The Machine That Goes Ping
Every time I make a a post at the moment, my laptop goes Ping, loudly.
Fortunately, I’m wearing headphones, and so npbpdy else on the bus notices
apart from those who are startled by my leaping in the air at the noise
which is, at a rough estimate, fifty billion times louder than iTunes.
The height of the ceiling on the top of this bus is about 5’10. This is
annoying, as I am 6” tall, and therefore have to decend down the bus
at an annoying “respectful” student angle. This is more annoying when they
put a bar in the way, and I am forced to adopt a more “writhing in pain”
student angle.
It’s raining.
Hertfordshire is pretty in the rain. The dark clouds squat with neither
grace nor elegance over the beige fields of unharvested grain, and you
can almost ignore the sight of the melting houses. For this is destructive
rain, and the bus has been specially reinforced to cater for the terrors
that were let lose upon the world by those evil GM crops. Where once
the village of Shefford stood, proudly revelling in three hundred years
of sitting somewhere between Bedford and Hitchin, now there is nothing
beyond the skeletal remains of a few houses, melted as if they were
made of gingerbread and left out in the rain, back in the days when
the rain wouldn’t kill you.
The trains, of course, will never run again. As fast as they lay new tracks,
they are eaten though by the never ending rain, and in a part of the country
where the rain can quite happily drift down for weeks at a time, they last
hardly any time at all.
The gingerbread reference would have seemed random three years ago,
but since the researchers discovered that that was exactly what was
happening – the rain was turning everything into hard biscuit before
disolving it in the next breath – it doesn’t seem quite so friendly.
We didn’t know why, of course, nor how. Nukes, asteroids or global
warming we had all planned for, but a confectionary based apocolypse
was something so far out of our experience it was ludicrous.
Would it have stayed that way. We now know enough. We know that this
isn’t just a “normal” freak event, it’s being caused, deliberately,
by someone somewhere. They – and I mean the DXO – say the walls of
reality are bending, something is trying to get though. To take over.
That is why I, with my useless masters in folklore and fairytales – have been drafted. They think it’s something that used to be
fictional. From what I’ve seen, I hope it remains like that.
The worst, most scary and terrible thing is what happens to the
people touched by the rain.
I’m nearly home now, I’ll have to stop. I’ll explain more
when I can.
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