Until one day, in some far orbit, a discovery is made by one such arthropod descendant…philosopher? Scientist? God? A discovery of such dire import that it breaks a million years of silence and burns a planet’s worth of energy in its haste to communicate the news to its vastly distributed kin.

It is coming to an end. It is all coming to an end. And both their mastery and immortality are finally revealed as a cruel sham.

2.

I

Julian Sabreur was, he had to admit, no young Sean Connery or even Roger Moore. Perhaps a little Daniel Craig about the eyes and chin, if Craig had dark hair and narrower cheekbones. At just shy of forty, he felt that he should have left such comparisons behind with the rest of his adolescent baggage. When he first started shaving, though, he’d taken to staring at his newly adult features, saying “Moneypenny,” or “Shaken, not stirred.” Even doing the sudden point-the-gun-at-the-camera bit from the credits. His dad had walked in on this once, to his eternal chagrin. Still got brought up at Christmas dinner, that one.

So now the eminently adult Sabreur, Julian Sabreur, could not banish the thought of 007 entirely whenever he took up the razor. It was just one of the many things he would never, ever share with any of his colleagues. Except Alison, who he’d told two years ago. They’d both been drunk and off-shift at New Year’s, she still reeling from her divorce, he from the death of an old friend and mentor. And there hadn’t been anything like that between them, even if Josie had cast suspicious looks Julian’s way come January 3rd when he finally came home. But he couldn’t talk to Josie about his work, and recently he couldn’t talk to her about much at all—apart from John’s long crash-dive towards GCSEs or whether they should sell or rent her late mother’s flat in Scarborough. Instead, Julian spent his time defending the country. It sounded very grand, put like that, but was mostly forms and reports and meetings.

The most dangerous-looking part of Julian’s face was the faint scar above one eyebrow. It was jagged enough that one subordinate had, for about two weeks, taken to referring to him as “Harry Potter” behind his back. Until Julian had called him in for a Meeting Without Coffee to explain that (1) that sort of thing was generally not conducive to a chap’s career prospects and (2) if he didn’t understand that people talked, then maybe the Security Service wasn’t the right place for him. Julian had inherited the tradition of Meetings Without Coffee from his late mentor, Germaine Willoughs, who’d had it from his own and so on back, probably, to the days of Kipling and the Great Game.