'Elon sighed'

Elon sighed.

Pushing against the glass-topped desk, he scuffed his heels on the carpet tiles until his chair swung to face the wall-length window. Another sunny day. Another blue sky. Elon sighed and shuffled back to face his desk.

He stabbed a finger at his leather-bound diary, about to flick open the pages, but instead jabbed at a button on his desk. A pleasingly unpleasant buzzing sound blared from the other side of the office door.

‘Sir?’ came a nervous voice from the intercom on his desk.

‘What’s in my diary for today?’ demanded Elon.

‘Sir?’

‘My diary. What’s in it? What am I doing? What’s happening today?’

There was a pause, then a soft cough. ‘Your diary is empty today, sir.’

‘Shit,’ said Elon. ‘Nothing? Again?’

‘Not at the moment, sir. I could—’

He stabbed at the intercom control before the sentence had been completed and eyed the Xbox controller lying upside-down on the floor beneath the desk, exactly where he had hurled it in a rage earlier that morning. Fucking games. They were too difficult these days. They cheated. Someone was out to stop him from winning, but he’d fix that. He’d had a great idea for a game the night before, and it was going to be the greatest game ever, and he would win it every time he played it, and then they’d see. Oh, yes. Then they’d all see. He made a mental note to make an actual note to get someone to make the game, then reached for the TV remote.

The TV, so big he had to push back against his chair to keep all of it in his field of vision, opened in garish demo mode, overly bright and with the colour and contrast turned up way too high, the way they were tuned to make them stand out in shops. Elon liked it that way.

Someone was talking on the TV,  but Elon quickly put a stop to that, flicking to the next channel before the man - who looked like one of those self-satisfied intellectuals who knew things, or did things, or created things or something of that sort - had a chance to impart any of his knowledge. There was a Bug Bunny cartoon on the next channel and, though Elon admired Bugs, he had seen this particular cartoon too many times already. Boring. Click. Next. Athletes raced across the screen. Elon despised athletes, with their training, their dedication and their ostentatious displays of physical skill. Show-offs, the lot of them. He could’ve been an athlete, if he’d felt like it. He just didn’t feel like it, that’s all. Next.

He lingered longer on the next channel. One group of monkeys had invaded another group’s territory and there was a dispute which seemed to involve a lot of fruit-throwing and shrieking. Elon chuckled and shifted in his seat, ready for more, but the programme shifted to another part of the forest, where some bird or other was building a nest. After a few seconds, it still hadn’t returned to the warring monkeys. Next.

Next up was a news channel, and Elon was about to click past it when something caught his eye. Something was on fire.

Elon licked his lips, his thumb stroking the ‘next channel’ button. ‘The UK has been rocked by riots for the second night running,’ intoned the news anchor, as the screen flitted between images of a storefront on fire and a gaggle of burly men hurling bricks at a row of police officers sheltered behind riot shields. Elon leaned forward, and the camera closed in on the furious face of a rioter wrapped in a St George's Cross flag, his pockmarked face lit by flickering flames. Elon felt something stirring; something he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

His eyes fixed on the TV, he reached for his phone, glancing down to open up the app he, and he alone, called ‘X’.

He licked his lips, rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth and tapped at the screen of his phone. ‘Civil war is inevitable,’ he typed, and slipped a comforting hand onto his lap as the flames on TV rose higher and hotter.

‘Inevitable,’ he moaned, almost imperceptibly.