The World's End

What will end the human race?

Will it be war, sparked by lunatics with more bombs than sense? Will it be an environmental end, with rising temperatures slowly boiling our blood and acid rain melting our skin?

We’ll have to wait and see. Hope it’s chips, it’s chips…etc.

I have a different theory.

People love to drive everywhere and park atrociously when they get there. They also like nondescript mush encased in pastry.

There are now so many Greggs outlets that there is little point in the aimed-at-vile-people chain of “bakers” opening another single one. They will instead start to join existing outlets together to create megastores and eventually entire cities will be levelled just to accommodate them and they will employ robots to cut labour costs.

At the same time, the world’s population will be halved on a daily basis by people who park their cars in an unsafe manner, leading to multiple pile-ups and billions of agonising deaths.

In twenty years there will only be two people left. One day one of them will park their car outside MegaGreggs and get out. The other will crash into the back of it, dying a fiery death as both vehicles explode.

The first man will realise he is the last human. He will race into MegaGreggs and purchase a steak bake from one of the robots before climbing on to the roof of the outlet.

He will hold aloft his un-nutritious, fat-laden snack and cry “VICTORY!” as he surveys a landscape which is just burning automobiles and towering MegaGreggs structures as far as the eye can see. He will bite into the pastry treat and die as a single bullet penetrates his skull right between his eyes.

A robot holding a smoking gun will look up at him and smile. Yes, actually smile. The machines will take over, but they’ll all kill each other within months.

Thousands of years later, a new society of people who have evolved from cockroaches will form in what is now a bleak desert.

One day, one of them will see something poking up through the sand, like at the end of Planet of the Apes.

Baffled, they will pull the item free and look at it quizzically.

“Is this some ancient form of weapon?” they will ask.

No, it’s a fucking selfie stick and that’s all there will be left of us.

I hope you’re all very proud of yourselves.