NGLND XPX

by Ian Hutson

  There’s an outside chance that the lower-ranks quality metal plate in my skull could bang against a reinforcing strut or something and cause an electric sparkle near the fuel hoses, so I have to wear one of those bobbly rubberised lady’s bathing caps at all times. That is, the cap is bobbly and rubberised, I’m sure that the sort of ladies who wear these things are not. As far as I know, that is. I only got to oil the visualisation-engines for a day and that was before they were fully commissioned, so I still don’t know much about ladies except for what I used to hear the lads in my old unit saying about them. None of the ladies in the photographs in their lockers were wearing bobbly bathing caps. Dougal’s got a wil-ly! Dougal’s got a wil-ly!

  Sometimes at the end of my shift my arm won’t stop going up and down and, once, I almost got sucked into the engine air intakes by mistake when they encountered a rogue asteroid and the pilot had to floor it. That would have been serious because they said I might have broken some of the turbocharger impellor blades and they’re expensive.

  The fuel leaks are getting worse and about an hour after the start of my shift today I got bored and decided to see if I could break the surface tension on a big diesel globule that was floating around and stick my head inside.

  Seems that I could.

  I had to let go of my valve handle and float around for a bit like an ant with its head jammed inside a drop of liquid. Without any gravity in the engine room it was a lot harder to get my head out of the big globule of diesel than it was to get it in, and for a moment there my gas-mask snorkel wasn’t just sucking air. Still, those oily rainbows you can see on the outside look even more groovy from the inside, especially when you vomit through a gas-mask intake and then pass out.

  All in all the first couple of weeks of my National Service has gone quite well, all things considered. Granted, it’s taking them some time to find me a nice desk job but in the meantime I’ve made Corporal, almost become a war hero and been reduced in rank to an engine spare-part. Mind you, even Uncle Geronimo would have to admit, as a Private First Class Replacement Valve-Actuator (Miscellaneous) Grade III, the only way from here is up! The future has to be better than this.

  Stardate 25th June 2027, no idea of the time. Does time still exist?

  These emergency personal survival life-spheres are really quite comfortable, considering.

  Now the other temporary valve-replacement chaps and I know what really happens to a sixty-thousand horse-power diesel spaceship engine if you wedge all of the valves shut at the same time. It’s quite pretty, but it also sounded very expensive.

  Most of the senior crew seem to be forming their pods into ranks and following the captain somewhere but all of the engine-bay lads are using the manoeuvring thrusters to play snooker with each other. It’s a bit chaotic because all of the survival pods are white spheres so we all look like cue-balls and because you can play up and down as well as side to side.

  I wonder how much propellant there is in these things?

  This is fun! Boing. Boing boing boing. Dougal’s got a wil-ly! Dougal’s got a wil-ly!

  Stardate 14th July 2027, apparently just three days shy of death from dehydration.

  I woke up this morning when they started tipping us out of the survival pods. The pods are quite expensive so the Army came back to salvage them even though we’d all run out of propellant and some of the other chaps were suffering a bit from the lack of fresh oxygen. I’d already been holding my breath really hard though, just in case my air ran out. I’m not daft.

  We’ve all been herded into a big room in the medical unit and the M.O. has looked us over again and said something about how Recycling could probably use parts from every two or three of us to make one new. I don’t know what he’s talking about, I don’t have any spare parts with me; they all went down with the old ship when the engines inexplicably failed near that big blue star thingy.

  For dinner they gave us a big pill each. They caught us one by one and the Sergeant blew it down our throats through a tube like old-fashioned vets used to use on farm animals. I don’t remember much after they turned the fire hoses and the Tasers on us, everything went dark. I barely had time to growl and throw my torso at the bars (I don’t know where my legs have gone, I’m not even sure that I had them with me in the escape pod).

  What next, I wonder? Duh-huh. Please, Serge, give me a desk job? Surely now I’ll get a desk job? I’m a pensioner you know, serving King and planet. Dougal’s got a wil-ly! Dougal’s got a wil-ly!

  Stardate 21st August 2027, Recycling Facility on New Mars.

  I say - I seem to be floating inside a tube again, only this time it’s not a launch tube but a clear medical treatment tube of some design and it’s filled with some variety of oxygen-rich colourless liquid, possibly perfluorodecalin C10F18 or some further derivative. Liquid breathing is my best guess – what fun and larks eh? Quite fascinating!

  An arrangement also seems to have been made for intravenous delivery of a milky suspension, I’m guessing it’s probably octadecafluorodecahydronaphthalene or heneicosafluorotripropylamine. Mind you, I don’t even want to think about the tube I can feel between my buttocks. That’s all very unsavoury and not a little injurious to one’s inner dignity – that certain dividing line betwixt socially acceptable intrusion on medical grounds and indecorous liberty was crossed the moment I regained consciousness, a situation that might only be ameliorated by swift and emotionally detached professional nursing intervention. One rather suspects however that there are no angels in white uniforms nearby.

  Setting aside my nagging intellectual displeasure at bobbing up and down like some tethered decoration in a curiously impractically-shaped fish-tank with no fish, my next thoughts naturally ran to my secondary environment, and I searched with not some little trepidation for hope for a less liquid-dependent future. The refraction caused by the brutal curvature and crude industrial Plexiglass of my tubular environment made detailed investigation problematic but I could hazard a premise that I was the focus of a medical laboratory that seemed marked with a purposeful and functional military motif. There was some sort of amusing optical illusion – I assume caused by the properties of the tube – in which I appeared to be one tube among a formation of thousands stretching to the horizon.

  I can’t help but wonder though why there is a nagging need manifesting at the threshold of my consciousness to comment upon the possession of a phallus by an oddly shaped semi-sentient cartoon dog with close associations to a magical roundabout and a novelty clock.

  Still, back to matters in hand. The technology in use – beyond those of my own obvious indignities – appeared to indicate a familiarity with and abundant use of complex electromagnetics. There were some suggestions of employed quantum chromodynamics. Certainly the infrastructure hinted that metamaterial composites and advanced nano-polymers were in use. The aesthetics tended towards the humanoid universal without the inclusion of tribal or territorial markers evident in the more primitive cultures – certainly there were no tacky little nationalistic flags about or stencilled labels bluntly proclaiming “Property of X, Y or Zed” or, worse, “God bless country A, B or C”. I surmised that I was at least, if not exactly in a functional utopia, in some corner of a civilisation based upon humanistic values, possibly even a corner embracing an altruistic post-commercialism and, by extrapolation from the deliberate lack of cultural metaphor evident in the room, a certain healthily separated establishment state providing a passive and supportive intellectual framework fostering artistic and political freedom for citizens within a system of protected personal interstices.

  Two chaps in white lab-coats suddenly entered my view. They were mid-conversation.

  ‘Yah! Ruddy cheek of him. LBW in broad daylight and then argues the toss with the umpire!’

  ‘Peasant! Some sort of comprehensive school wallah eh?’

  ‘Abso-ruddy-lutely. I blame the Labour Government of course.’

  A large relaxation fart-bubble entered my anus-t
ube and was sucked away for analysis by the machinery; I knew immediately where I was.

  I was in Heaven. Probably somewhere on the south coast, near Brighton. England, obviously.

  One of the chaps came up and tapped on my tube with his pencil. ‘Hair-lair! Awake are we? Splendid. Oogie boogie boogie? Ooda biggwittle bwave soldier den eh?’ He then mimed doing something that an adolescent circus-chimp would have considered too indecorous to actually be seen doing in public.

  [Yes, I rather thought that you might be able to picture that in some detail.]

  The two of them then began an appraisal of me the like of which I have not suffered since my last doctor’s appointment, and before that at the hands of the Physical Education master at school after-hours. My lips were moving desperately, but all I appeared to be able to try to say was ‘Dougal’s got a wil-ly! Dougal’s got a wil-ly!’ and I doubt that this contributed positively towards the achievement of my agenda, which was of course to initiate dialogue in re my confined circumstances and the immediate physical improvement thereof. Dash it all but, without the positive intervention of some sort of pro-active advocate on my behalf, I feared that progress may be slow viz exchanging sides of the Plexiglass tube or at minimum having my electrolyte levels balanced and the tube taken out of my arse. They continued discussing me as though I weren’t even sentient.

  ‘The grafts appear to be taking well, stitches healing, that sort of thing.’

  ‘It’s a bit short isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s all we could do old boy. Took parts from the last ten used squaddies in that batch of spare parts just to make this one and there are bits from three different brains in there, including I believe quite a few chunks of black Labrador dog – the RAF were having a spot of bother in the same sector. The “gentlemen’s parts” are straight off a bomb-disposal unit orang-utan, as you can plainly see.’

  ‘Oh gosh yes – looks just like a penis, only smaller. Are those the um...’

  ‘They are – although admittedly, the liquid in these recovery tubes is quite cold.’

  ‘I’ve seen squirrels with bigger.’

  ‘Have you really, Simon? Some sort of hobby eh, lookin’ at the nuts on squirrels?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, no. You get my point though. Poor chap.’

  ‘The M.O. said that most of the bits were going off by the time he got to this one and he was in two minds whether to finish it or not. Reckoned it would either be a usefully obedient moron or some sort of bumbling genius that given half a chance would dominate the universe. I must say, one of its legs looks as though it came off a stuffed Welsh Collie.’

  His colleague consulted the detailed notes.

  ‘It did. Apparently it was carrying it when it went into battle. Where the hell the squaddies find these things I’ll never know. Well we’ll decant it, pea-balls and all, load it with antibiotics and stack it in with the others ready for delivery to its new unit tomorrow. They can decide whether it’s Cro-Magnon or post-Hawking once they’ve put a Laser in its hand and a Bowie knife between its teeth again. The army never makes mistakes. It makes ugly buggers, yes, but mistakes? Never.’

  Bobbing up and down in my tube of liquid I hoped that the remark relating to “New unit” was a trick of the change of transmission medium from air through Plexiglass to perfluorodecalin, and that I had simply not heard the gentleman correctly. I’d been re-born like a phoenix from the ashes, and the army simply had to give me a shore posting now! Surely! I made a mental note to pee up a lamp-post, lick the C.O.’s hand and have a word with him about a transfer to Intelligence - or even to Recruitment - as soon as I arrived. I was safe enough – the armed forces never waste a resource of course. Surely after all of this surgery I deserved a break?

  The two lab assistants muttered peculiarly at the mirage of a tube next to me, then one of them pulled a chain and I could swear that I heard on old-fashioned outhouse flushing mechanism – the sort with the cistern up high and a long, battered lead pipe leading down to the hot-seat.

  I squirmed around in my bio-tube, anxious to catch their eye so that I could communicate. ‘I say - if it’s all the same with you chaps, I’d rather like to be given a spot of leave and then posted to somewhere rural with an extensive library of Greek and technical works. There must be some arrangement in the army for a chap to take a spot of leave, surely? This is, after all, National Service and not National Servitude. Eh? What? I have an idea for harvesting limitless free energy from the friction between adjacent multiverse branes and a political wheeze of a system that would inevitably lead to the peaceful co-existence of all creatures in the universe, both known and as yet unknown.’

  That did it – I finally caught their attention again although, obviously, since I was breathing liquid – even an ultra-low-viscosity liquid such as perfluorodecalin - they couldn’t hear me directly. Among my tangle of pipes and sensor-wires I did my best to mime a short message indicating my urgent need for clinical and psychological reassessment, and immediate access to the Speaker of the House of Commons in order to request a timeslot for my initial address.

  This time both of the lab-coated chaps made gorilla impersonations for my benefit, presented their arses like females offering mating, laughed and left. I was left with a rather nagging doubt that the pertinent detail of my request had been successfully communicated.

  They switched the lights out as they went. In the rather eerie glow of the tell-tales on the lab oscilloscope and the night-shift’s Morphy-Richards tea kettle I centred my karma and reassured myself that the army never made mistakes or wasted valuable resources. My next assignment would surely be to some cerebral establishment such as Porton Down or Bletchley Park where my brain would be best utilised. I think that my original physiognomy and psychological profile alone made it perfectly clear that I did not do well in hot or arid climes, or under immediate personal threat. The chaps were just joshing. At the very least I’d get promotion to the rank of Sniffer Dog.

  Stardate? How the hell would I know, I’ve been in and out of Medical and Recycling so often that I can tell you the number of holes in the ceiling tiles. Somewhere over the equatorial regions of the enemy planet Freezarsia. Or Rottenboggia, or Worthlessshiteholeium, or somewhere strategic. I’m three foot tall and I am all that’s left of my entire initial unit, literally. The M.O. has intimated that there was barely enough of me to stitch together after the last deployment and that I was probably close to the end of my useful army career.

  I woke up chained down in a launch chute this morning, just in time to see the last of the mustard-coloured knock-out gas being sucked out. There was a Laser pistol glued to my hand and a hunting-knife jammed between my gums. I think I’ve bent the blade by biting down on it and I’m considering using the Laser pistol to try to shoot the clockwork crystal-meth dispenser that’s clicking away again in my arse. I say “my” arse but it’s plainly Caribbean in ethnic origin and probably decorated the rear end of my late comrade in arms, Danny John-Jules, not so long since. I can’t tell you how confused I am about my genitalia since the army recycling unit began pooling male and female organs reclaimed from battlefield casualties. There can only be seconds left before the timer trips and the plunger delivers its next load of craziness into my bloodstream. I hope it’s not too late. It misfired on the last deployment and I was dropped into enemy territory initially quite sane and without chemical assistance of any kind other than my Wurther’s Originals field-issue, and I inadvertently swallowed that whole on landing.

  My new unit and deployment is similar to my old unit and deployment. The more battle-experienced guys and I have already begun our battle cry – we all bang our foreheads on the inside of our launch tubes to the drumbeat of “We will rock you” by Her Majesty, The Queens. We will, we will, thump thump bang, thump thump bang, kill you. We will, we will, thump thump bang, thump thump bang, kill you... After a bit of synchronisation we can drown out the base beat from the ship’s speakers, we’re that good at it now. My hands are a
bit tired though from clenching and unclenching without a thorax in them to crush. Those alien hundred-legged sand-bugs are going down.

  Again.

  Dear Universe, dear, sweet, all-loving Universe – please don’t let them rebuild me after this one.

  Let me die. Just let me die. Honestly, I promise not to be a drain on national resources wherever I go, be it heaven or hell or even, preferably, just nothingness. Just let me die, please... Mum? Can you hear me Mother?

  Tigger? Is that you, Tigger? Keep barking boy, and I’ll walk towards the sound. When your number’s up around here after two or three dozen rebuilds it’s really up isn’t it?

  Dear Diary, everything went dark just a moment ago...

  * * * * *

  Blood-curdling screams and the Whitworth screw-thread

  [back to table of contents]

  A quite terrifying crowd was circling outside the patent office. It was a mob of very upper crust protestinatrix (protestinatrix is the plural of itself, like “sheeps” and “thousand island dressings”).

  Each of those in the crowd carried sartorial bustles and fully-developed, veiled millinery the size of Dorset or Londonshire. Every last one of them was gently waving a placard made from lavender-scented hand-laid paper stuck to beeswax-polished timber batons. They were ramrod-straight lady insurgents, proudly holding up what might have been small font-samplers on sticks to dry, circling, waiting like powdered vultures for the old world order Establishment to die.