Another city state moves in to take the vacant land eventually, sometimes finishing off shrunken tribes living in the ruins. Another proud flag is raised to denote the current claimants to the empty title of master race. But diseases mutate and adapt, while the lemurs continue to reject interlopers who might bolster their failing genetic heritage. They are chosen, after all. They are better than the other lemurs and cannot be seen to mix with their inferiors. So they never grow or progress, and sooner or later they die.

14.

I

The next morning it all kicked off, despite everyone’s best efforts. Alison, eating cereal on the couch as she watched the news, was treated to a junior BBC reporter running out of words. They were reporting live from the Florida Keys because…something was happening.

The TV camera had caught it all, even though few knew what they were looking at. Off the coast, past a marina of rich retirees’ yachts, was an impossibly stationary tidal wave—as though the sea had suffered a critical error two hundred metres from shore. The camera was looking into an ocean which wasn’t our own, where the icecaps had melted and then some, creating a wall of water through which alien sunlight shone. The wave hung there, as though contained by some invisible membrane. It faded in and out, while behind the reporter’s stammering form people screamed and car horns blared.

Alison felt it like a knife to the gut, even on the other side of the globe. Two branches had slid into one another and fractured. Two Earths overlapped, a pick-and-mix of realities slopping together. She should get her phone. She should call…someone. Somehow make the situation better, using her inexplicable knowledge, within the remaining half a second before it all…

Then the impossible standing wave collapsed and began to roll in towards the shore. And there was more water behind it, more and more, a vast tsunami doing what water did when confronted with a gradient. Alison heard the reporter whimper as he started to run, but the cameraman was made of sterner stuff and filmed another handful of seconds before understanding what that great onrush of sea meant.

Alison could hear her phone ringing.

Heading into work, her driver—she had a driver now, as well as a bodyguard—had the radio on. Doreen from Croydon was calling in because everyone on her street had seen impossibly large rats scavenging in the bins. Or, in some cases, they’d bodily carted them away, as though hired by the borough council. Doreen was saying that her Patrick had seen one of the giant rats wearing a diving suit and telling the others what to do. And there was an epidemic of missing cats and dogs—was it connected? Alison asked the driver to turn the radio off, before anyone started talking about missing children.