by Ian Hutson
Experts were found and called in to the Palace of Westminster to explain the concept of “positive feedback” systems. Guidance was printed up explaining how to recognise the early symptoms of illegal internet-use (pale skin, carpal-tunnel syndrome, myopia, an apparently wide general-knowledge available only during browsing hours). Desk Sergeants in Police Stations across the land Sellotaped “Model-T Virgin Recognition Profile Charts” to their canteen walls and tested recruits at least once a year wherever possible.
The populations in unsettled corners of the world continued to rise and settle like nervous butterflies swarming in a steadily increasing number of un-registered Model-Ts. It became difficult to keep commercial satellites in orbit without some numpty smacking into them while on more casual, un-licensed manoeuvres. Fines were levied and remained unpaid, vehicles were crushed and crushed vehicles were redeemed with bolt-croppers from the rubbish tips and recycled into new vehicles which were then hidden better than the old ones. The mobile Virgin pop-up factory robots were busy robots.
After twenty years or so there came the day when, finally, insufficient tax revenues were collected to cover the running costs of the Strangers’ Bar at Westminster, and this in spite of the revised collection targets handed down to the hallowed halls of the Inland Revenue, to Customs & Excise and the new Tax Wing of the Armed Forces. Appropriate cuts were made to the salaries of those in the Inland Revenue, the Customs & Excise Department and in the Armed Forces generally, and working hours were summarily lengthened for all of those remaining, just to give them an incentive to buck their ideas up a bit.
The Army in fact seemed to have shrunk to just a few dozen Generals and a couple of thousand of the more military-minded commercially-sourced recruits – barely enough to encircle Westminster, facing outwards, fingers on triggers, really. The lines of tanks and stock-piles of ammunition that had, for logistical reasons, been moved into Westminster and the immediate grounds began to look very unsightly, very unsightly indeed. Not even the greenest MP cycled to the House anymore. Most of them used the old network of Cold War tunnels whenever they couldn’t blag a helicopter ride.
Members of Parliament began funding their own private security services around their homes as well as at Westminster, although no-one seemed to know how they managed it; they seemed to have some odd arrangement with The Remaining Bank. Paper money became ... unpopular. Platinum, gold and silver prices rocketed; copper and even bronze started to twitch enthusiastically on the Metal Exchange in The City. Laws were passed allowing only security services and MPs to hold firearms. To ensure safe travel for all the main roads were restricted to use by security services and MPs. No-one really cared, it hardly mattered. There seemed to be so very few civilians left to give a shit, so to speak. Black Wolseley and British Racing Green Rover vehicles sped through daytime London like ZIL limousines through Moscow, hugging the centre line at speed and ignoring traffic lights. No-one threw eggs at politicians anymore; eggs were far too expensive to waste on serious political commentary.
Eerily, the security services (unwisely) reported that they were not only meeting little resistance, they were in fact meeting little at all in the way of population. Security service numbers were immediately cut accordingly to eke out gold reserves and the pay of those remaining was reduced, since the politicians reasoned that the risk they faced had reduced. This resulted in a minor skirmish among the security forces assigned to protect Westminster and was cleared up only by the new incoming government’s swift and decisive actions in re permanently silencing the outgoing government’s protestations. The whole top layer of one stash of ammunition was used up in making the changes in the halls of power and in silencing objections. A lot of the security forces then found themselves holding posts in both the security forces and the new government. Sadly, it took them a while to realise that neither were still lucrative, or secure.
The entire planet took on the appearance of somewhere that had been tidied up by Edwardian maids while they were suffering from OCD and hyperactivity – there was not a derelict ship, factory or battered tin bucket in sight. Everything worth recycling had been salvaged by such population as had remained and had been fed under cover of darkness and some friendly barn to a mobile Model-T Virgin pop-up factory so that this “such population as had hitherto remained” could then remove themselves from accurate classification as “such population as remained”, preferring to emphasise only the “hitherto” aspect of their remaining status.
Such population as did involuntarily remain, usually for such reasons as extraordinary congenital suitability to armchair sitting or exceptional talent at waiting for someone else to do things, found itself in dire straits. Those who did had long-since gone. Those who remained because they couldn’t do found that no-one who previously had done remained to do for them and, though they tried hard to teach themselves how to do, they had not the doings or the wherewithal and were, in blunt point of fact, done for.
The portions of the population bell-curve that kept food on the table and kept operational roofs over the heads of those who could not provide their own all appeared to have vanished, taking their skills with them. The economy, that great holy cow of the past ten thousand years of human society, coughed, died and finally lay on its side. Everyone who remained was much too busy grubbing an existence from found tins and bucket-collected rainwater to bother to bury it. Oddly, there were no outpourings of grief or mass displays of hysterical bereavement outside the now-derelict The Stock Exchange. When the Lloyds Building caught fire a solitary Army Fire Engine turned up, but only to take photographs and to make certain that the conflagration didn’t end prematurely. Reports that they turned up before the fire broke out are both scurrilous and disingenuous.
Such politicians as remained then made all extra-orbital flight illegal and attached a full-term life sentence with no reprieve to the mere ownership of a Model-T Virgin. Anyone who had already left was declared a renegade and sentenced in collective absentia to summary seizure of all of their earthly goods and chattels, ordered to return immediately for imprisonment and to surrender their vehicle. Not many complied. Well, no-one actually. Human life on earth, hitherto merely characterised by the baby-bickering of the Bonobo, sank into Plan B, which was the bloodied bestial brawling of blue-bottomed baboons wrestling over ownership of the biggest and best branches. Humanity didn’t retreat back up the trees, but it did find that it was best to live among the trees – certainly, anywhere away from the abandoned conurbations where Nature was having a field day beginning her re-modelling.
At this point in his literary endeavours Alfred broke off from his binary typing to go for a stroll in the surf with Pipsqueak. Together they chased sticks (at walking pace), dodged seventh waves (by riding them out stoically) and investigated soggy sea-weed and stranded shells. Bi-plane birds wheeled overhead and far out to sea the local equivalent of the leopard-seal watched them playing. Alfred’s pronounced limp from his gunshot wounds hardly slowed them down at all really, given that they weren’t walking very fast anyway.
Alfred remembered Pipsqueak as she had been as a puppy – walking around as though she had more paws than she could handle, testing everything to see if it could be eaten. She was a snuggler and a cuddler even then, always happy to find a neck to nestle into for an over-warm snooze. Now she was fully grown, elderly, and occasionally took a double-skip with her back legs if the beginnings of arthritis were bothering her.
The two of them had fallen into a routine of playing until Pipsqueak became tired enough to call it a day – usually after ten minutes or a dozen fetches, whichever came first (and sometimes it was a close-run thing). The old hound would then find something inordinately more interesting among the salty pools left behind among the rocks. Alfred would then take the hint and go and sit down on the rocks just far enough back to catch just a hint of the splash of the biggest waves and Pipsqueak would huff and puff about and eventually agree to join him in a sit-down, but only to show her solidarity.
The two of them would then sit side by side watching the birds wheel about or the clouds roll in or the sun set or sometimes all three. Sometimes Alfred would be the first to reach out and hug, sometimes Pipsqueak would relax up against Alfred and make herself as comfortable as possible while she resisted dozing and thought instead of dinner.
To all sides of them were thousands of miles of unexplored, unpopulated planet. Above them a thin layer of atmosphere suited to a dog’s lungs and then trillions of miles of space. To be outdoors on a planet, any planet, was to be in a room with the ultimate high ceiling and perfectly placed windows.
Increasingly often as they sat, Pipsqueak would fall asleep. Sometimes she would begin snoring. Once in a while she would chase rabbits in her sleep. It tugged at Alfred’s heart when she whimpered in her sleep and, scared to wake her, he hoped above all that she was not remembering their headlong flight from Earth. All he could do then was what he always did, which was to hold her tightly, gently stroke her fur and whisper that everything was alright.
Sitting just within reach of the salt-spray was a deliberate ploy on Alfred’s part. Pipsqueak loved it, biting half-heartedly at any splashes that were brave and bold enough to reach them, and Alfred loved it because Pipsqueak wouldn’t think it odd that he needed to wipe his eyes every once in a while. As soon as Pipsqueak was safely back sleeping in her basket Alfred usually returned to his typewriter.
Half of the Virgin workshops’ iChap and iFellow numbers were under software orders that for each ten thousand customers they served the iChap and iFellow were to interfere with the running of the static robots in order to produce a duplicate pop-up workshop identical to their own. Once it was up and running they were to furnish themselves with a Model-T Virgin, load the essentials of the old workshop into it and follow the nearest human migration off-planet in whichever direction it led, setting up shop again in the first outpost that they encountered that did not already have a Virgin presence.
The second imperative subroutine buried only in the other half of the android managerial staff strength was triggered once thirty Earth days had passed without a customer requesting a Model-T. In that case the iChap and iFellow were to roll up their own workshop into a Model-T and head off boldly into the vast black yonder at random and await further orders. Like the unique signature of a Morse sender, this little instruction appeared to have been written by a different hand to the rest of their code. Still, it was there, and it was legitimate and catalogued, waiting.
Alfred and Albert had been in the latter group.
Mr Multi-Dosh had quite correctly surmised that, cute and cuddly though most of the human race was, a large proportion of it would stop dead in their tracks should their Model-T, heavens forefend, ever cease to function in “fully satisfactory mode”. It was vital that the wherewithal for continued outward migration continued to be spoon-fed to the great unwashed masses, otherwise the whole thing would likely stall as soon as the after-market ash-trays became full or the after-market furry dice dangling from the (after-market) rear-view mirror needed untangling. There seemed little point in splashing the human race around the galaxy in any pattern or form if the first giant leap for mankind was as far as it got before someone then had to re-invent the wheel and figure out how to build it all over again. He hadn’t wanted the answer to his question to be a short-lived one and nor, quite frankly, had he liked the idea of just one of just these two behaviours of humanity to be only answer to his question that was possible - once he was safely out of reach and pushing up the daisies of course.
Six times Alfred’s counter had begun clocking up the days without customers, when all that remained on Earth were lily-livered politicians cut from the cloth of the security guards of the previous generation of lily-livered politicians. Once, his counter reached as high as twenty-eight before someone had stumbled in from the smoke and the gunfire and the near-cannibalistic hunger, and had fed stolen vintage and otherwise useless coins into the slot for a Model-T.
Six times Alfred’s counter returned to zero amid the decline and fall into a brief period of almost unbelievable savagery, a period that would eventually see Earth’s newly minimal population knuckle under and return to a peaceful agrarian lifestyle with a little more respect for each other and for the planet.
Three times Alfred and his partner Albert moved their workshop to safer locations, thus requiring fewer repairs to the infrastructure. Each time their counter was re-set the more worried they became for their own safety and for that of the, um, the, er - the “security” dog they had adopted onto the staff when she had wandered in from the cold.
At the last move they accidentally-on-purpose set up the workshop well off the beaten track, out of sight and away from the ruins of the big towns and cities where the gangs of “Scrappers” roamed aimlessly. “Scrappers” was the term the iFolk used for all of those humans too scared to leave or too stubborn to leave or too determined to be the ones to dictate the future of the old home planet to leave along with the others. In time they’d become human again, but for the nonce they were just social savages and barbarians, looting, living off the wreckage and fighting among themselves over the broken scraps of civilisation’s old and obsolete toys. Who cared about the lessons of Rome when it was London that had fallen?
The “customer-free day” counter had again reached twenty-seven when Alfred and Albert once more heard gunfire close by, too close for comfort. A band of Looters of Tunbridge Wells (they were all wearing t-shirts bearing the team logo) seemed to be working their way through the neighbourhood, taking with them anything they thought of value and destroying the rest.
In a flash of rebellious brilliance born out of some almost mechanical instinct self-preservation, Alfred logged into Albert’s control system and set his internal clock forward three days. Then Albert reciprocated by setting Alfred’s clock forward too. The errors thus caused repeatedly filled their oops and oh-gosh logs until they thought to tear off the extra days from the “Far Side” desk calendar that they kept in front of shop. It did, however, also free them immediately from the constraints of welcoming customers and it meant that they could produce their own Model-T and leave too.
Alfred paused to untangle the zero and one keys from each other as he documented this part of their story. Jamming the keys in the first place had given him a little time to compose his emotions, and to stop his processors misfiring like an old engine running on lumpy nostalgia.
He rested his hand on the open page of the notebook, the one whose open top page read simply, as ever and in some other’s hand, ‘I love you’ and which was dated two days earlier.
The imperative to pack up and leave Earth had come just a little too late for them all. Were it not for fiddling with their own timekeeping they would none of them have escaped. The violent chaos and destruction that accompanies the decline and re-invention of every civilisation lay all about the Virgin workshop and pressed tightly on every side. There had been burning, looting, gunfire, murder and destruction for nothing more than destruction’s sake. There had been no time to follow the careful plan of packing away the static robots, the spares and the tools, no chance of an orderly departure at all.
Albert had gone to fetch their “security” dog and the litter of puppies that she had been carrying from where they were sunning themselves on the patchy grass, while Alfred prioritised as he thought best and threw water and dog-food into the Model-T, not caring where it landed just so long as it landed inside. The water could be recycled but once the dog-food ran out more protein would have to be sourced somehow, somewhere for the portable kitchen Kenwood Chef. He packed three or four tonnes of it – as much as he could squeeze into the T along with everything else immediately to hand. He worked like the sort of android blur that scares human beings on some primal level.
Kimberley and her puppies were rousing themselves, the puppies wagging tiny tails and stumbling towards the workshop as Albert ran to encourage them. Without further warning, all about erupted into fl
ame and debris, and in that moment all but one tiny scrap of Alfred’s family died.
Alfred, still moving as only an android can, reached them while the flames still leapt and danced and the smoke had yet to form. Albert, lying between puppies and chaos, had been shattered into a dozen pieces. Kimberley lay dead, and of her puppies all but one had departed the mortal coil along with her. Alfred had scant seconds to save what he could of a life that had been good and happy. With no pause in his stride he scooped up the one remaining puppy, rolled through still-flying debris to Albert’s side and removed the core memory module from his scorched and silent skull.
As Alfred ran he knew exactly which of his two precious loads he must protect above all others. Life, organic life in whatever form, and most especially in wag-tail furry-bundle orphan-puppy form was the priority. Nonetheless, he did not trust the memory of Albert to a mere pocket, preferring instead to find a way to cling on to both cargoes with all of his might. The Model-T started, as all did, at first touch and the bullets of the looters zinged and careened off the bodywork like gravel thrown up from the open road. The route that appeared in his registers without conscious prompt led low over the countryside to get them away from the gunfire and then high in a spiral, gaining altitude and speed to escape Earth’s gravity at the soonest possible moment.
Like a desperate sailing-ship captain, Alfred lashed the wheel to maintain the spiral and rigged up a brace to hold the accelerator wide-open. The puppy, singed and shocked, would not be left even while Alfred worked like a demon to seal the holes left by bullets and flying debris so that air pressure might be maintained. Working with one hand he patched and sealed, checking the sky about whenever he could for the unlikely interference of other traffic – and finding none, since the scared primitives left on the surface would not let themselves even consider flight.