it down and attempted to properly engage with the conversation.

"No new stuff?"

"None."

"I thought you wanted to write, like, new stuff all the time. Like opera."

A glimmer of sadness formed in his eyes, and he briefly looked like a little boy lost in a man's set of clothing. Much like Richard Hammond. "All I ever wanted was to speak to God," he said. "He gave me that longing."

Then he focused and the sadness was replaced with anger.

"No, not this time." he said.  "I didn't want to do it this time. The Olympics, they asked me if I would, right, but I didn't want to. Alex wants us to - "

Alex interrupted him. "I have this great idea for a new chorus. It goes 'Doo doo doo doo doooooooo....I'm loving it'".

"Shut up, Alex." Damon said. "But we're not doing it this time. We're concentrating on what works."

"That's good," I said, beginning to look for my nearest exit. Damon was looking a little bit manic.

"And do you know what the best thing is?" He asked.

"....no, Damon, I don't know what the best thing is."

"It means we win."

"You win?"

"Yeah," he said, nodding his head. "We win. You saw The Brits. You saw Noel Gallagher. Reduced to duetting with fucking Coldplay. He didn't even win Best Solo Male Artist."

"So?"

"It proves we were best. Nineteen Ninety Four, 'Country House' versus 'Roll With It'. We won then, but people thought we lost the war. Everyone was all 'oooh, Oasis, they're brilliant', but look at them now. Where are they now, eh? Nowhere, that's where."

There was a dangerous glint in his eyes that scared me.

"Do the rest of the band feel the same way?" I asked him.

"Who cares what the rest of the band felt?" he responded angrily. "Noel Gallagher, right,  didn't even win best solo artist, and then everybody cheered for us. We won. Like we should have won all the time."

"Damon," Alex said, "Wait. Think about this. If we lose all the anger at Oasis, we can just have fun again. We can project a nicer image, and maybe get corporate sponsorship, like McDonalds. And McDonalds is brilliant, isn't it Damon?"

"Shut it, cheese-fucker." Damon growled. I couldn't help but raise my eyebrows as Alex looked sadly at the ground.

"Maybe you're being a bit obsessive." I tried to say to Damon.

"Everyone's going to be saying how brilliant we are at the Olympics, while Noel Gallagher is sat outside with a piece of card saying 'I used to be relevant, why did I ever argue with Damon'. That's what he'll be doing. While I walk out as the fucking God of Brit-Pop."

"Look, you need to calm down" I said, as Damon continued to raise his voice.

"You know what my last concert is going to be? It's going to be us doing a concert on Noel Gallagher's grave. We're going to dance all over it and sing Song 2."

"I'm going to leave now," I said.

"Woo-hoo, Chris! Woo-Hoo."

As I left, Damon continued shouting "Woo-hoo", getting more and more out of breath.

Alex ran up after me. "Look, I just wanted to say..." he said. "...I don't fuck cheese. I just really like it."

"I know, Alex," I said. "I know."

The Warning (Short Story)

'On the twenty second of November, at twelve forty five, an earthquake will hit Prague. It will kill two hundred and fifty thousand people.'

I didn't take it seriously at first. In this job, you don't take things like that seriously. I had one patient tell me, every night, that the sun wouldn't come up the next morning unless a black child was killed. You don't take things like that seriously. You'd go crazy if you did. So, I thought nothing of it, gave him his medication. An hour later, he was asleep in his room.

The next day, at eleven minutes past three in the afternoon, he said it again. Word for word.

'On the twenty second of November, at twelve forty five, an earthquake will hit Prague. It will kill two hundred and fifty thousand people.'

I would say that I thought nothing of it this time, but there was something unusual about the way he was saying it. He wasn't anguished about it. He wasn't shouting it, screaming it, or in any way frantic. He was stating it calmly, as absolute fact. The same way he would state what was on the lunch menu on a Tuesday.

Most times, when the patients come up with 'prophecies' - a word that I use very, very lightly - it's a form of transference. It comes from a fixation on something else, which they have begun to loosen their grip on. Then, with the mental energy that they were using to fixate on this thing, they obsess over something. It usually involves celebrities. Ten years ago, we were being told that Michael Jackson would die three days before he hit forty. Now, we're told that Justin Bieber will die the day after his wedding. Other times, it involves politicians, or whatever environmental threat is inthe papers. Natural disasters aren't unheard of either, but usually, whatever they fixate on, they obsess on. This wasn't the way this patient was.

I asked him why he thought this would happen. He didn't know. I asked him if he read it somewhere. He didn't know. I asked him where he got the idea from. He didn't know. He said he knew it in the same way that he knew that fire was hot. He just knew it. So, while I thought nothing of the specific points he was making, I was intrigued by the way he was saying it. It was almost like he was saying 'why wouldn't this happen?'

It quickly became part of the routine for the day. Ten a.m. - hit work. Eleven - start one-on-one sessions, one o’clock – lunch. Eleven minutes past three - earthquakes and Prague.

He didn't just say it to me - he just said it, regardless of who was around. Other patients, other doctors. He said it in exactly the same tone. And in exactly the same way it happens with everything else, once it becomes part of the routine, it stops being something important.

Until I spoke to an old colleague in London at a party. I'm embarrassed to admit that the party was a 'Friends Reunited' one. A group of twenty year old students meeting again as forty year olds. Long hair and sexually transmitted diseases replaced by two cars, two mortgages, and worrying about your own child's long hair and sexually transmitted diseases. There was flowing alcohol, and stilted conversation, until I caught up with Neil, an old classmate of mine.

Neil and I had been close friends throughout most of university, but hadn't kept in touch.  It happens. You swear you'll be lifelong friends, then promptly move to opposite sides of the country without leaving forwarding addresses. We talked for a while, and compared notes on our lives, and eventually just got drunk together. We talked about alcohol, we talked about what our hopes and goals had been, we talked about the women in our lives, and we talked about work. And then he mentioned something strange about a patient he knew.

This patient had been catatonic for three years, since she had been raped by three men. She had been in denial first, and then became withdrawn. As the court case came closer, her withdrawal became so intense that, one day, she stopped talking or moving. She was able to be moved, and she could be prompted to basic moves, but was otherwise totally catatonic. Until two weeks ago, that is. She didn't break the catatonic state for long, but she broke it for a few seconds. The few seconds it took for her to speak two sentences, her voice barely audible.

'On the twenty second of November, at twelve forty five, an earthquake will hit Prague. It will kill two hundred and fifty thousand people.'

She said it at eleven minutes past three. For the first time, three weeks ago, and then daily, at the same time every day. It was now the nineteenth of October.

I sobered immediately. And once I told the story of my patient, so did Neil. We compared stories in more detail, and we compared notes. We couldn't find any common ground between the patients, other than the basic fact that they were dealing with mental issues - and even those mental issues had no common ground.

The next day, I drove to Neil's work, having called in sick to my own, and we spent hours discussing how to proceed. Did we believe what they were saying? Not yet. We were more interested in trying to find out why the two patients were sharing a prophetical experience. Over the next few days, we exhausted every possibility we could work out about the two people's histories. The chances of them having crossed paths were minute. And so we wasted three days. Three days closer to the twenty second of November.

We had decided to quietly begin to spread some information out. Colleagues speaking to colleagues - and two days later, we heard back from a doctor in Scotland. She, too, had a patient who was repeating the same thing, day in, day out.

With anything like this, it starts off small, and begins to pick up speed very quickly. It starts off with three, but quickly grows. Two weeks later, we knew of no less than fourteen patients around the UK that were repeating the same two sentences at the same time each day. And no matter what we tried, we couldn't find any links between any of the patients, other than the fact that they were all in institutions.

We didn't go to the papers with it, or alert the authorities. Not yet. To be honest, I couldn't really tell you why. I could come up with a list of excuses, but the truth is, we just didn't think we'd be taken seriously. We kept it within the medical community, more or less - we were also fairly sure that if somebody was to keep doing it every day, chances were that it would either break in the newspapers, or somebody would make a path straight to their nearest psychiatrist.

A Doctor in Cornwall came up with the idea of mass hypnosis, which seemed to ring true for a while. We worked on it for about a week, actually. As a hypothesis, it made a lot of sense - a TV hypnotist plants some subliminal idea while they are on their shows, which would only work on somebody who happened to be extremely suggestible. It wasn't totally outside of the realm of possibility - not that all of these people were fully hypnotised, but that they'd picked up the same thing. Until we found out that one of the institutions made a policy of having no televisions in the building, and there was no way that specific patient could have seen one any time recently. We were frustrated. That one had beenworking so well.

The next day, we found out about a case in Ireland.

Then two in Africa.

Seventeen in Germany.

Over forty in the United States.

Eventually we had exactly a hundred in total. All around the world. Different corners of the globe. All of them saying it at exactly eleven minutes past three in the afternoon, UK time. Some were even saying it in their sleep.

We couldn't work it out. There was no link. None whatsoever. There was no medium that could have reached all of these people at the same time, in the same way. Every path we went down came to a dead end.

And so we spent hours, and days trying to work it out, when instead, we could have been trying to do something about it. It was the fifteenth of November when we actually began to stop thinking about why they were saying what they were saying, and actually think about the implications of what they were saying. We'd been approaching all of this so clinically and logically, we had never stopped to think that it might actually be true. All of that time wasted, when we could have been trying to convince people to listen to us. To take us seriously.

We started contacting people. Not newspapers, not quite yet; but we got in touch with the Czech Academy of Sciences, the closest thing to an authority in the situation. They took us about as seriously as you would expect. It didn't help our case that the Czech Republic is a seismically quiet area.

So we took it to the newspapers. Days to go and we finally took it public. A lot of us knew that we would be effectively ending our careers by doing so, but we could no longer take the risk that we were wrong. We knew that the best way to do this was to present ourselves as a group. One that was geographically disparate, and one with few obvious other links. A group of Doctors may just be taken seriously.

Let me pose you a question. You're reading a newspaper, and on page thirteen, there is a story about how one hundred crazy people are predicting Prague will take substantial damage, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a bunch of Doctors are taking it seriously. Would it make you leave the city?

I thought not.

On the twenty second of November, at twelve forty five, an earthquake hit Prague. There was no way of knowing exactly how many people were killed, but eventual reports estimated the number to be close to three hundred thousand people.

I eventually took my theory public. My belief is that some people are more sensitive to the planet itself. If your body feels pain, it sends messages to your brain. When we damage the planet, it sends messages to us, but it sends it to that portion of ourbrain that we've either left behind through evolution, or that we haven't evolved enough to use properly. Except for a tiny, tiny amount of people. But being so sensitive makes these people vulnerable to breakdowns, and to psychotic episodes. They all break down in different ways, or they become more vulnerable to mental trauma. And when the brain is wiring itself differently in order to cope, it listens to what the world is telling it.

The world was sending us a very clear message, but we couldn't hear it. It wants us to stop damaging it. And it doesn't want us to kill ourselves.

They didn't take me seriously. I pressed the subject, I wrote papers, I wrote letters, I made websites, I withdrew from my family, my job, my life, and I desperately tried to put the message out. Eventually, I was arrested for attacking a member of parliament, and causing serious bodily harm. I was deemed to have a lack of control over my own actions, and I was placed in an institution. They say I don't know what I am doing, or why I do things.

But I do know one thing.

I know that on the Seventeenth of August in this year, at twenty eight minutes past six in the evening, the President of The United States of America will push the Nuclear Button. Fourteen million people will be killed.