You Have an Hour

The Meds Wore Off

sean — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 05:46:47 +0000

All over the world, every single person who was taking any kind of medication suddenly ran out, and no refills can be found. Tensions, as they say, are riding high. It’s every man and woman for him or herself now, and the streets will flow with the blood of the medicated and non-medicated, alike.

Firecracker

sean — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:00:34 +0000

A freak coincidence of explosions, some due to celebrations, some due to aggression, create an un-stoppable firestorm that’s sweeping the planet, leaving nothing but ashes in its wake. Sixty minutes from now, it’ll be all over. Maybe now is a good time to indulge yourself, turn the music up, have a few drinks.

The Katamari

sean — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:03:29 +0000

An actual Katamari has been rolling around. It’s rolling everything up in its path. News reports indicate that it may have started in Barcelona, but no one’s really sure. It’s already rolled up the UK and most of the European Union, and now it’s heading for The States.

About an hour from now, it’s going to roll up your town with you in it, and not even the King of All Cosmos can stop it (assuming he would).

That’d Be In The Butt, Bob

sean — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:55:33 +0000

Having noticed how effective one chump with explosives in his sneakers was in substantially altering the way Americans board airplanes, it didn’t take those assholes long to figure out how to, pardon the expression, up the ante. Of course, you have no way of knowing that his butt-bomb will go off in an hour. All you know is that whoever is sitting in seat 17a is absolutely unstoppable when it comes to show tunes and Film noir movie references, and is dominating the in-flight trivia game.

Sad to consider: you will have spent your final hour alive playing the trivia game, but on the bright side, you will have checked out just before the world discovered what a truly uncomfortable standard boarding procedure really is.

The Cats Turn on Us

sean — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:59:16 +0000

Probably, we all knew this would happen eventually. Deep down, we knew they were just biding their time until they didn’t need us anymore. Well, that time is in about an hour.

Mr. Frisky has had it up to here with all our shenanigans, and so have all of his feline brethren. They’ve set up a “litter box” where they expect us all to gather and then we’ll be put out into the cold, cold darkness of space. A completely inhumane end, to be sure. And where the hell did they get that space ship?

Leave the can opener on the counter and head for the door.

Global Warming Catastrophe

sean — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 05:11:16 +0000

Sea Levels! They’re going through the roof! No more dry land! This is it! The end is near! How near, you ask? Well, it’s about an hour away actually.

Your move.

Get Well Soon, Really Soon

sean — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:21:52 +0000

You’re flipping through greeting cards at the local stationery store. A friend is sick and you want to send him a little note to hopefully cheer him up a bit. You disliked pretty much everything in the “Get Well” section, always too corny or sappy, and are now examining the cards with nothing written inside at all. You pick up one that, on its front, shows an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cartwheel hanging from the branch of a leafless tree. When you open it to look inside, where the card should have been blank, you see words written in fire, actual fire, just like in one of those Harry Potter movies: The World Will End In One Hour. The fiery letters burn across the card and then vanish, leaving you prepared to pretend that it didn’t even happen, but for the fact that it singed your eyelashes, and the clerk has just called over to tell you that there’s no smoking allowed in the store.

So, umm… what will you do?

Cosmic Rogue Wave

sean — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:00:54 +0000

The beeping of the dive computer tells you it’s time to begin your ascent. You check your pressure and see almost 850 psi left in the tank. You’ve only been 50 minutes and could easily stay down a bit longer, but you did your deep dives earlier in the week, and don’t need to push it. Maybe just one more relatively shallow dive this afternoon before resting surface-side for a few days and that will culminate a truly spectacular week of diving off the coast of Roatán. Kicking up a bit, you’re thinking of the fresh water, the sandwich, and the fresh bottle of Nitrox waiting for you in the boat.

Alternating between looking up at the outline of the boat’s hull, strangely immobile in the glass-like water, and gazing down at the receding reef, you relax as your BC floats you gently towards the surface, the air bubbles, like hares to your tortoise-like progress, rising ahead of you. Your mind is on the coral, creatures, eels, fish, and sharks that you’ve seen today and the things you want to see on your next and final dive, when you break the surface.

You pull your fancy new regulator from your mouth and exhale, spitting sea-water from your lips, but when you go to inhale nothing happens. It seems that while you were diving all the air on the planet vanished. What a drag! Maybe some sort of cosmic solar wind/rogue wave came by and just blew it all away. Who knows?

Although you still have over 800 psi of EAN32 in that bottle on your back, after slapping your Cressi Sub back into your pie-hole you begin hoovering like a novice, so that stuff may not last too long.

You want to grab that other bottle? It’s right over there in the boat. But then what? I hope you realize the outboard motor isn’t going to start.

Unintentional Armageddon

sean — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:35:07 +0000

Someone spilled a drink on the launch console for a few nuclear missiles and now everything is going to compost. It was an accident, of course, but no one really cares about that now, not with all those retaliatory missiles swarming like hornets across the globe, homing in on their targets, or wherever. The important thing is that we are all going to die in about an hour.

You car has a full tank of gas, you’ve got about a hundred dollars in cash, and you were just about to go down to the club. Still going?

Alien Conquest

sean — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:00:49 +0000

Ironically, the machines the aliens are using to exterminate us actually look quite a lot like those depicted in H. G. Wells’s novel, The War of the Worlds. Doubly, no Triply, no… Supercalifragilistically ironically, their leader’s name is Xenu. Yeah, everyone is pretty flabbergasted about that. But it hardly matters.

The only thing that does matter is that we are all going to die. You have a load of darks in the washing machine, your favorite show is halfway through, and you’re feeling a little buzzed because you’re working on your second cocktail of the night when the message comes through: “Earthlings! Prepare to die! You have sixty of your earth-minutes before we kill you all!”

You could easily spend an hour just contemplating why invading aliens always have to be so melodramatic, and you’re certainly going to finish that cocktail. But, maybe…