At 15.36 yesterday, the bad-tempered man from the Health and Safety Executive inadvertently leaned on the Pier

handrail.

At 15.37, someone threw him a lifebelt.

At 15.38, the lifebelt sank.

At 15.39, Pinniped announced that construction work on the Pier was complete.

And at 15.40, the Pier opened to visitors.

The Opening Night Party for the End of the Pier Revue went on for several days, happily oblivious to the Armagnac

shortage and to the occasional dancing-induced structural collapse...

...But far away, terrible and portentous events were beginning to unfold...

Here, at the end of it all, the Spell-Checker has come home to die. Pingu is not about to get sentimental about it, but the

symmetry is somehow appropriate.

The sun-baked sidewalk of this forgotten suburb of Los Angeles is dry and bright. It is always dry and bright here, Pingu

knows. There is nothing familiar about the place, but he knows it anyway. In the derelict corners of the world, the eternal

characteristics leech out and stain the architecture, so that anyone who cares to take a minute can read history like a book.

This is such a place.

Dry and bright, and that's pretty much all She wrote. There isn't going to be a lot more by way of description, and Pingu

senses that She knows this place no better than he does. But he shows no sign of impatience. Ha can afford to do his job at

the pace of these soporific surroundings.

It is almost noon, and there isn't a soul on earth. There is only Pingu, the Spell-Checker and the Author, and none of these

has ever invested in the luxury of a soul.

Not even this divot of ponderous prose perturbs Pingu. True, he despises Her, but scarcely more than he despises everyone

else. He can wait until Her heavy-handed alliteration tails off into mute insignificance, and then he will do it. Such is the

single-minded relentlessness of his being, incomprehensible to the non-plasticine.

There is a lock-up here, and that much is familiar. Another barren womb for stillborn creativity. Some driven nobody has

toiled here to make something, yet another thing that the World never needed.

Whoever it was did their best. They surely believed in their pathetic creation, and they must have railed unheard at

Mankind's studied ignorance of it. We all come to that, eventually.

And so the Spell-Checker had been born here, among the dust and the discarded diskettes, but it did not die. It did not die

because this is California, albeit the least part of it. In California, the monstrous issue of a million wannabes comes to life like

nowhere else. In some other place, the paper-clips are inert. In this place, they infest the pre-installed consciousness, and

they beg hopefully for attention at the corner of every screen.

Anyone else would shudder at the thought, but Pingu is unmoved. The stillness intensifies, and he knows that the last feeble

glimmer of the Author's imagination has now been extinguished. It is time...

The door of the lock-up swings submissively open, its locks long since broken by some unremembered junkie. Inside, Pingu is

confronted by the carcass of a trashed PC, mindlessly upturned among the extinct pyre of dessicated pizza-boxes. There is a

sweet stench of nameless excrescences, and motes of dust coruscate in the invading sunlight. Pingu disregards all of this,

searching only for his quarry, finally cornered at the culmination of his patient quest.

And yet there is something else in the shadows too. Something deeper and darker than the trivial Spell-Checker, more

malevolent even than an animated paper-clip. Pingu feels a frisson of fear, so alien to him that he hardly recognises it. And

suddenly the wasted monitor crackles into an electric travesty of life...

Pingu struggles to stake arm. Counter ten. Wan, tooth, reef, orfe, hive, sick, sever, neigh to an iron hen. But he is slipping

intercom fusion Andy's pair. Games of fish-tennis with Robbie flash be furry size. The end is whiffed, and Pingu is rid used

to the clay from Wednesday came.

Evans' Nose wattle happen now. Anything could harpoon in the neckscarf hour.

Beer frayed. Beaver hairy affrayed...

In another of those, present-tense-curdling timeslips, it is now several days later. Miss Coleridge is taking a letter (to places it

never imagined in its worst nightmares) when something decidedly unpleasant bursts onto her screen.

She flicks the smoking remains of the virus checker from her ample brood-patch, and wrinkles her beak at the intruder.