EPEXEGESIS
                                                                      - Little Blue

	"OK," you say. "But what does he mean by decoys? Surely this whole plot has 
been about getting Howard to win the election, and yet... isn't that Kim Beazley? 
Isn't he in the Labor Party?" 
	"And what is the prize?" Fiona asks. 
	You stare longingly into Fiona's dark, gorgeous eyes; admire the lithe line 
of her leg, neatly ending in a designer sneaker near her father's corpse. You can't 
help the punning in your head: Not surprisingly that the daughter of a physics 
professor has a good physique...  You realise from your phallocentric objectifying 
view of Fiona that you could only be a heterosexual man. "How are they going to 
dominate?"
	A large wad of your hair falls lifelessly to the ground. You wish that you 
had accepted your father's offer to sponsor your use of Rogaine. Then, you remember 
that you are nearly a zombie and you are probably falling apart. A swarm of feral 
kittens pounce on your hair and start to tear it apart. They will get the fur balls 
from hell. You kick at one of their mangy hides. "Hey!" says the kitten, "You won't 
be doing that when Puss in Boots. oh." They disappear in the direction of the 
mathematics department.
	You blink for a moment before you realise what has happened. "These cats," 
you say. "They are nearly as common as the scraps of paper." An insecure-looking 
member of the Puzzle Hunt committee walks briskly past you, eating a bagel, and 
carrying a book entitled "1001 Pretentious Quotations." You wonder if any of this 
has any relevance.
	You start wondering about the cats. They have been everywhere: they were 
there when Theatre A blew up, quizzing Robert Foot, when the INU bar collapsed. 
this is getting too much.
	"Do you think there is another layer to this then?" you say to Fiona. 
"Maybe in some way the cats are responsible." The convoy is headed in the direction
of University Square. You and Fiona decide to follow, getting on the final tricycle 
(you can't believe that you couldn't think of the name of them before.) 


	Down at the Square, there is an enormous podium, and you can see the 
assembled outside broadcast vans of all the major television and radio networks. 
Trust the media to know before you what is happening. The zombies stand behind the 
media throng in the formation you can't quite make out.
	Suddenly, there is moaning and clapping. The clapping of the dead is eerie, 
calcified. A fat man mounts the platform, and pulls back his hood. "My God, it's 
Kim Beazley," says Fiona. And so it is. "But surely, the Liberals would have won 
the election?" Kim stands at the lectern, and clears his throat.
	"Good evening, my fellow Americans. I mean Australians. I appreciate so 
very much the opportunity to speak with you tonight." 
	"Huh?" you whisper to Fiona. 
	"Vice President Gore, I mean, Vice President Howard, I mean, Minister 
Howard, and I put our hearts and hopes into our campaigns. We both gave it our all.
We shared similar emotions, so I understand how difficult this moment must be for 
Vice Minister Howard and his family." You listen to Kim Beazley's voice. It has a 
funny twang to it.
	"This evening I received a gracious call from the Prime President. We 
agreed to meet early next week in Washington, I mean Canberra, and we agreed to do 
our best to heal our country after this hard-fought contest."
	Fiona looks at you, ashen. "But shouldn't it be Latham?" she says. 
"Following the mysterious disappearance of Mark Latham in the last day of the 
campaign, it is my job as the urgently elected head of the Republican, I mean Labor
Party, to lead this nation. We face many threats. More and more imports these days 
are coming from overseas. Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies 
will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the 
whim of a hat."
	Our decoys have worked perfectly. Kim's earlier remarks resonate in your 
head. So it wasn't a Liberal conspiracy at all. John Howard was just... just what? 
You remember back to the first document you ever found. You pull it out from your 
pocket.


He is a politician from a political dynasty; his father was a
politician. Both he and his father and share the same name. Their surname
begins with the letter .B.. If both are referred to, the son is usually
called .Jr. and the father .Snr.. He is an avowed Christian to the
right of his party. He has close defence and intelligence connections
for which he is sometimes criticized. His full name (Christian name,
middle initial and surname) has 11 letters. Four of those letters are
vowels. The remaining seven are consonants. The sixth letter is an .e..


	You remember how you used to think that it was George W. Bush, only later 
realising that it was Kim C. Beazley. But what if. you turn to Fiona.
	"What if Kim Beazley and George W. Bush are the same person?" you say.
	"What if there is a Hotmail account, furtherinstructionsawait@hotmail.com, 
and the password is ngfuaaukqnecyts?" says Fiona.
	"What are you talking about? Next thing, you'll tell me that the mod-26 
right-justified multiplication of 'The Pythagorean Brotherhood makes giant bagels 
filled with ice cream and eye fillet using the synchotron to appease the Oracle at 
Ekkos' gives the first line of the Thai national anthem, expressed in hertz, played 
in E major," 
	Fiona stares at you for three seconds, her pupils dilating like detergent 
on scum. A small bead of froth forms at the corner of her mouth. Then she says, 
"assuming that 0 is an integer that's true, but only according to the Viennese 
tuning system as it was around 1880, where A = 415. But never mind, let's go dig!"
	"Dig?" 
	But Fiona is already moving away, in the direction of the system garden. 
There, she quickly locates a gnome and begins to scrape this soil away with her 
hands. It reveals a trapdoor. Wrenching at the large iron ring, it comes open, 
revealing steps leading down.
	"Come on," says Fiona.
	"Are you sure?"
	You use the torch on the end of your mobile phone to light the way. The 
steps go down into a large space. You can hear dripping water, and maybe the 
muffled sound of bats. Suddenly, a glinting object catches the torch. You swing 
around, and see the mirror-matter controller standing, unprotected, on a pedestal. 
Fiona grabs the small object and secures it in her cleavage. You think of so many 
B-grade movies. You listen again to the sounds.
	"Wait," you say. "It sounds like --"
	You scan the room with your dim torchlight. Another glinting object, no, 
two glinting objects, no, four. And you can hear the sound more clearly now -- it 
is gagged shouting. You run towards the sound. The glinting turns out to be the 
eyes of two men, bound back to back, and thrown in the corner of the dungeon. As 
you get closer, you can make out who it is: Mark Latham and John Howard. Quickly, 
you ungag Mark Latham.
	"I plan to ease the squeeze on Australian families." says Mark. "I plan to 
put more money into Medicare. Today I can announce Medicare Gold, the greatest 
extension in Federal responsibility for hospital care in this country since the 
introduction of Medibank 30 years ago. A Federal Labor Government will take full 
responsibility for the hospital costs of Australians aged 75 and over. We will 
ensure that they can access a hospital bed - public or private - straight away."
	You shine the torch to John Howard. He is turning bright purple, and 
protesting through the kerchief that covers his mouth. Relenting, you ungag him 
too. 
"The one thing you just can't trust the Labor Party with is the economy. You can be
guaranteed that interest rates will go up under a Labor government, they have no 
plans to keep the economy strong..."
	Both leaders are now talking over each other, the din is unbelievable. The 
policy jargon echoes around the cavern; you and Fiona block your ears and run for 
the stairs, leaving the two politicians behind. As you slam the iron door back in 
place, you feel glad that the cabin is adequately soundproof.


	Without another thought, you run immediately back towards the control room. 
On the way, you encounter a squadron of cats, marching in formation, to the tune of 
"I left my wife in New Orleans."


I left my wives in New Orleans
with twenty five cents and a can of Whiskas
and I thought it was front left, front right, back left, back right,
right for my country, whoopsidoo. 


	You realise that Fiona is way in front of you, and hurry to catch her up. 
Scraps of paper fly in the windy evening air. Breathless, you turn the final corner 
into the corridor where the control room is. To your horror, there are six 
Dementors guarding the door, and you are pretty sure that neither decency, mercy, 
nor copyright law would make them let you past. Indeed, you can feel them sucking 
away... wait on, but you don't have a soul. Maybe you are not a zombie after all. 
Or else, you, like the rest of the plot, are inconsistent. You turn to run the 
other way, but hooded zombies are fast advancing upon you, reeking of lemon and 
swinging at you with triangular axes inscribed with Poincaré disks. You are 
trapped.
	The wrinkly desiccated hands of one of the zombies (you later realise that 
it was Bruce Ruxton) seize around your neck, and you are frog marched off through 
an inordinately circuitous route, into the depths of the catacombs. You exchange 
glances with Fiona, and manage to ascertain that she still has the controller. You 
are placed in a stone room, with bars running down the centre. You can clearly see, 
on the other side of the bars, a meeting room. A radio in the corner of the room 
talks continually in an undertone, relaying its fatigued transmissions. Almost as 
soon as you are shackled to the floor, a committee of cats files into the room and 
sits down at the large table. They seem completely unconcerned about your presence. 
	One of the cats, standing with his back to you, begins to address the 
meeting, speaking in low, hissed tones.
	"Soon complete domination will be ours. The Pythagorean Brotherhood will be 
destroyed, and our assault on global dominance will be one step closer to fruition. 
No one has suspected us, just as no one suspects the Spanish Inquisition. But there 
remains one obstacle in our paths. We suspect that the Rebel Anarchistic sect of 
the Brotherhood has stolen the mirror-matter controller and also switched the 
specially impregnated bagel that would allow Kim C. Bush to permanently maintain 
his duality without the need for a synchrotron. Therefore, it is absolutely 
imperative that we find the controller and manufacture a new bagel before it is too 
late. If the zombies retrieve the wrong bagel for George W. Beazley to eat, that 
is, if he consumes a bagel made of anti-mirror-matter, the duality will be 
destroyed, and we will again be further from our goal of global conquest."
	One of the subordinate cats, trembling, raised his paw to speak. "F... F. 
Felix, wouldn't anti-mirror-matter just be normal matter?"
	"Silence, Garfield. We have limited time. The food consumption of Kim C. 
Bush is the only thing we cannot control. You have seen how big he is. If he is 
given the wrong bagel, he will eat it, regardless of whether we tell him not to. 
Therefore, time is of the essence. We cannot change the zombie's course without the 
controller. They will present him with the bagel within the next hour. If they 
present the wrong one, we are doomed. We will lose our current control of Bush, and 
therefore of America. We will be back to square one. Failure is inconceivable."
	Fiona winks at you. You see her slip the controller out of her bra and 
deftly swallow it. The cats dissolve into several subarguments, which grow 
increasingly fierce and heated. Soon, the cats are at each other's necks, clawing, 
ripping off fur, shrieking and yelling.
	"Silence!" yells Felix. The cats immediately regain composure. 
	"Organise yourselves properly, and then go! You know what is at stake." The 
cats whisper among themselves in a more civilised way, and then hastily exit.
	"So they already control Bush?" Fiona says to you, when she thinks the 
coast is clear.
	"Evidently. I always knew something with a small brain was writing his 
speeches," you say. Then you pass out.

	You wake up what you think it is a short time later, feeling very heavy and 
queasy. The radio on the other side of the room hisses and spits. On it, you hear 
an incredibly flat, uninteresting voice.
	"As a result of the extraordinary and unbelievable events of the last 
half-hour, it is my duty to inform the Australian people that the Governor-General 
has just, in a ceremony held at Government House a few moments ago, sworn me in as 
Prime Minister of Australia. I, Simon Crean, pledge to do the very best I can for 
the Australian people. I promise a full investigation of the events today, in 
which, according to all eyewitness accounts, Kim Beazley, upon eating a bagel, 
dissolved instantaneously into the lifeless form of George W. Bush. We wish to 
dispel rumours, being circulated on the websites of certain anarchistic sects, that 
Kim Beazley was a duality zombie. Everybody knows that the only duality zombie was 
Howard, with his core and noncore promises."
	You listening intently, or at least as intently as you can until your ear 
falls off. You never thought you would be so happy to see such a boring man as 
Prime Minister. At least, you think, cats will not take over the world. Again, you 
lose consciousness. You come to momentarily and realise that Fiona is dead. Unlike 
you, whose life-force hangs in a precipitous zombification-induced balance, she has 
passed away without sustenance. You continue to fade in and out of consciousness, 
having no concept of how time is passing. No attempt seems to be being made to come 
and rescue you. Perhaps no one knows you're here.
	Just when you feel that your death must surely be nigh, you are brought to 
by an AFP officer who is gingerly trying to pour water down your throat. He begins 
to fill you in on all that has happened. Indeed a feline conspiracy was uncovered. 
George Bush and Kim Beazley were a duality zombie, undone by the swapping of a 
special synchrotron-produced bagel for an ordinary one. The cats had mysteriously 
disappeared underground. Howard and Latham had not been found. But just before your 
head falls from your shoulders, he says one last thing, that in your last gasping 
breath, you are unable to comment on:
	"You know, he says. "You'll never guess who won the American presidential 
election. It was some unheard-of independent candidate by the name of P. I. Boots."