Sears - Choose Your Own Apocalypse With Kim Jong-un & Friends

WITH KIM JONG-UN & FRIENDS

Also by Rob Sears

The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump
Vladimir Putin: Life Coach

Acknowledgements

Much gratitude to Hannah Knowles, Jamie Byng and Gordon Wise for helping me choose the right adventure, to Leila Cruickshank, Vicki Rutherford, AaIshah Hawton and Lucy Zhou for heroic work against a ticking clock, and to the 3M corporation for inventing Post-it Notes. Special thanks also to Grace for always looking me in the eye and dropping her next move, and to both our families for being supportive beyond any call of duty.

WITH KIM JONG-UN & FRIENDS

Rob Sears

First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by
Publishers Group Canada

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books

Copyright Rob Sears, 2019
Illustrations copyright Doaly, 2019

The right of Rob Sears and Doaly to be identified as the
author and illustrator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78689 864 7
eISBN 978 1 78689 865 4

Content

NOW RECRUITING

Can YOU keep a calm head in emergencies? Do YOU know how to manage upwards while maintaining a client-centric attitude? And are YOU ready to make the choices that will determine the future of human civilisation?

Then there may be an entry-level position waiting for you at the United Nations
Department for Continuity (Global).

Send your CV to Susan at

Its been six months since you answered an ad and began your job as a junior officer at the UN Department for Continuity (Global).

Based in a former toiletries supply room on the third floor of UN headquarters, your teams job is to prevent the untimely cessation of global activities in any given year, or, in laymans terms, to stop the world ending.

Basically, you are the ones world leaders call when the proverbial shitstorm is about to hit the proverbial windfarm.

But none of that matters right now because its five p.m. on Christmas Eve and youre heading home for the holidays. Your computer is shutting down and youre just putting your coat on when your boss saunters over with a greasy grin on his face.

Weve just had a Code Red from Pink Camellia. You recognise the codename for North Koreas Kim Jong-un. Something about a missing rocket, I think he said. Would you be a star and pop over to Pyongyang to make sure everythings OK? Id go myself but Im on Christmas dinner duties tomorrow. Im doing a bird within a bird within a bird, have you ever tried it?

Typical. Quiet all month then this. What do you want to do?

Tell him where he can stuff his three-bird roast. Youre not cancelling your Christmas plans for anything..

Spring into action. A nuclear conflagration would spoil the holiday season for everyone..

Abandoning your car, you approach the sinkhole cautiously. Its sides are dauntingly steep, but you want to see whats going on in there first-hand, so you begin to clamber down the rock walls. As carefully as you choose your hand and footholds, the freshly settled earth is loose and you find yourself slip-sliding down the last few metres, landing painfully atop the pile of wrecked SUVs.

Its dark down here. You dust yourself off and switch on your phones torch.

Youre in a perfectly circular tunnel, easily twice your height, stretching off into darkness. The walls are smooth and warm as if freshly dug, and from the darkness ahead, a low whirring sound reaches you. You advance forwards, running the light beam along the walls and ceilings and wishing you had a weapon.

You havent walked more than ten or fifteen metres before your torchlight picks out what appears to be a gigantic steel drill-bit. Completely filling the circumference of the tunnel ahead, it must be one of Blue Poppys inventions maybe some kind of tunnelling machine.

Almost silently, it rotates towards you, causing a glowing red light attached to it to describe circles in the gloom. You gulp.

Somehow you feel as if this colossal machine is watching you.

Hello? you say, feeling foolish for trying to communicate with what is probably a bit of inanimate mining equipment.

A small hatch in the thing opens and a flimsy plastic extendable arm pops out.

It would almost be comical if it were not carrying a pistol thats pointing straight at your head.

Retreat back up the tunnel immediately. You have no idea what youre dealing with..

Whatever this thing is, you dont like it one bit. Fight it mano-a-machine..

At first Kim Jong-un murmurs nonsensical sounds, but like an old radio tuning in he begins recounting his past to the hushed room.

Kim Jong-un remembers being the only kid with a bodyguard at his Swiss school.

He remembers trying to start an epic prank war with his best friend, who didnt dare prank him back.

He remembers the day his dad named him Great Successor but being more excited about watching Space Jam.

Think further forward in time, you prompt. Three years ago, do you remember a code?

He goes quiet for a while, then resumes.

He remembers his first taste of brie.

He remembers his trousers getting too tight around his middle, and one day finding theyd all been swapped for a larger size.

He remembers the shock of surfing Netflix one night on the nations only account and stumbling on his dad as a puppet in the movie Team America. Pretty funny, he thought.

The hypnotherapist interrupts to tell you that Kim Jong-un should be woken.

Being under this long could be very dangerous, she urges.

Snap him out of it..

He still hasnt remembered any kind of code. You have to keep going..

I want to save the bees as much as you do, you say, advancing with extreme caution towards the demented lab director. Perhaps if you can get close enough, you can seize her handheld detonator. But blowing us both up wont help the bees. Now why dont you deactivate the bomb and unlock the door, and we can both go outside and save the bees together?

Dont come any closer! she hisses, brandishing the device in front of her like a protective wand... but as you get closer, you realise you have seen one like it before. On your keyring.

Suddenly you laugh.

Are you going to shine your pocket torch at me? You stride over to the bomb and unravel some masking tape and loo rolls. Are you going to blow us up with these toilet rolls?

She shrugs her shoulders and turns away. You got me. But Im not sorry. It was the only way to get you to listen.

Its a sad scene. Shes used and abused your goodwill and given you quite a fright but at the same time you cant help but think how desperate she must be to go to such lengths. If she really believes the world faces an existential threat, can you fault her for going to extremes?