When the world ended, I was drinking tequila through a vuvuzela, trying to work up the courage to talk to a stranger across the bonfire, and failing at both. I had no idea where I’d picked up the instrument. I hadn’t even thought about the vuvuzela since the 2010 World Cup, when entire crowds had blown on the thing, sounding like a swarm of angry bees. And the stranger—I hadn’t expected I’d feel so lonely at the end of things, so desperate.

  The only thing that wasn’t a surprise was the end of the world.

  A burst of gamma radiation tore through the upper atmosphere of Earth at 10:18 GMT on the 24th of January. It destroyed the ozone layer and atmosphere in minutes. Organic life on the surface of the planet was basically gone from one moment to the next. Maybe a few microbes survived, deep down near magma veins in the depths of the Mariana Trench. I don’t know. Fuck those microbes. They got to live out the rest of their days in darkness. They didn’t have to worry about the rest of the universe. They got to stay small.

  Scientists had known it was coming for months. Two neutron stars collapsing in on each other. They’d thought it might collapse in a hundred million years or so, if we were unlucky. Then that had become a hundred thousand years, a hundred years, a year, a month. Such is life.

  The scene in the park that night was not normal. It was in a family-friendly area, the kind of place where people would walk their dogs, or old people would get their steps in. But on that night, someone had set up a generator and speakers in front of the swings and was playing Europe’s ‘The Final Countdown’ over and over again. On the opposite side of the park, near the edge of the looping footpath, a more modest speaker setup was blasting EDM. The two soundtracks pushed and pulled on each other.

  The park heaved with bodies. Most were shirtless, some pantsless. Everyone was more sweat than human. The streetlights were turned off, but there was a massive bonfire in the centre of the park. The closer I moved to the centre, the hotter it got. People danced, kissed, shared body heat. The light of the fire reflected off the sweat on their skin. There were coolers scattered everywhere, filled to the brim with warm beers, and no-one made a complaint whenever I grabbed one.

  Even while I was there, I wasn’t sure why I was there. It wasn’t me. Or maybe I’d always wanted this. A part of me was sure I’d been waiting my entire life for the excuse to dance half-naked and be reckless.

  I remember… snippets.

  “Paulie’s down at the entrance with a bucket of whippets,” a nasally voice said.

  “What’s a whippet?”

  “It’s like nitrous.”

  “What’s a nitrous?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Wooooo,” I yelled, and blew on my vuvuzela. I felt my elbow crush into someone’s ribs, felt a knee drive into my thigh. The crowd jostled and moved as one. I took a deep breath and blew again. The sound cut through both songs, a clarion call to dumbfuckery.

  Someone, far away, lost in the crush of people, yelled, “Shut the fuck up.”

  Later, in another moment, a long-haired muscular man who looked like every romance book cover ever, held out a hand for me to dap. I’m tall, six foot two if I stand up straight, and this guy towered over me. “Heyyy, it’s vuvuzela. Who’s got a pen?” A pen materialized from the crowd, and the giant drew a dick on my exposed stomach. I blinked at it swimming there amongst all the many dicks drawn on my torso.

  “Hell yeah,” the giant said, and held out his fist.

  I fist bumped him.

  Later again, my memories small islands spread across an ocean of black, I caught the eye of the woman on the other side of the bonfire. She had heavy mascara and eye-shadow and a smile that felt like a punch in the gut.

  Drifting, shifting, someone passing me a Ziploc bag of something, faceless, whispering, “It’s basically a lethal dose.”

  “Hell yeah,” I heard myself say, and swallowed whatever pills were in my hand.

  I blacked out, then. A long period of just nothing. The last few hours on Earth and I don’t remember a lick of it.

  Then, strange clarity. Body full of heat, eyes vibrating in their sockets, brain suddenly certain that the driving mechanism of the universe was love, always had been love, and that I was simply a vessel for love, a thing made so that the universe could feel love and give love to others.

  “I love you, man,” I muttered to nobody, everybody.

  “Vuvuzela, chug this thing,” someone said, and poured a bottle of tequila down the opening of the instrument. I drank until I needed to breathe.

  Sputtering, liquor pouring out my nose, I vomited, and met eyes with the woman again. I was drawn to her, and in that moment, it felt like the universe was telling me to reach out, let love carry me away. She grimaced and looked away.

  I had sudden clarity in that moment. It wasn’t love I was looking for, nothing animalistic or sexual. I just didn’t want to be alone in a sea of people. I wanted to feel like someone saw me and accepted me. And I knew that the feeling was because of whatever drugs I had in my system, but there wasn’t ever going to be a tomorrow to wake up to, so it made the feelings seem more real.

  I remember the final countdown. Not the song, but the countdown to the end of the world. The count started at thirty. By the last ten seconds, everybody in the park was calling out the numbers.

  We only got to three.

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  I blinked at the bright infobox, swiped it away with my hand, and tried to go back to sleep. The grass was lush and fresh-cut. It itched my nose but was soft enough to be a pillow. The sun was up but felt almost cool against my skin. I could sense the leaves in the tree above me rustling. I could feel my hangover waiting there, like a predator hiding out in thick foliage, and if I could just stay still it might not notice me yet.

  The infobox was a solid grey rectangle burnt into the back of my eyelids. The text flickered into place and a voice that sounded just like my own read it out in my mind. I pressed my eyes closed tighter but the text didn’t go away. I blinked, stumbled to my feet, the space clarifying around me.

  I wasn’t in the park anymore.

  There’d been a lot of conspiracy theories leading up to the end. 4chan hummed with them: the rich were uploading their minds, entering hibernation, slingshot solarsail vessels that could reach one percent of light speed, vaults beneath the surface of the earth, etc. etc.

  I didn’t know which conspiracy theory this was. It could be virtual reality. It would certainly explain the video game interfaces that kept appearing in my vision. But I didn’t know why they’d make me keep the hangover.

  I swiped at the strange infobox, and almost lost my balance. It slithered away, like a living tendril withering at poison, but my own voice kept narrating the text. My hangover reared its head, sank its teeth into me. For a second, I thought the voice was my hangover. My head throbbed, my throat and chest burned with reflux, and the back of my neck was oddly numb. It felt like I’d been hit by a truck carrying bile and cigarette butts. I had a half-full bottle of tequila in one hand, and a sticky vuvuzela in the other. I dropped them both. Had I been smoking? Jesus Christ.

  “Shut up,” I muttered at the voice, still talking about life force, and tried to comprehend my surroundings.

  Something shifted close by, reacting to my voice. What I had thought was grass under my cheek, was actually more like a fungus. It looked like what I’d expect to find growing on a long-forgotten meatball sub. It was made up of these hairy, almost worm-like, hyphae sticking straight up to the sky.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  Something shifted again.

  It wasn’t the grass moving, I realised. Further along, next to what looked like a cross between a cactus and a patio umbrella, something trembled at the sound of my voice. It was the same colour and texture as the cactus it leant against, but as it moved its outline shifted to match the blue of the sky, before reverting again to green.

  As soon as I noticed it, a new infobox popped up, this time in the corner of my vision.

  I was supposed to die in a bathtub filled with ice while eating an ice-cream cake. That’s how I’d planned it. Not at a party, not in a weird alien biome, not looking at a weird horse-sized chameleon that was apparently a threat.

  Another infobox popped up, blocking my vision and making me one breath close to vomiting. I took a knee and tried to catch my breath.

  I didn’t know what the hell any of this meant. Faith of eleven? I hadn’t been to church since my mother died. And the level had so many zeroes in it that it basically meant nothing. I tried to remember what it had said about the chameleon, but my brain wasn’t yet firing on all cylinders.

  I didn’t think I deserved any of this, but however bad my hangover felt, I knew it should have been worse. I’d drunk more tequila than a human ever should. I’d taken a mix of drugs that would kill an elephant. I should be comatose, dead, on display in a museum to drinking and debauchery. I should be huddled in a corner somewhere praying for a swift death from a just god. And even if I wasn’t, even if I had no hangover at all, I should be freaking the fuck out. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was looking out for me, making this all go down easier.

  A squeal came from everywhere at once. For a second, I thought it was the chameleon, but it seemed as shocked as me. Its entire surface rippled with different colours. The sound was like someone playing a dial-up internet connection over a ham radio. Then a voice crackled from the sky.

  “Hello, hello.” Feedback. The exact audio-quality of a bullhorn on sports day at school. The chameleon shivered between colours. “Hello. Welcome to the solo fight. This is… not how this usually goes, but we will persevere.” The voice cleared its throat. They sounded like a man, slightly dour, drawling. I couldn’t see where the voice could be coming from. Just sky and fungus.

  “Hello,” I said into the sky.

  “I can see that many of you are trying to talk to me right now. We don’t quite have time for questions right yet. That will come later. The rules of this test are simple. We have placed you in a basic room with a random non-sentient creature of roughly equivalent power. The exit to the room will open once the other creature has been killed.”

  A moment passed as I tried to wrap my head around what was happening. For the first time since I’d woken, I remembered that I was supposed to be dead. It seemed unfair.

  “Okay. Good luck, everyone. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  Then, a new infobox appeared, the borders a purplish-red instead of grey, and the voice reading it inside my head was breathless, like they could barely contain their excitement.