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The flying metal tubes were called airliners.
They were one hundred times faster than a horse, and twenty times faster than a ship. The airliners guzzled vast amounts of oil, and that was part of the reason for the energy crisis of 2162.
A holiday involved lots of strange rituals … mandatory rituals … and lots of money. Generally, people didn’t do any work on a holiday so they just wasted their time away, wasted their money away, and generally made themselves poorer.
And sunburnt!
They would come back home from a holiday and boast about how fantastic it was, and how the best bit was when SimpleSimon had had a drink or three, ate something called a Vindaloo, then lost his purse and couldn’t get a motorised hackney cab back to the inn.
SCENE 3
(An image of a mysterious institution, an airport.)
BENET
Up the road from here, there’s a place that we call a harbour, or a port. Well, in the old days there used to be places like that called airports. They were manically overcrowded hell holes of people … technology … and guardians.
• The robot guardian of the travel warrant;
• The bureaucratic guardian of the territorial integrity;
• The scatter brained guardian of the forbidden belongings; and
• The fire breathing guardian of the gate.
And they all hated each other!
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