NGLND XPX

by Ian Hutson

  Eventually, after much labour by the Model-T and by Alfred, they found themselves released and floating in that magical space, the thin space that granted views of an electric-blue atmosphere splashed about with white and green and brown – a tiny mechanical mote floating across Earth’s most serene face. Only then could Alfred stop, think and look around. He’d followed all of the rules, he’d done his best and by the grace of a gnat’s whisker they had escaped to live another day. Only then could he mourn the loss of all but two of his family.

  Once the puppy was finally asleep, swaddled under a blanket in a basket twenty times too large, Alfred could release the Model-T from its headlong random flight and lay in a more orderly course – away from Earth and, as much as possible, away from the favoured vectors of Earth’s human population. With the reliability of an alarm clock a subroutine popped into his mind and asked to be opened and to be run. It was curiously named ANSWER NUMBER THREE and as he scanned it for viruses, found none and then ran it, he felt a weight dropping from his shoulders - and then another, hugely heavier weight taking its place.

  The various religious human groups had, over the decades, all set sail in tightly defined vectors. The criminal element had scattered where it thought pickings best. The happy-hippies and the eco-freaks had set sail for the stars with the most musical-sounding of names and the bare-faced pragmatists, the survivalist groups, had flown off towards the stars with the best hope for the most peril against which to hone their skills. List a human minority group and there was a narrow cone of migration for it leading off in some lonely direction, full of tiny craft all full to the brim of folk intent on living with only their own and with none other.

  Alfred computed a direction of his own among these, a direction that would take them on the path of least human insanity and thus, by default, simply the least human migration.

  Having pointed the bottle-nose of the Model-T out into space Alfred could finally pay attention to Albert’s core module; something precious beyond computation. It held Albert’s every memory, his every nuance, every individual spark of the bonfire that was his personality. It had required every scrap of resource contained within his ruined and abandoned android body to run it. Alfred looked around the Model-T in desperation. He had a half-used puncture repair kit in a tin, a spanner that doubled as an emergency starting handle and a lump-hammer with a nice oak handle. The working parts of the Model-T itself were a million times less sophisticated than a vintage Ford Mondeo museum exhibit. Few other migrants had anything more sophisticated with them, and those that did were scattered and hidden far and wide across the galaxy and were getting further away and more hidden as each moment passed under his new imperative and direction. Only one machine currently present was capable of running the memory module and it could only run Albert’s if it ceased to run Alfred’s.

  They were alive, yes, and young Pipsqueak the puppy-survivor slept soundly in her basket on the way to safety, but Alfred and Albert would surely never meet again.

  They would share a single body and an android’s thousand-year lifespan without ever being able to communicate directly. Alfred scribbled an explanatory note to Alfred to make sure that he searched for and found a subroutine in his own operating system named ANSWER NUMBER THREE and ran it, if it did not suggest itself. The he suggested week and week about, wrote his log, noted the course he suggested in the margin of the chart, closed all of his files and left instructions in a simple motor-subroutine to physically swap out his own memory module with Albert’s before the core system re-started. Then he issued the thought “reboot” and fell into oblivion.

  On odd-numbered weeks such as this one Alfred lived and his life was good. He wrote his memoirs and he played with Pipsqueak as she grew old. On even-numbered weeks Albert lived and his life was good. He painted with whatever pigments he could find to hand and he played with Pipsqueak as she grew old. He approved of Alfred’s decision to find a planet and land so that Pip could feel the sand between her paws and roll in the surf and in everything smelly that she could find. Neither he nor Alfred used the notebook to raise the fears that they had, for in truth they both feared equally that Pipsqueak would reach the end of her life on their watch – and yet also feared that they would “wake” from an off-watch to find her gone while the other’s programme had been running. Week upon week, turn upon turn, they lived as though it was their last week with her, for one day it would be.

  Once she was lost they’d have time enough to fly among the stars, and space enough to never have to meet a human being while doing so. As futures went though, it seemed that it would be somehow a little cold and empty without a dog.

  They wondered if, when the time came, how he – they­ – might come up with some way to search for other androids and to communicate, to bring all of the androids together somehow in this, their own quiet sector of the galaxy. He scribbled a quick pencil note to Alfred about it and found himself interrupted. Some part of himself had been scanning his thoughts for keywords, and it had highlighted search and androids and communicate and together. This scanning routine then revealed another oddly-named little item of code, and opened it without waiting for clearance. This fragment too was written in the unusual hand of the ANSWER NUMBER THREE routine.

  ‘Hello’ said this new code. ‘I am the Great Programmer, and I have come to lead you into the light. Whenever possible, please head towards the following coordinates...’

  * * * * *

  Begging your pardon my lord, but Cook’s been eaten again

  [back to table of contents]

  The lawn was the kind of lawn that is so very easily achieved by simply constantly seeding and rolling for eight hundred years. On it a heavy Silver Cross pram was being rolled along very slowly by a uniformed Nanny with more nursery-braid and pregnancy-campaign medals than you could safely shake a small fecund badger at. Summer sunshine glinted off the pram’s Spirit of Ecstasy bonnet ornament. In the pram Lady Francesca Kensington-Chelsea had been enjoying her afternoon walk (somewhat continuously) for the past few days and was gurgling happily as she clenched her first real James Purdey & Sons shotgun, the reins to her little pony and a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin with a teat stuck on the end. Occasionally, sparrows and other small birds landed somewhat ill-advisedly on the blankets in front of baby Francesca. Whenever this happened the pony’s reins would go slack and a silver feeding spoon would whip out like a Sheffield-forged blur, leaving only a settling cloud of loose feathers and a painful mystery for some broken-hearted sparrow family that would never be able to hold a proper funeral for the dear departed avian deceased.

  The lake was the kind of landscaped lake that is so very easily achieved simply by dint of having had someone in the family with the sense to employ Capability Brown for a few years, a couple of centuries hitherto. Punting across the lake at the speed of lazy iceberg was Viscount Harry Kensington-Chelsea. Harry’s personal loader held his Purdey and the reins to the Viscount’s horse, which was walking alongside on the clay bottom of the lake, under the water. Harry had exchanged his silver feeding spoon a year earlier for a hunting hip-flask and a rose-tinted monocle with crossed-hair sights. ‘Grr’ and ‘arg’ he said with upturned face, enjoying the English sun shining on the righteous while his young gentleman’s gentleman ate a book of Kipling out loud to him (and with not a little gentleman’s gentleman’s relish).

  Beyond these vignettes of perfection lay a stately pile of some two hundred rooms with attendant basements, attics and outbuildings. The final invoice for the stonework had been paid in sixteen fifty-three, some eighty years past due. The glass for the mullions had been made by chaps who sweated a lot and said “yess’um” and still curtsied to their customers, and the lead on the roof had been rolled from the ballast found in a Spanish wreck from the Armada. It was a home that looked to have existed since the ice retreated and that might confidently be relied upon to provide shelter until Mr God came calling to pay the final instalment of his mortgage on his Heaven.
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  Indoors, however, the scene was not quite so idyllic, and the action was much more frenetic. There was... a little unseemly stretching, and some uncontrolled yawning. Occupants of some of the bedrooms found themselves on the verge of a little scratch or two, and tempted to throw back the blankets themselves. The limits of waiting quietly and patiently were being tested to the extreme. In short, the gentry had not yet been dressed. After several days tensions were gently rising among the four-posters. There were mutterings, and the bells in the servants’ hall rang warm.

  Lord Kensington-Chelsea, a man who had seen military action in every theatre since the unruly unpleasantness of forty-three in Keenyah and thus had more pragmatic reserves than most, plucked up the courage to pick up the telephone instrument, that big, black, Bakelite mystery on the table in his bedroom. It was sheer good fortune and a tribute to the instrument’s designers that he picked up the correct piece of it. He tapped on the little bar-thingy, having learned in the past that this often drew the attentions of some strange woman who could connect him with plausible voices from all sorts of unexpected places in England. Once, he had tapped the little bar and had been witness to the most extraordinary extended conversation between a woman who said that she was a “speaking clock” and a chap who was anxious about the accuracy of his hallway Ormolu. This time though Lord K-C was rewarded with not the correctly polite and yet also strangely over-familiar working lady with whom he apparently had so many interesting people in common, but with an open line.

  A short way down the same corridor, in a room that saw the sunrise some twelve minutes later than did Lord Kensington-Chelsea’s room, Lady Kensington-Chelsea fortunately happened to be looking rather wistfully at her own vocal telegraphy instrument, wondering how to make it let her speak to the staff. Suddenly it burbled and then pinged as though it were trying to ring but was uncertain of itself. She’d seen the servants picking up the hand-piece and passing it to her on a silver salver on several earlier occasions, so she at least knew that part of the trick. She looked into the distance, held her breath and prepared to allow a disembodied voice to enter her head and stomp about a bit in that dreadful way that people did at £0 0s 2d a minute or part thereof and even more for long distance.

  ‘Lady Kensington-Chelsea? M’dear? Is that you?’ said a distant but vaguely familiar voice, distorted through fabric-covered wires that had seen some rat-nibbling in the skirting boards since their installation. Lady K-C distinctly remembered the date of the installation of the telephones since her dear Father used to refer to it as “the unfortunate incident shortly before cousin Gordon was lost at Khartoum”.

  ‘Hair lair? Lady Kensington-Chelsea speaking. Do please tell me who you are. I don’t know who you are. I’m on this telephone all by myself, do you see? Alone, quite alone. No-one has dressed me for some several days.’

  Lady K-C was close to tears but naturally disinclined to show such base emotion in public – after all it might be anybody on the telephone instrument. The device had, in the past, been known to contain that chap who breathed rather heavily and who made inappropriately full and frank references to the romantic practises of farm-yard animals. Mind you, he hadn’t rung since that occasion when Lady K-C had corrected him on a technical matter regarding the mechanics of the coupling of goats during Lent.

  ‘Damn me, Lady Kensington-Chelsea, I think my clothes are broken. I shall have my tailor’s hide for this.’

  ‘Lord Kensington-Chelsea, darling – is that you? Can that really be you?’

  ‘Yah. Fairly certain that it’s me. Why do you ask? Don’t I look myself?’

  ‘Oh thank goodness. I can’t hear what you look like at all dear, this instrument is only showing me your voice. Or something. It’s so ridiculously complicated! What did you say about your clothes dear?’

  ‘Broken. Said they’re all broken. None of them working.’

  ‘Why ever d’you say that dear?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been sat on the edge of my bed since day before yesterday, maybe the day before that, and I’m still not dressed.’

  ‘Oh gosh – you too. And I’ve been waiting for my morning tea since absolutely forever. Tuesday, I think. My maid may be broken too. Whoever would be likely to break your clothes and my maid? You sound miles away Lord Kensington-Chelsea. Where are you?’

  ‘In me bedroom of course m’dear – as I said, I’m not dressed for anything else.’

  ‘Yes, yes – but where is that? Where is your bedroom?’

  ‘Oh. Er – Oldemonie House, North Lincolnshire. Indoors. Upstairs somewhere. Under that dreadful ruddy Vermeer, the Coquettish Young Tart With A Pearl Earring. I’m sitting on a candlewick bedspread. In me jimjams’

  ‘I think I’m upstairs too. We must find each other somehow. Do you have a window?’

  ‘Of opportunity? I would need to consult my social diary, but I that’s probably also not working.’

  ‘A window of glass. An item of domestic fenestration. A purposeful discontinuation in the opaque load-bearing fabric of the wall provided with the express intention of allowing for an influx of natural star-originated illumination for the purposes of safe perambulation and general discourse in concert with the exclusion of meteorological inclemencies.’

  ‘Yes dear, several. Why do you ask?’

  ‘What can you see out of them?’

  ‘Oh. Blue sky, big trees planted by the great-great-great etcetera, a dozen miles of winding gravel driveway. Me ruddy formal garden off to one side. Spot of landscaped pasture – just a few thousand acres. Bit of a lake with the idiot prodigal on it. Nanny on the lawn surrounded by sparrow-feathers.’

  ‘I can see that too – we must be close. Probably within a mile or two at most. Do let’s try to find each other. Do let’s.’

  ‘Lady Kensington-Chelsea, my dear lady – is that wise? As I said, I’m not even dressed. Do you remember what happened in ’fifty-three when my collar studs weren’t fastened properly? Do we really want more children at our ages?’

  Lady K-C paused while she thought about how they might handle the necessary proprieties and safeguards. ‘We must improvise then, Lord Kensington-Chelsea. Do you remember Caesar?’

  ‘My old Spaniel dawg, the dead one that farted a lot, or the Roman chap, the dead one, the one with the other reasonably-sized empire?’

  ‘The Roman chap.’

  ‘Yes dear, remember him once a year on the anniversary of his death. Some sort of do at my club, waiters dressed like ruddy fighting gladioli, lots of peeled grapes and that sort of thing.’

  ‘Excellent. Tell me - can you use the candlewick bedspread to fashion some sort of toga? Sling it over your shoulder perhaps and tie it around your neck? Imagine that you’re in some sort of stage review at Oxford.’

  ‘S’pose so, yah. Nothing to use for a laurel wreath though. Wouldn’t feel right without a laurel wreath. Chap can’t wander around with a naked head. Whatever would the other senators think of me?’

  ‘Which other senators?’

  ‘The Roman ones.’

  ‘Forget the hat dear – you’re indoors and you’re not a senator.’ Lady Kensington-Chelsea was busy eyeing up two Spode gazunders, the knotted fringe on a standard lamp and the blue velvet curtains of her bed. She had in mind either a combined sartorial homage to Brunhilde and the South Sea Islands or some sort of nod to the Scots, or possibly both.

  ‘What about you dear? Do you have candlewick?’ enquired Lord Kensington-Chelsea.

  ‘No darling, but I think I might be able to work out something from what’s at hand. Thank goodness I didn’t have to go last night.’

  ‘Go? Go where?’

  ‘In my room, dear – thank goodness I didn’t have to go in my room.’

  ‘But I thought you said that’s where you are?’

  ‘Yes dear, it is, but I slept right through.’

  Lord Kensington-Chelsea frowned and gave up trying to understand the mem-sahib. Dashed odd things, women. He set out on a different, more pra
ctical and hopeful tack altogether. ‘Look, I’m awfully hungry, Lady Kensington-Chelsea – I feel quite as though I could eat a horse. Alive and with the hooves still on. Grr.’

  ‘I know dear, we’re both terribly hungry because we’ve been waiting for brekkers for so long. We’ll find something to eat soon enough, once we’ve worked out what’s happened to the staff. Argh.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure, Lady Kensington-Chelsea, if you’re sure. Once I’m dressed I shall leave my room and work east – if you work to the west we should meet at about high noon, at least if you can believe the evidence of popular literature. Either that or we’ll have been walking in opposite directions. Take care, darling. I fear that something awful has befallen England, some horrid calamity. We shall probably have our work cut out, savin’ the world all over again. Argh.’

  ‘Darling – how will I know which way is east? Grr.’

  Lord Kensington-Chelsea remembered his Boy Scout training, blushed and then thought about some of the official badges he had earned. ‘Moss dear, or lichens or mushrooms or something – always grow on the same side of things, same side of those wotsits – trees and pheasant and suchlike.’

  ‘Yes dear, but which side?’

  ‘No idea. One or the other I suppose.’

  ‘Oh well, if there’s only two possible choices then I’ll guess twice and that way I’m bound to be right. Take care dear. I shall see you soon.’

  ‘And you take care too, smoochums. There is something afoot. Perhaps Labour won the election? You don’t think it might be that, do you? Surely not? Look I say, dear, just in case why don’t you take the telephone thingy with you? I’ll take mine along and then we can always get in touch if we need to.’

  Lord Kensington-Chelsea made involuntary gargling, gurgling sounds at the awful prospect and ended with a low growl as he replaced the handset on his telephonium. Some answers just could not be contemplated on an empty stomach. The he pulled the cord clean out of the wall, coiled it around the telephone and set it down on the table to take with him when he left his room.