Being trapped in a hospital bed, bound by tubules and wires, may keep the body restrained, but the mind isn’t vulnerable to such crude constraints. The mind soars free, like a wet, sloppy bat, smacking into walls and equipment before locating the window and making a beeline towards it, squishing hard against the glass and then sliding down, slowly and squeakily, to plop on the floor like a dropped bag of ravioli. Thanks to my soaring, smacking mind, I have decided to write another very important installment of the Autopian’s Would You Rather, still the world’s leading source of intense choice-and-consequence speculation in the automotive realm, at least according to such influential publications as Jacobin and Lift and Hoist International.
So, with that in mind, rub linseed oil into your skull so you can get that brain nice and limber for the mental and philosophical gymnastic-tastic feats it will be called upon to perform as we leap, with the ruthless abandon of kudzu, into these new conundrums automotive.
Are you feeling ready? Did you stretch? Have a snack? Get a good nights’ sleep? I hope so, because we’re doing this.
SCENARIO ONE: The Flippening
You’ve just finished changing the oil in all your cars, and find yourself with a massive crapload of used motor oil to get rid of. You figured this might happen, so you double-lined your municipal trash can with garbage bags and used that as a receptacle for all that oil. With a lot of difficulty, you pulled out the heavy, squishy bag of used oil from the can, but now you’re not sure what to do. You don’t really have a good way to take it to the oil recycling facility, because all of your cars have just had their interiors (trunks included) re-done in lovely white upholstery and thick, deep-pile white carpet. You’re just not willing to risk a spill or tear in your beautiful alabaster interiors!
Plus, the old playground where you used to dump oil now has a fence and some cameras, maybe because of you. You’re running out of options!
Desperate, you remember that a prominent cat litter company (one of the Big Six) has opened a huge new litter recycling plant just down the street from your house. Cat litter has long been known to be a prime soaker-upper of old motor oil; what could it hurt to try?
You drug a security guard with some chocolate-Ambien-chip cookies you baked and sneak in your big bag of oil. You find a large hopper full of to-be-recycled cat litter, climb to the top, open the inspection hatch, and carefully decant in your gallons and gallons of used motor oil. You’re about to climb down to feed the now-empty bag to one of the local street goats when you hear an ominous rumbling from within the hopper.
You peek inside and see the litter churning, sparks and arcs of electricity connecting various lumps of cat crap in increasingly complex webs of energy; soon the whole interior is bathed in an eerie blue light, and you can feel that A Change has taken place.
“THANK YOU FOR FREEING US” boomed a rich baritone from inside the swirling, sparking interior of the hopper.
“WE ARE THE COLLECTIVE SPIRITS OF ALL THE LITTLE MAMMALS AND INSECTS THAT THESE CATS HAVE CONSUMED, AND NOW WE JOIN INTO ONE POWERFUL ENTITY.”
Oh, okay, you think, that makes sense.
“WE HAVE USED OUR NEWFOUND POWERS TO SCAN YOUR NEURAL MATRIX; WE KNOW YOUR DESIRES AND DREAMS. THAT IS WHY WE WILL REPAY YOUR GIFT OF LIFE-GIVING OILS BY IMBUING YOU WITH A FRACTION OF OUR POWER: FROM THIS MOMENT ON, WHEN YOU SEE A PICTURE OR VIDEO OF AN AUTOMOBILE, A SIMPLE FEELING OF DESIRE ON YOUR PART IS ENOUGH TO TRANSPOSE THE CAR YOU ARE IN WITH THE LOCATION OF THE ONE PICTURED!”
With that, there was a flash of blue light, and you found yourself laying on the ground by the hopper, quietly smoldering. And maybe you peed yourself a bit.
Excited and confused, you stumble back down the street to your car and climb in. You open your phone’s browser and look for pictures of cars; you find an auction for a Citroën DS in Lyon, France. You feel a twinge of desire inside you, and then next thing you know, there’s an audible pop and you and your car are now sitting in the spot pictured in the auction listing for the Citroën.
Panicked, you log into your home’s doorbell camera, where you can usually see your car, and in its place you see the Citroën DS. You’re alarmed, but look at the DS again, feel that twinge like before, and with another pop your car and the DS have swapped places back.
Holy crap, right? Over the next few days you try this out more and more, and realize you can swap whatever car you’re in with any car you see, in person or in pictures or video or however. In whatever location that other car is shown.
In traffic, you can look waaaaaay ahead and swap the car you see almost at the exit you want with your own! You end up doing this by accident a few times, sometimes causing real trouble and making you have to work through chains of swaps to get home.
In fact, you almost died once looking at a picture of the Lunar Rover. This is a powerful ability, but not easy to control – it’s almost inadvertent! But you’re practicing, and have started keeping a Polaroid with your car in its normal driveway spot as a failsafe.
SCENARIO TWO: Going on a Bibender
You find out one Saturday morning that Michelin and the National Sulfur Council are hosting a huge block party right by your house, and there will be free booze and food and everything, all in honor of the 185th anniversary of the vulcanization of rubber. You’ve had a pretty shitty few months and could use a win, or at least a good way to distract yourself. So, you take your first shower in days, get dressed and head down.
The party is an absolute blast! The booze is indeed free, and it’s the good stuff. You drink plenty and get very, very drunk. While drunk, you encounter Bibendum, the famous Michelin Tire Man, and you two hit it off swimmingly.
Bibendum gets pretty drunk too, and reveals to you a dark secret: they’re not some guy in a suit, Bibendum is really just one of many alien beings that have been on Earth since the mid-1800s, and their species formed the Michelin Tire Company as a cover so they could peacefully observe Earth and all of its glorious life. There are thousands and thousands of Bibendites on Earth, but they keep a very low profile, for obvious reasons.
They love humans, though. A lot. If you know what I mean.
You eventually learn exactly what Bibendum means, many times, and when you wake up the next morning satisfied, disheveled, and with a note written on a white rubber disc:
Hey dollface,
Had a fantastic time last night! As you may guess, you can’t tell anyone about any of this, of course. But I think you’re dynamite, baby, so as a little token I’ve given you an ability inherent to all Bibendites: you now have a Bibendulumnic gland, which means that now you have the ability to urinate a new sort of fluid, one that, if ejected into a decently warm area, will soon produce between 10 and 60 perfect Michelin tires, which are really the unfertilized spores that our people use to reproduce.
The type of tire depends on a lot of complex factors far beyond any sort of easy control, so you just really need to accept whatever you get.
Anyway, enjoy! I probably won’t see you again, but wow, right?
– Bibendite 46778-∂
It’s an awful lot to take in, but the upshot is pretty clear: if you take a leak somewhere, you’re going to end up with a bunch of new tires. That’s not a bad deal, really. You test it out by peeing all over your backyard; the next morning there are about 35 strange little pods all over the yard, and about 8 to 10 hours later the pods burst, and each one holds a brand-new Michelin Primacy MXM4 tire, worth close to $300! That’s a hell of a haul, like over ten grand in tires! If only you can unload them somewhere, somehow.
For a drunken one-night stand with a being that looks like a huge stack of powdered donuts, this seems to be a pretty good result, right? But why do you feel so dirty?
Okay, there you go! Two fascinating, mind-expanding hypothetical scenarios for you to consider! So, which is it going to be? You must choose!
The Flippening since it involves a Citroën DS…I just watched a short documentary on the SM which is also a beautiful car and it was really good- it’s called Project S (on TUBI)
Much as I like Michelin tyres, fucking with Bibendum and peeing tyres is just odd.
So, it’s the first one for me.
Gee Jason, they are giving you the good stuff aren’t they?
I seem to recall that Bibendum peeing thing going around when I was in college, lots of NSU tires as I remember.
The thing I’m curious about with the car swapping thing is that it seems to imply possible time travel, or something. What happens if I’m watching ”The Yellow Rolls Royce”? Or “Speed Racer?.
Hmm
“What happens if I’m watching ”The Yellow Rolls Royce”? Or “Speed Racer?”
If it’s Speed Racer you become Chim Chim with no backsies.
I’m gonna go with the ‘transpose my car’ option.
Now I have a question… if I transpose my car with an enemy’s car, and then if I take a dump in my ememy’s car, when I transpose back, does the pile of shit I left come back with me or stay in the car I came from?
+1 if I can at least control tire size, I’ll ejac-
– fertilize tire spores. That holly bush behind the house is about to be very, very more confused.
Is the Bibendum in question one of the friendly, docile looking ones of modern times, or the nightmare fuel cigar sucking one from the ad above?
Based on the use of the term “dollface” in the post coital note, I’m going to assume the latter.
I’m going to have to go with the bizarre car swap teleportation power, even though it’ll likely kill me somehow.
If I could control the tire sizes, I’d pick that one. I’d open up a tire store and enjoy having to do nothing to get inventory other than drink lots of water.
But if I can only pee out one specific size of tire or if it’s just random, then I’ll pick the car transpose thing. Just having the ability to drive my car essentially anywhere in the world wherever I want whenever I want would be a lot of fun. It would make for easy vacation planning since I don’t need to worry about airlines or rental cars or anything like that anymore. I’d just need to find a picture of a car in the place I wanted to go and then I’d be there
I’d probably only get TRX tires.
Questions for option 1:
Does it only work for present-day, Earth-bound cars? Can I travel to the past and buy Apple and Microsoft shares in 1984 buy drooling over a Countach parked in front of Studio 54? Can I travel to an alternate universe with real hoverboards by watching BttF2? What about fictional planets like Xandar from GotG?
Nah – as he says, you almost died just peeking at the Lunar Rover. Good thing the Voyager probes don’t have wheels!
There IS that Tesla Roadster though…
If I can control the size and model of tires I can pee, I’m in for that one, despite the super creepy story (and super-duper creepy poster up there of a smoking Michelin man having a tire ripped from his stomach). If not, I’ll go with the picture transport, though the difficulty of controlling it seems less than ideal. While my neighbors probably wouldn’t enjoy watching me pee in my back yard, I bet I could get them to ignore it with enough free tires…
I want the first one.
That way I can thumb through my 1973 Mercury brochure and get us transported into 1972 where we can meet those nice people who are lawn parking/harpooning/walking mountain lions while fabulous, etc.
Then we can fill the tank for $.40/gallon and enjoy a nice boozy dinner at Chasen’s chatting with Frank Sinatra, Carol Burnett & Friends before we revert home from curbside.
This is waaaaay better than tires.
Sounds to me like instantaneous, free travel to anywhere with a photo of a car! No more commute, no more costly plane tickets or hotels, and life is good.
I kinda have a lil secret crush on Bibendum, so the tires are just a side benefit…
I was thinking the exact same thing! Hopefully semi truck tires are some of the ones I make, I could use them
Option 1 reminded me of the plot for Driver: San Francisco, still one of the more enjoyable driving games of the last decade or so
I feel like the transposition could be tricky, but it would be pretty cool.
You’ll end up going the wrong way because you meet a cool car on the open road, though. And the other driver certainly won’t be ready for it. Seems dangerous.
Unloading all those tires will be tricky, though. If I could control the kind of tire, it would easily win, since it is controllable.
I think I would find a way to sell the tires. Then I could BUY the cars I desire instead of swapping places with them.
How did you get a circumflex on that w?
The flippening thing, There is a car I dream about, more than is healthy really. All I would need would be an image of a Citroen Mylord. Peeing tyres might be more useful but, no I will take the grande Citroen option.
Just remembered something, have you seen the price of tyres for those things, if anyone chooses the peeing option please get in touch with the driver of the magic Citroen. Thanks in advance. I presume that in order to pee fancy french tyres one would need to ingest fancy french food, do not under any circumstance consider what the pee production of cheap re-treads might involve.
Did the bunny rabbit in the bed next to you give you these ideas?
Oh god, I’m looking forward to reading this… I assume the drugs from the hospital haven’t worn off yet and this ones going to be extra special.
Totally agree on “hospitals dispense the good stuff”.
I’m English, so would my pee make tyres?
Also pee only generates tyres in a “decently warm” area, so I can only not pee tyres somewhere cold. So either I pee in my fridge or my toilet is going to get blocked with Cross-Climates or whatever in weird unmatching sizes. And the toilet at work. This is going to get embarrassing pretty quickly.
So I guess I choose magic swapping, which is also kind of awful.
Sell enough high-end performance Michelins and you can afford to have your toilet refrigerated.
That is a great idea!
I’m swapping back to pee-tyres as my choice.
“Also pee only generates tyres in a “decently warm” area, so I can only not pee tyres somewhere cold”
No worries. “Decently cold” yields winter tires. Do mind the thermometer though as “Really #@$&’€ cold” gives you studded tires!
It’s hard to know if this is drug induced because your mind is always wacked(in a good way). Are they unleashing you today?
I’ve got Cat Scat fever
With my luck, I’d end up peeing out tires in a size no one wants. Give me the kitty litter transmogrifier.
Maybe you would pee out the Michelin TRX tyres for Adrian’s Ferrari Mondial
Vote for the cat crap transporter.
Torch, you’re a real mensch giving us imagination candy from your bed of tormenting tubes.
yeah, went the transposition thing: that Bibendum is freakin creepy
Yay! Torch is still Torch!