It has come to my attention, via screams from the closet where my intern has trapped himself for over a week, that I haven’t done an Automotive Would You Rather since April. Holy crap! That’s miserable – all of you must be just desperate for Would You Rather content, probably to the point of seizing strangers’ arms in grocery stores and begging them to give you difficult and wildly improbably fictional automotive scenarios to pick from. I get that. Well, you can unhand those poor people, because I’m here to help. So, lotion those brains up good and get ready for some satisfying conundrums!
SCENARIO ONE: Terrified Lincoln
You’re listening to some news on your phone as you’re making a salad for dinner. In the process, as you’re chopping leeks and venison and balsa wood and cucumbers for your salad, you hear a story about how Microsoft, of all entities, has created quantum quasiparticles called Majorana zero which will have applications for quantum computing. As the report is being broadcast, the ingredients you happen to be mixing in your salad are reacting with the atoms and quarks in the surrounding atmosphere and are being arranged by the very mention of these quantum quasiparticles via the EM radiation of the data stream to your phone, such that your salad is causing the Majorana zero quasiparticles to be generated, and those quasiparticles are getting quantum-entangled with a sister-salad across the multiverse, this one existing in an alternate universe’s year 1863, and that entangled time-salad is being presented to President Abraham Lincoln.
The Majorana zero particles arrange themselves into a highly organized matrix capable of thought and action; because your salad provided the subatomic framework needed for these events to transpire, the Majorana zero matrix decides you are its creator, and as such must be rewarded. Silently scanning your synapses, the Majorana zero matrix discovers your love for cars, and grants you the ability to manifest into reality any car you’d like, as a real, drivable car!
Oh, there is one catch, though. Because the Salad of Creation is quantum-entangled with the 1863 time-salad, every car you manifest will have an instance of Abraham Lincoln in it, too. These Lincolns are pretty much identical to our universe’s Abraham Lincoln, except this one has reddish hair. Also, this Lincoln is even more prone to panic than our Lincoln was, and being blipped into existence over 160 years after their own time is going to be very traumatic for this Lincoln.
So, let’s say you blip a Lamborghini Miura into existence: in the passenger seat of that lovely car will be Abraham Lincoln, deeply confused and frightened, shaking like an opposed-three engine and shrieking and screaming at the top of his lungs. You’ll get in the car to drive it, and as soon as you stomp that throttle Lincoln will grab you by the shoulders and scream DEAR GOD WHAT IS THIS MADNESS and when you drive into the city and pass the first animated LCD billboard Lincoln will whip his head around and yell NO NO BEWITCHED PAINTING AHHHGGH WHY and then a plane will pass overhead and you’ll feel the hot spray of uncontrolled urination strike your leg as you turn to a writhing Lincoln gesturing wildly at the sky and bellowing EEEEAAAGUUUUUGGHHH IRON BIRD!
He’s going to be absolutely apoplectic, nonstop. There’s no calming him down. He’s freaked.
Oh, and because of the complex physics of the quantum realm, you can’t just drop old Abe off anywhere. He has to stay with the car for it to continue existing. You can gag him and tie him up, if you want, but it’s still our 16th president, and you’ll have to explain why he’s all tied up and crying in your trunk to someone at some point, probably.
You can blip the cars out of existence at will, and that will take Lincoln out, too, so at least you won’t have to leave him freaking his shit out in some parking deck while you have dinner. But as soon as you summon a new car, you’re getting a new Lincoln, in the same state of shock and panic.
SCENARIO TWO: Swap Souls To Swap Engines
Everyone likes engine swaps, right? Of course you do! It’s a great way to dramatically change the character of a given car, sometimes in a nice, unholy way! But, doing an engine swap is a colossal amount of work, arguably one of the hardest jobs you can undertake as someone who likes to wrench on cars. Your mind can think of all sorts of exciting engine swaps, but your available time and skill and resources just aren’t up to the challenge. At least, until you met that demon at your book club.
Yes, a demon, a literal demon, at your book club. The demon, named Clamazrael, hasn’t even started to read Infinite Jest and probably never will. He came there for souls, but just hasn’t been feeling it. He has taken a liking to you, though, and has looked into your soul and noted all of your dark desires, a shocking number of which revolve around cars. He wants souls, badly, but realizes that you may be key to helping him up his soul count, thanks to an interesting loophole in the technicalities of Hell’s soul-acquisition system.
You see, demons that take souls get their counters incremented when a soul is recorded leaving a body. Ordinarily, the soul would be placed into storage in the given demon’s fanny pack, but the tally gets incremented even if the soul is transferred into another being. Now, it’s technically possible for this demon to take, say, you, a dog, and a ferret, and transfer your soul into the dog, the dog’s soul into the ferret, and the ferret’s soul into you. Once a full loop of souls is made, you can get your soul back into you, and the intermediary beings, dog and ferret, will end up with each other’s souls. But, who cares, you have your soul, and the demon has their tally of souls increased! Win-win!
For this to work, though, the human has to willingly agree to give up their soul. So, to make this palatable for you, Clamazrael has agreed that if you bring him any two cars, he will use demonic magic to swap the two engines, perfectly and cleanly, from one car to another, as long as you’re willing to undergo the soul-loop procedure. So, for each time, you need to bring Clamazrael two cars and two animals of some kind. In the end, the demon will have another soul taken on the ledger, and you’ll have two engine-swapped cars and two animals with swapped souls.
You could sell the cars or just make money from doing strange engine swaps for customers! Want an MGA with a modern Coyote V8? Easy! Of course, you’ll also have to figure out what to do with a 2015 Ford Mustang that now has a 1500cc four-banger making 60 hp, but I bet someone will want it for the novelty value. Especially if you throw in a cat that acts like a dog!
So, what’s it going to be? Any car you want, but it has a freaking-out Abraham Lincoln shitting his pants in it, or being able to swap any cars’ engines, but you’ll have a lot of weird animals to deal with, and you’ll have to trust a demon. Time to choose!
sooo, what happens to Abe if I summon a Peel P50? Do i have a lap buddy?
Hes riding the roof like aunt edna
According to the internet all you need to actually do the demon thing are some aborted fetuses and a recipe from Hillary Clinton.
They say a fox is a dog running on cat firmware. Time to find out.
A demon that can swap a Demon into anything but you might have to live with a hellcat…. interesting.
“Especially if you throw in a cat that acts like a dog!”
My cat used to drink from the toilet and poop on the freshly mowed lawn. I think that demon deal is real.
So lets get a dog that acts like a cat: cross a “Demon possessed” Hellcat with an AC Greyhound and see what happens.
I’m seeing a loophole in the soul-swapping scenario: to effect the engine swap, you have to swap the souls of two animals, but Clamazrael didn’t say the swaps have to be permanent. I’d just get two dogs and swap their souls back and forth. Better yet, I’d get and ant farm, because who cares what happens to an ant’s soul?
I like your thinking. I’ll go with a drop of pond water and a gazillion amoebas.
I’ll take a Lincoln Continental with a screaming Lincoln in it.
I would go to all the cars & coffee events to piss people off.
Lincoln. Ketamine is cheap enough on the dark web, especially if I don’t have to make car payments. The admin with the demon thing sounds like a pain.
I cross the US/Canadian border too much to have undocumented presidents with me all the time. Soul demon it is.
Yes, I already know all about living in society. I work for a corporation, so this demon will be an improvement.
So, tangentially related to this topic: I know one weird thing about Lamborghini Miuras.
You see those two rectangular grills in the top of the hood in the picture up there? They are made from bolting 28 profiled aluminium plates together for each side. Although they look the same all 28 are slightly different profiles, so if you fit them together in the wrong order it’s a mess, and if you skip one you only find out when you try fitting it right at the end. And if you mix up some of the 28 plates from the other grill, well…
I had a chat with a guy who was restoring one, and when I said the grills looked cool the dam burst and all that came out as a sweary rant.
I have brother-in-laws who are twins, no problem swapping their souls, so I’ll do the soul swap thing.
I’ll swap the 261bhp 3.0 BMW N52 straight six from my Z4C in to my GT86 to make one perfect car and one efficient but reliable shopping BMW.
Actually if we do the swap thing again with the twins they’d get their own souls back, the demon would get a score of six, and I could swap the engines of my cousin’s 2CV and my brother’s Jag, just for the lols.
Lead battery fumes are a hell of a drug
…a HELL of a drug…
14 year old me never really got over seeing that viper powered hot rod with the windows on the engine bay… Though technically I could get that with either deal. So that brings me to side effects: A) I deal with Lincoln B) I get to see if a pigeon really is a flying rat. Option B sounds win win to me!
I love the Autopian’s west coast comments.
Can’t help but feel we’ve brushed over the ethical considerations of not just creating a panicked and screaming Lincoln variant each time, but also then effectively killing that variant each tube the car is returned to the aether.
Have we learned nothing from the MANY generally overwrought SciFi serials that tried to explore the similar ramifications of ‘resetting’ AI and other synthetic forms and thereby undoing any growth/learning and undermining their existence? No?
Okay, cool. Screaming Abe snd chloroform it is.
Counterpoint – never mess with demons under any circumstances.
I disagree. Aleister Crowley summoned Choronzon, and lived to tell the tale.
“Have we learned nothing from the MANY generally overwrought SciFi serials that tried to explore the similar ramifications of ‘resetting’ AI and other synthetic forms and thereby undoing any growth/learning and undermining their existence? No?”
Why would we? That’s TV. If TV were real all of life’s problems would be trivial and be solved in 42 minutes.
When my computer acts up I hit the reset button and its fine.
Demon swap (now 50/50)
I’ll take Lincoln for a spin. I’ll just knock him out with my half read copy of ‘Infinite Jest’. It’s a slog of a read.
I sure hope he appears sans top hat though, at 6’4” he’s already gonna feel cramped in most my automotive choices.
Driving a pony car with Lincoln in the passenger seat would be more fun than being a passenger in a Corvette with Biden at the wheel, but at least you’d get to talk about basically the same stuff.
If you were real mean, you could also conjure a first gen Miata with a hard top option…
I’ll take Lincoln, I’ll just bring some chloroform or something with me on every drive…
Good idea! Chloroform BOROform ha ha
or something
A: “Honey did you pack the chloroform for Lincoln?”
B: “I thought you said ‘Colorforms’.”
A: “This is gonna be a long road trip.”
B: “Just give him the Etch A Sketch, he’ll be fine.”
I’ll take Mr. Lincoln. I’ll quiet him down by asking, “Have you driven by Ford’s…lately?”
Re-read the swap situation again.
I’m not even sure I understand the soul/engine swap scenario. And if I’m honest, even if I attended a book club, it sure as hell wouldn’t be one where we’re reading Infinite Jest. It’s more likely to be John Green YA novels at best and more likely just the Costco flyer (Oh look, Tide pods are going on sale. I had better stock up.).
But the terrified Lincoln scenario is right out. A large part of Lincoln’s appeal was his unflappability. The entire damn country literally broke in two pieces, and he calmly put it all back together. This shrieking nutcase may look like our 16th president, but if he can’t help but to completely lose his shit at literally every turn, then he is not Abe Lincoln, and he is not someone I want anything to do with — let alone riding shotgun with me wherever I go.
So I gotta go with Clamazrael. And since I don’t fully understand the bargain, I’ll probably wind up effing it up by swapping an Iron Duke into a Countach and swapping myself into one of the neighborhood raccoons and eating out of my own trash can for the rest of my miserable rabies-infested life.
Oh gimme Honest Abe for sure. I mean, it wouldn’t be any different than the usual sounds coming from my passenger seat.
This raises a lot of messed up ethical questions.
Like if your dog was on its death bed and you could swap its soul with an unborn or freshly born puppy who would die in your dog’s body while your dog is a puppy again while retaining their memories would you do it?
I love my dogs more than anything else in this world but I don’t think I could do that.
Since we’ve already messed with dogs genetics so much I hope we can get the point where dogs can live as long as us (ethically).
Oh god no! I’d leave the puppy alone and swap souls with the dying dog. Old dog me would be much more fun at parties and me dog would understand the sacrifice. Can I get a belly rub? Anyone? I’m dying here.
My dad said son yer gonna drive me to drinkin’ if you don’t stop driving with hot, mad, Lincoln.
Perfect response!
Was off Autopian for 5 days for a very Autopian reason and missed my opportunity to make this joke myself. I’d do the demon thing. I know where to find prairie dogs.
Yeah no problem doing the John Wilkes Boothe to a fake annoying Lincoln. Might just do it in a lincoln for fun. As for the demon forget swapping let’s go joyride for souls. The devil does okay but how much better with a wingman. Hey dude i bet your soul you can’t jump higher than me to a NBA star. A little demon help i got a 12 foot vertical leap and a probable ahole soul going to hell. Now what would be a great soul gathering demon car?