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THE BODYGUARD PROBLEM

A key problem in bunkers was the question of how the billionaire owners could control their bodyguards, and placing mind-reading microchips in their brains was a natural first step. Common to all bodyguards, they discovered, was the daily hope that someone would hurry up and attack the billionaire so that they could do some cool bodyguard stuff, and get their gun out and shoot some people, or kick them to death. Sometimes this wish was so intense that it threatened to drown out the otherwise constant thoughts about how easy it would be for them to kill their billionaire, they could just do it with their bare hands, it would hardly take a moment, which took up most of the rest of their consciousness.

Many billionaires took to wearing an earpiece which would alert them with an alarm sound whenever their bodyguards were fantasizing about killing them, but this left the billionaires with such a constant ringing in their ears that they couldn’t get any work done. A few tried to positively reinforce those moments when their bodyguards weren’t musing on murdering them, and whenever there was a pause in the alarm for a particular bodyguard, they would compliment them on their clothes or hair, or say something encouraging like “I really value your presence here,” or “Have you been working out?”

Further analysis of their thought patterns showed that most of these bodyguards thought the billionaires had a crush on them, which some notched up to a midlife crisis, but in a handful of cases the bodyguard had feelings for the billionaire, and felt emboldened to express their own longings.Analysis showed that this sexual attraction corresponded, in most cases, with a radical dip in the number of minutes per day the bodyguards were musing about murdering their employer, which is why many billionaires entered into long-term sexual relations with one or more of their bodyguards: as an act of cynical self-preservation.

In rare cases this blossomed into love, although in the case of Jeff Bezos and Jurgen, it ended in a double suicide, the two of them choosing to end their doomed affair by detonating a hand grenade pressed between their bellies as they kissed, causing a catastrophic loss of hull integrity of Bezos’s private jet which crashed into the M&S food hall in Chepstow.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GANGS: SADOMASOCHISM, GROUP THERAPY AND SKI-JUMPING.

As we may or may not already have said, the first of the seven nuclear winters was a mixed blessing for the skiing industry.While the snowfall was the best seen in decades, reinvigorating many of the lower pistes, the number of people taking skiing holidays dipped to around zero. The only people still skiing at this time were the British Royal Family – who refused to let a nuclear conflagration interfere with their social season – and people practising for the new and flourishing sport of Tyrolean Jousting, invented by a gang of entrepreneurs from Kitzbühel, which involved setting up two ski jumps facing each other across a valley.

At the booming honk of a giant horn, competitors would swoosh down their ramps and hurtle towards each other, clutching a lance under one arm, and hope to impale their opponent mid-air. Wearing armour was considered bad sport, and the bravest lancers would compete naked, except for a silk scarf displaying their gang colours stuffed into their anus, which would flutter behind them during their flight like the tail of a beautiful tropical bird. A double impalement was not uncommon, and if both jumpers managed to keep hold of their lances, the skewered pair would helicopter madly downwards in a spectacular death spiral, much to the joy of the spectators beneath, who would lock arms and spin in wild circles, howling and mimicking the tumbling duellers, even to the point of stabbing each other to death, much to the joy of the falling ski- jumpers, who would laugh and point out to each other the various dying dancers, who would point up and laugh as they watched the doomed skiers plunging to their doom, laughing and pointing.

Getting landed on by a grotesquely injured ski-jumper was considered good luck, though was rarely survived. A double miss, with both lances flapping stupidly in the wind, was met with boos and raspberries, and the unlucky jumpers would find themselves landing in a furious blizzard of old shoes, snowballs and ninja stars. Some gangs, keen to see their champion jumper win, would set up crossbow snipers near their rival gang’s ramp, and most tournaments would have at least one face-off with two already dead jumpers tumbling limply towards each other across the frozen landscape.

LOS ANGELES, SCIENTOLOGY, SELF-HATRED AND THE EXTRAORDINARY MYSTERY OF KENDRICK LAMAR.

Scientology survived for several decades as a peculiarly violent gang, led by a seldom-seen electronic device, which the higher echelons of the gang insisted contained the soul of actress Kirstie Alley, but was in fact a child’s toy looted from a Toys “R” Us warehouse. A few other notable gangs claimed Kirstie Alley as a deity or guiding prophet, including one which was formed by chance, when the annual reunion lunch of the still close-knit cast and crew from the film Look Who’s Talking Too was interrupted by the apocalypse. The brutal gang that emerged that day from the rubble of the San Antonio Winery in the heart of downtown Los Angeles sacrificed their enemies, and people they’d only just met, to Alley, whom they celebrated as a merciless destroying archangel with amazing hair.

Their slang for murdering someone was ‘making a doody’, and any gang members present at the slaying would chant their catchphrase, a line spoken by Roseanne Barr’s character in the poorly received sequel: ‘Big deal. I made a doody!’

Many gangs operated a code of silence. This often made it difficult to communicate, and almost impossible to get a monthly poetry slam off the ground.