Page 21 - Unlikely Stories 4

The President’s New Birthday Suit

Previous success had established the precedent of attacking the
other candidate’s strengths—not weaknesses, as intuition might have
assumed. In this case, the president, despite the artifices available in
television studios and expensive haberdasheries, looked even to the
untrained eye like a tired, overweight old man. His designated
nemesis, at least in comparison, was youthful, energetic and fit. The
president’s staff had put a stop to letting photographers join their
boss on the golf course; there his silhouette could not be disguised
nor his complexion tinted by the embalmer’s art. Focus groups and
big data analysis both pointed to this obvious distinction between the
candidates as potentially decisive. It had to be turned around. But
how?
Looking overseas to leaders with whom the president felt most
comfortable, one bunch of brainstormers hit upon a means of
challenging his opponent precisely in that perceived quality of the
latter’s superiority: demonstrable physical fitness. The foreign
potentates regularly displayed themselves riding horseback,
swimming in lakes and jogging through forests. If the president could
show himself in such a context, doubts among the independent and
cross-party electorate could be erased and victory assured.
This logic was put before the chief executive in a meeting of his
closest crony-advisors. Keen of mind, he immediately spotted its
flaw.
“Great, but I can’t do any of that stuff. And I wouldn’t look good
trying.”
No problem, he was assured. His party, through its control of top-
secret cutting-edge technologies in both the private and public
sectors, could generate a video with a radically-improved version of
his body doing any sort of activity they pleased. It would be
undetectable, of course, by anyone else’s lower-level means of
constructing and deconstructing such images. All he had to do was
spend a few minutes in front of a green-screen hologram and
motion-capture generator to establish some basic parameters of
dimension and proportion, with special attention to his face and its
tics. Skilled graphics artist—all loyalists sworn to secrecy—would do

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