Week 6 / Monday

On Monday, Larissa started uni. Her first lecture was one of the only ones she was doing with her class from last year. When nearly everyone was there, and they were waiting for the lecturer, she stood up and went to the front of the class.

“Hi Everyone!” Lots of welcomes, and nearly all of them followed the project so she’d had a lot of comments. “I know most of you saw that I got married since last year.” Solid cheer for that. “Thanks. So the other thing I did during the break was work as an actual Vet. I worked solidly, even Christmas day. So you all know I was doing that before exams last year, but I stepped it up, and I learnt a huge amount though the Christmas break. So when I went to enrol in this year, the department said that lots of our subjects, I don’t need to do. So I kind of have a weird year this year, because I’m doing other subjects. This is the only one I have with you. I’m sad about that, I’m really going miss spending the rest of the time with you. But at least I still have this class!”

It was nice, she got lots of congratulations. Even from Annie, who’d been a bitch to her before – really? She decided to take that at face value. Then someone asked, did she have good stories from her work. “Well, yeah, I mean, there’s a crazy story just about every day, it’s just insane. I’m doing a welcome lecture to the first year students, you’re welcome to come along, it’s on Thursday morning, and I’ll tell some of them there. But here’s one I’ll tell you now.” She told them about the reportable virus incident. By the time she finished that, the lecturer had turned up, so she sat down and put her head down, ready to learn.

That afternoon, Larissa was sitting at their table at home looking at her plan for her research project and working to prepare her data request for the vet service, trying to figure out what data to ask for, and how to meet their privacy requirements. Her phone was going nuts, but she really wanted to focus so it was face down on the table; she’d get back to it later.

When Julian arrived home, he kissed her and then sat down, and said, in a serious tone, “Babe, this was published today.” He handed her his phone.

She looked at it, and found an opinion piece from the Murdoch, from a well known national columnist, Peter Nutter. Larissa knew he was a classic Murdoch shill, and avoided his trash whenever she saw it. The piece was entitled, “Climate Change might be sexy, but still not real.”

She read the piece. It started with a picture: her and Layna kissing in the sunset. Then he briefly described Layna’s project, and the focused in on her beauty, and her willingness to show her abs and ass for hits. Sure, sex appeal, he said, and she promotes herself well, but she just doesn’t understand the real world – which is what you expect from a girl like her. Yes, she knows how to play the popular woke trends, like this suggestive gay-friendly picture with a ‘friend’ (an even less respectable girl, also famous in the same way in her own right – you can look up photos of her kissing another girl too) and she’d snared some sponsors, probably entranced by her dance. But none of it was real, they had no content, just like you’d expect, and soon enough she’d grow up and understand that all this was just a warmist thing, a leftist socialist agenda to bring society down, take money from people who worked hard for it, and destroy the good things Australia had built. He ran some typical big oil talking points for a few paragraphs, and concluded that sensible people would know he’d made the case. Hell, he said, they’d forecast a wet summer this year, and nothing – these scientists just had no idea, like always. But maybe Layna never would learn anything, cocooned in her little woke bubble, sucked in by the climate religion. And if you weren’t convinced, here was another picture of Layna on the beach with her ‘friends’. It was a picture of Larissa and Layna cuddling Hannah very closely indeed and laughing while they walked back across the beach to their house – just what were they thinking, doing this kind of thing in public, what was with that friend in the middle? And they were considering whether they could release other pictures of what Layna and her friends got up to later that night. And what had Layna done to seduce her sponsors, he asked, and gave each of them a swipe in a paragraph of their own. Finally, he deplored a society where people would listen to such a piece of trash as this. You should focus on the fundamentals of our healthy society and don’t give her what she wants, fame, like any other young blonde model.

Larissa was breathless with rage by the end of the piece. “Fucking fucking I hate him. What a bastard, going after Layna like that. Tell me you’re going to sue his fucking ass off. Fuck, Julian, they watched us here ... You and I need to find him and beat him senseless, what a fucking bastard. I don’t know what to fucking think.”

“Yup,” Julian said, “that’s exactly how I felt when I first read it this afternoon. I haven’t been that angry since you told me your story. It got under my skin, and that’s what he set out to do. We were in our weekly meeting, and we all read it, and we were all full of rage when we had. Except for Layna.”

He paused and held her face. “What Layna said, when she made us stop shouting, was that she expected exactly this, we knew it was coming, and we should understand that it was weak, and shallow, and we should look at the big picture; we, of all people, can respond in our own way without censorship, and we will. But first, she needed us all to stop taking it personally, because she didn’t need to and wasn’t going to. What we needed to do was to think about how to love our supporters, who’ll be just as angry, and particularly Hannah, who totally didn’t deserve that. But this is what we should expect if we go after Murdoch, and what price is that worth?”