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Friday 28 June 2019

Village Life!

   No.242 “Well you’ve watched the video evidence for yourself. The Mk1 doesn’t work.”
    No.243 “Not now it doesn’t, it’s at the bottom of the estuary!”
    “We can retrieve it once the tide has gone out.”
    “It’s very disappointing.”
    “Its performance lacked a great deal.”
    “It was fine on the road.”
    “Yes but it was supposed to be an all-terrain vehicle, on land, on the sea, in the sea.”
    “It was supposed to go up walls.”
    “Well that was never going to happen was it?”
    “How do you mean?”
    “Well it behaved like a Dalek when it came to the steps.”
    “You mean it couldn’t climb them.”
    “It went down them alright.”
    “My biggest regret is 256.”
    “Ah yes, poor 256 I dread to think what kind of state he’s in.”
    “We won’t know what’s happened to him until we’ve retrieved the Mk1.”
    “We know the tractor beam works.”
    “Do you think he could still be in the machine?”
    “He was just absorbed by the blue light, he must still be inside it!”
    “How?”
    “If you don’t know, I cannot possibly tell you.”
    “That’s not good enough, after all we developed the Mk1.”
    “We simply have to try again that’s all.”
    “But it doesn’t work we’ve proved that.”
    “We retrieve the MK1, find out what happened to 256, then carry on from there.”
    “Mechanics isn’t the solution to the problem.”
    “You tell me what is?”
    “Well as a matter of fact I’ve been working on a new bio-mass.”
    “Bio-mass?”
    “I’ve managed to grow synthetic membrane in a Petri dish.”
    “Let me see.”
    “Its here. Just a minute the lid’s come off. Where……”
    “Look…on the floor.”
    “It’s a sphere!”
    “A sphere made of living tissue.”
    “Living membrane.”
    “Look it’s moving, rolling about on the floor.”
    “It’s roving about, that’s it, we’ll call it Rover Mk II.”
    “Well we had better catch it before it gets out of the laboratory.”
    “It already has, through the mouse hole in the skirting board!”
    “We had better tell Number 2.”
    “He’s not going to like this!”
    Somewhere, it’s not clear where, but somewhere there behind the skirting board a mouse is going about its business, when it encounters a sphere of living membrane. The thing emits a roar, a roar mixed with the sound of someone breathing through an aqua lung, a bicycle pump, and Gregorian chant. The mouse sniffs the air, its squeaks, turns, but the sphere is on it almost immediately. The mouse is suffocated to death, its body is absorbed by the Rover, its membrane taking on a pinkish hue.

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