Time has a radioactivity. The years transmute; the seconds decay and cannot be reconstituted. Take one world and briefly poach for the sake of industry. The water warms. The white rhino becomes a memory. A king dies: Rexit. A war starts, and then another. Two become one, a celebration with lethal confetti.

The water warms.

There are reasons still for combustion, fossil fuel lobbyists know several, the world’s forests know several more. Stained air, destruction, the loss of habitats, the loss of many.

The water warms.

Ash on remnant snowpack hastens melt. Floods in many regions, drought in others. A war starts, maybe merely continues. It’s so hard to tell these days; even the news has been weaponised.

The water warms.  More people are commenting on it.

Thalarctos maritimus­ becomes a memory, habitat gone, zoo enclosures too hot. A billionaire chokes on endling stew, his robot servitors too eager with the Heimlich. Anonymous readily claims responsibility. (Bows and arrows? No, that’s the fifth. Ticket number three, serving now: crowdfunded 3D-printed suicide drones against private jets and superyachts, the ostentatious emblems of excess and imbalance.)

The water warms.

A species of glass frog becomes a memory; five people notice. Human population reaches its maximum.

The water warms.

Somewhere in all of this, a fulcrum’s crossed; five people notice. Seas climb, oceans acidify, krill carapaces cannot cohere, fish decline. Walled cities, swamped cities. No prizes.

The water warms.

A spacecraft, a big one, the last one, explodes near its destination. (Scratch plan B, never a plan, merely a slogan.) Stocks tumble enough at the news that a war starts, a big one, and none can say how it ends. It grows cooler, a few years, dust-choked and dark. The stocks have not recovered. A billionaire plummets to a messy death within his airlocked and climate-controlled mineshaft fortress, crushed by the following descent of his robot servitors. Five people notice, the sort who fall in with that crowd.

The water warms.

There are new ways for organisms to fail. At the craterlands’ fringes, life becomes its own poison as the isotope game plays out. Community means gang now. Guns are out this year, knives and spears are in.

The water warms.

Now the fifth, and none can say how it ends. Quieter now.

The water warms.

The seas have now unleashed so much carbon dioxide that, were any infants yet born, they could never stay awake to feed.

The water warms.

Ice becomes a memory. The idea of some long-past ‘snowball Earth’ now seems a sick joke. Methane and water vapour side-hustle for thermal influence, their seafloor clathrate solidarity long forgotten.

The water warms, liquid’s no birthright, we’ll Venus this world yet.

Gone now the Wollemi pine, gone the ginkgo. Fire sweeps the land bare. Five people notice, the sort who endure longest.

The water warms.

The concept of ‘city’ becomes a memory, the actuality soon follows.

The water warms, the risen shores stink.

Coelacanth, chambered nautilus, horseshoe crab, famous survivors all: gone. Cockroaches and tardigrades, it transpires, aren’t impervious after all. Decomposition greedily consumes the reserves of atmospheric dioxygen. Not that it matters; nothing is using it, nothing is making it, and there will be an end to rot, just as to flame. Spared, for now, are the still-submerged seafloor’s oxymoronic deposits, dead lifeforms, but their time of weathering and decay will come.

The water warms.

For a time, before thanks to acid air they too become a memory, the only remnant traces of humanity are cave art: Look upon us, this is how brave we were taking down that huge mammoth and See Roger, next cave over, for a good time, if you have ammo or food he’s up for anything and Perhaps we should have done something different. And now, now, it begins to boil, and it will not stop until all is gone. Limestone rockfaces crumble, consumed by heat and acid rain, giving up the ghosts of carbonate to the ever-welcoming, ever-warming air. Still it grows hotter, as if to say, to this now-vacated room: plant food this, you stubborn pointless money-hungry bastards. The seas unhurriedly whittle themselves down to sputtering vents. It grows hotter. The universe is quieter now, in a small and probably unimportant way, with the curtailment of a small and probably unimportant aberration, this thing found here briefly, exactly here and nowhere else, this thing termed ‘multicellular life’. The house always wins, and the name of the house is thermodynamics. Take one world and bake for literal aeons. The seconds decay and cannot be reconstituted; the years transmute. Time has a radioactivity.