Need we try again to investigate how everyone found out about the End? It was complicated enough for the people to adjust without the extra baggage of working out how they found out.

There were interesting, diverting discussions about when it was known suddenly that the world would end in three and a bit years. But no one remembers how they were told. They remember remembering it, as if they’d all been told years before, but had only just now recalled the facts to mind.

People chatting in the streets suddenly stopped, their minds yanked into a new realisation, to the ‘memory’. When they tried to resume, something in the others’ eyes demonstrated that the knowledge lay behind those too.

These days that moment is hardly spoken of, nor that sickening feeling in the stomach, a gut punch. Like some horrible obligation that you’d put to the back of your mind.

People are too busy as well, reassessing their lives. Preparing somehow, making sure lists are ticked, scores settled, axes ground or buried.

There are a vocal few who try to convince the world that it can’t possibly be true. Because it can’t, can it? Almost every scientist who has tried to find clues has come up wanting. There are papers debating whether something can be true just because we all know it. And this isn’t mere belief, faith – this is knowledge. No one knows how the End will occur; they simply know it will come, and when it will come.

But two scientists know the truth. They know why everyone knows. It was their experiment. Will be their experiment. Their experiment which inserts something into the timeline. Even they don’t how it started, or will start; where, when or how their machine created a loop. The loop ends time only to restart it four years earlier.

The fact is everyone remembers it, the moment itself, even if they don’t realise. And that is why they are sure. They have seen it happen, and it will happen again, and it may happen forever.