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have happened.’

    ‘Maybe not. Why couldn’t life turn out better than the diary, not worse? Why couldn’t it turn out that we’d made the whole thing up — that he hadn’t been attacked at all?’

    ‘Because it didn’t.’

    I sat at the desk for a moment longer, staring at the words that I couldn’t take back, that I never could have taken back. But my lies were the lies I’d promised to tell; I’d done the right thing, hadn’t I? I’d known for years exactly what I’d ‘choose’ to write — but that didn’t change the fact that the words had been determined, not by ‘fate’, not by ‘destiny’, but by who I was.

    I switched off the terminal, stood up and began undressing. Alison headed for the bathroom. I called out after her, ‘Do we have sex tonight, or not? I never say.’

    She laughed. ‘Don’t ask me, James. You’re the one who insisted on keeping track of these things.’

    I sat down on the bed, disconcerted. It was our wedding night, after all; surely I could read between the lines.

    But I never was much good at improvising.

    * * * *

    The Australian federal election of 2077 was the closest for fifty years, and would remain so for almost another century. A dozen independents — including three members of a new ignorance cult, called God Averts His Gaze — held the balance of power, but deals to ensure stable government had been stitched together well in advance, and would survive the four-year term.

    Consistently, I suppose, the campaign was also among the most heated in recent memory, or short-term anticipation. The soon-to-be Opposition Leader never tired of listing the promises the new Prime Minister would break; she in turn countered with statistics of the mess he’d create as Treasurer, in the mid-eighties. (The causes of that impending recession were still being debated by economists; most claimed it was an ‘essential precursor’ of the prosperity of the nineties, and that The Market, in its infinite, time-spanning wisdom, would choose/had chosen the best of all possible futures. Personally, I suspect it simply proved that even foresight was no cure for incompetence.)

    I often wondered how the politicians felt, mouthing the words they’d known they’d utter ever since their parents first showed them the future-history ROMs, and explained what lay ahead. No ordinary person could afford the bandwidth to send back moving pictures; only the newsworthy were forced to confront such detailed records of their lives, with no room for ambiguity or euphemism. The cameras, of course, could lie — digital video fraud was the easiest thing in the world — but mostly they didn’t. I wasn’t surprised that people made (seemingly) impassioned election speeches which they knew would get them nowhere; I’d read enough past history to realise that that had always been the case. But I’d like to have discovered what went on in their heads as they lip-synched their way through interviews and debates, parliamentary question time and party conferences, all captured in high-resolution holographic perfection for anterity. With every syllable, every gesture, known in advance, did they feel like they’d been reduced to twitching puppets? (If so, maybe that, too, had always been the case.) Or was the smooth flow of rationalisation as efficient as ever? After all, when I filled in my diary each night, I was just as tightly constrained, but I could — almost always — find a good reason to write what I knew I’d write.

    Lisa was on the staff of a local candidate who was due to be voted into office. I met her a fortnight before the election, at a fund-raising dinner. To date, I’d had nothing to do with the candidate, but at the turn of the century — by which time, the man’s party would be back in office yet again, with a substantial majority — I’d head an engineering firm which would gain several large contracts from state governments of the same political flavour. I’d be coy