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by Richard Neville
The year is 2020, the place is the Futurescafe, an off-the-grid,
vine-entwined gazebo which thrusts seawards from its foundation
on the former carpark of the Byron Bay lighthouse. Sunday
brunch is in full swing. Erin taps the screen of her webwatch
and flicks back luminous lime-green hair, noting the prevailing
scent of pancakes and wildfowers. "Cool site, Erin",
murmurs her companion, Amrit Singh. The table-side screen
lights up with NASA's footage from RedApollo 10, as it nears
the surface of Mars, projected from Erin's watch . Two of
the crew jerkily wave at the camera, as Dick, the white haired
host, sets down a tray of chai: "There was a time we
hated NASA ", he says to the couple, as the camera zooms
on two of the crew holding hands, "Could those two really
be in love?"
"Kismet and Cog?" Erin's laughter is faintly brittle.
"Maybe Dick, but there's nothing they can do about it".
"I wouldn't count on it", says her Indian friend,
"My dad's at MIT and he wrote their programs. Kismet
is ready for anything." The scene switches from robots
to aerial pans of the Red Planet, dotted with the glassy domes
of the First Settlement.
Amrit pulls a Mambo-Organic cheroot from his turban, lights
up and offers it to the hovering host.
"Not while I'm working, thanks". Dick's more interested
in the soaring value of the Indian rupee. "Half of Bombay
seems to be Byron."
"It's not only a bargain, Dick. This town is spiritual,
full of magic… and the curries are great."
Dick laughs. "That's what we used to say about India"
"So I heard", says Amrit Singh, "we're having
our revenge on the hordes from Lonely Planet".
"More like the Ruined Planet", snaps Erin, in
her chilly, post ironic global twang. Like many travellers,
she exudes ambivalence about tourist promoters who don't know
when to stop. "They've probably got a prick with a Palmtop
on Apollo". She taps her watch. The screen switches to
Planet.com, and its streaming 3D footage of the Mars backpacker
dome.
Amrit sighs and glances at the sea: "Forget high-tech.
I'd rather swim with Dolphins…." It wasn't so easy these
days, since the melting of the ice caps had raised the Pacific.
"Once there was a fancy restaurant over there",
Dick says, pointing vaguely north, "near where the beach
used to be". According to the Byron Guide, if you snorkelled
over the ruins of Rae's, a nudge from a dolphin was possible.
The oceans had stabilised since the ban on logging and the
mandatory use of renewable energy. Erin asks Dick if he could
sit down awhile.
"It was you I came here to see", she says "I'm
stuck on my Phd". Amrit and Dick swap places, as a flock
of Japanese honeymooners soar by on paragliders, waving handcams.
Amrit takes the tray and zig-zags through the tables, clearing
up crockery with the easy grace of a seasoned job sharer.
Dick sits down, "What's the topic?"
"It's sounds a bit corny - The Webolution of Consciousness".
Erin expounded her thesis: there'd been a seismic shift in
the psyche of Australia, and that it had started years ago,
early in the millennium, soon after the era of America's great
social divide. "You people have learnt to flourish within
your diversity, she said, "to navigate the future with
flair. How come?"
Dick sprinkles his chai with ZIP-ZAP, a state-of-the-art
brain booster. An old mate belts down the slope with a board
on his head and yells a greeting, then leaps into the ocean.
"Who's that hunk?" asks Erin.
"A sixties surfing champ on an accelerated anti-aging
program", Dick says, "elephant genes and nutra-cuticals".
Erin wants to know when the Big Change had started. "Maybe
the Olympics?"
"Even before that." The New Years Eve fireworks
in '99 had climaxed with the crowning of the Sydney Harbour
Bridge in a fiery halo , the word Eternity. "It marked
the end ockerdom".
Erin looks bewildered.
"You know, the yob mentality that drove Joern Utzon
from our shores - never to return!" Soon after came the
march of reconciliation across the same bridge, where history
merged into the future, and we switched from self destruction
to self discovery.
"What about the Olympics?"
"Lots of social commentators, myself included, thought
the Sydney Olympics was going to be a disaster, until that
first crack of the whip on opening night". The Victa's,
the Hills Hoists, the aerial tropical fish. "At one point
I turned to a friend and said: 'Wow! It's one of the few times
I'm feeling proud to be an Australian.' She said, 'same here".
Dick recalled that on the trains, trams and buses, the citizens
smiled, joked and "consorted with that dreaded beast,
The Stranger, like they were high on ecstasy. As many were".
He glanced at the sea, where the surf champ in a silver wetsuit
shot by on a mighty breaker, two great grand-daughters balancing
on his shoulders. Dick turns to Erin, who was proofing his
words as they turned into text on her webwatch. "Overnight,
Sydney became a city of merry-making rather than money grubbing".
"Did it convert you to the Olympic spirit?"
"More to the spirit of building a vision for the 21st
Century." People had droned on about social capital for
years, he said - the intangible asset of memory, loyalty and
human yearning - but it was dismissed as new age plot. "All
of a sudden we had half a million volunteers bringing a new
dimension to the Games, which up till then was a bit ike a
re-run of the Goebbels-Hitler propaganda machine, the Swatch
logo replacing the swastika".
"Those Smart Drugs can sure make you talk", Erin
says, as she clips on her solar powered roller blades. "Before
I speak, I'm programmed to think".
Dick's on a roll: "And then who would have predicted
that a regional gripe, the strangling of the South Sydney
leagues club, would have driven 80,000 protestors the streets,
where a former captain told the crowd, " 'they've closed
down our banks, our police stations and now they want to take
away our game'". Dick even remembered the following day's
headline, OUTCASTS MARCH AGAINST MONEY MEN.
Erin glances at the surf champ, still performing acrobatics,
now with a pod of dolphins in his wake. She tries to concentrate
on Dick's bizarre argument, that the footy demo was like the
eruptions against the global "money men" on the
streets of Seattle, Washington, Melbourne, which had so surprised
the media at the time. He quotes the anti IMF placards: NO
ECONOMY WITHOUT ECOLOGY; ROBIN HOOD WAS RIGHT; STOP THE WAR
ON THE WORLD'S POOR; SPANK THE BANK, END RED MEAT, and, "the
one which said it all", I MOCK YOUR VALUE SYSTEM. "Such
sentiments had been floating around the Rainbow Region for
years", Dick went on, "but in the new millennium
they started bearing fruit".
Erin isn't satisfied. She wants a specific source of Australia's
future dreaming. "A charismatic politician, maybe?"
"Are you kidding?" says Dick, as laughter ripples
among the eavesdroppers. Not that such a thing is impossible.
He remembers John F Kennedy's 1961 vision to put a "man
on the moon" by the end of end of the decade, even though,
at that time, America did not possess the technical capacity
to bring it about. The act of announcing a vision that caught
the imagination had led to its fulfilment, one which "changed
the world", as Dick puts it. Computers, satellites, the
web, as well as the first whole-earth pic - the catalyst for
environmentalism and the credo of sustainability. "John
Kennedy gave us the moon", he thunders, "and John
Howard gave us the Business Activity Statement".
Erin is about to ask who John Howard was, but senses that
it doesn't matter.
The famous Oz 2020 vision had trickled up from the grass
roots, Dick is saying as he kisses her cool cheek, uniting
the arts, entrepreneurs, eco-activists…. "Basically it
was a shift away from feeling ashamed about our past to being
creative about the future. That's it. No magic".
Amrit wanders back to the table and asks Erin to join him
for a snorkel. "You're system's waterproof, I take it?"
"Sure. Can't wait". Erin gathers up her Anti-Brand
eco-pack and glances down at the champ, who's playing volleyball
on the rocks with the tourist kids. Several of them - all
blue-eyed, fair haired - had been cloned in Iceland, and she
marvels that their "parents" can tell them apart.
Erin skates down the grass, her metallic hair shimmering.
Dick goes back to clearing the tables, wondering if tomorrow
belongs to the cyborgs. On top of the lighthouse someone is
playing a flute.
Richard Neville
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