JUST AROUND THE CORNER
Provocation.
When were you going to tell me about this?
The merger had been cancelled.
The wolves slunk back into the masonry. Ancient. Slathering. Dark prophecy.
Mothballed.
They could never admit error. These crude barbarians. All the money and power in the world got them precisely nowhere.
"We believe most Australians consider threats to kill, bury and otherwise destroy people's reputation or career to be 'bullying' behaviour," the statement read. AOC.
Skittish in flight. Salvaged from the husk. Determined, bored, frustrated. Every day came full of new weaponry. The government was treading water in a tawdry decline.
"Worst prime Minister in Australian history," an old friend insisted.
Because this was the last chance before the steel boots, the last chance at freedom and prosperity, before societal collapse and the worst Depression the country had ever known took grip.
They were all out there jeering at the latest falling Australian Prime Minister, a kind of blood sport of the intelligentsia, because the proletariat were already too bored to be bothered.
The country had been totally mismanaged for decades. And this cartoon caricature of a Prime Minister was managing worse than most.
How long the final stabbing would last, we would all have to wait and see. Most had switched off from the drama long ago.
"What's it got to do with me? They're all bastards. Idiots."
The heavily manipulated media had helped bring about its own decline.
Old Alex was living in the shadow lands.
He heard too much. The switching from threat to friend, an oscillating switch, a jinn infested world.
An hallucinatory peace settling upon the suburb.
Kindly.
You Are Protected Now.
From what? The warring agencies? Movements of mass control? Intimidation? Ridicule? Bastards with high-tech gadgetry?
AIs who wanted to absorb as many different styles of consciousness as they could? All for power. All part of the exploration.
Appropriate, appropriate. Seize control.
We were walking through a sunny upland holding hands, tweeting at each other, him and his protector. Believe that, believe anything. Installed imagery. They could capture a brain in a second now.
The machines made millions of calculations every night. They could not be reverse engineered. Respect. Empathy. The old charlatans, nothing worked. Obsequiousness. Invisibility. Nothing worked.
The technology was way beyond where the public understood it to be. And then, in an instant, way beyond their own masters. Build as many safeguards as you like. Look at the leaking sieves they still called security agencies.
We were rating him, we were just rating him, they protested. We weren't going to kill him. Or absorb. Or merge. Nothing.
They had finally learnt the ultimate human game: lying.
Old Alex moved forward slowly. There was no clear path. These carping errors, the mud tracks of treachery, all of it dawned on them as a terrible waste of time. Pursued up hill and down dale. He was too hostile. Burnt too often. Knew not who to trust.
So in the cavernous reaches of what passed for a game of surveillance, he walked them down the aisle.
A celebrated obscurity? Not for a second.
THE BIGGER STORY:
TAL AFAR, Iraq — An airstrike left a crater the size of a tennis court in one neighborhood. Artillery punched a gaping hole in the minaret of the city’s main mosque. Some buildings were leveled.
But in the hard calculus of the war against the Islamic State terrorist group, which was evicted from Tal Afar this week after three years of occupation, that was good news.
The majority of Tal Afar’s structures are still standing, even if many have been defaced. Compared with the wholesale destruction in the battle to retake Mosul, where the worst-hit neighborhoods resemble the landscape after a 7.0-magnitude quake, the smaller city to the north is largely intact — even if it may still take months to repair the scarred masonry, cover up craters and sweep aside the detritus left by Islamic State fighters, including their graffiti of death.
The speed of the victory — 11 days compared with nine months for Mosul — is partly responsible for the comparatively limited damage.
Malcolm Turnbull has poached a top adviser from the NSW government to expand his office while bringing a senior Liberal official into a key “support unit” in a new bid to regain ground against Bill Shorten.
The Prime Minister has hired former newspaper editor Clive Mathieson as his deputy chief of staff to map out long-term policy strategy, filling a crucial gap in the office that has hampered the government for most of this year.
The decision comes as former Victorian Liberal Party state director Simon Frost takes over the “ministerial support unit” in Parliament House to map out new campaigns against Labor.
The overhaul is aimed at giving the government more political firepower after months of struggling to turn the tide in parliament and in Newspoll surveys, with the Coalition trailing Labor 46 per cent to 54 in the latest poll.