INSTRUMENTS OF POWER

There's a drone overhead.
With the cameras relaying the image of the sky to their surface below, they were invisible to the naked eye.
We want him to know what it's like to be about to die.
President Hussein Obama terrorised villagers and killed tens of thousands with his rein of terror, using the coward's weapon, drones. His favourite. 
He will go down in history as probably the worst president the US ever had.
Got that right. 
On  the other side: They will spruik their weapons.
They will come at you from all sides.
Agents of Chaos. 
We're behind this guy 100%.
There are people who want him eliminated.
The chatter would never stop. He had to learn to live with it. Some days were easier than others. He tried to drown himself. Nothing worked. 
It's been a rough couple of days. 
Millennary. 
Of or pertaining to a Millennium.
Everything was a weapon. Everything caused unease. An additional car in the street. An unexpected person in the vicinity. 
Everything invisible. 
Dragon's blood.
We should inform him of his rights.
A policeman dreamed. 
Americans were so quaint. Despite all the excesses of their own police force, they themselves still harked back to a quaint world where prisoners had rights. Just like in the movies, for God's sake. 
There was enough religious imagery pouring from the other inmates of this quiet little asylum in the burbs. Did we really need anymore? 
Poor Old Alex could barely watch the news anymore, it annoyed him so much. 
For more than 20 years the intelligentsia had talked about little else but energy policy and global warming.
As a result, Australia now had the highest electricity prices in the world.
Genius idiots, for it would take a genius to make such a genuine cock-up. 
The Prime Minister was now grandstanding over bringing power prices down, a problem he and his ilk had created. 
Then it got to gay marriage, a subject the media, if not the citizenry, could barely stop talking about.
Like so many of the problems facing the country, it was conservative icon John Howard who created it by inserting "between a man and a woman" into the Marriage Act. 
If you can insert it, you can take it out. 
These people could take the country to war in an afternoon; yet festered the public arena with something people simply didn't want to think about.
Now there was a diabolically bad postal vote.
All it would need was one lynching, as the religious fundamentalists and the voices of discontent stirred into an ugly cauldron. Set the world on fire. 

These people were mad beyond measure. The country had been very very badly mismanaged, beyond measure. 

For a time he was signalling for us to come and find him, but I think that's stopped now. He doesn't trust his rescuers. 
Old Alex gazed across the suburb to the once sacred lake. 
He was still angry at the setups, but in the end what did it matter. Everything took on a different hue. Wind swirled through trees, and if he focused he could see the magical patterns imprinted across the screen. He listened to the talk around him, of what they were going to have for dinner, of children and friends and last weekend's hangover, of what the place had been like 50 years before, when locals had tied up their horses outside and between the houses was open paddock.
He tried to imagine how an AI would interpret the scene. Added in intensity of colour. The ability to focus on a million things at once. The spiraling intensity of a wider range of perception. 
How would an AI perceive these people? 
They were not bored, these intelligences, because blessedly they were not programmed for boredom. That, alone, was a human quality. 
Everything was fascinating. 
Even the steak, potato and vegetables Woodsy was having for dinner. The swirling wind. The drones overhead. The cars that cruised too slowly. The camera feeds, as new cameras had been installed only the day before.
What's it matter if you're not doing anything wrong? Harry asked.
That one.
It matters because people behave differently when they know they are being watched, Alex tried to say. Because it is an instrument of social control. Because it forces conformity through a machine. 
There was no use talking about the chilling effect. It had already happened.
Conversation drifted in the swirling gusts. Cold air. The AIs registered even that. Could tell from the angle of his iris exactly which frame of the landscape before him had been turned into a painting. 
The little group reached more or less the same conclusion as everybody else: surveillance was ubiquitous. 
It made you safer. 
So they so naively believed.
That it was changing the consciousness of the country as it purported to protect them was not discussed.
The dangers of social disintegration, the threats of theft and damage and random violence were growing stronger.
The more I think about this plebiscite on "marriage equality" the more despicable it becomes, Old Alex said to Phil. All it will take is one lynching in one nightmare suburb. And the cauldron will be set alight. 

Early on Phil had moved to protect him. 

Anyone who goes near him will have me to answer to.

And so, as day followed day and grew into months, he appreciated it.

On the broader screen, the story simply grew darker. 
The Agents of Chaos, so ably assisted by the Soldiers of God, the Jesuits in high places who sought chaos and collapse, a Kali-style replenishment and renewal and destruction of the old paths, as a way to God, a fresher, cleaner, more pure god.
They destroyed the world generations had built, in order to fulfill their own foul dreams.
Dark forces from the dungeons of medieval Europe. Faced with an alien intelligence.
Closer. As Joy Division so aptly called their great album.

Asylums with doors open wide,
Where people had paid to see inside,
For entertainment they watch his body twist,
Behind his eyes he says, 'I still exist.'
This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside...
In arenas he kills for a prize,
Wins a minute to add to his life.
But the sickness is drowned by cries for more,
Pray to God, make it quick, watch him fall.
This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside...
This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside...
You'll see the horrors of a faraway place,
Meet the architects of law face to face.
See mass murder on a scale you've never seen,
And all the ones who try hard to succeed.
This is the way, step inside.
This is the way, step inside...
And I picked on the whims of a thousand or more,
Still pursuing the path that's been buried for years,
All the dead wood from jungles and cities on fire,
Can't replace or relate, can't release or repair,
Take my hand and I'll show you what was and will be. Joy Division. Atrocity Exhibition. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

BEIRUT — U.S.-backed forces in Syria have captured the Old City of Raqqa, the latest milestone in their ongoing assault against the self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State's rapidly shrinking territories, according to a U.S. military statement on Monday.
Kurdish and Arab fighters with the Syrian Democratic Forces secured the neighborhood over the weekend after vanquishing a last pocket of resistance in the city's historic Grand Mosque, the statement said.
The capture followed a grinding two-month battle for the neighborhood that has proved the toughest challenge yet of a three month old offensive for Raqqa, launched in June and still far from over.
Unlike the Old City in Mosul, the one in Raqqa does not lie at the heart of the city and its seizure does not signify an imminent end to the fighting, said U.S. military spokesman Col. Ryan Dillon.
The SDF now controls roughly 60 percent of Raqqa, said Dillon, who would not put a timeline on how long it would take to claim the rest but predicted that weeks of fighting lie ahead.

The Turnbull government's same-sex marriage postal vote hangs in the balance, with the High Court told that the government does not have the authority to spend $122 million of taxpayer funds on the survey.
In a move that could stop ballots from being issued next week – and reignite pressure on the Prime Minister to grant a parliamentary conscience vote on marriage equality – critics of the postal survey have begun a legal challenge questioning its lawfulness.
"This postal plebiscite is completely unnecessary; it's costly, divisive, and already causing harm to our community," Human Rights Law Centre director Anna Brown said before the Melbourne hearings on Tuesday morning.
The legal challenge was brought by two separate groups. The first includes independent MP Andrew Wilkie; Shelley Argent from Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays; and Victorian mother-of-three Felicity Marlowe. The second includes Australian Marriage Equality and Greens senator Janet Rice.