Theme Planet (8 page)

Theme Planet spread out, a
tapestry of wonder.

Theme Planet undulated, an image
of physical joy.

Green fields rolled, golden
beaches gleamed, turquoise oceans lapped, purple mountains sparkled, and amidst
the finery and luxury and stunning natural beauty, amidst the perfection of
cleanliness and holiness and utter, total perfection, sat the
rides...

“There’s Bubble Guts!” shrieked
Molly, pointing. All along the Shuttle other kids were shrieking and hollering
as they spied favourite rides seen so many times on TV adverts and filmys. Dex
squinted. The entrance to the “ride” was as big as five cubescrapers. It could
be seen from
space.

“What’s Bubby Guts?” said Dex.

“Aww
Dad,”
said Molly,
giving him
one of those looks.

Katrina appeared at his shoulder.
“You certainly know how to keep up with the times,” she said, and nibbled his
ear-lobe.

“Careful. Don’t want to get
spanked by that pedantic head-rest,” he said.

“Insane! Insane! Insane!”
shrieked Toffee, red in the face.

“You’re damn right, you are,”
muttered Dex.

“No dad, it’s the
ride
called
Insane,”
chided Molly, rolling her eyes. “Look!”

Dex looked. It was a five
kilometre high rollercoaster with enough loops and curves and flick-backs and
twists and turns and jelly-donuts to make the hardiest of hard roller-coaster
riders puke his quivering burger into his lap. It dominated the skyline,
starting a full five kilometres up in the sky, and dropping into the turquoise
ocean where (Molly reliably informed him) it went five kilometres
under the
waves.

Dex stared at his daughter. “Now
that
is
insane,” he said.

“Can we go on it, Dad, please,
please, you can only go on it with your parents, please Dad, please, can we can
we can we?”

Dex stared once again at the true
monster
mother
bastard
bitch
of all roller-coasters. “The day I
go on that ride,” he said, voice soft, words carefully clipped, “is the day
Hell freezes over, God comes down from his cloud to sign limited editions of
Bible
II
-
The Remix, and the
sun explodes to consume Earth with a comedy
Pac-Man
munch.”
He shouted the last word, barking it like a dog.

Molly worked this out. “Aww, come
on Dad, Mum, will you tell him?”

“Go on, Dex. Don’t be such a
stick in the mud.”

“Don’t worry,” said Dex, ruffling
Molly’s shoulder-length brown hair. “Your mother will take you on it.”

Kat threw him a glance like a
sock filled with razor-blades.

Again, the Shuttle’s engines
decelerated with rumbling whines, and as they slowed, and slowed further, and
dropped towards the Theme Planet’s plush Port Terminal, more shouts echoed up
and down the Shuttle’s interior.

Criss-Cross! There’s Criss-Cross!

Monster Mash! You can see the
monsters, look!
Look!

Oh, wow, Mum, it’s the Power
Matrix!

Look, look, it’s
A-mazing,
it’s totally amazing!

That’s the Survival Jungle!

Over there, Dad, you can see the
Movie-Scape...

The Molecule Machine! I can’t
believe it, I’ve always wanted to go on the Molecule Machine!

There’s Adventure Central! Mum!
Auntie Ethel! Uncle Bob! You can see the Museum of Baron Nutcase!
And there’s our hotel!

I can’t wait to eat at Monster’s
Burger Mush! They say the
Slopper
is
a burger
as big as your head!

And so on.

Dex found it quite exhausting. He
lay back. Closed his eyes. Folded his arms. And said, “Wake me up when we get
there.”

~ * ~

It was sooner
than
he anticipated. The Theme Planet’s Landing and Immigration Service was perfect
to the point of anal. Which was a good thing for eager, tired travellers; a bad
thing for Dexter’s snooze-time.

Hundreds of people disgorged from
the Shuttle into a series of plush, elegant connecting tunnels, and various
families in dodgy sports-gear rushed off with squeaking trolleys as if they’d
been injected with a damaging narcotic. Dex frowned as he watched two
shell-suit wearing grannies stomp off, each carrying twin walking sticks, as if
they were in a race for their lives.

“Come on, Dad!”

“Faster!”

“They’ll beat us!”

“There’s no point,” whined Dex. “Listen
to me, I’ve done this a million times, right. I am well versed in immigration
matters, and we’re good to wait for a few bloody hours in this first queue
alone, I can
absolutely guarantee it.
They have to take fingerprints,
blood samples, urine samples, retina scans, faecal-passage scrapes. We have to
be assigned genetically modified Personal Drones. Kids, sorry to disappoint,
but we’re in this queue, and the next one, and the one after that for the best
part of the damn
day.
I know bureaucracy. It’s a curse, I agree. And
Theme Planet, even in all its splendour, can’t cure the absolute blight of the
low-paid clipboard-wielding official.”

“Bah, humbug,” said Kat. “Come on
girls! Daddy’s a rotten egg! He can catch us up on the beach!”

And with that, Dex watched his
family stream off like so many other charging idiots, and Dex frowned and got
his stubborn head on, and formed his stubborn jaw, and decided he wasn’t going
to play the idiot’s game and wasn’t going to show himself up. Oh, no. He was
going to walk at a normal pace and be
civilised
and
dignified
about this whole business and to Hell and bloody fire damnation with
getting
on the rides first...

~ * ~

But Dex was
wrong.
There were no queues. There were no bureaucrats. There weren’t even any
clipboards. Everything was automated, and there were beautiful smiling women in
smart uniforms handing out welcome flowers to the ladies, welcome bottles of
whiskey to the men, and very specific toys to the children. Molly got a
Hellhorror PinkPunk doll, and Toffee got a My Little Alien, complete with “realistic
slime-puke regurge action.” They all stepped through scanners, which blipped
and blopped, and then they were through the five-hundred-slot immigration
counters, out onto Theme Planet itself...

A heady aroma of flowers and
fresh pine wafted in through the Port Terminal’s huge reception. There was a
bustle of activity, and each family met their Personal Drone when the Personal
Drone arrived towing each family’s unmolested luggage. No queues. No waiting.
No lost bags. No drama, baby.

Kat raised her eyebrows at Dex,
as if to say,
there you go, idiot, First Class++++++ service! All with a
smile! And no bureaucrats! And no bloody queues!
Queues had been a bone of
contention with Dex when it came to booking the Theme Planet holiday in the
first place. He’d protested long and hard and longer and even harder, saying he
didn’t want to spend a King’s Ransom on a holiday where you spent most of your
time standing aimlessly in queues. And even though the Monolith Corporation’s
Theme Planet literature proclaimed otherwise, Dex still didn’t
believe.

“Yeah?” he snapped.

“They promised there’d be no
queues.”

“We’ll see,” he snarled. “No
holiday is
that bloody good.
“ But he had to admit it, as they were
guided towards their
very own personal hover bus,
as provided
for
each and every single family on vacation,
he had to grind his damn teeth
and actually admit it.

It was starting to look as good
as the promise.

As the bus doors opened with a
phizz,
the Personal Drone - which was a small black ball, about the size of a tennis
ball and hovering at shoulder height - spun around and glowed softly through
various slots.

“Welcome to the Theme Planet,”
said the Personal Drone. “My name is Lex. I am a GradeB PopBot Pleasure
Mechanism with advanced SynthAI and a Machine Intelligence Rating (MIR) score
of 2750. I am here to be of constant assistance, and I am indeed your personal
servant, Theme Planet guide, childcare facility and even food critic. I have an
inbuilt PersonalityChip™ which means every single PopBot PD is unique and can
provide endless hours of fun and entertainment. I can even quote Shunkspeare.”

“How’s it going, Lex?” said
Molly, pushing her face in close.

“It’s going fine, Molly,” said
Lex, glowing amber. “I see you have a Hellhorror PinkPunk doll. They’re groovy.
If you press the button at the base of its spine, it’ll do the famous PinkPunk
PunkDance.”

“Cool!” beamed Molly.

The PopBot rotated to Dex, who
growled at it. He didn’t like machines. Well, not unless they took bullets and
killed bad guys.

“Hello, Dexter.”

“Dex to you.”

“Hello Dex-to-you. A-ha-ha-ha.
Sorry. That is my ComedyCircuit™. It means I have comedy.”

“Would you like me to shove this
whiskey up your...”

“Dex!”

“Sorry. Sorry.”

“Ahh, your entry whiskey, Uncle
Scrote’s Finest Single Tantalus Malt. A fine dram, if I may be so bold.”

“Do you want some?”

“Alas,” said Lex, his soothing
male voice quavering a little, “I fear it would burn out my circuits and render
me useless.”

“Really? That’s interesting,”
said Dex, raising an eyebrow.

“Dex,” said Katrina, again.

“Okay, my happy little family of
Colls, if you’d all like to board the bus, we’ll be on our way to your fabulous
Hotel Suite. As you are aware, you are staying in the Kool Kid Zone which
allows you endless access to the Lolly Pop Forest, Area 51B, the Water Fun
Zone, the Gingerbread Mountains, the Dinozens and Create-An-Alien, amongst
many, many, many other attractions! How hot would you like your bath water?”

“Sorry?” said Katrina, who had
just climbed aboard the hover bus and was watching in fascination as the
luggage seemed to be loading itself into the hold.

“Bath water? Temperature? They
are running you a Splish-Splash Jacuzzi bath right now, so that you may sink
into bubbly delights with some Greebo Champagne the minute you enter the
snuggling confines of The Kool Kid Zone Hilton Hotel.”

“Hot,” said Kat.

Dex chose a seat at random. There
was a
click
and a beer appeared in front on him. A chilled
Blue Zone
Lager
of finest Japachinese brew. He took a swig. It was perfect. And
exactly what he wanted.

As the doors closed, Kat threw a
look at him. The kids were giggling as they played on the back seat of the
hover bus with some Gigglegum, stretching it between their fingers and toes.

“Well?” she said.

“Damn, but they’re good,” said
Dex, shaking his head.

“I told you,” said Kat.

“Okay. Okay. It’s not my fault I’m
Mr Bloody Cynical, is it? Look at the place where we live. Look at my
damn
job.
Look at your tortured brother. Just
look at the world,
mate.”

“It’s a shame everything back on
Earth can’t be as precise and efficient as the Theme Planet,” said Katrina,
sipping an orange sherry - the exact thing she was in the mood for after a
long-haul flight.
How did they know that? How the hell could they have even
possibly known that?