A day for celebration in the history of Earth is how this paper had styled it. How wrong could we be and in so short a time. With barely enough staff to print run this last edition those still here to read will forgive this editorial if I go over very old ground as a reminder of how we have come to this.

We had hailed Prof Dugdale as the greatest man who had ever lived and the luckiest too. He had saved our souls.  He did for our souls what the ARC programme had done for our bodies.

With the ARC program we had done the same, greeted it as our saviour and we’d been wrong. The All-world Resuscitation Concept meant nobody died. We could live for ever. How clever we felt. Our invitrio transponders frequenced an SOS if our biorythyms were critical and triggered a body shutdown stasis. It was enough to keep the encephalographic data intact.

Body recovery, mem and pers transfer into a cloned and stored body (not necessarily yours but let’s leave aside the lawsuits) and Bob’s your uncle, and probably your great uncle too.

But immortality was a killer. It killed adventure, it killed risk taking, it killed contact sport not because we tired of them because the transponders were frail and could fail.

When we’d believed we were going to die, we could risk our lives because it was then or later – we had to die.  Now we could – if we were careful and stayed within the ARC coverage  – live forever.  And that’s what we wanted to do  - live forever - and so we stayed safe. Nobody wanted to gamble away forever.  Maniana was good enough when you had a billion billion tomorrows to do it in. Don’t do to day what you can do a thousand years from now. We began to stagnate.

And then our redeemer, the God-hole. From decline to the sublime, it saved us from us, so we thought.  Dugdale, won the hearts of the world and the colonies, when he made free his knowledge “not just for the United States of Europe but for all humanity for all time”. We barely registered the boffin-speak about its status as a multi dimensional discontinuity in time, space. Yeah, yeah, we said to his discovery that it had manifold potential portals into the vari-dimensional cosmos.So what?

It was what Dugdale learnt about what it did and how he learnt it that riveted everyone.

An Andromeda class trans-solar clipper had imploded losing a thousand lives in a mico-second. By the greatest fluke, Dugdale had traced those lifes into the God-hole and beyond.  Their life force had been translated into other dimensions.  Now death held no fear – quite the opposite.  It was holding us back.  What we’d always wanted, what we’d always known deep down inside, was true – there was more life after death.

It was too much.  First the crime and then the killing and then the suicides and last the wars. Nothing mattered. Prisoners, suspects, anyone unhappy killed themselves knowing they were going on.  No trials, no sentence, no punishment, no deterrent, whatever we did we knew where we were going. 

Into the God-hole and beyond.  Then the killings, black against white, jew

against gentile, Sunny against Shi’te, West against East, poor against rich, neighbour against neighbour, loser against winner. Then the  ‘Cide pacts, enormous tranches of people determined to go together and, last, the wars. Neither side had anything to lose. At least, if they did once they didn’t now – with the SkyGrid down, the distort weapons destroyed nearly all.  But the fools, even that was not enough for them, even now their antique Nukes were being traded. In a month, nuclear winter will........