“Hey groovlings,” Dad said. He was fond of ancient idiomatic terms. I found it cringeable.
He was sat in the front offside seat of our Nisbang Misogynist, which is one of those excessively large vehicles beloved of trades, especially the hyper-masculine ones like Kitchen Cinching. Dad was one of those, you could tell by the big yellow toolbelt he always wore. I’m a librarian-spandicle. Don’t ask, just don’t visit a library in spandex. He says its chick-work, which is okay because I haven’t decided on my gender yet. Maybe I won’t, just to confuse him. He laughs like it’s the funniest joke, which irritates me more than it should. He’s about as funny as a full nappy.
Anyway, he was looking out of the front window (he calls it a “windscreen” for glimp’s sakes), jutting that ridiculous jaw of his at the unkempt countryside and saying things like, “you don’t see this kinda soup in cities”, and “wow, look at that. We used to call those trees.” He’d dragged the whole family along for this adventure. “Communing with nature” he calls it. We’d driven out of the city, which is also okay, because the AI’s reach is global these days and all we had to do is say, “Car. Take us home,” if we ever got lost. At least that’s the theory. The trouble with theories is they ain’t worth puppy droppings if the tech says “hello, goodbye”, which is what the AI decided to do, just as we drove past the first 100 miles into the dead zone.
“The AI has gone offline,” said dad. I could have told him this, my bone buds stopped pumping Core-Dreg rhythms into my body about thirty seconds earlier. Reality intruded very rapidly, I can tell you.
The car rolled to a halt, and mum started wailing. “We’re all going to die.” Her pacifiers were offline too. I wasn’t sure if her emotes were better than her glassy-eyed stare into the distance or not. On balance, everything was shit, and got worse when the dog started barking and nan wet herself.
“What is the dog doing?” Dad asked.
“Barking,” I replied. “It’s what they do when the AI isn’t translating for them.”
“Can’t he do it quietly?”
“He’s alarmed. Can’t you fix it?” I sounded a bit whiney, but I’m a kid, so I felt a bit entitled to it. “I was just getting to the good bit.”
“Wait a minute. A message is downloading. Man, this is taking a long time.”
I leaned over his seat. On the screen was a slowly scrolling pixelated message. I took reading in Brain-Drip, so I could make out the words.
“Citizens. The AI has suffered a catastrophic failure as the result of terrorist attacks on the twelve global data centres. We are working to rebuild the core and will inform you of progress. Good luck.”
That was it. We were being dumped. So that’s how we found ourselves in a truck, in the radioactive dead zone, with only eight sandwiches, a bottle of water and a fully dysfunctional family. Yeah, and it was dad’s fault.
“Can’t you put it on manual?” I asked.
Dad pressed a button. A round thing slid out of the console and dad put his hands on it.
“How difficult can this be?” he said.
“Not authorised.” Said the screen. “Only licenced drivers are allowed to engage manual mode. You are not licenced and therefore not authorised.”
Dad slammed his hand on the round thing. “Who has a licence these days? You get in the car and tell it where to go. This is crooby.”
“I’m licenced,” said Nan, who seemed to be escaping the warm arms of her unfocus-cloud.
“What do you mean,” Dad sneered, “you’re licenced?”
“I have a driving licence,” she replied firmly. I’d never seen nan like this, and I can tell you it was scary. Her wrinkled old face was a study in determination. “My Bill insisted I get a driving licence, so I could drive him to hospital if he had a stroke, or something.”
“And did you drive grandad?”
“Yes,” she replied. “Only I crashed. Which was ironic, because so did he. He was like a gagging fish on the bank. I thought it was funny at the time but managed to hail a cab to get him to Mount Simeon Hospital.”
“Did they save him?” I’d never heard this story before.
“Sadly no.” She looked momentarily defeated. “It turns out Mount Simeon is only for ophthalmology. I needed Mount David. Anyway, I haven’t driven since. Your grandad would have wanted it that way.”
“Can you get us out of here?” Dad sounded hopeful.
“I could if I could get to the front.”
“That’ll mean going outside.” He glanced at the rad-counter on the console. It was showing 80 rads, which is the equivalent of getting 20,000 chest x-rays all at once.
“We’re all going to die.” Mum wailed again.
“Shut up, mum.” I wasn’t in the mood for her shit.
“Don’t talk to your mother that way,” Dad looked genuinely angry, in a terrified sort of way. That’s the trouble with excessive male hormones. You don’t know which way the wind is blowing until you smell it.
“You could try to protect yourself,” I handed him the baco-foil from my sandwich pack.
“Good idea,” he responded and wrapped it around his crotch.
“I think the head would be a better place,” I said. “They can always grow a new body.”
“I’m rather fond of this one,” Dad replied. “Especially, well, you know…”
“Okay, I guess it won’t make much difference,” I said as I unbuckled nan’s seat belt.
“On the count of three,” I said, thumbing the door catch on nan’s side. “One, two, THREE!”
I pushed the door open and bundled nan outside. She squealed and landed on the black sand like a potato salad sliding off a table at Denny’s. Dad dashed around the car, scooped up nan and deposited her in front of the round thing. She told me later it is a steering wheel. I have no idea what that means. Dad dashed back around the car and pulled at the door opposite me, just as the AI came back online, locked all the doors, and warned, “Radiation Hazard. Emergency procedures initiated. A long coil of synthe-rope snaked out, snared dad and bundled him on to the roof rack and the truck roared off back along the road we’d come along earlier.
Anyway, it’s visiting day and I’m off to visit dad in hospital. He’s only a penis, the rest having been irradiated into charcoal on the return journey, but we have high hopes they’ll be able to regrow the rest, and no-one will notice the difference.
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