by Paul Dueweke
* * *
Professor Halvorsen’s hair was long and blond, like her name. Though in her late forties, she had no trouble avoiding accumulations of fat since she subscribed to the latest regimen of drugs that sculpted her body chemistry to her desires. Her slender legs rose like saplings into the terry cloth attending her. She brushed her hair behind her right ear and walked toward her study where she sat down before a computer. Her hair slowly regained its desired position, strand by strand, like a child testing a distracted parent.
The dormant computer surged to life with a touch. With a few glances at icons and some verbal commands, she had ultra-high-resolution images of the three candidates from the Primary at her command. Now she could examine them again, but at her leisure and with all the power of the best image analysis software at her disposal.
She had worked at the University for nearly twenty years, though they’d not been easy ones. The problem wasn’t lack of publishing. She had seventy presentations and journal articles to her credit. She’d chaired numerous symposia and co-edited two books, one of which became a popular text book early in her career. The problem wasn’t her relationship with students or lack of teaching ability. The undergraduate course she had regularly taught was popular and received the highest grades from her students.
The University, however, hadn’t allowed her to teach a course for years. She was told that many of the students completing her class had “demonstrated an unhealthy attitude toward many of the basic tenants of twenty-first-century disciplined democracy” and that many parents and alumni had complained about her iconoclast views.
Cynical was the University’s word describing her view of Government, and there was no need for cynicism. The Government had taken dramatic steps to insure total and uncompromising honesty in the political process. Technology wrested every bit of lying and empire building out of the political arena. In fact, the socially correct term for politician had recently become social principal, which had been shortened to sopal and was being further shortened to pal by a subtle media campaign.
But Professor Halvorsen refused to believe that Government could be trusted to monitor its own integrity and maintain the degree of discipline presumed by its new role. Since the media’s traditional watchdog role had become compromised by its alignments with political parties, she felt there might no longer be anyone overseeing the overseer.
Most skeptics like her had been weeded out of the education establishment over the last twenty years. But her brother-in-law occupied a very influential position at the National Subsidy Foundation and she had an aunt at the National Pension for Preceptors. This helped make her maverick ways tolerable to an intolerant aristocracy.
Technology had become the principal tool of the many tentacles of Government. Not only did it allow unprecedented access to the minds of the electorate, it provided a subtle wall between it and them, a barrier that ordinary people could neither understand nor penetrate. Technology was the most effective isolation Government could maintain during a period when it claimed to be bringing both the leaders and the led into a historically unique milieu, a oneness of body and function that would preserve fundamental rights into the centuries that followed.
Professor Halvorsen had her PhD in political science, but understood that the science of poli-sci wasn’t the science of the technological elite. She felt she would have to understand technology if she were to understand the workings of this new republic, so she studied communication engineering. But this had become another wedge between herself and the Political Science Department. They resented her as uppity, an engineering transvestite. Her research into political trends and electro-optical imaging technology made her aware of the fantastic potential for its use and abuse.
This research and her outspokenness had gelled in the events of this evening. Tonight she would test her theory based on thousands of hours of research. It would be her vindication to the University. She would have hard data that not even an academic community, dedicated to the status quo and fearful of government funding agencies, could ignore.