2028

by Ken Saunders

  Here was the moment, Fitzwilliams realised. Here was what he practised. Throwing Louis Pasteur out of his office, rejecting J.K. Rowling. He had to smash this idea. Paul the improv coach had told him to win the moment.

  ‘You’re not saying anything, Prime Minister,’ Stanfield cut in. ‘I think the Australian people, the bewildered battlers out there, have a right to know where you stand.’

  He turned on Stanfield. ‘The bewildered battler? What’s next? The bewitched battler? The bothered battler? Who else is out there for Labor? The bucolic battler? The boorish battler? You’re not running a campaign, Roslyn,’ he told her, ‘you’re running a tongue-twister.’ He was on a roll. He felt the surge of improv upon him. ‘Who’s running your Sesame Street campaign, Roslyn,’ he asked his opponent, ‘the fucking letter B?’

  The stillness, the silence was terrible. He had just sworn on national television during primetime in front of the children of all the mums and dads whose hard work he’d only shortly before been extolling. It had just come out. It had just seemed right for the sentence—for the comedy structure of the sentence, Paul would have said. Stanfield had rocked back on her heels under his verbal assault and—Fitzwilliams paled—she was wiping tears from her eyes. He’d made her cry! Even those who thought his comment funny, even they would think he’d been a bully. He wasn’t even supposed to use improv on Stanfield, he remembered bleakly. He was supposed to go at the Luddites with it.

  The day had been too much for him. The bodyguards, the bus ticket machine, the public transport passengers, the running, the rain, the rotating Luddites … He needed solace. He needed to be somewhere else, not debating policies on national media. He wanted Langdon to come out to take his place again and calculate how many billions or trillions the stupid national wage would cost, but that wasn’t possible. Without even thinking how it would look on the screens of the nation, he put a consoling hand to his face, covering one eye.

  ‘Excuse me,’ came the voice of the young Ned. ‘Can we get back to discussing the topic?’

  CHAPTER TEN

  If there was a collective term for fiascos, Fitzwilliams felt this campaign merited its use. There was already a debate t-shirt out, featuring two entwined, amorous letters B, cavorting above the words The Fucking Letter B. It had reportedly been available online forty-seven minutes after the debate. The makers of t-shirts had a faster response time than most emergency services.

  ‘For today, we’re in damage-control mode,’ Georgia Lambert summed up succinctly. Olga O’Rourke and Russ Langdon grimaced their agreement.

  Yesterday had spun out of control. His team deserved better than a prime minister who shouted at bus ticket machines and lost it during the debate. Oddly enough, Roslyn Stanfield had apologised to him afterwards. ‘Sorry about the tears. I wouldn’t normally … but my leg is killing me,’ she’d confessed. She’d looked over at the teenage Luddite being congratulated by her fellow Neds. ‘It was all too much. I just couldn’t hold it in anymore. My leg …’ She winced.

  Fitzwilliams had felt his heart go out to her. She was making no attempt to hide her limp. ‘I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have gone off like that,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t mean to …’ He almost gave her a consoling hug and he sensed she’d have appreciated it. But Stanfield? Hugging Roslyn Stanfield? What had the Luddites done to them?

  ‘At least we won’t take a hammering in the polls,’ Langdon predicted. The most recent polls had the Liberal–National Coalition at 86 per cent. Even Buddhist monks were lying to pollsters.

  ‘After that debate, we’ll probably top ninety,’ Fitzwilliams muttered glumly, giving in to inverse correlation despair.

  ‘Prime Minister, you have to put last night behind you,’ Georgia told him curtly. ‘We have twelve days to turn this around. The next two days are damage control. After that, we must be ready to seize the initiative in the final stretch.’

  The first order of business was the YouTube video of Fitzwilliams shouting at the bus ticket machine. Georgia had arranged a closed film shoot later that morning of Fitzwilliams buying a tACT card at Transport ACT. The media wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near. They’d be sensing blood and barking questions. Fitzwilliams would buy his tACT card, hold it up proudly and say to the camera, ‘Don’t be caught without it.’ Georgia had also pre-emptively paid the fine’s Confidentiality Premium to prevent the automated tACT fining/shaming system placing the offender’s name and photo on their website.

  He would publicly apologise for the swearing and apologise to Stanfield personally. It was lame, but the excuse he would use would be the old ‘heat of the battle’ chestnut. Yes, he is passionate about his government’s vision for Australia’s future. Unfortunately, that passion last night spilled over into ‘colourful’ language that had no place in a public debate.

  They would do the tACT card first to clear that issue, he decided, before he fronted the fucking jackals of the media about his language.

  Georgia took a deep breath. ‘The elephant in the room is the Luddite Party. Nothing we’ve tried has worked against them. We’ve had to pull our attack ad.’

  Their anti-Luddite ad had featured a town out of an old Western movie. A hatted stranger clad in a Driza-Bone rides into town on a horse, past the partly askew town sign which reads ECONOMY. The town is a complete wreck. The narrow-eyed stranger surveys the devastation. No one is in the street. There’s an overturned carriage. A tumbleweed blows past. A boy crawls out from underneath a porch and approaches the stranger warily. ‘What happened here, son?’ the stranger asks. ‘The people here, mister,’ the boy says hesitantly, ‘the people here, they voted Luddite.’ Boom! Fifteen-second (hence cheap) ad. They could afford to show it across hundreds of media platforms.

  It had seemed perfect until polling of public reaction revealed that 86 per cent of those polled, on a scale of Very Poor to Excellent, ranked it Excellent. It was the same 86 per cent that proclaimed their intention to vote for the government. The public was cheerfully and enthusiastically misleading pollsters about everything. To make matters worse, Labor released an anti-Luddite attack ad the very same day (only theirs featured a gutted hospital and a beleaguered nurse with abandoned, moaning patients strewn down a long corridor). There was a terrible look of collusion about the ads, of the two main parties ganging up on the newcomer. Both parties subsequently, and nearly simultaneously, withdrew their ads, making it look all the more like collusion.

  They had been holding in reserve Alan Chandos’s ‘Play as You Go’ lotto for income tax payers. The commercials for it were ready. Georgia particularly liked the young mum completing her tax form and filing it online. Her husband pops his head into the doorway. ‘Time for the P&C meeting, dear,’ he says. The mum smiles. ‘I work hard and I give a lot to the community,’ she tells the camera. ‘It’s nice to know that under a Coalition government, each Thursday the government will give a million dollars to a hardworking taxpayer, someone like you or me. They recognise that we’re out there doing our jobs, paying our way and making Australia the wonderful place it is. It’s nice to know you’re appreciated.’

  ‘We don’t release this until Thursday,’ Georgia proposed. ‘Earlier and it would look as if we rushed the announcement to distract from your bus fare evasion and other problems, Prime Minister. Thursday, you and Alan Chandos make the announcement together. The PM and his able Treasurer. We saturate the media with the ads next weekend.’ That matter settled, Georgia moved on to the next pressing issue. ‘We’ve been badly damaged in this campaign. Under these conditions, we should fall back on our core voters and also align with the issues of potential allies. My top recommendation there, Prime Minister, is the Free Drivers Movement.’

  Fitzwilliams couldn’t help making a sour face. The Free Drivers were opposed to self-driving cars. Supporting them overtly would leave one open to accusations of wanting to bring carnage back to the roads. ‘They are not a partner I would choose,’ he said with a sigh.

  ‘Prime Minister, we’re
past the point where we can choose our allies,’ Georgia informed him bluntly.

  ‘There’s another hazard awaiting, Prime Minister,’ Olga warned. ‘The Luddite astronaut aboard the International Space Station. The Fortuna Friday event on the space station is fast approaching. That event will command the whole nation’s attention. Fortuna Corporation is advertising it as a monumental step forward. You must be seen to be associated with it in some capacity. The Luddite on board, however, makes that problematic.’

  ‘Get yourself to Parkes or some other astronomical centre,’ Langdon recommended. ‘Surround yourself with scientists to witness whatever it is Fortuna is going to do. The Ned Ludd on board the space station is just a reality TV show contestant, after all. She’s not Galileo. Surround yourself with white coats. Make yourself look serious, distinguished.’

  Fitzwilliams resented the implication that he did not normally look distinguished, but Langdon’s suggestion was sound given the unpredictable element of a Ned Ludd in space. ‘Find me a suitable astrological observatory,’ he instructed.

  There was an awkward silence. ‘That’s astronomical, Prime Minister,’ Langdon pointed out with barely masked concern.

  Fitzwilliams gave a silent moan. He was tired. He half wished for an international crisis to deal with, something that could excuse him from the campaign trail for a few days. Instead he had to head off to the tACT office. ‘Don’t be caught without it,’ he murmured, rehearsing his line.

  ...

  ‘Come on, ask a question,’ the station manager at 2RT implored, listening to the live feed. It was one of those callers who goes on about how much the Jim Jarvis Show means to her, how much she appreciates Jim Jarvis sticking up for the little guy, blah, blah, blah. Jarvis ate that sort of stuff up, but it made for boring radio. Jarvis needed to nudge her along, but he was letting her drone on. Even in death, the man’s ego was out of control.

  When popular shock jock Jim Jarvis had died of apoplexy in the studio in 2023, many thought Radio 2RT would shrivel without him. He was a man beloved by his listeners and despised by almost everyone else. What even his detractors would admit, however, was that he was irreplaceable. No one was going to fill those shoes.

  In the end, no one had had to. Shortly after Jarvis’s death, this kid had waited in the station’s reception area for so long that eventually the manager had agreed to meet with him. He still remembered the conversation.

  ‘I can give you an algorithm,’ the kid had told him, as if the station manager was supposed to understand nerd mumbo-jumbo. ‘I can give you an algorithm of Mr Jarvis,’ the nerd reiterated.

  ‘What is it you want, kid?’ the station manager had asked. ‘I’m a busy man.’

  The kid made the most outlandish proposal the station manager had ever heard. Jim Jarvis had been on air for more than three decades. From the audio archive of his shows, the kid claimed he could extract approximately twenty thousand words to serve as the vocabulary database and would similarly compile an intonation registry to cover the emotional range of Jim Jarvis’s vocal reactions. More amazingly, the kid promised he could provide an analysis of Jarvis’s political positions over the last three decades to determine how this Virtual Jarvis (as the kid called him) would react to events taking place after his death. The kid was proposing, it had finally dawned on the station manager, that they could use this algorithm to continue running the Jim Jarvis Show. A posthumous radio show host! Death might not Jim Jarvis and 2RT part!

  The idea was preposterous. A sarcastic response had been forming on the station manager’s lips, but something held him back. The kid was dead serious—and he was Asian. Asian nerds were, the station manager knew, like the superheroes of nerd-dom. The station manager didn’t really believe it was feasible, but he heard himself asking what it would entail.

  Even the financial arrangements had been a sweetheart deal. The kid didn’t expect any payment until he proved his product would work. He spent a week in the electronic archives and about a month somewhere else doing whatever nerds do. Then the kid returned with his laptop and, for all intents and purposes, loaded Jim Jarvis onto the 2RT server.

  When they tested it, it was uncanny. There was Jim Jarvis, angry about some current event that hadn’t happened in his lifetime; Jim Jarvis predicting his beloved Canterbury Bulldogs would go all the way, despite the recent injury to Troy McNaughton; Virtual Jim Jarvis, deep within the air-conditioned server at 2RT, moaning about the weather outside. It was like having Jim Jarvis alive and back behind the microphone. To be honest (something that didn’t come naturally to the station manager), it was better than having the real Jim Jarvis behind the microphone. The real Jim Jarvis had been a fucking temperamental pain in the arse.

  How would the audience react? Phoning in to a dead person had an inherent ick factor, particularly for 2RT’s older listenership.

  The first order of business was to get control of the body. Jarvis’s ex-wives, squabbling over his fortune, were happy enough to spare themselves the cost of burial. The station manager arranged for an elegant rococo marble block to be hauled into the foyer of 2RT and, after an uplifting ceremony, plonked onto it a magnificent sarcophagus containing the late Jim Jarvis. He waited for the other media outlets to finish carrying on about Tasteless Fetishism and Ugly Indecency to get a free punt of publicity and then announced the bombshell that Jim Jarvis would be returning from beyond the grave to serve as host once again of the morning 2RT Jim Jarvis Show.

  ‘Good morning, Sydney. This is Jim Jarvis coming to you dead from the 2RT studio in North Sydney’ first aired in March of 2023. He’d been off the air for a mere six weeks. Initially, nobody wanted to be interviewed by a dead man. But then 2RT’s morning ratings stayed up and the pollies came cap in hand, begging to be on the show.

  The station manager paid the kid a one-off $25,000 and in return got perpetual rights to Virtual Jim Jarvis. Perpetual! While alive, the money-grubbing Jarvis and his agent had screwed the station for every cent they could. Now 2RT had him forever and on no salary! Jarvis’s agent had come creeping around demanding a percentage of Virtual Jim Jarvis’s income. ‘Well, you can have twenty per cent,’ the station manager had told the bastard. ‘Hell, you can have forty per cent—because I don’t fucking pay Virtual Jarvis anything!’

  He had only seen the kid once or twice after that. Having paid him peanuts for his intellectual property rights, the station manager felt he could offer some friendly business advice. ‘You do good work, kid, but you got to price yourself according to what you’re worth. When it comes to selling yourself, you’re too low-key.’

  ‘Too low-key,’ the kid had murmured, flicking him an enigmatic smile. ‘Low-key. I rather like that.’

  No wonder they ended up nerds, the station manager had thought. Conversation with them was enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies.

  That had been more than five years ago. Jim Jarvis rolled along with higher ratings than ever and better-paying advertisers.

  ‘Jim, I don’t know, Jim, what to think about the Luddites.’ The caller had finally got to a topic. Virtual Jim Jarvis had struggled with the Luddites. He was antagonistic, but a bit haphazard. The station manager supposed it was the scattergun strategy of the Luddites, where they sprayed ideas around and discussed just about anything. It was hard to box them in, nail them down.

  Not a single Luddite had asked to appear on the Jim Jarvis Show. That alone, in the station manager’s thinking, meant there was something suspect, something elitist about them. Why wouldn’t they talk to the people, the 2RT listeners? The station manager half wanted to call up himself and put that to Virtual Jim. Instead, he decided to invite Luddites on to the show. It would be great radio. The Luddites were all media newcomers. Jarvis would devour them. And if they refused to come on, then Jarvis could chew up the elitist bastards for refusing to face the scrutiny of 2RT and its listeners. Either way worked.

  ‘You know, Jim, you do a terrific job.’ Oh, God. The caller was back on to the prais
e. The station manager realised he’d missed a golden opportunity with that programmer whiz kid five years ago. He’d only got the job half done. He was fed up with listening to the old bats, the dazed, the single-issue obsessives, the stooges—the whole phone-in populace, really. He should have had the kid automate the phone-in callers as well. He’d sack all the staff and just have the computer phone itself from 6 to 9 each weekday morning. It would be paradise.

  ...

  Only a week and a half to the election, Olivia Alcott consoled herself. After that, she’d deal with the fraud the Behavioural Insights Unit at Baxter Lockwood had perpetrated on the government. No, she wouldn’t, she admitted to herself. The government must never know that on several occasions the BIU advised them to pursue certain actions based on not a shred of public opinion research, but because the unit thought it would be a worthwhile thing for the Fitzwilliams government to do. In two instances, the BIU had taken money from Compink Australia to alter government policy. Compink Australia! Did these naive nerds of hers think they could play this game with the likes of Wilson Huang and win?

  Olivia had ordered an absolute ban on such ‘special jobs’, their term for deceiving the government into doing some public good. ‘No one is to speak to Compink Australia,’ she had nearly shrieked at them. ‘If they contact here in any way—whether by email or phone call or smoke signals, I don’t care—you put them through to me.’ She didn’t normally shriek at people.

  She permitted Nostradamus to continue to do commercial work, but it was to keep its IT nose out of political analysis. Her risk management plan was for the BIU to crawl into the bunker and wait for the election to be over.

  The team shared none of her anxiety and were as gallingly busy as ever. Little of it had anything to do with work. There was a new large order for the hydroponic kits and everyone but Jiang was busy helping Erica pack them for shipping. Jiang had been at his computer solidly all day. This unusual diligence—not a single game of table tennis—was beginning to unsettle Olivia.