NGLND XPX

by Ian Hutson

  To fuel a Model-T Virgin you poured whatever you had into the tank, be that petrol, diesel, methylated spirits, onion gravy, beer or mid-flow mid-morning urine. They all worked reasonably well, especially if you’d spent the mid-morning drinking yourself senseless on methylated spirits.

  The small pop-up factories that produced these beasties needed a managerial staff of two. There was the iChap who used a bit of two-by-two wood and large adjustable-spanner when necessary to keep the static robots working, and there was also a night-watchman type of iFellow who brewed tea and answered the occasional wrong-numbers calling on the telephone. The night watchman’s primary official duty was to replace any bulbs that had blown, since the static robots were a bit scared of working in the dark. He also manually emptied the banks of efficient Lithuanian-Ion batteries onto the factory lawns or into the decorative fish-ponds if the excess energy collected by the solar panels wasn’t burned off by the machines. This often played havoc with the corporate grass and the decorative iGoldfish.

  On really sunny days if the solar panels were clean everything managed to get a bit manic and Virgins occasionally rolled off the production line so fast that they rolled into one-another. It was the night watchman’s favourite conversational observation that “they” had forgotten to fit a regulator to the building, one of those things with two spherical weights whirling around that you see on steam-engines. It would have looked great on the roof of the factory, whirling around next to the vain cockerel with the wind.

  Conversely, if there was eight-eighths cloud cover for more than three days then the static robots would all begin to behave like Marcel Marceau before his first coffee of the day, and everything mechanical would turn an unnerving shade of quiet. On such days the iStaff collaborated to hook up the giant crocodile clips onto the National grid supply and go online to negotiate a semi-decent rate for third-party supplied excited electrons.

  It was all old technology, unimaginatively banged together like a farmer bangs together two dusty sheep before chucking them tidily into a corner of the stock yard. The vehicle sold – and here’s the clever bit – it sold for the price of a couple of wheelbarrows’ worth of assorted junk and a few coins in a slot. No waiting list, no ordering system, no pre-production models just for the celebrities; just tip an old iron bedstead into the hopper, slip the price of a few pints of cider into the slot, collect your numbered token and sit in the waiting room to be called anywhere from twenty-three seconds to an hour later.

  The calling was done by the lady with the estuarial peg on her nose who had previously been the voice of the BT Speaking Clock. She achieved this constant calling by dint of recording her messages; she wasn’t hooked up to every workshop on the planet, trying to keep up with announcing every delivery from some central control room or anything silly. No, she had recorded a few hundred keywords to be edited together as needed, and it was a favourite game of every iChap to edit them into ridiculous combinations and occasionally play them to keep the human waiting rooms and the static robots amused.

  ‘Would the customer holding ticket number seven seven seven seven one on a fern green slip with the printing in cerulean or Egyptian blue please proceed to the collection area where your new vehicle is waiting. Thank you. Pip-pip-pip.’

  ‘Would the blue-green customer please refrain from going number one and two while the vehicle is in the waiting room. Thank you.’ Working life in a Model-T factory could get awfully tedious after a while, so to an iRobot such variations were hilarious life-savers, and were often shared on iRobot chat forums.

  Factories sprang up like mushrooms on the planet. Literally like mushrooms, in that they self-seeded and sprang up overnight under cover of darkness. Commercially-adept AI iGents who programmed themselves to speak Foreign and all dialects thereof paved the way. Whenever the iWorker robots established a new workshop their first most important task was to take a deep breath and duplicate themselves, sending little convoys of Model-T Virgins snaking out, driven by brand-new robots and loaded with payment-in-kind junk, to build and run new factories as directed by the cunningly AI iGent agents.

  Folk in the officially designated “Third World” areas of Europe, Middle East and Africa cottoned on first because they knew what decent junk was and had plenty of it to hand. The easiest to obtain was old U.N. vehicles and abandoned peace-keeper armaments, non-functional charity-built well-heads and detritus from daringly-sited international conference centres after the delegates had all left to go back to the “First World”.

  In the more civilised parts of the world of course, like everything else, old junk was the sole preserve of the prevailing government. Private individuals were not allowed to hold scrap. Ordinary domestic households had it forcibly taken away at great cost (to themselves) once a fortnight by burly men in big lorries. If anyone started accumulating junk around their property there was a court system in place to make sure that it was confiscated as quickly as possible and that the population’s non-junk status quo was safely preserved. In this manner any resources that were not controlled fiscally via taxation were controlled socially. Each household, by and large, was thus tied to the volume and supply of resources approved by the government and to those resources alone. New things came in via VAT and National Insurance registered routes and individuals were absolutely discouraged from building things of their own, since that was worse than fiscally neutral to the establishment. Old stuff left in a wheelie-bin once every two weeks to be fed back around to the entry to the VAT-liable route.

  This civilised system slowed, but could not stop, could never hope to stop, the spread of the new Model-T Virgin. If it wasn’t actually bolted down then it was fair game as scrap.

  In a way, the busiest workshops and highest initial customer take-up were in those parts of the world where humans rarely paused long enough in their taxation-negative or taxation-neutral endeavours to let their gonads cool down.

  The strength of the beast lay in India, China, almost all of Africa and in parts of Grimsby and Cleethorpes - those areas most in need of an alternative pastime to uncontrolled and incidentally-fecund heterosexual sex. There the Model-T Virgin was received like the introduction of the safety-valve on a steam traction engine - it took some of the pressure off by offering even the poor a viable second interest in life.

  With an irony not seen since cavemen first queued at the forehead-straightening clinics, the queues at Virgin Factories stretched for miles, mostly of folk still looking a bit hot and bothered, dishevelled but happy and yet still slightly coy around each other. Every twenty-three seconds these queues stepped one pace forward and dumped bits of old oil-tanker or bits of last year’s model of some desktop computer into the hoppers. The pace and rhythm thus was not totally dissimilar to their previously favoured pastime, but it resulted in fewer incidental children and in something that they could polish in the driveway. Clatter, clatter, thump, bang, bang followed by a brief wail of delight, quick footsteps and the slam of a vehicle door. Even the choreography and soundtrack of the factory itself were similar to the global obsession that they were interrupting.

  In the case of the Virgin queues though, someone always drove away the proud First Registered Keeper of a vehicle with no fancy Teutonic badge, no sporting heritage and, usually, no tax or insurance. This highly confused most folk in the “civilised” world who thought that government tax and commercially obtained insurance were intrinsic mechanical parts of a vehicle, whereas they rather obviously are in fact simply intrinsic parts of government and commerce and nothing whatsoever to do with efficient travel or vehicles. Pavlov’s dogs might as well have been trained to pay-up, pay-up and play the game as well as to slobber. The people had, and dogs aren’t really that much more intelligent than most people in the final analysis.

  The civilised masses initially sniffed at the Virgins and turned up their noses. They preferred their Mercedes and BMW and Triumph and Wolseley vehicles. They preferred something with a bit of class. Something with a few feature
s, something with some real luxury. Why, the Model-T Virgin had the unrefined, noisy old lump of an engine from a chuffing satellite-launcher! It was like putting a lorry engine on a bicycle and calling it a BSA! Ridiculous!

  When the first proud new owner experimentally pointed his Model-T Virgin out of the atmosphere and just kept the loud pedal floored, nobody actually noticed his departure.

  By the time Mr Derek Huang of the D’ing D’ong province of China had crossed the orbit of Pluto and had begun to seriously regret failing to make adequate extended provision for his more personal atmospheric needs he had exceeded the stated cruising speed of one hundred times light per year and was well on his “ooh what a pretty streak of quantum-annoyed and reality-confused particles” way to the factory-estimated maximum speed of one hundred and twenty times light. His speedometer needle wobbled nervously over the eighty thousand five-hundred million miles per hour mark, with the integral odometer whirring around faster than I have just caused Mr Einstein and his many relatives to spin in their graves.

  Somewhere, about six thousand light-years away now, quantum-confused and possibly also reality-annoyed aliens are probably wondering what to think of a red tin bucket with a lorry engine thundering through their home system with a skeletal pilot at the controls and with the accelerator pedal still floored. They are probably going to think that all humans are skinny, made almost entirely of calcium, are very uncommunicative and permanently sport a wide, toothy ‘look at me!’ rictus.

  Overall, there could be far worse inter-stellar ambassadors for the human race than Mr Huang.

  A faux-celebrity of some sort from the media, for one. Or a pond-life politician from the sewers of power. No, much better that the honour should fall to Mr Huang, a local legend not long after his own lifetime and genuinely missed by many, not least by the Guinness Book of Records and his mates, all of whom owed him money from the dare.

  What happened next on planet Earth couldn’t have happened without the elderly white-haired old multi-multi-etc-millionaire and his idea to slap together the brutal blunt instrument that was the Model-T Virgin, but really nor could it have happened without Mr Huang and his mates too. In a way, Mr Derek Huang was the very first human being to answer Mr Millionaire’s lonely dinner-conversation question, and he had answered it loudly and clearly.

  Like a kettle beginning to steam, Earth began to boil off little wisps of human population. Those with an excess of discontent or a deficit in the intelligence quotient department, or those who eschewed sanity or even just necessarily lived in uncomfortable proximity to their neighbour’s bathroom were first to feel the exciting new heat. Had their departure not been subject to an expanding cube law of some fancy sort and, alright, yes, further complicated by curious time-distortions, the criminally insane might have rubbed shoulders with the hyper-intelligent, all sneaking out under cover of Establishment ignorance while those who were just fed up to the tits with everything sped past recklessly in some sod it, what the hell alternative to suicide. In short, the long and the tall began to leave the planet and the nature of the Model-T allowed them to do so independently of the good, the bad and the socially ugly.

  Without conscious thought from those involved, favoured vectors began to form, with all of human society’s various divisions, sub-divisions, hate groups and mutual support groups maintaining their separation and even increasing it as they sped off towards different star clusters. Survivalists aimed for the more isolated star groups, the various religions all segregated into straggly single-faith convoys and blacks, whites, pinks, yellows and greens took advantage of the new-found space to give each other even more space than ever before. The farther they went the further away from each other they came to be, physically as well as socially, and they gave exponentially less thought to one another. Religious and ideological ties and loyalties were securely embedded in the migrations, and all freed from any legislative stricture. People began to leave Earth with their loved ones and their friends and with their neighbours, not in all-inclusive cross-sections of human life.

  One or two (hundred thousand) folk who really should have known better made brief but very interesting trips to places where they found themselves outside the protection of the snorting herd, such as Mercury, Venus, and Mars. A couple of cult-loads even fled directly into the Sun and got the spiritual disappointment of their shortened lives. That group were like a little line of flares going off across the face of the star and were so very, very pretty, for a couple of minutes in a way they had never been before they left Earth.

  The Westboro Baptist Church held demonstration after demonstration, holding up placards that read “God hates Virgins” and “Die Virgin-abusers, Die”. It was not to be long though before Reverend Big Daddy Westboro was spotted sneaking out of the back yard hefting a wheelbarrow full of scrap metal crucifixes, and heading for the Virgin factory.

  Warming with cold-blooded bureaucratic sloth to the notion that here was a new behaviour requiring regulation and control, Governments the world over busied their less reptilian devotees with creating fee structures for orbital parking, and with inventing new classes of vehicle taxation and with subsidising their school-chums at new insurance businesses. Something they called MoOT testing (Ministry of Orbital Transport) became compulsory. Once they got going, they positively hopped up and down, foaming at the bank account, issuing ever more thou shalt dictates and ever more thou shalt nots with ever greater fees and penalties.

  As ever, nobody really gave a flying shit. “Catch me if you can” was a phrase that, happily, came back into vogue after a deplorable absence of many years, and the establishment fleas on the tail of the dog duly tried their hardest to catch the dog by urging the tail to go faster. Laws were passed and laws were duly ignored.

  Meanwhile, although almost imperceptibly in the early years, the electorate in the most densely populated regions of the planet began to thin. I don’t mean that they lost weight – the fast “food” chains saw to that – but I mean that they became fewer, and fewer, and fewer. Governments and politicians in ministries charged with food provision and population control and public order (M.o.F.P., M.o.P.C. and M.o.P.O.) patted themselves expensively on the back and gave themselves bonuses for having somehow succeeded at whatever it was that they had been supposed to be doing. In truth, they had no idea what they had been doing, but whatever it was it was obviously working, and they intended to put similar effort into doing more of it than ever before.

  Governments the world over continued to legislate eagerly and to tax rabidly, chiefly with regards to the crimson (or bloody or sunset-ruddy or tart’s fingernail-polish red) tide of Model-T Virgins that seemed to have washed into every suburb, every shanty town, every high-density “social” housing scheme on the globe. Hansard records the day when the Right Honourable Members, acting on the advice of a joint sub-committee and two tame quangos, set the Vehicle Excise Duty on Model-T Virgins (only) at fifteen thousand two hundred and twenty-seven guineas per year – precisely the average gross income of “the common man”. It was a dreadful vehicle anyway, they said. It could do no more than seventy-five mph on the level and was far outstripped in all departments by public transport, let alone by the Merc Smaht-Kaka and the Beamer Peeple-Karreea. Their Honourables had no idea why anyone might want to own one in the first place, so it behoved government to stop people doing so, at whatever the monetary cost to the people who seemed to want to do so.

  Massive bites of dwindling tax revenue were spent recruiting private firms to impound and crush untaxed Model-T Virgins and they, in turn, spent much less massive bites of money from taxation on recruiting little people to drive the lorries around estates and the even more dismal parts of towns from coast to coast, hoisting up and crushing vehicle after vehicle on the spot.

  No-one paid the fines, since it was cheaper to buy a new car. They were just – usually - careful to never leave the dog, the children or their Rayban sunglasses in the car.

  Minor modifications were ma
de (by the robots) to the raw-material chutes of the pop-up factories so that they could more easily accept the heavy cubes of crushed raw material that were becoming ever more popular as payment. Very little had to be sourced outside of these payment contributions then since, somehow, the incoming junk matched almost exactly the material requirements for production of a fresh, new Model-T vehicle. A cube of junk, a little energy from the sun, some tweaking by the iWorkers on the production line et voila! A shiny new red Model-T Virgin looking exactly like the old one before it was crushed.

  In the third world the vast back-slapping pension-scheme contributing honours-attracting jobs for the old-school boys mechanisms that called themselves “international charities” noted a change in behaviour in their customers. When trouble flared, as it seems to do so frequently in the warmer, less sanitary climes, an ever-increasing proportion of the population rather gave the impression of just fluttering into the skies like a cloud of disturbed butterflies, settling just beyond reach of the troubles. It was becoming difficult to target services to meet the stipulations of the funding requirements – national boundaries were becoming blurred.

  Damn it, said the reports, the human population was beginning to ignore government controls with borders and immigration and was starting to take on the appearance of animal migrations. It was as though butterflies were migrating with the massed force of wildebeest. If an “aid” agency or the forces of a coup moved towards them they just took to the air and moved on, like butterflies and wildebeest. Is “wildebeest” its own plural? I do hope so. Wildebeasties. Wildebeastings. Whatever.