12 April
The ultimatum arrived, as ultimatums do, not with a bang but with a spreadsheet – Form 7B/Rev.3, “Request for Temporary Existential Relief (Non-Proliferation Tier 2)”, stamped Urgent – Hand Deliver to the Void. President Trump’s original deadline – Monday at midnight – was, I understand, contingent upon the precise alignment of three geostationary satellites and the completion of a full audit of Iran’s nuclear larder, which, in fairness, had run slightly over budget due to an unexpected shipment of 87 tonnes of unenriched cumin being mislabeled as low-enriched uranium in customs.

The five-day extension, issued at 11:58pm on the dot (time zone: Tehran Standard Time, though adjusted for daylight savings observed only in the Ministry of Strategic Ambiguity’s annex), was granted not out of mercy, but because the EU delegation arrived at the Moscow-adjacent summit table only to find Moscow already seated at the EU table, having swapped its own chair for theirs during a brief intermission while everyone was distracted by the sudden appearance of a live badger wearing a tiny beret and holding a clipboard.

I watched the news feed flicker through three contradictory interpretations before the screen resolved into a single frame: a map of the Persian Gulf, with Tehran and Washington connected by a dashed line that, upon zooming in, turned out to be a photocopied receipt for 47 litres of industrial-grade baking soda – the sole remaining ingredient in the “non-violent deterrence” protocol, now out of stock.

The real crisis, of course, is not the power plants (which, I’m told, run on a combination of coal, solar, and the residual kinetic energy of diplomatic handshakes), but the fact that no one has yet updated the Ultimatum Scheduling Algorithm to account for leap seconds, time zone drift, and the occasional Tuesday when everyone forgets whether it’s AM or PM.

(Incidentally, the badger has now been appointed interim mediator. It signs all documents with a paw dipped in pomegranate molasses. So far, no one has dared question its credentials.)