My parents both came from big families. Maybe that is what prompted their outlandish ideas.
Nicholas Cunningham braced himself for another long week at the chalk face. Teaching increasingly ill mannered, tired and undisciplined children was becoming more irksome by the week. First of all, each incidence of bad behaviour now had to be put down to some newly discovered syndrome or chemical in food or whatever the latest cranky fad was or is now the latest excuse. God forbid that we should actually take any responsibility for our own actions. Someone or something, other than ourselves had to be to blame. His wife, Nicola was also a teacher who was beginning to hate the job just as much as he did. They met at university years ago now and only had one daughter, Nicole who was turning out to be what they hoped she would be. She had a brain like a steel trap. She could recall the answers to any question you liked to ask and was almost like an encyclopaedia when it came to recalling facts on various subjects and was often accused of cheating when it came to her exams although she never did. They didn’t seem unhappy as a family although they were joyless in the sense that they never went on holiday or engaged in what Nicholas described as trivial pursuits such as watching mindless soaps on the television or things which were not of an informative or educational content. Each of them sat at the table to eat even when alone and tee and coffee were drunk from little coffee cups in the case of the latter and teacups in the case of the former but never mugs. Mugs were vulgar and only for navvies and the uneducated and uncouth. Some brave souls who questioned Nicholas on their very small family of one got short shrift for their pains. Some fleetingly thought that Nicole was not his until they realised for sure that she looked like her father. Others put her compulsions down to his strict and authoritarian discipline and some of her teachers suspected things they dare not mention to him with regard to much of her behaviour. She was so bright as to be dazzling so they thought. She loved her books and her father built her a massive room which he had extended still further on the back of the house so she could stockpile more. None of your “Jane Eyres” or “Rebeccas” were present but lots of autobiographies and quiz books. It was while admiring them that the idea came to Nicholas and over dinner, when Nicole was at university, did he put the idea to his wife.
“Why don’t we start streaming people for the game show with a difference”? When he was teaching, streaming was what they did then so why not extend it?
Nicola was really sold on the idea. so why not extend it, she agreed.
Once he developed his idea it would be safe to quit teaching but not before. He carried on in the same old way with the same old despondency until every little jot and tittle was worked out. Once the thinking was done, he had to start putting it all together. Eventually “Cunningham’s Educational Life Plan” (Celp) was born. This was his non-stop rolling quiz channel which he had set up after his media studies course. With all these geeks in the world it was bound to succeed. He ran the whole outfit with his wife and there were experts employed on every subject imaginable in order to fact check and judge the competitions.
The world population was invited to take part and it was divided into three main groups: “Quizzles”, “Quazzles” and “Quozzles”. The first group was then again subdivided into juniors, seniors and young adults and all cultures were represented in the form of questions so it wasn’t all about learning about Western cultures. The more you got right, the higher up the group you rose and there were championships and tournaments but only for the fun of taking part and no pursuance of material greed and affluence. The Cunningham Foundation was formed and there were huge grants to the developing world for the relief of poverty and to reduce hunger and to eliminate ignorance when it came to people having large families they couldn’t take care of or feed. When you became twenty, you gravitated to the “Quazzles”. It was when you got into this group that you were invited to play: “The Nudge”. In this game you earned double points for your answers and seemed to be locked out of the more difficult rounds and questions using what he called: “The Amazon Principle”. With Amazon you can play quiz games and access more questions and games by paying to unlock questions. In: “The Nudge”, you unlock more games by choosing the right foods and taking the appropriate amount of exercise as recommended for your age group and these rules are amended in other countries whose cultures value different things. A stumbling block seemed to occur in countries where large families were recognised as beneficial or culturally advantageous or the norm. Nicholas won awards for his philanthropic deeds and the originality of his ideas and it was suggested he should go into politics. His name was fast becoming known everywhere.
You stayed in the “Quazzles” until you reached fifty. Then you became a “Quozzle” which you stayed in until your death. Nicole married an Australian so emigrated there but supplied many of the answers to quiz questions and once technology advanced sufficiently, she could judge via a Zoom link. She always came home for Christmas as summer out there is hotter than she liked and it was on one of her visits to her father’s office that she became alarmed. On the door was a sign: “All that you do is known”. All the bar codes regarding shopping and even each time a couple had sex was fed in to the “Cunnicomp”. That was the name for his computer. Information on each one of us is gathered to a frightening degree and he says he needs access to it for the purposes of awarding and unlocking questions in “The Nudge”. When she returned home, a throw-away comment from her husband startled, scared and horrified her.
“Have you noticed nobody lives beyond seventy”?
People weren’t thinking about it because of the rise in human population levels and the drain on various health systems who dish out increasing numbers of drugs for blood pressure treatment, cancer and heart disease treatment, plus the costs of treating or managing stroke patients, those with various forms of dementia so all turned a blind eye to this fact but when Nicola found out and quietly investigated she knew why when she paid her next visit to England.
The computer stats were shown to her by a proud father who trusted her belief in his values. Those who had children outside marriage found their levels of quiz questions frozen so they couldn’t advance up the quiz leagues but the top prize for the “Quozzles”, meeting “Mr. Big”, namely Nicholas himself, always was yours when you were seventy. You received a special trophy and for this purpose, you went into an inner room where sat a little man, wearing steel framed spectacles. In fact he was known as: “Doctor Steel”. Nicole exacted the final betrayal of her parents’ values by producing and distributing the poster: “Doctor Steel who steals your life away”, for nobody ever left the room where he met them and presented them with their trophies and examined them for good health and fitness. Just like that other doctor, he rolled up their sleeve and injected them or they ate a meal at Cunningham’s table and were no more within a day of so doing.
The mad Quizzer was denounced by his own daughter who shopped him to the world as a devious killer but not before asking him why after he confided all to her in a manner which smacked of arrogance, hubris and pride.
“The Bible says we have a span of three-score years and ten. In a grossly over populated world, where climate change is out of control, animals becoming extinct and resources running out, this is not an immoral concept”.
Maybe the dubiously endowed when it comes to morals and brains may agree with until, that is, you find a very convincing birth certificate (forged of course) showing Nicholas to be twenty years younger than he actually was so he could dodge his own rules but even his wife was not so treated and was due to die at seventy, had his daughter not blown the gaff. Like so many evil geniuses before him, he committed suicide, thereby maintaining control over life and death as so many bad people of murderous intent seek to do.
I did not shudder, in the land of kangaroos and didgeridoos when I was there when I became seventy. Instead I got on with the business of eating my birthday cake, basking in the love of my friends and being grateful not to have been born in a country and in an era when a silly, strutting little Austrian tried to take over the world and exert control over who should live and who should die. Beware the crackpots and criminals whose decency and empathy have forsaken them because when they have nobody else to challenge them or hunt them down and make them answer for their actions, they will come for you.