Two years after I exposed the conspiracy to conceal from the general public the existence of the Wormwood, attention is already moving on and we have yet to start work on the great project of our survival.

Indeed, the Wormwood itself is already having advance effects. It is a cruel irony that just as, for the first time in our history, we were beginning to manage our future responsibly and jointly, the prospect of Wormwood Day seems to render such efforts meaningless. Already we’ve seen the abandonment of various voluntary waste-emission guidelines, the closure of nature reserves, an upgraded search for sources of non-renewable fuels, an extinction pulse among endangered species. If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well bum the furniture today.

None of our problems are insoluble, not even the Wormwood. But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history.

Still, my hope centres on humanity and ingenuity. It is significant, I believe, that the Wormwood was discovered not by the professionals, who weren’t looking that way, but by a network of amateur sky watchers, who set up robot telescopes in their backyards, and used shareware routines to scan optical detector images for changing glimmers of light, and refused to accept the cloak of secrecy our government tried to lay over them. It is in groups like this — earnest, intelligent, cooperative, stubborn, refusing to submit to impulses toward suicide or hedonism or selfishness, seeking new solutions to challenge the complacency of the professionals — that our best and brightest hope of surviving the future may lie…

Bobby was late arriving at RevelationLand. Kate was still waiting in the car lot for him as the swarms of ageing adherents started pressing through the gates of Billybob Meeks’ giant cathedral of concrete and glass. This “cathedral” had once been a football stadium; they were forced to sit near the back of one of the stands, their view impeded by pillars. Sellers of hot dogs, peanuts, soft drinks and recreational drugs were working the crowd, and muzak played over the PA. Jerusalem, she recognized: based on Blake’s great poem about the legendary visit of Christ to Britain, now the anthem of the new post-United Kingdom England.

The entire floor of the stadium was mirrored, making it a floor of blue sky littered with fat December clouds. At the centre there was a gigantic throne, covered in stones glimmering green and blue — probably impure quartz, she thought. Water sprayed through the air, and arc lamps created a rainbow which arched spectacularly. More lamps hovered in the air before the throne, held aloft by drone robots, and smaller thrones circled bearing elders, old men and women dressed in white with golden crowns on their skinny heads.

And there were beasts the size of tipper trucks prowling around the field. They were grotesque, every part of their bodies covered with blinking eyes. One of them opened giant wings and flew, eagle-like, a few metres, The beasts roared at the crowd, their calls amplified by a booming PA. The crowd got to its feet and cheered, as if celebrating a touchdown.

Bobby was oddly nervous. He was wearing a tight fitting one-piece suit of bright scarlet, with a colour morphing kerchief draped around his neck. He was a gorgeous twenty-first-century dandy, she thought, as out of place in the drab, elderly multitude around him as a diamond in a child’s seashore pebble collection.

She touched his hand. “Are you okay?”

“I didn’t realize they’d all be so old.”

He was right, of course. The gathering congregation was a powerful illustration of the silvering of America. Many of the crowd, in fact, had cognitive-enhancer studs clearly visible at the backs of their necks, there to combat the onset of age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s by stimulating the production of neurotransmitters and cell adhesion molecules.

“Go to any church in the country and you’ll see the same thing, Bobby. Sadly, people are attracted to religion when they approach death. And now there are more old people — and with the Wormwood coming we all feel the brush of that dark shadow, perhaps. Billybob is just surfing a demographic wave. Anyhow, these people won’t bite.”

“Maybe not. But they smell. Can’t you tell?”

She laughed.

“One should never put on one’s best trousers to go out to battle for freedom and truth.”

“Huh?”

“Henrik Ibsen.”

Now a man stood up on the big central throne. He was short, fat and his face shone with sweat. His amplified voice boomed out: “Welcome to RevelationLand! Do you know why you’re here?” His finger stabbed. “Do you? Do you? Listen to me now: On the Lord’s day I was in the spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, which said: “Write on a scroll what you see…” And he held up a glittering scroll.

Kate leaned toward Bobby. “Meet Billybob Meeks. Prepossessing, isn’t he? Clap along. Protective colouration.”

“What’s going on, Kate?”

“Evidently you’ve never read the Book of Revelation. The Bible’s deranged punch line.” She pointed. “Seven hovering lamps. Twenty-four thrones around the big one. Revelation is riddled with magic numbers — three, seven, twelve. And its description of the end of things is very literal. Although at least Billybob uses the traditional versions, not the modern editions which have been rewritten to show how the Wormwood date of 2534 was there in the text all along…” She sighed. “The astronomers who discovered the Wormwood didn’t do anybody any favours by calling it that. Chapter 8, verse 10: The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water — the name of the star is Wormwood…”

“I don’t understand why you invited me here today. In fact I don’t know how you got a message through to me. After my father threw you out.”

“Hiram isn’t yet omnipotent, Bobby,” she said. “Not even over you. And as to why — look up.”

A drone robot hovered over their heads, labelled with a stark, simple word: GRAINS. It dipped into the crowd, in response to the summons of members of the congregation.

Bobby said, “Grains? The mind accelerator?”

“Yes. Billybob’s specialty. Do you know Blake? To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, / And Eternity in an hour… The pitch is that if you take Grains your perception of time will speed up. Subjectively, you’ll be able to think more thoughts, have more experiences, in the same external time. A longer life available exclusively from Billybob Meeks.”

Bobby nodded. “But what’s wrong with that?”

“Bobby, look around. Old people are frightened of death. That makes them vulnerable to this kind of scam.”

“What scam? Isn’t it true that Grains actually works?”

“After a fashion. The brain’s internal clock actually runs more slowly for older people. And that’s the mechanism Billybob is screwing around with.”

“And the problem is…”

“The side effects. What Grains does is to stimulate the production of dopamine, the brain’s main chemical messenger. Trying to make an old man’s brain run as fast as a child’s.”

“Which is a bad thing,” he said uncertainly. “Right?”

She frowned, baffled by the question; not for the first time she had the feeling that there was something missing about Bobby. “Of course it’s a bad thing. It is malevolent brain-tinkering. Bobby, dopamine is involved in a lot of fundamental brain functions. If dopamine levels are too low you can suffer tremors, an inability to start voluntary movement — Parkinson’s disease, for instance — all the way to catatonia. Too much dopamine and you can suffer from agitation, obsessive-compulsive disorders, uncontrolled speech and movement, addictiveness, euphoria. Billybob’s congregation — I should say his victims — aren’t going to achieve Eternity in their last hour, Billybob is cynically burning out their brains.