by Ken Saunders
The Behavioural Insights Unit was the elite team of Baxter Lockwood. Most of Baxter Lockwood’s work was in advertising design. The BIU’s work fed Olivia and the rest of Baxter Lockwood the data they needed to do that work. They were also the team that provided the Liberal Party with its firm feel on the pulse of the nation. They ran the focus groups, the statistical analyses of behavioural trends, the detailed studies of cultural and political developments. They gave the Prime Minister the information on which policies to choose and how to package them and flagged the policies of Labor to abuse and how to unpackage them. They’d given Fitzwilliams the means to win his three elections.
For all the prestige this brought, the BIU was ill-suited to the swank offices of Central Park. The BIU needed focus groups for their work and that meant Olivia and other senior managers could not entertain Baxter Lockwood’s sophisticated clients without encountering people padding about in thongs and wearing t-shirts inscribed with dubious sentiments. The BIU inevitably attracted—it simply couldn’t help it—the Australian people. Olivia had hit on the idea of shipping the whole unit out to the industrial zone of Tempe, rendering them out of sight in a place where office rental space was charmingly less expensive. No one at the swank head office was ever going to set eyes on another focus group straggler in daggy clothes beyond any possible claim to retro-hood.
Olivia looked about the office, dumbfounded. ‘There’s an election on,’ she squeaked. ‘This place should be as busy as …’ A simile failed to come to her lips. ‘Where’s …’ She tried to think of BIU staff names. ‘Tina? Where’s Mrs Giardino?’
‘Mrs Giardino is on Christmas break,’ Sam offered. It being late March, this was an expansive use of the word Christmas.
‘What’s happened here? What’s all that stuff in the focus-meeting pods?’ Olivia’s voice seemed to implore them to give her a reassuring answer. The glass-walled rooms she asked about were filled with bric-a-brac.
‘Tina’s parents had to downsize,’ Jiang explained, indicating the first room. ‘We’re just storing some of their stuff temporarily.’
‘And what’s that?’ Olivia pointed to the next room.
‘Erica set up hydroponics in there. Tomatoes mostly.’ Jiang tried smiling at her. ‘Would you like some?’
Olivia sank into a chair at one of the desks in the open-plan office. ‘I came here to announce that the Liberal Party has offered to double their contract with Baxter Lockwood until the election is over. Doubling the contract also means doubling the KIs.’
‘KIs?’ Sam queried.
‘Key impacts. For God’s sake, Sam, the term has been around for a year at least! You ought to know it.’ She hadn’t meant to raise her voice with him. As a CEO, she prided herself on how she treated her staff.
‘Don’t worry,’ Jiang assured her, ‘we’ll be able to deliver the KIs, even CGS’s if they need any.’ This was a reference to the output measures of the early 2020s. ‘We’ll be able to tell the Liberal Party whatever they want to know.’
‘How?’ Olivia gestured around her. ‘By asking a roomful of tomatoes?!’
Sam and Jiang exchanged glances. ‘Let us introduce you to Nostradamus,’ Sam said.
...
Twenty minutes later—or rather twenty-five minutes later, as they’d had to make her a good cup of tea afterwards—Olivia staggered to the street and summoned an available Auto Pilot. Auto Pilot was the driverless taxi service that had crushed the manned market, taking out both Taxis Combined and the once-mighty Uber. She clambered into the front seat and stated her destination.
‘Do you want Cabbie mode?’ the screen asked. The vehicle was capable of banter for those nostalgic for it.
She hit No. She needed time to think.
She’d learned that the Behavioural Insights Unit hadn’t seen a single focus group for almost the entire two years they had been in Tempe, not since Jiang had completed the design and testing of his Nostradamus program. Instead of actually surveying people and finding out how they reacted to various nuances of policy, Jiang had simply loaded thirty years’ worth of focus group data into Nostradamus. Much like the chess computers that could beat any human grandmaster because they could remember and analyse every move of every grandmaster game ever played, Nostradamus could tell you how the Australian people would react to even the subtlest shifts of policy. Ask it whether voters would react better to the term ‘tax break’ or ‘tax rebate’ and it could give you the postcodes of where each term would work best. Ask whether they wanted more boots on the ground in the Caucasus republics and it would tell you not only the answer (yes), but also when they would change their minds if the situation did not improve (fourteen months). It could tell you how many people would prefer to see the Prime Minister wear a striped tie. (37.4 per cent).
Olivia felt numb. ‘We’ve been telling our client that we’ve been intensely surveying voters,’ she lectured her two employees. ‘I mean human voters, those voters voting in five weeks,’ she emphasised. ‘This is fraud! We’ve been taking their money and we haven’t been doing any of the work they contracted us to do.’
Sam put on his soothing voice. ‘They’ve contracted us to give them answers, Olivia, and we’ve been giving them answers. Accurate answers. There’ll be plenty of KLs to go around.’
‘KIs!’
‘What’s a KL then?’
‘I think KL is Superman’s name on Krypton,’ Jiang chirped.
The team had used their free time to develop other interests. Erica was planning to market her low-cost, high-yield hydroponic kits. Tina was writing a fantasy novel. Mrs Giardino’s knitting group met there on Thursdays.
What wounded Olivia most was their reason for developing Nostradamus. At first, Sam claimed, they’d done it because holding all those inane focus group meetings was driving them slowly mad. ‘You don’t know what it was like listening to all that opinion all day!’ he told her. However, there was another reason underlying that one. If Jiang could invent Nostradamus, they reasoned, then somebody else could as well. They’d developed the program because they presumed Olivia already had someone working along those lines and would sack them all once it was served up to her.
She wasn’t like that. She wasn’t one of those CEOs who schemed to have all other jobs in the company automated. She liked having co-workers. Granted she hadn’t visited their Tempe office since the official opening party, but she valued people. Perhaps, it occurred to her for the first time, she wasn’t cut out to be a modern CEO. She’d never once thought to automate their jobs and sack the lot of them.
Sam tried to point out a silver lining. Nostradamus had successfully delivered KIs for two years now, and while it did subsidise the BIU workforce to go on extended holidays and play beach volleyball in the workplace (they had actually laid sand in one of the focus pods), it had also saved the company a packet. Over the two years, the absence of the focus groups had saved the company $60,000 in muffins, coffee, tea, milk and sugar. ‘I always hated that,’ Sam told her. ‘We’d drag in the public to ask their opinion on whether to increase our military commitment in Nagorno-Karabakh, but all they cared about was their next tea break, and they’d fret if we didn’t have any boysenberry vanilla muffins.’
Olivia held up her hand. ‘You saved the company sixty thousand dollars? Where is it?’ She may not have visited their office, but she knew their accounts. ‘You’ve been filing the standard muffins and coffee expenses every fortnight for the last two years.’ A sudden thought jolted her. ‘Hang on. We aren’t just talking about muffins and tea expenses. You paid—or pretended to pay—a stipend to each of those phantom focus group members you never interviewed. That’s—’ the calculations whirled in her head ‘—over two hundred thousand dollars.’ The magnitude of the sum wrenched her stomach. ‘Where’s that money?’ she demanded.
‘Don’t worry,’ Jiang intoned.
‘You keep telling me not to worry and yet you keep telling me alarming things.’
‘We were going to
embezzle it,’ he explained, ‘but only when you had brought in a rival Nostradamus and fired us. It was our own redundancy payment fund. Since you say you weren’t planning to fire us, you can have the money back. It’s in our phantom account.’
‘Two hundred and ninety-seven thousand dollars,’ Sam told her, seemingly proud. ‘No, wait,’ he corrected himself. ‘Two hundred and eighty-five thousand. I forgot about the Christmas party.’
She ignored the fact that they had spent $12,000 on a staff Christmas party for seven people (part of that sum had been used to fly Mrs Giardino back from Hamilton Island). ‘After this,’ Olivia shot at them, ‘how can I possibly trust you?’
‘You don’t have to trust us,’ Jiang replied. ‘You only have to trust Nostradamus.’
CHAPTER SIX
Amy Zhao waited impatiently for the calligrapher to finish her nails. Symbols of the planets this time, apparently. She hadn’t known the planets had symbols. CalliNail might be squiggling any old nonsense on her nails, she realised cynically.
She had much to tell CEO Wilson Huang. Her special agent Loki had pulled it off. The Prime Minister had agreed to allow the Luddites to participate in the leaders’ debate. Amy had not risked communicating her request directly to Loki, instead engaging her slovenly underemployed flatmate, an ex-postie. He still delivered flyers door-to-door on a casual basis. She hand-wrote the coded request to Loki and asked her flatmate to slip it under the door at Loki’s home address the next time he delivered Special Carpet Cleaning Offer flyers in Newtown. Amy would have gladly given the flatmate a hundred dollars to do this small task, but Amy Zhao the data entry clerk was supposed to be hard up. She’d offered instead to do the dishes for the whole month. It was, Amy sighed to herself, a case of bringing your work home with you.
When she entered the fingernail-drying room, a young girl, no more than seven or eight years old, was sitting there. ‘Niece,’ the girl said.
Wilson had sent his niece?
The girl admired her own fingernails a moment and then looked up at Amy. ‘Odin,’ she informed her.
Amy let out a breath. Odin was Wilson Huang’s agent inside ASIO. All Amy knew of Odin was that he or she worked in the surveillance section, not in operations. Odin could tell you what ASIO had discovered, not what they were planning. Odin must have alerted Wilson that ASIO now knew of his clandestine CalliNail meetings with Amy.
‘Pokémon,’ the girl grinned, showing Amy the tiny figures on her nails.
‘They’re very nice,’ Amy replied, realising she could speak normally in this room for a change. Her uncle’s message about ASIO delivered, Wilson’s niece left the room.
ASIO would certainly be asking themselves why Wilson Huang was going out of his way to rendezvous secretly with one of his data entry clerks. If ASIO was on to them, obviously Amy could no longer meet directly with Wilson. Was she sad about that? She did occasionally wonder whether she might be in love with Wilson. The answer, she always acknowledged, was no. She didn’t love Wilson Huang. What she loved was their peculiar relationship, their meeting of minds in a state of utter secrecy. She wanted nothing else from him. She couldn’t imagine sitting across a dinner table from him. She certainly couldn’t imagine waking up next to him in bed. More fundamentally, she couldn’t imagine a conversation with him where they used verbs.
On leaving CalliNail a few minutes later, she noted the Australia Post drone trailing her. She smiled. In intelligence, when the other side thought they had the upper hand on you, there was almost no limit to what you could make them believe. She could fill her ASIO watchers with disinformation. And pleasingly, Amy realised, glancing at the absurd planet symbols adorning her nails, ASIO having discovered their meeting spot meant she no longer was obliged to go to CalliNail!
That observation didn’t last until the next block. Having calligraphy done on her nails was the one indulgence the downtrodden data entry clerk Amy Zhao allowed herself. Amy examined the absurd planet symbols adorning her nails. She would have to keep up the pretence, she sighed in resignation.
...
It was still called the National Press Club, although none of the media giants had pressed anything onto paper for several years. The only newspaper Donna Hargreaves ever saw in print these days was the Green Left Weekly, the irony that it was the last of the newspapers still hacking down trees to pulp evidently lost on the old geezer flogging it outside her grocery shop. As Minister for Health and Ageing, Donna recognised she really ought to delete the word ‘geezer’ from her vocabulary.
From behind her lectern on the National Press Club stage, Hargreaves sized up her opponents. Labor’s Jessica Underhill, smiling and clearly nervous, was reviewing a bundle of note cards. Note cards—right out of the twentieth century—which, Hargreaves mused, was roughly where Labor policy was. Anyone who relied on note cards wasn’t ready for debate.
Donna Hargreaves had made it clear to Fitzwilliams that she wanted to be Minister for Health and Ageing. She wanted it because, unlike many of her cabinet colleagues, she was committed to the concept of an effective, free healthcare system. Others might run Medicare simply because it was something the government had to do—the political consequences of scrapping it altogether being catastrophic—however, they’d have gladly let it run down, wean as many voters as possible into private health care and blame the state governments for all the healthcare system’s problems. She, instead, had fought for the last six years to maintain funding and kept the ailing system from haemorrhaging too badly. Instead of blaming the state government for failures, she badgered them to meet their obligations. She made sure funding reached preventative programs and under-resourced hospitals. And she was also a master of illusion. Part of keeping the whole thing running was pretending it was running along just fine. She could say with total honesty that the healthcare system was working better now than it had been six years earlier.
Her eyes shifted to her other opponent. The Luddites had sent a woman who looked eighty years old. She was small in a shrunken way. It could be inadvisable to be aggressive in debating someone so frail-looking. The Luddite was plainly dressed—frumpy, even. Hargreaves eyes lit on the long brooch on the Luddite’s lapel and did a double-take. It wasn’t a brooch at all, but a stick of celery pinned there. Was it a joke? For a person of this Luddite’s age, it was sometimes a fine line between eccentricity and dementia. Hargreaves’ mind, in debating mode, quickly reviewed some statistics on the provision of dementia services.
The moderator began the introductions. Hargreaves reminded herself of her strategy for the triangular debate. Sideline Labor and then go after the Luddite. If Labor went for the Luddite, rise above it. ‘And representing the Luddite Party of Australia,’ the moderator finished, ‘Ned Ludd.’
‘The Australian people,’ Jessica Underhill said, launching into it and pointing at the elderly Luddite, ‘have a right to know your real name. Why do you and the rest of your party hide behind a false name?’
‘It is my real name,’ the Luddite replied gently. ‘I changed it to Ned Ludd nine years ago.’
‘But it’s not your real name,’ Labor’s shadow health minister insisted. ‘Tell the Australian people your real name!’
‘Well, dear …’ the Luddite twinkled at Jessica Underhill. The word ‘dear’ had been so intricately laced with condescension that Hargreaves was instantly on her guard. ‘You’ve changed your name too, haven’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’ Underhill was nonplussed.
‘You changed your name when you married, didn’t you? I suppose it was your choice to take the man’s surname—though,’ the Luddite editorialised briefly, ‘many women of my generation thought it was important not to do so. What was your real name again, dear?’
Jessica Underhill wanted to snap back that it wasn’t ‘dear’, but realised she shouldn’t respond petulantly to the old bat. ‘Braithwaite,’ she muttered. ‘Braithwaite,’ she repeated more loudly to indicate she wasn’t ashamed of it.
‘B
ut you also changed your first name,’ the Luddite prompted.
‘My name has always been Jessica,’ Underhill replied evenly.
Hargreaves could tell Underhill was disconcerted, but she couldn’t fathom why.
‘Ah, but was it always spelled that way?’ Ned Ludd probed.
‘I don’t think that’s important,’ Underhill said. ‘We’re here to discuss health and ageing.’
‘You’re the one who raised the names. Tell the Australian people how you used to spell your name.’
Jessica Underhill nee Braithwaite knew her parents would be watching. She had never told them about officially changing her name. She’d always insisted to them that it was just the media that couldn’t get it right. ‘J-E-S-S-’ Underhill began conventionally enough, before pausing. ‘Y,’ she soldiered on. There was a titter in the audience. ‘K.’ A few guffaws broke out. (Poor thing, thought Hargreaves. She would have changed her name too. What kind of parents did that to a child?) ‘A … H,’ Underhill finished bleakly.
Jessykah? Donna Hargreaves had to suppress a snort and was only partially successful. She took the opportunity to move in decisively. ‘I think we should talk about health and ageing and the challenges that face the next government in maintaining quality, free, efficient, accessible and fair health services.’ She always liked to rattle off a smorgasbord of descriptors.
The next fifteen minutes were fought out more traditionally. Labor insisted that emergency room wait times had increased, Hargreaves countering that they had reduced. The ageing population was either suffering, neglected and abandoned or they were the recipients of a comprehensive range of community and residential services that was world-class. The Liberal–National Coalition was either leading Medicare into an abyss or a golden age.
Ned Ludd mostly stayed out of this, which worried the moderator. Having a Luddite in the debate had been the prime drawcard for the media. He directed a general question to Ned Ludd on Luddite healthcare policy.