The creation of Brown-man

2:30am.

Gordon Brown stared with dour misery at the digital bedside clock. The red digits burned with laser-like intensity in the dark, third-floor bedroom of Number 10. Gordon noticed, not for the first time, that the digits were actually composed of hexagonal and trapezoidal lozenges, and wondered with fresh irritation why they weren't simply rectangular.

Gordon knew that he wasn't going to get any sleep tonight. He could literally feel his spleen burning in anger, and it was fuelling his brain stem, which wailed like a banshee in his head, a venegeful turbine spinning at full throttle. Ploys, plots and revenge scenarios exploded like fireworks across his mind's eye.

Gordon levered himself onto one elbow, and glanced at Sarah. Her large-boned frame lay motionless across the bed, her breath shallow and regular.

Gordon knew that something had to be done, and it had to be radical, much as he despised that Blairite term.

3:00am

At the wheel of his Jaguar, still dressed in pyjamas, Gordon hurtled down the A12. Chelmsford, Colchester, Ipswich. The road signs zoomed past, but Gordon's focus was fixed in the middle-distance. He knew now what must be done, and would not waver. The speedometer hit 100mph. 105. 110. 115. Gordon's unblinking left eye glinted under the baleful sodium roadlights, hanging like spectres over the central reservation.

5:00am

Sizewell B. Gordon lowered himself with grim determination into the cooling waters of the reactor, and bathed in the rejuvenating and transformative blue glow of the Cerenkov radiation.

5:30am

In a Suffolk forest glade, Gordon knelt, head bowed, on a spongey patch of moss. Gnarled roots and trunks and over-hanging boughs surrounded the Prime Minister. Gordon's head and torso throbbed with an opalescent glow. He twisted and screamed in agony and elation as every cell in his body transformed itself, re-arranging its DNA, creating trillions of super-enzymes and super-proteins. The calcium in Gordon's bones transmogrified into an allotropic titanium-plutonium alloy; his nervous system mutated into a broadband fibre-optic TCP/IP network; his muscles became a carbonfibre-reinforced weave; his organs became high-capacity chemical processing plants.

Gordon raised his head and grinned manically. Standing now upon the mossy platform, his body began to pulse with fetid energy. Blue sparks discharged to the ground, and a growing aura surrounded the Prime Minister. "Behold," he proclaimed with a sonic shock-wave, "I'm a pretty straight sorta guy as well!"

And with that, a blinding flash of blue light exploded from his frame, and a luminous wave of purple coruscation propagated outwards through the forest. In its wake, as the first shafts of dawn sunlight penetrated the glade, the wood was transformed into a jewel-encrusted kaleidoscope of light and colour. The facets of a billion jewels, in a million different shades, shimmered and sparkled and glimmered on trunk and bough; the forest floor became a green velvet carpet; and leafs made of gold and silver shone upon the bejewelled branches above.

The Prime Minister marched out of the clearing. The world needed saving, and Brown-man was here to do it.