The Prototype

A phone call:

'Hey David. I'm at Uncle Malcolm's. Landscaping.'

'Hoffy. Hoffman. The Hoff. John. Speak of the devil, I've been going through late Uncle Michael's -'

'Malcolm.'

'Late Uncle Malcolm's paperwork. Scrapbooked all his receipts in his journal. Meticulous. Monotonous. Fascinating. If he'd died twenty years earlier I'd have had source material for a better thesis than Variations on the Pork Pie in Western Sydney 1826 - 1839. Still no idea why he left us everything.'

'He kept to himself.' Smart. 'I would like help, here.'

Insulted: 'I am helping. Someone's got to find out why Uncle Michael -'

A quiet groan from John.

'- withdrew two hundred dollars at 16:45 every Thursday for something billed under "Lucy" and, well, nobody else has a doctorate in history.'

John lights a smoke and exhales meditatively: 'The irrigation piping runs everywhere. Not sure where I can dig. I need a historical perspective?'

'Oh. Grunt work. I'll get the post-grads.'

Dr David Hasselhoff makes a few calls and more-or-less blackmails one of his colleagues, who he once caught masturbating in her department chair. He leads a convoy of vans, of appropriated archaeology students seeking extra-credits with trowels and buckets and other paraphernalia, to late Uncle Michael's front yard. Standing on the street-front pathway, a bit slack-jawed, John watches twenty-odd students excavate around and under the maze of irrigation, which leads to plenty of pointless dead-ends and often loops around on itself. David stands at his side, hands clasped and rocking on heels:

'See, one problem solved.'

A student calls from the backyard: 'Oh shit, I've actually found something.'

David stops rocking and panic strikes his eyes. Amongst sifted dirt is a Minié ball, the projectile launched from muskets. Speculation begins: who fired the musket? Soldier? Convict? And at whom? Kangaroo? Black man? White man? Something mistaken as the fabled Yowie, a product of imagination  made overactive by a cocktail of colonial-era gossip, rancid booze and venereal disease? Chinese whispers trickle into the government, who form two competing hypothesis. First: the musket was fired by a disaffected First Australian radicalised by Islamist-Marxists. Second: the musket was fired by a disaffected First Australian radicalised by Marxist-Islamists. ASIO moves in. Standing on the street-front pathway, a bit slack-jawed, John watches men in plaid shirts (no women?) cordon off the property with black-and-yellow crime scene tape. He turns to David:

'Bad.'

'Yes, yes, but, I know a guy.'

Stroking beard, David watches the appropriated students, forced off the excavation site, gather at ad-hoc party being thrown impromptu at No. 26: post-grad Carl has been recognised by old high-school friend Lauren and, judging by Lauren's eyes, Carl has bloomed since those acne-ridden days. Lauren has invited Carl in for drinks 'if you're not doing anything...' which has been misinterpreted as an open invitation to all the apprentice archaeologists, spread via phone call ‘and tell the others’, extrapolating a few drinks into a decent-if-not-crowded gathering. Lauren waves this off with a fuck you, popular kids, I throw the party now laugh. (Disclosure: Lauren and Carl will get drunk, make out, almost bang but decide it feels incestuous. In the morning they will rekindle a close friendship, becoming god parents to each other's children in later years.)

John follows David's lead: walk up the party, carry a carton of grog from the university van (appropriated for the booze run) inside to the fridge. They find Tubs the cat, thinking to herself 'the folks will be pissed at Lauren, leaving me the angel child and granting me more biscuits wait wait whaaat?' as John takes her under arm. In the backyard, David gives out hand-rolled cigarettes.

'Is that reefer?'

'You're a cool professor.'

'Thanks Doc.'

'Wait. This isn't dope.'

'It's working on me. It's dope.'

'You don't know dick.'

'No, but I'd like to meet dick.'

‘… Huh.’

John watches those two sneak into the bedroom: 'What is that?'

David: 'Oh, just catnip and organic tobacco. Another guy I know.'

Tom, in full Indiana Jones get up, whip and all, jumps over the back fence and lands next to John and David and, jogging on the spot: 'Post grads. Responsible, but not too responsible. No demon spawn in nine months.' Raising hand for high-five. 'Condoms.'

David nods: 'Brevity.'

'Good enough.' Tom, still jogging, lowers hand. 'You want The Prototype.'

David: 'Yes, we seem to have bitten off a bit more -'

'Yep. Yep. Government. Ew.' Tom's gaze unwavering from the party inside. 'The Prototype. Built by bank robbers. Why tunnel into the vault when you can tunnel the vault to you? Never used it. Discovered they had a knack for engineering. Went legit. Or black ops. Can't remember.'

John drops Tubs: 'Move the earth underneath. No crime scene. House intact.'

Tom: 'Bingo. In exchange, I want this.'

Tom drops a note at David's feet before sprinting inside to the party with a hummed da da daaaa, da duh duummm. The note is about the Plate of Buluc Chabtan, a stone tablet which prophesises, with 37.3% accuracy, the first three numbers drawn in 245 lotteries run in various locations around the globe in the years between 2024 and 2045. It is not easy money but, to the right entrepreneurial eyes, there is potential for profit. A joint project of the Aztec and the Maya, the Plate of Buluc Chabtan was gifted to Bertha (seen here in a black and white photograph from her heyday, kind of like Lara Croft sans the pointy, pixelated tits) after she repelled an army of demons, unleashed from the temple by condo development, with rather nasty but prowessed sack-taps - it's cool, the demons were cunts.

Dorothy Smooshen inherited the Plate of Buluc Chabtan after Aunt Bertha passed in her sleep at 88. Now Dorothy sits with elbows on kitchen table, hands clasped around drooped head, bordering on angry tears. Cloves, wild blackberries, a half-broiled duck and cinnamon sticks are strewn about the table covered in spilt nutmeg. Fourteen open cookbooks dot locations in a wider circumference around the kitchen. This is how John and David find her, having followed Tom's note to the address and been let in by the indifferent bitch who is her housemate.

John feels sad for Dorothy: 'So what's your problem?'

She sniffs: 'The judges of the Heresford Shire Baking Contest are snobby prigs who only appreciate -' she lets slip a small angry growl '- avant-garde, pretentious cooking, so unless I find some niche wank to bake then -' a mewl, a couple of tears shed '-I won't get that win on my resume and -' fists slamming on table '- I will never have my dream job of catering for shadowy private military companies during their mercenary but stabilising security details.'

'Oh.' David's eyes widen. 'Oh, oh, oh. Ohhhhh yes. Yes. Fuck yes.'

John raises an eyebrow, thumb over shoulder: 'He knows pies. Old pork pies. He did thesis. Trade?'

David, now outside, screams at the night sky: 'Fuck yooou, Dad, I was right all aloooong.'

Once calmed down, David provides academic consultation to Dorothy in exchange for the Plate of Buluc Chabtan. John and he return to No. 26 to find the remaining dozen revellers splayed naked and exhausted on the lounge room floor. Three orgies have taken place: the first in the Eleusinian tradition, the second taking inspiration from Mesopotamian Iraq and the last being a mash-up of Saracen technique and Lemurian trope. Tom, head pillowed by someone's buttocks, smiles content at John and David:

'If we do not learn from history, we are doomed to never repeat it.'

The Plate of Buluc Chabtan is exchanged for The Prototype, which is an intimidating 2m tall, 90cm diameter dark grey upright cylinder. John and David are not sure how it works, exactly, but punch the necessary x, y and z values into the keypad to switch the problematic front yard – irrigation, excavation and crime scene – with a piece of lawn from above parliament house. Whilst the two slabs of land are swapped by slow, mysterious mean, David lights a smoke to extend and accentuate his lingering glow of validation:

'You know, after going through late Uncle Malcolm's bookkeeping, I am inclined to believe that this isn’t his place. He paid strata fees.'