May 20, 2011 01:54
Based deep in the heart of Texas, a secret brotherhood labored night and day to hold off the end of the world. For generations they toiled in obscurity, passing the mission down the years: prevent the apocalypse from overtaking the earth.
Only one of the members knew of the full extent of the organization, and almost none of its laborers knew its true mission or its history. No one knew its name - if indeed it had ever had one. It was known only as the Trust, which was coincidentally the only requirement that it had of its employees.
Those employees were scattered across America. "Great pay. Easy work. Telecommuting OK" ran the Craigslist ads that popped up, every seven years or so. "Must be willing to believe anything." The sort of people who answered this ad, fortunately, were mostly already guaranteed to meet this description. But the work of believing was harder than it looked - generations of experience had taught the leaders of the Trust that professional believers had a working life of about seven years before they wore out and had to be put on furlough.
That was all the Trust's workers needed to do: believe, with all their hearts, that the world was going to end tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that...
John Cavus, oil baron and founder of the Trust, could not have been called a believing man himself. But when he heard the preacher speaking of the day when earthquakes would rip apart the land and the true believers would be caught up in middle of the air, he decided to take steps. "You shall know neither the day nor the hour," he read in the Good Book, and he set aside a modest sum of money to ensure that someone, somewhere, would always know the day and the hour. Day after day, year after year, his Trust paid for a perpetual faith perpetually disappointed.
The organization fluctuated over time, of course, at times going in for hypnosis and at others polygraphy to determine the truth and force of their workers' belief. At times they tried preaching and at times persuasion, but the most reliable workers were the one who simply had the extraordinarily valuable quality of being able to believe whatever they chose to believe. And it paid - quite well - to believe in the end of the world.
Only the Master of the Trust knew that the organization's mission was not to prepare for the apocalypse, but to prevent it. Quality was difficult to ensure, however. Did the rolling years demonstrate the Trust's utility, or show only that it had not yet been tested? If believers had been promised an unexpected apocalypse, surely that meant that the apocalypse could be expected to arrive when it was not expected - a contradiction guaranteeing the world's perpetual existence.
It was probably only a coincidence that the world ended, quite unexpectedly, when the Trust's last worker reasoned that one out.
fiction,
apocalypse,
what now!