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“there.” In the past I had read the ScotCall slogan A Better Life For You is Here (Not Out “There”) and fallen into their trap. Answering phone calls about the logistics of having sex in a chimney, or how to remove tarragon stains from The Koran, or if the battle of Culloden was ever restaged using weasels, or if the finest word in the English language was “drosophila,” or if tea was T-shaped, or if Atlas ever dropped the sky, or if nasal copulation was unhealthy, is not a Better Life unless one happens to have cabbages for brains. I moved to The House having read the slogan “A Better Life Than at ScotCall is
Here”
and settled down to writing four bodice-rippers set on Neptune per week for a cash-rich slob named Jericho—a Better Life in comparison to an earful of Kirstys branding me an incompetent lackey for failing to answer questions about where Tim had hidden the marmalade, or if spark plugs qualified as real plugs, or if air had a smell. I had no intention of remaining at The House forever. I had to take my chance in the wilds and find the sea. I had heard rumours that a commune had sprung up “there” devoted to the simple life where people lived off the remaining land that hadn’t been used to store malfunctioning toasters and digi-pets.
    I made the decision to flee when slobby Jericho flung a bodice-ripper at my face, refusing to pay for my services due to the paucity of bosoms in the first four pages (I had made the mistake of attempting to weave a plot between the scenes of heaving bosoms and bodices being ripped from their wearers). I packed up my clothes (two shirts, two pants) and savings (twelve pounds) and took to the Crarsix roads. I had to make the trip on foot as all buses took passengers direct to the local ScotCall Training and Advanced Brainwashing Centre whether that was your desired destination or not. I would have to be careful to avoid scavenger buses along the hinterland routes, where buses stopped and operatives chased you along the road trying to “coerce” you into signing up as an operative using their arms to “coerce” you into the buses.
    The morning of my liberation was overcast. I was grateful for the cold winds so I could wear (and not have to carry) my coat. I headed along the asphalt road towards the first hectare of stock-dump fields. I had armed myself with a bat whittled from my (former) desk to protect myself from the onslaught of rogue digi-pets, electric toothbrushes, and any other menacing hardware-gone-bad that might wish to feast on my throat. The damp weather would keep the attack count low. The summer heat drove these appliances to fighting frenzies as the sun fried their wires and insides. I showed no mercy, warning the surrounding lurkers by crushing a stray digicat to smithereens with my bat—deaf to its plaintive pleas as I hammered its wires and whiskers into the dirt and performed the
coup de grâce
with my jackboot. I continued along the road until an electric hand fan whirred up from the disconcerting quiet and tried slicing out my eyes. I swung my bat around crazily, hitting the pest with the force of a baseball pitcher, and pummelled in its rotors once it landed. I flung its carcass into the field to dissuade its family, but two larger hand fans rose up and tried slicing out my brain in revenge. I readied myself for their approach and powered the bat into action, catching them in a quick swivel. I killed the family, moseyed onward in fear, and emerged from the stock-dump fields unscathed.
    A furious washing machine lumbered near hoping to ensnare me in its rinse cycle, but I was able to avoid its feeble attack merely by proceeding at my usual walking pace, and looked on amused as it pursued me for a mile, clattering in desperation until its mechanism fried and the door collapsed from its hinges, leaving a molten plasticky lump bubbling on the asphalt. A microwave spat flaming batteries onto the road, two of which singed my trousers. I noticed