Vote at Toad Hall

by Eddie Saint

  Salvatore had read all of the book but not all of it had made sense to him. He had needed Yuri to help him find the meaning. Yuri was a good teacher. He could see the real meaning hidden deep in the text of the book, so deep that sometimes only a special teacher could find it. Like the lesson of the Sycamore Seeds. Yuri had explained it to him and now, oh how lucky he was, Salvatore was going to share that lesson with creatures who were still lost and needed to be found.

  He settled on a place in the Shopping Centre. It was a good place to find a large crowd, and Yuri had told him he would want a large crowd the better to marvel at the lesson of the Sycamore Seeds. He wore his yellow woollen hat to help him stand out, and his jacket of Sycamore Seeds for the big finale, just as Yuri had advised him.

  Salvatore looked around, searching for the best spot for his lesson. On the ground floor concourse there was a silver birch, fully grown, at one side.

  ‘How odd to keep a tree indoors,’ thought Salvatore. ‘Is it not suffering enough?’

  He took up a place opposite the silver birch, asked a café owner if he could borrow a chair for a moment, and then stood on it to address his audience.

  ‘How heavy,’ he thought, ‘these Sycamore Seeds are, but how well they will delight the crowd when they fly out of my jacket and rain down their blessings on the non-believers.’

  He cleared his throat and began the lesson.

  ‘In the Beginning was The Word, and The Word was Wood.’

  He had hoped that by standing on the chair, with his bright yellow hat and his special jacket, a crowd might gather, if only out of curiosity, at the start of his lesson. It disappointed Salvatore that his presence seemed to have the opposite effect. Creatures started to back away from him. Yuri had told him this might happen, that not everyone was ready to hear the message the first time.

  ‘If that happens,’ Yuri had advised, ‘go straight for the jacket. Release your seeds of blessings and then, when you have their attention, you can go back and explain the lesson.’

  Yuri was a very wise teacher.

  Happy to finally have a purpose in life, Salvatore took the trigger from his pocket…

  Chapter Seven

  LOOK, THINGS WERE never going to end well for that Gibbon. If I hadn’t got the story first hand, and seen the evidence with my own eyes, I’d find it hard to believe too, but what can I tell you? For pawns, life can be nasty, brutish and short. Bad animals do bad things. And the animal who told me you would never believe this story is probably grinning his self-satisfied grin right now.

  Who will you blame?

  Salvatore?

  ‘The Tree of Life’?

  Or the animal who is moving the pieces…?

  The lobby of the Tufty Tail Street office block struck Weasel as unremarkable, almost disappointing. He had expected Tommy Pincer to have offices walled in marble, shining with gold (or was it Oil now? Or Data?), with acres between the front door and the security desk. Instead he found that the three of them together had just enough room to squeeze past the security guard sitting behind a large oak desk, and that they had reached the metal cage door of the lift before the door to the street had had time to fully close behind them.

  Never one to be backward in coming forward Weasel raised his thoughts with Pincer as they waited for the single lift to arrive.

  ‘I don’t mean to be vulgar,’ he said, ‘but with your money I imagined you’d have something a bit more…’

  He left the sentence hanging. He wasn’t sure what word he required, but he did know that ‘cramped’ and ‘old fashioned’ were certainly off the list.

  The lift slowly rattled down to meet them. It stopped a foot short of the floor, accompanied by a curious metal snapping sound way above them. Stoat jumped back in alarm. Pincer, however, seemed unperturbed. He yanked the cage door aside, made the small jump up into the lift and said with a smile,

  ‘Well, c’mon. It’s this or the stairs. Life’s a gamble, right?’

  Once the three of them were in the lift Weasel dragged the cage door shut. He’d seen this type of lift in films and wanted to give the impression that he was totally up to speed with whatever mad contraption a billionaire dog was comfortable with. The lift jolted into life, and almost immediately something landed with a clatter on the lift roof. Stoat grabbed at the cage door, fearful for his safety, but again Pincer turned his super-confident smile on him.

  ‘It’s old, but it’s never let me down yet. And besides, there’s no stairs between two and four so it’s all we’ve got.’ He winked at Weasel as, high above them, the sounds of a straining motor began to settle into an arthritic rhythm and the lift began its slow ascent.

  ‘Let me ask you a question,’ Pincer continued, his nose pointing firmly at Weasel, his eyes sharp, ears cocked. ‘What colour did the bad guys wear in the Second Orchid War? And, for the sake of balance, you can choose either side as the bad guys.’

  Weasel considered his response carefully. Was it a trick question? Was he being sounded out? Would his answer dictate which way they turned when they got out of the lift (did Pincer have an office and a special office, wink, wink, and all that?)…

  ‘It’s ok. It’s not a trick question. One wore Purple, the other Green, right?’

  Weasel nodded, not quite sure where this super confident American Bulldog was headed, but absolutely certain he wanted to follow.

  ‘Er, of course, yes. Rats and Cats wore Purple. Wild Wood, Foxes, Dogs… all Green.’

  ‘Ok, now it’s your turn. Pick a battle.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Weasel.

  ‘Pick a battle. Any battle. Test me…’ said Pincer, cocking his head to one side.

  (To say that Weasel had ‘studied’ History at school was being generous to the verb ‘to study’. History itself would probably argue that all that could be said with absolute certainty was that Weasel had been in the same room as textbooks and teachers. All of the other subjects would most likely agree.)

  The best Weasel could say with any degree of certainty was that he was pretty sure there had been a battle with a bridge involved.

  ‘The, er… the Bridge at er…’

  Quick as a flash Pincer answered.

  ‘Sparrow Falls? Red and Blue. Hornsbury? Grey and Mustard. Bad Bottom Ridge? Green, Grey and Blue.’

  There was silence in the lift for a moment, save for the clanking of the winding mechanism and the rattling of the cage.

  ‘Well! You really know your stuff!’ said Weasel. For the second time that day he could hear himself starting to sound like a Prep School boy, this time in the presence of a cool Sixth Former rather than a Headmaster.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve guessed my point though, eh?’ Pincer asked.

  Weasel, momentarily back in short trousers and school cap, said,

  ‘I’m with you all the way, Pincey.’

  ‘Pincey’? ‘Pincey’! What am I saying? Get a grip, now!

  ‘Sorry sir, I mean… Mr Pincer… Pincer.’

  Did I just call him ‘Sir’? Quick: dig!

  ‘But Stoater, er… Stoatey… Stoat here might need a bit of a nudge.’

  Phew. Good save, Ollie old boy. Deflect and recover. He might not have noticed…

  Two pairs of eyes turned to look at Stoat, who was shaking slightly, and not just because of the rickety lift.

  ‘Um… I’m not sure,’ ventured Stoat, timidly. ‘Are you a fashion expert?’

  Weasel could have kissed Stoat. If ever he needed to not look like the idiot in the room (and with a personal motto of ‘Fake it ’til you make it’ that had so far added up to quite a lot of rooms) then Stoat was the perfect fall guy.

  Pincer, though, looked kindly on Stoat.

  ‘Let me give it to you straight,’ he said, ‘ ’cos not everyone gets this, and that’s why it matters’.

  Stoat and Weasel both edged in closer to Pincer, as much as that was possible in the confined space of the lift.

  ‘If you don’t want to wind up dying in a batt
le, don’t wear a uniform.’

  He let his words sink in for a moment. Stoat started imagining naked armies, like the ones he’d seen in the big paintings in Art Galleries, and wondered how that might be considered safer. But for Weasel the light was slowly starting to dawn.

  ‘So this office is a disguise? Like an undercover army?’ he said, with wonder and admiration in his voice.

  ‘Precisely, my ‘dear old thing’! Precisely!’ and Pincer laughed, a deep, throaty laugh, and the others joined in, relieved that the rising social tension of their lift journey had finally been lanced.

  The lift passed through an empty floor. No lights, no life, peeling paper.

  ‘Ok, it’s like this,’ said Pincer, happy now to fill in the blanks for them. ‘That Second Orchid War really opened things up. I mean really. A bunch of us business families were just poised to jump right in and start trading the heck out of all those places on the other side of the lake. But, as always,’ he rolled his eyes and gave Weasel and Stoat a knowing look, ‘politicians stepped in and carved things up. They put trade barriers in place. Made it hard for us to turn much profit. And year on year they have tightened the screw even further, am I right? I mean, there’s regulations for everything now, right? What ever happened to ‘buyer beware’?

  Weasel nodded. That sense of injustice, with politicians putting up barriers to free trade and snooping around to see where you have hidden your money, was just what had driven him his whole life. It was, of course, precisely why he was trying to bring down the LEAF League. That thought reminded him of the task in hand, and how time was against them.

  ‘Yes, yes, and yes again,’ he said. ‘Sold to the Dog with the green patch on his eye!’

  ‘So, we got ourselves a lease on this building to give us a foothold right in the heart of enemy territory, if you catch my drift. By the time I turned up here there was already a thriving war effort going on.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Stoat. He was struggling to keep up. ‘You said ‘war effort’?’

  ‘Sure did, my whiskered friend. Take a wrong turn in this building and you never know what you might come across: a right wing website (we’ve got two of those here so take your pick); any of three think tanks (they are your go-to guys for legal fees, financing for demos, backing for activists, funding academic papers – you can really fill your boots with those guys); climate science deniers by the bucketful; we’ve got an SM station pushing hashtags (but then, who doesn’t, right?); the list goes on. If you want to open up political divisions anywhere in the world we’ve probably got all the tools you need right here. We’ve been fighting this war for years now. I almost feel sorry for the poor suckers we are fighting against who still haven’t realised!’

  He paused, lost for a moment in a personal reverie. ‘Almost.’

  The lift stopped without finesse, and the three travellers got out to find themselves in a corridor that was much more what Weasel had in mind.

  ‘Right,’ said Pincer, striding towards a large oak door. ‘Let’s open up a new battle front.’

  Weasel followed him down the corridor as if in a dream…

  IT WAS THREE hours later, once the forensic team had finished at the blast site and those bodies that could be had been bagged up and taken away for identification, that an odd rain began to fall on Kevin the cleaner. One, then another, a slow fall of small ball bearings that had been stuck to the ceiling way above by something gooey, were finally making their way back down to earth. As he glanced up to see where they were coming from his eye was caught by a flash of bright yellow in the shattered branches of the silver birch: on closer inspection it appeared to be a yellow woollen hat.

  Weasel entered Pincer’s office with only one thing on his mind: Data. He hadn’t really got what Pincer had said about it before, but when he saw the rows of terminals, with two dozen Dogs busily typing and clicking, and the racks of large black… things (I guess I’ll find out what they are called later) humming and flashing and generally looking sinister, he knew that, whatever Pincer meant by it, ‘Data’ really was the new ‘Gold’.

  The office was, in fact, four offices knocked through into one large space. At the end where they had come in two banks of computer terminals ran opposite each other in the centre of the room. A single trunk of cables was tied along the centre of the ceiling, with two cables descending from it to each terminal. Beyond the last pair of computers the cable trunk moved on to the large black ‘things’, that stood in solid rows, like really, really nasty soldiers, going back deep into the third and fourth rooms. The whole effect looked like some giant super-creature, being fed through cables by the pack of Dogs on their swivel chairs.

  Pincer breathed in deeply.

  ‘Let battle commence.’

  He took Weasel and Stoat to the nearest terminal and had them look over the King Charles Spaniel’s shoulder as she typed.

  ‘This here is what I bring to the party. It is my most powerful weapon,’ he said with pride. ‘The power of…suggestion.’

  Looking closer, Weasel and Stoat saw that the Spaniel was editing a poster.

  ‘Now, Selina here is working on the Marsh Peninsula. You know it?’

  Stoat shook his head, Weasel vaguely nodded (…and the ghost of Weasel’s Geography teacher turned, involuntarily, in her grave).

  ‘Of course you don’t. Who does?’ Pincer said, jovially. ‘But you will!’

  ‘Go on then,’ said Weasel, ‘What’s the story?’

  Aware that time was pressing, Pincer hurried the conversation along.

  ‘It may be tiny, but it is one of five small areas hoping to join the LEAF League. There’s an election coming up. Candidate A is streets ahead in the polls, but we really want Candidate B. Now, can you guess why we prefer B?’

  Weasel’s mind was whirring. This was more like his territory.

  ‘I’d say Candidate B isn’t a fan of the League, so if he got the gig he would stop them joining?’

  ‘Close, my new Weasely friend,’ said Pincer. ‘Close, but not quite there. Candidate B will win (trust me, I know how these things go) and he will take the Peninsula into the League. And then, for a small fee, he will join our growing number of delegates on the inside.’

  A knowing smile crept slowly across Weasel’s face and he nodded appreciatively.

  ‘That is genius, Pincer. Sheer genius. But I do have one question….’ he said.

  Stoat, on the other hand, had plenty of questions. His head was still trying to fathom the coloured uniform conversation. On balance, he decided that silence was currently his strongest suit.

  ‘It’s ok, I know.’ said Pincer. ‘You want to know how we make an ‘also ran’ into a ‘champion hurdler’. Am I right?’ Without waiting for an answer he carried on, caught up in the delight of getting to tell someone new about his favourite weapon.

  ‘It’s all about suggestion. That is all political campaigns have ever been about, but the annoying thing is… there are rules. They stop you using crafty punches to wind your opponent. They force you to play by, or at least pretty close to, the rules. But not any more!’

  Selina swivelled in her chair and showed Pincer the finished poster. It showed a picture of a Puma holding a door open, and a very long line of Goats walking through. The banner read, ‘MANOLO wants to give your job to a Goat.’

  ‘That’s not true, is it?’ said Weasel, slowly beginning to reverse-engineer Pincer’s strategy.

  Pincer shook his head.

  ‘And ‘Manolo’ is ‘Candidate A’, yes?’ asked Weasel.

  Pincer nodded, delightedly.

  ‘And they don’t like Goats in the Marsh Peninsula?’

  ‘Right again,’ said Pincer.

  ‘So, just one more question…’ said Weasel. ‘How do you get to run the posters without getting caught?’

  Pincer patted Selina on the shoulder, nodded appreciatively at her, then took Weasel and Stoat over to the window.

  ‘In one word?’ he said.

  Eve
n Stoat realised what was coming next…

  ‘Data!’

  From a distance they watched Selina busy herself at the keyboard while Pincer explained what she was doing.

  ‘These days everyone likes to think they have the scoop on something. There’s a widening suspicion that there is ‘truth’ out ‘there’ and ‘they’ are trying to keep it from you. So when you find a ‘real truth’, you share the pants off it, trying to make up for the huge injustice of ‘them’ having control of all ‘the media’. Are you following?’

  Stoat sort of nodded, but Weasel was already slotting this new idea into his own plans for the campaign.

  ‘So what Selina is doing,’ ventured Weasel, testing out his understanding, ‘is creating some new ‘real truths’ and, what, passing them around?’

  ‘Precisely. She is a genius at propaganda posters. Others here are better at articles. And all of them are great at astroturfing.’

  Weasel was back on familiar turf (so to speak) with astroturfing. Pretending to be an ordinary member of the public had been one of his key assets for many years, and he had on occasion felt the need to bung the odd school chum a few quid to write ‘unbiased’ reviews for various projects he had invested in.

  ‘Ok, so does Selina have lots of online friends? How does that bit work?’

  ‘This,’ Pincer paused, genuinely paused, for dramatic effect. Weasel could have kissed him! ‘…is where the data comes in.’

  In five minutes he explained the process of data collection. Weasel was all ears, but to Stoat it sounded very complicated. There was something about online competitions, small print, contact lists, behaviour patterns. The upshot seemed to be that Pincer could send total lies tailored to individual voters and convince them they were true, and no-one really knew it was happening. It was the alchemy of campaigning.

  ‘I have found,’ said Pincer, summing up, ‘that the more outrageous the content, the more likely it is to be shared. Animals, eh? What are they like?’

  Weasel took Pincer by the paw and said, ‘Where do I sign?’

  ‘Sign?’ said Pincer. ‘We’re gonna do you a freebie to test some new algorithms. You just fire the starting gun and we’ll get cracking.’