"I'll do it tomorrow," Lloyd spoke dimly, without turning his head to the recipient of his words. He hadn't even heard what his mother had asked him to do, due to being encapsulated by his book. Feverishly he typed, one headphone in listening to jazz music, thinking he had something great on his hands. The idea had come to him in a dream. A semi-autobiographical horror novel about a colony of people from one of Jupiter's moons being terrorized by the titular character who thinks he is Satan. It was pure rubbish. The writing of this novel, Lloyd felt, was more imperative than his mother's request to vacuum his room. He would be proven right for the wrong reasons.
Lloyd typed deep into the night. Around 6 AM he noticed he was struggling to keep his eyes open and made the decision to shuffle off to bed. He took off his clothes, laid in bed, and blissfully went to sleep, content with himself. All of those things being done for the last time, for Lloyd and for many others. Around noon, Lloyd's mother ventured jovially into his room. She was unsurprised to see him comatose, room unkempt, carpet unvacuumed. The usual routine fell into place as she picked up dirty clothes around her sleeping son and left the room, not fully closing the door. That was the last time she would do that as well. Routines were about to become extinct. Mere moments later, before Lloyd's mother could touch her black coffee to her lips, before her husband could walk in the door on lunch, before Lloyd's dream was halfway over, in a flash, in an instant, tragedy struck. Not just this simple family, but all families. As well as all not families. The scroungers and drifters and millionaires and homeless and presidents and peasants alike received an unwanted gift from the cosmos. One that you sadly couldn't return for something you actually liked. A celestial power blasted through the Earth, splitting the hunk of rock we call home into pieces. A gamma ray burst shot through the planet, core and shell, and rendered it inert. It's something you cannot be prepared for. All things suddenly became upended at once, inverting things and intangibles just the same. Millions upon millions of people died in an instant, with the rest of them following shortly. Anyone who wasn't finished off in the actual space catastrophe was left with an uninhabitable state of being. Earthquakes so vicious it shook your vision and blurred your senses. Tidal waves only possible in this exact scenario. Oceans drained and overflowed as gravity ricocheted around the world, adjusting and readjusting to the new chunks of mass that used to be one. Houses and streets turned sideways and spun out of control. It was truly a waking nightmare, though it lasted only a few seconds.
Lloyd had an ending most people wish they could have themselves. He was catapulted from his bed, and thankfully the roof had simultaneously been torn from its base, or he would have been splattered then and there. But no, he was instead launched through the air about 400 feet. He broke his fall with his soft, delicate head, and it shattered into bits as if he had been an unruly child's dinner. That doesn't sound pleasant or desired, which it isn't for most, but it was in these few seconds of flight that envy would have been focused on, if there was any left in the world. Lloyd's first thoughts in this time of deathly crisis, went to his horrible and hopeless book. Sprung from his bed, unjustly tossed through suburban skyline, the very first thing to cross his mind was excitement over being awake. Excitement to sit down and type up something personal that he had only stopped doing a handful of hours ago. In those moments, those short instants, he thought about a new character, a clever line, and where he left his moon colonists. In his morning stupor, he felt only joy and pride for his work, and desire to do more. No fear, no anxiety, no sadness, no remorse. Only hope for the future, when everyone else had none at all. Lloyd was absolutely overflowing with tenacious creativity, having absorbed the rest of the population's. And at the very end, in the unquantifyable seconds before he impacted destructed Earth, he felt a hint of guilt. He never vacuumed the rug. His mom sure would be annoyed.
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