Angry Moon

Chapter 10a

     Her car, a bright pink Toyota Regal, came to meet her by the door. The door opened as she approached and Samantha settled herself into the drivers seat. “Home, Parker,” she said in her best aristocratic voice.

     “Yes M’lady,” said the plummey British voice from the dashboard and the car moved smoothly forward. Samantha would much rather have been in the back, to assist the fantasy that she was being driven by a human chauffeur, but the law still required that drivers sat in the drivers seat, where they could reach the controls in case of emergency.

     As they left the university grounds and entered the traffic of the main road, she thought fondly back to the time, over twenty years before, when an uncle had given her brother the boxed set of an ancient television adventure series played by puppets for his birthday. Harry hadn’t thought much of them, but Samantha had fallen instantly in love with it, and particularly with the aristocratic lady secret agent who was driven around in a pink Rolls Royce by her manservant, Parker. She’d acquired the voice print of the actor who'd played him and had used it for the verbal interface of every gadget she'd owned since.

     “I regret to hinform you, M’lady, that there happears to be a problem with the traffic hinformation service,” the car informed her as it sped away from the centre of Bristol. “I cannot be sure that the road ahead is clear.”

     “That's alright, Parker. We'll just have to take our chances.” The traffic information system, like so many other things, was dependent on satellites to deliver information from the cameras and road sensors all across the country to the central assimilation centre, and from there to all the vehicles using the roads. It was considered a low priority system, and so had been sacrificed so that more important satellites could be saved. The result, though, was that the roads had been thrown into a chaos that hadn't been known since the early decades of the century, and sure enough the car was soon forced to slow to a crawl as the road became congested ahead of them.

     Their progress was slowed even more as the car kept stopping to allow vehicles from side roads to enter ahead of them. Their selfishness was set too low, she realised. Everyone else had it set to maximum so that their cars forced their way in front of more considerate drivers. That wouldn’t do. Being nice was no good if everyone else just took advantage of it. “I think we need to take a more aggressive attitude to our journey, Parker,” she said, therefore.

     “The machine gun, M'lady?” That was the code phrase she'd programmed in to mean that they would raise their selfishness to its maximum setting.

     “The machine gun, Parker,” said Samantha, confirming the command. The car accelerated a little, closing the distance to the car in front, preventing others from pushing in. Someone honked a horn at them and she smiled to herself. Up yours, Mister! she thought with satisfaction.

     The slow progress they were making was a reminder of the calamity that had so recently hit the world, though, and of the potentially far greater one that might be coming. Passing a row of shops, she saw queues of people lined up outside them, the people complaining loudly and angrily to each other, probably about the scarcity of food and how high prices had become. Things had been affected that almost nobody knew was reliant on satellites, and the combined GPS systems in particular. Trade all across the world had been hit hard, and although people would do little more than grumble if the delivery of their new car or Virt system was delayed, the delivery of food from Europe and the Americas was another matter. Some goods had actually been rationed, and all the promises by the politicians that the shops would be full again very soon did little to reassure a fearful public.

     And if there was indeed a second, much larger Scatter Cloud on its way, things could soon be getting much worse. Maybe end of the world bad. On the other hand, if the very worst case scenario didn’t come to pass, maybe civilisation would collapse with survivors crawling around in the ruins. If that happened, she had to make sure that she and her daughter were among those survivors. “I think we need to do a little shopping, Parker,” she said, therefore.