“Hallo!” returned the little mecha.

“Do you know if they’ve sold the prize turkey that was hanging up there?”

“What, the turkey as big as me?” returned the mecha. “It’s hanging there now.”

“Is it?” said Scrooge. “Go and buy it, and tell ‘em to bring it here, that I may give the direction where to take it. Come back with the man, and I’ll give you twelve credits.”

“I’ll send it to Bob Ratchets!” whispered Screwge, rubbing his hands and splitting with a laugh.

It was not until an hour later that he realised that a family of mechas could no more get nutrition from a prize turkey than he could photosynthesise, but his mood was such that even this seemed like a capital joke. And there was time enough to follow the turkey with a good old-fashioned voltaic pile.

“I will live in the Past, the Present and the Future!” said Screwge. “Even if it’s sometimes impossible to tell them apart.”

Fin

Screwge had endured visions without end of possible futures, containing every conceivable combination of mongrel technologies, each of which ended with his own solitary grave (or vacuum-casket or orbiting reliquary or vampire-proof holocoffin). Old Joe  had haggled and gloated over his effects whether they were cotton night-clothes, wetly-glistening neuroimplants, hydraulic diesel-driven exo-armor or quaint 21st-century solid-state trinkets.

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Screwge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”

“And say,” he muttered to himself, “that they don’t all have this fucking leather-and-brass fetishist’s decor.”

“As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the mechas saw him in the church, because he was defective, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day who recharged the batteries of the lame and rebooted the visual sensors of the blind.”

“Spirit,” said Screwge, with an interest he had never felt before, “tell me if Tiny Timbot will live.”

“I see a vacant outlet,” replied the Spirit of Virtual Presence, “in the recharging booth, and an oilcan without an owner. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will be scrapped.”

“Romans invent gunpowder… Chinese settlement of American west coast… no… the British and French like one another… aliens don’t make it to Nazca… damn, I was sure I’d bookmarked it.”

“What’s that?” asked Screwge, pointing at a glossy stratum. It was composed of millions of small, sleek objects.

“Oh, those,” said the Spirit, distractedly. “They show up in a lot of timelines, we’re not really sure what they are. Maybe devotional objects of some kind – the stylised emblem is a fruit linked with Christian ideas about original sin. Doesn’t matter, whatever timeline they appear in conks out after about a decade. Ah! Here we are. Fezziwig’s radioisotope factory.”

“In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.” The ghostly figure was dressed in chains, leather straps, brass clasps, caoutchouc galoshes, a deep-sea diver’s helmet and steam-driven bondage trousers. He could barely fit through the door.

“I am here tonight to warn you, that you yet have a chance and hope of escaping my fate. You will be haunted tonight by three Spirits!”

“Bah!” said Screwge, as he adjusted the vernier of his right eyepiece, as if to bring the clanking apparition into sharper focus.

“You are nothing more than a simulation, one of the betas he kept on the public babbagenet, the better to short-sell telegraph shares.

“There’s more of data than the date about you, whatever you are!”

The glowing magical fiber-optic tree is the surviving neural core of a crashed spaceship, the corroded spars of which are still visible. The Na’vi are related to humans, from the future (of the future) or a parallel universe or a genetic engineering program. Either that or humans are the stunted pale survivors of a Na’vi colony on Earth. Or we have a common ancestry.

Whatever. Anyway, this explains why Na’vi have four limbs and boobs.

Princes Highway, Tempe. Enormous wall of decorative wheels and rims which rotate constantly. Correlate: David Simon, creator of The Wire.

New Canterbury Road, Dulwich Hill. Dulwich Hill Auto Restoration’s [sic.] Correlate: David Foster Wallace

The Lighthouse Keepers were such a good band, and so relatively little known, that they could seem (as with the Craven Fops or successor to the Keepers, Widdershins) as if they were something you and two or three of your friends had dreamt up between yourselves. But that could just be me: I was solipsistic even for a student, and  wore out my copy of their album Tales of the Unexpected while feeling sorry for myself and mooning over girls.

So, the show last Friday was excellent, and I was happy to buy a copy of their new compilation Ode to Nothing as soon as some young persons had politely bumped me out of the way with a folding table and a box of CDs.

The next day I found myself with earworms of great songs I hadn’t listened to in years like ‘Ocean Liner’ and ‘Wheels Over The Desert’ and ‘A Time Of Evil’ and a mood that varied from regretful to flat-out depressed.

This was not the Lighthouse Keepers’ fault, but a lesson to be heeded: beware the Angstworm, the earworm of a song which you listened to incessantly when you were sad. Especially if it’s charming, bittersweet, well-crafted pop.

Those of you without any such associations are encouraged to partake of any Lighthouse Keepers’ material you can lay hands on, because they  really are that good.

We are also told that this a solution to an impending food crisis, where enough humans are demanding more protein than the planet can sustain if it were grown on the hoof.

One of my daughters is vegetarian by choice, and I’ve discovered Quorn, a vat-grown moon fungus which comes in a bewildering variety of meat-like textures. All of these are delicious: the nuggets, in particular, are a hit with all three of my kids.

This, for me, blows the “feed the hungry” argument for artificial meat out of the water. We already have plenty of ways to grow protein and make it just as delicious as meat, all of which will certainly be more economical than tube-steaks.

It seems that our consumption of animals answers a different urge than a simple hunger for protein. We want even synthetic flesh  to have its origin in living cells, no matter how token a variety of “living” these strange blobs will have.

Meat is not murder: it is sacrifice, and perhaps the real reason why vegetarians cop so much flack is that they have opted out of a communal ritual with very ancient origins.