The Colonists

by Keith Fenwick

  Former Vice-President Wilmot must have known more than he had let on about the situation regarding President Mitchell’s demise and the way Mitchell had lost his mind. Wilmot and General Smith had been in cahoots while they developed some new world order, right about the time Automedon had been discovered heading for Earth, and Mitchell had lost his marbles. Chump had attempted to bully his way onto the team dealing with the possibility the asteroid might collide with Earth, in the hope of making some form of political capital and injecting life into his flagging presidential campaign. This strategy had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, but not on his terms.

  He had gone from being a rank outsider in the early race to easily taking his party’s primary, and then the election. However, there were unintended consequences to this success.

  Realising his ambition of being President of the United Sates, something he had never really considered possible, even in his wildest dreams, was a fantastic achievement. However, in doing so he had become a puppet of the General, and the nebulous group the General answered to.

  He was sure the hick farmer from New Zealand who had tormented him when he attempted to gate-crash the asteroid collision committee had something to do with it, but he could never figure out how. Besides, he had never really believed the asteroid would trouble the planet and had publicly put his trust in God, who would ensure no harm came to America and American interests.

  “I Tweet every day. Isn’t that enough?” Chump had insisted, when he started to protest about his new appointments schedule.

  “Anyone could be sending those Tweets, you know that. You know it and so does everyone else.” The General had controlled Chump's account for months, explaining the transition to a more presidential and less inflammatory content. Chump's use of the platform to attack his enemies and bully anyone who slighted him was now forbidden. These days he wasn’t allowed a device giving him access to a social media platform, let alone email (something he had never really got the hang of anyway).

  “Besides, it’s not the same. People need to be able to see you in the flesh. You need to be visible. People know you have a huge communications team who can craft your messages for you,” the General explained.

  General Smith had temporarily given Chump his phone back when he won the election. When Chump had almost kicked off a global panic that the Earth was about to be invaded by aliens with a random Tweet, the General decided enough was enough and confiscated Chump's smart phone and replaced it with the simplest device he could find. It was only capable of receiving and sending texts and voice calls. He also took away Chump's tablet and laptop, and from them on took complete control over all his communications.

  “Are you clear on what today’s message is?” Doctor Shelly Shaw asked. Shelly was standing in for the General, preparing Chump for what was going to become a regular appearance in the White House press room. She stood just behind Chump as he preened in front of the mirror.

  Chump turned to gaze at her. She was a real beauty. He leant forward his lips slightly puckered, eyes firmly shut, aiming to give her a peck on her delicious cheek.

  Smack!

  Chump’s head started to spin, and he was sure he saw a few stars.

  “By golly. You’ve got some spunk,” he declared. Despite being so roundly rejected, the slap around the head made Shelly even more attractive to him. He got off on feisty, confident women and had pursued them relentlessly in the past. They were more likely to tell him where to go if he crossed a line they weren’t happy with, without any recriminations and hints about his unacceptable behaviour that could be picked up by the media or his enemies. He gave the shy demure ones a wide birth, because in his experience they were more likely to make trouble if they took his intentions the wrong way. He’d also learnt another lesson the last time he had made an improper suggestion in the General’s hearing.

  “If you say anything like that again to a woman in my presence, if I hear you have made a vulgar or improper suggestion to or about anyone, I’ll take you down to a dark corner in the basement car park and give you a bloody good hiding,” the General threatened. Chump didn’t want to take any chances, but sometimes he just couldn’t help himself. The General’s statement had also confused him, he’d always associated the dark corners of car parks with indulgence in illicit pleasures; smoking, cussing, and drinking out of the public eye, not somewhere where punishment would be meted out.

  “Now. Look at your cue cards and repeat the topics you are going to talk about one more time. We need to make sure we’re on the same page.”

  “I can’t go back on my word to the Russians, President Bobrovsky's a personal friend of mine,” Chump protested. “I promised him I wouldn’t object if he wanted to run a military exercise simulating an invasion of the Baltic states.”

  “Fuck. This guy's an idiot. How he ever got elected is beyond me.” Bruce was sitting in his office with his feet on his desk, cuddling a cold beer. He was taking a special interest in both the press conference and the military exercise Chump was about to denounce. It was a dangerous example of sabre rattling, escalating already high tensions in the area, which could result in an armed conflict breaking out if they didn’t intervene. Bruce didn’t often test the full extent of his capability, but sometimes he just couldn’t help himself and felt like playing God.

  “Get your feet off desk, dear,” Ngaio, his wife-to-be said, handing him a refill, “and turn those feeds off. You have to learn to let go and let the people you have entrusted to deal with these situations get on with their job.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “What will my wife say? She introduced me to Boris, which was the beginning of all those very great deals we did together.”

  “You don’t need to worry about your wife any longer, Mr President, we’re looking after you now. She is no longer able to influence you.”

  Shelly had been alarmed to discover how much control Chump’s wife had. Even more interesting was the funding she had brought to the marriage, saving his barely solvent business interests, and enabling new more successful ventures. The money trail led via her Eastern European ‘family’ all the way to Moscow.

  “You’d be amazed at the bedfellows some of our politicians have and their brazenness when their wrongdoings are discovered,” Vice-President Wilmot had told her and Dick when they discussed the suggestion the Russians had attempted to buy the Presidency of the United States, employing Chump as their unwitting stooge. “There is a particular kind of politician present in our society who seems to believe if a lie is told often enough and loud enough then most of us will eventually be convinced the lie is the truth. None of this is helped by the slow death of the old media who exposed the worst excesses of this behaviour and helped call people to account, or the rise of anti-intellectualism and the glorification of the village idiot in our culture. It’s a sad indictment on our society.”

  “I’m not convinced...” Shelly had started to say. But this was music to Dick’s ears and confirmed all his prejudices about American politics. Wilmot had been on a roll at the time and Shelly found it difficult to interrupt his flow while they were discussing how to handle the situation with Mrs Chump.

  “I’m not sure if this great intellectual leap backwards is part of a wider conspiracy to dumb down the American public so they don’t realise they are being exploited, but if it is, it seems to be working, because a sizeable chunk of the population laps up the lies and the myths the likes of Chump spew,” Wilmot had added. “There’s a whole industry out there aimed at asserting the rights of the individual and convincing people a pure free market is the only fair form of economy because there will always be a balance of supply and demand. This fantasy is perpetrated by people who control huge chunks of the economy, who are hell bent on preventing anyone from challenging that status and use their resources to stamp out any competition and challenges to their privilege. They perpetuate the myth the market is the ultimate regulator, but because they control most of the resource and cap
ital, its always skewed in their favour.”

  “But…”

  Wilmot brushed aside Shelly’s attempt to interrupt him. “Men like Chump believe they are invulnerable, too big to fail. Untouchable, like a big bank. What’s worse is we repeatedly let them get away with this kind of behaviour, because secretly most of us wish we were rich and powerful like Chump and his cronies are.”

  Dick considered this for a moment. “Yeah, I get it, but you can’t tell me that purposely denying decent education to a significant section of the population isn’t part of a wider plan? Because this is how it seems to me being an outsider. The rich are aiming to get richer at the expense of the poor.”

  Wilmot had shrugged his shoulders. “There are certainly a number of conservative think tanks, supported by big corporations who contribute to candidates at all levels of state and federal institutions, who are convinced it’s not in the best interests of the economy to have open and democratic government, ensuring the basic needs of the labour force are met. They intend to re-write the constitution and enshrine the rights of the individual at the expense of the greater good if they get the opportunity.”

  As the layers of deceit had been peeled away, the second Mrs Chump was exposed as the driving force behind the expansion of the Chump empire.

  Soon after they had been married, Ronald D Chump had been quickly relegated to be the figurehead of a family business which had evolved over several generations, and he had almost bankrupted several times. Nobody thought she was anything more than eye candy, but the second Mrs Chump had been a key figure in a plot playing a very long high stakes game.

  The Kremlin or their surrogates had ensured the Chump empire got the finance needed to close deals. It was agents of the Kremlin who could make opposition to their developments disappear or smooth the way. It was the ‘family’ who gently stroked his ego and manipulated the press in his favour until the perfectly natural thing for him to do was run for the senate and then for President.

  “Are you sure about my wife?” President Ronald D Chump asked. “The last time we spoke she said Boris was very unhappy with me.”

  “Boris has more important things to do today than worry about you,” Shelly informed him. She was babysitting the President while General Smith was in a highly secret meeting of key world leaders, including the Russian President, laying out the expectations of a new world order, and providing a demonstration if one was needed.

  The Russians would soon get used to the back-flips on promises made by their President, in the same way the American electorate was, and remain equally powerless to do anything about it.

  Repeal his predecessor’s universal health care plan? No, let’s provide even greater coverage. Decrease taxes? Yes, but only for low and middle-income earners, let's increase them for the rich. Lower government spending? No, let's increase infrastructure spending to stimulate growth and spend those tax dollars. On and on it went, to the bewilderment of Chump's supporters and enemies alike.

  “Please focus on the job in hand, Mr President. Now what is the main purpose of today’s press conference?” The General’s team had quickly found out it was impossible to get Chump to memorise a speech. They had discovered the best way to keep him on topic was to give him cue cards with key words and simple sentences printed on them in a very large font and get him to fill in the gaps with adjectives and phrases like ‘great' and 'very great', or 'very, very, great'. 'Enormous' was another favourite of his.

  Chump held up the first card and read aloud.

  “The United States is concerned about the build-up of troops on the borders of Estonia and Latvia. We will not tolerate any military incursion into the territory of our allies and remain fully committed to supporting NATO.” There was no way an invasion could proceed, even if President Boris Bobrovsky thought he might be able to roll his tanks across the border while the world was preoccupied with the disarray in Chump’s America.

  “Very good, Mr President. Now what’s next?”

  “I don’t even know where Latvia and Estonia are! I’m sure Boris means them no harm. Besides he told me these countries were once part of the motherland so why can’t he have them?”

  “Mr President!”

  “Oh, very well. The United States of America will honour all treaty commitments and obligations and will work tirelessly to promote peace internationally. What do I say if I am asked when we are going to start the wall along the border between us and Mexico?”

  “Have you forgotten already? You tell them there will be no wall and the main driving force behind our nation's greatness is our diversity. We accept migrants from all over the world because they enrich our society both financially and culturally. Got it?”

  President Ronald D Chump certainly didn’t agree with the sentiment, but he ‘got it’. His world, the little bubble he inhabited, was changing, driven by forces he couldn’t comprehend or imagine and unlike what happened in the movies, there wasn’t anything he or anyone else could do about it.

  Twenty-Five

  “None of this makes any sense to me,” Janice declared, while she, Zarif, Morris, and the old man who liked to be called Mitch, and who by all accounts was the former President of the United States, sat around a television monitor, waiting for Trev to provide some guidance and direction.

  It didn’t seem to occur to Mitch that the others might think he was just some crazy old coot who looked a little like the recently deceased President and had decided to impersonate him. He was doing an excellent job of masquerading as an old man who was supposedly dead and buried, and he was in a remarkably good state physically. The same couldn’t be said for the state of his mental health.

  “There is a disrupt underway in the political establishment which will fundamentally change the way our governments operate,” Mitch declared.

  The four of them were sitting around a table watching a live feed of one of the more conservative American cable news channels. The host was apoplectic while he described plainly what would happen if President Ronald D Chump didn’t have the spine to deliver on the election promises he was reneging on, and Chump's new fixation with following the MFY program into space.

  “It’s not real,” the host insisted, “It’s just fake news. The so-called colonists are actually on a film lot somewhere in the Australian outback.” The gullible victims who tuned into these shows continued to believe this, and similar assertions, despite the very real rockets being launched from the Australian desert on a regular basis and the images of the colonists being beamed back to Earth. Nobody had located the film set yet, but the host asserted the story was true. He also maintained he had scientific proof that the world was flat, which he would release when the time was right.

  Janice wondered if the man was about to have a stroke the way he was carrying on, fuming almost incoherently about President Ronald D Chump’s latest policy back-flip.

  “We are contributing to this disruption, or are at least involved on the periphery,” Mitch continued.

  This sounded a bit vague to Janice. It sounded more like wishful thinking by a discredited politician attempting to justify his mistakes and rehabilitate his public image.

  Janice glanced over at Morris to see if he had anything to say. She could see he wasn’t really engaged in the conversation and was keeping his thoughts to himself. Zarif was in a state of shock, still coming to grips with his new reality and had nothing to contribute either.

  She felt sorry for Zarif. At least she and Morris had been exposed to the MFY program and its aims and hoped to get into space. Zarif had been simply searching for a better life.

  There were other recent MFY arrivals at The Farm. However, they had all declined to perform the tasks they had been assigned. Apart from Janice they were all middle-aged men and spent most of their time drinking and annoying the few indoSkidian women living in the settlement.

  Janice turned her attention back to the television. They might have been on the other side of the galaxy from Earth, but the sign
al was fine. Besides, who cared if it was in real time or not? It was a message from home, and a reminder home existed, even if they had no way to make contact.

  Their phones had been replaced by devices called Books. They resembled a device in between a large smart phone and a small tablet. An awkward sized hand-held device, too big to be carried in a normal pocket, too small to carry around in a bag. Most of their standard applications had downloaded; address books, navigation, social media apps. The works. However, they could only receive emails and messages and various feeds, they had no ability to respond to anyone not already on Skid.

  “OK, guys,” Trev joined the group just as the interview had ended without the host imploding, “I’m here to tell you what we need you to do.” He hesitated, maybe expecting some push back. “The situation is this. You all know this planet’s original population was decimated by a famine.” This wasn’t strictly true, but Trev carried on regardless.

  “We are part of a project to re-populate the planet...”

  “What triggered the famine? Where is what is left of the local population?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say,” Trev replied, hesitantly.

  Janice waited for an update from Bert, but it remained uncharacteristically silent. If the planet is being controlled by an AI, a super computer, why wouldn’t it ensure the safety and well-being of all the inhabitants? Bert continued its silence and Janice wondered if it was somehow responsible for the tragedy, its lack of response an admission of guilt or complicity.

  “At the end of the day I am not here to debate the ins and outs of decisions made at a higher level. I am just here to fulfil my responsibilities in relation to this undertaking...”

  “OK, OK. Less of the bullshit. Let’s get on with it. Tell us why we are here and what this manual is all about. I hate fucken' manuals,” Janice added.

  “Very well. Within a few weeks, you will be joined by all the MFY volunteers currently encamped at the South Australian site, and tens of thousands of migrants and refugees, from camps across Europe and others trying to get entry onto the European mainland, like young Zarif here. We’ll hoover the lot up. Most of them will be processed on the asteroid Automedon where the mad and the bad will be drafted out and returned to Earth if they are beyond recovery, and the rest will come here.