by Ian Hutson
NGLND XPX
Ian Hutson
Kindle Edition
Copyright Ian Hutson 2013
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Table of Contents
The Model-T Virgin
Begging your pardon, my lord, but Cook’s been eaten again
Robots knitting with rubber needles
Je pense it’s all going very bien
Footloose, en pas de basque
iG-Zero-D
In which Mr Cadwallader shampoos his parrot
Diary of a National Service chap
Blood-curdling screams and the Whitworth screw-thread
The Day the Earth took tea
A message from the author
About the author
Connect with the author online
The Model-T Virgin
[back to table of contents]
Once upon a time (I’ve always wanted to open a story with that phrase) a frail old white-haired multi-millionaire asserted during a very lively dinner conversation at his London club that whenever Man has packed up and moved, be it from the Rift Valley to the Rhine Valley, from Ethiopia to Australia, or more recently from Rotherhithe to Cape Cod, he has only ever carried his own luggage.
Sadly, there was no-one present to hear his pithy assertion because no-one at all liked him and thus he always dined alone, and with very poor service from the waiters who were uncomfortable serving club members who talked to themselves.
Still, the conversation resonated with the old man and, in time, he sat down to work out a proof at the various draughtsman’s drawing boards in the various studies of his unpretentious little multi-acre homes in London, New York, on the shores of Lake Como, in Paris, in Hong Kong and on sundry unspecified private islands. He sat down at them individually you understand, and at separate times – the “multi” refers to his finances, not to instances of the man himself. Nor did he just sort of flicker in and out of existence at the various desks in his various studies; he travelled by dint of his fossil-fuel burning private jets, so there was quite a delay between his appearances.
Frankly, he’d finished for once and for all with the hub and bub of corporate commercial life and with industry for money’s sake, and what he wanted to do most, he told himself (in an unassuming note scribbled in the margin and signed in ink, dated for posterity and witnessed by his in-house legal team and a personal photographer stroke biographer), was to test his assertion. He would do this by giving the peoples of the Earth a kick up the arse, a fundamental kick into the next stage of human social development, whatever that may be.
Once again it would be travel, cheap, easy access to fast and reliable travel that would be the key, he mused, musing in the form of a pseudo-mathematical formula with some home-spun symbols. Some form of travel that, unlike the modern motor car, moved faster than the heavily taxed and regulated walking pace of a tired horse. Supply just that device, he reckoned, and one of two things would then inevitably happen.
The human population of the planet might prove beyond doubt that they all really love each other, and his design would be used initially to facilitate one great big global hug throughout the species. In this scenario everyone would skip around the world to kiss their enemies and to deliver gifts of rose cuttings for the garden. Then, once these fully-inclusive non discriminatory hugs and smoochies were over everyone would move out to populate the galaxy hand in hand in hand in hand, singing hippie love songs and wearing some flowers in their hair. Sitar music would fill the aether of the celestial spheres and all would be groovy. The reach of Humanity would expand in a happy tide of well-mixed sexual and socio-economic variety and a carnival of riotous political and skin colour.
Or, just maybe, the human population of the entire planet would scatter as widely as it could and as fast as it possibly could without so much as a single backward glance to check that any of the other lifeboats had launched successfully.
Was, perhaps, the whole planet harbouring dreams of never again worrying about rubbing cheek and jowl with the wrong sort, and of never again having to accommodate and pussy-foot around those whom they actually hated and always would hate and distrust on some fundamental level?
Possibly, instead of embracing the political correctness of the aim of an all-inclusive society, everyone would just hoof off into the sunset to a frontier future in the same process that had originally created the (only recently, and now again not quite so) united state of America, where the only agreement seemed to be not on any peaceful mixing or purposeful compromise, but simply that every minority and majority group should instead be heard to complain at the same volume level, and to stick a feather in it and call it progress.
They might all just bugger off and live somewhere new and start the process all over again, with hippies huddled to the west, Baptists to the east, Catholics and Mormons filling in the gaps and the evangelicals chasing down the atheists everywhere in-between. Would the human race look for space so that, for a while at least until the populations grew again to bursting, the acolytes of the various religions would never have to see one another, the ginger ninjas could avoid mixing with the clinically blonde and everyone could stop pretending that they didn’t pass both wind and judgement whenever two Kinsey Sixes kissed devant les personnel domestique? Sitar music would only be available in the segregated groovy sectors of the galaxy and then only for as long as it didn’t annoy the next-biggest minority group neighbours. Humanity would map out onto the plains of the galaxy in bickering puddles of this group or that group and the galactic picket fences would be raised and fought over once more.
Mr frail, white haired old man sang to himself as he formulated the mechanics of the exquisitely uncomfortable little question that he would pose to the human race and, whenever he couldn’t remember some of the words to the old songs, he simply substituted catchy phrases such as “tum tee tum tee tum tum tum” and “I’m rich, I’m rich, and I’m not wearing a stitch, hey nonny nonny”.
Whichever of the two processes happened would start slowly of course, as all great changes do, but one of them would begin and then it would be unstoppable. How delicious! Would it be headbands and beads and vegan love-ins under a giant rainbow, or would it be the blunt honesty of a stampede out into self-segregated Lebensraum? Although he could demand an answer he couldn’t control which answer would be given, even if he knew which it would be. What fun and jolly japes, hey ho, he would push the buttons and, in time, he would know, hey ho! Gosh, he decided that as well as being a bit of a demanding, difficult to amuse and cranky old god-like git he was a poet – and he did know it.
To break humans free of their own border controls and road tolls and restrictive documentation nonsense this new mode of travel should be as fast as possible and as free as a bird – able to arc up to scrape the radio aerial on the underside of the stratopause and then back down to land in the driveway of Number 23 Acacia Avenue without so much as Norwegian Customs and Madagascan Excise noticing.
What was needed was a vehicle that was as simple as a plank and as cheap as chips and as fast as the most commonly available engine could make it. No frills, nothing fancy, just the means of letting the people travel freely. Something to finish what the human foot, the horse, the horse and wagon, the sailing ship, the steam train and, more recently, the motor car had started. A little som
ething on four landing-wheels and a rocket motor to circumvent establishment controls on the movements and interactions of the human race. This time on a galactic scale rather than merely global. Everyone, without even realising it, would eventually vote in the poll by either using or ignoring their feet, their horse-shoes, their sails or their tickets to a forward-facing non-smoking seat in a third-class carriage.
Tum tee tum tee tum tum tum to a catchy tune. There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb, and oceans and rivers to cross, what the world needed now was a universal vehicle, no, not just for some but for everyone. Cheap, independent, private space-capable transportation – that was the only thing that there was just too little of. Oh how his hairy little legs swung gleefully about as he sat on his high architect’s stools and dashed off the blueprints with three or four slashes of his HB pencil and a well-chewed wooden ruler!
How delighted he was to be powerful enough to make the whole future of the human race pivot around a single action of a single human. He felt somehow almost omnipotent – the biggest buzz he’d had in decades. He was a hinge around which all of human space-time would swing, even if only the once. Someone had once led mankind out of the Rift Valley, Kings and Queens had made minor adjustments here and there, and now he, a simple and ordinary man, would either bring the entire human race together for all eternity or split it apart for millennia. The coin was his to flip and everyone, every man, woman and child would act out the answer soon enough. The lightning of pure excitement crackled about his ears. Who says that money can’t buy you, Love?
The Austin 7 Virgin was born, and it was immediately re-named by the accountants.
The common man would be liberated to make his own future – but in his Model-T Virgin.
And so it all began.
Meanwhile, in your present day and on the edge of a vast beach of pale sable-coloured sand lapped at by a blue-green ocean, sat an android. He was precisely six foot three from heel base-plates to cranial bolt, one hundred and ninety pounds, mousy-haired and barefoot. Where the multi-entrepreneur previously mentioned had been naked from the waist, this robot was the more usual naked to the waist. His faded blue jeans were frayed and much repaired. Specks of sand and salt-spray clung to the cafe-creme skin of his torso, and the sea-breeze spiked his hair into an unruly tumble. With unnervingly green eyes he watched, fascinated – and ten-tenths happy – as his old organic dog played by wandering in and out of the surf. The warm salt water might do Pipsqueak’s arthritic joints some good, although she’d need hosing down again at the end of the day and would probably also have stashed a couple of juicy alien starfish somewhere for a midnight snack. All things and the unholy rush of their headlong flight from Earth considered, they had found a great hiding place on an almost totally benign planet.
The folding chair the android sat upon was rusted and looked to have been salvaged from the same rubbish tip as the folding table that supported a battered manual typewriter, a mug of coffee, a small vase containing a single large flower, and a silver-framed photograph. The photograph was of two happy androids with a happy dog and six tiny puppies, and all posed in front of a pristine pop-up Virgin factory. Next to the photograph frame was a lined pad, a note on the top sheet of which – in some other’s hand and in light pencil – read simply “I love you”. The note was dated two days earlier.
Alfred, the android, fed another precious sheet of loose-leaf A4 paper into the typewriter and hammered at both keys with the full force of his muse, periodically slapping the carriage return lever for a new line.
01000011 01101000 01100001 01110000 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01001111 01101110 01100101 00101110 [Chapter One.]
01001001 01110100 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100100 01100001 01110010 01101011 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101111 01110010 01101101 01111001 00100000 01101110 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100 [...and the world was about to be changed again, for ever.]
...There’s a grand beach on this planet, and it’s all mine. Well, the dog thinks that she owns it, but in reality, provided that I am careful where I walk barefoot in her trail, it’s all mine. The surf rolls in as though the water is about a yard higher than the sand and, when it’s windy, creamy white horses fling themselves back out to sea from the tops of the waves. Even after a storm there’s no flotsam and no jetsam, none at all. There are no great ships out there – yet – to toss anything over the side or to go down and lose their cargo to the currents. This is as isolated a planet as I could find in this sector of space, and Albert, Pipsqueak and I don’t have the luxury of endless time to keep looking for something more completely like Earth – so it will do for now.
Our temporary home – a splendid shack made from wood and canvas and loose panels from the Virgin - stands fifty yards back from the beach, huddled down in the dunes where the warm wind is just enough to make the sand rush from pillar to post like tiny little tourists. The dunes are held together by grasses that are green and straw-coloured, and the whole effect is really quite like planet Earth, but Earth on a good day. Let me tell you how I came to be sitting here wearing the face of a happy, contented man, living in hiding and on the run so that my dog can enjoy the last year or two of her life as a dog should – with sand and soil beneath her paws, not cold, hard deck-plating.
It all began maybe fifty years ago I suppose, and it began with a new product. Not an invention, not even really an innovation – it began with a revolution that wasn’t revolutionary, and yet something that was revolutionary, somehow. It was a giant leap forwards for mankind, accomplished in one small technological step backwards. Several strands of old something came together and wallop! Mankind was slowly, slowly catapulted backwards towards its future, a future a million times more unalike than the post-Industrial Revolution world and the sleepy agrarian society that went before it had been, centuries before. It was all so predictable, and yet so unpredicted. So sudden and yet so slow. So piecemeal and yet so total. It was a revolution, as they always are, of contradictions.
An old and frail man who ran a vast international corporation decided, almost on a whim, to build a new vehicle for the masses. First man had walked, then he had ridden the horse, held on for dear life in the speeding carriage, coughed in the smoke behind the steam engine and, eventually, he motored about in the orange Volkswagen Beetle 1303S with regulation surfboard strapped to the roof. At each stage the obsolescence of the earlier innovations became more pronounced. If man walked on a bridle-path he wouldn’t have seemed too out of place or be in too much danger. He could ride a lone horse among the carriages and his only problem would be exposure to the inclement elements. A carriage on a steam locomotive was not a million notions apart from a carriage towed by a horse, just a simple step from the cupped hands of a groom to the concrete steps of a railway station platform. Walk on the railway tracks though or even ride your horse over the sleepers, and you were liable to meet a thunderous and cataclysmic end. The diesel-electric locomotive and the Volkswagen Beetle didn’t so much mix as they avoided one another reasonably politely. Different tracks, different timetables and gates to keep them separated where necessary.
This new vehicle though would transcend all of that and be freed from the constraints of path, bridleway and track. Bigger, faster, better, higher, cheaper, simpler and more effective than all of the other technologies put together over all of their thousands of years. A vehicle to perfectly fit a cavernous niche that the human race hadn’t even known existed until it was filled.
The man took an old engine design that had been flinging dirty industrial satellites into orbit without fuss for decades, bolted it without elegance into some utilitarian bodywork and produced the whole thing on an automated production line, one every twenty-three seconds, overseen by AI robot workers. There was no company F1 racing team, no vast corporate advertising, no research and development department chipping away at the next latest model – mainly because there wouldn’
t be a next latest model, what you got was as up to date as it would get. There was no accessories department and ruddy little in the way of a servicing and after-care network. It didn’t need them. It didn’t need any of them. There were no blue-suited dealers; you bought directly from the factories. There were no underhand finance schemes; if you could afford mushy peas to go with your haddock and chips on a Friday night then you could afford one of these new vehicles.
The old engine design was a lump of cast-iron with eleven moving parts (and they all moved very, very slowly indeed). It was vastly more powerful than was needed for a vehicle of the size, but it was also the cheapest, the simplest, and as available as damp grey raindrops in a Grimsby monsoon.
The bodywork was made from recycled junk-metal and hyperplexiglass and came in any style you liked, so long as you liked the one style it came in. The style it came in was neither saloon nor coupe nor estate but “box with windows and a door”. You could have it finished in shiny red or shiny red or at a pinch sometimes even in shiny red. The shade of red and the amount of shine varied according to what paint your local factory spray-shop had in at the time. The bodywork was airtight and anyway, what looked suspiciously like a Dunlop bicycle puncture repair kit in a tin came as standard. This was one of the very, very few over-the-top luxuries that came as standard.
The engine came with an emergency starting-handle that also looked cunningly like a large spanner and that fitted every other nut and bolt on the vehicle. There were seats. The seats weren’t heated and they didn’t recline or adjust electrically, they just fitted the reasonably average human bum reasonably averagely well.
There were no seat-belts, no airbags, no sat-nav, and no stereo. Landing lights you got, along with a big, round velocity-indicator dial and a savage handbrake for parking. Actually, that makes it all sound far too utilitarian since every model also came with an ignition switch, a joystick to steer by and two cunning pedals – one for “go” and one for “stop”. These were even labelled Acceleratrix and Enstopinator. The toolkit consisted of the aforementioned spanner that doubled as the emergency starting handle, the puncture repair kit in a tin, and a good-quality lump-hammer with a thick oak handle for fixing the more delicate things. Wise customers added their own items such as duct tape, a few lengths of miscellaneous wire and an oilcan.