Meanwhile, somewhere across town…

Dr. Keenan Fritz went pale and clammy, and not for the first time.

The room was carpeted, even on the walls with a rich burgundy colour, which Keenan noted as being intimidating to him for some strange reason.

On a makeshift stage, Keenan fiddled with a great big machine with lots of flashing lights and beeping and whizzing bits.

But the machine seemed to be malfunctioning.

In the audience was Dr. Angus' Board of Directors, most of Dr. Angus' staff, and most callously - almost all of his billionaire investors.

You see, Keenan Fritz, Dr. Angus' loyal lieutenant, had done something not very loyal at all. In fact, he had ripped Angus off, stolen all of his designs, and built a supercomputer of his own.

He did this for a variety of reasons; including, but not limited to:

1. He was jealous of Angus' success

2. He was an insecure, unhappy man, and

3. He had been offered a lot of money to do so from a very sick billionaire not quite ready to die

Keenan had it all in his sights. Wealth, power, and a holiday home in Majorca.

Unfortunately, however, all of this hinged on one inconvenient reality - that he was not, and probably never would be quite as smart as Angus McBairn.

The supercomputer he had secretly built, based on Dr. Angus' designs, had failed publicly and spectacularly, all in front of the investors and Board of Directors he had discreetly stolen from Dr. Angus over a year prior.

Unfortunately, having wanted so very badly to be as smart as Dr. Angus, and telling all his friends at the pub that he could do his job better in a pinch - was not the same as actually being able to do it.

‘Just a technical issue,’ he said, as he switched wires around frantically. ‘Nothing to worry about. Just let me…ah-’

Keenan started to sweat bullets as his wire rearranging reached a frightening pace.

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The billionaires in the audience were highly unamused, to say the least. Keenan had promised them a prototype that would work on humans rather more quickly than Dr. Angus, without the bother of clinical trials. His willingness to do this entirely illegally, on the dim chance that it would succeed, appealed to Phil and Herbert King, on account of Phil’s aggressive and incurable cancer (ironically, the only one that hadn’t been cured by 2058).

If only he could get the blasted thing to work!

Sadly, instead of the fabulous spectacle he expected to occur, Phillip King sat in his chair onstage, hooked up with wires to the computer, defiantly in possession of his own mind. The screen above, which was now supposed to display an avatar of Phillip’s face, remained disappointingly blank, save for an error message that Keenan hadn’t seen before.

But in fact, Dr. Keenan’s experiment wasn’t entirely without consequence. Due to a mathematical error, rather than upload the mind of Phillip King to a hard drive, the supercomputer had instead diverted energy back into the power grid, which then escaped into the cellular network, blasting simultaneously out at every man, woman and child in Britain, and confusingly, the entire population of a small green planet somewhere about umpteen light years left of the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy.

Several moments later, chaos erupted across Britain. Millions began quite suddenly to experience urges to live like animals – very strange animals. In fact, over the next few hours, unbeknownst to Keenan and the group of billionaires (some of whom were getting rather mammalian urges of their own), complete and utter chaos would spread across the entire country. People dropped what they were doing, and started sniffing lamp posts, galloping like wildebeests, and trying, with mixed results, to fly. Sadly, and in particular for those who had taken to flying, one of the immediate consequences was that the mortality rate nation-wide shot up frightfully quickly, and continued to accelerate as the hours went on. People began adopting the different characteristics of animals on an African Savanna – each separating into groups based on their perceived order in the food chain, and acting accordingly. Some people hid, some people grazed – and some people hunted.

Keenan looked at his audience of billionaires, a palpable sense of fear building like acid in the back of his neck.

Something had, indeed gone horribly wrong. Phillip King immediately jumped with puma-like efficiency onto a ceiling rafter and started hissing at Keenan, while various other members of the audience broke out into squabbles, hooting and shrieking in various otherworldly cadences.

Was this really how he was going to die? Eaten by a pack of lunatic billionaires? Keenan backed slowly towards the door, feeling for the latch with his hands as he tried to not alert Phillip (who was for all intents and purposes now an apex feline predator) to his movements.

He pressed the latch gingerly, but the final click sounded loudly, echoing through the hall. Everyone in the room, animal, vegetable or mineral, stopped what they were doing, turning their attention to Keenan.

This is definitely how I’m going to die, thought Keenan.

And then he burst the door open behind him, and ran as fast as his lanky, skinny-fat frame would allow.