Now BeastOnline was the most-read news website in the world. More readers than the BBC, more than anything produced by the Americans. It reached ten million a day, and rising. Already, BeastOnline was cannibalizing its mother, breaking stories that could have waited for the print edition. But why wait? News was best when newest. And BeastOnline had the brazen chutzpah of the coming thing. The print edition was starting to lag behind. He’d saved the Beast by destroying it; that was his legacy. But he didn’t want to live to see BeastOnline’s final victory, and regretted that he probably would.

Using a rag kept for that purpose, he worked the metal with oil, exploring its cavities and protrusions, then with another rag rubbed it to a dry shine. He rolled the empty cylinder to hear its lubricated clicking. His other hand squeezed the ammunition box so the cardboard lid stood up, and he opened it with his thumb. The heavy bullets nestled inside like sleeping bees. Feeling the pleasure of how snugly they fitted into the spaces they were made for, he slipped six of them into the chambers, and clicked the gun shut.

He wished the internet had a single head, so he could put the gun to the back of it. But it didn’t. His time was over. There would be no more gentlemen of the Press. There was no place in the coming era for that old romance of notepads and shoe leather. Feeds, content, copy and paste; he’d shown the way, but he could not follow.

That was perhaps just the nature of things; the unceasing change that had already done for the typesetters and that would one day do for websites, too. But the terrible, perverse waste was that the mahout atop BeastOnline would not be his son. Despite having the news in his blood and being saturated with it as a child, Edward denied his patrimony. He’d become a director of music videos. Even when the Editor expressed it to himself this baldly, he couldn’t quite grasp it. Music videos? Tarts gyrating in bikinis? Even after years it was still shocking.

He moved the framed picture into the centre of the lamplight and turned it side-on to himself. Standing up, he reflected that the boy had always been headstrong, contrary, intolerant of authority. All good qualities in a journalist. But this year he’d refused even to come on their annual father-and-son ice-fishing trip to Greenland. And this despite the fact that he, his father, had in something approaching desperation offered to bend the rules of right and wrong for him. If Edward agreed to join BeastOnline, he would of course have to go in at the bottom, but the Editor had guaranteed that the boy would be on the back bench within three years. Three short years! It had taken him nearly twenty. And the boy hadn’t even considered it.