Do Novellans Dream of Technocratic Bliss? - Printable Version

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Do Novellans Dream of Technocratic Bliss? - Novella Islands - 01-19-2024

1 December 2023, 6:59 AM
Sydney, Aqis, Novella Islands
Apartment 44/G, Garden Park Tower

The serenity of the cool winter dawn was punctuated by the din of the Partridge household's early morning rituals, echoing about the apartment's walls. As the cacophony of a mother corralling her primary school son threatened to wake the rest of Garden Park, John began his final preparations for the day of work ahead. Latching onto his last piece of toast - generously slathered with edopru jam, as was his own morning tradition - he shrugged on his suit jacket, before yet another noise was added to the symphony of chaos.

7 AM alarm. Time to leave.

Swallowing the last bite of his breakfast, John grabbed his backpack on his way towards the front door; a quick detour to give his wife a parting peck on the cheek, and he was out the door. Stepping out of the lobby of the tower block and onto Felix Street, the unmistakable smell of his lunch wafting through the air caught his attention. The Hanafleuran across the footpath from John recognised him immediately, shooting a massive smile, and beckoning him toward the food stall.

"Mr. Partridge, Mr. Partridge! Good morning to you!"

"And to you, Mr. Sato. My, my, whatever you have for me today, it smells positively divine."

As had been the daily tradition since Kenji Sato had immigrated to the Novella Islands with his family seven years ago, opening the food stall on Felix Street, John fished the empty lunch box out of his backpack and placed it on the benchtop. Beginning to fill it with authentic Hanafleuran delicacies, Kenji began to speak once again.

"I am sorry to say, but I have bad news for you, Mr. Partridge... I will have to close my stall, very soon." A pained expression shot across his face, before returning to his typical starry-eyed cheerfulness. "My daughter, she will study in Hathon! And, I will open a real restaurant!"

Sato had routinely gushed about his daughter and her achievements to John - having mentioned on multiple occasions that she had applied to the Hathon Academy of Medicine - so it came as no real surprise to him. "Excellence deserves to be rewarded, Mr. Sato. I have no doubt she will flourish there, and I wish you luck on your own entrepreneurial endeavours."

Somehow, Partridge's comments only exacerbated the Hanafleuran's wide grin, as he finished boxing up the man's lunch. "Here you go, Mr. Partridge. Eat well!" Packing the lunchbox back into his bag, the Novellan tried to hand over a 1,000 Novelle note - only accepting cash as payment, a peculiar habit the Hanafleuran had retained from his home country - but Sato refused. "For you, my loyal customer? No charge."

After insisting, twice, John knew the other man was not going to back down. Putting the money back in his pocket, before bowing his head deeply in thanks, he set off for the metro station a block away.

"Ms. Gold, Ms. Gold! Good morning to you!" Sato's voice - greeting yet another regular customer - faded slowly into the omnipresent sounds of the city.

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1 December 2023, 8:30 AM
Sydney, Aqis, Novella Islands
Office for the Minister of Social Affairs (Sydney Branch)

Exiting the elevator, John's eyes locked on the only other person on the floor; his junior officer, the diligent office earlybird. "Emilia! Just the person I was hoping to see."

The young policy officer glanced up, giving a slight but polite nod of recognition of her senior, before turning back to her work. "Yes, boss?"

"What's the queue on a Class C tenancy, in the... campus district of Rikal?"

"873," she responded to the non sequitur dryly, not even glancing up from her monitor, nor ceasing in her typing of the report she was presently working on.

"There is precisely zero chance you know that off of the top of your head," Partridge chuckled. Ask a joke question, get a joke answer, it seems.

"Would you like me to look it up for you?"

"No, no." Brushing his junior's all too genuine offer aside, he began walking toward his office, before something sparked his memory. With a heel turn, he continued speaking. "Oh, Em... I do need that agriculture report by the end of the day, though. The Minister is going to be on my back about it, otherwise."

Shaking her head with an apologetic expression and a shrug, Emilia rebutted. "Can't be done. NRO still haven't got back to me, yet." For dramatic effect, and to properly drive her point home, she refreshed her email, before giving him another glance.

John had already begun to walk away once again after her first response, confident she was more than competent enough to deal with it on her own. For good measure, however, he shot back a blow at their bureaucratic cousins. "Prod them again. Let me know by lunch whether it's actually a 'can't be done', or if it's just that the NRO can't be stuffed doing it on a Friday."

"Will do."

Darting between the arriving staff on the now-busying office floor and towards his office, interrupted by the occasional greeting, John finally sat down and booted up his own computer for the day. 31 new emails, 2 meeting reminders, and a call from the Minister in 25 minutes. A little bit of breathing time, before things started to get too hectic for the day; certainly enough to sate his own curiosity. Searching through the government database, in just a few minutes, he found the answer he was looking for...

873.

You can't convince me she's not a Tellarian!

With another chuckle, he opened up the spreadsheet with the list of applicants, and began scrolling.

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RE: Do Novellans Dream of Technocratic Bliss? - Novella Islands - 09-29-2024

12 August 2024, 8:27 AM
Novella City, Xeles, Novella Islands
Miriam Flinders Academy

"Hey. Will."

The crisp morning air inside the foyer of Flinders was abuzz with a symphony of students preparing for their morning classes. The chorusing stampede of frantic footsteps, the refrain of clattering locker doors, and the melodic drone of weary-eyed pupils chattering their daily gossip coalesced into the all too familiar opera. Amidst the ruckus, an ever soft but desperate whisper attempted to cut above the din.

"Hey... Hey! William!"

Yet again met with silence, the call hung in the air like an unanswered question. Standing amidst this whirlpool of adolescent chaos, methodically flicking through letter after paper after envelope, the voice grew ever more exasperated at not being acknowledged. As the boy finished checking the notes within his pigeonhole and reached out his arm to close the box, the cuff of his uniform was unceremoniously seized... and him along with it.

"Mister Talbot!"

Before he could muster a coherent thought, let alone a protest, William found himself dragged to the end of the hallway. Slowly attempting to piece together what was happening to him, his captor finally relinquished her grip, and he turned to face a girl with an exaggerated pout etched across her face. Allowing himself a brief moment to breathe, he couldn’t help but recall how ignoring this problem never made things easier for him; if anything, the opposite was universally true. Bracing for the worst, surprised washed over him as her expression changed in an instant, a mischievous smirk forming across her face.

"Now that I have your attention... You've checked in already, right?" Her voice carried an edge of impatience as if the minutes were slipping away too quickly.

Exasperated and trying to glean some understanding of the situation he found himself in, Talbot was barely able to muster a response before being cut off. "Alright, then let's go!" Grasping him tightly by the hand this time, the pair set off against the natural flow of students, the girl expertly weaving through the throng. Her steps confident and unerring, William's mind whirled as he was half-guided, half-dragged out of the main doors of the Academy, the chilly morning air biting at his cheeks.

"Sarah, where on Earth are we going? Classes start soon!" His tone, a mix of frustration and curiosity, hung heavy in the air, but if she heard him, she chose not to respond immediately.

"I'll tell you once we get there!" An evil grin worthy of a caricature villain momentarily spread across her face as she spoke. Reaching the metro station entrance, Talbot's concern had overwhelmed his curiosity. Stopping abruptly, he wrenched his hand free from her grip. The bustling crowds of morning commuters barely noticed the young pair facing off against one another.

"Miss Ellington, you'll tell me now." His words were intended with exasperation more than genuine anger, but they carried enough weight to make Sarah pause.

"Alright, fine!" She slumped her shoulders in a performative display of acquiescence, slinging her backpack off with a flourish. Rummaging through it with exaggerated motions, she eventually produced an envelope, presenting it to him with extended arms. "Open it quick, we need to catch the train soon if we're going to make it in time." Her voice carried a sense of urgency as she gestured to the letter with wide eyes, in an attempt to emphasise her point.

Pulling out two smaller slips of paper from within the envelope, his confusion was not alleviated in the slightest. "Concert tickets?"

"Concert tickets," she confirmed, her nod decisive and triumphant.

"For... today?"

"For today."

"In... Hathon?"

"In Hathon."

"Are you just going to repeat everything I say verbatim, or are you going to make this make sense at some point?"

An impish grin overtook her face as she retorted once more, "are you just going to rep--... Sorry, sorry." Sticking her tongue out playfully as she teased the boy, Ellington made for his hand once more, but this time with a sense of pressing urgency. "We really do have to get going, though." Her tone left no room for further debate, and with a sigh of resignation, William allowed himself to be led onwards once more.

---

12 August 2024, 11:53 AM
Rikal, Hathon, Novella Islands
Atrium, Rikal Performing Arts Centre

Sarah's planning had been impeccable. A short jaunt on the metro to Main Station, a quick transfer onto the Intercity Rapid to Rikal, and then a brisk walk to the concert venue, arriving a mere ten or so minutes before showtime. Even with the excellent interconnectivity National Rail provides, a journey of this scale in such a short time frame has a miniscule margin of error to contend with. Clearly, she had been scheming this for a considerable amount of time, which only served to confuse William as to why he wasn't let in on it sooner.

"Ugh! I can't believe I let you drag me here... We have prelim exams next week, Sarah!" His reaction betrayed the answer to that particular question, his voice sounding a note of exasperation, tinged lightly with the kind of affection only a long-time friend could detect.

"Relax! Just..." Ellington was interrupted momentarily as the clerk checked the pair's tickets, providing her a brief respite to come up with an excuse that wasn't utterly preposterous. As the staff member waved them through the gate and into the venue, she continued, "...think of it as study?"

William shot her a dubious look. "Please, I beg you. Walk me through the twisted logic that you have managed to concoct within your labyrinthine mind to justify that assertion."

"Well... The band sings in Hanafleuran?" As if to accentuate her point, she nudged him, nodding towards a poster of the band upon the wall. There, the quintet of Hanafleuran immigrants to the Novella Islands who made up the group stared back at them, their expressive faces filled with youthful confidence, each member not much older than the pair themselves.

"But I'm not studying Hanafleuran, I'm studying Haean," he replied, as if the correction would make all the difference to the fundamental absurdity of the argument.

"Close enough, right?"

"Completely different languages. Not a lick of similarity." William retorted, drawing out the last word for effect. Sarah’s playful smirk in response was as predictable as it was maddening. It was clear this line of questioning was going nowhere beneficial.

"Other than how different they both are from English!" Her signature mischievous grin growing wider - a sign that her methods of persuasion had shifted from logical to whimsical - Sarah attempted to quash the line of questioning, as it was clear she was never going to satisfy his concern. Distracting him before he worked himself into a frustrated tirade appeared to be her only effective strategy.

"I let you drag me on a date to a different bloody province, and that's the best justification you have? I am going to be absolutely crucified if my mother finds out."

"Hey now, who said this was a date?" she playfully chided, clicking her tongue with a mock sternness, deftly avoiding the actual concern raised.

"Yeah, because that's the thing she'd be upset with, right?" As they finally made it to their seats, William found himself momentarily awe-struck. Not quite front-row, but well within a stone's throw of the stage, the proximity was staggering. The thought of how much these tickets must have cost sent a shiver down his spine. There was a magnitude of effort and expense here, all for a single day's escapade.

"Shhh, you're here now... Look, they're about to start!" As she spoke, the house lights were turned down and the crowd was engulfed in the resulting inky black, save for the thousands of blue glowsticks punctuating the shadows. A quiet came over the audience as the band slowly made their way onto the stage under the cover of darkness. Time stood still, as the masses waited with baited breath.

All at once, the refrain of an electric guitar rang out throughout the amphitheatre in its dulcet tones, before the band was bathed in a harsh light from behind the stage. Without requiring a passing glance at his companion, William could tell she was already mesmerised, feeling her sway to the beat as the vocalist finally joined the rest of the band in song.

As the lead singer’s voice joined the instrumental, harmonising in perfect synchronicity with melody, something shifted within William. He felt his resistance crumble, his concerns melting into the void created by the music. Before the chorus had begun, he too was entranced by the performance, his earlier grievances all but forgotten.

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RE: Do Novellans Dream of Technocratic Bliss? - Novella Islands - 04-04-2026

19 March 2025, 9:12 AM
Novella City, Xeles, Novella Islands
Novella Islands Immigration Office, Staff Offices

Through the partition, the remainder of the morning shift could be observed settling in. The particular percussion of bags being set down, drawers opening, screens waking. The folder before her was thin... A good sign, usually. Clara Hewitt had been conducting naturalisation assessments for six years, long enough to know that the complicated cases tended to arrive in folders with rubber bands around them. This one had no rubber band. She opened it.

The summary sheet gave her the broad shape: Haru Nishimura (西村 春), 34 years old, structural engineer, resident in the Novella Islands for nine years. Born in Kaiga, Hanafleura. Primary language Hanafleuran. English listed as working language since early schooling, consistent with Hanafleura's bilingual education requirements. No criminal record. No outstanding debts to the state. Employment continuous, and tax-compliant throughout residency. Character references from two colleagues and a former supervisor at the Ministry of Infrastructure, where he had worked on contract for the past four years.

On paper, straightforward. In practice, since October of 2024, nothing was quite as straightforward as it used to be.

The amendment had granted immigration officials discretionary approval powers for borderline cases. What the training materials had not specified - indeed, could not specify - was where exactly the border lay. "Functional fluency, in a broad variety of contexts" was measurably different from both "full fluency" and "functional fluency, in everyday contexts", but the measurement required judgement rather than calculation. Five months into the new regime, Hewitt had exercised the discretion a grand total of four times. Twice she had approved. Once she had declined, and written a detailed memorandum explaining why. Once, she had deferred pending additional assessment, and spent the better part of a fortnight second-guessing herself.

Each time, she had written the decision out longhand, before committing it to the official record. It seemed important to make herself say it in complete sentences first.

She was pulling the assessment checklist when her trainee, who had been clicking the same pen for the better part of ten minutes, glanced up from the adjacent desk. "Hanafleuran names... The name in English always flips. Mizumian ones don't, even though Mizu runs family name first as well. Odd, isn't it, given they're basically the same language?"

"The difference isn't the language," Hewitt said. "It's how the names arrived. Hanafleuran names come filtered through the Opthelian colonial context, and reach us already reordered. Mizumi has been presenting its own names to the world, on its own terms, for as long as anyone has been keeping records. Nobody changed them along the way."

The trainee considered this explanation, unsatisfied, questioning further. "So why not correct it? Put the family name first in English for naturalised Hanafleurans, as well?"

"Because that would be a different kind of distortion. The reordering happened. Silently reversing it is not more honest than maintaining it, it just moves the erasure." She set the checklist on the folder. "The brackets are the honest part."

The trainee nodded slowly. "The name as it should be."

"The name as it is," Hewitt softly corrected. The trainee turned back to their screen, and after a moment, the pen-clicking resumed.

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19 March 2025, 9:30 AM
Novella City, Xeles, Novella Islands
Novella Islands Immigration Office, Assessment Suite B

Suite B was small and faced a courtyard, and at this hour of morning the light came in flat and even, which suited the work well. A maintenance worker was making slow, methodical progress across the courtyard below with a long-handled broom. She collected Nishimura from the waiting area at 9:30, precisely. He was the only person there; he had a small notebook open on his knee, which he closed when she appeared.

The first ten minutes were administrative. Hewitt verified documents, confirmed the details on the summary sheet, and checked the completeness of the supporting materials. Nishimura had the manner of someone who had done paperwork before, and did not find it objectionable; organised, unhurried, signing where indicated, without needing to be told twice.  At one point he caught a discrepancy in his own address history - a postcode that had changed mid-residency - and corrected it, unprompted, before Hewitt had reached that section of the form. The folder stayed thin.

The assessment proper began at 9:41, politely ahead of schedule.

Hewitt had developed her own approach to ascertaining "functional fluency in a broad variety of contexts", in the months since the amendment. It was not a test she could conduct from a rubric, so she did not even try. Instead, she ran it as a structured conversation, moving deliberately between registers: the formal and technical, the casual, the ambiguous. She listened not for errors, but for the joins, the moments where a speaker shifted strategy because the language they needed was not available in the mode they were working in.

Nishimura's technical English was, as the folder had suggested, excellent. He discussed load calculations and seismic tolerance specifications with the ease of someone for whom these were not translation exercises, but primary thought. He used the jargon without gloss, and correctly. She shifted registers. "Tell me about where you grew up. Kaiga."

A different quality of attention entered his expression. Not wariness, but recalibration. He set both hands flat on the table before answering. "Kaiga is a port city, in the north of Hanafleura. It was a significant industrial centre, historically, though that has changed considerably in the past thirty years." A brief pause. "I grew up in a district called..." He stopped, taking a beat to grasp for the right word, before conceding. "There is not quite an English word for what it is. A neighbourhood, but also a social structure. Closer than a suburb. We would say, machi."

"So you used machi," Hewitt said, an observation, rather than a correction.

"Because the available English was not quite right." He seemed to be considering whether this constituted a failure. "That is honest, I think."

"It is," Hewitt affirmed. In the courtyard, the maintenance worker had reached the far wall. He stopped, tipped the broom, and began working his way back. She wrote a note on the pad beside the folder. "What brought you to the Novella Islands originally?"

A slight shift. She had learned to observe this one: the movement from professional confidence into the somewhat more exposed territory of personal motive. "Work, initially. The Ministry of Infrastructure had a technical placement program for engineers from Commonwealth nations. But by the time the placement ended..." He seemed to choose the next phrase carefully. "I had come to feel that this was a place whose values I could agree with. That may sound imprecise, but I mean it as something specific."

She waited for Nishimura to continue, idly twirling her pen.

"In Hanafleura, English is taught in schools. It is compulsory, because it is the official colonial language. But the education is... Functional. It is for commerce and administration. It is not, particularly, for thinking." He looked at the table for a moment, then back up. "Here, I found that people expected you to think. In English, in your work, in how you justified a decision. I found that I preferred it."

Hewitt considered this. It was not an answer she could have predicted, and it was more precise than most answers she received to that particular question. She made a second note. "The naturalisation process includes a component assessing familiarity with the Intellectual Imperative," she said. "The constitutional criterion is knowledge of it. I would like to ask you one question on that, and I would ask you to take it as genuinely as it is meant." She laid her hands down on the folder. "What does the Intellectual Imperative ask of you, that your upbringing in Hanafleura did not?"

He was quiet long enough that she wondered, briefly, whether she had pitched the question too large. Down the corridor, a door clicked shut. "Accountability," he said, at once. "Not to a governor, or to an ideology, or even to a correct procedure. To evidence, to the reality of things. In Hanafleura, under the administration, you could follow an approved process and be finished. The process was the standard. Here, a correct process that produces a wrong result is still your problem." A pause. "That is a different relationship to being wrong. It takes some time to adjust to."

Hewitt looked at what she had written on the notepad. Two sentences. She read them back to herself, decided they said what she had intended, and reached for the form with pen uncapped.

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