The idea first came up during a DARPA brainstorming session a few years ago. Someone in the brass asked a bunch of junior engineers in the High Mobility Infantry Soldier program to come up with a lightweight, all-terrain counterpart to the robot challenge that had been monopolizing all the press as of late. Dozens of fresh-faced university engineering students constantly infested the labs, when they should have been out getting honestly drunk instead of playing with PCBs and blow torches. It was assumed that none of these guys had gotten laid in a while, seeing as how they spent all their time tinkering with self-steering pickup trucks.
The robot vehicle guys weren’t the only ones stealing the thunder lately. Those windbag jerks over at Weapons Platform Research never stopped bragging about their damn Predator drones. Listening to them, one couldn’t help getting the impression that those remote-controlled flying marital aids could do just about anything, including making coffee for breakfast. Everyone knew the platform boys cheated at cards just to get the Air Force meatheads to sneak them into the drone operations center so they could play with their toys in the field. It was harmless fun at first, with the Xbox-raised joystick jockeys frequently buzzing goat herds on the other side of the world, scaring the crap out of the locals.
The yokels in the area had never been particularly happy about having infidels chase their livestock around the place with their horrid winged nuisances and would drive out in their jeeps to shake their fists at the drones, screaming Pashtu obscenities at the little bastards. Things got a bit out of hand when one of the drone controllers got a bit over-excited during a particularly obnoxious bit of aerobatics and accidentally spilled his Coke on the launch console, dropping a couple of laser-guided bombs on a Land Cruiser belonging to some Waziri chieftain. After this screwup, it was going to be difficult to keep the carnage under wraps, so Bolander, the navigation systems team lead, called a cousin at Central Intelligence and claimed they’d just completed a successful live weapons test on a known group of Al Qaeda operatives. The Pakistani army didn’t dare go into that neighborhood for a while afterwards, so nobody ever asked what terrorists would have been doing with the 50-odd now-disassembled sheep littering the smoking crater.
After the robot vehicle teams were asked to leave following a badly wired circuit that sent an F500 pickup, nicknamed “Fluffy”, through the cafeteria during lunchtime at 50mph, the infantry mobility team had a bit more peace and quiet to figure out some ways of giving soldiers laden with several hundred pounds of weapons, armor, electronics, supplies, pornographic magazines, beer and anything else a grunt needs in the field, the kind of movement advantage that would let them chase down hopped-up fanatics with AK-47s in narrow side streets.
Everyone’s nerves were on edge, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the project was on a tight deadline and an even tighter budget. Inter-office SRM (Stress-Relief Mission) competitions, usually involving substantial amounts of liquor, the roof terrace, and large electronic appliances liberated from other groups did a bit to improve morale. Bannock, who inevitably instigated the shenanigans, figured that using taxpayer money to buy more equipment from American manufacturers was a better way to stimulate the economy than giving it to bankers, who’d just use it to buy cocaine anyway. This all lasted until late one Tuesday night, Mrs. Holley, the assistant director’s personal secretary, failed to note the deep gouges in the pavement outside lab building C and parked her Mini Cooper in the wrong place on her way to “take dictation”, as the team euphemistically named her rumpus sessions in the conference room. Nobody ever claimed responsibility for having gravity-tested the storage tape array that Mrs. Holley found taking up the driver’s seat of what remained of her car later that evening.
Things looked glum, until Simonds, the junior micromotor engineer, found the leftovers of the custodial staff’s chocolate brownie supply. That cheered things up a bit. It cheered things up even more when Mohdi, the IIT exchange student from UCLA, inexplicably, quietly, started singing Bollywood show tunes in an oddly high voice. That drew some giggles, then more, until the entire crew was impossibly stoned, having neglected to realize that Drew, the Grateful-Dead-t-shirt-clad loser who operated the trash pickup golf cart and insisted every time on clipping the rear fender of whoever happened to be parked in spot 27, had been driving particularly erratically that day, and that after their brownie party, the maintenance guys had been uncharacteristically mellow. Everyone just figured that Johnson, the apprentice electrician, had a perfectly good reason to spend 45 minutes staring at the socket he’d been installing that didn’t necessarily involve a copious amount of pot baked into the brownie he’d just eaten.
The subject of unicycles arose after a meandering discussion about PC power supplies, tulips, astronomy, the true power behind the government, and finally, the problem at hand, which was a portable, lightweight, universal infantry vehicle. In one of his more lucid “wouldn’t it be cool if…?” moments that evening, Roberts, the mechanical engineer, tried to follow a logical chain of thought that kept popping up in his marijuana-choked mind…small size, rugged, simple, cheap, fluorescent…. Actually, the color hadn’t figured in the original army specs, but that wasn’t going to stop Johnson from including a degree of psychedelic coolness in the design, into which he launched himself with a determined frenzy once he’d decided that his protractor wasn’t actually trying to crawl away — all of which seemed nearly as funny to the rest of the team as the fact that Roberts had trouble staying on his chair while drafting.
The idea was readily accepted by the three colonels on the project evaluation board. This was considered a career dead end, and each of them wanted to get the hell back to his respective regimental HQ ASAP to prepare for some serious ass-kissing before the next round of promotions rolled about. Nobody would fault their decision — after all, these were some of the nation’s greatest scientific minds, stoned or not, solving the toughest challenges of the common defense, and if the goddamm French could mount an artillery piece on a Vespa, we could certainly put an infantryman on a unicycle.
The Mark 27 Portable Veterinary Inseminator (actually a strangely squat-looking unicycle given the name of an abandoned low-visibility project as a smokescreen against nosy reporters) went through the design and production stage in record time, due to Mohdi’s ability to get one of his numerous cousins to commit to a rush order job in his sweat shop outside Chennai. The first hundred units shipped Stateside in boxes labeled “Bananas — ripen before re-shipping” and went to the testing platoons for evaluation.
The test results of the world’s first personal combat unicycle resulted in no major failings, with several of the volunteers who had been ordered to participate in the project surviving the field trials with remarkably few serious fractured bones. Minor design flaws were observed, such as the propensity of the device to flip over from recoil when firing heavy weapons from the shoulder while riding, or the possibility that enemy soldiers would simply poke long sticks between the spokes of the wheels. However, it was estimated overall that in a combat deployment, enemy casualties might, given optimal conditions, actually exceed friendly injuries. Psychologically, the new weapon was proven to be a masterpiece, with simulated enemy troops literally reduced to combat ineffectiveness, from laughing at the vaguely embarrassed GIs frantically flailing their arms in an effort to remain upright.
A special 8-foot-high scout model was considered, but rejected as being impractical after repeated falls from inattentive snipers banging their heads into low street lamps and shop signs while looking in another direction. An airborne model also existed at one point in the form of a few prototypes, designed to be strapped under a paratrooper to allow a rolling start when landing in a “hot” zone. The development group, alas, underestimated the force with which the average parachutist hits the ground, their only exposure to such suicidal stunts as jumping out of a perfectly good airplane coming from childhoods spent watching action movies and playing war games instead of actually doing their homework. The resulting injuries, remarkably, left the army footing the bill for fewer than 20 gender reassignment surgeries for those parachutists who had managed to avoid getting their clumsy undercarriages caught in trees, swamps, chimneys and other obstacles and actually landed upright. And landed hard. Too hard. Thankfully, the army’s shiny new sex non-discrimination policy prevented the resulting paperwork from being too complicated.
During the invasion of Iraq, a testing platoon was issued with early versions of the combat unicycle — while the unit generally performed well on flat surfaces, the insurgents quickly developed the technique of lying in ambush by the roadside and jumping up and waving their arms to startle the riders. The resulting confusion would inevitably send badly balanced and overloaded infantrymen careening into each other, to the endless amusement of the local children watching the closest they’d thus far ever come to a clown circus.
The unicycle project was finally dropped after a little-known incident when the testing platoon accidentallyentered a patch of quicksand, to tragic yet strangely hilarious consequences, with 45 troopers simultaneously faceplanting in the soft ground. The design team is currently on indefinite administrative leave; their respective academic institutions have been asked to restrict themselves to providing research input on sanitary installations and camouflaged candy wrappers.
