Monday 9 July 2012


Episode 12 - The company day out.

So it was early July and the company day out loomed. We’d been discussing what we were going to do since the last company day out and the consensus was that nobody in the company (except me) wanted another day in BrightTown*.
 

It wasn’t so much that someone nearly died last time (Nepty’s prosthetic stomach had taken beautifully and she was now back on solids) or that Striton was still being shadowed by a holostalker that appeared beside his bed at night. It wasn’t even Dorid’s exclusion tag that stung him every time he went within ten miles of BrightTown.
 

They said it was more to do with ‘Culture’.
 

“So what’s not cultural about the Maritime Experience?” I asked.
 

“Well, I really don’t think they had laser cannon in the Napoleonic wars,” said Jupe, “..and if they did, I still don’t want to watch bits of virtual French sailor flying all over the place, even if it’s me shooting the cannon,”
 

“You said you enjoyed it!”
 

“A bit. But that was only because I’d had some of that ‘Rim’ stuff”
 

“Rum” corrected Striton.
 

Dorid chimed in “Also, July 18 is the only day we can do, and the weather bureau have a rainstorm set for mid-day all along the coast.” He added quietly, “My exclusion tag’s been revoked now anyway, so it's not that.”
 

“Why don’t we just go into LanDanTarn*?” said Loci
 

Silence – especially from me - LanDanTarn was expensive…
 

“We could eat at that new Welsh restaurant, ‘El Boyo’, - that’s cultural - and then take the new HoverBoozer over the city, you can hire HoverPacks and fly like a bird right over Parliament House and along BigRiver”.
 

With hindsight, the alarm bells should have started ringing right away. A bunch of drunk designers and holotechies, two thousand metres over a universe heritage site. I suppose we had had a reasonably successful year, and they deserved a little fun, but….
 

Dorid got in before me, “Sounds great. Striton, book it up!”
 

-----
 

Two weeks later, although the sun was shining, and we’d had an extensive, expensive and entertaining lunch at ‘El Boyo’, it didn’t seem like such a great idea…
 

I had a stomach full of SheepMeat and Shepherd’s Folly LeekBeer. I was standing in a gale beside a HoverBoat (The 'Floaty Boaty' - fashioned to look like a Victorian pub) wearing an AntigravPack, looking down at a 2,000 metre sheer drop.
 

Nepty whizzed past, doing at least twenty K…
 

“Come on Art, you big….” Her words were snatched away in the high wind.
 

I held my breath and pushed off.
 

To be honest, it was quite good fun to start with. A beautiful clear day, LanDanTarn stretched out underneath, the whole area was now a HoverCar exclusion zone, so the air was clear and fresh and you could see for miles.


Your wrist band was hard-wired to zero elevation, on a plane with the HoverBoat, so you couldn’t rise or fall, and you only really travelled in two dimensions. In principle you couldn’t upset the wealthy folk underneath. 
 

By putting your arms forward it changed your centre of gravity and you speeded up. You slowed by putting your arms backwards. So if you just pushed your left hand forwards that side pulled faster, taking you to the right (a bit like an old HoloVid I’d seen of SuperPerson)
 

A surrounding energy field protected your head, so you couldn’t collide with anything too hard, at the same time the field kept anything you lost or dropped within your ‘envelope’, protecting the ancient buildings below. The AntigravPack was set to return you to the 'Floaty Boaty' after 40 minutes.
 

It should have been safe and almost foolproof...
 

After shooting around like manic, shrieking seagulls for a few minutes, we settled into type...


Dorid and I flew sedately side by side, admiring the ancient buildings below, the old and crumbling ‘PickledCourgette’, the rebuilt ‘SharpBit’ and ‘YellowBirdTower’, gigglingly following a couple of seemingly unattached ‘Beefeater’ waitresses on their break.  
 

Nepty and Jupe had clearly enjoyed more of the Shepherd's Folly than the rest of us. They were repeatedly flying towards each other, interlocking opposing arms as they collided, like in an old folk dance, to fly off spinning and laughing.
 

Alto had discovered how unbelievably fast you could go by putting your legs forwards too. No mean feat, it took all his yoga skills and he had to use his belt to tie his legs forwards against the slipstream. He shot off like a human nautilus.
 

Not sure what Striton was doing, but he cruised past slowly fiddling with his wrist control. He was wearing his smartass techy expression.
 

Tanto had found a way to hover, stationary, whilst reading his tablet on advanced HoloCode.
 

Forty fun-filled minutes later the AntigravPacks brought us, in various states, back to the HoverBoat;
 

Nepty and Jupe had suffered one particularly hard collision, causing Jupe’s wristband to fly off. Although the wristband couldn’t leave his envelope – so he didn’t fall – he summersaulted round it uncontrollably for ten minutes and had been violently sick. Luckily the same envelope had kept this in too, protecting the good people of LanDanTarn.
 

Nepty had tried so hard to help Jupe that their envelope fields had combined. The packs brought them back in, pressed firmly together in a sticky cloud of semi-digested Welsh food and drink,
 

Dorid was in love again, and planning his next divorce,
 

Tanto had discovered a way to create an edible (but vegetarian) Hologram.
 

We watched Striton far below, being pulled out of BigRiver.
 

…and we still haven’t heard from Alto.
 

At least no one died - probably.
 

To be continued…
 

http://www.hartley-stone.com

*Late in the 21st Century, regionalists and marketeers decided that many places were losing their ‘unique identity’. New names were created to try and retain the regional accent (like LanDanTarn, Liverpule, Glarsgee), or following sponsorship by local industry (BrightTown, for instance, had attracted funding and jobs from Acme Lighting Co., BurningHam had acquired a distribution centre for BBQ Inc. and Bristol’s and Arsenal's councillors were vying for the attention of underwear designers.)

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