There are worse things than the Apocalypse....

On the CCTV Alex watched people scream, run, and stare upwards. 

The sky filled with fire. The ground shook. Outside the bunker the air turned oven-hot. There was no time for the inventor to test his calculations: He took a deep breath, rammed his head into the bowl of superconducting electrodes, and banged on the return key.

He opened his….. no. Not his eyes. 

He was seeing through the CCTV cameras.

It'd worked! He’d copied himself into the quantum computer under the bunker  floor – he was now a simulated mind, an AI, running at a billion times human speed.

Not an escape from the end. But a postponement. He should gain subjective decades.

He watched the approaching shock-wave crawl down the street. The flames grew, fractionally......

...........

........... and a little more........

...................................................... 

....... and, eventually, Alex was desperate enough with boredom to open his internet browser. 

 Everything froze, then the world turned blue. A tiny line of writing appeared in the middle of the blue:

‘A bad script is causing your internet browser to become unresponsive. Please wait while an error report is filed’.

Far, far slower than the approaching blast wave, the green bar beneath the message began to fill up.

And Alex joined the rest of humanity in screaming....

Image Credit: Scienceblogs.com