I’m still in shock! He did it! The Tin Geezer actually did it! But I didn’t need to tell you that. It’s all over the news! They’re not sure what to call it. Technically, he’s not the first robot to take office. That honour would go to the Roomba that technically became mayor of Tower Hamlets for an hour a few years back due to a bizarre quirk of bureaucracy and complicated electoral fraud. Not to mention that Bonabot hasn’t actually run for office. Rather, Hatchfield council is now dominated by his representatives.
Nevertheless, this certainly is ‘something’ and the eyes of the nation are on Hatchfield for the first time since we built all those metre-high speed bumps on account of a typo in some planning documents. As much as you may be sick of this media frenzy already, I’d wager most of you still have appetite for hearing how it all happened from an insider.
By the time Thursday rolled around, those of us in Club Bonabot had modestly accepted that the end of the road was nigh. It had been a fun experiment. It had bruised the egos of a few political heavyweights. But we all knew that when we woke up on Friday morning, it would be to the news that everything was, disappointingly, back to normal. Only the more fanatical fans of Bonabot thought that this was real. And so, I, and most of L’Emperor’s troops had an early night on Thursday in lieu of sitting in a dusty sports hall waiting for the tens of votes to be tallied. Polling, resources, and common sense all indicated that it would be another VB landslide. It always was. And they had FACTory now.
It was far from a restful night though! I’d only had my head down for a few hours when I awoke to the sound of one of Lawrence’s drones (I think it was the one he calls Veronica) repeatedly butting at my bedroom window. After some frantic arm waving and repeated cries of “He’s doing it! He’s doing it!”, Lawrence convinced me to pull on the nearest pair of acceptable trousers and sprint to the sports hall.
An eternity of watching papers being shuffled and people huddled around phones showing livestreams of news channels trying to outdo each other with infographics that could only be described as sheer statistical pornography followed. The tension finally came to a head around 6:30am when a frail returning officer clambered to a makeshift stage and read out some numbers. By 11 votes, Bonabot had won! Well… technically I’d won but I was only a surrogate for a gadget. And soon, news rolled in from other wards. Across the city, representatives of the Bonabot Party were taking seats by margins as low as 3 votes and as high as 22.
Put it down to the frustrations of the long-ignored masses or the charm of Bonabot or the 10% voter turnout, whatever the cause, the city was now under the control of a cult dedicated to a wheelie bin with a personality disorder. Jubilation followed. As did a speech from Bonabot. It seemed to be an almost exact rendition of one of Napoleon’s actual speeches, and to his credit, was delivered as passionately as the original probably was. Its gravitas was somewhat undermined by the fact that the speech was peppered with the word ERROR throughout and inexplicably, quotes from the movie Napoleon Dynamite.
Either because of sleep deprivation or because of the lead content in Hatchfield’s water supply which leads its residents to be more detached from reality than most, this speech was met with enthusiastic applause by almost all of those in attendance. Not a moment passed after the speech before we initiated ‘media protocol 1’ (Several of us wheel Bonabot as far away from journalists as we can whilst Lawrence talks at them very loudly).
Ordinarily, most of what Lawrence says isn’t fit for print but I feel his response to the local paper essentially asking him what the hell was happening proved a concise summary of the general feeling in Hatchfield.
“Well why not vote for a bloody robot! What the hell else were we meant to do!? What choice have we got left? Did you expect us to vote for his lot!? [Lawrence gestured towards Hamish Haroldson. A notorious MP for the NA. A divisive figure, public perception of him seems split between ‘magnanimous altruist’ and ‘evil bastard’ if news site comment sections are to be believed.] Across the country tonight, 40% of the 20% of the people who bothered to get off their arse and vote have turned the map all one colour again! Except for here! Hatchfield is turquoise! [It’s worth noting that all the primary and secondary colours were already associated with other political movements when the Bonabot Party was formed so we didn’t have much choice. Technically, the official party colour is ‘Lagoon Falls’ according to Dulux.] if it takes voting for Frankenstein’s dishwasher to end decades of rule by those neglectful [redacted]heads, then I say vive le Tin Geezer!”
Bonabot’s victory has only strengthened his ranks. In perhaps what will prove to be one of the most important developments of his political career, Boanbot appears to have won the admiration of FACTory. Yet another, and dare I say now the most powerful ally in the technology park. All of their projections and there handywork had set this election up to be an open goal for VB. And yet Bonabot has defied every one of their spreadsheets and scatter graphs.
In the few hours since the election, we’ve already seen a deluge of communications from people within FACTory. Asking all-manner of questions out of frantic curiosity and fawning over the being that they now call ‘The Machine that Defied Numbers’. For an organisation that’s essentially an evangelical cult of data, a statistical, logical and natural anomaly like Bonabot is messiah material.
So what next? To government I suppose. And then what? Stay tuned to find out!
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