The End of the World

The end of the world used to be a big deal, but it's not anymore. I'm talking about the space part of the end; the time part's not a big deal anymore either, since the worldologists decided it was going to go on forever. In time, of course. They've got the physical end mostly fenced off, now, so people don't fall off drunk or suicidal. Or get thrown off. God knows how many people have gotten murdered by being tossed off the edge, not counting the religious dissenters and executed criminals. When you think about all those bodies falling, starving to death and rotting and - well, it's pretty creepy. Of course it's been a while since anyone took "that last step". They shut down the power plant, too; it was just a big long rope with a bunch of bags of garbage on it attached to a generator, and didn't make any pollution or noise, but people started worrying about running out of stuff to drop. Now they just use it to get rid of the waste from the nuclear plant they built after shutting the old plant down. Oh, every once in a while some guy leaves instructions in his will to throw his body over the side when he's dead, but that'll probably be illegal soon, to make sure we don't run out of stuff that way either. Fifty years ago some people from the geography department at the university fixed up a kind of sliding scaffold job and went and took a look at the other side of the world, but it was boring, just flat granite far as the eye could see. They thought about some way of exploring, say by gluing some sort of support structure to the other side, but it seemed dangerous and nobody really cared anyway. Later on a couple of guys from the local news station took a helicopter down there, but didn't find anything interesting, not even the spot where a grad student from the geology team was supposed to have carved his initials into the granite, and probably nobody'll ever be back there to try again. Every once in a while somebody suggests sending out a helicopter to look for Joan of Arc or Jimmy Hoffa or Marilyn Monroe, but apparently it's kind of windy down there and it only takes a few months for a body to fall a long, long way.

But back a couple hundred years ago the end was a big thing, maybe the biggest. It took a long time for people to even accept that the world just stopped, and in fact the first explorer who reported it got his head chopped off for his trouble. Back then all the philosophers and physicists were sure as sure could be that the world had no end at all, in fact it just wrapped around and joined itself like an orange peel. It wasn't till a band of radical astronomers kidnapped the board of the National Science Academy and left them in a basket over the edge for a few days that educated people started to accept it. And the church - for years everyone who so much as wrote "the end of the world" in a book got excommunicated; which didn't stop the Inquistion (and later the mafia) from scaring people witless by tieing them by their ankles and swinging them upside down over the side. Nowadays, of course, you can hardly hear a sermon without the priest using some stupid metaphor about "the Fall of Man". And of course it had a big effect on literature - Romeo and Juliet jumping off, Holmes and Moriarity dragging each other over, Keats's "Ode on the End of the World" everyone reads in school. These days there's hardly a soap opera where the edge isn't a big part of the plot. Naturally they don't shoot films or TV there anymore since Natalie what's-her-name went over for real in the final scene of that movie; there are five or six mock-ups in Hollywood, and one in Disneyland where you can get a videotape of yourself taking the long trip. It's amazing what people will blow 15 bucks on.