Popshot Magazine – August 2019

the programme as soon as the police leave. Together, Midhurst and I fast-forward
through grainy, under-saturated, footage of the car-park.
At 1am, a stag party appears, uncertain on their feet, and bellowing.
EXTERIOR. NIGHT. A CAR-PARK BATHED IN A NEON SKY.
Five men stagger towards The Menagerie. A brick is thrown off-screen, and broken
glass enters from stage left in return.
CUT TO: INTERIOR. NIGHT. A DARKENED ENTRANCE HALL.
The stag party stumbles and trips, snagging their novelty inflatable hats on the jagged
edges, as they squeeze themselves through the fissure in the window.
CUT TO: INTERIOR. NIGHT. THE MAIN AT TRACTION HALL.
The men bound around The Menagerie, cooing at the exhibits. They head for the
pride and glory; a gleaming metal box I had picked up from a man who had delivered
it at midnight with a forklift truck and a vicar, who consecrated the prongs as soon as
the cargo was loosed. The Fetish Engine.
Midhurst asks me what the Engine was designed to do. I answer as fully as I can.
The manual – for these things always come with manuals - claims that by combining
virtual reality, telepathy, and a few mechanisms used in the dairy industry, it can
provide the user with their deepest, darkest, truest fantasy. Not what they think they
want. What they truly crave. This is what had killed the man.
“Can we see what went wrong?” Midhurst asks.
I nod, and point to the ticker tape spooled at the base of the Engine. If we feed the
tape back through the Engine’s port, we will see the man’s fantasy in full surround-
sound technicolour.
So we don’t.