schlock.co.uk - Bobpocalypse

Now Bob, both of him, was a medium sized man just nudging forty. He was mixed-race, African mother and English father, and running ever so slightly to seed (his ‘border’ region was over planted); which in Bob’s case meant his dark blue suit was a little tight around his waist when buttoned up. His hair was still black but had receded to leave a widow’s peak pointing menacingly down towards his fine nose. Bob considered his nose to be his best feature, though Sophie—his wife—thought his chocolaty eyes much better. Those eyes, surrounded as they were by a spider’s web of laughter lines, negated the fierceness his face often wore when he concentrated; such as now.

So Bob picked a handful of necklaces and Bob choose the pretty yellow dress and both made their way to the counter to pay. As always in big stores the ‘Please Pay Here’ sign was disguised by as much advertising as possible but eventually they both found the queues, and each Bob stood in a line. British through and through and a Midlander to boot, Bob did not bother with the whole looking at other people in other lines, so when both Bobs reached the tills at roughly the same time it was just one of those quirks the universe likes to throw out to budding authors.

Without looking around, they each slipped their credit card into the machines and typed in their PIN number. Each nervously chewed on their bottom lip as they always did, Bob—when he had been just the one—had once mistyped his PIN three times and had the mortifying experience of having to leave the shop under a cloud (Honestly, the cloud was just in his imagination; no one else noticed, but ever since he felt a frisson of nerves every time he brought something). Today the worst thing happened. Each card reader sent out Bob’s details to his bank, which instantly cottoned on to the fact that he was buying two things simultaneously from two different terminals—at the same time! (Which obviously is the very definition of simultaneously but banks are very prone to tautology).

Each machine bleeped forlornly and spat his cards back out at him. Bob reddened, although under his lush, almost golden skin, it was hard to see, and held his card. Both Bobs wondered whether to pay with another card linked to his wife’s account so that in theory she would pay for her own gift, or with cash. As he decided, both Bobs again shimmered unseen and resolved into two pairs; one searching his jacket pocket for cash and the other pulling out a second credit card.

Each assistant, who by a strange quirk of fate were both called Shannon, although one was spelt Shaanon to be fair, screamed as Bob peeled away from himself and both stood with a faint uncertain smile upon identical lips. People stood back and toes were trod upon. A stand of earrings tumbled and a petite floor manager stormed across the chaos to intervene, as was her wont. She had survived four Black Fridays, and this was a mere ripple across the pond; or so she thought. She was faced with four Bobs all arguing amongst themselves about who was the ‘real’ Bob, and two slightly crazed girls, as well as a collection of distraught shoppers. A Community Police Officer was offering first aid advice to an elderly male, which appeared to consist of merely mentioning the word ‘breathe’ every so often, whilst the Bobs continued to argue loudly.

More police arrived and soon the collection of Bobs was detained despite the dubious looks from both shoppers and police. Bob protested his innocence, as did Bob, Bob and Bob. Each gave his full name, Robert Anthony Aloysius Sefton, and correct address. Each date of birth matched the others and even the small scar upon their right thumbs matched. The police, not knowing fully what to do, did what came natural and threw them into a police van. Let a sergeant or inspector deal with it. A four voice chorus protested, explaining that they were in the Birmingham Bullring shopping for their wife’s birthday and nothing more, whilst the youngest of the constables filled in the requisite anti-terrorism forms, (in quadruplicate and by hand, as necessary for any young constable; how else were they to grasp the nihilistic nature of life in general and Birmingham in particular?) The police were working on the theory that whatever was inexplicable was by its very nature a terrorist event.

As the police van moved through the Queensway traffic the four Bobs decided not to make a run for it; unfortunately in a universe too close for comfort, four more Bobs sprang into existence. The van separated like two soap bubbles, an inaudible pop resounding through the ether. Now one of the first laws of the multiverse raised its head. Apart from Bob it seemed that living matter could not be replicated. What this meant in a practical sense was that all of the police officers died horrible deaths and the two vans, now travelling side by side, veered away from each other in driverless disarray and crashed.

Now at almost exactly the same time at the University of Helsinki, a group of researchers were observing a unique phenomenon. Normally they achieved five to six neutrino hits an hour but they found a sudden splurge of twenty, followed a few minutes later by a second spike of thirty-seven hits. As they looked, a third wave of neutrinos was picked up by the scintillation detectors.

By the end of the day they had formulated thirteen separate concepts to explain the sudden increase in neutrino behaviour. Four were discounted because the need to increase reality by fifteen discrete dimensions—and one anti-dimension—and seven looked almost the same, except that each had been devised by a differing school of mathematics and so were considered as separate equations and thus colour coded in differing felt-tips.

The remaining two actually looked promising until the first anti-quark materialised; not so much a spin as a velvety slide, a louche glance and a few bars of My Way, hummed by Sinatra. CERN contacted the world, asking if anyone could explain why their nice particle accelerator had suddenly begun to spew out all sorts of exotic particles—particularly as it was inactive that day.

Of course, for Bob this was all irrelevant. The four Bobs rushing to escape did so along one of Birmingham’s busiest roads. Thus eight became six fairly quickly. When Bob looked on at his two dead bodies, actually one and three quarters—the white van that had hit this particular Bob was now a reddish van with entrails for décor—he considered any number of paths and suddenly Bob split not into two but into five as each Bob decided upon a differing path.

Now if we had but thought and dabbed our old ‘original’ Bob with something indelible (and likewise unable to be replicated by the multiverse) then the Bob who dodged away and made his way back into the city centre would indeed be thus marked. As he tried to blend in with the background people who inhabit any story but are rarely called upon to actually do something—and also bearing in mind that at each decision a Bob would peel away from him, making ‘blending in’ even more difficult—Bob began to understand his predicament. Not understand it fully, but he could see certain ramifications because he was, after all, an intelligent man who read the odd issue of New Scientist and watched Horizon—at least until they dumbed it down.

He thought about making his way back to the car park, the police had helpfully allowed him to keep his car fob and wallet; but decided that other Bobs would be doing just that, even now. By the time he arrived, any number of Bobs could be there; and any number of Bobs could well have driven the car away. He had a little change but not much.

Bob decided to wait while Bob decided not to wait. The first Bob—who we may consider to be our Bob—decided that he would need to escape. He moved to a concealed part of the street and picked a random number. Instantly a second Bob appeared, who had obviously chosen a differing figure. Bob demanded money from the second who laughed nervously but refused, on the grounds that they were all Bob together. Bob hit him, kneeing Bob in the groin and striking Bob across the temple with a half end brick. It was now a Bob eat Bob world, and Bob was determined to be well fed. Bob pictured a second number. Another Bob popped into existence. Bob just swung the brick and lifted his—or was it his?—wallet. In fact, this Bob managed to amass over £300 in notes and almost as much in change. He then headed for the station hoping to beat any number of other Bobs with the same idea.

Now this ‘original’ Bob was wise not to head home. The variances that encompass any journey at rush hour meant that four buses were eventually full of Bobs, each nervously watching one another. By the time the first bus had reached Bob’s general neighbourhood, the army had become involved and a section of the Hagley Road cordoned off. Tempers flared and forty two Bobs left this plane of existence—of course another two hundred and thirty-seven had winked into existence, so on balance Bob did not feel so let down.

A fifth bus comprising of seventy one Bobs had set out but within a few yards seventy one differing decisions had been made and... well; the road had enough width to hold nine buses tightly. The other sixty two ended atop each other; a tower of white and red over one hundred and twenty feet high. Well it was that high for precisely 5.8034 seconds before several buses shifted—they were, not surprisingly, unused to perching on top of each other, after all—and the tower collapsed like a metallic version of Jenga.

The first, and thus, original Bob was by then on a train to London. Two Bobs accompanied him unknowingly whilst three others travelled north to Glasgow; one had decided that Manchester was the place to be and an eighth had decided inexplicably on Wolverhampton on the grounds that it would be the last place anyone would run away to.

By the time the seventeen Bobs had reached Euston—decisions needed to be made about tea, coffee, sandwiches and, crucially, which toilet to use (there is always one toilet that has previously been used by someone with both acute colitis and a range of bowel flora that are florid and able to emit olfactory elements unheard of in the natural world)—Birmingham was a disaster zone. Now Bob was barely overweight. The opening of a café at his local park had not only shortened his weekly walk but added a soupcon of processed fats and sugars in the form of a white chocolate muffin. One Bob unit weighed just over 12 stone; but by 9.05 an even million Bobs littered the streets of Birmingham, doubling its population in just a few short hours.

Over three quarters were dead and hundreds of buses and cars and bikes—plus twenty seven skateboards and four scooters—now littered this fair city’s streets. The clean-up would take forever; literally because this was—obviously—the Bobocalypse and even when they ended up just heaving a multitude of dead Bobs into the back of refuse trucks Bob would not stop multiplying.

But for now ‘our’ Bob was on a train for Paris out of Waterloo. He had ‘decided’ not to pick-pocket some one’s passport. so of course any number of light-fingered Bob’s popped into existence. Two manged to successfully pick-pocket a man of indiscriminate age—to be fair they were massively helped by the chaos caused by a handful of Bobs all yelling and been chased after failing at the whole Fagin thing—and then Bob had kneed both of them and purloined their (his?) ill-gotten gains.

He gave the least convincing passport—fat chubby face, pale with drooping blue eyes—to a passing Bob and kept the best one for himself; which he promptly used to buy a ticket on the Eurostar. He converted the rest of his cash to Euros, only having a minor grumble about the exchange rate, and waited in the carriage. He risked sleeping, believing that once asleep he would be less likely to make any rash decisions which could end up with a multitude of Bobs, or worse, a multitude of express trains all travelling along the same track. He knew very little about railways—train drivers were definitely not in vogue when he grew up—but suspected that such a scenario would end badly.

By the time the Eurostar had reached the Gare du Nord station, the situation in Birmingham had escalated from ‘Fairly Annoying´ to ‘Quite Serious’ with a soupçon of ‘Bloody Hell’s Bells’ as added flavour. As the army had been called in, the area had been cleared of reporters and all phones. No one wanted the image of ‘Our Lads’ shooting civilians in The Sun the following morning. That week’s leader of Birmingham council gleefully issued the freshly minted ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ protocol and then sharply booked four days flexi-leave and seventeen study leave days, followed by four weeks of annual leave and—for good measure—maternity leave on the basis that after all of this time off she might have time for ‘other’ pursuits. She was later found in Antigua but by that time of course it was waaaaay to late.

The soldiers, buoyed by the proposition of shooting actual zombies, chatted amongst themselves as they readied their various firearms. They were to fire on the count of three, but as always someone started on 2.5—there is always one man who suffers from some form of premature evacuation (of weapon).

By now the Bobs had reached some form of critical mass and thus each shot became a variation on Schrödinger's cat; each bullet either killed or did not kill its target. What that meant practically was that as each Bob was killed, another rolled into life. A sort of hive mind effect took hold of the Bobs. Not in the sense that they shared each other’s thoughts but on the basis that they were literally one mind. As a group they became aware that there was no need for an individual to survive as long as there was a Bob; somewhere; anywhere!

The situation was now tagged ‘Bugger this, let’s call the Yanks in,’ which roughly translates as dropping big bombs from a great height. As this had worked well during the Second World War Britain had never really felt the need for anything more up-to-date. So a dirty great big bomb was dropped on the streets of Edgbaston. Now we may as well rest here, it has been something of a rollercoaster—albeit one for very small children—and focus on why the government would actually drop a bomb upon one of its own cities. (Actually, the bomb was rather small—something rustled up quickly—and used only upon a more Bob-congested section of the Hagley Road).

So; for the Government looking down upon said section of road all the people looked like Bob. Was this a zombie apocalypse; but one in which each individual person was transmuted into a multiracial, peace-loving accountant in a slightly tight blue suit? Who knew? Perhaps the end of days would come now under the banner of multiculturalism, but as the minutes ticked by no one really had much time to think. They certainly did not receive the tidily scripted note that advised—most strongly—against any form of large scale attack against the Bobs. From the Government’s view point people were being turned into Bobs and frankly there are only so many things you can do with an accountant.

So a nice shiny bomb was dropped. At its best it could potentially kill four or five thousand Bobs, for they were pretty densely packed around the Kings Head at Bearwood. Of course a bomb is of an order of magnitude greater than a bullet. Which, translated, meant for the Bobs that as it rained destruction down upon five thousand men, it also brought into being 85,000 different Bobs; some with arms but no legs, others with legs but no arms and everything in between. We are talking a mountain of Bobs—or in truth a mountain of bits and Bobs. And of course there would always be a small chance that each Bob would survive and thus five thousand popped into existence, slipping and slithering across a landscape of limbs and blood and heads and bodies and other things once inside; each Bob stood atop his ‘brothers’ and lamented.

Meanwhile the single Bob this author calls the ‘original’ (although in truth even I have lost track of him) has sat in the Gare du Nord for a few hours until daybreak. Now he stirs just as the TV screens jump to life and announce the multitude of Bobs now infesting Britain. Birmingham is virtually a wasteland—due more to the peculiar odour brought about by over a million dead Bobs strewn about the streets—with outbreaks in Manchester, Glasgow and London.

Britain is now in lockdown, but it is too late. Bob leaves the station. Already, seven Bobs are multiplying at an alarming rate below his feet as the Paris Metro awakes to a surfeit of Bobs. The Bobpocalypse has only just got started.

Not the end. just the beginning.

BOBPOCALYPSE