Qualityland

SECRET POWERS

Oliver House-Husband, the CEO of World Wide Wholesale, is sitting in the presentation room with important clients when his contact lenses convey an urgent notification from his new assistant. “QuantityLand 2 has filed an official complaint. Such a shame. A very unpleasant development.”

Oliver groans. He is responsible for QualityLand’s new tourism campaign. His team has thought up some great slogans. “Spend QualityTime in QualityLand” and “Come to where the quality is! Come to QualityLand!” But now there is tension with the neighboring countries, and merely because they erected signs at the borders with the announcement: “You are now leaving the QualitySector.”

Oliver types an answer onto a free-floating keyboard that is visible only to him: “The disagreement can be easily settled once everyone accepts that QualityLand is not a powerful country, but the most powerful. Don’t get your period over it, dear!” He makes a send gesture, and the message is sent. Of course, the company’s internal algorithm for political correctness deletes Oliver’s last sentence and replaces it with “Don’t worry.”

Oliver turns his attention back to his current clients.

“Where was I?” he asks with a smile.

“Perhaps you were about to explain to me,” says Aisha Doctor, “how you could think that any of the problems in your insignificant little life could be more important than the next fucking president of this lousy country!”

“Well, the opinion polls are leaning more toward Cook…”

“And it’s your job to change that, you moron!”

Oliver presses his thumb and index finger simultaneously against his eyelids, switching his augmented reality lenses to standby.

“My apologies,” he says. “But I’m sure your mood will improve once you see our new campaign video. I’m very excited about it.”

“Well, put it on then,” says Tony Party-Leader.

Oliver is just about to start the film when John of Us himself comes through the door.

“What are you doing here?” snaps Aisha. She looks at her watch. “You’re supposed to be doing a video interview now.”

“I’m doing that too,” says John.

“Now?” asks Aisha. “Right now?”

“It’s called multitasking, my dear woman. Something that my kind have been capable of since the Amiga. I know humans still struggle with it.”

“Don’t ever call me your dear woman again!”

“How can you be giving a video interview if you’re here talking to us?” asks Tony.

“For you humans, there’s a difference between text, image, and sound,” says John. “But to me, it’s all simply data. I receive the questions as data. For the answers, I synthesize my voice and generate a lip-synched image of my face. Believe me, it’s not in the slightest bit difficult. The questions are too stupid for that.”

John sits down. “Go ahead,” he says, in a prompting tone.

Oliver starts the advertising video.

The recording shows John of Us smiling broadly as he strides past a crowd of excited people up the steps to the presidential palace. John shakes hands, has a brief chat, and takes a baby into his arms. Suddenly, a man with a machine gun, dressed in the classical garb of a religious fanatic from QuantityLand 7, storms toward John. He shouts out the name of his god, but before he’s finished, red laser beams shoot out of John’s eyes, and all that’s left of the attacker is a charred heap of remains.

“Okay, stop!” cries Aisha. She turns to Oliver. “Perhaps we should leave that bit out.”

“But why?” asks Oliver in bewilderment. This is the part he is most proud of.

“I think,” says Aisha to John, “that we shouldn’t tell anyone in the world you can even do such a thing.” She looks at him. “Can you really do it?”

John focuses his gaze on a buzzing fly that has been annoying him for the last 25.6 seconds and incinerates it in midair with a swift laser beam.

“Never do that again!” shouts Aisha. “I forbid you! Do you hear me?”

“I don’t understand what the problem is,” says Oliver. “I think it’s awesome!”

“Tell me, you halfwit,” explodes Aisha, “did someone with diarrhea take a shit in your skull? Do you really think we can make people elect the Terminator as their president? How brain-dead do you have to be to think up such a ridiculously stupid image?”

Oliver hasn’t felt this insulted for sixteen years, since the time he tried to get his best friend’s fiancée into bed. He is a rare sight: a speechless ad man.

“Someone should have warned him about her,” says John with a smile.

“Conrad Cook’s campaign is trying to overtake us on the right, Aisha,” says Tony. “On the far right. We have to make it clear that John isn’t to be messed with either.”

“You don’t conquer the wolves by howling with them,” says Aisha. “And we can’t defeat the right by bellowing out right-wing extremist slogans.”

“I don’t want to offend you,” says Tony, “but I think that because of your heritage you may be… well… a little biased. You’re not seeing things objectively.”

“What do you mean by that, you small-time fascist?” retorts Aisha. “That I’m one of ‘them’? A towelhead?”

“Aisha, please,” says Tony. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No? So how did you mean it, for fuck’s sake? I’ll tell you this: if the people want to elect shit, then they’ll elect original-brand shit every time, not the rehashed instant shit you want to offer.”

“She’s right,” says John. “If I extrapolate historical examples into the future, the strategy seems misguided to me too. We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

“You’re quoting someone, aren’t you?” says Aisha.

“Yes,” John admits.

“Vonnegut?” asks Aisha.

“Yes.” John gives her a penetrating look.

“What are you looking at?”

“I’m revising my estimation of you.”

Oliver clears his throat and tries to get back to the matter at hand.

“We will, of course, only share this video on a personalized level, with people who want a hard line to be taken against the terrorists.”

“If this video ends up anywhere near the internet, I’ll personally rip off your balls and use them as cocktail olives at my next girls’ night,” says Aisha. And for some reason, Oliver takes the petite, delicate-looking, 1.61-meter-tall woman at her word, believing that she really could and would do it.

“You, er, have a very vivid way of using language,” he says. “We need people like you. If you ever get bored of election campaigns…”

Aisha shoots him a look that makes it clear he should shut up. She’s on the brink of an idea.

“What we want to create is not the image of a killer machine,” she says eventually. “Not the Terminator. What we need is more… Wall-E.”

John smiles.