AFTERWORD

I never went back to Tasmania. Penelope and I settled on the mainland, although we like to keep the location to ourselves. The world is still full of technology refugees, and we have no desire to be turned into gurus. I’m now a writer, and even though computers can glow and ping in the corner without making me so much as twitch, I still prefer to write using Dundas’s old Remington Portable. An affectation, you say? I don’t care.

As you probably know, after D.F.’s death, Factory 19 was doomed. Most people left for good after Freeman slashed their unemployment benefits and repossessed their homes. (It transpired he had underhandedly privatised the housing commission he had created and upped interest rates until mortgagees were forced to foreclose. He then sold off the collateralised debts in bundles to unsuspecting overseas pension funds, making quite a killing.) Today what remains of D.F.’s original capital and the wealth the workers of Factory 19 created belongs to a trust fund registered to a post-office box in the Bahamas.

The Seedsman and the Rainbird survived the attack on the drone field to achieve even wider fame. Their greatest exploit was, of course, yet to come. In 2025 they infiltrated Google’s California headquarters, managing to hold the facility at gunpoint for forty-eight hours, before burning it down and escaping back to their natural hideout through the city’s network of sewers. You’ve probably seen the famous image of them waving their AK-47s in salute atop the complex’s roof. For now, they seem to have disappeared, although I put this down to Big Tech blocking any mention of them. Every time a Google or Facebook data centre mysteriously burns down or the internet drops out while the head of Apple is on stage launching a new digital product, I raise my glass to them.

Art’s syndicalist Factory 20 in Strahan also eventually failed, leaving little trace behind. The late 1970s became popular for a while but eventually fell out of fashion, and in the economic fallout Strahan imploded and Art and the Prof were run out of town. It was reported that they divorced and Art later died of alcoholism after opening a 1970s-themed bar in Melbourne. Strahan has since been turned into an experiment in self-sufficient farming and industrial handicrafts, changing its name to Workshop 21. They’ve gone further back in time than even we had dared – but as D.F. and Bobbie always said, while living simply and self-sufficiently may be satisfying, it’s never going to challenge the hegemony of the present. Nostalgia has to be more than a hobby.

Not long ago, one of Strahan’s new inhabitants contacted me. The message said that Dundas’s and Bobbie’s remains had been discovered in a partly uncovered shallow grave on the outskirts of town. Someone had noticed the radium-painted numerals of Dundas’s watch glowing in the dark. There were other graves close by too, which I’m guessing contained the bodies of others who fell out with Art and the Prof. Maybe John Travolta, Donkey Jacket and even Gladys. A photograph of the tomb was enclosed. It showed D.F. and Bobbie’s final resting place to be on a hilltop beneath a fig tree, overlooking a river valley in which the rusting waterwheel of a nineteenth-century logging mill still spins after a decent rainfall. The scene is dense and lush and private. Could I, as Dundas’s and Bobbie’s old friend, they asked, suggest something appropriate to chisel under their names on the tombstone? I replied with just four words that I felt summed up what the two of them had sought to achieve with their brave revolt against the inhumanity of the present age. Maybe one day the words might inspire a new human revolt:

ET IN ARCADIA EGO