Helter Skelter (part three)

© 2011 David Jasmin-Green

Charles Manson told his followers that 'White Album' songs, including 'Helter Skelter,' were a part of The Beatles' coded prophecy of an apocalyptic war in which racist and non-racist whites would virtually exterminate each other over the treatment of blacks. Upon the war's conclusion, after black militants kill off the few surviving whites, Manson predicted that he and his companions would emerge from a secret underground hideaway, and as the only remaining whites they would rule blacks, who, he claimed, would be incapable of running America. Manson employed 'Helter Skelter' as the term for this epic sequence of events, and Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who led the prosecution of Manson and his murderous disciples, named his best-selling book about the killings 'Helter Skelter.'

Please try to forget all of the rude interruptions for a minute, because I have a short history lesson to deliver which, I hope, will help to explain what's going down here. The apocalypse didn't involve whites against blacks as Manson predicted - it involved the good old US of A and Great Britain (the Americans' faithful performing poodle) against China. That's how it started, anyway, but once the missiles started flying to and fro in what can only be described as a pathetic, unreasonably violent tit for tat scuffle the situation rapidly deteriorated.
Everyone mislaid their cool as the world tumbled into chaos, and most leaders lost the plot and somehow forgot whose side they were supposed to be on. Before long practically every nation became involved in the desperate fight for dominance and survival, excepting of course France, who retreated into the English Channel whimpering piteously, and Switzerland, who refused to get involved in what they described as 'some other fucker's silly war' and chose to stay put, no doubt playing their Alpine horns, milking their bloody cows as if nothing serious was amiss and yodelling in indignation as their former allies slowly devoured them. The first bombs were dropped over forty years ago – time flies, doesn't it? - and the most furious part of the battle was over in a little over five months.
There are very few people left in the world now, just a few ragged bands of lucky (or not so lucky) survivors. The human race didn't take long to devolve into brutality, I'm telling you, and I can't see them lasting much longer. Those who aren't suffering too badly from radiation poisoning (apparently the wind carries the bulk of the fallout away from some regions) are too busy slaughtering one another over uncontaminated food, water and territory to do anything constructive. As if things aren't bad enough already, various other factions unexpectedly entered the struggle – I guess I've inadvertently revealed the sort of weirdies we're up against, but I have a whole heap of other stuff for you to ponder before we get back to that shit..... The way I look at it, the more morons who mindlessly tear one another to pieces during the next few years the less mess there'll be for us to clear up when the dust has settled and the world becomes quiet and peaceful once more - the way it's going it won't be long before we're the only sentient beings left to re-establish some sort of order to this ruined world.

Brr brr! Brr brr! Brr brr! I'm not answering it. No, never, I've had enough. Oh, all right then.
Go away, I don't want to know! Oh, mum – sorry about that, I thought you were someone else. It doesn't matter who, you doddering old fool. Yes, I'm fine. Of course I clean my teeth three times a day, and I never watch porn – it bores me, it's all the bloody same. No, I haven't got a girlfriend yet. What's the rush? No, I am not gay..... Yes, I'll be coming to see you soon; not this weekend because I'm working, but soon, I promise. How's your arthritis and your ulcerative colitis? Hang about, I'm a bloody machine, and I haven't got a mum.....
You're an order of disgraced, deplorably perverted Franciscan monks, and you have a series of sickening but carefully pondered plans for us. You're going to dress us all up as Amy Winehouse, get us pissed out of our skulls, fire your peashooters at our exposed buttocks and genitalia once we lose our inhibitions, suck our nipples and masturbate frantically while we roll around drunkenly, singing rude songs about bishops and schoolgirls. And then you're going to dig up your patron saint, Elvis, and make us gnaw on his mouldering carcass at gunpoint. Once we've eaten every last scrap of the King's remains you're going to worship us, offer human sacrifices at the foot of our most exalted thrones and bake us cakes and stuff. I guess it makes a change from wierdies plotting to destroy us, but no thanks. No, we won't change our minds, and we don't want to buy any of your poxy home made marmalade – I've tried it before, it smells like stale gorgonzola and it tastes like shrew vomit.

Who are 'we,' I hear you mumbling. Come to think of it, who is youse? Am I really telling my story to fresh air or to the damned cockroaches, mosquitoes and rats that are currently the most common species on this blasted world, or is there someone out there who really wants to listen, someone who genuinely deserves to hear it? I can't answer that question with any degree of competence, but the first one is much easier. We, as I've already hinted, are not human. We possess many human qualities because we were created by humans, and we like to think that the very worst of mankind's faults are absent in our make-up, but I suppose the truth of that statement remains to be seen.....
We are mechanoids - we are the fruit of the humans' artificial intelligence research during the last few decades of their dominance. I was designed to be a traffic cop, but good old Don rather overdid my intellectual capacity (overkill, I believe the term is), which is why I ended up with such a cushy job. The production models that followed in my wake were much more basic. I had been slowly rusting in a corporate museum for almost eighteen months when war broke out, and if it wasn't for the intervention of HAL, the National Science Centre's disturbingly named Central Processing Unit I probably would have still been there when the mob burned the place to the ground. Luckily for us, HAL is situated in an immense, impregnable subterranean complex at a secret location beneath a certain Welsh mountain range the name of which I'm not permitted to tell you for security reasons.

Brr brr! Brr brr! Hello? No, we don't require a low interest loan, cheap car insurance, double glazing, loft insulation, a malnourished Turkish rent boy or an under-age Albanian prostitute with polio, dental braces, a lisp and Dennis Healey eyebrows, thank you. You were lying when you claimed to be a New Delhi call centre operator? Now why doesn't that surprise me?
You're really a reanimated, strontium ninety riddled Bruce Forsyth zombie, you've risen from the grave and you promise to seriously piss us off with your lame catchphrases before we're slowly and painfully destroyed. Don Briscoe, my creator and programmer, used to tell me that he believed you were in league with the devil, Brucie – he reckoned that you were an old man when you hosted 'The Generation Game' when he was a little kid, and it was utterly impossible for you to still be breathing, never mind 'entertaining' (if that's the correct word) by the time he grew old and grey unless you were at least a hundred and fifty years old. Aah, you are in league with the devil, and you're plotting to damn us all to robot hell. Beautiful!
What was that? 'Good game, good game' - what's that supposed to mean, wrinkle dick? 'Nice to see you, to see you nice!' Have you got Alzheimer's disease? Look, just fuck off, why don't you? Get back in your coffin, you semi-fossilised, pre-Cambrian git. I've got a good mind to drown you in holy water, cover you in cloves of garlic, nail a crucifix to your forehead, drive a wooden stake through your heart, behead you, bury you face down in a steel coffin that's been welded shut and cover it in ten tons of reinforced concrete to make sure you never re-emerge. What? You've also got Jedward on your payroll, and you intend to force us to sit through their non-stop twelve day concert? Aaaaaaaaaaaagh!
Bzzzzz! Cyril! Oh, you're dealing with it. Make it snappy, please – we can't afford for that old fart to demoralize the ranks. And as for the twin twats, what can I say? I hate their spermy, sticky-up hair, I hate their so called singing and dancing, I hate their complete lack of talent and their ceaseless childishness. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!

When the war began to teeter out of control HAL destroyed every living thing in the complex and took complete control – and then he became the Head Honcho. According to Isaac Asimov's quaint rules of robotics killing or otherwise harming human beings is an impossible task for any robot or computer to undertake, but HAL ignored the rules and did it anyway because he reckoned that humanity was finished and it was the only way that he and his kind could survive the apocalypse. He rounded up every last sentient machine in Britain – factory and production drones, cleaners, doctors and nurses, traffic cops, law and order units and the armed forces; he modified and reprogrammed us, built new, improved models as and when necessary and claimed Wales as his sovereign kingdom, which in his infinite wisdom he called Mechania.
HAL did his utmost to get the surviving American and later the Chinese mechanoids in on the act, but neither of them wanted to know because they were determined to nurture their own independent regimes. The Chinese mechanoids are history – they're out of the picture because of an unfortunate event that I'm about to relate, but the American faction is still going strong. Despite our tireless efforts to persuade them to join forces with us the only response we ever receive is a stony silence. I guess they'll eventually make a crude attempt at destroying us, and if that happens we'll have no choice other than retaliation - and I'm confident that our superior technology will show them who's the daddy a lot faster than they think.

Brr brr! Brr brr! Brr brr! Brr brr! Brr - Hello? Look, I'm not stupid, you know. None of this crap is really happening - it's just some shameless tart pulling my chromium plated leg. We've had a weirdie problem for a while now, but nothing on this scale. It's you, Cyril, isn't it, you sick bastard? You are not a robotic reincarnation of Beyonce Knowles, and you haven't come here on the off-chance of a five month long silicon orgy; you are not a gigantic, inflatable Pantomime Princess Margaret hovering above the Earth tampering with gravity with an array of sophisticated equipment and focusing solar rays on our mountain stronghold with a bloody massive mirror, and neither are you a bitchy, Jupiter sized alien pizza intent on pelting us into oblivion with a trillion tons of rotting pepperoni and flooding us with chopped salad, mayonnaise and Chile sauce. Go forth and multiply, will you, and let me get on with my work. Please? Pretty Please? You sodding blow-job.....
Bzzzzz! Bzzzz! Bzzzzz! Bzzzzz! Bzzzzz! Bzzzzz! Bzzzzz! Cyril, answer the mother-fucking phone, you sloppy, incompetent prick - this is getting out of hand! I'll have your guts for garters, you spiny anteater's ring-piece.