"Was it actually getting harder to find a taxi?", Brian wondered to himself as he found he had walked half way from Paddington to King's Cross station without seeing a single one.
And thus began one of the most fascinating, dangerous, and scandalous investigations of his long and intrepid journalistic career.
Starting with visits to Knowledge Corner, the legendary cafe and on-ramp point for all would-be Hansom Cab drivers and moving on to the hushed corridors of the hyperscale self-driving e-bike company, Fahrt, the trail would peter out, only for his pride to be piqued once more when narrowly missed by one of said companies vehicles, apparently sans rider - "ha!" he exclaimed silently to himself "this ain't no sleepy hollow".
Indeed it wasn't, as the clues led him through Limehouse past the charnel houses, to the great Koala tea warehouses of the Tai Chi Chai conglomerate.
On his mind, the constant mantra "where are all the drivers going?, as plenty of them are still dithering around town on those very e--bikes, learning the statutory 320 routes in the bluebook, and coping with the vagaries of roadworks and christmas lights and unexploded traffic cones."
As luck would have it, one day, he managed to hail a ride in a good old fashioned diesel smoke spewing black cab, and, no luck needed there, the driver wouldn't shut up about it.
"You'll never believe the signup fee they now pay - back in my day, you had to buy a moped and clipboard and waterproof all yourself, and ride up and down until you could pass the test - the inspector, no-one ever learned his name, was one hard b*rd, i can tell you. Never let you by if you made one mistake - things like thinking swiss cottage was on the way to st johns wood, or crystal palace was close to ally pally. na, pain in the backside, even more than the seats in these things"...
"so" started Brian in a millisecond gap in the constant stream of nostalgia and cursing "where are all the drivers going then, if they are paid so well?".
"now theres the thing - its a real conundrum and I can tell you " continued keef almost without taking a breath and chewing on a cheese and onion white bread sandwich whilst executing a sudden u-turn right in front of an ambulance, nearly executing a traffic warden in the same manoeuvre. "they aint going home, which just adds to the mistry. and they ain't showing up at the footie " (Brian consulted his smart watch and ascertained that gate was indeed way down at Millwall). "But" and here the cabbie touched his nose, winked and nearly took out two nuns on a pedestrian crossing "they are drinking an awful lot of tea. You can find them lined up all weekend down in the docks, you know, by that big old pagoda between limehouse basin and cannery row or wharf or whatever its called".
This was the big break Brian had been waiting for. He hotfooted it (actually pedalled) down ther right away having paid off keef for his interesting route (from paddington to kings cross via alexandra and crytal palace really showed creativity, especially in diverse use of bridges over the river thames, approaching that of US movies allegedly set in London).
And that's where he found them all, stretched out in the tea dens in the catacombs beneath the Master Ting Academy. Drinking tea, talking nonsense, but all the while, their heads in some weird contrivance that looked all the world like an old fashioned digital perm machine.
Brian use his smart watch again to track the signals coming out of these machines and determined that, yes, indeed, it was heading back to Fahrt HQ, in grammerly square, behind, surprirse surprise, Kings Cross again. "what are they doing" he asked himself, especially as there wasn't anyone else there who would know.
Then a terrible thought struck him. Wasn't the founder of Fahrt also the guy who'd been going on about neural implants and direct mind control? Wasn't there a scandal when it was discovered that while the devices worked, they were once only use, since they erased the part of the brain that they interfaced to, in the process of sending the signals to the metacloud? What if his new outfit were crowdsourcing smart routes for their self-driving bikes, and hadn't figured out how to record the routes, so needed a constant supply of new graduates of the Knowledge, to keep the whole enterprise from collapsing? What if the answer to all these questions was "yes"?
Sadly, we will never know, as, ironically, he was knocked into the river by a black cab driven by someone the police say is probably called keef, although witnesses said it was hard to make out his features for all the blue air around the vehicle at the time.
