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It’s hard playing second fiddle to a genius brother; harder still when he wipes out half the planet. Nobody congratulated me on being sister to the boy who won the science award five years in a row, but now I’m diabolical because of his bright ideas. It almost seemed destined, somehow. He was the clever boy, and I’d be the pretty girl. It worked for a time until puberty hit me, and then I failed to hit the mark. Stretch marks, acne, braces, greasy hair, and worst of all, entirely mediocre grades. Next to him, the best I could hope for was invisibility. Still, he loved me. I’m not sure he ever understood how brilliant he was, to be honest. I hated him all the same. On a good day, I’d leave the house before anyone came down for breakfast. I’d make my way to the back of the classroom before anyone else filtered in. I’d sit in the bathroom to eat my lunch. If I was really lucky, I’d make it home before anyone else. I'd run straight up to my bedroom to set up my telescope in time for the blue-black unveiling of the great beyond.

On a bad day… things were different.

Peter graduated from a prestigious university with dual honours in theoretical physics and chemistry. After that, he earned a distinction in his master's degree. His success came from some stupid experiment that went viral, securing the funding he needed for a PhD placement. All the words they used to describe him seem so redundant now. What a bright young man. What a future he’ll have. What genius! The people around me took all the funniest parts of The Little Red Riding Hood and turned them into my own personal nightmare. In the end, he was nothing but brilliant dust.

One day after school, he found me in his bedroom. I’d lifted one of the balls on Newton's cradle and perched on the bottom of his bed, watching. When he hurried through the door, he barely noticed me at first; invisibility does have its perks. In any case, he wasn’t as angry as I thought he’d be. That’s the thing about men: show an interest in their shit and they morph into talking heads, jabbering on until their teeth are fit to fall out. The trouble starts when you think they ought to show an interest in anything you might have to say. Better to be pretty than to say a silly thing. That was mum’s motto. And she was, for a time, I suppose. My dad’s interest in her was solely aesthetic. It didn’t matter that she’d studied mathematics when, in her second year, she became pregnant with Peter. All that cleverness evaporated almost as quickly as it flourished. Now she’d have to marry, pick out pretty booties, match the curtains and the carpet, as good wives do.

“It works using perpetual motion. Newton theorised that there’s a conservation of momentum transmitting force through the balls to allow movement to continue.” His own drivel fascinated him.

“Will it go forever?”

“No. Once the potential energy converts into kinetic energy and dissipates through thermodynamic entropy, the motion ceases.” He wasn’t even looking at me as he spoke. He moved like a wasp, flitting from one place to the next, shuffling papers in search of something more important than I’d ever been. When I left, he continued speaking for several minutes, not even noticing that he spoke to an empty room. Hollow words in an empty chamber; how very apt.

He tried, once, to tell me about the constellations. Black holes. Meteors. He didn't understand. I stared into space because of the art, not because of the reason. Peter spent his whole life searching for the why; I accepted things as they were, and enjoyed them for it. His mind never stopped asking questions. It raced from one thought to the next, like an intricate web of transport without an intermission. How exhausting that must have been for him to live with all the time. Was he ever happy? Were any of them? Every one of them, so furious about the “senseless” loss of life, but was there any sense to them winning? I know you want to hear about the day he killed them all. Even as a monster, my brother is ever more attractive than I am. Sweet irony, save me from the inevitable.

Life is different now, of course. Calmer, and so much quieter. The oceans are crystal clear. The coral reefs are glorious. Habitats have been rebuilt, and dwindling species have pulled themselves back from the brink of extinction. Scientists say that the hole in the ozone layer is completely repaired, and global warming is but a dwindling memory. It’s almost like that day saved the human race. Of course, I wouldn’t want to put words in the mouths of the survivors, who do seem so very married to their grief, even now. It wiped out my whole family, of course. I always was so very different from them. Just little old me left to fend for myself out in the great beyond. I have my mother’s heart-shaped locket, of course. Why? I don’t know, but it seemed important to the people around me that I had it. I know I’m supposed to feel bad, and everyone certainly reacts favourably when I pretend to be. But if I’m honest, it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. With half the population wiped out, everyone is visible. Even me.

It was a failsafe, I guess. I’m an artist; I don’t have the first clue what my brother did in that lab. I won’t pretend that anything I have to say about it could ever have any meaning. But, after that day in his bedroom, I suppose he felt sorry for me. Stupid, brainless me. He started to take an interest in the things I was doing. He made a few calls to his investors and arranged for a couple of galleries to exhibit my work. I even made some sales that financed my first car. We flew to Paris to attend a conference on particle physics. I didn’t pay all that much attention, to be honest. The food was great. Better than this place, that’s for sure.

Anyway, the failsafe. Peter said that it existed for what they called the “tipping point”. Regardless of what you might have heard in the media about global warming - you know the stuff: We have ten years left to act. Now we have five years left to act. Now we have eighteen months. And so on and so forth. Well, the whole point of it was marketing. The plan? Scare the richest into action and make a business out of the climate crisis. If successful, nobody loses. None of the estimated deadlines were true, even as estimations. They weren't supposed to be. Top global industries and world governments put together a timeline for action that wouldn’t cost them anything. Beyond that deadline, they’d have to finance the whole thing themselves -- that is, until they developed the failsafe. The real tipping point for action existed at the very moment that it became expensive for the wrong people. It's all a numbers game, baby.

They came up with all kinds of ideas to begin with. Gases, poisons, even mass shootings. The only reason I knew about these things at all was by snooping in Peter’s bedroom on his long trips across the globe. Trips, I should add, that he travelled to via aeroplane. They’re always hypocrites, these people. By the time Peter and I visited the lab together, I was already familiar with most of the projects they were undertaking, both past and present. The final prototype was complex but easily disseminated. I’m not a scientist, of course, but the notion seemed straightforward to me.

1. Isolate a specific cell present in half of the population

2. Trigger perpetual cell division

3. Sit back as fifty per cent of the world meets its demise.

The trickier part, I suppose, was catalysing that reaction. How to trigger the cells into replication? I realised during my reading that cancer does this instinctively. One cell replicates over and over, creating masses that spread throughout the body. We had no cure for that, of course. At least that’s what they told us. When I realised they’d reverse-engineered that process without releasing the cure, you might say I was upset. Still, reverse-engineer it they did, and they rigged the whole system to a single button. Once pressed, it released the catalyst into the world’s water supply. They figured out how to speed up the process so that the reaction happened in moments instead of the months you’d typically see in a cancer diagnosis. By the time people started hitting the ground, it was too late.

The sticky part was what happened afterwards. They couldn't exactly admit that in the event that they failed to mitigate climate change before the tipping point - previous incarnations of which had been lies the entire time - their plan was to execute half the population. What they did was predictable. They lied their way out of it by claiming it was a freak virus. That scientists were working round the clock to find the cause. They offered platitudes and assurances that it definitely couldn't happen again. The following week, paparazzi snapped a celebrity locking lips with a man in the wake of her husband's death, and everyone forgot about it. The public will never know what really happened in that lab. Nobody will.

It’s almost time for tea, so I’d better go back to my room before the matron notices I’ve been out for too long. The medication they’re giving me makes me hazy in the daytime, and they treat me like a criminal. It’s almost like they think I pressed the button that killed half of the world. Don’t they know I’m too stupid for that?

Better to be pretty than to do a silly thing.