Mortal Engines - my remote control

The other night I had big plans. BIG PLANS. I was going to hire a DVD (Mortal Engines) and go home and watch it! I wish you could have seen my super excited face. So I ventured to the local Hoyts Kiosk – OLD SKOOL!, where a non-human machine thing dispensed the DVD into my hand in a cold, hard business transaction; just the way I like it.

Mortal Engines was released in early 2019, and I missed it at the cinema, and I’m up to the last book of the Mortal Engines Quartet by Philip Reeve, so have been mega keen to see the series come to life.

Anyway, anyway, my Mac is the one made of Air and thus does not allow things to be stuck in it, so I headed to my DVD player, which I haven’t activated since 1908, and the ‘child safety lock mode’ was on, with no remote to be seen for many, many miles. 

I turned my lounge upside down looking for that damned thing, getting more and more frustrated, the way you do when the world Zuckerberg created helps to turn you into an inpatient, demanding jerk who can’t just ‘be in the moment’ with a lost remote.

My lost remote is all very hilarious actually in this context, because the main character’s job in Mortal Engines is as an ye olde world historian who hunts down and trades in old tech to survive. Maybe he could have found my lost remote. Maybe that can be the second movie. 

Mortal Engines is a post-apocalyptic world where entire cities are mounted on wheels and drive around preying on each other and, let me tell you, I’m gonna kill my bloody remote when I find it.

So after lots of button pressing and holding, it quickly became apparent that I needed another way into the machine. Professionally trained ‘child safety lock mode’ defusers get paid a lot of money to do this job with a remote. One small mistake, and you’re dead.

So, I turned to the Googles to help me dismantle the 'child safety lock mode' sans remote. Unfortunately, I immediately ended up in one of those tech help forums, where the answers to questions create more confusion than the questions themselves. And then, before I knew what was happening, information technology folk starting peppering me with questions via a bot called Bob. I didn’t care for it, so I left the theatre of war, and took sanctuary IRL.

In the end, much like in the movie, the device wasn’t infiltrated, someone was mortally wounded in a sword duel, the crash drive was destroyed with an old tech nuclear warhead, and no-one lived happily ever after.