Not yet, but soon (5)

And this leads us seamlessly back to Timmy, the loveable junkie. I know that last part for a fact, because we were screen buddies at college. This just meant that we got high and watched television series for the better part of our higher education. We even went back to some of the early twenty first century stuff, which was often better than the mind numbing series we had in our time, but the joints and the alcohol made us pretty, uhm, unfazed by this lack of quality. The problem was that while I did manage to at the very least show up for my exams, Timmy never did. The closest he ever got to taking an exam was doing the assistant in a nearby classroom. He still failed, however, because he hadn’t managed to get her off. Imagine, her orgasm could have changed the world. By the time I graduated, he had started to simply add the hashish to his packet of tobacco and carry around a hipflask filled with moonshine. The day I showed him my diploma was the last time I saw him. Until he brought about the end of the world, that is.
I called him a loveable junkie, and he really was. I don’t know if you’ve ever met junkies, but usually they’re invasive for pretty much all of the senses (in case you’re brave enough to ever lick one). But Timmy managed to keep his personal hygiene on a not unacceptable level, and he kept to himself, mostly, which is something people appreciate from addicted drug users. When he had reached that ominous thirty something age, he had become an integral part of the inner-city of his hometown on the Western European coast. Nobody minded him, and nobody really cared either, but it was an arrangement that seemed to work for everybody, albeit by the grace of Timmy’s uncle, who died when he was a much less ominous twenty something and left him enough money to remove his last care in the world: his next fix.
Now, I have been talking to you about the end of the world, but as I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, it’s not as dramatic as it sounds. Sure, it was the end of our civilization as we knew it; sure, billions of people died. But we’re humanity! We’re the fleshy, pink-skinned big-headed cockroaches of the galaxy! Sort of. Which means that that ‘heroic tale of a number of Earth’s survivors’ isn’t that heroic at all, and that Timmy really shouldn’t feel too bad about himself, as he was pretty much just a catalyst. Well, more or less, because a catalyst quickens a chemical reaction while staying out of it and emerging unscathed, but Timmy was already quite scathed at the time our story starts (and it will soon enough, keep your pants on), and he was dead before the reaction had even really started, but still, I’m sure you get my point.