The end of the world was announced on a Friday, which was considered unnecessarily cruel by people who had already been having a difficult week and were looking forward to the weekend.
It was announced by the Ministry of Continuity, a government department responsible for ensuring that nothing came to an end without the appropriate documentation.
The announcement was brief.
"After careful consideration, the present world has been declared unsuitable for continuation. Citizens are requested to remain calm while arrangements are made for its replacement."
The stock market fell immediately. It had been expecting something mundane.
By Tuesday, three committees had been formed to investigate the announcement. By Wednesday, two had concluded that the world was not ending, while the third had concluded that it had ended some time ago but that nobody had informed the relevant departments.
On Thursday, the Ministry opened applications for a new world.
Thousands arrived.
The first applicant was a general who wanted a world without enemies, provided that he remained in charge of defending it. The second was a banker who wanted equality, provided that his wealth was exempt. A politician requested freedom of speech with the additional condition that nobody be permitted to disagree with him.
An entrepreneur wanted a world without competition.
A philosopher wanted a world in which everyone thought independently, preferably along the lines he had suggested.
The committee was exhausted before lunchtime.
At four o'clock, a tall, poorly dressed man entered the room. He carried no documents, had no lawyer and appeared to have mistaken the Ministry for a railway station.
"Your application?" asked the chairman.
"I haven't brought one."
"Then what do you want?"
"A beginning."
The chairman sighed. "Everyone wants a beginning. The difficulty is that nobody wants to end anything."
The tall man sat down.
His name was Elias. He had been a teacher, a librarian, a husband and, for a brief period, a reasonably successful seller of umbrellas. He had almost lost his life in a war, his savings in a financial crisis and his sanity to an illness that had not recognised the importance of his plans for the future.
He had also lost something less easily identified: his confidence that human beings were becoming wiser.
"Tell us," said the chairman, "what should the new world look like?"
Elias thought for a moment.
"Different."
"That is hardly a specification."
"Then perhaps you should ask why the old one failed."
The chairman was offended. The committee was intrigued.
"Go on," he said.
"We built cities without knowing our neighbours. We developed machines that could calculate the distance to distant galaxies but could not tell us when someone sitting beside us was lonely. We invented a thousand ways to communicate and perfected the art of misunderstanding. We accumulated knowledge without acquiring wisdom. We became wealthy without becoming generous and powerful without becoming secure."
"Are you suggesting," asked the banker, "that wealth is undesirable?"
"No. I am suggesting that wealth becomes rather ridiculous when people have more than they can enjoy while others have less than they need."
The banker made a note to have Elias investigated.
"And what about nations?" asked the general.
"Keep them."
"Religions?"
"Keep them."
"Languages, cultures, traditions?"
"All of them."
"Then what precisely are you proposing to change?"
"The way we see one another."
The chairman laughed. "You want to rebuild civilisation by changing human nature?"
"No," Elias replied. "I want to rebuild it by changing what we reward."
For the first time that afternoon, nobody had anything to say.
The committee decided to conduct a practical examination.
Elias was given a small town and one hundred volunteers. He was told to create a model of the new world within seven days.
On the first day, the volunteers argued about who should be in charge.
On the second, they argued about how much everyone should contribute.
On the third, three groups separated because they disagreed about the meaning of fairness.
By the fourth, the model town had developed a housing shortage, a currency crisis and a thriving black market in committee appointments.
Elias watched the proceedings with growing amusement.
"Do you see?" said the chairman, visiting the experiment. "Human nature cannot be changed."
"Of course it cannot," said Elias. "But neither can the weather. We still build houses."
On the fifth day, a pipe burst in the town's water system. The chairman expected another committee. Instead, a carpenter, a doctor, two schoolchildren and a retired soldier worked through the night to repair it.
They did not ask who was responsible for the accident. They did not ask which group the others belonged to. They simply needed water.
On the sixth day, a child fell ill. The doctor treated her without asking whether her parents had contributed to the common fund. A baker sent food to the family. The carpenter repaired their roof.
On the seventh day, the town held a meeting.
There were still disagreements. There were still complaints. One man continued to believe that the world would function better if everyone followed his instructions, although he had not yet managed to convince his own dog.
But something had changed.
The volunteers had stopped treating every disagreement as an invitation to become enemies.
The chairman returned to the Ministry.
"Your experiment has not eliminated conflict," he announced.
"Nor did I promise that it would."
"It has not eliminated greed."
"Nor has it eliminated hunger. But you would hardly suggest that we should preserve hunger for the sake of consistency."
The chairman closed the file.
"You are an impractical man, Elias."
"That is what people say when they have run out of practical objections."
The committee retired to deliberate.
They deliberated for fourteen days. They considered the matter from economic, political, philosophical and historical perspectives. They commissioned a report on the cost of beginning again and discovered that beginning again was considerably cheaper than continuing to make the same mistakes.
Finally, the chairman summoned Elias.
"We have reached a decision," he said. "Your application has been approved."
Elias smiled.
"Excellent. When does the new world begin?"
The chairman looked uncomfortable.
"There is a complication."
"Naturally."
"The new world cannot be established until the old world has formally surrendered its authority."
"And who has the authority to do that?"
The chairman looked at the other committee members.
Nobody answered.
After a long silence, Elias began to laugh.
The chairman frowned. "What is so amusing?"
"You have spent fourteen days deciding whether humanity deserves another chance, but you have forgotten to ask humanity."
That afternoon, something unprecedented happened.
The Ministry opened its doors.
People came from everywhere. Factory workers arrived with engineers. Farmers sat beside scientists. Teachers spoke with soldiers. People from different countries, cultures and traditions found themselves sharing the same tables.
Nobody was asked to surrender their identity.
Nobody was required to think alike.
The only question put before them was this:
What kind of world would you be willing to build for someone you have never met?
The answers came slowly.
A world where children did not inherit the hatred of their parents.
A world where poverty was treated as a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be endured.
A world where knowledge was shared, differences respected and disagreements settled without violence.
A world where a person's worth was not measured by the country of their birth, the colour of their skin, the size of their bank account or the language in which they prayed.
A world where success did not require someone else's failure.
There were no unanimous votes. There were arguments, revisions and disagreements. But the people continued talking until they found enough common ground to begin.
At midnight, the chairman signed the final document.
The old world was dissolved.
The new one was declared.
Elias returned to the Ministry the following morning to collect his copy of the agreement.
The building was empty.
The offices were deserted. The telephones had been disconnected. The chairman's chair stood overturned. Even the great brass sign above the entrance had disappeared.
On his desk lay a small envelope.
Inside was a note.
Dear Elias,
You have been informed that the Department of Tomorrow was established to design a new world. This was not entirely accurate.
The department was established to discover whether humanity was ready to design one.
For centuries, people waited for a new world to arrive. They imagined it would descend upon them through some extraordinary event, brought by extraordinary people.
They were mistaken.
The new world began the moment ordinary people stopped waiting for somebody else to create it.
The Department of Tomorrow is therefore being permanently closed.
Its work is complete.
Elias read the note twice.
Then he noticed something written at the bottom, in a different hand.
P.S. The chairman was you.
He looked up.
Across the empty room stood Elias' child, a little boy, around nine years old, carrying a schoolbag.
"Father, you were the Chairman of the Department of Tomorrow?" the boy asked.
"Yes."
"And you helped create the new world?"
Elias smiled. "I suppose I did."
The boy pulled a chair towards him and sat down.
"I have a complaint."
Elias raised an eyebrow. "Already? The new world is less than a day old."
"That is precisely the problem," the boy replied. "Everyone is celebrating it. Nobody has explained how we are supposed to keep it."
Elias looked at him with renewed interest.
"Go on."
"My grandfather, your father, says that before I was born, people called one another enemies because they lived on different sides of a line. My teacher says that people went to war because they wanted things that belonged to other people. My history book says that some people even killed one another because they believed different things."
"Your grandfather and your teacher are correct."
"Then what stops it happening again?"
Elias leaned back.
"Memory. Education. Good laws. Wise leaders. People who refuse to be silent when something is wrong."
The boy considered this answer.
"That sounds like a lot of work."
"It is."
"And what happens if the leaders become foolish again?"
"Then the people must remind them."
"And if the people become foolish?"
Elias smiled. "Then I suppose the children must remind the adults."
The boy looked pleased. He reached into his schoolbag and placed a folded sheet of paper on the desk.
"What is this?"
"A list."
Elias opened it. There were twenty-seven names written on the page.
"Who are these people?"
"My friends. They come from twenty-seven different countries. Some speak different languages. Some have different customs. Some don't even agree about which football team is the greatest."
"An unfortunate beginning," Elias observed.
"But we have decided something. Every year, we are going to meet in a different country. We will learn about one another, share our ideas and solve one problem together. This year, we are starting with a school that has no clean drinking water."
Elias studied the list.
"And who is organising all this?"
The boy shrugged.
"We are."
"Who gave you permission?"
The boy looked genuinely puzzled.
"God did!"
Elias said nothing.
The boy stood up, adjusted his schoolbag and walked towards the door. Then he turned around.
"One more thing."
"Yes?"
"What was the name of the old world?"
Elias thought for a moment.
"It had many names. Some called it civilisation. Others called it progress. Most people simply called it normal. But mostly it was Satanic and ugly. It was the Satan's World where everyone had free-will"
The boy nodded thoughtfully.
"That's strange."
"What's strange?"
"If that was the old world, why do everyone want to go back to it? The old world is made up from the ideas of men. The ideas of men comes forth from Satan while men think it springs from free-will. We need to truly listen to a higher source, God and only God! Man is the Problem, God is the Answer."
Elias watched him leave after spouting these words of wisdom. The child had understood the Great Deception of Satan while grown men who were too neck-deep in their illusions could not see through it. They were too caught up in the cobweb of Satan's deceit. Satan deceived humanity into thinking their thoughts were original while the true source was actually Satan. The ideas of men emanates from Satan while men think it emanates from free-will.
For the first time, he understood what the committee had failed to discover in all its fourteen days of deliberation.
They had thought the new world needed a chairman, a constitution, a department and a carefully prepared plan.
But the boy had arrived with something far more valuable. The will of Good is the will of God. The will of men, especially men; turned everything upside down which created conflict and turmoil.
The new generation had different ideas. Their vision for the new world was completely different. A world where free-will would disappear and only righteousness would live. The will of God.
Elias looked again at the list of twenty-seven names. At the bottom, the boy had written a sentence:
"We have decided that our children will never have to learn the names of the countries we hated. They will learn the names of the people we helped. We will do Good because Good is God and God is Good. Our motto of the New World: God is Good and Good is God."
Elias folded the paper carefully and placed it inside his coat.
Outside, the city was waking up.
And somewhere, in a classroom thousands of miles away, another child was making a list of friends.
The Department of Tomorrow had closed. The Children of the New World would take things forward. This time around, the parents will learn from their children.
Tomorrow, it turned out, had already begun.
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