2028

by Ken Saunders

  Normally, morning radio interviews were closely controlled. The politician came prepared to talk about the chosen point of the day and the interviewer had time to raise a secondary topic towards the end. The politician repeated a key phrase on the primary topic several times, knowing that a good portion of the target audience was half asleep.

  The events of the day before, however, had left a field strewn with casualties upon which the crows of the media were eager to feast. By 8.30 am, Fitzwilliams was exhausted, his mind swimming in a morass of platitudes. He thought back on just a sample of his answers:

  A: This government is determined to protect demonstrators and I make no apology for that. If the Luddites choose to offend public decency, that reflects on them. I think the Australian people will see it for what it was, a hollow and rather pathetic publicity stunt.

  A: The Luddites have not told the people anything about what they stand for or their vision for Australia. Until they do, I don’t think they are worthy of comment.

  A: I don’t wish to comment further about the Luddites.

  A: No, I didn’t hear that [Russ Langdon asking Frank Knox: ‘How the hell did you ever become Minister for Defence?’] Russell and Frank are good friends [fake chuckle]. They like to give each other a bit of stick.

  A: No, I wouldn’t use the word ‘debacle’ [Fairfax Online’s headline description of yesterday’s events]. Yes, Murphy’s Law was working overtime last night [fake chuckle] but I think the Australian people, like me, can have a good laugh about it and move on.

  A: [To shock jock Jim Jarvis] No, I don’t think Senator O’Rourke is a ‘commie sympathiser’. She was praising first-aid training, not the Soviet system of government. I think it would be a good idea to have first-aid training added to our high school curriculum. [That had been a moment’s rashness. He’d better get Alan Chandos to cost it.]

  A: No, I tried to catch him. It just looks that way on the footage.

  The worst moment had come on ABC radio.

  Prime Minister: The Luddites haven’t told the Australian people what they stand for. They seem more like some sort of postmodern joke than a political party.

  Interviewer: In what way?

  Prime Minister: In what way what?

  Interviewer: In what way would you consider the Luddites to be postmodern?

  A terrible void had engulfed the airwaves. Something had to be said. His primal political spinal cord seized control: when cornered, answer a completely different question.

  Prime Minister: The Luddites said yesterday they want a meaningful debate about the future of this great country. I welcome that debate.

  Interviewer: Are you saying you’re willing to debate the Luddites?

  Prime Minister [hesitation]: I am saying I’m keen to visit every corner of this great country to get our message across.

  Interviewer: Will you debate Ned Ludd?

  Prime Minister: I think I have answered that question, Jenny.

  Interviewer: With respect, Prime Minister, you haven’t.

  Fitzwilliams hated that phrase. ‘With respect, Prime Minister.’ Interviewers only said that when they were sticking the knife between your ribs.

  It was only a single day in a long campaign, he consoled himself. Mopping up the mess and turning shambles into spin what was needed. It was for precisely that particular skill that Fitzwilliams could stomach having hired the likes of Lister St John.

  His campaign manager was waiting for him when he got back from the parliamentary studio. St John handed him a letter. ‘What’s this?’ Fitzwilliams asked.

  ‘My resignation. What a complete fucking balls-up yesterday!’ Lister declared. ‘I’m not working with your pack of clowns any longer. You don’t deserve me.’

  ‘On that we are agreed,’ Fitzwilliams answered stiffly. It was crystal clear to the Prime Minister what was happening here. Lister St John’s reputation could not survive another electoral fiasco, not with the skeleton of Senator Bolen lurking in his closet. He was jumping ship. Fitzwilliams fixed him with his most contemptuous stare. ‘When the going gets tough …’ he said quietly.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ St John snarled. ‘I got you elected three times, in case you’ve forgotten. It’s not as though I think you’re a great prime minister!’

  Fitzwilliams thought he had never seen a more unpleasant face. Not so much ugly as totally repellent. But now that the time had come to tell the odious Lister St John he was vermin, Fitzwilliams found he couldn’t be bothered. He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Just go,’ he said.

  Lister St John wanted the last word. ‘You’re fucking doomed,’ he predicted and swept away.

  A campaign manager quitting on the day after the election announcement would suggest that the campaign was in disarray. Nonetheless, Fitzwilliams couldn’t help but feel a sense of liberation as St John moved off. He scanned the letter. It spoke of ‘irreconcilable differences’, as if they had been married to each other. He noted that St John had backdated his resignation three days. It would dissociate him from the events of the day before.

  Olga O’Rourke and Russ Langdon were in the media room with several staffers. Olga was shaking her head, her arms crossed, her lips pressed.

  Langdon grimaced at Fitzwilliams. ‘More bad news, Prime Minister.’

  Langdon’s right arm was in a sling. The bad news could wait. ‘How’s the shoulder, Russ?’ he asked, touching him gently on the other arm. Langdon flinched in obvious pain. Fitzwilliams blinked. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I broke my left wrist in the fall as well,’ Langdon informed him.

  ‘Why don’t you have it in a cast?’

  ‘I don’t want them—’ Langdon nodded at the television screens ‘—to make more of a story of last night than they already have. I’ll see a doctor when all this has died down.’

  Fitzwilliams put a hand to his mouth. Langdon was rapidly running out of limbs with which to serve his party. ‘What’s the bad news?’ he asked reluctantly.

  ‘Show him,’ Olga murmured.

  On the screen, a YouTube video came up of Fitzwilliams and Olga on the tennis court. Olga had the ball in her hand. The screen Olga spoke:

  ‘You are no longer young, Prime Minister. You’re sixty-four.

  You’re not fast anymore. You need to be sharper.’

  ‘W-W-Where …?’ Fitzwilliams stammered. ‘Who filmed that?’

  ‘I checked for drones and journalists before speaking,’ Olga said, her voice uncharacteristically flat. ‘See how low the angle is? It was one of the primary school kids on the next court.’

  ‘Little bastard!’ Fitzwilliams exclaimed.

  ‘Probably a Kid-cam,’ Olga speculated. Kid-cams were the latest in child protection, a band around the wrist providing GPS location and a video/audio feed to a concerned parent. Not only could you be reassured that psychopaths had not taken your child, you could also check on whether the kid was putting any effort into their piano lessons.

  ‘There’s no context,’ Fitzwilliams fumed. ‘You were talking about tennis!’

  ‘Oh, there’s tennis.’ Olga advanced the clip. It showed Olga sending Fitzwilliams scuttling back and forth, stretching him further each time. Fitzwilliams closed his lips firmly. ‘I am sorry, Prime Minister,’ Olga murmured.

  About the room, heads were down. Those young staffers who could still meet Fitzwilliams’ gaze had eyes full of alarm. ‘I have here Lister St John’s resignation,’ he told them. He let the surprise ripple around him. It was a Henry V moment. ‘We are well rid of him,’ he declared. ‘Now let’s pick ourselves up and run a campaign! There’s an election to be won!’

  Some staffers applauded, mistaking his optimistic bluster for strategy. ‘We could use that old song!’ Langdon shouted, caught up in the mood. ‘The one about getting knocked down but getting up again. You know the song I mean. We use it in in our campaign promos. We splice in footage from last night. You can even put in me being pushed off the stage.’

  �
�Don’t be …’ Fitzwilliams stopped himself. He held up a hand as if trying to control the thought. The song Langdon proposed was forty years old. They needed something more modern. Fitzwilliams knew nothing of recent music. ‘I want you to find me an upbeat song,’ he instructed the young staffers, ‘preferably written by an Australian, indomitable spirit, that sort of thing.’ He clenched his fist. ‘We will use yesterday to our advantage.’ Suddenly the Holy Grail of the start of an election campaign seemed tantalisingly within grasp. ‘We’ll claim we’re now … the underdog!’

  ...

  Colin Sanderson was the founder and sole owner of Autocar. It was a pared-to-the-bone, cutting-edge organisation, the darling of IT e-journals, on top of the world. Its days were numbered.

  The driverless car would eventually become mandatory and with the last of the erratic free motorists off the road, there’d be no need for Autocar to save their lives anymore. Colin’s latest computer projection was that Autocar would maintain its dominant market position for another five hundred and eleven to five hundred and twenty-four days. Autocar having manoeuvred its employee, Aggie Posniak, on to the Royal Commission into Road Safety might extend that a little, but not forever. When the optimal moment came to cease business operations, Colin knew he’d click the TERMINATE BUSINESS button on his screen without a moment’s hesitation.

  He’d been working for hours but was still in his bathrobe. The trouble with working from home was you let yourself go. He hadn’t shaved. He hadn’t done the breakfast dishes—probably, he realised vaguely, because he hadn’t had breakfast. Colin Sanderson had made, if his bank balance was to be believed, 480 million dollars out of Autocar and yet his place was a dump. Big and grand and expensive, but a mess; no better than the share flat he’d had in his student days, only now he didn’t have any flatmates to blame for the state of the refrigerator. He could have hired a live-in cleaner, only he always imagined this cleaner sounding like his mother, carping on about all of his slovenly habits and the state of his room. He couldn’t face that.

  One of his computer’s tasks was to monitor all media for news items that could impact on the operations of Autocar. The message on his screen was that Autocar employee Aggie Posniak had yesterday engaged in political activity of an unauthorised nature. The computer’s face recognition software had identified Aggie as the main speaker at the Luddite demonstration outside Parliament House. Colin had trawled the media to find out what it was all about. DEBACLE read one headline, but that had more to do with the Prime Minister shoving cabinet ministers off a stage. Who and what the Luddites were, the media had no idea, although to judge by the number of photos, they were highly approving of the group’s dress code (or lack of it).

  He opened Aggie’s HR file. Do you wish to dismiss this employee? Yes/No appeared on the screen as it always did when he opened a personnel file. His hand hesitated over the Yes button. Unauthorised political activity. Membership in a secretive, unknown political party. She’d gone from trusted to dangerous in the blink of an eye.

  He had never met Aggie Posniak, having only interviewed her by Halo Hologram Plus. She was an excellent programmer, but he’d sacked many of those before. He flexed his fingers. Aggie Posniak and her Luddites had erupted onto the political scene yesterday and created havoc for the government.

  He breathed out. ‘A CEO cannot through action or inaction allow harm to come to the company,’ he intoned. He pressed Yes.

  She was dismissed.

  ...

  Renard Prendergast clutched his overnight bag to his chest, not even daring to stare out the bus window. He had met Fiona Brennan, the ASIO chief, only an hour earlier in a nondescript office of a business called Geodesic Technical Solutions.

  ‘I have no idea what they do,’ Fiona had told him. ‘We rent office space from them when we need to meet someone away from headquarters.’ Renard had thought he’d been summoned for a debriefing. Instead, Fiona Brennan had sacked him.

  ‘Don’t take it badly,’ she consoled him cheerily. ‘It’s just that you told the media yesterday that you were going to campaign for the Luddites in Sydney.’

  ‘I was undercover,’ he protested, recognising it as an odd description for a nude marcher. ‘I had to say something.’

  ‘Yes,’ Fiona agreed, ‘and you did well. It’s just that if it ever came out that ASIO had an undercover operative campaigning for a party, we’d be in deep trouble.’ She gave him her pleasant smile. ‘So I thought it best to fire you.’ She pushed a bulky envelope across the table.

  His eyes opened wide when he looked inside. The envelope was filled with fifty-dollar notes. There were thousands of dollars in the packet.

  ‘We’ll still pay you,’ she explained. ‘We just need to have you off our books for a while. Best not to deposit in a bank for now. It would look suspicious.’

  What she had done was backdate his sacking to December, putting it well before the appearance of the Luddites. With the assistance of a compliant big-four bank, ASIO had reversed his pay since then, taking them out of his bank account to leave no trace of there ever having been payment. ASIO, Fiona promised, would hire him back officially a discreet period after the election.

  Renard had never held more than a hundred dollars cash in his hands. Not even drug dealers used money anymore. ‘What am I supposed to do until then?’ he asked.

  ‘What you said you were going to do,’ Fiona replied. ‘Work for Ned Ludd in Sydney. Find out what you can. Let us know anything important.’

  There was close to five months’ pay in the envelope. He couldn’t hide it all in one place. He would have to divide it into smaller sums and spread them around. His parents could keep one. Taylor, his girlfriend, another. An important detail popped into his head. He cleared his throat. ‘What was I officially fired for?’

  Fiona looked at him sympathetically. ‘I thought it best to put down inappropriate sexual conduct,’ she answered. ‘We needed something that attracted a summary dismissal. At the Sydney ASIO staff party last December,’ she elaborated. ‘You know Geraldine Nesbitt? I put her as the complainant.’

  Renard had danced with Geraldine at that party. If anything, she seemed interested in him. Taylor did have a tendency towards jealousy. She didn’t like Geraldine, and Renard hadn’t told Taylor about dancing with her. ‘Don’t worry,’ Fiona said, ‘it will all come off your personnel file in time.’

  On the bus back to Sydney, he gradually realised he ought not to clutch his overnight bag so suspiciously, as if it had … well, nearly five months’ pay in it. He relaxed his grip and let the bag rest on his lap. He tried looking at his Gargantuan like everyone else on the bus. Luddites and Liberals were all over the news. Nothing much new had happened. The Prime Minister had pledged to make first-aid training mandatory in high schools. It seemed an odd issue on which to start an election.

  Two young women were taking turns looking around at him and, after a few pokes, the aisle-seat passenger came back to Renard’s seat. ‘You’re Ned Ludd, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You’re on all the networks.’ She made the eye motion to indicate that Renard should ask her to sit down.

  ‘Would you like to sit?’ he managed, his arm going instinctively to his overnight bag. Physical money was completely unnerving.

  ‘I didn’t recognise you at first,’ the woman said, shooting a quick glance at what Renard thought was his overnight bag, but realised, from her smile, was his groin. ‘I’ve got nothing against nudity,’ she said. This would have struck Renard as a promising beginning to a conversation had he not been in a relationship. ‘But was all that yesterday just a joke?’ the woman asked. ‘Are the Luddites for real?’

  The advantage of aligning with a political party whose only website item was an assertion that there were dragons in Central Australia was that you could wing it. Luddites run as individual candidates without a party platform, he informed her. ‘The Ned Ludd of Sydney will discuss issues with as many members of the electorate as she can,’ he promised, ‘listen t
o what people have to say, and then take the best of those ideas to parliament.’

  Her window-seat friend came down the aisle to join the conversation. Renard heard, ‘It’s Ned Ludd,’ whispered among the other passengers.

  ‘Hey, Ned,’ a man with a deep Jamaican accent called to him, ‘you got my vote.’

  He explained that he was not the candidate in Sydney, only working for her.

  ‘We live in Pyrmont,’ the two women—sisters it turned out—told him. ‘We’ll help with Ned’s campaign.’ They each touched their phones to Renard’s to transfer their phone numbers. The Jamaican man also signed up and a boy asked for an autograph. When the bus reached Central Station, two Australia Post drones were waiting, someone in the bus having tipped the media he was coming.

  Renard gave two short, stiff interviews while grasping his overnight bag in front of him with rigor mortis-like firmness. A message arrived on his Gargantuan. I AM WAITING FOR YOU ATYOUR PLACE. Taylor and he had been going out for six months. She had never used uppercase with him before. He made his way home with trepidation.