Planet Earth, the year 2162

The coast finally clear, Angus dropped down from the branch and scanned the area. Save for a few whimpering wildebeest people rolled up in balls on the bitumen, there wasn’t a whole lot going on, which was a welcome relief.

But then Angus remembered the fact that his old mate Quinton was probably bleeding out in a gutter somewhere with two kidneys short of a body, and his relief quickly festered into misery.

The misery compounded as his mind whizzed through the many possible ways in which Quinton could have met a messy end. Firstly, and most likely to Angus was that he was trampled and turned into a squidgy pancake of a man. It was an incredibly visceral thought to have with a stomach full of coffee.

Angus pulled out the map that he had managed to hold onto, and started to orientate himself. He looked at his list - the first member of his team due to be collected was Roderick Dalrymple, his head of nanotechnology, and thankfully located reasonably nearby in Dagenham.

He would have to cross the Thames to do so, however, which normally wouldn’t worry him so much, but considering the tendency for local infrastructure like bridges, tunnels and buildings to have been blown up or rendered useless in the past six weeks, he was mildly concerned about it.

Angus wasn’t a particularly strong swimmer by anyone’s standards.

Could he have found a tree? Angus hoped he would have. Yes, that’s the most likely scenario. Quinton’s nothing if not an able-bodied problem solver. He’ll be up a tree somewhere, calmly waiting it out. Or perhaps even whittling himself a treehouse to relax in as he figured out how to find Angus.

But he wasn’t running fast enough. Not fast enough at all. Angus had done the mental math, and his velocity couldn’t have increased enough to outpace the thundering hoard.

But men like Quinton don’t let things like physics limit their potential. Yes. No, Angus needn’t be worried, surely.

But he couldn’t help it, for Angus was genetically prone to worrying. Worrying, after all, was how he managed to do so many interesting things with his life.

He worried about something, then he fixed it - or changed it - or invented a new thing that gave us all a new paradigm to imagine it.

And then after that, he would find something new to worry about, and on the cycle went.

Angus meandered along the road, following the map, keeping his eyes peeled for threats. Thankfully all was very quiet.

The other elements had yet to peek their mad faces out after the stampede, and Angus felt somewhat safe for the time being. He followed in the stampede’s riptide, a bit like someone late for work might follow a path cleared by an ambulance in heavy traffic.

The thames was only a mile or so away. He kept walking with his fists and teeth clenched, ready for action.

But just as Angus’s worrying reached an internal mental crescendo, he felt a tap on his shoulder from a dinner-plate-sized hand.

‘G’day Gus. How’s tricks?’

He was never happier to see 250 pounds of tanned Australian muscle in his entire life.

His eyes welled up with tears, and he planted one of the biggest hugs on Quinton he’d ever planted (though his arms only reached around two-thirds of his body).

‘Ha ha…easy there mate. I missed ya too.’

Quinton hugged Angus back, lifting him off the ground so his legs flailed about.

As it happened, Quinton hadn’t turned into a pancake, or built a tree-house - he’d simply hidden in a sewer. Angus didn’t have to ask him to find that out - he could smell it.

‘Oh Quint. You really had me worried for a minute there.’

‘Don’t worry about me mate. If there’s anything that you ever do - don’t make worrying about me one of them. I’ve survived worse that that twenty times over. It’s not my first stampede by a long shot.’

‘Thank heavens for that.’

‘Definitely was my first stampede in a city centre though. I was sweating like a gypsie with a mortgage for a second or two. Actually does Timbuktu count? Anyway, I guess I can scratch that off the bucket list.”

‘I wonder if the water’s still running in that building over there? I’d love a shower. I smell like shit stew.’

Wonderfully, the water was still running, and they both had a nice long shower. Quinton - to wash the putrid stench of stormwater and human excrement off - and Angus, just because he thought it was a nice treat after such an ordeal.

The fridge in the studio apartment they were in still had a few things in it, too, which was great, since they were both a bit peckish (it was almost time for afternoon tea).

Once back on the road, they picked up the pace a bit. It was ideal to get to Dagenham before dark - for obvious reasons.

But another reason was that Roderick Dalrymple was not actually the helpless weedy type that one often associates with scientists. Roddy was an immense burly man, perfectly suited to survival of the elements. His main passions in life, after science and rigorous hard work, was Judo, which he was frightfully good at. It made a lot of sense, therefore, to make his the first stop - since in firstly, he was far likelier to be alive, and secondly - he would add an extra layer of ass-kickery to their merry little band of apocalyptic survivalists.

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The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge was thankfully still standing, and save for a few leering baristas squawking like pelicans on the muddy shoreline, there wasn’t much to be alarmed about.

Before they knew it, they were outside Roderick’s house - a wonderful 4 bedroom Tudor facade, which he was able to afford after the second round of venture capital money came through. Apart from a few human-sized splurges of blood on the exterior, the building was entirely unmolested, which Angus took as a good sign.

They knocked on the door, which was a welcome bit of before-times behaviour that they hadn’t been required to do for a long time, and it was comforting.

Angus heard a sudden commotion, as if a possum had just been frightened while asleep on top of a pile of Christmas ornaments. Then a booming pair of footsteps approached the front door from within. It got closer to the door, paused, and then backed up a few metres.

‘Who’s that? If that’s you Edgar, bugger off will you, I haven’t got any more condensed milk.’

‘Roddy? Is that you? It’s Angus. McBairn? You know, from work?’

The heavy footsteps ran towards the door.

‘Gus?’

The door opened, just a smidge, with the latch still firmly on. It was dark inside, and a very tall man’s face looked down at the visitors with one eyebrow raised almost at a right angle to the other, to indicate that their owner was very suspicious. The right eye looked bugged out and very twitchy. The twitchy eye, as well as the untwitchy one, looked Angus and Quinton up and down, and then suddenly a look of calm washed over what was hopefully Roderick Dalrymple.

The door closed again, then the sound of the latch being un-latched could be heard, and then the door swung open wide to reveal all 6”6 of Roderick Dalrymple.

The last six weeks hadn’t been kind to Roderick. The interior of his stately home looked as if a herd of bulls had trampled through it once, played a game of twister in each room, and then trampled everything once more on the way out for good measure.

‘I ah…I’m sorry I don’t have anything much to offer you gents. I ran out of tea a couple of weeks ago. In fact, I ran out of almost everything.’

A thought struck him.

‘Oh - I’ve got some tubes of condensed milk if you fancy some of that? Just don’t tell anyone about it.’

‘Ah…’ Angus started. ’Look it’s alright Fritz, you keep your condensed milk.’

Roddy’s expression melted into relief. Angus was a little bit weirded out by how much he didn’t want to share his condensed milk - but then he considered that since he’d spent six weeks in mind-swapped Britain, his behaviour was probably on the more reasonable side.

Quinton looked at Roddy with pity in much the same way that someone might look at an owl trying to mount a postbox.

He shrugged amiably, and opened up his satchel.

He pulled out a few strips of biltong, raised his eyebrows at Roddy as if to say ‘you want this, mate?’

Roddy nodded with his entire body. Quinton tossed it to him, and he inhaled both strips almost instantaneously.

‘Jesus mate. Is that Paprika? That’s fantastic. That’s got to be the best damn biltong I’ve ever had. What’s your name sorry? I’m Roderick. Nice to meet you. Did you say if you had any more of that biltong?’

Keenan offered the hand he wasn’t using to stuff the biltong into his mouth to Quinton.

‘Ah…Quinton. Nice to meet ya.’

‘Quinton, I must get the recipe for that. That’s got to be the best damn biltong I’ve ever had in my entire life that is.’

Keenan licked his fingers ravenously for any remaining morsel, almost taking them clean off.

After catching up on all the latest goings on - whose neighbour ate whose and whatnot, they finally got down to brass tacks.

‘So ah - Roddy - how likely is it, do you think, that we had anything to do with it?’

‘It?’

‘You know - the whole…’ then Angus mimed an atom bomb explosion. …’Thing.’

Keenan thought for a moment.

‘About 96% I’d say.’

Angus sighed deeply. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it didn’t help his mood at all. Then Roddy had a thought.

‘No, hang on,’ he said.

Then he picked up a pen and did a quick bit of arithmetic on the back of a battery packet. Then he summed and ahhed, and finally got to a point where he was happy with his conclusions, nodded, and looked back up at the expectant Angus.

‘Closer to 98% I’d say.’

Keenan showed Angus his work. Angus looked at it, sighed, and concurred.

Keenan was a mathematician. One of the most profoundly gifted ones of his generation, in fact. If he thinks it was them, then it was definitely them. Angus started another thought.

‘You know actually, I rather thought it might have had something to with forgetting to carry the…’

Before he could finish, Keenan cut him off

‘Carry the one. Yes, that’s the one. It’s a colossal cock up. Carry the one Roddy, CARRY THE ONE!’

Fritz then started hitting himself in the head repetitively, while repeating the phrase ‘CARRY. THE. ONE.’ It was clear that he hadn’t been taking it all particularly well.

‘Stop that Roddy. You’ll give yourself a concussion.’ Angus tried to grab his hand to stop him hitting himself.

‘Stop it. STOP IT man! JE-SUS.’

Roddy stopped it finally, collapsing in a heap on the sofa.

‘Oh it’s miserable innit,’ He said from behind balled fists. ‘We’ve offed about a third of the country, at least.’

Quinton sighed, again with a look of pity, but this time the pitiful look was more the look one might give an owl who married a postbox.

‘Mate, there’s no way of knowing that…’

Angus gave him the ‘zip-it’ mouth signal. Roddy burst into a lumbering, moist cascade of tears. The depth of emotion in his weeping was so great that it contorted his facial expression so much that every feature was violently frowning - his eyes, his mouth, and most curiously, his nostrils.

‘You know I can. I can’t not know. I’m a bloody genius ah bahaaaaaoooooooo…’

Roddy pointed desperately at the wall to the right of the study, revealing a metre long equation with the title ‘How many people have I offed’ and the fraction ‘1/3’ circled violently and repeatedly in the bottom right corner, then written again and again over the top of the rest of the equation, then again on the other walls, and, for that matter, all over the sofas. Roddy’s sobs went on for another minute or two in earnest, before finally running out of steam.

‘I’m a bloody monster.’

Angus sighed.

‘Roddy, you’ll be glad to know that - in actual fact - your maths was solid. It wasn’t your fault.’

Roddy looked at Angus incredulously.

‘You’re just trying to make me feel better. I’m the mathematician. I’m the one wot’ did it. It’s my own damn fault.’

“No - no…it was Keenan. He stole the design. He tried to skip the clinical trials.”

“Keenan? I’d never believe that. Keenan’s good people, Gus.”

Angus pulled out his phone and played the message from Keenan.

Roddy sat for a moment, a look of sheer disbelief pocking his facial features. Then the disbelief swiftly gave way to rage. Then he got up, and started pacing violently.

“He did WHAT?”

Roddy punched a wall. The wall came off second best.

“It was the Kings I would imagine Roddy,” offered Angus wimpishly. “I’m sure they gave him a lot of money to betray his ideals, friends and better instincts.”

Roddy sighed and sucked his teeth.

“I heard Phillip had ass cancer. Terminal actually. So I suppose this all tracks. And Keenan’s always been very grabby with money. Remember when we found out he’d been rounding up our portions of the lunch split bills? What a cad.”

Quinton, by this point had gotten so completely bored that he had begun whittling a Javanese fertility goddess out of a piece of Roddy’s dining room table.

“Well is it awful that I’m a bit relieved by all this? I mean not by all this. I just mean specifically the fact that I play a not quite so central role in it all.”

“I think it’s perfectly reasonable Roddy. Keenan really is a cad. And arguably an international war criminal to boot. Though I’d be more on the side of internationally colossal cretin if definitions were left upto me.”

Amidst the considered discussion, Quinton had discovered a bottle of rum. He shot Roddy a look as if to say ‘could I have some?’ Roddy acquiesced. Quinton gulped. Angus interlaced his fingers thoughtfully and rapped them on the part of the dining table tat Quinton hadn’t yet whittled.