Killing time. Chapter thirteen.

The times, they are a changin'.

He’d not need to start the fire, that had always happened. That was why the discovery had been discovered, if not for the fire it would have remained, unnoticed and fading, in the bottom of a box for evermore.

The boxes of old photographs stored in the archives had been saved by the valiant efforts of the Glaswegian fire service. Alas, the building hadn’t. The boxes of photos, manuscripts and drawings were moved from the smoldering remains of the library at the Glaswegian School of Art to safe storage off site where they were audited by a hoard of studious students and distributed to Universities and museums around the country. The destruction of the photograph at any time prior to it being sent would surely be guaranteed to bring forth the singularity.

And so off he went, via the bakers and the pound shop on the shopping precinct near the hotel that the old man hoped, along with the crime scene full of his own DNA in room sixty four, would soon cease to have ever existed. It wouldn’t take much, he was sure.

A little accelerant tucked behind a few books, maybe a fire engine smashing headlong into a car driven by an octogenarian and therefore delaying the valiant efforts of the heroes within, so many spanners available to throw into the works. With the advent of time travel, hindsight really had become a wonderful thing.
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As we all know, right now our world is a wonderful place. For the first time in history all are fed, all are happy, our futures are bright, our children cherished.
If the old man fails in his final attempt we’ll not notice the deterioration in our quality of life. The hunger that spreads across the Earth, the displaced millions clambering over the dead to reach a new Hell and escape the old one, all will seem as if it has always been, as if it has spread from the past gradually. It will seem to be getting out of control and we’ll try to fight it, we’ll try to save this Earth that our avarice and greed has already condemned to death. Life will get worse, we’ll suffer and then we’ll die.
Right now, it’s not looking like a successful resolution, but you never know. He has time on his side, after all. Just think, if he succeeds then at this very moment oblivion and Hell come racing toward one and other, all of us standing somewhere in the path of the collision. At any moment, in the blink of an eye, without any warning, we may simply cease to be.
As is, was and shall always be.

J2H.

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