The all new Triumph eight cylinder 1300; how does it handle on mushrooms?
We take this classic Brough Superior off road and knock over a tree!
Ten uses for a written-off Gentleman Bandit!
Another brainwave was ‘Sporting Team GO!’; this was to be the magazine’s entry into the world of professional motorcycle ice hockey, but manufacturers and dealers were becoming nervous about lending Sean anything when it was most likely coming back in pieces. He and Miles posed as a rival magazine out of desperation, and were arrested while road testing fraudulently obtained superbikes. These were not only superbikes, but priceless one-of-a-kind concept superbikes of theoretically unlimited value; the sheer numbers involved meant a longer stretch than the standard ten days could be expected. With their leading lights awaiting trial, Maximum Acid Beat staffers sprang into action; in Sean and Miles’ absence the ‘Free the Maximum Two!’ campaign generated a firestorm of publicity. The magazine cleaned up selling footage of the bust to news vlogs, and circulation rose so much they even started to attract advertising. The very motorcycle company they’d ripped off took out a double page colour spread for their new range of trail bikes, the strapline reading ‘At Least Sean & Miles Won’t Be Nicking These!’
Miles blogged his daily observances on Sean’s remarkable prison career; these were serialised in the magazine as ‘An Effete Ponce in Bd’s Hardest Jail’ and have since become a paperback, the narrative of which culminates in a terrifying kangaroo court. Essentially Sean was to be killed, raped and eaten; the purpose of the court was merely to decide in which order. The trouble with Sean was he was one of those rare people who genuinely have no fear, and don’t give a fuck who they offend. He could accept intellectually the likelihood of physical harm, but saw this as no barrier to doing exactly what he wanted to do, saying exactly what he wanted to say and going exactly where he wanted to go at all times. None of the above makes for an agreeable cellmate, and Miles stood alone as Sean’s advocate. The defendant had momentarily been clubbed insensible in response to his own demand for trial by combat, and the eyes of the Court are on the Counsel for the Defence. Miles clears his throat.
“All I can say, your Honour, is you only have to deal with him while he’s in here, but I have to work with him as well. I put it to you if anyone is to kill my client it should rightfully be myself and I have no wish to do so yet, although I can see a day coming.” Miles sits and the ersatz judge regards him awhile, before turning to an assistant.
“How much longer?” The assistant rifles through documents.
“Twenty days.”
“Can we get him locked in solitary that long?” The assistant rifles again and nods; the judge rises to pronounce punishment.
“This court decrees the defendant be bound and gagged, his pockets filled with narcotics and his person left outside the Governors office. Court dismissed.” It was a peaceful twenty days, and a holiday atmosphere reigned; although fully one hundred percent of the inmates wanted Sean dead, nobody wanted to be the one to finally snap and kill him. It would have been embarrassing, like accidentally stepping on a yappy dog.
Through steamed up café windows the seaside town is waking, although this can be considered a relative term so deep into winter. Miles resumes work; five thousand words on the Monsters of Acid Beat festival, sponsored by the magazine. The money came from loans against Sean’s share of a money laundering operation, for which the show was a front. This sort of thing and worse is historically how art survives, as fifteen years on the new music had yielded few contenders for stardom. The Froot Shugga Big Band were the choice of the mainstream, and their line up churned; it was generally held until you worked for Froot you weren’t even in the game. The Big Band did three hour shows these days, their leader alone staying the distance with as many as twenty others coming and going as the sound demanded. They were too big for the underground but the inaugural Monsters, held at an out of season holiday camp on the north coast of Somerset, England had been like a trade fair. True to form many of those attending are in bands themselves, often on the weekend’s bill, but it’s a chance to catch up, exchange news and see who’s still playing these days. The Su Quattro Company have a stand in the exhibitors arena, and Miles is able to spin a long overdue catch up with Jenny into copy and several free plugs for her business. Jenny’s a married woman these days and although the initial capital had, admittedly, come from her brides’ trust fund, the loan was quickly repaid and the range grew. The tiny Suzie Q for instance is an electric ukulele with wireless headphones, and those sell in large enough numbers to be banned on most public transport networks, while the Big Bottom is a full size electric upright.
It took the biggest surface lode ever found to stop the increasingly irregular heartbeat of the economy. Silver flowed in such quantities it lost all value, and ended up in the hands of people who had never thought about it before. They were thinking about it now and an explosion of ideas met cheap electronics, cheap meds, cheap energy and cheap everything head on; previously unimagined resources were of such negligible cost a rise in manufacturing, slow at first but accelerating exponentially, increased the value of currency and that was when the economy reset. Britain had been on and off the gold standard for centuries, and it had been so long since the last one the economy was worth ten times all the gold on Earth or anywhere. The solution was quickly realised, and at the stroke of a pen gold appreciated overnight; silver rose initially in the hopeful way it does every time gold gets sexy, but this just meant the artificial variety got cheaper as production stepped up to meet demand. Artificial falling met real rising and the market found a balance, as it generally will if the government keeps out of it for long enough. When an economy hits a bottleneck, pressure builds up and finds a way out; nine out of ten times this will happen, but the tenth is the end of civilization.
An economic boom means little if some selfish bastard keeps it all to himself, but every now and then the one percent gets nervous and the twenty third century is one of those times. Rising populations can become seething masses ready to rumble; in the nineteenth century Britain began a course of liberal welfare reform and emerged as undisputed nation state of the industrial age, while France was still hosing down the pavement outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. If revolution promises much but rarely delivers for the man in the street it does change positions of power, often for ever. In light of problems Bd was having with nationalists, it was argued that diverting a tiny fraction of the wealth towards the people was preferable than potentially losing the lot to some other fellow and the Economic Reform Bill[§§§§] of Britain and her Colonies was passed into law. Where Britain led others followed, unless they wanted to haemorrhage talent, and the proles found their standard of living rising. It became possible to own your own home on a nine to five salary; a new hover pod every few years and inter-system holidays became the norm. Working hours fell, and stay at home parents raised healthy well fed children while their partners were home in time for a bedtime story. Rock & roll had been back for thirty years but it was soon to have the one thing it lacked; an audience was growing up, and it was going to be massive.
17.7500° N, 142.5000° E
26th March, 2236 A.D.
The latest British Vlog Council blockbuster Deep Planet is to be filmed in the Mariana Trench using state-of-the-art high pressure everything. BVC ocean documentaries revealed progressively weirder and more repulsive life forms the further down they went, and if there was one thing the British public loved it was a watery abomination. RRS Deep Planet Challenger is but the latest name of a ship so vast it bankrupted three cruise companies before the Navy got their hands on it. She has two engines and multiple thrusters from time spent as an exploratory oil rig in rough seas and her centre has been gutted and reconstructed as one giant room, with a floor which rolls back to reveal the ocean below. Thousands of sixty foot steel pipes will be slotted together to lower a massive claw disguised as a scientific platform down the trench; thi
s arrangement together with a flooded submarine will weigh twenty five thousand tons, and a flooded submarine is what the Royal Navy are looking for. The submarine in question does not belong to the Royal Navy, so Deep Planet has been annexed by the authorities as a cover story. The claw is the size of a football field, and will take thirty six hours to lower; the top side bristles with cameras of all spectrums, hydrophones and environmentally investigative hardware which will add to a wealth of data harvested by the Deep Planet programme.
Somewhere in the world a US operative with a longer memory than most is concerned but not overly worried; if the Brits want to go poking around down there good luck to them, there’s no way anything’s coming up from those depths and just as well. There’s something else down there in the darkness, something which would serve humankind well by staying lost. The operative is an algorithm designed to keep track of nuclear submarines, and anything which may come snooping around them; there’s not been a lot on recently but the algorithm remains, porting from mainframe to mainframe over the centuries. It started life as a series of holes on a punched card, then migrated to magnetic tape and spent some time in binary digital storage before donning its current coat of qubits. The operative knows there’s something on board the USS Kobzar beyond top secret; a theoretical but realisable formula for a disease which could wipe out mankind within months. It came about as a thought experiment, inspired by the discovery of previously unimagined microbes released into Earths’ ecosystem as the ice thinned out. The experiment was this; within the boundaries of known science and extrapolating from current data, what’s the worst that could happen?
Miles Ravenscroft is part of the BVC sound crew; the original guy got sick, and a friend of a friend put the work his way at the last moment. Radio Sunlight were going to be pissed when they found his recorded message; it was difficult to sound apologetic when you were grinning from ear to ear but come on, this is the bloody BVC for Christ’s sake! It wasn’t as if Miles had no loyalty. On the contrary, he was brimming with loyalty; it was just highly localised in this instance, and any one of his colleagues would have done the same. Only once aboard the Challenger is he asked to sign the Official Secrets Act along with all civilian participants, and a growing awareness of this trip being more than it should be settles upon them. Commander Gregory Pearson is not only known as a war hero and adventurer, but holds a degree in Oceanography and will narrate the finished presentation. He is joined by students Dan Delacroix and Matthew Lancaster; although neither has yet left the Mary Rose Space & Marine Comprehensive, both have clocked up an impressive amount of hours in bathyspheres and the plan is to follow the claw. These models are four man subs with robotic arms, built to withstand the crushing pressure of the depths while receiving oxygen and power via cables reaching back to the ship. The BVC has two in company livery, and the boys are inspecting them.
“Bagsie the Mk III!” calls Delacroix.
“You’re welcome to it!” retorts Lancaster, patting the hull of the older conveyance with affection “There’s a reason the Navy still buys Mk II’s.”
“Is the reason masochism?”
“Absolutely! It’s not real diving if some water doesn’t get in.”
The seven mile depth of the Mariana Trench will be attempted in a staggered relay race. The Navy contingent descends first, and then the BVC crew follow on to an agreed staging post; if all remains well they repeat the process. As they pass the three mile mark the operative awakens to remind its creators just what’s down there, and alert them to its possible disturbance. It assembles the packet and sends, but the packet doesn’t go. Never mind; send again. The operative can keep this up all day if it has to; all week or all year, makes no difference to the operative, who will with unending patience send and resend the packet until its departure has been confirmed.
In the half light of the Living and Dying room of the British Museum, the night watchman notices a pale blinking lamp on a section of antique U.S. military mainframe. He places a hand upon the exhibit; it is warm to the touch and humming softly. Concerned, he looks about the machine and discovers it is still attached to a tour guide’s interface from a demonstration earlier in the day. He pulls the plug and returns the device to its pigeonhole in the office; there was always something left switched on after a big school visit. The operative is not aware of a loss of power, the operative is aware only of instructions; the ageing mainframe may never again connect to the outside world, but if and when it does, the operative will send the message.
At the bottom of the Trench one bathysphere has whirred off with its great big BVC cameras rolling, and another is hidden below the platform, checking as the claw carefully grips something large and half buried. There is a shock as huge metal teeth hit rock; the bathysphere chugs concernedly up and down the affected side.
“Can we get any closer?” hazards Lancaster to Delacroix.
“Not without pulling on your bathing suit; you may need more than a snorkel though.” Pearson shakes his head.
“We’ve no choice and no time; up it goes.”
“Is that a warhead I can see in one of the tubes?” This from Lancaster; Delacroix peers through the gloom.
“It’s probably just a torpedo.” Half way to the surface the damaged claw fractures; pressure sensitive transducers and electric motors activate to regain grip, but the warhead slips from its tube, descends and accelerates. The seconds tick by, then the minutes; the dreaded explosion does not come, but as the sub restarts its ascent the larger forward section judders and groans. Completely unsupported by the claw, two thirds of the Kobzar will depend on the structural integrity of the hull to make the journey.
On their return all civilians are confined to quarters with no explanation, and a guard is posted outside each cabin. That night there is a raging storm, and Miles watches through a sliver of vision available to him at a porthole which has not quite been painted out; if he stands on the toilet, he gains a frustratingly limited view of thrilling clandestine activity. All of a sudden there is an almighty lurch skyward, and Miles cracks his head on the ceiling. Later that day he hears a crane broke, and the Navy contingent are working with their engineers to repair the damage; whatever they winch from the abyss is carefully stowed away by morning.
The BVC Six O’clock News announces the raising of an American sub, and shows a burial at sea performed for bodies found within the stern; the bow would remain trapped forever, along with anything it may contain. After this public show to assuage US concerns, a meeting is held within Whitehall; audio of the meeting is all that remains, recorded by an American mole in the British secret service, and sound engineers have long found gainful employment in analysing the last fifteen seconds. In answer to the question ‘is the front section of the USS Kobzar in British hands?’ there is a pause, then the dull thud of something like a muffled but heavy iron bell, of the very sort which used to adorn the prow of U.S. nuclear submarines, being placed upon a table.
The First Whoppers on Earth
Ealing, London. 2239 A.D.
Human beings have always had a good relationship with space, but time management really means something in the twenty third century. From the dawn of the universe, the fourth dimension was nothing more than a slow turning of seasons and a pulse of daylight hours as far as the human race knew or cared. Navigation at sea brought the need for accurate time measurement and it was well it did, when railways exploded from the Black Country of England to enmesh the world. Factories multiplied along their routes, towns sprang up to serve them and whole populations became slaves to the rhythm. Being new to the concept, mankind adopted spatial representations such as the clock and the calendar, which only served to muddy the issue; we were like a people blind from birth who fancied we could assign sound or taste to what others called colour. Space is familiar; you can let an escalator carry you, or you can walk up it. You always have a choice, and even when perfectly still you can look around and consider your options; time is much the same once you get y
our head around it. It’s not like you can zip back and forth across the centuries, but there’s wiggle room, sometimes.
Rebel Sunbury learned to expect the same three point reaction when she told British people who she worked for these days. First there was the suppressed smirk followed by a fleeting glance downwards and the inevitable puzzled look when they found her eyes again. For the love of God! Whoppers family restaurant, named for the size of its servings, was a well established chain around the system of Barnards’ Star, but the only Whoppers the British had heard of was that one topless bar out near Alpha Centauri! Reb was athletically built, and had never felt self conscious about it until recently; the whole debacle was redefining the concept of getting on her tits, and now she’s leading the team charged with establishing the first Whoppers on Earth! The company could have at least held back until their legal department had done what they were paid to do and buried that seedy little Centaurian clip joint but no; galactic domination spared no blushes. To make it just about as bad as it possibly could be the bastard thing was in England, the puerile, facile home of the double entendre; even their language borrows from the despised French if they think it’ll make something sound more risqué.
Rebel Sunbury was born in Missouri the year it seceded from the United States. It had been a hard fight, because the last thing the Confederacy wanted was Missouri; the entire state was descending into anarchy and it made the border untidy, but after a twelve hour filibuster by the junior Senator in which she brought up the Mason-Dixon Line a record one thousand and twenty three times, they were in. There had been five other children of the same name in Rebels’ class at the Service & Hospitality Comp; S&H was a wide discipline encompassing many career choices, but it was strutting around in a suit with a clipboard looking important which most appealed to Reb. In her downtime she rode out with her motorcycle buddies so the job was like acting, except she wrote her own scripts. Dialogue was almost her entire war chest; she studied the rhythms of superiors and underlings and played out the next days interactions at night alone, exploring every avenue the conversation could take and delivering a flawless performance on the day.
The Only War Page 12