Chapter 2
The most powerful man in the world might also be the most charming.
Chloe wondered if that was because so much power made it easy to be personable or because so much charm made it easy to become powerful.
Either way, it was fascinating to watch, even through a green tint of jealousy.
Andrew Norman circulated through the ballroom, his straight-backed, white-bearded form moving effortlessly from one knot of congresspeople to another, clasping hands, touching shoulders.
Each mingling group of Very Important People parted to make space, their faces turning toward him with the bashful, fawning welcome of groupies.
Norman radiated a confidence Chloe could only imagine having herself.
It was a confidence that made promises: I’m here, I’m in control, you have nothing to worry about.
Since this was Andrew Norman, the confidence was justified.
His promises were made with the collateral of a dozen past impossible pledges, all kept.
Rumor was he’d be making another tonight. That was why Chloe was here. But she wasn’t mingling. She was at a back table, alone except for the passing server dronebot that was refilling her water and checking if she’d finished her chicken Francese.
She thought about the most important promise she’d ever made: “I will fight to make the black boxes of AI algorithms transparent.” That promise had gotten her elected.
She liked to think that was because she really believed in it, and people could tell.
She hadn’t gotten the Overcheck Party’s rubber stamp just because it would be a nice addition to her collection.
She hadn’t even sought it out, or any of her stamps.
She’d focused on the issue, and the stamps had followed.
Preelection polls had shown that her collection of stamps averaged less than half majority approval, but people didn’t vote by a perfect average of their interests.
They focused on the one or two issues that mattered most to them.
And, at least in her district at that time, AI transparency was the hot issue.
She had made it the hot issue. Because nobody could tell her what she needed to know: Why not me?
That’s a powerful question! said her phone brightly in her ear. “Why not me?” can come from many places: ambition, frust—
Damn, she’d unconsciously subvocalized again.
She cut her phone off with a consciously subvocalized, Shut up.
As always, the irony of an algorithm trying to answer the question made her roll her eyes.
But despite pushing and struggling and fighting and earning her right to be here, she was no closer to answering it herself.
In her first week on Capitol Hill, she’d been taken aside by a fatherly congressman who was old enough to have been in office during the Cybercrash and told, very kindly, that she needed to stop pushing her AI transparency agenda so hard.
In fact, in the upcoming vote, the smart move would be to vote against her agenda.
After all, AI bias was a complex issue, and in this circumstance, it was on the wrong side of a bill that included elements beneficial to all Americans.
Setting aside her interest and voting for the common good would show she was a team player ready to work with the consensus and would gain her political collateral to use later when overturning the entrenched thinking on AI was more likely.
Chloe had known she was in for a fight, but she hadn’t expected this.
One of the few positive things about the Cybercrash was that the creaky old two-party system had imploded in the chaos.
So many political parties had tried to form in the aftermath, with so many conflicting ideas, that they’d stratified into not two parties but two dozen, which soon schismed into two hundred, like cells dividing not to reproduce but to get as far from their neighbors as possible.
Rather than getting a single party’s nomination, a politician now collected stamps of approval from the parties—the stampers—that fit their interests.
If a politician was in favor of increased defense spending but with an isolationist foreign policy, they might get stamped by the Strong Ds (officially the Homeland Defense Party) and the Bald Doves (the American Eagle Party), respectively.
If they collected enough rubber stamps, or at least enough of the important ones, they found themselves in the national conversation.
Voters checked who’d been approved by the stampers championing the issues they cared about and voted accordingly.
The political discourse, both on the Hill and among the public, hadn’t exactly gotten more civil, but it was at least fully about the issues, not “My party is perfect and can do no wrong and yours is evil and can never be trusted to do or even think anything good ever.”
That should mean that each politician was beholden only to their constituents, not to a party.
But here she was, being told to sacrifice her beliefs in the service of some “common good” as defined by this patriarchal relic of the previous system.
She had politely declined, mostly managing to keep the distaste out of her voice, and had voted against the bill, as she’d promised.
The bill had passed in a landslide. And she’d been politically frozen.
Oh, everyone was polite to her. Everyone was congenial, greeting her with smiles, inquiring about her day, her weekend plans, her family.
But she wasn’t invited to anything. She wasn’t nominated to committees.
She wasn’t asked to collaborate. When she tried to join conversations, they downshifted into small talk before evaporating in a cloud of vague smiles and vaguer excuses.
As bad as the old tribalistic parties had been, being without a tribe at all didn’t feel any better.
She stabbed her chicken. She wasn’t invited to dinner gatherings either.
She was here tonight because this dinner, hosted by the Joint Committee on National Networks in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the launch of OverNet, was for every sitting congressperson.
Norman wanted everyone here for his rumored earthshaking announcement.
But she was sitting alone. Even the few colleagues who’d voted nay along with her avoided her.
She was too new, without enough clout, and, in her frozen state, more likely to be a liability than an asset.
The bill had hung in the Senate and was now back in the House in a revised version and up for another vote, and she was seriously considering voting against her promises.
Maybe then she wouldn’t find herself alone at a back corner table at the next banquet.
She thought of that now—of logging in to VoteNet with her MeNetID, of subvocalizing her aye—and a flush of nausea made her choke on her piece of chicken before it was even off her fork.
“Careful,” said a voice, and Chloe jumped at the realization that she was not, in fact, alone at this table.
Someone had joined her while she’d been lost in introspection: an older woman, short, very sharply dressed, with a face Chloe felt she should recognize, almost did recognize, but not quite.
She was angled toward Chloe rather than the rest of the room or Andrew Norman, studying her with intent green eyes.
Chloe subvocalized a command to her phone to run a trust check on the woman’s MeNetID but drew a blank, which meant first, that the woman wasn’t famous or in the newsfeeds, and second, that she’d marked her MeNetID as nondiscoverable.
That was unusual. Most people left their MeNetID visible because closing it implicitly signaled that you were trying to hide low trustworthiness.
“I don’t think we’ve met?” Chloe said. “I’m Chloe Dunne-Carr.
” She didn’t extend her hand. She wasn’t sure it would be taken.
The woman’s posture was closed, contained, though her eyes watched Chloe brightly.
“I know,” the woman said. There was an awkward pause as she failed to volunteer her own name. Chloe struggled to remember if she had met this woman before, but she couldn’t have because her phone’s facial recognition would have remembered and given her a “last interacted” date at the very least.
The woman leaned forward. “How are you?” she said, with more intensity than those words usually held.
“What? Oh, that. Just too much chicken.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“Come again?”
“You don’t have to be chicken. Even if that’s what they want you to be.”
Chloe stared. The woman looked levelly back. “I’m sorry, Ms. . . . ?” Chloe said at last.
“Don’t be sorry. And don’t be chicken. I’ve been watching you. I think I like you.”
“Um, thanks?”
“I like you because you’re sitting by yourself.
I like you because you did exactly what you said you’d do when you were elected.
That’s happened, let’s see, thirty-eight percent of the time in the last ten years, and eighty-nine percent of that thirty-eight percent was because it was pragmatically expedient and cost nothing. ”
“That’s awfully specific.”
“I’m an awfully specific sort of person,” the woman said. “And I like an awfully specific sort of person.”
“The kind that’s not pragmatic?”
The woman leaned back. “To hell with pragmatism, girl. Speak your thoughts. Vote your principles. Always. What’s the worst they can do? Fire you? Not for two years, and even then it’s not up to them.”
Chloe decided she liked this woman back, or would if she had a chance to stop and think. “I had a grandma like you. But I don’t think we’ve met.”
“We haven’t.”
“So who are you?” She made the question explicit.
“A grandma is someone who smooths your way? Pulls strings? Tells you when you’re doing good, tells you to grow a spine when you need one?”