(aka The Clean Machine)

Bringing a whole new meaning to the term “cleaner emissions”, the Soap Bubble Car was the brainchild of wealthy research chemist (with an obsessive compulsive disorder for cleanliness) Serge Marangoni. His discovery of complex chemical compounds resulted in fluids with astonishingly high surface tension, easily strong enough to support the weight of a man. (In fact it was widely reported that one of his assistants remains trapped in a large soap bubble to this day. Dead, but very, very clean).

Here we see Marangoni himself, in his trademark trilby hat and raincoat, test driving an early prototype bubble car. Locomotion and steering is achieved by cunning deployment of airstreams into the four drive “wheels”, which cause them to rotate (for forward / reverse) and change size (to cause turning left or right).

Useful side-effects of bubble technology include the fact that the entire vehicle acts as an airbag in the event of a collision, and that it never needs to be washed.

Rightly or wrongly, many people blame the New Columbians for a lot of the world’s ills, but there can be no denying the enormity of the mistake (or ‘miscalculation’ as they put it) of continued and repeated tests of their new Positron bomb (an antimatter weapon with enormous destructive power (more later)) using the Earth’s Moon as a target.

Unfortunately, the final test was also the final straw, and the Moon collapsed into a cloud of antimatter which girdled the Earth for several weeks, ruining all astronomical observations and causing psychosis in wolves across the world, who had nothing to howl at.

Amazingly, the accident was successfully kept under wraps for many years afterward, thanks to the HALF project. From remote locations across the planet, small hydrogen balloons were launched every night into the hazy atmosphere, to provide a facsimile of the Moon.

As can be seen from the illustration, the phases of the moon are easily controlled by the Segmented Human Assisted Mask Mechanism (or SHAMM) with the controller (also known as the Lunar Tick due to his insect-like upper atmosphere protection garb) simply pulling on the appropriate control line.

The imitation was actually surprisingly good, and it was only due to one of the balloons exploding (those Lunar Ticks were mad enough to smoke while on duty) that the pretence was finally exposed.