Flash fiction, David Gaffney

COLONY

The Director of Good Ideas, Gregory Falter-Mountain, popped his head out from a trap door in the roof where they have been growing new Arts Council staff under hot lights, and asked me to come up and take a look. I ascended a ladder and entered a dazzling white room where row upon row of small people in pods lay perfectly still as if they were asleep. They were small, about the size of ventriloquist dolls, but Gregory Falter-Mountain assured me that they would grow to become full-sized members of staff. They all looked a little like Melvyn Bragg, even the female ones, with thick ruffled hair and an expression on their faces that suggested they had thought of something droll and would tell you later. Soon the entire Arts Council would be run by the creatures they were growing here. Smalls fan stirred the air about the staff member’s faces to help them get used to adversity, which they may meet in the real world. Lights were low, yet now and again, bursts of colour and fragments of film flashed across the walls and ceiling. Music and podcasts played to ensure that the subjects were equipped with good humour and imagination so they wouldn’t sound robotic like some of the earlier versions. I was told this was top secret. What was even more top secret was which previous members of Arts Council staff had been computer-powered hybrids of machine and flesh, who had since been decommissioned while we waited for this new batch. Maybe this was something we already knew, but weren’t aware that we knew, like the way the Chuckle brothers entered our consciousness long before they appeared on our screens. Mahler’s fifth was playing quietly out of the speakers and it reminded me that Mahler’s wife once worked as a lab assistant over-seeing a colony of praying mantis.