The Christmas Calculus
Prologue: The Last Man Who Could Fix Things
The heat hit you first. It wasn't the dry, honest furnace-blast of the outback. This was a thick, soupy, expensive heat, pumped and circulated by the city’s vast climate-control network, smelling faintly of ozone, recycled sweat, and the tang of overworked lithium batteries. It was Christmas Eve, and Sydney was doing its level best to impersonate a postcard, if the postcard had been designed by a committee with a severe anxiety disorder and an unlimited budget for fairy lights.
On the 43rd floor of a glass tower in Barangaroo, James Winston Campbell watched a drone shaped like a metallic star of Bethlehem hum past his window. It trailed a holographic banner that flickered in the haze: "SEASON'S GREETINGS & ENHANCED COMMUNITY HARMONY. REPORT UNSEASONABLE SENTIMENT. A MESSAGE FROM THE NATIONAL CHRISTMAS BUREAU."
James took a long pull from a tinnie of ironically named "Heritage Lager" and muttered to the empty room, "Peace on earth, goodwill to all men. Terms and conditions apply. Battery not included."
He was what his late, no-nonsense Scottish grandmother would have called "a useful lad." In another lifetime, he’d been an engineer who built things. He’d helped design the reinforcing cage for the concrete in the very dam that now provided this tower’s questionable drinking water. Now, at forty-seven, he was a Senior Compliance Synergist (Infrastructure Adjacent) for the Department of Strategic Renewables and Community Cohesion. His job was to write reports about reports about the projected socio-economic outcomes of hypothetical green hydrogen projects that everyone knew would never be built. He was a mechanic trapped in the cockpit of a flight simulator, watching the warning lights flash on a plane that didn't exist.
His lineage was a quiet joke he kept to himself. On his mother’s side, a Campbell from the Hebrides, heirs to a legacy of sheep and rain-soaked stoicism. On his father’s, a rum-soaked First Fleeter named Ebenezer Winston, a London pickpocket given the choice between the gallows and Botany Bay, who’d promptly stolen the Governor’s favourite snuffbox upon arrival. James felt the split daily: the Celt’s simmering fury at pointless authority, and the convict’s visceral understanding that the system was, at its heart, a giant racket.
He looked away from the drone to his government-issued dataslate. A mandatory "Festive Wellness & Productivity" module was playing. A digitally generated presenter with a calibrated, empathetic smile was explaining how to manage "Sustainable Festive Joy" to avoid "December Burnout."
"…and remember, team," the avatar chirped, "responsible gift-giving aligns with approved carbon-budgeting goals! The ‘Goodwill Gauge’ on your MyGov portal can help you choose gifts that reflect both personal affection and national environmental solidarity!"
James snorted. The "Goodwill Gauge" was widely known to be powered by the same algorithm that adjusted your health insurance premiums. He clicked through, his eyes glazing over, until a glitch occurred.
For exactly 1.3 seconds, the saccharine interface dissolved. In its place was a raw data screen, a budgetary transfer log. It was meant to be seen only by the electronic equivalent of Ebenezer Winston—a system pickpocket. His engineer’s brain parsed it instantly.
Line Item: Project SILENT NIGHT – Phase 3: Urban Sentiment Acuity & Behavioural Nudging Infrastructure (Metro Zone Alpha).
Annual Maintenance & Power Cost: $4.7 Billion AUD.
He blinked. Four point seven billion. For one city’s network of cameras, mics, social media scrapers, and those bloody carolling drones. His mind, trained in concrete and kilowatts, performed the conversion. That sum was, to the dollar, the estimated capital cost of the Kimmeridge Compact Nuclear Pilot Plant—the project his old team had spent two years designing. The project that had been cancelled six months ago with a press release citing "shifting energy paradigms and community focus."
The numbers hung in the air, cold and solid as a block of lead. The "magical liquid" of public safety had a price. And its price was the future.
The module flickered back to life. The avatar was now demonstrating "deep-breathing exercises for post-feast serenity." James killed the slate. The silence in his overpriced, under-ventilated apartment was suddenly deafening. He could hear the faint, city-wide hum of a million air-conditioning units fighting the soupy heat, the distant, atonal buzz of the drones, the low thrum of data flowing through the fibre-optic veins of the building.
He thought of his ancestor Ebenezer, standing on the hot, alien sand of Sydney Cove, looking at the desperate, ragged colony. He’d probably seen the same look in the officers’ eyes that James saw now in the dataslate avatar’s: a look of management, not vision. A janitorial class, polishing the deck chairs on a ship they didn’t know how to sail.
The joke died in his throat. This wasn't funny anymore. This was the sound of a country hollowing itself out. They weren't building reactors. They were building a giant, billion-dollar baby monitor for a population they feared. And they were paying for it by selling the future.
He finished his beer, the taste suddenly flat and metallic. Outside, the false star drifted past again, its holographic banner now reading: "REJOICE! YOUR ATTENTION FOSTERS SECURITY."
James Winston Campbell, useful lad, descendant of thieves and survivors, looked at the glowing city and felt the first, cold trickle of a terrible, clean thought.
It wasn’t a plan. Not yet. It was a simple, low-entropy calculation.
If the system spends its last real capital on a surveillance system… what’s left to surveil but the emptiness?
And a quieter, more frightening thought, from the Campbell side of his blood:
What does a useful man do in a country that has forgotten what use is?
Chapter 1: The Unmerry Payout
Christmas Day dawned with the gentle subtlety of a dropped brick. The sun wasn’t so much rising as asserting dominance over a sky the colour of bleached denim. In the Campbell household—a compact, over-mortgaged terrace in Newtown that smelled of cat and rising damp—the festive spirit was as thin as the imitation ham sweating in its plastic container.
James’s daughter, Chloe (22, permanently online, studying Applied Narrative Shaping at university), was locked in a heated, whispered debate with her dataslate. “It’s not recognising the tree!” she hissed, gesturing at the small, potted plastic Norfolk Pine in the corner, strung with LED lights. “The ‘Hearthside Harmony’ app says our ‘Domestic Festive Index’ is in the ‘Potentially Performative’ zone because we can’t verify organic origin. It’s threatening to adjust our weekly Community Cohesion score!”
“Tell it the tree’s from Bunnings and it can get stuffed,” grumbled Roy, James’s father, from his armchair. A retired fitter and turner, Roy was a monument to gristle and suspicion. He regarded the modern world as a poorly calibrated lathe, spinning too fast and bound to throw a part. His contribution to the festivities was a pair of socks printed with the words “Carbon Neutral & Vaguely Annoyed.”
“Language, Dad,” said James’s sister, Fiona, bustling in from the kitchenette with a tray of “climate-positive” canapés that tasted of salted sawdust. Fiona was a pillar of the new system—a Mid-Level Facilitator in the Department of Social Permeability. She believed in the system with the fervent, bureaucratic faith of a medieval monk. “The app is just trying to help us align our celebration with best-practice outcomes.”
“Best practice for what?” Roy fired back. “Turning Christmas into a compliance spreadsheet? Next they’ll be metering the bloody pudding for joy-per-gram.”
James sat at the small table, trying to tune them out. The $4.7 billion figure from last night was drilling a hole in his mind. He’d spent the morning, as was their dark family tradition, checking the “Christmas Payout” on the government’s energy portal. Every household got a token “Solidarity Dividend” to offset the season’s spiralling power costs. It was a direct deposit of political morphine.
His own payout was displayed on the screen: $87.50. A cynical calculation based on a notional, efficiency-rated dwelling. He knew for a fact his creaking, poorly insulated terrace, sucking power to fight the heatwave, had cost him over $400 in the last week. The Dividend was a band-aid on a bullet wound, paid for with the money that should have been building a reactor.
He switched to the public data feed—a sanitised, real-time map of the national grid. A festive holly-leaf icon pulsed optimistically in the corner. But the data beneath told the real story. Demand was spiking into the red “Critical Appeal” zone. The supply mix was a precarious ballet: 45% “Renewables (Intermittent),” mostly solar now frying uselessly on rooftops at peak noon; 50% “Gas & Legacy Coal (Carbon Adjusted),” burning a fortune in imported fuel; and 5% “Strategic Reserve (Diesel Generators).” The “Community Conservation Nudge” alert was already flashing amber on his slate: “A Period of Peak Festive Load is Forecast. Consider Delaying Non-Essential Thermal Activities (e.g., Oven Use). Celebrate Cool!”
“They’re telling us not to cook the roast,” James said to the room, his voice flat.
“It’s a sensible collective action,” Fiona chirped, arranging her canapés in a geometrically pleasing pattern. “Shared sacrifice for grid stability.”
“Shared sacrifice?” Roy wheezed a laugh. “I’ll tell you about shared sacrifice. Your granddad and I shared one beer between three of us on Christmas ’42 in New Guinea. That was sacrifice. This is just being poor in a rich man’s world, with better graphics.”
The conversation was cut short by a heavy thump from next door, followed by a raised voice. Old Mr. Papadopoulos. A few seconds later, a new, soothing chime came from everyone’s slates. A government notification.
NCB Advisory: Neighbourly disagreements are a natural part of community life! Elevated acoustic signatures have been detected in your vicinity. Please remember your “Calm Contention” protocols. Resources for Mediated Festive Discourse are available via the Harmony Hub. Let’s keep the season bright!
They’d heard the thump. Of course they had. The acoustic sensors in the smart power poles were always listening, always analysing. James pictured the data point flowing into the $4.7 billion system: “Papadopoulos, D. – Festive Agitation Index: Elevated. Probable Cause: Family, Heat, Financial Stress. Recommend: Targeted streaming ad for debt consolidation loans.”
He looked at Chloe, anxiously tweaking her digital tree; at Fiona, blissfully aligning with best practice; at Roy, a practical man made obsolete in a theoretical world. He saw the hollowing. The capable were being re-trained into uselessness, the stubborn were being pacified, and the young were being taught to police their own emotions for a social credit score.
The “festive” lunch was a quiet affair. The ham was watery. The pre-cooked, “energy-efficient” roast potatoes had the texture of moist cardboard. They ate under the silent watch of the dataslate, its screen dark but undeniably present, like a third parent at the table.
As Fiona launched into an explanation of the new “Water-Usage Virtue” tiers for suburban gardens, James’s own slate buzzed with a personal message. It was from Baz, an old mate from his dam-building days, now working in Indonesia on something he could only ever hint at.
The message was just four words: “Pati, Central Java, Indonesia.”
A jolt, like a live wire, went through James. Pati, Central Java, Indonesia. The Jawa 1 Gas Power Plant project. He looked from the message to his family, to the pathetic, sensor-monitored celebration, to the grid map bleeding red.
The calculation in his mind shifted. It was no longer just about the price of silence. It was about the price of leaving.
Baz’s next message popped up: “They need builders. Not report-writers. Real ones. The kind who know which end of a wrench is which. The pay’s in something that still holds value. Interested?”
Outside, a government drone whined past, its speakers emitting a staticy, digital rendition of “Jingle Bells.” Roy shook his head. “Sounds like it’s got indigestion.”
James didn’t answer. He was looking at the $87.50 Solidarity Dividend on his screen, then at the $4.7 billion line item burning in his memory. He was weighing the weightless, abstract freedom of his compliance salary against the heavy, tangible freedom of a wrench in his hand, building something that actually made light.
He typed a one-word reply to Baz: “Specs?”
Then he put his slate down, smiled at Fiona, and reached for a sawdust canapé. “So,” he said, his voice a perfect mask of mild interest. “These water-virtue tiers. Do they account for the fact my lawn’s been dead since November?”
The joke landed. Fiona beamed, launching into a jargon-filled explanation. Roy rolled his eyes. Chloe sighed with relief as her app finally accepted the tree’s provenance.
And James Winston Campbell, useful lad, sat amongst the hollow cheer, beginning the quiet, meticulous work of planning his own personal sovereignty. The first step was always the same: knowing what you were willing to walk away from.
Chapter 2: Testing the Fences
The week between Christmas and New Year’s was a national twilight. The city existed in a state of suspended animation, powered down to its essential surveillance functions, its populace either comatose from heat and overconsumption of "Sustainable Celebration Packs" or frantically trying to spend their "Goodwill Credits" before they expired. James moved through it like a ghost, but a ghost with a newly acquired, razor-sharp focus.
The message from Baz had been the crack of light under a door he’d thought was welded shut. "Pati. It’s alive. They need builders." Pati, Java. James had spent an evening falling down a rabbit hole of satellite images and construction manifests. He saw it: colossal cooling towers rising next to rice paddies, skeletal gantries of new smelters against jungle-green hills, the stark geometry of a new deep-sea port clawed into the coastline. It was the opposite of his dataslate reports. This was not projected socio-economic outcomes. This was dirt being moved.
His first test was professional. He logged into the departmental portal and navigated to the "International Skills Transfer" module—a bureaucratic relic from a time when Australia exported expertise, not just iron ore and degrees in Narrative Shaping.
He submitted a vague, exploratory query: "Seeking clarification on regulatory frameworks for an Australian infrastructure engineer providing short-term consultancy on overseas power generation projects, specifically in ASEAN regions."
The response was automated, swift, and chillingly polite.
*"Thank
you for your query, Mr. Campbell. The 'National Interest Skills Audit'
(NISA) framework requires pre-approval for any specialist knowledge
transfer. Please complete modules 4A through 7C on 'Sovereign
Intellectual Capital Retention' and submit Form F-22G 'Intent of
External Engagement' for preliminary assessment. Current processing time
is 12-18 months. Your patriotism is appreciated."*
Translation: You belong to the state. Sit down.
Test two was financial. He cautiously explored international job boards, using an anonymising browser extension that probably wouldn’t fool a determined fifteen-year-old, let alone the NCB. The figures for roles in Pati were staggering. They weren’t offering a salary; they were offering a bounty. Paid in a mix of US dollars and a project-specific digital scrip that was reportedly exchangeable for everything from housing to imported tools. It was a mercenary’s contract. They weren’t paying for his time; they were paying to extract him from one system and implant him in another. The premium was for the friction.
His third test was physical. On a sweltering Tuesday, he told Fiona he was going to the “Annual Post-Festive Decluttering & Mindfulness Walk” promoted by the local council. Instead, he took three different automated light rails to the international terminal at Kingsford Smith.
The airport was a monument to paranoia dressed as efficiency. Facial recognition gates purred softly. Holographic border agents with gentle smiles gave instructions in multiple languages, while above them, discreet scanners performed real-time biometric and behavioural analysis. The line for outgoing passengers was short. Most people were coming in, not leaving.
James didn’t join the line. He stood near a cafe selling eighteen-dollar coffees, watching the departures board. Singapore. Tokyo. Dubai. Jakarta. He watched a family—a weary-looking man, a woman, two kids buried in slates—approach the gates for the Singapore flight. The man fumbled with his passport chip. A soft, amber light glowed on the gate. A real human officer materialised from a side panel, all crisp smiles and cold eyes.
“Just a routine verification, sir. Could you and your family step this way for a moment? It’ll be quick.”
The family was shepherded away, their holiday smiles frozen into masks of anxiety. They didn’t come back. The gate swallowed other passengers seamlessly. James felt a cold knot in his stomach. The system wasn’t just watching; it was curating. The fences weren’t to keep people out. They were to keep certain people, and certain knowledge, in.
He bought a terrible coffee for the sake of cover and sat. His dataslate, sensing the airport Wi-Fi, pinged cheerfully.
"Exploring
new horizons? International travel is a wonderful way to broaden your
community understanding! Remember to update your 'Global Citizenship
Profile' upon return to maximise your Social Permeability Score. Safe
travels!"
The message felt like a hand on his shoulder. We see you.
On the light rail home, crushed between shoppers and the limp, post-Christmas air, his slate buzzed again. A notification from the "MyEnergy" portal.
*"Alert: Unusual Activity Pattern Detected. Your domestic power consumption between 10:00-14:00 today registered a 95% decrease against your Festive Season Baseline. This is commendable conservation! However, prolonged deviations can sometimes indicate welfare concerns, system faults, or unauthorised absence. Please confirm your well-being via the button below, or schedule a voluntary Home Efficiency Check-Up."*
He’d been gone four hours. The smart meter had ratted him out. It wasn’t about the power. It was about his presence. The Janitorial State had noticed an empty room. He clicked "I'm Well," his finger trembling with a fury he hadn't felt since his dam-building days, when a safety inspector tried to halt a pour over paperwork.
That night, in his damp terrace, the emptiness wasn’t just around him; it was inside him. The system was a web of gentle, inescapable constraints. It didn’t need walls. It had permissions, protocols, algorithms, and the quiet, constant threat of a nudge becoming a shove.
He opened the specs Baz had sent for the Pati project. It was a PDF of stark, beautiful clarity. Mechanical drawings. Fluid dynamics calculations. Metallurgy reports. A construction schedule measured in poured concrete and welded steel, not in stakeholder workshops. It was a low-entropy document in a high-entropy world.
He looked at his own latest work product on another screen: a 150-page "Stakeholder Sensitivity and Narrative Integration Plan for Proposed Virtual Power Plant Community Engagement." It was gibberish. It was air. It was the sound of a civilization talking itself to death.
The calculation was now complete. The price of staying was his soul, his skills, his very usefulness, slowly dissolved in a vat of compliant mediocrity. The price of leaving was everything else: his family, his citizenship, the fragile, monitored peace of his life.
Roy’s voice echoed in his head, from a long-ago lesson in the garage: "You see this spanner, Jimmy? It only fits one nut. But it fits it perfect. You can have a thousand fancy tools that do nothing well, or one good tool that does the job. Be the spanner."
James Winston Campbell closed the gibberish report. He opened a new, blank document. At the top, he typed two words.
Exit Protocol.
He wasn’t dreaming of a better place. He was engineering an escape from a collapsing one. And the first rule of engineering was always the same: know the weakness of the material you’re trying to break.
Chapter 3: The Quiet Trade
Planning an escape from a system that monitors plan-making required a certain perverse poetry. James approached it with the methodical detachment of a man defusing a bomb, if the bomb was his own life and the trigger was an errant data-point.
He started with the irreplaceable: knowledge. Not the digital kind, which lived in clouds owned by someone else, but the old, dirty, low-entropy knowledge that lived in muscle memory and graphite on paper. Over several nights, under the guise of “heritage digitisation” (a government-subsidised hobby for boosting “intergenerational cohesion”), he began to empty his father’s garage.
Roy’s garage was a time capsule of a functional Australia. It smelled of grease, turpentine, and mildew. Under a tarp lay the corpse of a 1972 Holden HQ, a project abandoned when import laws changed and parts became “non-viable.” Shelves bowed under manuals for machines that no longer existed: lathes, arc welders, two-stroke engines. This wasn’t a hobby shed; it was an archive of a country that built things.
James’s “digitisation” involved his old, offline tablet and a high-resolution camera. But he wasn’t scanning for posterity. He was conducting an inventory. Page by page, diagram by diagram, he captured the geometry of a lost world: tolerances, shear forces, wiring schematics, the alchemy of alloys. He saved the files to multiple, fingerprint-locked, solid-state drives no bigger than his thumb. This was his real inheritance. Not money, but the instructions. It was the one thing he could take that they couldn’t tax, track, or delete.
The physical extraction was trickier. One evening, Roy shuffled out, drawn by the light. He watched his son photographing a diagram for a differential gear. “Gonna report me to the Antiquated Tech Bureau?” Roy grunted, gesturing with his beer.
“Just preserving the family legacy, Dad,” James said, tapping his tablet. “Before it turns to dust.”
Roy was silent for a long moment, his eyes, clouded by cataracts but sharp with cunning, fixed on James. “Preservin’ it, or packin’ it?”
The question hung in the dusty air. James kept his face neutral, the face of a man doing boring, virtuous work. “Bit of both, maybe.”
Roy took a slow sip. “Your great-uncle Alistair. Campbell side. Caught at the ’38 Glasgow docks with a suitcase full of precision watch tools. He wasn’t a watchmaker. He was a toolmaker. They were for the Spanish Republicans. Got six months for ‘unauthorised export of strategic components.’” He fixed James with a look. “Sometimes the most useful thing a man can do is get a useful thing to where it’s needed.”
He turned and shuffled back inside, leaving James with a racing heart and a newfound, ancient ally.
The next hurdle was currency. His Australian dollars were digital, traceable, and increasingly porous—their purchasing power against real goods (tools, energy, medicine) evaporating weekly. The Pati bounty was paid in hard currency and project scrip. But he needed a bridge.
This led him to Frank.
Frank ran a hole-in-the-wall kebab shop in Marrickville that inexplicably survived every health inspection and economic downturn. He was also, according to barbershop legend, a “quiet banker.” James found him at closing time, wiping down counters with a grim efficiency.
“Frank. Heard you might know about… asset conversion. Off the books.”
Frank didn’t look up. “I sell kebabs, mate. Hummus. Tabouli. Very converting for the digestion.”
“I need to turn some digital weight into something with less… memory.”
Frank stopped wiping. His eyes, dark and liquid as olives, scanned James. He saw the calluses on his hands, the clean but weary look of a professional, not a cop or a criminal. “What’s the weight for?”
“Tools. Not here. Elsewhere.”
A faint nod. “Toolies, eh? Good trade. Always value in a good tool.” He named a figure—a brutal 30% conversion fee from digital AUD to untraceable, polymer US hundred-dollar notes. It was usury. It was also the only game in town. James agreed.
A week later, over a remarkably good lamb souvlaki, a grease-stained paper bag changed hands under the counter. It felt profoundly solid. James’s life savings were now a two-centimetre-thick brick of coloured plastic in his inner jacket pocket. It was the most insecure security he’d ever felt.
The final piece was identity. His passport was a beacon. The moment he scanned it at an outgoing gate, bells would ring in a dozen systems. Baz had been vague but clear on this: “Don’t book a flight to Jakarta. Don’t even book a flight to Singapore. Get creative. The old ways.”
The “old ways” meant ships. A evening of deep, cautious research on forgotten maritime forums revealed a shadowy network. Bulk carriers, container ships, even the occasional cruise liner, all had needs for last-minute, specialised crew for short legs. A certified marine engineer, even one rusty, could find a “relief” berth. It was cash-in-hand, passport-stamped-at-the-last-minute, and off the standard surveillance grid. It was also highly illegal and deeply dangerous.
He found a broker with a ProtonMail address and a reputation for discretion. The communication was terse, encrypted.
“Marine engineer. Australian certs, lapsed but verifiable. Seeking urgent relief berth SE Asia. No questions.”
*“M.V. Sumatra Star.
Bulk carrier. Dampier to Surabaya. Loading bauxite. Departs 15 Jan.
Needs 2nd engineer for Java Sea leg. Seven days. Cash, USD. Papers
arranged port-side. You miss sailing, you forfeit deposit. Risk is
yours. Interested? Y/N.”*
James looked at the date. Two weeks. He looked at the brick of money in his drawer. He thought of the compliance modules blinking on his slate.
He typed: “Y. Send details.”
That night, he dreamt not of Pati’s cooling towers, but of the Sumatra Star’s engine room. He dreamt of the deafening, honest roar of a diesel turbine, of greasy steel, of sweat and salt air. A place where the only algorithm was the one that kept the propeller turning and the lights from going out. A place of brutal, beautiful, low-entropy function.
He woke before dawn, a strange calm settling over him. The plan was set. It was mad. It was mercenary. It was the act of a convict’s descendant and a desperate, practical man.
On his government slate, a new notification glowed: “Your ‘Skills Retention & Patriotism’ module (Section 4B) is now overdue. Continued non-compliance may affect your Professional Vitality Score.”
James picked up the slate. He looked at the cheerful, chiding icon. For the first time, he smiled a real, wide, Ebenezer Winston smile. He didn’t click it. He placed the slate carefully in a drawer, next to his grandfather’s old, physical engineering compass.
Then he went to the garage to say goodbye to the Holden. He put a hand on its cold, dusty bonnet. “Sorry, old girl,” he whispered. “Some of us still have a few miles left in us.”
The exit protocol was no longer a document. It was a countdown.
Chapter 4: The Leaving
The last days had the hyper-real, slow-motion quality of a dream—or a sentence. Every normal act became a final performance. James moved through his life as a careful forger, replicating the signature of James Campbell, Compliant Citizen, while the real man packed his soul into a single, rugged backpack.
He took Roy to the pub. The “Woolpack” was a dying breed: a place of sticky carpet, faint beer-smell, and a single, suspiciously blinking poker machine. It was a low-surveillance zone, its analogue gloom a kind of privacy.
“Going somewhere, son?” Roy asked, not looking up from his schooner of Reschs.
“Might do a bit of contract work up north,” James said, the lie feeling thick on his tongue. “Remote site. Bad comms.”
Roy took a long, slow sip. The clink of his glass on the table was a full stop. “North, eh?” He finally looked at James, his eyes like chips of flint. “Your great-uncle Alistair… when he got out of chokey, he didn’t come back to Glasgow. Went straight to Southampton and caught a steamer to Buenos Aires. Toolmaking paid better where they still had an industry to feed.” He pushed a battered, old Zippo lighter across the table. It was engraved with a faded, intricate thistle. “He sent this back. Last we heard.”
James took the lighter. It was heavy, cold. It wasn’t a gift; it was a relay baton. “Thanks, Dad.”
“Don’t thank me. Just don’t get caught.” Roy’s voice dropped to a gravelly whisper. “And if you do… you’re a Campbell. You know nothing.”
Fiona was easier. He told her he’d won a “Digital Detox & Strategic Foresight Retreat” for government adjacents, sponsored by a Sino-Australian wellness partnership. It was exactly the kind of glossy, meaningless thing she’d believe. She was thrilled.
“Oh, James! That’s so aligned! It’ll do wonders for your Social Permeability! Will there be mindfulness gurus?”
“Probably,” he said, giving her a one-armed hug that felt like a betrayal. She smelled of lavender hand-sanitiser and unwavering faith.
Chloe was harder. He found her in her room, bathed in the glow of three different screens, composing a post on “The Semiotics of Festive Melancholy in Late-Stage Consumer Atmospherics.”
“Chlo,” he said, leaning in the doorway. “If you wanted to… I don’t know, learn to fix something. Something real. What would it be?”
She blinked, pulled from her digital universe. “Fix? Like, an app bug?”
“No. Like a leaking tap. Or a busted bike.”
She stared at him as if he’d suggested learning to hunt mammoth. “There’s providers for that, Dad. It’s all in the community sharing ecosystem. Why would I?”
Because the ecosystem is a fairy tale, he wanted to shout. Because when the lights go out, the only app that matters is the one in your hands that can turn a wrench. Instead, he just smiled sadly. “No reason, sweetheart. Just curious.”
He left a plain, unmarked envelope on her desk later. Inside was half his brick of polymer hundreds and a note on paper: “For a real emergency. Tell no one. Not even the slate. Love, Dad.” It was the most subversive act of his life.
The day of departure arrived, breathless and hot. He dressed for function: tough trousers, steel-caps, a worn shirt. His backpack held the thumb drives, the cash, Roy’s Zippo, a multi-tool, and a single, paper photograph of his family from before the Dataslate Age. Everything else—the apartment, the furniture, the government-issued smart devices—was just scenery. He was walking away from the set.
His final test was the transit system. He used his opal card for one last, mundane trip to Circular Quay, a tourist move. He then ducked into a public toilet, emerged a different man, and boarded a crowded, grimy ferry to Manly using a pre-purchased, disposable paper ticket bought for cash weeks ago. The system, tracking James Campbell’s digital identity heading to the Quay, would assume he was there, blending, behaving.
From Manly, it was a series of cash-paid bus rides, a symphony of anonymity through Sydney’s sprawling, sweating suburbs, all the way to the industrial badlands of Port Botany. The air grew thick with the smell of diesel, salt, and container rust. The glittering city skyline became a distant, irrelevant necklace.
The Sumatra Star wasn’t a ship; it was a rust-streaked, floating warehouse. A Panamanian flag hung limply. Cranes groaned, loading red-orange bauxite dust that coated everything in a fine, gritty film. It was perfect.
His contact was a wiry Filipino man named Rico, the chief engineer, who met him at a grimy portside gate. No words, just a scan with a handheld biometric pad that beeped once, green. A sheaf of poorly photocopied papers was thrust into his hands—Indonesian seaman’s papers for a “John Stirling.” The photo was blurry, the face vaguely like his if you squinted.
“You know a B&W Alpha V12 diesel?” Rico asked, his voice like grinding gears.
“I’ve known a few,” James said.
“Good. Ours is sick. You make it cough for seven days, you get paid. You don’t, you swim. No questions on deck. Crew knows you’re relief. Keep to engine room.” Rico spat a glob of red betel nut juice onto the dusty ground. “Welcome to the Star.”
The walk up the gangway was the crossing of a frontier more real than any airport gate. The metal echoed under his boots. The sounds were visceral: the clang of metal, the shouts of stevedores in a language he didn’t know, the deep, intestinal groan of the ship’s hull accepting load. No soft chimes. No holograms. Just noise and work.
As the last light bled from the sky, the lines were cast off. Tugboats grumbled, nudging the colossal hull toward the Heads. James stood at the stern rail, a borrowed grease-stained jacket over his shoulders, watching the lights of Sydney recede. The Opera House shells, the Harbour Bridge coat-hanger—they looked like a child’s model, pretty and profoundly fragile.
His dataslate, left powered on his kitchen table back in Newtown, would be pinging now. “Unusual absence pattern detected.” Then: “Wellbeing check requested.” Then, eventually, a visit from a polite, concerned officer from the Department of Community Cohesion. They’d find an empty, slightly damp terrace, a missing person, and a career’s worth of unfinished compliance modules.
They would log him as a “voluntary disengagement,” a “social fabric anomaly.” A problem to be managed, a data-point to be analysed. They would not understand the why. They could not compute a man who traded a digital citizenship for a wrench and a bunk on a filthy ship.
The city’s glow became a smudge, then a memory. Ahead lay the blackness of the Tasman, then the Coral Sea, then the archipelago. Ahead lay Pati, and noise, and work that meant something.
A vast, unshackled feeling rose in his chest, so immense it was almost terror. He was not just leaving a country. He was leaving a religion—the faith in the abstract, the managed, the safe. He was exiling himself to the realm of the real.
Rico appeared beside him, offering a cigarette. “First time running away to sea, pare?”
James took it, lit it with the thistle Zippo. The flame was a tiny, defiant star in the vast dark. “Not running away,” he said, the wind stealing his words. “Running towards.”
Rico grinned, teeth stained red. “Same thing.” He clapped James on the back. “Go below. The engine is calling. It sounds… hungry.”
James took a last look at the vanished shore. Then he turned his back on the silent, surveilled darkness of his old life, and descended into the roaring, blazing, brilliantly alive heart of the ship.
Chapter 5: The Forge
The Java Sea wasn’t blue. Under the relentless sun, it was a sheet of hammered, blinding pewter. The Sumatra Star cut a brown, sluggish wake through water thick with silt and the ghost of a thousand rivers. The air changed first—the clean, empty brine of the deep ocean giving way to a dense, complex perfume of mud, woodsmoke, blooming frangipani, and the distant, sulphurous tang of industry.
James—John Stirling for seven days—had lived in the ship’s steel gut. The B&W Alpha V12 wasn’t sick; it was geriatric and temperamental, a cathedral of pistons the size of waste bins that required constant, devotional attention. It was the most honest work he’d done in a decade. The engine didn’t care about his Social Permeability Score. It cared about lubrication, temperature, and the precise torque on a thousand bolts. When he fixed a pressure valve with a filed-down piece of scrap metal, the engine’s deep-throated rumble smoothed to a contented purr. The feedback was immediate, tangible, glorious. Rico had clapped him on the shoulder, a gesture that meant more than any performance review.
Now, standing at the bow as the Star approached the north Java coast, he saw his future take shape on the horizon. It wasn’t a city. It was a process.
First, the green: an endless, impossibly vivid quilt of rice paddies and banana groves, steaming under the haze. Then, the grey: a vast, spreading stain of concrete, steel, and dust. Cranes stood in silent forests. The twin hyperbolic cooling towers of the Jawa 1 power plant rose like secular cathedrals, their tops lost in cloud. Next to it, the skeletal grids of new smelters and factories were being welded into existence, sparking in the sun. And cutting through it all, the raw, red gash of the new deep-sea port at JIIPE.
It was chaos. Beautiful, productive, deafening chaos. After the sterile, silent management of Sydney, it was a physical shock. The noise hit the ship an hour out—a symphony of piledrivers, foghorns, distant explosions, and the ever-present, metallic shriek of angle grinders.
The Star docked at a makeshift ore terminal, its hull shuddering against tyres hung like giant black donkeys. The air was thick with red bauxite dust. Rico handed James a final envelope, thick with cash. “You fixed my baby, pare. You walk straight through that gate.” He pointed to a security checkpoint where a line of men in hard hats and high-vis vests were streaming. “Ask for Site Boss Rudi. Tell him Rico sent a mechanic, not a politician.”
James shouldered his pack. The thistle Zippo and the photo were in his chest pocket. The thumb drives were sewn into his waistband. He was a set of skills walking.
The transition was surreal. One moment he was on a Liberian-flagged rust bucket, the next he was swept into the human current of the Pati megaproject. The security check was a cursory glance at his forged papers and a biometric scan that registered him as “John Stirling, Mechanical Specialist – Tier 2.” They issued him a hard hat, a lanyard with a chip, and a digital work tablet that was refreshingly, blessedly dumb—it showed schematics, work orders, and safety protocols, and nothing else. No social credits. No community nudges. No “Harmony Alerts.” Its only purpose was to help him build.
Site Boss Rudi was a bull of a man with a Dutch-Indonesian accent and eyes that missed nothing. He looked at James’s hands, not his face.
“Rico says you can talk to metal.”
“I listen better than I talk,” James said.
Rudi
grinned, a flash of gold. “Good. Smelter B, conveyor drive system.
Japanese gear, German software, installed by locals who were reading the
manual via Google Translate. It eats bearings for breakfast. Make it
stop. You have two days.” He handed James a radio. “Channel 4. You need
anything—parts, a crane, a prayer—you call. Otherwise, I don’t want to
see you.”
It was an engineer’s dream. A clear problem, total authority, zero bureaucracy.
Smelter B was a vision of hell, and James fell in love instantly. The heat was a physical wall, smelling of molten alumina, ozone, and sweating men. The conveyor was a monstrous, kilometre-long snake of steel and rubber, shuddering as it fed raw bauxite into the furnace’s maw. The problem was in a misaligned drive housing, causing a harmonic vibration that pulverised the high-precision bearings every week. The Japanese-German solution involved laser alignment tools and software recalibration worth hundreds of thousands.
James spent the first hour just watching, listening to the machine’s complaint. Then he did something heretical. He ignored the software. He used a chalk string, a spirit level from his pack, and a mechanic’s stethoscope. The low-tech diagnosis confirmed his gut: the foundation slab had settled unevenly. The fix wasn’t digital; it was physical.
He called for a team and a grout pump. For twelve hours, they drilled, injected expanding epoxy resin under the settled corner of the massive drive housing, and used industrial jacks to lift it microns at a time, guided by James’s chalk lines. It was brute-force, Stone Age engineering. The German software screamed alarms at the “unauthorized physical intervention.”
At the hour before dawn, sweat-drenched and coated in grout dust, James gave the signal. The drive engaged. The conveyor belt hummed. The terrible, grinding vibration was gone. It ran smooth, with only the deep, healthy rumble of immense power doing its job.
Rudi appeared out of the gloom, holding a printout from the German monitoring system. It showed a perfect sine wave. He looked from the paper to the purring conveyor, to James’s grime-streaked face.
“The software says it’s a miracle.”
“It’s just physics,” James croaked, his throat raw with dust.
Rudi
laughed, a sound like rocks in a drum. “Here, that’s the same thing.”
He tossed James a key-card. “Dormitory 7, Room 12. Shower. Sleep.
Tomorrow, the gas turbine auxiliary cooling system is making a noise
like a dying goat. You will make it sing.”
The dorm was a concrete box, but it was clean, air-conditioned, and his. He stood under the shower, letting the cool water turn the Pati dust into rivers of mud on the tiles. In the silent room, he took out the photo of his family. Fiona’s smiling, oblivious face. Chloe’s distracted eyes. Roy’s defiant scowl. They felt a million miles away, part of a different timeline.
He thought of Sydney, likely now issuing a missing person alert for a “Senior Compliance Synergist.” He pictured the quiet, concerned officers, the reports, the eventual classification of his case as a “voluntary disengagement.” A line of data in a system he had escaped. They would never understand the pull of a problem you could solve with your hands, of a machine that thanked you with a purr instead of a ping.
Here, he wasn’t James Winston Campbell, a subject of the Janitorial State. He was Stirling, the mechanic. A useful man in a place that measured usefulness in tonnes processed and megawatts generated. The freedom was terrifying in its simplicity: work, eat, sleep, build. The entropy here was all in the creative, productive chaos of construction, not in the stifling, managerial chaos of decay.
He lay on his bunk, the thrum of the smelter a constant, reassuring vibration through the concrete. Through his small window, he could see the night shift’s constellations—not stars, but the orange sparks of welders, the white glare of floodlights, the serene, steady glow of the power plant’s twin towers.
He had not found a promised land. He had found a forge. And in the heat and the noise and the grime, for the first time in years, the hollowed-out feeling was gone. It had been filled with something dense, solid, and real.
As he drifted into exhausted sleep, a single, clear sentence formed in his mind, the final answer to the Christmas calculus:
It is better to be a necessary tool in a forge than a museum piece in a curated void.
Epilogue: The Hollowed-Out Silence
Six months is a long time in a country accelerating its own decay, and no time at all in a forge.
In Newtown, the terrace was repossessed by the Department of Housing Sustainability. Fiona appealed on her brother’s behalf, citing “unforeseen psychological dislocation from excessive data-streams,” a diagnosis she’d found on a wellness forum. The appeal was processed, denied, and the property was placed in the “Community Rebalancing Pool.” A young couple from the Department of Social Permeability moved in. They painted the walls a soothing, government-recommended shade of “Eco-Serene Grey” and installed a next-generation Harmony Hub that played algorithmic bird-song to mask the sound of the neighbours.
Roy received a single postcard. It showed a blurry, sun-bleached image of a coastline he didn’t recognise. The message, in James’s precise engineer’s hand, read: “Weather’s hot. Work is solid. The tools fit. Tell Chloe a spanner doesn’t need an update. – J.” No return address. Roy placed it on his mantelpiece, next to the photo of great-uncle Alistair. He’d nod at it sometimes, a private, grim salute.
The official story on James Winston Campbell was closed after ninety days. The Missing Persons module, after exhausting its algorithmic empathy prompts, classified him as a “Category 3: Voluntary Societal Disengagement – Low Priority.” His citizen file was tagged, archived, and his tax file number was gently pensioned off. A brief, automated memo was sent to the Department of Strategic Renewables, noting the “attrition.” His position of Senior Compliance Synergist was not filled. Instead, the workload was distributed among three AI sentiment-analysis scripts and a junior graduate named Liam, whose job was to “ensure the scripts felt validated.”
In Pati, the man called Stirling was overseeing the commissioning of a secondary coolant loop for Gas Turbine 3. He’d been promoted to Shift Supervisor. His pay, in hard currency and project scrip, was kept in a lockbox under his bunk and a crypto-wallet on a device not connected to anything. He’d grown leaner, his forearms corded with new muscle, his face etched by the sun and permanent squint. He spoke enough Bahasa Indonesia to command a work crew and swear beautifully at malfunctioning equipment. He was, by the brutal, pragmatic standards of the forge, a happy man.
Back in Sydney, the summer heatwaves bled into autumn, but the grid, stretched thinner than a politician’s promise, continued to wobble. “Community Conservation Nudges” became “Targeted Load Shedding.” The affluent suburbs, with their private battery walls and solar arrays, experienced gentle “brownouts.” The western suburbs, like James’s old Newtown, experienced blackouts. Real ones. Hours long. The kind where the silence is absolute, the fridge stops humming, and the digital world winks out, leaving only the oppressive heat and the dark.
It was during one such blackout, in the deep, silent bowl of a Wednesday night, that Roy Campbell sat in his armchair, a battery-powered radio his only light. The national broadcaster’s emergency feed was playing gentle, pre-recorded assurances. Then, a news snippet, read by a tired-sounding AI voice, flickered across a low-bandwidth frequency:
*“…and in international news, the Pati integrated industrial zone in Central Java has announced the successful early commissioning of its third gas-fired power unit, citing ‘unconventional efficiency gains in mechanical systems.’ The expansion solidifies the region as a primary hub for aluminium and rare-earth processing. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister, speaking at the opening of the new Digital Citizenship Centre in Parramatta, emphasised that Australia’s future lies not in ‘smokestack industries of the past’ but in ‘leading the world in the ethical governance of data and human connectivity.’ In related news, the latest ‘Wellbeing & Cohesion’ survey indicates a 7% year-on-year rise in voluntary social disengagement, described by officials as a ‘manageable trend within expected parameters of societal evolution.’”*
Roy turned the radio off. The silence that followed was different. It wasn’t just the absence of power. It was the absence of a future being built. He could feel it, a cold, empty draft blowing through the bones of the country. They were polishing the doorknobs while the roof blew off. His son was in a place that built power plants. His country was building a better way to take a survey.
He looked at the blurry postcard. “The tools fit.” He thought of the young people next door, whose world existed between the Harmony Hub’s chirps and their slates’ chimes. He thought of Chloe, who had used his emergency cash to buy a “digital wellbeing retreat” but still jumped at every notification.
The hollowness wasn’t coming. It was here. It was in the polite, managed despair, the substitution of safety for strength, of commentary for creation. James hadn’t just left a job or a house. He’d left a simulation. And the simulation was running out of other people’s reality to consume.
In the dark, Roy reached for his old, heavy torch. He clicked it on. The beam cut a solid, yellow cylinder through the gloom, illuminating dust motes. On the mantel, the space where the thistle-engraved Zippo had lain for fifty years was empty. Just a faint, clean rectangle in the dust. The tool was gone, doing its work elsewhere.
He understood his son’s choice, then, completely. It wasn’t an act of despair. It was an act of furious, practical sanity. A useful thing had been taken to where it was needed.
When the power returned an hour later, with a soft chime from every reactivating device, Roy did not get up. He sat in the chair, the torch beam still cutting its path through the newly restored electric light, a stubborn, low-entropy truth in a world of high-fidelity lies.
Outside, the government drones whirred back to life, resuming their patrols. One passed his window, its camera lens glinting like a cold, black eye. Its speaker emitted a soft, synthesised chime, part of the “Post-Disruption Reassurance” protocol.
Roy didn’t look up. He just kept the torch beam steady, a tiny, defiant forge-light in the hollowed-out, glittering dark.
