Friday 9 November 2012

Resident Virtue


   “It’s escaped, Professor Murray. The T-Virus went airborne when General Carstairs’ helicopter struck the Interrogation Technologies laboratory. With current wind speed and direction it’ll reach Heathrow Airport by noon. The contagion will be international in three hours and global in twelve.”
  “Then God help us all, Doctor Pryce.”

The

  “Darling, I’m just taking the dog out to foul the footpath used by schoolchildren every day.”
  “That’s alright, dear - it’s not as if I expected an evening of sexual or any other kind of pleasure with you tonight; given that our sons’ brief, disappointing conception is fading into distant memory. I’m only grateful that the spin dryer has developed a pronounced wobble at high speeds.”
  “No problem sweetness. I prefer my own company and the dog anyway.”

Truth

  “Yes, Constable. Of course I stole these credit cards. Do I seriously look like someone who’s worked hard enough and long enough to merit Platinum rating at my age? Give me a break.”
   “I’d love to, son. I’d also love to give you massive internal bleeding and incurable back pain and a permanent limp. In fact I’ll take you to the Station where you’ll refuse to say anything and some rich, tax-funded lawyer will get you out on the streets tomorrow morning the instant some magistrate who lives far from where when you rob the elderly frees you with a plea for mercy disguised as - let’s see - your ninth consecutive Definitely, Positively Last Chance to escape prison.

Will

   “This is the BBC. This is not news.
   In a carefully managed selection of talking points tonight, a round dozen overpaid, talentless people who basically agree with each other on all the great officially-approved issues of the day will neglect to mention how much they all agree with each other while simultaneously adopting the undeserved pose of fearless seekers after the truth. They will also ignore or deride the lives and worries of that vast majority of people who did not attend the same schools and universities as themselves nor took part in the political campaigns that they naively remember as the gilded years of youth. You’d be better off reading the lunatic fringe on the internet that listening to us, really you would. But here goes nothing anyway….”

Set
  
   “In a truncated broadcast from Teheran today the Iranian leader stated that of course his government is planning a nuclear attack on Israel just as soon as his scientists finish refining the three warheads for which they already possess sufficient fissionable material during the next few months of Western diplomacy and sanctions.
  He added that he personally couldn’t give a stuffed fig about the fate of a bunch of fast-breeding Sunni fellaheen Arabs too stupid to organize accurate rocket strikes on schools and hospitals only a few kilometers away or to back that up with an effective land-based guerilla war. 
  
You

    US Senate leaders of both parties issued a joint statement affirming that they had become very rich supporting vested interests to whom they owed the bulk of their campaign funding.  Being possessed of well-stocked and fortified houses distant from America’s crime-ridden cities, they were rather looking forward to the rioting and famine that would follow the national collapse that they jointly and severally had become powerful and legally untouchable by arranging. Let the suburbs, the dumb Christians, the Mexicans and the guys from the Hood sort it all out - if they can. Failing that, and with the Caribbean in flames after the Honesty Riots there’s always the resort islands off Northern Australia to retreat to if a private navy’s what’s needed to avoid the fallout from China’s Politburo Confessions when the US economy finally croaks. Now that post-industrial Europe and an Africa bereft of Western aid are starving it seems like a good idea to be far away. The taxpayers and grassroots party workers with their awful kids and endless whining can spend Eternity as skittles in Satan’s Alley for all they care.

Free

   Meanwhile, the Australian Prime Minister said that the world had always been a lousy place - except for most of Australia. If only people had spoken their bloody minds a lot more before the T-Virus mutated the human brain to make truth-telling irresistible, maybe the rest of the mess wouldn’t have got so bad.
   “Fortunately,” he went on “the Lucky Country’s a long way over stormy oceans from any seaborne refugee swarm and the Australian Navy can handle anyone who makes it this far. Once the refugee holding camps in the Northern islands that we seized this morning are completed, then resettling any refugees in Papua New Guinea and the Philippines will become an orderly and simple routine. They can farm or mine for a living like the original transportees did. No bloody worries, mate.”

2 comments:

Steve Green said...

BRILLIANT!!! I Loved it!!

AB Singer said...

Thank you sir - I loved writing it. Funny, that.....