by Ian Hutson
Got drought? Move in any direction just far enough to find water. Being shot at by rebels? Everyone seemed to overshoot the established refugee camps full of dysentery and patronising international journalists, and set up home wherever it was peaceful but still looked and felt similar to home.
Soon the problems changed. Being shot at by troops working for the international aid agencies and approved international charities? Move back to from whence you came or even just one hop to the left. Clouds of Model-T Virgins occasionally swept completely over the more unhappy parts of the planet like vast flocks of starlings, the outer and inner layers churning and flowing in accordance with some natural and possibly fractal rule of air-traffic self-control.
Back in Blighty, a rocket-science graduate “student yeah?” by the name of Kyleigh, who was working as an unpaid intern in both the Minister of Transport’s office and the Minister of Transport’s trousers, speculated one day that a flock of refugees might, just might, be able to make it across the English Channel in sufficient un-licensed Model-T Virgins and in sufficient numbers to exceed EU immigration quotas. That simple observation chilled Westminster to its gussets. Gins were put down, cigars allowed to go out and worried eyebrows were raised, and then raised again in line with VAT increases announced in The Monthly Budget. It was difficult enough keeping up with the crushing and re-crushing of English Virgins – how would the Exchequer cope with the expense of an influx of Foreign Virgins? Taxes would have to be raised and new laws passed immediately, obviously. They leapt onto the matter like wild things, and scheduled some discussion for almost immediately after summer parliamentary recess – one might as well enjoy the nice weather while it was about eh?
It was during a dirty weekend away in the summer recess that the minister in question quietly bought Kyleigh a Model-T as a present (from the Clacton-on-Sea pop-up Virgin factory). That way she could come to him in his flat if he couldn’t get to her in his other flat.
Once again the “first world” was glaring at the old “third world” and wishing it just wasn’t there.
Vast portions of India, China, parts of Russia and the great hordes of Eastern Europe were on the move! Ye gods, man, they might land anywhere!
Priorities were changed, armed forces given new focus, national boundaries defined afresh and taxation levied on the populace at large so that sections of the populace at large could be recruited into an expanded Immigration Control Service to stop the rest of the population at large immigrating, emigrating or migrating anywhere in order that they may be taxed to fund the immigration, emigration and migration control services that are so vital to maintaining a viable taxable populace.
They failed dismally of course, but the initial drop in the number of unemployed caused a two percent increase in trouser-joy in the Stock Exchange and the income tax levied on the salaries of the new civil servants washed notionally into the coffers to keep the whole thing afloat until at least beyond the next election. The house of cards wasn’t finished yet by any means.
More and more migrants encouraged their Model-T Virgins into ever-higher trajectories as they sailed sub-orbitally over the heads of anything and anyone between them and their destination, including the freshly-employed immigration, emigration and general migration services. Fixed Penalty Notices were stacking up nicely in the new computer systems and, notionally, using cunningly-negotiated bridging loans from the “big one” High Street bank, these funded the increase in Police Community-Support Officer numbers designed to collect the fines. The increase in P.C.S.O. numbers was funded, it was said, by the nice healthy blip in the economy caused by the new, previously unemployed recruits’ salaries feeding directly into the domestic economy (at least, so the figures suggested, or would - until after the next election).
The establishment snake was growing by regurgitating itself.
Still, there is no place for complacency in public administration, so Governments and governing bodies of Governments met and passed draconian legislation, throwing resources and the full weight of The Law at the problem of people fleeing from problems into the back yards of people who lived where hitherto there had been no such problem of an influx of people desperately fleeing problems. The greater part of the world’s remaining population played a vast game of human chequers, and, like all folk whose lives depended upon the outcome, they played it better than the paid workforces of any immigration control services. The population of the “First and Second Worlds” had no idea what was hitting them, other than that there was a fan involved, and lots of people living where hitherto they had not lived. The NIMBYs found themselves unwilling and unhappy IMBYs.
In a dusty corner of a dusty census department a dusty census chap stirred, briefly, and wondered if perhaps the statistical trends were not indicating that far fewer discrete population-units remained globally than had hitherto. After gathering and analysing another couple of years’ data the chap wondered – via internal memo – if perhaps someone ought not to pop out of London into the regions and into the abroad to take a quick gander, by eye so to speak, just in case the population really was disappearing off the census radar. They were supposed to be worried about a local influx, not a planetary evaporation, but he couldn’t help but wonder. He knew that it was impossible, because people weren’t allowed to leave, as such, without first acquiring permission and notifying the Census Office, but there did seem to be rather more discrete population units missing than had applied for permission to leave. He sent a memo to the issuing offices to check that they had logged all of their “Permission to leave” applications correctly, and then he went to lunch and got run over by three axles of a six-axle London eco-bus just outside McSubway-Donalds. He was pronounced untaxable at the scene of the accident by a passing para-accountant. Oh – and pronounced dead too by the driver of the bus who had been trained in selling First Aid t those in emergency need.
Everything went nicely quiet again, what little census dust there had been settled, and Governments re-elected themselves, raised their salaries and went back to their gins, cigars and their research assistants’ loins. The great unwashed – at least, those that did remain - continued to turn to genital friction as their main source of entertainment. Child benefit was capped at a maximum of ten children per family in England and the wholly autonomous Model-T Virgin factories flew discreetly with the herd, like Queen wasps in a swarm, now popping a fresh, unlocked Model-T down whenever they found a vacant parking space, and leaving the keys in the ignition, operating to the rules of Mr Multi-Millionaire’s “Phase One A”.
The crisis, the Assistant Secretaries reported to their Department Heads in Cabinet, was over. Although there had been some nasty-looking trends in immigration, emigration and general population dispersal it appeared that the problem had been beaten by the new legislation and taxes, and now represented nothing more than statistical background noise. In short, not everyone abroad had in fact migrated to the Home Counties. In fact, after a few hairy years the NHS appeared to be coping better than ever and the planet as a whole seemed to have less junk lying around, although there were some factors of forward fiscal planning that would need tweaking by focusing attention on updating Inland Revenue and HMRC records and by collecting a backlog of taxes and penalties that had built up during the time of confusion. In final analysis the task at hand was a very simple one; to find out where the missing population had moved to and to make them pay before the National bridging loans became due. All would be well.
And so it was well. Well, quite well, for a while.
Then Corporations here and there began to report difficulties in recruiting high-calibre graduate candidates, or indeed candidates of any kind, and began offering extraordinary dividends to head-hunters. They reported, somehow expecting sympathy, that the job market had now become somewhat of a jungle for employers. Poor loves. Incentives were offered to attract workers desperately needed to run London Transport’s buses and underground systems. The usual hunting grounds of the East Indi
es, Africa and engineering and science students needing summer jobs were found to be largely deserted except for some self-catering holidaymakers, and that only in the case of the East Indies and the wildlife-ridden parts of Africa.
Interpol began to report suspicions that a significant proportion of the “The Most Wanted” were unlikely ever to be found again. Wild theories circulated, some of them based upon the exodus of the dolphins in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, although it was not thought that any of the gangsters, terrorists and nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties media-types from England had thought to even say “so long and thanks for all the teenagers” as they departed. Odd, loot-strewn trails like Nazca lines on the surface of the planet everywhere seemed to lead to a couple of hundred still-smoking yards of Model-T tyre tracks and then nothing. It was all very puzzling and very disturbing. Without a “The Most Wanted” Interpol had little left with which to justify its significant budget requirements. Interpolice of all Inter-ranks were becoming interminably inter-worried.
Someone in a back office working for London Transport Innit-Yeah PLC then noticed that even with all of the cancellations and reduced timetables caused by scarcity of motile, sentient staff, no-one seemed to be complaining and the system was, in fact, running quite sweetly even with half of its rolling stock parked up in sidings. The situation was quite untenable in the medium to long-term because management levels were beginning to look rather top-heavy. The organisational structure was assuming the look less of a typical public-enterprise uber-efficient shallow pyramid, fnarr fnarr, and more of a squashed Liquorice Allsort. Turnstiles were rusting up and grass was growing on some of the escalators. Internet rumours circulated that the missing passenger millions were stuck on commuter trains at abandoned, locked-up stations, existing on the contents of vending machines and, possibly, on each other.
When Tube Customer Service Announcers belched customer-service orientated announcements such as ‘mind the fecking doors you stupid arseholes’ and ‘the next train is cancelled because I say it is cancelled’ all that came in reply was a hollow mechanical echo, or a hollow mechanical echo. To be frank, they were starting to miss the happy banter based on a massed-customer chorus of ‘up yours too, Doris, and the horse you rode in on’.
Somehow, slightly faster than they could be crushed, new Model-Ts appeared the world over. It occurred to even more folk than ever before that sub-orbital establishment avoidance was not the vehicle’s only trick. Pointing the nose in a spiral and keeping the foot to the floor could corkscrew one right out of the atmosphere and beyond Earth’s gravity well in just a spiffing jiffy. What the internet-savvy, the pragmatic criminal, the functional intelligentsia and Mr Derek Huang had known and acted on for years was now filtering down to those with plastic hips, plastic brains and red-plastered tax demands. Those previously un-moved by the increasingly status non-quo were beginning to find themselves moved. They were even starting to move themselves. Vanilla suburbia was becoming, as one report read, disgruntled. Tunbridge Wells was not happy.
There was a substantial blip on the graphs of RoSPAA (the Royal Society for the Prevention of Aerial Accidents) indicating that a certain portion of the population bell-curve didn’t fully appreciate that breathing comfortably and in a healthy manner was a privilege that sometimes had to be arranged, rather than merely relied upon, and most especially so when leaving the planet’s atmosphere for any significant length of time, such as more than three minutes or possibly four if you were an Olympic-standard swimmer or a scuba-diver. Model-Ts rained down from the sky for a while as the adventurous but survival-inexperienced lost consciousness and, eventually, any sense of bodily integrity. Darwin’s ghost roamed the planet gleefully and, already sated by the successful departure of high proportions of the off-radar population, he positively micturated in his tweed plus-fours at the self-removal from the plane of earthly existence of those truthfully less than fully suited to the responsibilities that came with the opposable thumb. Joe Bloggs was removing himself from the gene pool at an undignified rate of knots, and the exodus was better for it.
In an indication of the cranial limitations of a certain portion of the suburban species, the moon gathered a dust-halo of Model-Ts that had set off for a day out (with cheese and crackers). The surface became dotted with Model-Ts in various innovative but generally unsuccessful attempts at lunar parking (no-one had marked out any spaces, and there appeared at first sight to be no “pay and display” ticket machines). The song lyric “Everyone’s gone to the moon” found itself in court and charged with aiding and abetting the wholesale slaughter of that proportion of a whole generation who found themselves suddenly with more mobility than was technically within their safe intellectual scope. The song was banned and Tony Blackburn went back to playing My Ding-a-Ling twice an hour. As one of a very few remaining media-figures from his era that was not languishing in an open prison under sexual-predator segregation rules it was obvious that not only was no-one else playing with Mr Blackburn’s ding-a-ling, but that he had refrained from playing away from home with it himself too. Splendid chap.
Rumours were spread (by the governments of the world) that those who had been seen to so suddenly become disadvantaged in terms of altitude had actually been shot out of the skies by authorities eager to clamp down on dangerous travel - for the good of the population at large of course. Fewer and fewer people gave a damn about the government’s opinion. The population of the planet was well on the way to shaking off the “at large” epithet forever. Stay at home and become the almost sole target of an always-bloated government and bureaucracy, or corkscrew up through the clouds and sod off to pastures new before the food shortages and riots took hold? Hmm, which should we choose, the population thought, as they corkscrewed through the clouds surrounded by their chattels and clutching a map of likely destinations.
It eventually dawned too on the powers-that-were-trying-very-hard-to-still-be that sub-orbital travel was indeed not the only trick the old Virgin dog had up its sleeves, and it dawned that their public and Mr Huang had already realised this, somehow long before the authorities had. Quelle surprise, quelle horror. Emergency legislation made it a capital offence to attempt or to achieve full orbit or to leave Earth’s gravity well without a valid licence and payment of the necessary stupendous fee (waived for flights of an official nature and for all travel by MPs who naturally had to see what was going on for themselves).
Taxation was raised again to fund the expanded Air Force required to keep the taxpayers who were expected to fund the required expanded Air Force in a position in which they could be required to pay the extra taxes that would keep them paying the taxes. Further taxes were required to fund the extra demands made upon the services of the Ministry of Justice in order to handle all of the extra cases of non-payment. Hearing cases in absentia was just as expensive, if not more so, than hearing them with the accused actually in the dock rather than naffing off at relativity-inducing speed to some distant star with grandma and grandma’s walking frame strapped onto the roof-rack to make room inside for the beer. Judges began to ask questions in court such as ‘Space? Isn’t it rather cold?’ and ‘But they’ll all be back, won’t they, once they realise how far away it all is?’
The governments were doing some foot-to-the-floor spiralling themselves. It began to occur to what remained of the Armed Forces that they were paying these emergency taxes while a great many other folk who had just bogged off into the great yonder were not doing so. Morale, unlike a lot of the civilian population, was not stellar.
Any (remaining) Model-Ts that appeared to have been modified to add hydroponics and recycling systems that might make flights of a fortnight or more feasible began to be impounded, rather late in the day. The son of a sitting MP accidentally left his laptop in view with his browser open on the instructions on how to cheaply convert the Model-T into a long-distance vehicle. MPs thus finally discovered the true nature of the internet and it began to dawn horribly upon them that what
they had previously ignored before as mere “techie gamers’ piffle” was dangerous stuff – the interwebbingsonline really existed, and there was lots of stuff on it! Damn, but this was a serious development.
The internet was banned and Mrs Shafquat Husain O’Reilly Kim-Lee, the American president (Republican, on an Evangelical ticket), rather dramatically, during a globally-televised media circus, broke the “In case of Emergency” glass and threw the big industrial “Stop Internet” switch on the wall in the Ovoid Room of The Whitehouse. Minutes and hours later they were all still waiting for any discernible effect. The U-Bend video site and that blog with the poodles that dress up in drag continued to be visible when the C.I.A. checked. It was all such a puzzle. The Whitehouse began to suspect that the big switch hadn’t been wired up correctly to Mr Sir Berners-Lee’s dreadful device. They also began to worry if there might be similar problems with the red-painted glass-fronted switches for “Stop Global Oil and Gas Supply” and “Stop Global Economy”.
Taxes and restrictions were levied on hydroponics equipment, and unlicensed expertise in civilian gardening and allotment food production were made criminal offences. The Exchequer complained that there seemed to be fewer and fewer taxpayers about at all really, and it was all becoming rather worrying. Governments sacked these obviously incompetent ministers in charge of their Exchequers and passed new laws enforcing the old laws about observing the ancient laws regarding not evading tax laws. They also passed further, modest rises in taxes to fund collection and, in a quiet addendum, to fund increased security services to ensure the safety and security of government offices and MPs interests and MPs private dwellings. It was becoming increasingly difficult to find anyone to recruit into the security forces and MPs were beginning to wonder if they themselves weren’t a little bit vulnerable.