A Blip in Modernity

Chapter 1. A Rare Arrival

The dilapidated railway station lay sleeping in the searing heat of the American Southwest desert sun. It was just a single wooden platform attached to a simple wooden building. Opposite the platform, on the other side of a single glistening steel track, sprawled a thirsty sun-baked sandy desert with a heat haze making it seem like a sea of golden waves.

The station had been sleeping for three years, dreaming its lonely endless dream, abandoned and in a state of extreme disrepair. Trains would only threaten to awaken it. In a few minutes, the midday train would speed through from the east... At three in the afternoon, another train would speed through from the west... Both trains would share the single track. Day after day after day, they would surge past the station shaking the twisted and weather-warped wooden platform floorboards. In three years they had never stopped to wake the station from its dream...

The station building combined a waiting room and a ticket office. Once it entertained the staff and passengers, but now it only entertained the high-pitched crying of a mild breeze sucking itself in through the open scars of the walls and ceiling. In the past, when the station was regularly in use, the station was dutifully re-painted bone-white every few years. Now the outside of the building was grey and lifeless, as the unyielding sun had blistered the white paint and all but peeled and blown it away. The matchboard overhang drooped forlornly, offering barely enough shade to the platform below. And swinging lazily and squeakily in the mild breeze from this overhang on a pair of rusty chains was a large rectangular metal signpost. Unlike the rest of the station, it was reasonably well preserved. And it said, almost apologetically: LITTLE TUMBLEWEED.

The tiny town clung to the railway line where it cowered barely alive, miserable and forgotten. It was an insignificant island floating in the sea-like desert whose waves of sand, rocks and cactus plants rose and fell in their infinitude as they disappeared towards every compass point of the heat-wavering horizon. Little Tumbleweed: a study of isolation; a tour de force of irrelevance; a home to 129 inhabitants. Little Tumbleweed, scorching beneath the daily sun, a place where the townsfolk moved in slow motion and insects seemed hardly to move at all.

The world of 2098 was racing ahead with science and technology—for this was the Age of Modernity—but Little Tumbleweed was simply not interested. In fact, Little Tumbleweed despised modernity. And with such a passion that it spat in modernity's eye and stabbed at its very heart. The town was an anachronism within an anachronism: a nineteenth century Wild West culture, supplemented with a late 1960s technology. Its only connection with the outside world was the twin strips of the singular glistening steel railway track. But in Little Tumbleweed, the station was no longer used and just a place for the town to collectively turn its back on modernity by ignoring the speedy high technology trains that shot by. Yes, the town was dreaming itself into oblivion...until—

'Hey!' cried Benson from the chunky cowhide upholstered barber's chair. His keen olive-green eyes had noticed something unusually exciting in the barber's mirror.

'Keep still, damn it!' said the bald, portly barber in the slow pedestrian Southwestern drawl of Little Tumbleweed. And he jerked Benson's manly, heavily tanned head roughly to the correct cutting angle, redirecting it the exact opposite way it wanted to go; the way only barbers can do.

'Hell and damnation,' retorted Benson, his particular silver-tongued drawl for once uncharacteristically and paradoxically hurried. Suddenly, he flew into action. Wildly shaking his head, he sprang out of his chair while ripping off his hairdressing cloak. The cloak went flying into the air shedding clumps of his hair. And even before the cloak had drifted to the floor, in a blur, he had charged out of the shop with his characteristic sleepy eyes unusually wide-awake.

The barber stormed to the open doorway roaring, 'Hey, Bense, where's my 20 bucks?' But he stood in hope more than in expectation on the raised wooden platform of the shop-side High Street walkway in his black cotton apron and trousers. Old Willy Henderson, the barber, would rarely leave the vicinity of his shop in working hours. He held his hands up to the searing sun, looking like a beetle peeping out from under a stone.