by Andy Remic
“That’s cyber-rubbish,” said Molly, frowning. “At school, my cousin Vincent’s little cousin’s brother’s friend’s dad has been there, and he took his little boy who was seven years old and he went on the Kid Rapids, and if you think about it, Daddy, they wouldn’t even have something called the Kid Rapids if it wasn’t designed for kids would they? And my cousin Vincent’s little cousin’s brother’s friend’s dad said there was a place called the Forest of Iron and it had bandits and everything and it led to the Caves of Hades and there was a secret tunnel that leads under the secret sea to the secret island called The Lost Island that everybody at school’s been talking about, so please, Daddy, please, please, please will you take me on an expedition to Adventure Central and we can meet bandits and find The Lost Island and everything?”
Dex digested this information. “If everybody at school,” he said, carefully, “has been talking about The Lost Island, how can it be lost? It means they found it. It’s no longer lost. It’s been found.” He smiled at her. Molly made a phut sound and climbed down off his knee.
“That’s okay, Dad. If you’re too scared...”
“Oh, scared is it?” he said, and grabbed her round the waist, tickling her ribs. She giggled and started kicking and woke Toffee up, who started crying, just as Katrina arrived carrying two MUGGS of coffee and frowning.
“I leave you three alone for a minute...” she said.
“Daddy said he’s taking us to Adventure Central,” said Molly, smugly.
“Er, no I did not!”
“You promised!”
“Did I?”
“You did. You did!”
“And I want to go as well,” pouted Toffee.
Katrina gave him a withering look. “Well Dex, looks like I’ll be sunbathing and admiring all those hunks on the beach all on my own.” She grinned, and he took the coffee from her and considered pouring it on her head.
“Yeah. Right.”
~ * ~
It was night. Or at least, night by their body-clocks. The cabin’s lights had been dimmed and the Shuttle seats unrolled back into beds. Both Molly and Toffee were covered by Snooze-o blankets and Dex and Katrina were reclining, sharing a bottle of Helix Towers red wine. The Shuttle had been rapidly accelerating for the last ten hours to 0.7LS and they were heading for a JUMP which, Dex knew, would make him want to vomit and feel like he was wearing his internal organs on the outside. Annoyingly, Katrina felt no adverse effects during a JUMP. She used it as another excuse to call Dex a “pussy.”
“So then, lover. This time tomorrow, we’ll be walking hand in hand down the beach.”
“Your reckon?”
“I hope so.” She smiled.
“But what about all those hunks you mentioned?”
“Hey, I have my own hunk right here.” She stroked his chest and kissed him, and their tongues lingered for a few moments until the flashing lights in the headrests of the seats in front got brighter and brighter and a buzzer started to get progressively louder.
No Snogging, said the flashing sign. Snogging leads to sex. This is a No Sex Shuttle... unless you wish to upgrade to First Class+++, only an extra $£15,000 and have your very own Sex Suite! You know it makes sense.
Dex groaned. “Told off by a fucking headrest. The fucking ignominy.”
“That’s a long word for a PUF.”
“Yeah, laugh it up. I’m not as dumb as you look.”
“Cheeky.”
“Better believe it.”
“So then...” Her hand was still rubbing his chest. “Are we going to visit Pleasure Island whilst we’re on TP?”
“You fancy that, do you?”
“Oh yes,” said Kat, a sparkle in her green eyes. “There’s The Glade of Eternal Delight, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a Sex Theme area, The Pleasure Trail...”
“You have been doing your research. However, much as I don’t wish to spoil your fantasy mental party, you seem to forget we have two psychotic dependents who need psychotically depending on.”
“I’ve looked into that, as well. They have a baby-sitting service. For just this purpose.” She winked.
“Interesting.”
“You better believe that” said Kat, leaning forward.
No Stroking of Chest Hairs, said the flashing sign. STROKING OF CHEST HAIRS LEADS TO SNOGGING AND SNOGGING LEADS TO SEX. THIS IS A No Sex SHUTTLE... UNLESS YOU WISH TO UPGRADE TO FIRST CLASS+++, ONLY AN EXTRA $£15,000 AND HAVE YOUR VERY OWN SEX SUITE! YOU KNOW IT MAKES SENSE.
The headrest turned red with annoyance when both Dex and Kat burst out laughing.
~ * ~
“Dad! Dad Dad Dad Dad Dad!”
“What? Jesus, kids, can you stop with the bloody shouting?”
“I can see it, it’s down there, we’re getting close, it’s not the time to have a lie-in, Dad, you can see the domes and the hotel cubescrapers and the ginormous roller-coasters and everything! Come look, Dad, come on, look!”
Dex looked, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Up and down the Shuttle similar scenes were being re-enacted by excited squawking kids pummelling awake their bleary-eyed parents, who’d known it was far too damn much to hope that they’d get a bit of sleep on the first day of their vacation. Forget Christmas, Juja, Pokaloloa or any other festival which leaves presents beneath a tree precipitating 4am awakenings by excited young offspring... this was something else.
Dex, Molly and Toffee stared out of the Shuttle’s porthole as engines screamed in deceleration and the whole world of Theme Planet swung into view, spreading out before them like some massive, mammoth playground - which it surely was. Dex blinked, his eyes funny for a moment, and he realised the Shuttle’s porthole was magnifying the images for their benefit, thus giving an immediate sense of gratification that hey, hell, they’d picked the right damn holiday of a lifetime, baby.
Theme Planet spread out, a tapestry of wonder.
Theme Planet undulated, an image of physical joy.
Green fields rolled, golden beaches gleamed, turquoise oceans lapped, purple mountains sparkled, and amidst the finery and luxury and stunning natural beauty, amidst the perfection of cleanliness and holiness and utter, total perfection, sat the rides...
“There’s Bubble Guts!” shrieked Molly, pointing. All along the Shuttle other kids were shrieking and hollering as they spied favourite rides seen so many times on TV adverts and filmys. Dex squinted. The entrance to the “ride” was as big as five cubescrapers. It could be seen from space.
“What’s Bubby Guts?” said Dex.
“Aww Dad,” said Molly, giving him one of those looks.
Katrina appeared at his shoulder. “You certainly know how to keep up with the times,” she said, and nibbled his ear-lobe.
“Careful. Don’t want to get spanked by that pedantic head-rest,” he said.
“Insane! Insane! Insane!” shrieked Toffee, red in the face.
“You’re damn right, you are,” muttered Dex.
“No dad, it’s the ride called Insane,” chided Molly, rolling her eyes. “Look!”
Dex looked. It was a five kilometre high rollercoaster with enough loops and curves and flick-backs and twists and turns and jelly-donuts to make the hardiest of hard roller-coaster riders puke his quivering burger into his lap. It dominated the skyline, starting a full five kilometres up in the sky, and dropping into the turquoise ocean where (Molly reliably informed him) it went five kilometres under the waves.
Dex stared at his daughter. “Now that is insane,” he said.
“Can we go on it, Dad, please, please, you can only go on it with your parents, please Dad, please, can we can we can we?”
Dex stared once again at the true monster mother bastard bitch of all roller-coasters. “The day I go on that ride,” he said, voice soft, words carefully clipped, “is the day Hell freezes over, God comes down from his cloud to sign limited editions of Bible II - The Remix, and the sun explodes to consume Earth with a comedy Pac-Man munch.” He shouted the last word, barking it
like a dog.
Molly worked this out. “Aww, come on Dad, Mum, will you tell him?”
“Go on, Dex. Don’t be such a stick in the mud.”
“Don’t worry,” said Dex, ruffling Molly’s shoulder-length brown hair. “Your mother will take you on it.”
Kat threw him a glance like a sock filled with razor-blades.
Again, the Shuttle’s engines decelerated with rumbling whines, and as they slowed, and slowed further, and dropped towards the Theme Planet’s plush Port Terminal, more shouts echoed up and down the Shuttle’s interior.
Criss-Cross! There’s Criss-Cross!
Monster Mash! You can see the monsters, look! Look!
Oh, wow, Mum, it’s the Power Matrix!
Look, look, it’s A-mazing, it’s totally amazing!
That’s the Survival Jungle!
Over there, Dad, you can see the Movie-Scape...
The Molecule Machine! I can’t believe it, I’ve always wanted to go on the Molecule Machine!
There’s Adventure Central! Mum! Auntie Ethel! Uncle Bob! You can see the Museum of Baron Nutcase! And there’s our hotel!
I can’t wait to eat at Monster’s Burger Mush! They say the Slopper is a burger as big as your head!
And so on.
Dex found it quite exhausting. He lay back. Closed his eyes. Folded his arms. And said, “Wake me up when we get there.”
~ * ~
It was sooner than he anticipated. The Theme Planet’s Landing and Immigration Service was perfect to the point of anal. Which was a good thing for eager, tired travellers; a bad thing for Dexter’s snooze-time.
Hundreds of people disgorged from the Shuttle into a series of plush, elegant connecting tunnels, and various families in dodgy sports-gear rushed off with squeaking trolleys as if they’d been injected with a damaging narcotic. Dex frowned as he watched two shell-suit wearing grannies stomp off, each carrying twin walking sticks, as if they were in a race for their lives.
“Come on, Dad!”
“Faster!”
“They’ll beat us!”
“There’s no point,” whined Dex. “Listen to me, I’ve done this a million times, right. I am well versed in immigration matters, and we’re good to wait for a few bloody hours in this first queue alone, I can absolutely guarantee it. They have to take fingerprints, blood samples, urine samples, retina scans, faecal-passage scrapes. We have to be assigned genetically modified Personal Drones. Kids, sorry to disappoint, but we’re in this queue, and the next one, and the one after that for the best part of the damn day. I know bureaucracy. It’s a curse, I agree. And Theme Planet, even in all its splendour, can’t cure the absolute blight of the low-paid clipboard-wielding official.”
“Bah, humbug,” said Kat. “Come on girls! Daddy’s a rotten egg! He can catch us up on the beach!”
And with that, Dex watched his family stream off like so many other charging idiots, and Dex frowned and got his stubborn head on, and formed his stubborn jaw, and decided he wasn’t going to play the idiot’s game and wasn’t going to show himself up. Oh, no. He was going to walk at a normal pace and be civilised and dignified about this whole business and to Hell and bloody fire damnation with getting on the rides first...
~ * ~
But Dex was wrong. There were no queues. There were no bureaucrats. There weren’t even any clipboards. Everything was automated, and there were beautiful smiling women in smart uniforms handing out welcome flowers to the ladies, welcome bottles of whiskey to the men, and very specific toys to the children. Molly got a Hellhorror PinkPunk doll, and Toffee got a My Little Alien, complete with “realistic slime-puke regurge action.” They all stepped through scanners, which blipped and blopped, and then they were through the five-hundred-slot immigration counters, out onto Theme Planet itself...
A heady aroma of flowers and fresh pine wafted in through the Port Terminal’s huge reception. There was a bustle of activity, and each family met their Personal Drone when the Personal Drone arrived towing each family’s unmolested luggage. No queues. No waiting. No lost bags. No drama, baby.
Kat raised her eyebrows at Dex, as if to say, there you go, idiot, First Class++++++ service! All with a smile! And no bureaucrats! And no bloody queues! Queues had been a bone of contention with Dex when it came to booking the Theme Planet holiday in the first place. He’d protested long and hard and longer and even harder, saying he didn’t want to spend a King’s Ransom on a holiday where you spent most of your time standing aimlessly in queues. And even though the Monolith Corporation’s Theme Planet literature proclaimed otherwise, Dex still didn’t believe.
“Yeah?” he snapped.
“They promised there’d be no queues.”
“We’ll see,” he snarled. “No holiday is that bloody good. “ But he had to admit it, as they were guided towards their very own personal hover bus, as provided for each and every single family on vacation, he had to grind his damn teeth and actually admit it.
It was starting to look as good as the promise.
As the bus doors opened with a phizz, the Personal Drone - which was a small black ball, about the size of a tennis ball and hovering at shoulder height - spun around and glowed softly through various slots.
“Welcome to the Theme Planet,” said the Personal Drone. “My name is Lex. I am a GradeB PopBot Pleasure Mechanism with advanced SynthAI and a Machine Intelligence Rating (MIR) score of 2750. I am here to be of constant assistance, and I am indeed your personal servant, Theme Planet guide, childcare facility and even food critic. I have an inbuilt PersonalityChip™ which means every single PopBot PD is unique and can provide endless hours of fun and entertainment. I can even quote Shunkspeare.”
“How’s it going, Lex?” said Molly, pushing her face in close.
“It’s going fine, Molly,” said Lex, glowing amber. “I see you have a Hellhorror PinkPunk doll. They’re groovy. If you press the button at the base of its spine, it’ll do the famous PinkPunk PunkDance.”
“Cool!” beamed Molly.
The PopBot rotated to Dex, who growled at it. He didn’t like machines. Well, not unless they took bullets and killed bad guys.
“Hello, Dexter.”
“Dex to you.”
“Hello Dex-to-you. A-ha-ha-ha. Sorry. That is my ComedyCircuit™. It means I have comedy.”
“Would you like me to shove this whiskey up your...”
“Dex!”
“Sorry. Sorry.”
“Ahh, your entry whiskey, Uncle Scrote’s Finest Single Tantalus Malt. A fine dram, if I may be so bold.”
“Do you want some?”
“Alas,” said Lex, his soothing male voice quavering a little, “I fear it would burn out my circuits and render me useless.”
“Really? That’s interesting,” said Dex, raising an eyebrow.
“Dex,” said Katrina, again.
“Okay, my happy little family of Colls, if you’d all like to board the bus, we’ll be on our way to your fabulous Hotel Suite. As you are aware, you are staying in the Kool Kid Zone which allows you endless access to the Lolly Pop Forest, Area 51B, the Water Fun Zone, the Gingerbread Mountains, the Dinozens and Create-An-Alien, amongst many, many, many other attractions! How hot would you like your bath water?”
“Sorry?” said Katrina, who had just climbed aboard the hover bus and was watching in fascination as the luggage seemed to be loading itself into the hold.
“Bath water? Temperature? They are running you a Splish-Splash Jacuzzi bath right now, so that you may sink into bubbly delights with some Greebo Champagne the minute you enter the snuggling confines of The Kool Kid Zone Hilton Hotel.”
“Hot,” said Kat.
Dex chose a seat at random. There was a click and a beer appeared in front on him. A chilled Blue Zone Lager of finest Japachinese brew. He took a swig. It was perfect. And exactly what he wanted.
As the doors closed, Kat threw a look at him. The kids were giggling as they played on the back seat of the hover bus with some Gig
glegum, stretching it between their fingers and toes.
“Well?” she said.
“Damn, but they’re good,” said Dex, shaking his head.
“I told you,” said Kat.
“Okay. Okay. It’s not my fault I’m Mr Bloody Cynical, is it? Look at the place where we live. Look at my damn job. Look at your tortured brother. Just look at the world, mate.”
“It’s a shame everything back on Earth can’t be as precise and efficient as the Theme Planet,” said Katrina, sipping an orange sherry - the exact thing she was in the mood for after a long-haul flight. How did they know that? How the hell could they have even possibly known that?