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shape. But your average bollock-scratching couch potato isn’t thinking about that as he sits, glued to his screen, laughing at the contrived blunderings of a stage school halfwit and a talking alien called Alfonse. He doesn’t know I made Alfonse from an old car seat cover and a box of artificial hip joints I snaffled from a hospital skip. And he certainly doesn’t know that Alfonse’s big sister is a six-foot mechanical whore. It just wouldn’t figure in your average mind.
    So the months roll on. Dromedary sits back, counting the cash and, no doubt, rubbing his hands and licking his lips with glee. And me, Claire and Anja, we work underground in that bloody cellar, trying to make a fully articulated metal skeleton out of things we’ve found on scrapheaps and by begging for parts.
    Before The Great Isolation we just ordered whatever we needed, but sanctions mean that you can’t import mechanical components here in case they get weaponised. So we make do with what we’ve got and, eventually, we’ve got something . I won’t say she’s pretty and we haven’t got any form of artificial skin – it’s back to the garage for more seat leather for yours truly – and she’s ripped the ends off a few courgettes along the way, but we’ve got a tangible thing to show for our efforts and that means we might even get paid. Hell, we might even get a weekend off.
    Now, I can’t think of a delicate way of putting this other than to say that our creation needs road testing. I’m not doing it. That’s flat. Claire and Anja find the whole concept pretty morally repellent and haven’t got the necessary equipment anyway.
    I tell Dromedary next time I see him. He goes into great detail about a woman he met who tested vibrators. He said she rated them on a number of criteria including “abrasion when wet” and “abrasion when dry”. I ask what criteria we should use here and he lists the possibles in such a way that I stick my fingers in my ears and go “La la lah!” And Claire and Anja do the same. And Claire goes “Urgh!” and Anja says she never wants to hear those words coming out of that mouth again. It’s too creepy. Well, I wouldn’t trust Ambler with a blunt pencil. So we’re a bit stuck.
    But, luckily, our Glorious Leader intends to lead from the front. (And the back, once we’ve drilled a second orifice.) It doesn’t seem to matter that his mechanical sweetheart has the swarthy complexion of an old handbag. The old boy’s ready for the racetrack. After all, he’s gone fifty years without so much as starter flag. We retire as fast as our little legs will carry us.
    Now, every new product requires an operations manual and this is no exception. They’re pretty basic instructions: you stick it in and work your way up through the gears. We list the various settings. We figure you can have quite a pleasant evening starting on ‘Vaguely Disinterested Housewife’, move things up a little to ‘Accommodating Hussy’ and work yourself to a resounding finish with a vigorous bout of ‘Earthshake’. And then, as an envelope-pushing experiment, and certainly not something we’d put on the commercial product, we added yet another level, codenamed: ‘Shy Librarian With The Truly Weird Kink’. We never figured anybody would be stupid enough to use it. Well, we underestimated human curiosity. We see a button, we press it.
    Now I can’t rule out industrial sabotage. However I’m more inclined to believe that Dromedary thought he could run before he could walk. Or, perhaps it wasn’t the machine at all. Maybe it was all those years of pent up frustration and he smashed his pelvis into seventeen pieces through sheer enthusiasm.
    Still, they’ve managed to wire up the bits and he’s now wearing a rather fetching genital cast. So I guess the moral of this story is that taking your work home with you is a very bad idea.
     
    Okay, so what do you want to know next? Bactrian? Yes, let’s have a little more on