it's an olympic nightmare, cities waste away into dust and dereliction, windows shatter, door frames blasted, catastrophe came and went, some sort of soft apocalypse. it was like we had all slept deeply one night, all shared the same dream, a strange wave of refraction, distorting reality, twisting it up, churning through kitchens and car yards, leaving a dawn just out of reach as we awoke, everything like a bass relief, slightly out of whack. 
the zeroes were threes, the ones were sevens, even the words changed into some sort of james joyce linguistics.
i wandered down to the beach to collect the bones of a dead blue whale, it smelt of flowers as the crowd gathered, a child in a skool uniform was jumping around the tail, clambering over it with her friends watching.
the beast had been dead a long time, you could see the rot setting in, like an enamel sheen creeping over the flesh. along it's belly was a huge tear, guts spilling out onto the sand. i clambered in with my tools, a long pincer type implement and some cutters with extenders. these seemed to be the tools of my trade.
a police man in a nurses uniform approached, 'hey what's your game?'
i flash him my pass, it's a red emblem, a heart bursting with light on a black background. 
'oh err, i see, well go ahead then sir.'
i lifted myself up, on it's soft body, avoiding the decomposed bits, when i got close to the rip i peered in getting a grip with its stomach.
my tools opened a section of stomach, a gas seemed to wheeze out, black and filthy, the slimey entrails like a bag of eels in jelly spilled further out and the skool girls all shrieked in joy. 
the cutters tore into the main piece of digestive tract, as i moved in further i grabbed hold of a binding to keep myself from falling off.
it was cold, an ice wind blew across the ocean, in the distance i could see huge clouds forming. 
the cutting seemed to get easier as i snipped away, and then looking through the contents, amongst the black slime and fish stink, i could see the lump. it was pitch black, exposed to the atmosphere it begun to harden, solidification beginning.
the skool girls were being reprimanded by a parent, they were late for skool. i noticed a crowd of people had gathered now, watching me work. 
some one passed me a bucket of water, in chain i splashed the water across the ambergris until it was exposed. it was a large piece, gleaming in the morning light.
i grabbed the lump with my pincers and placed it in my bag, it was heavy, the size of a large paperback. 
i lugged the thing across the beach back home, some people asked me what i was going to do with it. a woman in a big anorak asked if i wanted to buy some whale teeth. 
there was a sudden tremor, an aftershock, i saw the sky shift and the earth seemed to shake. over in the distance the surf club seemed to slant on one side, and it changed colour from a sandy light mustard to orange. the windows all shifted.
'it's an aftershock, take shelter inside.'
it was the police man in the nurses outfit, he was running past me, the children and parents behind him.
one of the kids fell over and sunk into the sand. i saw her tiny hand disappear under.
the skies shifted, changing from deep blue to blood red, like a martian landscape. 
this is what it was like, the post soft apocalypse, it wasn't the event everyone expected, society just moved sideways, and life seemed to carry on, despite adversity. stock markets didn't have the same sort of significance, no one really turned up to work in those fields anymore, banking and finance just dissipated, morphed into more esoteric careers. there were plenty of artists, everyone seemed to be in touch with their creative side, and the past was like a forgotten song, we hummed it but did not know the words.
i took the ambergris home, cleaned it up in my processing tanks, the basement was now a sort of make shift lab, i was never familiar with the equipment but running on auto pilot i seemed to know my way around the system. 
i left the piece in a vat of chemicals, i would have to soak it for a few days and then i'd start braking it up into smaller pieces. 
i went upstairs to make some eggs and coffee, the phone rang non stop from various dealers, all wanting a slice of the piece, i had not worked out a price, it was a good piece, i did some referencing and investigated the markets, i could make a few hundred thousand credits from this lump. there was a buyer in paris who was begging me for a few kilos, i suggested they ring back in the morning. 
wandering through the house i noticed the books had changed, they were all different books, strange, not a familiar title amongst them.
my arms hurt, muscles i had never had before seemed to demand attention, my face looked slightly harder, i'd less teeth, my eyes were green.
this is how it was in the soft apocalypse.