“A world without waste is a world without freedom. Perfection crushes choice, fairness devours joy, and efficiency leaves no room for dreaming under the sun. To live is to slack in the face of the machine.” - The Te of Slacking, Book 4, Verse 8:

So, the Apocalypse…

First things first: what has the Great Slacker’s panties in a bunch isn’t like any other “end of the world” scenario I’ve ever heard of. And trust me, the competition for most ridiculous End Times is fierce.

Let’s start with the classic apocalypse—the biblical, Old Testament-style extravaganza where the sky turns blood-red, the oceans boil, and some multi-headed nightmare beast crawls out of the sea to eat humanity like an All-You-Can-Eat Chinese buffet. Bonus points, of course, if there’s a plague of locusts, horsemen riding ominously, and a giant angel with a flaming sword making sure we all know it’s Judgment Time.

Then there’s Ragnarok—the Norse version of the end, which really leans into the metal vibe. Fenrir the giant wolf breaks free, eats Odin, and stomps around generally being a twat, while the Midgard Serpent poisons everything because . . . it can. Everyone basically punches each other to death until the world sinks into the sea. But don’t worry! A couple of humans hide out in a tree to reboot the system, so it’s less of an apocalypse and more of an extreme factory reset.

The Hindus go hard, too. In their version we get Kali Yuga, the Age of Decline. According to them, society crumbles into greed, corruption, and TikTok dances until Kalki, the last avatar of Vishnu, rolls in on a white horse – what’s with it with the End of the World and all the white horses? – to clean up the mess. Imagine a divine Clint Eastwood in a cosmic spaghetti Western.

Now, let’s fast forward a little to the modern takes on what happens when the clock ticks down to zero.

First up, we’ve got nuclear annihilation—the ultimate “oops” button. Mushroom clouds billow dramatically over the horizon, the air filled with screams of “Why didn’t we listen to the scientists?!” and somewhere, a lone guy with a Geiger counter skulks around, looking grim and muttering about “fallout”. It’s less the end of the world and more like we collectively left the oven on, went on holiday and came back to find the house—and the neighbourhood—reduced to smouldering rubble. Basically, it’s burning the toast on a planetary scale, except the toast was everyone and everything you’ve ever loved.

Or we can go with the ever-popular zombie apocalypse, a perennial reliable fallback for creative self-destruction. It always starts with someone sneezing on a monkey, licking a doorknob, or eating an undercooked bat in a place no one can pronounce. Cue the montage: shambling corpses clawing at windows, people screaming incoherently, and some guy with a shotgun yelling, “Aim for the head!” right before his best mate goes full cannibal on him. Bonus points if society collapses in record time, the survivors are inexplicably buff and well-armed, and everyone pretends hygiene isn’t a thing while fighting over tinned beans and shotgun shells.

Personally, I’m a big fan of the environmental apocalypse—it’s got that satisfying “you had it coming” energy. Mother Nature finally gets sick of our crap, throws down her leafy gloves, and goes full Loco Down in Acapulco on us. Hurricanes rip through cities, tsunamis gobble up coastlines, and homicidal weather patterns chase down anyone who’s still clinging to their plastic straws like a badge of honour. It’s the ultimate passive-aggressive “I told you so” from the planet itself. If we’re going to screw over the environment, it’s only fair that it screws us right back.

And, of course, we can’t forget the classic alien invasion apocalypse. It’s a fan favourite for a reason. Giant spaceships hover menacingly over all the major landmarks—because aliens apparently have a fetish for our architecture—while humanity collectively panics and starts yelling things like, “Why London? Why not Milton Keynes?”

Dramatic beams of light vaporise everything from national monuments to unlucky pigeons, and the military tries their usual “throw more explosions at it” strategy, which, shocker, doesn’t work. Enter Jeff Goldblum – who I’d like to play me in the film version of whatever this shambles is – casually sauntering in with a laptop he clearly picked up in Dixons' clearance sale, ready to hack an intergalactic supercomputer running on what I can only assume is alien Windows 95.

Now, all of these, for better or worse, have their own logic.

They’re big, dramatic, terrifying, and—most importantly—they follow a script. But apparently, what’s got the Great Slacker flustered isn’t any of these. No fire and brimstone, no zombie hordes, no aliens or vengeful gods.

No, the apocalypse that’s arriving in three days—because why wouldn’t it be three days? Why not give me a few years to prepare?—is none of those.

This apocalypse—the one that’s apparently the whole reason I’ve been dragged back from the dead—is something else entirely.

Although – and this is more of a sidenote, because I don’t really want to ponder about being the guy who is supposed to save the world, right now – the more I think about it, the more it occurs to me that my so-called saviour, the Great Slacker, isn’t just the lazy deity who’s supposed to help me thwart this end-of-days situation. No, the longer I sit with it, the more I’m pretty sure he’s the one who killed me in the first place.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Don’t get me wrong—this isn’t exactly a dealbreaker. James 1.0 wasn’t having the best run. Guy was one bad bus ride away from becoming a permanent footnote in the Job Centre’s filing system.

But still, it’s worth pointing out: I didn’t get here by accident. I didn’t stumble into this world because fate smiled on me. Nope, I’m here because someone—specifically the Great Slacker—decided to yeet me out of my shitty existence with a delivery truck.

Murdered by a god of loafing. Honestly, that’s about as on-brand for my life as you can get.

So, what’s coming in three days – did I mention this is all happening in three days! - isn’t fire and brimstone or shambling zombies, but something worse.

Much worse.

“This world,” the Great Slacker had said, “is going to be fully transformed into a game. Not like the one you’re in now. Not loose, or fun or with, you know, options. It’s going to be strict. Rigid mechanics. No choices, no deviations. Just… rules.”

“You mean, like a really boring MMORPG?” I actually thought the Slackster was making a bit too much out of this. Just the other day, Scar had me pay 50 gold to speed up Lazytown’s Pixel Workers resource collection so we could get a ‘Efficient System’ +10% morale buff. Things already felt pretty damn gamified . . .

“No,” the Slacker “It’s not going to be boring at all. It’s going to be terrifying.”

He then explained, in his slow, lazy drawl, how this wasn’t going to be the freewheeling, loot-hoovering fun and games I’d grown used to. What the Maker had planned was going to be a world ending cataclysm where everything—everything—was dictated by the System.

No creativity, no options, no wiggle room. Just one big, self-playing machine. He called it the "Total System."

“The Maker has, they believe, designed a perfect algorithm that will reduce all life in this realm to a never-ending grind.”

“Like Orwell?” I said. 1984 had been one of the few books that I’d enjoyed reading at school. “Total control.”

“Sort of,” the Slacker had agreed. “But worse, because the Total System won’t even be malicious. It just… is. If this end of the world comes about, there won’t be any cruel overlord. No tyrant to overthrow. Just an all-seeing algorithm making sure every person does exactly what they’re supposed to do.”

He explained how what was going to happen wasn’t just the Maker unleashing a nightmare of totalitarian control but the ultimate surveillance state.

The way the Slacker put it, the Maker’s going to turn the world into something called the Panopticon. A prison where the inmates don’t even know if they’re being watched, so they behave as though they always are. Every step, every breath, every action will be logged, tracked, and monitored by the System.

“Step out of line, and you don’t just get hit with a stick,” the Slacker said. “The System will remove your stick, your ability to hold a stick, and then will ban you from walking within ten feet of sticks.”

“But the worst thing,” he added, stretching the words out like he couldn’t bear to say them too quickly, “is that the Total System will feel fair. The world is not going to come crashing down in flames and chaos—it’s going to arrive in perfect, shiny order. Every person will be permanently assigned their role: gatherer, soldier, builder, healer. Resources will be distributed with exact efficiency, every scrap accounted for, and waste will be eliminated entirely. No hunger, no shortages, no more squabbling over who gets what.”

The Great Slacker has paused then, looking frail and old. “But fairness isn’t freedom, James. Everyone will become part of the machine—a cog that slots neatly into place. Nobody will aspire, because the System will assign them their worth based on its calculations. Nobody will create, because there won’t be room for deviation from the plan. And nobody will dream, because in a perfectly efficient game, dreams are just unnecessary clutter.”

“Why would the Maker want this?” I asked.

“The Maker is the System. This is their ultimate blueprint, child. They don’t see the apocalypse as the world falling apart—it’s falling into line. They’ve been building toward this all along: a perfect, self-sustaining game with no glitches, no exploits, no Freeloaders. Just order. Precision. Control.”

“So, what happens to people like me? People who… don’t exactly fit neatly into a ‘role’?”

“You get deleted,” he said bluntly. “Or, if the System is feeling generous, reassigned. Maybe as a Level 1 woodcutter or a mushroom gatherer. Something menial. Something where you can’t screw up the plan.”

The more he talked, the more the gamified nightmare came into focus. No more random drops, no more quirky loot mechanics, no more choosing to be a hero—or a slacker.

Every aspect of existence would be dictated by the System’s algorithms. Every resource meticulously allocated, every task assigned down to the smallest detail. There’d be no “grind” in the traditional sense, because nobody would be allowed to level up unless the System deemed it necessary.

“Even the economy,” the Slacker continued, “will be perfect. The System will calculate exactly how much is needed at any given time, doling it out to ensure there’s no hoarding, no shortages, and no excess. Sounds great, right? Except it also means no one will ever own anything. No one will ever want anything. Because the System will decide what you need, when you need it, and how much you’re allowed to have.”

It was the ultimate nightmare for someone like me. A world where slacking wasn’t just frowned upon—it was impossible. A place where creativity, chaos, and individuality had no place because they couldn’t be measured, quantified, or controlled.

“And the Maker thinks this is good?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

“They think it’s perfect,” the Slacker said. “A flawless machine. No mistakes. No rebellion. No humanity.”

So, what was coming in three days wasn’t just an apocalypse—it was an erasure.

And it was up to me to fuck it up.