SPIN THE BOTTLE

Let's play Spin the Bottle.

No, I wouldn't kiss any of those present either. I was being hypothetical.

Look it up.

It means let's just pretend, OK?

Let's pretend we're playing Spin the Bottle, with a group of people we have invented for the purpose.

I see they are all incredibly attractive, and that one is Paminard from the SOCKO! advert. I'm afraid this will not be appropriate for our purposes. There must be at least one person in the line-up we would not wish our bottle to point to.

Very well. We have Paminard from the SOCKO! advert, Cumula Cloudbase, Professor Bean O'Bergre from The Rollie Hamster Show, the entire cast of Moffit the Beastie Killer, popular singing group X Party 7 except for Barney and a person of indeterminate gender but very definite acne and a pronounced overbite. I fear we may be dipping our toes in the shallow end, or is your low snoggability rating of this person based on purely physical revulsion?

I see. It is Bucktooth Beverley from school who constantly embarrassed you in front of your friends with hir insistent flirting. So your reluctance to kiss this person is entirely due to the fear of looking a fool among your peer group and having to endure the consequent ribbings? No, they never do seem to get tired of it. Perhaps you should choose your friends more wisely, showing preference to those who will treat you with due respect whatever you choose to do with your life, as I do?

I don't see what business it is of yours how many friends I have. I prefer to stick to one or two close friends, actually. At the moment? Well, I'm sort of between friends. Can we get on?

Perhaps it's because this person is, as mentioned, of indeterminate gender, and allowing yourself to feel any affection towards them would cause confusion in your mind as to where your true sexuality lies.

True. There is a generous mix of genders in your chosen group.

Oh really? Bev has the personality of a bluebottle buzzing around your bed at night? That's quite an unsettling thought.

Let us proceed with the lesson.

We are sitting in a circle with our fellow gamesters around the bottle. We spin the bottle.

No, it does not point to Cumula Cloudbase. It points to Beverley.

It HAS to point to Beverley! Calm down!

We have arrived at a causality nexus. From this point, you have at least two choices to make. You can play to the rules, and give Beverley a great big sloppy kiss I SAID CALM DOWN! or you can take to your heels and run.

No. This will not create a rift in space/time by breaking the rules. The rules pertain only to the game. They have no cosmic significance.

Other choices? Such as?

Giving the bottle a little surreptitious push so that it points to Cumula Cloudbase will not work. Everybody is watching very closely and will not countenance cheating. We are straying from the point.

Which is… whichever of the two choices you opt for, the resonance has already begun to, er, resonate. Beverley is puckering up in readiness for the long-awaited kiss resulting from choice number one. The others are preparing to applaud and hoot with glee. So we can see that a future event, in this case the kiss, can have a retrospective effect extending back to the causality nexus. From the moment the bottle ceases spinning to the moment you plant a gurt big one on Beverley's hot little lips STOP MAKING THAT FACE, the connecting threads can be plucked and one may even, if one has the raw talent and has learned the necessary skills, play a tune on them.

It's no good complaining. These explanations aren't supposed to make sense.

There IS a point!

However, there is still the possibility of choice number two. If you were to take to your heels and run - yes, I rather thought you would, but it is not actually necessary for you to make a choice; we are, as you recall, being hypothetical here - these threads would snap. To an observer at a particular moment between the two points - I don't know, some sort of fourth-dimensional being, probably the one who was playing the tune - it would be as though the threads had never existed.

THE POINT IS, if you will stop picking up on every little detail, that until you actually take to your heels, these threads are still in place and providing a merry soundtrack to life in the fourth dimension. Though you made your decision immediately, don't bother arguing, I know you did, for the ten seconds you sat there waiting for the precise moment to make your escape, the threads were still there, right up to the moment you began to rise from the floor. Intention is not enough to snap the threads; they remain connected and tense until a decisive action is performed.

That WAS the point. Because it's what makes tachyon tracers feasible.

Incidentally, do you know what gender Beverley was? During all those years of school with all its gender-coding you must have found out at some point.

Really? Permanently excused PE? There was no school uniform? Everybody took both woodwork and domestic science? How very progressive… I know! Which restroom did Beverley use?

What, never? Oh, I see. Bev had a phobia of public conveniences and lived just down the road so always went home for the purpose.

Why do I get a sneaky feeling you made Bev up? No, I suppose it doesn't matter. One should take people as individuals. I was just wondering what pronouns to use when referring to Bev. Purely out of courtesy. Nothing to do with idle curiosity.

Look, just be glad I didn't have to explain the Pantaloons of Paradox where the leg holes are sewn to each other.

Then go away and have a nice cup of tea, watch your favourite episode of Moffit or something. I don't have to do this, you know. I have a Mattress of Irrelevance.

The Goodly Doctrix came to a decision. She flicked on the tracker. Nothing. Of course; she had spun the bottle and knew where it pointed, but had not yet acted on it. Walking over to a storage cabinet, she yanked open drawer after drawer. She knew she had some in here somewhere. She found cartliments, torque burners, any number of gribbets; finally, a whole boxful. She took one from the box and dropped it in her pocket in readiness.

Now the tracker showed a thread. She keyed in the autopilot and set it to follow the thread back to its beginnings.

Wafter followed the signs to find a plush elevator lobby with thick carpet and big ferny plants, and a single set of lift doors. An uncomfortable sense of déjà vu nagged at his mind. Ah, he thought, that'll be one hemisphere of my brain lagging a little behind the other. Ah, thought his brain, if only you would use more than 10% of my capabilities, it would save you so much trouble.

Or, thought Wafter, I may have seen something like this in my dreams, particularly the occasionally recurring one I have had ever since… since… well, a long time ago anyway. The lift doors closed, the cabin rose.

That's odd, I'm shivering, and it's quite warm in here. Something in his cerebrum seemed to be quivering too.

Will this journey never end?

The cabin shuddered to a halt; its ascent had taken an interminably long 25 seconds. The doors began to open.

Without knowing why, Wafter was expecting to find a carbon copy of the lobby he had just left.

He didn't though. A blast of high-altitude air freshened his attitude and he strode out onto a concrete platform high above a spacious plaza where… at first his eyes rejected the sight, eventually refocusing to see something that made him wish they had skipped the refocusing bit.

The mating habits of slugs, who have their sexual organs in their heads, are repugnant to most humans' sensibilities, involving as they do gross enlargement of said organs, slithering around in a mess of slime and the entwining of two soft and squishy bodies into an homogenous squelchy mass, often while dangling from a handy suspensor. Although there are, of course, certain humans whose mating habits involve precisely the same things, most of us squeal in delighted revulsion and turn away.

The mating habits of slugs are nothing compared to the mating habits of vacuum cleaners, a large collection whom lay far beneath, yet unnervingly near to, Wafter's lofty perch, in a great big writhing pile with the accompaniment of shudder-inducing slurping noises. Fighting the horrified fascination that strove to keep him glued, he backed away from the railing, keener than ever to reach the abode of his friend Mervyn, the lighthouse which he could see from here on the diagonally opposite corner of the roof.

Wafter strolled to the northern side, keeping well away from the edge of the ledge, with the intention of walking around.

The ledge ended at a blank wall. Peering over, Wafter beheld a sheer face. No way around here.

He strolled rather more urgently to the southern side.

This was different; it was exactly the same, but facing south.

How then was he to? He scanned the area and allowed himself to notice what he had tried to ignore. The only way across to the other side was a rickety walkway, apparently composed of rust, except for the bits which were composed of nothing at all, not being there. Presumably they had fallen to a grisly fate, and might even now be slowly digesting in the bellies of the beasts below.

Steeling himself for the thing that needed steeliness, Wafter cautiously approached the bridge and put a footsworth of weight on it.

The catwalk rattled along its entire length, causing some of the slithering creatures beneath to momentarily pause in their business and look up; a variety of nozzles, all without the apparent sensory organs that go to make up a face, nevertheless managed to look hungry.

But the span held, only a few oxidised flakes losing their grip, falling lightly through the air… until they had descended far enough to be caught in the sudden suction, whereupon they accelerated rapidly into their allotted maws.

Wafter gulped the sort of *GULP* that you see in comix, a tangible sound effect emanating from the throat of the gulper with a few action lines to imply the gulping action.

Turf this for a shenanigan, he thought on his way back to the lift as fast as his plimmies could carry him.

Correction: he thought this on his way back to the blank wall where he was sure the lift lobby had been. When he got there, what he thought was that perhaps it had been a little farther to the left. Or the right. But no, he had definitely emerged into this alcove. So for his next trick, he thought perhaps he was being trailed by a mischievous builder who had sneaked up behind him, removed the doors and bricked up the gap. If so, this was surely the world's fastest speed builder, for he had been no more than five minutes exploring the rooftops.

He ran his hands over the surface of the wall as though expecting to feel the tell-tale ridging where the doors met, in case his eyes were lying to him; if so, then his fingertips were part of the conspiracy, and all the rest of him was joining in the deception, for all he could smell was wall, all he could hear was wall, and he was pretty sure all he could taste would be wall so refrained from what would be not only a futile action but also a fairly disgusting one.

Now doors simply do not just disappear, although he had heard tell some years ago when he was resident in Lumpen of an entire building apparently leaving its post and attempting suicide by drowning; or had that just been a dream? Surely not a memory?

As he struggled to recall, the confused muddle of memory/dream combined with the disappearing lift mystery to blow a fairly important fuse in his cerebrum, one of those which help to separate reality from fantasy. Was he a nerk dreaming of being a nerk, or the other way around?

Right! How dare the universe break its own rules! Two can play at that game!

He would no longer be the wimp who fled in fear from a the wobble of a walkway; the time had come to show his untrue colours! He would be an intrepid adventurer!

The born-again hero spun on his axis and began to fearlessly tromp back to the bridge. He would show it who was boss!

The vacuum cleaners paused in their revoltingness to crane their snakey necks[1] at the sound of a wild rattling from above. More than flakes came tumbling now; whole chunks fell spinning, snatched out of the air as they descended by the rushing intakes of air that drew them into eager nozzles. One particularly obese specimen of predator which had not emptied its dust bag for weeks snared an entire railing, causing it to explode, its fellows around it snatching the resulting shards from the air in a feeding frenzy.

High over the terrible turmoil, Wafter stomped his way, eyes fixed straight ahead, ignoring the contemptuous clamour beneath him. With a will of iron, nerves of steel, and a pat of butter[2] he strode across the span, fearless in his lack of trepidation, focused on his goal.

Perhaps it would have been better for him had he focused on the gaping hole in the flooring. Then he could have jumped it, instead of thrusting his leading foot into it.

Despite falling at an angle, the flexibility of the human body allowed the rest of him to fall right through, except for his chin which caught on the far edge of the hole and left him dangling.

There was only one thing to say at a moment like this.

"Oops," he decided.

Again, an error of judgment; the motion of his jaw tipped the precarious balance which held him safely suspended, and he plummeted.

Whirling through the air, what he saw beneath him was enough to curdle the blood; a tangle of squirming hoses, at the end of which scores of sucking orifices all strained fervently in his direction. Yet his blood did not curdle, for in his veins there now coursed the pure fire of the champion. He twisted with the superhuman skill of an action hero, regardless of the physics of the cosmos which had so recently let him down, and kicked into the nearest nozzle. As its wretched neck concertinaed beneath the onslaught and he sank below the safety line of highest hose reach, he flailed wildly about him at his target's companions, batting them back. His chosen cleaning appliance reacted according to its natural instincts, as he knew it would, having spent many years of training to become a superman, part of which involved researching the habits of all predators he may come into contact with during his future exploits. In this case, the inherent reaction of a vacuum cleaner to a compacting blow on its neck was to spring back to its full length so as to throw of its attacker. It did so with startling swiftness, throwing Wafter clear of the moil and back towards the hole that had ambushed him and got him into this mess in the first place. All those hours of trampoline practice had come into their own at last! With his arms outstretched and flapping to give him that essential extra lift, it was left to his teeth to grip the jagged edge of the hole and secure his position. Thank heavens for the dental plan provided by the shadowy and secret organisation that employed him, for without it he would not have had his incisors fortified by stainless steel!

Wafter pulled himself up and through and took a moment to congratulate himself on his clear-mindedness and almost instinctive expertise. Lance Grant, crack agent of COATPEG[3], could not have done better!

With this thought in his mind and pride in his heart, Waftie confidently completed his traverse and made his way to the lighthouse where he would enjoy, with much shouting and swapping of sociable insults in the traditional manly manner, a joyful reunion with his friend of many whiles Mervyn whom he had not seen for almost as many whiles.

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[1] All wild vacuums are of the cylinder type. The few upright models which attempted to live ferally died out early, being too tall to fit into their burrows, and the little chumbley ones with faces were so cute they quickly became domesticated.

[3] Covert Operational Alliance for the Total Protection of Everyone's Good. A little weak as an acronym, but ultimately preferable to its short-lived predecessor, Covert Operational Coalition for Keeping Universal Peace.