Hitchhiker's Guide to the Apocalypse

Chapter One — Winter Wonderland

Mum: So you are finally leaving?
Son: Yes, bag is packed, I have my trusty travel book and I am ready to go.
Mum: Ah yes, how to see the world on a shoestring — just don't do anything stupid because it was in a book.
Son: Everyone calls it The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Apocalypse, Mum.
Mum: Whatever. Just stay safe and come home early if you need to.

I gave Mum a hug and then shook Dad's hand. It turns out the only thing that will survive the end of the world is cockroaches and toxic masculinity.

"Stay safe, son," he said in a gruff voice.

I jumped into a self-driving car to the airport. First stop: Antarctica.

Day One

Can't wait to start my new job. I've been lucky enough to get work at one of the most exclusive hotels. The pay is terrible, but I get free food and accommodation, so it'll be worth it.

Day Two

Finally off the plane. The hotel is in West Antarctica, right next to the highest mountain range, the Vinson Massif. I was expecting a snow castle. Instead I found a Soviet bunker. Wind speed can reach over 300 kilometres per hour here, so you can't build fancy towers. I was ordered to go straight to my bunk — four hours to rest before my first shift, and I want to make a good impression.

Day Three

I'm in hell. What have I done? I am basically a prisoner, and the prison guard is a cold-blooded, malfunctioning AI. They tell me it was built using historical data on how human hotel managers operated.

They must have been watching Fawlty Towers, because this place has the serenity of a volcanic eruption. Every morning we line up to get our tasks from the Hotel Allocation Logistics system — HAL.

You always have to be nice to HAL, otherwise it will lock you outside in the cold and refuse to let you back in. I never imagined the end of the world would be this stupid. HAL takes every complaint the guests make and assigns staff to fix it — the problem is HAL causes most of the complaints in the first place, so fixing them means working around its own bugs. Today's challenge: stopping the cleaning robots from killing the guests.

The Dirt Identification Cleaning System — DICS — decided the children were biological waste, and started spraying them with disinfectant. To be fair to the system, some of the kids were pretty gross. The only fix was to turn the machines off and on again. Which meant catching them first.

It makes me laugh to think everyone was worried AI would enslave humanity. The real danger was that we'd become slaves to constantly fixing these stupid robots. Eventually I turned it into a game, getting the kids to help lure them into a corner. Using children as bait wasn't ideal, but it worked.

Day Four

I never thought hell would be this beautiful. The cracks in the ice glow a magical blue — the ice is so dense it absorbs every other colour, but blue's short wavelength scatters instead, reflected back in the streams, rivers and ocean. The sculptures the wind and water carve into the ice look almost alive. Nowhere else have I seen how connected the ocean, land and air really are.

If only I'd had more time to enjoy it. One of the hotel's ongoing problems was flat-earth conspiracy theorists, frequently turning up to try to prove the globalists wrong — jumping off cliffs, skydiving into ice chasms, trying to make the penguins confess. Eventually the hotel built a fake scientific base a short distance away, luring them there with big signs:

TOP SECRET — DO NOT ENTER DANGER — INSTANT DEATH $50 FINE

The hotel staff filled a warehouse with old documents, beakers of coloured water, and a machine that goes ping. Staff are sent out every six hours to collect the conspiracy theorists, explain it's fake, and charge them $50.

So today, between resetting the cleaning machines and being yelled at by guests, I drove out to our "secret lab." You'd think the unlocked gate and lack of guards would have tipped them off. It hadn't. Inside was an eclectic collection of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Normal procedure is to let them yell until they're exhausted, then drag them back to the hotel. Today I tried something different — I turned to them and whispered, "If you want to know the truth, you have to follow me," then ran outside and pointed straight at the sun.

They followed me up the nearest hill. I pointed at the sun again. One of them slowly started to speak.

"The sun is going back up. It's the afternoon. It should be going down."

"Exactly. Now you know the big secret."

They all nodded at each other, satisfied, and I drove them back to the hotel. Of course, the sun doesn't set at all in the Antarctic summer — it waltzes around the sky with the clouds, and there's no such thing as afternoon, since we're in every time zone simultaneously. For now, they all believed they understood something no one else did.

Day Five

Fun fact: ninety per cent of serious skiing accidents happen on your last run of the day. Great example of misleading statistics — of course most accidents happen on the last run. The real question is who are the insane ten per cent who get seriously hurt and decide to go for one more anyway?

Today I was allocated to the ski slopes, right next to Mount Vinson — 4,892 metres, so tall the snow doesn't even want to fall on it, reluctantly pushed up by the wind instead. Only an idiot would try to climb it. But wherever there are mountains, there are idiots. These days, anyone who can afford a lift pass can reach the top — and billionaires are seldom sensible. Maybe all the money's gone to their heads. Maybe their robotic enhancements make them feel invincible.

To make matters worse, global warming has made the mountain far more dangerous than it used to be — water flowing beneath the glaciers, cracks appearing without warning, avalanches tearing down the slope. The hotel's solution: signs, in multiple languages, occasionally lost in translation.

PLEASE STAY ON THE PATH NICE TO LIVE, DO NOT JUMP OFF CLIFF

The signs increased safety about as much as alcohol improves driving. Like most jobs at the hotel, rescues were done by robots — built to look human so they wouldn't scare people, and installed with an overly cheery personality no situation could dent: "Thank you for choosing our service." "May I please prevent you from falling?" "Life is good, let's not die today." My job was fixing them when they went wrong — and because they couldn't tell rescuers from guests, they'd try to rescue each other, turning every emergency into the world's most annoying, overly polite argument, until I faked a fall myself just to get one robot's attention off the other.

Day Six

"What time is it?" — the most common, and most confusing, question the staff get asked. Antarctica sits in all twenty-four time zones at once, so the hotel runs on three simultaneously: one for the Americans, one for the Europeans, one for East Asia. In a summer where the sun never sets, that's anarchy — especially behind the bar, where one guest wants an all-day breakfast and twelve more bottles of wine in the same sentence. The wibbly-wobbly time zones make for wibbly-wobbly customers.

Day Seven

Penguins are adorable. One of them even offered me a pebble. I think that means we're engaged?

Day Eight

Reassigned to the zoo — the resort's odd-ball menagerie of animals rescued from the melted north, a modern Noah's Ark of polar bears, arctic foxes and caribou, plus species revived from fossil DNA and hybrids nobody asked for. No one argues with Gladys, the head keeper, who's been here since the start and always has a snake around her neck.

Feeding the polar bears is a problem, since they can't tell the difference between me and a fish with legs. So I built a trebuchet out of old pipe and a trolley — and by the end of the day had a small crowd of tourist kids helping me launch lunch over the fence, one bear (and one prehistoric turkey) at a time.

And then she arrived — the only person who could make the bright orange zoo uniform look good.

"What do you think you're doing?" she said.

"Hi Kissa, nice to meet you," I squeaked.

"Stop playing around and get back to work."

Turns out she's the head keeper's daughter. I spent the rest of the day shovelling mammoth dung. One landed directly on top of me. Karma, probably, for the trebuchet.

Day Nine

I will never complain about picking up after my dog again.

Day Ten

Reassigned again — kids' club this time, filling in for Mildred, who's had a breakdown. One small girl wants to know why the hotel exists at all, and won't accept "the snow melted everywhere except here" without a proper explanation of polar vortexes and forcefields. By the end of the day the whole group is asking how ice reflects sunlight and why Earth used to be so much cooler. It's a strange kind of hope — scientists once came here to drill ice cores and learn about the past. Now it's a refuge for the future, and maybe, if I can teach these kids something, that's not nothing.

Day Eleven

Is tofu made from toes? What is the point of trees? Why can't I put scissors in my mouth? So many questions. Child logic: if an adult understands one thing, they must know everything.

Day Fourteen

My ticket out of here arrives with all the arrogance of a male peacock in mating season — bare-chested in the cold, feathers implanted on his shoulders, recruiting staff for Cretaceous Adventure Land. I write her name is Kissa and she loves animals on the corner of his hotel map and hand it over with a wink.

The next morning: bags packed, 8am sharp. Downstairs, peacock man and Kissa are standing dangerously close together. "Hurry up," he says. "You can carry our bags to the car." I somehow carry all three, and follow them out — glad to be leaving the broken robots and the shovelled dung behind, but strangely fond of the kids' club, penguin jokes and all.

…and that's just Antarctica. Kevin and Kissa's journey has barely started.