In a waterless brown land with fat white people fixated on property prices, as the 24-hour news cycle weaves fear and hatred around a tattered body politic, a secret government plan was concocted in the grass-covered bunker of Federal Parliament, to hound the poor of their welfare overpayments, whether they’d been overpaid or not. Built by boffins rich in logic but poor in people skills, the Lantana Code was launched at 12.09 on the night before Christmas, when nothing stirred, not even a mouse. It drew on confidential government information on every man and woman who’d received a welfare payment in the last three years. By 2.00pm the next day, 700,000 robot-driven emails, letters and phone calls hit their targets and there was much lamentation.

William Shield lived in a treeless cul-de-sac of Paradise Grove in the intellectual vacuum of Adelaide. He was not a migrant, an Aborigine or a wage slave in the satanic mills of the culture industry. He was not a communist, labor man or conservative. He was hungry. He smeared the last of the butter on to a nub of stale bread. The morning sun fell on William like a bureaucracy and although it was a brilliant day, full of laughter and smiley faces, he pulled the shades down. His stomach cramped on last night’s bubble and squeak and he just made it to the toilet as a free trade agreement hit the porcelain. No toilet paper. A newspaper hawking entrepreneurialism lay crumpled at his feet. He looked at his left hand then at the newspaper then at his left hand again and reached for the newspaper.

The morning stretched in front of him like a yawn. He did a number incorrect yoga poses in front of a mirror which hurt his back. When he worked as a food delivery wallah, delivering pizza on the back of his postie motorbike, he could afford to go to the gym. A good place to meet women. The women did not think it was a good place to meet him. They were more interested in toning their tummies and bums than listening to William’s woeful pick up lines such as, “do ya live around ‘ere often?” Sometimes after doing his stretches, he’d masturbate in front of the mirror but because he was a 37-year old unemployed loser, living alone in a bedsit on Christmas Day, that seemed too sad.

Christmas passed like a herpes infection and for this, William was thankful. An old iMac on the kitchen table provided propaganda-driven Youtube videos of the war in the Ukraine, dogs doing tricks, the extermination of the Uyghurs, porn, death bed confessions, porn, the Twin Towers falling again and again, clips of ageing b-grade movie stars of the 1960s, real estate porn and the news of the day filtered through politically correct news rooms. He checked his email expecting to find invitations from pert-breasted wannabe brides in eastern Europe who really knew how to please a man and spam from SEO experts in India who promised to get his website to rank on page one. William didn’t have a website. A government email in Times Roman marked ‘urgent’ sat on top of the list.

“Dear Mr Spears,

You are hereby notified that due to 12 unemployment benefit overpayments and an undeclared income of $22,700 over the last two years, you owe the Department of Social Security (SS) the sum of $11,333 dollars. We ask that this sum be paid within 21 days. If you wish to discuss this matter with a customer service officer, please call 1800 …” blah, blah, blah.

Since he’d quit the wage theft food delivery job, he lived on the dole and worked one night a week cleaning a Vet’s surgery for $60.00 cash. His bowels cramped again. He looked at his bank balance. A little over $400.

He called the 1800 number and John Lennon’s Imagine crackled down the line They say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one… every 30 seconds a monotone robot voice chirped he’d progressed in the queue and the wait time was 47 minutes and Merry Christmas. He stared at the indelible coffee stain an old lover had left on his mahogany chessboard, a present from his mother when he won the state under-12 championships. The affair lasted barely longer than a game of chess. Her flat was full of high brow books she never read, which shored up a fractious and humourless personality. A princess who ghosted him so effectively, he struggled to remember her name. He called her Amber, short for ambivalence. His mind drifted off in to a grey study where time stood still.

The paint was flaking from the wall above the sink. It looked like Gondwanaland. He could make out Africa and Australia and there were dinosaurs and strange sea creatures and birds the size of old American cars and then the meteor and his mother’s face coming through the acid rain saying, a Queen-side Castle in the first 15 minutes is absolute suicide. Are you a freaking idiot?

A lilting voice with correct English and a hint of Mumbai poured sweet and melodious in his ear. Another robot.

“Thank you for your call. We will record this conversation for our records so we can deliver a better service to you. Would you please state your full name”

“William Speers”

“Willhelm Queers?”

“No William Speers”

“Thank you. You live at Unit 2, Beria Place in Paradise Grove. Is that correct?”

“Correct”

“Please answer yes or no”

“Yes”

“How can we help you today?”

“I got an email from the SS and it says I owe $11,333 dollars. There must be some mistake. Would you please check it out”

“Just one moment Mr Spears and I will search your social security and tax records”

The phone went dead except for a click, click, whirr sound Kookaburras make when they’re about to break into song. A text hit his mobile with a ping which read he owed the Department of Social Security $11,333 and he had 21 days to pay. In the far distance a Mr Whippy van played ‘Greensleeves’ as it headed down Anzac Highway to the beach to await sticky hands clutching money.

“Mr Speers, thank you for your patience,” Ms Mumbai robot said. “Our records show you owe the Department of Social Security $11,333 and this must be paid within 21 days. Our records also show you have $427.00 in your bank account, which means you will need to lodge an appeal or compound interest will accrue on the debt at 9 per cent per month”

“So I can appeal against the repayment?”

“No. You can appeal against having to pay the interest”

“I want to speak someone who’s not a robot about this error. I’m just one step from living on the street. Help me out here”

“We have feelings Mr Queers. Be advised that you must pay this money within 21 days. Have a Merry Christmas and goodbye”

How did the robot know he had $427 in his bank account? The flat Coke in the fridge tasted like gun metal. A pimple was growing on his neck. There was something delicious and awful about squeezing pimples. Of late, he’d started to watch Youtube clips of Bot Fly removals from people’s skin. Parasites plucked from flesh.

The SS weren’t going to get one dollar. What were they going to do? Send around a goon squad of accountants and batter him with double entry ledger books? He read the fine print at the end of the email.

“If payment is not made by the due date, the matter will be passed to the Sherriffs’ Office and you may be detained”

The Christmas tree covered in fake snow looked forlorn in the corner. He pictured a 1930s American movie about a chorus girl who endures hardship only to find true love and gets the lead role in the Follies. The final scene, set on a mountain of fake snow and pine, is her leading the girls, arm-in-arm, high-kicking their way to happiness. In truth, it looked more like Orwell’s Aspidistra. A symbol of middle class respectability wilting amongst a rising tide of urban poverty.

The problem was, as he picked at Gondwanaland, knocking India to the kitchen bench, he was smart enough to know his prospects, even without this extraordinary government impost, were slim. He had a worthless degree in political science which he would never pay off. Once upon a time, in his salad days, something approaching idealism welled in his tummy and he thought of becoming a politician but then blanched, knowing too well the self-seeking bovine qualities of the beast. Shouldn’t he too line his pockets with superannuation paid at 17 per cent on a salary of $220,000 a year? Shouldn’t he too boss his staff around like a psychopath or walk into a room and every one knows his name? Oh, to feel the poisonous patronising pats on his back from colleagues. To have friends amongst the hyenas and jackals. He ripped off a loose hanging nail and trimmed it with his teeth. He picked up an old text book, long out of print, of Barrington Moore’s The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy and placed it carefully on top of the newspaper in the toilet. A penny saved.

The ‘Wraiths of the Unemployed’ blog was created long ago by an Adelaide Hills hippy, whose brain was pureed by Tolkien. A place for the unemployed to bitch about the SS. The site went viral three years ago when ‘Brillig’ a young man from Fortitude Valley, blew his brains out live with a 12-gauge shotgun. He’ d fallen in love with his case worker but the case worker lived in fear of Brillig getting a job because he’d lose his. It made the 6.00pm news.

William kept his post short:

Just got a bill from the SS which says I owe them more than $11,000 in overpayments. They also know how much I’ve got in my bank account. The government has armed their servers against me. WTF is going on?

He toggled through some of the articles he had posted two years ago. He’d calculated the unemployment rate was 13 per cent and rising, not four per cent and falling. The SS hadn’t counted young and old people who’d dropped out of the workforce. He sent the figures to the media and all he heard back was the crackling sound of the universe expanding.

William looked at the nude women on Metart but depression stole his hard-on. His last dole payment was three days late. The shape of things to come. The sun set and he lit candles in the kitchen. Almost romantic. He was heading back into the 18^th century. A bottle of stolen Jack Daniels sat next to the iMac when his mobile rang.

“Is this William Speers?”

“Who wants to know?”

“My name is Mark Robespierre”

“You can call me Billy Marat. How do I know this isn’t the SS?

“You don’t think they’d call themselves Robespierre do you? I’ve read your posts on the Wraiths and I’ve got an idea. Can we meet?”

“How about 12.00 noon tomorrow at The Shallow Bowl in Sellers Square? You pay”

“See you then”

The Shallow Bowl wasn’t called the Shallow Bowl. It was a Hari Krishna restaurant where you didn’t get much dahl, veggie and rice but it only cost $5.00. The water was free. The off yellow walls were covered in pictures of a ghoulish Kali surrounded by skulls. Reluctant children were dragged in by their hungry single mums. The salt and pepper shakers were ceramic Shivas and Ganeshes and were frequently pinched.

A man in his mid 50s, wearing a ridiculous straw hat worn by older males at Womad and other culture vulture events, saw William sitting alone in the corner.

“Mister Speers, I presume,” lifting his hat to reveal a semi-circle of male pattern baldness and a dent in his forehead where a melanoma was removed.

“Mister Robespierre, I presume.”

He sat down, poured himself a glass of water. His preconceived image of Speers was wrong. He pictured a tall, well-educated man, maybe with a goatee and a courduroy jacket. Not a short man with rounded shoulders and acne pocks on his cheeks. As a child he’d kept ferrets and the similarity was unnerving.

“What’s the food like?”

“The same as last week,” William said. “It could be last weeks. Who’d know?”

“I’ve been reading your comments on the blog. You know the political system”

William scraped his spoon on the side of the bowl. The Hari’s used to provide a slice of bread to do the mopping up, now they charged a dollar.

“Good to know your enemy because the enemy sure as hell knows a lot about me”

“The government has activated a web browser that hunts and catalogues everything about you. It’s called the Lantana Code. At the moment its targeting people on the dole. If you’ve gone to school or university, paid tax, got a bank account, a credit card or joined a club, they know. They can even activate street cameras to track your movements based on facial imagery. The code’s inculcated with the political values of the government.”

Robespierre spoke like a radio just off station. Sibilant s’s and ‘s that sounded like b’s. Well educated. Middle corporate or public service. William found it hard not to stare at a one centimetre hair poking out of a black mole on his chin. The image of tweezers floated across his mind then vanished.

“You wanted to chat. I’m all ears. Obviously, not all ears …”

Robespierre did the talking as his fingers knitted and unknitted below his chin. As a convicted whistleblower, he’d lost his executive job in the government’s IT department in Canberra. He’d discovered the department was using Chinese technology, bought at a discount price and hadn’t declared it in the procurement papers. Neither did it mention that there was a chance the technology could be monitored from Beijing. Robespierre told the Prime Minister’s department who told his boss who sacked him. He was now working in a call centre, helping people to open a browser. He wanted revenge and William was onside immediately.

William’s job was to pick up a brief case from railway station locker 17 and take it to Colonel Blights statue in the city and leave it. The briefcase contained important diagrams on the interconnectivity of the government’s servers.

“It sounds all very hush hush. What are you going to do?”

“If I told you and they tortured you by making you watch as they squeezed shampoo into puppies’ eyes. You’d crack and spill the beans. It’s best you don’t know. Remember the dominant paradigm. Ignorance is bliss”

Here was a chance to do something worthwhile whatever that was; something secret squirrel, something at some time in the future, he could use to impress a woman. He pictured himself wearing a beret and a black leather jacket and he did not look ridiculous. She would be so overcome with patriotic fervour, they’d fall madly, deeply in love and have blonde children with strong chins and they’d buy a lovely house in leafy Statusborough Street and the sun would rise and fall just for them.

“So you’ll do it?”

“Count me in,” William said and in a fit of extravagance, walked past the terrifying pictures of Kali and ordered a slice of bread.

That night he fell asleep like a man with a mission. He ignored thoughts of jail, of torture or being made to work in the public service, where the future was called moving forward, and change was called action, as in ‘we will action this’. Verbs lay dead and dying like fish thrown upon a shore. He didn’t need the sleeping pills or valium. To sleep, perchance to dream with an empty bladder. Sleep wrapped its velvet arms around him. His mouth filled with stars as he rose through the roof of his bedsit, over the suburbs, where people were actioning their lives.

xxxxxxx

William walked from the railways station on a sunny Monday morning, carrying the small leather brief case. He imagined in years to come, when he was dust, children will study this walk to the statue of Colonel Blight; people in green rocket cars will note, if only in passing that on this day, the 27^th of April at 9.30, William Speers walked with confidence, his face a picture of steely determination. The sun was low in the east and the dew on the parklands was burning off. The teacher hologram will say to those upturned happy kid-ogram faces, he walked over King William bridge where generations of wage slaves, like ghosts, had trod before. How he studied the faces of those walking towards him and noted the incestuous features of low brows and weak chins, the stooped shoulders of a shrinking gene pool.

The history books will not mention the car of hoons, who hit him in the back of the head with an egg and then did a u-turn and with tyres squealing, sped out of sight. He wiped the yoke off and rubbed his hands on the cool grass.

The brief case was locked. Robespierre didn’t trust him. Fair enough. Trust was like Tasmania Tigers. Much talked about never seen. The bag felt light. He placed the brief case at the foot of the statue and looked up at Blight’s hand pointing to buildings rising up from the plain, full of wage slaves with IQ’s bouncing around in the low 80s. He returned home and stood naked in front of the mirror and a tingle of tumescence rose in his manhood.

The daily newspaper, which sacrificed truth for boosterism, said the burgeoning unemployment camps in the parklands, were a blot on the landscape. An eyesore. They must be bulldozed. The city life style reporter wrote that while the cardboard tents looked like the Soweto ghetto as ghettos went, it was world class. Much better than the ghettos in Melbourne and Sydney.

To drive circulation the newspaper bet big on a fear campaign. What were Australia’s chances of avoiding obliteration if China attacked? Would a nation focused on property prices, football and inflation, rise like the sun over an ANZAC Day commemoration, and meet the foe, who was armed with 57 submarines, five aircraft carriers, a fleet of battleships and 1.5 million armed men, as they sailed through Sydney Heads? Would advertising executives and real estate agents lead the way carrying high our star spangled Union Jack as the Americans debated and ummed and ahhed as getting involved looked like an expensive exercise in terms of hardware and human capital?

A month passed and the Shallow Bowl closed because hungry people ransacked the food trucks. The CEO of Woolworths said its shareholders were demanding action and armed guards would now ride shotgun.

William took half a valium as he crawled into bed. He put the headphones on and played a sleep-guided meditation. A female voice backed by cooing whales led him through a forest and the grass felt cool under his bare feet. He relaxed his legs, unfondled his penis and looked down and saw he’d trod in human shit. He was sitting in an open cubicle in the New Delhi railways station at 1.00am. His first trip to India as a 19-year old and he had a stomach churning case of food poisoning. The Lassi at the Taj Mahal seemed like a good idea. On the ceramic floor in front of him, half a dozen cripples were begging and contorting their arms into Hindu swastikas, while chanting praise of Shiva. Some were missing arms, eyes and noses. A Goya nightmare. Shit and stagnant water rose from a broken cistern. He wiped his arse with his left hand and dipped it in a bucket of water full of cigarette butts. It was 20 metres to the front door. The cripples were screaming for help. In another minute, they’d drown. This was William’s chance to be a hero and carry them one-by-one, on his back to the railway platforms. He’d read Lord Jim. This was his Patna moment.

He took his socks and boots off, pulled up his pants and made for the door. An old man missing his teeth and left eye latched on to his leg and wouldn’t let go. Help me, Sahib. Help me. William turned, lifted his other foot from the rising tide of shit, urine and water, kicked the old man in the face and ran out the door and towards his train. He slathered himself in deodorant and hoped his fellow passengers wouldn’t be offended by the smell.

That night as the train made its way to Dharmasala, he thought of the cripples. Surely someone would save them. This wasn’t a world where we left the poor and defenceless to drown in the mire. He lay on his back in the sleeper. Soon he’d be sitting at the feet of the Dalai Lama and all would be well.

William rose, cooked a stale piece of bread in egg and sipped a cup of strong, milkless tea. He gave yoga a miss and felt guilty because, as his mother used to day, he was letting himself go. His inveterate laziness would end up as middle age spread and tits. Women would run screaming when he entered a room. He checked his bank account as yoke dribbled on his Paw Patrol night shirt. There must be some mistake. He logged off and logged on again. At midnight, a Mr Robespierre deposited $115,000 into his account. He logged on to the Wraith and saw hundreds of posts saying a ‘Mr Robespierre’ had closed down the government servers while pumping money into the bank accounts of the poor and unemployed. A Robin Hood, a saviour, the prince of peace.

Robespierre’s Myna Worm spread through the Department of Social Security network, when at 9.00am on a cloudy Tuesday morning, the drones armed with cups of tea and buttered finger buns, turned on their computers. The screens locked to the sound of an Indian Myna bird screaming its head off. The worm locked the network and deactivated the Lantana Code. SS executives gave a strict instructions not to email another government department. They’d contain the worm in the local network and work out what to do.

Dorothy worked in accounts on the fifth floor of the SS. The news was too good not to share with Amanda, her best friend, a low level functionary in Treasury. She opened her laptop and logged on to the SS wifi. The email was short, full of superlatives and open ended questions. This was the biggest thing to happen to the SS apart from that mental defective six years ago who fired a surface to air missile in to the cafeteria, killing 12 people. Blood and soup of the day hit the walls creating an image Jackson Pollock would have been proud of. Dorothy hit send and Amanda, who was about to go on long service leave opened the email.

The Myna worm hit the banking sector the next day and 24-hours later, the economy ground to a halt. ATM’s died. No one could withdraw money. Shops closed and property prices plummeted. The fat white people blamed the government, the Chinese, the Russians, migrants and the unemployed. They formed lines in active leisure wear which stretched across the city and waited for the soup kitchens to open. Lamentation turned to grumbling then anger as petrol bombs flew at police cars. It took three weeks before the government IT boffins hammered out a fix. They couldn’t trace the money the unemployed received. It vanished like Robespierre.

William stood in the Anzac Day crowd wearing his Granddad’s Vietnam service medals. The old men and women doddered past. A few sat in cars and wheel chairs. The sun poked its head out from behind a cloud, and blasted the parade with phosphorescent brightness. While the economy hiccupped and farted back to life, property prices continued to fall and he was happy. This wasn’t schadenfreude. He’d found a woman. Melody was no princess. She was hungry for him, which was baffling. When he looked in the mirror, he saw a rodent with a long nose and beady eyes. But helping Robespierre had re-ordered his organs, welded steel to his spine and made his realise, his life was not meaningless. A small cog played a part. Melody looked at the medals on his chest, smiled and squeezed his hand.