2028

by Ken Saunders

  Into this historic opportunity of political dithering marched Autocar. Programmed into a vehicle, Autocar followed a driver’s every movement. It still let the motorist cut people off, pass on the shoulder and drive above the speed limit at times; what it didn’t do was allow critical accidents to occur. It would always seize control prior to the moment of crisis, taking over the steering when the drunken motorist was nodding off, reducing speed on the wet road before the car careened out of control.

  To avoid accusations that it was a tool of the nanny state, Autocar came with illegality settings whereby motorists could choose their level of disobedience of traffic laws with a maximum ceiling set at 25 per cent over the speed limit. Whatever the setting, though, Autocar would intercede if human life was imperilled. A car could still run a red light, but Autocar made sure it was only able to do so if everyone in that intersection would survive. Installing Autocar was the concession motorists had to make. It practically eliminated the death toll.

  The software programming required for Autocar to work was astoundingly complex and Agnieska ‘Aggie’ Posniak was among the very best of Autocar’s programmers. She had never met Colin Sanderson—the founder and CEO of Autocar—in person, but when she’d joined the company four years earlier, he had sent her (as he did all new employees) a copy of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot in which he had inscribed: Autocar will not through action or inaction allow a human to come to harm.

  However, a company such as Autocar could not survive on programming excellence alone. It needed the political stasis, the mix of driverless and motorist-driven cars, to be maintained. To that end, Aggie was also one of what Autocar called its ‘operatives’. As Autocar’s mole within the Royal Commission into Road Safety, a commission of critical importance to the company, she was to alert Autocar to which way the political winds were about to blow.

  No one on the commission knew she was with Autocar. Instead, she purported to be a bicyclist-rights enthusiast, representing a group called Bicyclism Australia. Bicyclism Australia was a totally phantom association. It had been created by Autocar solely as a means of manoeuvring Aggie on to the commission. This cyclist lobby group may have been conjured into existence by Autocar out of nothing, but, thanks to the company’s wizardry, it had an impressive internet presence—so impressive that not only had Aggie been appointed to the Royal Commission but, fourteen months of commission hearings later, Bicyclism Australia, to Autocar’s astonishment, had developed a sizeable and growing membership of actual cyclists. Aggie now found herself obliged to send out e-newsletters, rent occasional meeting spaces and produce tedious annual reports on behalf of Bicyclism Australia just to keep up the appearance of legitimacy in the eyes of the group’s loyal membership.

  It was a hot night to be attending Royal Commission hearings. Though she was still several kilometres from her destination, Aggie dutifully got off the train, hoisting her bicycle onto her shoulder as she climbed the steps out of the station. Attention to detail was important. The bicycle ride would be just enough distance to give her a credible film of sweat for her arrival at the public hearings.

  After more than a year of hearings, Aggie thought she had the other commissioners sussed. Two were plants from the Free Drivers movement (as the motorists now called themselves). Another was an operative from the Car Share people, who were playing a very subtle game in the new motoring world order. The rest were a hotchpotch of advertising firm types and automobile salespeople, many of whom now considered the driverless car to be their Frankenstein’s monster escaped from the lab. Finally, there was Sandra, a representative of the Australian Public Transport Alliance, a painfully sincere citizens group that all the other players could safely ignore. Given Aggie’s guise as a representative of cyclists, Sandra had gravitated to her as a fellow outcast from the main game.

  Aggie did not particularly approve of the industrial espionage, lobbying and political chicanery involved in her role as an operative. She simply had interests that overlapped with those of Autocar in its fight for survival. She had her own agenda and would be loyal to Autocar right up to the moment when she wasn’t any longer. Both Autocar and Aggie sensed the temporary nature of the alignment.

  When Aggie arrived, bicycle helmet under her arm, Sandra was the only commissioner seated at the table. The others were scattered around the room typing into their Genie phones. Sandra beckoned to Aggie and patted the chair beside her. ‘Agnieska,’ she hissed excitedly, ‘there’s a letter for you. Hand delivered.’

  Aggie blinked. No one sent letters anymore. No one could send letters anymore. ‘Hand delivered … by who?’

  ‘By whom,’ corrected Sandra, who was always un-splitting infinitives in the revisions to their commission reports, ‘and the answer is, I don’t know by whom. He didn’t leave a name.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  Sandra levelled her eyes on Aggie. ‘Look like? I’ll tell you what he looked like: he looked like a spy.’

  Aggie stared at the public transport activist. Was Sandra having a joke with her? She had never seemed the joking type before. ‘What do you mean he looked like a spy?’

  ‘Like in an old movie. Trench coat, sunglasses, a three-corner hat pulled low over a four-corner face.’ Sandra paused, as if hoping for a laugh, but got none.

  Aggie just stared at her, baffled.

  ‘A trench coat!’ Sandra remarked. ‘It’s thirty degrees out there.’

  ‘You’re making this up,’ Aggie suggested.

  ‘Making it up?’ Sandra repeated. ‘Well, have a look at this then.’

  She handed Aggie the envelope. It had Aggie’s full name on it but, underneath, it read: For Ned.

  ‘Who’s Ned?’ Sandra probed.

  ‘I’m Ned,’Aggie replied without hesitating.‘It’s an old nickname.’

  ‘What’s it about?’ Sandra asked, apparently feeling entitled to know. She had delivered the letter, after all. ‘Is it Royal Commission business?’

  ‘No, not Royal Commission business.’ Aggie could feel the excitement tingling through her. She could tell the envelope contained a plastic identity card. She shifted her eyes back to Sandra. ‘It’s about …’ Aggie paused, ‘to become interesting.’ It was going to be hard to concentrate on the hearings that night, and besides, she would soon have to resign from the commission anyway.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Despite the confidence he was exuding, Prime Minister Fitzwilliams could not help but feel that this cabinet, his carefully constructed cabinet, was an uninspiring group. They were what he called ‘lifers’: MPs who thought the way to get ahead was by keeping their own head down, hitching one’s wagon to the strongest horse around and being very, very careful where one used one’s credit card. Duration was their measure of success. Reliable, steadfast, said some. Dullards, the Prime Minister thought—with very few exceptions.

  It was his own doing. Three terms as PM, and over those years he had effectively seen off any rivals to his leadership. He had dispatched them all, the lean and hungry ones, those who would have used his fallen body as the podium from which to address the nation. The most threatening of them had been Boswell, Damian Boswell: poster boy of the private schools, movie-star handsome, witty—all things the Prime Minister was not. Damian Boswell had the common touch as well. He could mix it with the crowd at a Rabbitohs match and from there go straight on to ABC Classic FM to confide his love of Shostakovich. ‘I’ll give him Shostakovich,’ the PM had muttered darkly to Senator Olga O’Rourke. Olga soon saw to it that Damian Boswell was outmanoeuvred in cabinet and isolated to such an extent that Boswell was almost grateful to accept a posting as Australia’s ambassador to Russia, just to escape. The Prime Minister was not an overly vindictive man, although he did occasionally instruct his new ambassador in Moscow to tour some godforsaken mining town in the depths of the Siberian winter.

  The cabinet was a tepid crew, but they would do. It was the moment to go for a fourth term. His inner circle had been planning it for months
, his final campaign before retirement. Labor was in a feeble state. The honeymoon was over for Roslyn Stanfield, their newish leader. She was perceived as vacillating, thin on policy, a lightweight whose only ideas came from focus groups. The PR and marketing firm Baxter Lockwood Inc. had confirmed this for the Prime Minister via their own focus groups. Baxter Lockwood’s research had delivered Fitzwilliams three terms in power and he counted on their help to win the fourth.

  The Australian Greens, meanwhile, were in receivership. In the previous election, they had campaigned hard to ban some chemical … Fitzwilliams had mastered the name of it back then, but it eluded him now. The Greens had stumped up and down the country crying that if the stuff got into the water table, you could kiss agriculture goodbye. They might even have been right, scientifically speaking. Fitzwilliams had no idea. Being scientifically correct, however, had no particular clout when it came to the terms of the Tri-Ocean Free Trade Agreement. The Australian Greens were successfully sued for compensation by the manufacturer of Dioxy … something or other … for ‘unfair practices causing a diminution in trade’. The suit cost them almost a billion dollars, with the Akron, the US company, arguing that the damage to their reputation had been worldwide. The Australian Greens had no choice but to go into receivership and lodge an appeal. That the Akron company had been subsequently taken over by a German consortium which later went into receivership itself meant that no phoenix-like Green Party was likely to emerge from that legal morass for at least a decade.

  Fitzwilliams’ announcement of his intention to call a snap election had gone down well with cabinet. The polls were strong and already there was a taste of victory in the air. ‘Total confidentiality,’ he now told them. ‘I’m visiting the Governor-General tomorrow at two pm and going straight into a press conference at three thirty. That way we’ll capture the evening news with scarcely any time for Labor to react. At seven, we’ll have a “spontaneous” rally in front of Parliament House at the Stadlet. The whole of cabinet together on the platform. From there, we’ll disperse in different directions without talking to the press, telling them only that we are fanning out across the country to take our message to the people.’

  The election material packages from the campaign team lay before the cabinet members, each package tailored to the minister’s specific portfolio. It would contain the catchphrases, slogans, tactics and targets of the campaign to come. There were grunts of approval around the table.

  ‘Ah, Prime Minister …’

  The room fell silent, the interjection jarring the upbeat mood. All eyes, including the Prime Minister’s, shifted to Russell Langdon, the Minister for Security and Freedom.

  Fitzwilliams had always felt Langdon was born to be on the backbench. He possessed those contradictory attributes of a backbencher: an extreme deference to the Prime Minister that barely concealed a suppressed inclination to mutiny. Yet it was thanks to career backbencher Langdon, even more than Baxter Lockwood, that they were comfortably ensconced in their present positions. It was Langdon who had won them the last election, an election that even the Prime Minister had thought they would lose. The Labor leader then was impossibly good-looking, a charismatic charmer, gladhanding his way around the country and social media, muttering inanities about the need for change. He appeared unstoppable.

  But in their darkest electoral hour, backbencher Russ Langdon had managed to get his leg blown off. It happened at a campaign speech in Langdon’s safe electorate of Flinders (although safe, Prime Minister Fitzwilliams supposed, was probably not an accurate term in this case). A terrorist suicide bomber, a lone wolf who had objected to … the PM frowned … objected to the court ruling on prayer rooms in state schools? Three dead. Four if you counted the terrorist, but the media seldom did these days. Four and a bit if you counted Langdon’s left leg.

  The fifty-six-year-old Langdon was rushed to hospital where they amputated the leg and saved his life, and Langdon, doped up to his eyeballs on painkillers, summoned all his backbencher nous, propped himself up on his pillows and gave a smiling, double thumbs-up to the photographers. That photo had won the election. Suddenly everyone realised that they didn’t need Labor’s heart-throb with his shallow Tony Blair smile. They needed a steady hand. They needed the kind of indomitable spirit that was Russ Langdon.

  When re-elected, Prime Minister Fitzwilliams made Langdon the Minster for Security and Freedom. Whether he was competent to manage such an important portfolio didn’t overly worry Fitzwilliams. The bureaucrats of vital portfolios could run them no matter who was minister.

  ‘There may be a problem tomorrow, Prime Minister …’ Langdon now told his leader. He winced, shifting his artificial leg. The grimace irritated the PM, who sensed it was done to remind him of just what he owed Langdon. It was an uncharitable thought, but Fitzwilliams still felt it was true.

  ‘A problem?’

  ‘You said three thirty for the press conference and seven o’clock for the rally outside parliament.’

  The Prime Minister nodded, but Langdon appeared uncertain how to proceed. ‘It may be nothing, but there appear to be demonstrations scheduled at both those times—here in Canberra—right here, outside parliament.’

  ‘Demonstrations?’ the Prime Minister queried. How was such a thing even possible? He shot a glance at Olga, the veteran Minister for Communications. She looked equally surprised, but nodded at him reassuringly. It was nothing they couldn’t handle.

  It was not good to start off an election campaign dealing with the unexpected. He hadn’t encountered a demonstration for what … five, six years? On the other hand, it would be ridiculous to delay when everything was poised to go, including radio and internet interviews scheduled for ungodly hours on the morning after the election call. They had bought advertising, billboards, goodness knew what on the internet, and it was all scheduled for release at dawn on Wednesday.

  His face betrayed none of his deliberations. ‘I think Olga’s legislation will sideline any demonstrators sufficiently,’ he assured the cabinet, referring to the senator’s much-lauded Demonstration Protection Act of 2022. ‘We announce as scheduled tomorrow.’

  He redirected his attention to Russ Langdon. ‘Who’s planning these demonstrations?’ he asked. It never paid to ignore the unexpected.

  ‘This is somewhat surprising, Prime Minister.’

  ‘Just tell me, Russell,’ the PM urged, ignoring another wince from the minister as he shifted his leg.

  ‘Well, Prime Minister … it’s the Luddites.’

  ...

  Events had moved at a precipitous pace for Renard Prendergast. That he was one week later in the ASIO Canberra headquarters meeting with the legendary head of ASIO, Fiona Brennan, did not surprise him. He knew the letter he’d received in Low Expectations would go right to the top. Now, he and the director were to brief the Prime Minister on the matter.

  Fiona Brennan had been made ASIO director less than three years earlier, after a succession of fumbles, from the short reign of the director who had overseen the 20:20 Vision fiasco, followed by the PM’s patronage appointment (who was out of his depth) and then the know-it-all one who had annoyed the Americans. Brennan had steadied the ship. A career ASIO official, she knew the workings of every ASIO office. What made her legendary was the quality least expected of an ASIO director: Fiona Brennan had cultivated a certain grandmotherly charm. She could go on television and while sipping tea delicately from a china cup explain why ASIO had destroyed evidence of its activities in East Timor or peeked at the private tax records of thousands of Australians, and people would come away feeling that, well, she had to really. ASIO found itself with a PR star for the first time in its history. As Renard sat with her now, he found that the image she projected to the public was evidently real. She was charming and … nice.

  ‘You have done excellent work here, Renard.’ Brennan took off her glasses and fixed Renard with such a focused stare it made him wonder what possible use her glasses could be. ‘I should warn yo
u, the Prime Minister isn’t fond of ASIO and you were part of our lamented 20:20 Vision debacle several years ago.’ She smiled. ‘The Lustathon incident remains a sore point with him.’

  Renard was surprised the director had even spoken of it. Among ASIO employees, the word ‘Lustathon’ was treated with the same superstitious dread Shakespearean actors had of speaking the name Macbeth. The existence of the drug Lustathon had been rumoured for years; almost always, according to the urban myth engine that propelled it, linked to United States military research. The drug was purported to create an overpowering sexual desire in anyone exposed to it. American forces were alleged to have released it in the mountains of Afghanistan against the Taliban, setting off a homosexual orgy among the stolidly homophobic ranks of Taliban fighters, thus wreaking significant psychological damage on the enemy.

  Lustathon emerged from urban myth to nightly news during the 20:20 Vision project. An anarchist cell staged a dramatic gas attack in the Melbourne financial district, simultaneous issuing a statement to the media claiming to have released the libido-raising gas. No one really knew if Lustathon existed, let alone in gas form; certainly, in the Melbourne attack, the gas released was a harmless substitute. However, the disruption was enormous, far beyond what the anarchists had hoped. What they hadn’t anticipated was the so-called placebo effect on hard-working financial officers and day traders who believed they were under a Lustathon gas attack. The ensuing pandemonium and sexual abandon severely damaged the reputation of many distinguished firms in the financial sector.

  What had been devastating for ASIO was that the two perpetrators of the attack were ASIO agents on individual 20:20 Vision placements. Both thought they had penetrated the inner workings of the hard-core anarchist group; both, in their activist guises, thought they had converted the other to the cause and each had fallen in love with the other. None of the actual anarchists, who had deemed the plot foolish from the start, were involved.