Arms Race

by Nic Low

  For a while there, before we took over the world, life was much the same at the agency. I was solid, Slick was a whizz kid, but who cared? Advertising’s full of these punks. They come on strong and burn out fast. Sure, his campaign for Audi showed talent. Leaving bullet-riddled A5 sedans outside foreign embassies sold a lot of cars. But Slick was from a family of see-you-in-hell Catholics from the western suburbs. All he’d had for stimulus was the Bible and the internet. I gave him a year, tops.

  Then that BP rig blew a million litres of crude over the Gulf of Mexico’s face. Birds and fish died in their millions, and whole towns and industries went belly-up. It was a public-relations disaster. When we came in one morning to find BP’s Director of Global Marketing in the foyer, a ripple of excitement went round the office. This was going to be lucrative.

  The BP guy was Jim Bacon. Most marketing directors are so cheerful you want to stab them. Jim looked old and tired. BP’s stock had crashed, they were up for a trillion in federal damages and they’d had to stop advertising their green credentials in National Geographic. Worst of all, there was still a stinking black oil slick out there killing their business. They were desperate to clean up their image.

  Jim told us he wanted a southern-hemisphere campaign to win support for their clean-up efforts. He’d liked our work for Audi. When he found out that was Slick’s idea, he asked the kid to come in.

  He’s just a junior, I said.

  Jim waved his hand. Bring him in.

  Slick wandered into the boardroom and listened to what Jim had to say. Then he pushed his ridiculous lank fringe out of his face, looked Jim in the eye and started asking questions.

  Who’s doing your campaign in the States?

  How’s that working out so far?

  What’s your total budget?

  What’s your best-case scenario?

  He listened to Jim’s answers then said, like it was the most natural thing in the world: You need to fire all your other agencies, and give the whole campaign to us. You give it to us and we’ll make that oil slick go away. It’ll be the most ambitious campaign in the history of advertising. Ever.

  For the next hour Slick outlined his plan. I don’t know if he was making it up or channelling it from on high, but the rest of the world disappeared, and there was just Slick’s voice and a weird electricity in the air.

  The problem, he said, is that no one has ever gone all the way. People complain there’s too much advertising. The problem is there isn’t enough. Given what’s possible, every campaign to date has been piecemeal and half-arsed. You might sell a few more toasters, but you quit before you’ve ever really started.

  The secret is to expand your view of what’s possible. We don’t just do web or viral or TV or film or print or politics or bribes or school sponsorship, or whatever. We do all of them and more; we do things that haven’t even been invented yet. No one will escape this campaign. It’ll be an oil slick of information. With my ideas and the size of your budget we can make history. We can unmake history. Give the job to us and no one will ever remember there was an oil slick. No one. Not even you.

  It was a hell of a pitch. We sat in silence. No one’s iPhone rang. Jim Bacon’s stunned expression thawed into a grin, and he nodded. He went into the hallway and made some calls. It was on.

  After that, the madness. Our boardroom became a war room. We ate, slept and drank the oil slick. It started with a viral smear campaign against BP. The allegations were ingenious: napalm attacks on protest vessels, Blackwater contractors torturing seagulls and posting the photos to Facebook, political conspiracies we’d made up that later turned out to be true. We recruited, at one point, thirty-two per cent of all American college students to talk incoherently about the oil slick at parties. Slick even commissioned season six of The Wire, set in the Gulf of Mexico but without once mentioning the spill.

  My strongest memory from this period is of the nightly strategy meetings. Come two a.m. you’d find a dozen of us at the boardroom table in our singlets, drinking Scotch and throwing round ideas. Slick watched over us with a beatific smile and a knowing twitch of the mouth.

  Which option should we choose? we’d ask, and his answer was always the same.

  All of them.

  Two months in, something began to shift. Public opinion dipped, then rose a little, then plummeted. I started to worry. Petrol stations were bottled, yet share prices rose, and then a truckload of rotting sea turtles was dumped in the lobby of BP’s New York headquarters. No one else at the agency seemed to care.

  It’s a delicacy, I overheard someone say on the phone. In Helsinki that shit is two hundred bucks a gobbet.

  The rest of the team worshipped Slick, and the more incoherent public opinion looked, the happier Slick became. It made no sense. My questions became more and more shrill, and before I knew it Slick had put me in charge of a smear campaign against our own company. He was shutting me out. For months I picketed our front gate, chanting dumb slogans and linking arms with luddites, wondering what was happening inside.

  Slick had changed too. He hadn’t shaved in months and never seemed to sleep. At night, when security let me in after the day’s protesting, I would pause in the doorway to watch him work. He sat at his bank of screens, humming with manic energy like he was in spiritual communion with the data. The numbers streamed past, reflected in his two-dollar shades.

  One night he looked up and saw me.

  Hey, he said gently. What’s on your mind?

  I swallowed, feeling ashamed, and angry that we’d let this child lead us so far astray.

  It’s all—this, I said, gesturing to the monitors and graphs. I don’t understand what we’re doing anymore. We’ve lost sight of the facts. Worse, we’ve lost sight of the brand values.

  Slick took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. He was skinnier than ever but his gaze was full of knowing kindness. I know you don’t trust what we’re doing, he said. That’s okay. There are no brand values anymore, or facts. We’re way past that. We’re doing something revolutionary. These days we’re so over-saturated that no single fact can mean a thing. So, what are we working with instead? Over-saturation itself. Creating it, shaping it—one giant ecosystem of chaotic over-stimulus. It’s the new medium of communication. It’s the only thing people can possibly understand.

  He paused just long enough for me to blink in agreement.

  Try not to think of it as an advertising campaign, he said. Think of it as an information mandala. Or a kind of magic-eye picture. Up close it looks like chaos, but as you draw back and the months pass and people try to make sense of it, they’ll find a pattern. Their brains are hardwired to find meaning and, trust me, there is meaning in all of it. We’ll buy the satellite imagery of the oil slick from space, maybe start a war in Mongolia, and launch a new Cormac McCarthy trilogy. Then it’ll all come together. You watch.

  I thanked him. Our eyes met and I tried to smile, but as I said good night my voice cracked. I was turning against him, and he knew it.

  The campaign went into overdrive. We churned out daytime soap operas, claimed responsibility for Hurricane Katrina and launched a new frozen yoghurt derived entirely from petrochemicals. I wanted to call it Oils Lick, but Slick said I was still thinking too literally. We routed hal
f the world’s internet traffic through Mexico and had mentions of disaster replaced by discussion about running shoes. We saturated people with so much gibberish they stopped noticing it was gibberish at all.

  At the height of the craziness I answered a call from Jim Bacon. Get your boss, he croaked.

  Mary took the phone. Beneath her make-up she blanched. Okay, she said. I’ll call you back. She turned to the team.

  Pack your bags, she said. You’re not going to believe what’s gone down.

  That night six of us boarded a plane for the US. As the sky grew light over the Gulf of Mexico, we were watching from the deck of BP’s research ship. Jim Bacon and his team of marketing execs stood grim-faced.

  I’m not sure how to tell you this, Jim said, but—we’ve lost the oil slick.

  What do you mean? one of our people asked.

  Jim flung a hand out towards the horizon. See for yourself.

  The sun slid into view. In front of us, the blackened remains of the oilrig stood silhouetted like a giant mechanical wading bird. Beyond was smooth ocean and the cries of seabirds, and a faint wind whistling in our ears.

  How can you lose an oil slick? I said.

  You tell me, Jim replied. We did as you asked and stopped the clean-up for a week, and when we got back out here we couldn’t find it.

  The deck erupted in shouting. Had the slick moved? Had it sunk? Somehow dispersed? Someone suggested we check the satellite data, but I pointed out that we’d already bought and changed it. Jim thought maybe BP’s ship-towed chemical booms had finally worked, but we soon realised we’d made them up as well.

  The buzz faded and died, and one by one we turned to look at Slick. He was leaned against the railing with his sunglasses on, watching us with a smirk.

  All right, you, Mary said. Any thoughts?

  We’re done, Slick said.

  All twelve of us on the deck stared at him.

  It’s over. We’ve won.

  What do you mean? Jim said.

  We did it. We made the oil slick go away. It’s a work of freakin’ art.

  But where’s the slick gone? I asked.

  Slick shook his head, disappointed. They’ll spend the next few weeks searching for the oil but they’ll never find it—and eventually they’ll forget about it altogether. We all will, and you know why? Because it never existed in the first place.

  Slick looked at me.

  There never was an oil slick, he said. That’s what’s at the heart of the mandala.

  Let me get this straight, Jim said, a tentative awe in his voice. Your advertising campaign was so successful you’ve physically made the oil slick go away? It’s just—gone?

  Slick simply grinned. We stood there trying to let the idea sink in. Mary McGowan was leaned against the railing, crying. I went over and gave her a consoling hug but she shook me off. I saw she was crying with joy.

  It’s a fucking miracle, someone said.

  But it doesn’t make sense, I said.

  The others scowled at me.

  He’s right, Slick said. We’re way beyond making sense. He looked out towards the radiant dawn. We’ve finally broken through.

  These long summer evenings when the mosquitoes whine, and sleep is a brand name I can’t quite recall, I go walking. I unlock the back door and shuffle down to the beach. As I walk I replay that day in my mind. Does it weigh on my conscience? Does it grind me down?

  It does. I betrayed him.

  While the staffers danced, and a drunken Jim Bacon backflipped awkwardly off the side of the ship, I sat in a toilet cubicle staring at my phone. People needed to know the truth. I called the executive producer of The View, and for more than a few pieces of silver I spilled my guts.

  Even as I rejoined the party, I knew I’d made a mistake. Jesus would never have been famous if he hadn’t been crucified, and Slick—reclining in a deck chair, watching me with his infuriating smile—well, he knew it. It was the last time I saw him.

  The party spread to the wrecked platform of the Deepwater Horizon. A few hours later, when my outraged voice began to blare from TVs around the world, Slick was nowhere to be found. A wildfire of bogus revelations blazed across the mediasphere. The agency was courted and maligned by everyone, from the climate sceptics to the Pope. British American Tobacco offered Mary a fortune to tackle cancer. Confusion was swift and total, and the truth—that thin thread, so easily lost—was but one hair in Slick’s long and tangled beard. The man had disappeared.

  Some evenings, if it’s still early, I pass others strolling on the beach. To most I’m just a harmless old eccentric, Gucci slippers in hand. A few recognise me and there’s hatred in their eyes. They think I did more than betray Slick.

  Murderer, they hiss.

  I shrug, and roll my cuffs, and amble on down the tide line. What really happened is nothing so banal.

  Slick was the Messiah.

  There. I’ve said it. The millennial doomsayers were right: He was coming. They were just looking in all the wrong places. The Messiah was a Bible-and-internet kid from Western Sydney, come again to walk this earth in jeans that were a little too tight. He ushered in a new spiritual age, and then returned to the network, from whence He came.

  At the end of the beach I climb the steps to the headland. I sit and rest my bones, and light a cigarette—a great pleasure, as for some reason or other few of us used to smoke. The view over the Gulf of Mexico is wonderful from here. The ruin of the Deepwater Horizon stands majestic against the fading sky. These days people think it’s a public sculpture, donated by BP. I know better.

  I take a drag and sit forward, hands on knees, and stare out at the ocean. I’m very patient. If I stare long enough, and hard enough, like I was looking at a magic-eye picture, something begins to emerge from the chaos of tide and wind. There’s something out there in the water, coating the waves from the horizon to the shore. It absorbs all light, and all life. When I close my eyes, the darkness behind my lids is not so dark as what’s out there. I open them again, and it’s gone.

  ARMS RACE

  SAN FRANCISCO sparkled with life. Crowds of uniformed men and women poured through hooting, gridlocked streets. The cable cars were a heave of teenage drone pilots and good-time girls smashed on pheromones and Coke Zero Zero Zero. Flags flew from every house. Fireworks blossomed over the glassy reach of Mission Bay. Russia had joined the Allies, and it was official: the war was global. Everyone was in a great mood.

  Alex Davidson felt like killing someone. She had a flight in an hour, and her cab had been stuck in traffic for so long that she wasn’t far off walking to the airport. That, or setting fire to the enormous billboards of General Hurtz lining the roads. It’d be the most productive thing she’d done all week. Her film crew was heading home after spending one last, infuriating day cornering drone pilots outside Sweeney Ridge Base. The pilots had turned it into a game.

  Alex: What do you say to suggestions that General Hurtz is covering up civilian casualties in the conflict zone?

  Pilot: That’s an important question, and we’ve been discussing it a lot on the base. In all honesty, I believe—that you should show us your tits. />
  Six hours of that, and the shooting budget for her documentary was finally gone. The producers expected her home the next day to begin editing. She pressed a hand to her temples.

  You all right? the cabbie asked, eyeing her in the mirror.

  Headache, she said. Nothing a bullet wouldn’t fix.

  Do what you feel, the man said.

  Up ahead, a crowd of drunken pilots came capering through the stopped traffic, singing and drumming on car roofs. One of them stuck his head through Alex’s cab window. Hey, baby! he yelled. You’re gorgeous!

  His friend jostled in beside him, and his face lit up. Hey! Didn’t you used to be famous?

  Alex screwed up her face like she was sucking a lemon. She’d mastered the expression for these situations. Maybe I look like someone else?

  Yeah, maybe, the man said uncertainly. You look a bit like that newsreader. You know, the one that had a meltdown on air?

  Beats me.

  Said all kinds of crazy stuff about General Hurtz? Called her a traitor? Wanted to stop the war?

  Wrong woman, Alex said. I prefer to start wars.

  Cool, the man said, grinning. Well, just so you know, you’re easily beautiful enough to be on TV.

  Thanks, Alex said, turning her widescreen smile on the man. That’s very kind. And just so you know, you guys are easily dumb enough to be castrated.

  The man’s grin vanished. Come here and try, he said.