To sate the lust of power; more horrid still,

The foulest stain and scandal of our nature

Became its boast — One Murder made a Villain,

Millions a Hero. — Princes were privileg’d

To kill, and numbers sanctified the crime.

Ah! why will Kings forget that they are Men?

—Beilby Porteus

I’d always pictured the confrontation in the Oval Office. The traitor would be sitting behind his polished desk, the shadow of doom lurking behind his cornered rat eyes.

“Mr. President!” I’d exclaim, with the fire of two hundred million voters raging behind me. “You are going to jail!”

Instead, the meeting was in Gertrude’s Diner, an hour’s drive from DC. The kind of place where sandwiches are thirty dollars and can feed a family of four. Everything smelled faintly of pickles. Though it was mid-November, we were in the middle of a record heat wave and the place was sweltering. The vents were rattling overhead but that was about all the good they were doing. The lights kept flickering, and it was the same everywhere you went, there were nationwide brownouts. A country on the fritz.

“They hate it when I come here.” President Cohen nodded to the secret service men stationed at all points of entry. “Takes a double detail, and I think they spend about four hours sweeping the place for bugs. See those things on the windowsills? They vibrate so you can’t use a laser microphone to eavesdrop. Very James Bond. It’s all worth it though. You can’t get a better pastrami outside of New York. You just can’t!”

Already he was different than I’d anticipated. Ralph Cohen was shorter than he looked on camera. He wasn’t wearing a suit. Instead, he wore a plaid shirt and a cardigan, which made me look overdressed. He’d called it an informal meeting, but I hadn’t expected it to be this informal.

“Whatever you get, make sure to get it on rye. They bake it themselves; I’m not joking.” You could hear the Brooklyn leaking through with every word, and it dawned on me that this was his normal voice, and that he suppressed the accent when speaking publicly.

“You know why I’m here. It’s over for you, Cohen,” I said, determined not to let him drive the conversation.

“Ho-oh! Thought we might wait until our food comes until we pull out the big guns. I haven’t even had coffee yet. Mr. James!”

An old man walking with a pronounced limp sidled up to the table, wearing an apron that said “Gertrude’s” in faded green letters. The apron looked like it might be older than I was.

“Yeah, whaddya want?” Mr. James said.

“Mr. James, I’ll have two cups of coffee at the same time, corned beef hash well done, eggs over hard, rye toast, buttered. And a bottle of hot sauce.”

Mr. James scrawled the order on a pad, even though we were the only two people in the restaurant. He scowled at the pad like it had done him some terrible wrong.

“You?” Mr. James asked, tilting his ancient head my way.

“Just coffee,” I said.

“Hell, get her a pastrami on rye. This could take a while, and I don’t want her eyeballing my lunch,” the president ordered.

“Yeah, yeah,” Mr. James replied, and he trundled off to the kitchen. I couldn’t believe a waiter could be so rude, but Cohen had a big dopey grin; he was eating it up. I guess the one thing you couldn’t get at the White House was a waiter to be rude to you.

I glared. President or not, I didn’t like Cohen ordering for me. I didn’t like how any of this was going. I should never have agreed to this meeting, with no entourage, no press, just the two of us at a worn out booth in this grungy diner.

“Relax. That’s gonna be the tone of this whole meeting: I know something you don’t. For instance, I know we’re gonna be here for about four hours, minimum, and you probably didn’t get breakfast. Nerves, am I right?. Also, I know that the pastrami here is literally slices of heaven served on rye bread. So please, let’s just take it easy.”

I had been irritated before, now I was angry. How dare this corrupt asshole talk down to me? I had to remind myself I was going to put him behind bars.

He continued: ”First, let me congratulate you on a hell of a campaign. Just a hell of a campaign. First Independent president since George Washington. Quite the accomplishment. Now, I can’t say I was happy with the focus of your campaign...”

The focus of the campaign had been simple. Prosecute the President. My imagery was all banging gavels and prison bars and Cohen the Criminal, a cartoon caricature of the President that we spun out into an animated show that had shattered all engagement records. We’d invested big in commissioning the series—celebrity voice actors, a domestic animation house. You wouldn’t believe how expensive it all was.

Cohen the Criminal was my baby. I’d started working on it seriously the day after Cohen got re-elected. I created the characters, wrote the scripts; I even got to oversee production on the first six episodes before the campaign started heating up. There were twenty six total episodes, the series finale released the night before the election.

No one had ever created a show just for their campaign, and most analysts thought I was crazy to spend so much money on it. It took a long time and a lot of money to make cartoons. But they worked. They were smart, they were funny. And the damning thing was they rang true.

Joseph Macken, Cohen’s Vice President, was the Democratic candidate, and he was absolutely skewered in the show. He looked like such a bumbling imbecile in the series that no one could take him seriously in real life. During the first debate, he made two statements that were word for word, the exact same lines his character had said in Cohen the Criminal. The media erupted in glee, playing the clip endlessly on every station. It crippled him. In the following debates Macken was so careful not to repeat that mistake that he came across as robotic and insincere. He could never get his momentum back.

The Republicans should have been the real threat, but they chose to field Vincent Frank, a comedy goldmine. Large, loudmouthed and prone to gaffes, he initially tried to weather his portrayal on the show by laughing along with it, reveling in the exposure. He would do impressions of his character on late night shows. It played a lot better than Macken’s stuttering protests. But Frank was an oldschool political machine candidate. He was about endorsements, canvassing, pressing the flesh. He outspent me and out-campaigned me and every bit of it backfired with the new generation of voters. Vincent Frank was really the last of his kind, and when the votes came rolling in, it was clear he was a dinosaur.

Still, I’d had to fight like hell. Two massive political machines were against me, and we’d had to build our own out of nothing. I had thrown every fiber of my being into this race. It had been two weeks since I won, and I hadn’t felt whole since. Some part of me was burned up in that final dash. From cartoons to the capitol, I had made it. Now, I looked across the table at Cohen, wishing I could slap the smirk off his face.

“Why should you be happy? You’re going to prison,” I said bitterly. I’d spent four years of my life to get here, and he thought he could just show up in a cardigan, order my lunch, and make nice? It wasn’t happening.

“OK, look. This conversation, it’s not going to work if you’re sitting there like a kettle about to boil over the whole time. I suggested this because you and I need to talk about the future of America. It doesn’t matter too much what happens to me, but I don’t mind telling you: If I decide not to cooperate, you’ll squander a whole term trying and failing to prosecute me. No matter what prosecutor you nominate, no matter what you throw at me, it just won’t stick. The people, they’re angry, sure. They have every right to be. But you’re not going to get a conviction in any court of law. Do we both agree on that?”

“No! I don’t agree! I was elected to take you to court and by God, I will prosecute you. You don’t get to issue unconstitutional orders, collude with our enemies, puppet-master the legislature, and siphon billions of taxpayer dollars into shadow companies and then claim it’s for national security. This isn’t Zaire. You will be held ACCOUNTABLE.”

I realized I’d risen up from my seat. The room had grown silent. I heard the secret service agents shift just slightly into readiness behind their soulless sunglasses. I guess they were ready to take me down if I came after Cohen with a butter knife or a fork.

“Ho-boy, Joan of Arc over here. A fanatic. Well, let me save you about four years of your time. You may have noticed that the other two candidates in the race, both former lawyers, made no promises about taking me to court. Is this because they’re my friends and we have some kind of agreement? Not in the slightest. Frank would jail his own mother to get elected. And Macken... just between us presidents, I had an affair with his wife years ago. Forget jail. He’d shoot me if he had the balls.”

The idea of this reptile having an affair with anyone turned my stomach.

“It’s not for lack of desire. It’s because they are realistic people who understand how the legal system works. They respect me as an adversary and know going after me is a tremendous waste of their time. Conventional wisdom says I should be having this conversation with one of them this very moment, not some dark horse third party cartoonist. C’est la vie. You play the hand you’re dealt.”

The coffee arrived burnt and bitter. Cohen drank his black somehow; I needed three sugars and lots of cream to choke it down.

“I’m not stupid, Cohen. I know it’ll be a fight to get a conviction. I don’t care if it takes my whole first term, even the second. I’ll fight you the whole way. I keep my promises.”

Cohen winced at that one. Eight years ago, a younger Senator Rupert Cohen with far more hair had campaigned on a promise to bring charges against the former President Arthur Kross for his administration’s role in getting us embroiled in the Sevenstans war. Kross had pulled a classic GWB after a cruise ship bombing, claiming Tajikistanis had suitcase nukes they’d stolen from Pakistan. The trick worked, as it had a thousand times before. The hawks flew into a frenzy and no one could speak out against them without looking like a traitor.

Six years of war and now Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Northern Pakistan were carved up between America and Russia. The UN had gone along with all of it, and China was left complaining bitterly to anyone who would listen because we were knocking on their back door. Critically, the war destroyed their rare earth mineral monopoly, as there were massive deposits in the Pamir Mountains. We still had a huge presence there, and it was costing us an absolute fortune.

“Do you want to know how this is going to go? I’m going to plead guilty. You’re going to put a man in prison for life for grand embezzlement, and ride that victory to a second term. You’ll need to run as a Democrat in your second term, by the way. You can’t pull that Independent magic trick twice.”

I froze. I hadn’t expected this.

“But the man you jail won’t be me. A surrogate will serve, someone who looks enough like me that there won’t be any questions. He’ll do life in solitary, and life will not be that long. We’re going to use a guy with bowel cancer, looks just like me. Treatable, but this is his second relapse. They think two years max.”

“What about you?” I asked, playing along with the farce. Clearly, Cohen had realized there was no escape, this was his delusional attempt to avoid life in prison.

“What about me? I go to my estate in the Catskills with my family, and I’m never seen or heard from again. I’m going to get some work done on this-” he grabbed his prominent nose between thumb and forefinger “-and spend what little time I have left fishing, and bickering with my wife as a hopefully much more handsome man. End of story.”

“Why on earth would I agree to this?”

“Because after we finish this conversation, you will understand many things you did not understand before. You will realize that you have just leapt into the lion’s jaws, and you will be happy for the precedent of pardoning your predecessor. Otherwise, in eight years, it will be you sitting in this chair across from some young jackal thirsty for your blood and wondering where the hell your lunch is.”

It wasn’t long after that a pastrami sandwich half a foot tall and an oval plate of chunky corned beef hash with three eggs limped their way to our table in the trembling hands of Mr. James. More coffee was brought; had it somehow gotten more bitter? I wondered idly if they were poisoning me.

“Now...” President Cohen said through a forkful of eggs drenched with hot sauce. He’d tucked into his lunch shamelessly the moment it was set it in front of him. “Do you want to know where all the money went? Do you want to know why I didn’t jail Kross and went along with this debacle at the crossroads of civilization? “

I did want to know. And he wanted to tell someone, so badly you could see it glittering in his tired old eyes. He was ready to confess.

I listened to him talk for four hours, and by the end, I had agreed to his insane plan to plead guilty and jail his double. What’s more, I agreed to continue what he had started, even to expand his programs, and cut more social services to fund expanded operations in Asia. The shock of it all was so immense that I could feel nothing for days. The amputation of my ideals was so swift and complete that it was a long time before I remembered to bleed.

In the course of one meal, I had to reverse every single position I’d campaigned on, everything I had ever believed. I even ate the sandwich.

He was right, it was the best pastrami I’d ever had.

* * *

Eight years passed.

I watched my name, once so shining and immaculate, get dragged into the mud and stepped on. I had once been a beacon for all the young dreamers of the country, now I was more reviled than Kross and Cohen combined. The public could take deceit better from these smooth-talking politicians. Voters had been conditioned for centuries to expect positions to be reversed and promises to go unfulfilled. I was meant to be something new, a revolutionary. My betrayal was unforgivable.

They’d tried my own trick on me, in the next election. Tried to split the vote with a far left candidate, Senator Murray Wright. His campaign even ran their own series, Lady of Lies, a surreal three camera musical sitcom that just oozed subversion. It was honestly well done, they had a great cast and the songs were catchy as hell.

But my reelection campaign had anticipated the move. I’d reengaged the original cast of Cohen the Criminal. We created a new animated series that skewered me far more thoroughly than anything the opposition could have run. It was a withering self-examination, digging deep on our naive promises, showing how vastly we’d underestimated the problems left by the Kross and Cohen administrations. Every word in it was true, we even declassified material just for the show. The comedy was black and bittersweet, and the writing was absolutely superb, I oversaw all the scripts. I wrote the finale myself, a bleak ode to futility that kept more young voters home than an election day downpour.

Still, it was a fight. I initially sought to run a reasonable race, but support for Wright kept ballooning. Someone had leaked early drafts of our preparations to raise the social security age again, and to cut Medicare, and the granny demo hoisted their canes in a fury. In the end, I had to slime him to win: three rape allegations, one probably real and two trumped up. His campaign went down in flames and the Republican candidate, Gary Fordham, was too stunned by the sudden turn of events to capitalize properly.

Even if he’d tried, we were giving the right everything they wanted. Manufacturing like they hadn’t seen since 1950. Investment in aerospace like the Cold War had never ended. Massive deregulation, privatization, huge cuts in social programs; Big Money was absolutely thrilled. The conservative media conglomerates ran anything we asked them to, the networks were tripping over themselves to give us more favorable coverage than the others. It was barely enough. I won by less than a percent. The rioting was fierce.

Murray Wright denounced me after the election. Not your typical “We lost but we have to move on and support the president” speech. It was an absolute condemnation that almost called for insurrection. We could have hit him with a treason charge, but it was safer to just ignore him.

I honestly didn’t care. I’d passed a heinous milestone the day Wright gave his concession speech: if you counted up all the people who had died as a result of slashed medical programs, cut welfare programs, classified space programs, and military actions in Central Asia and the Middle East, as well as the people we had simply disappeared, I was responsible for more deaths than Pol Pot. Three million dead in just four years. And I’d only just begun. When all was said and done I’d make Mao look like Ghandi.

I was building up our forces in Southeast Asia. Okinawa was humming with US troops again, and we were eyeballing Taiwan hard, flying recon drones over the mainland. It was a nervous time to be Chinese; the new alliance between the US and Russia had them spooked. Relations with India were much improved by the new pressure we were exerting on Pakistan as well. The People’s Republic of China was hemmed in on all sides.

One other thing had been in my favor during the election: we were supposedly at the brink of nuclear war. China’s satellites kept exploding, and none of the spacecraft they sent to investigate our operations in the asteroid belt ever returned. They lost contact with their dinky little robot colony on Mars, while our operations on the red planet were doing just fine. We denied everything, said we’d been losing contact with our satellites as well. Even blew up a few of our own to keep them guessing.

Four bloody years passed.

Just as I had, President-Elect Lucas Johnson ran on a platform of prosecuting the standing president’s crimes. He didn’t need any cartoons to win; he ran a brutal centrist attack campaign in which the parallels to Nazi Germany flew hot and heavy. He’d claimed he would have me tried by an international court, so there wouldn’t be any sweet life in prison deal like I’d given President Cohen. They would have me executed. Johnson won in a landslide, as we expected. We knew better than to try and rig this one. The rioting would have leveled cities.

So there I was, sitting in a dingy booth in Gertrude’s Diner, sweating as I waited for my replacement to show up. They’d upgraded the air conditioning out of necessity, so the vents didn’t rattle anymore, but it was still just barely tolerable inside. The preparations that had taken four hours during Cohen’s presidency had taken two days this time. The secret service had evacuated a three block radius. In the second term of my presidency I’d survived two assassination attempts, a swarm of bomb-drones that were prematurely exploded by electronic countermeasures, and an old fashioned sniper who had simply missed. The secret service chief had complained half-heartedly about the location, but I think he could tell I wasn’t going to back down. It felt right. Mr. James was still there, though he walked with a cane now.

“Whaddya want?” he asked, pulling the pad out of the ancient apron.

I smiled at him, the same way Rupert Cohen had. Poor Rupert. Not a year after his patsy died, he’d come down with prostate cancer himself. He hung on for another year. Only about twenty people in the world knew what a truly great president he’d been. Everyone else just remembered him as a stain on history. It would be worse for me.

“Coffee, black,” I said. No more milk and sugar for me. I was getting fat. Mr. James limped away to yell the order into the kitchen, and a gangly youth in a yarmulke brought the coffee out to me. Mr. James’s days of carrying trays were far behind him.

President-Elect Johnson arrived as I sipped the bitter black sludge, and he was ushered over to the booth by the secret service men. They actually frisked him—I grinned at that. I rose to greet him but he wouldn’t shake my hand, and I shrugged. At least I hadn’t worn a cardigan. I would also resist the temptation to order lunch for him.

“I just came here to see the look on your face. You’re going to be executed, Madame President.”

He didn’t even sit down. Johnson was already turning to leave.

“Grab that idiot and put him in the chair,” I ordered, and the secret service scooped him up and sat him into the booth kicking and struggling.

“You are going to sit there and listen to what I have to say, or I will have you executed. I don’t have to stand down as president. I have total control of the media and the military. I’m only allowing this because the alternative would delay our plan and cost many lives. Also, I’m tired.”

“How dare you talk about lives! You’re a butcher! You’ve killed millions.”

I stared into his eyes, watching the fury build there. I hoped that I was right about him and he wasn’t as simple as he looked. I prayed there was something calculating behind the anger.

We had backups if Johnson wouldn’t play ball, but the consequences would be significant. But I didn’t think we’d have to go that route. I’d analyzed hours and hours of footage, and I believed that the serpent was there in him, hidden deep. It was in the little pauses, the moments of reflection between rehearsed talking points where I could see the essential emptiness. I believed he could be made into a monster.

“I have. And if you become president, you will do worse. It’s unavoidable.”

There was a lot of weight on that “if”. He scanned my face to see if I was bluffing, and I stared back, daring him to try me.

“What do you mean?” Now I could hear the fear stealing into his voice. The nightmare was beginning.

I motioned to one of my agents. He had an aluminum case handcuffed to his arm. Another agent had the key and they set the case on one of the empty tables and very carefully opened it. If the lock mechanism detected tampering, the agent with the case was going to get very badly burned.

Inside were two thick manila folders, identical copies of the story of the last generation of American politics. Two hundred and eighty eight pages, single-sided. Both copies were going to get incinerated right after this meeting. Just about every person involved in their creation except me had said it was idiotic to have this written down anywhere. But I had studied Lucas Johnson. The man had majored in Economics before he got his law degree. He was going to need something he could hold in his hands if he was to believe any of this.

“I’ll explain over lunch. You should get the pastrami on rye.”

“I don’t like pastrami,” Johnson said, an oddly childish tone in his voice. He stared at the manila folder, unwilling to touch it. His instincts were right, the folder was a portal to hell. I motioned for the secret service to get me Mr. James, and he made his way over, in no great hurry.

“Whaddya want,” he asked again.

“Two pastramis on rye,” I ordered, and the ancient waiter jotted it on his yellow pad and trundled off to the kitchen as Johnson shot me a poisonous look.

“Eat it anyway,” I said.

* * *

I motioned to the folder in front of Johnson and nodded to agent Till, who stood behind him. Till moved a step closer to Johnson, just in case something in that file broke Lucas’s tiny mind and he decided to lunge across the table at me. He was a humorless man, and in my experience, when that type broke, they broke hard. Again, I thought about Rupert Cohen, who had laid this whole burden on me with his shrugging grin. The joke’s on us, huh kid?

I must have looked just as stupid to Rupert, but somehow he’d made me his friend. He was so much better than me at this type of thing; every word I spoke to Johnson was just dripping with disdain, I could never pretend to like people. And Johnson was no help. He sat there like a child, refusing to even look at the folder.

It took a while for the food to arrive, even though we were the only ones in the place. The kid brought the sandwiches over, and I could see Mr. James eyeballing him from the kitchen entrance, as if he couldn’t be trusted to carry a tray.

There was steam wafting up from the sandwich, a lovely pink slab of beef as thick as my fist with a faint outline of rye. I took a bite out of mine, closing my eyes and letting myself drift in a world of peace and pastrami. Just a moment of umami, but it was probably the only joy I’d have today. The mustard was sharp enough to make my eyes water, or maybe I just wanted to weep. There was still a long way to go. Somehow I had to make this man understand the desperate situation we were in.

I focused on enjoying my lunch, eating slowly, and relishing every bite. Finally it got through Johnson’s thick skull that he wasn’t leaving until he read the report. He was a hopelessly slow reader and I couldn’t understand how he’d ever made it as a lawyer. About ten pages in, he flipped through the rest of the pages and then set the folder back on the table.

“Well. This is the most insane bullshit I’ve ever read in my life. Tell whatever hack wrote this to switch careers to science fiction.”

“I wrote it,” I hissed. I had a brief urge to lunge across the table with a fork myself.

“You should have stuck to cartoons,” he sneered.

“Till, Bradley, Simmons. Come here a second,” I said, and the three agents were beside me before I finished the sentence.

“Hit President-Elect Johnson for me. Not in the face.”

It happened so fast he could barely get a cry of protest out. They dragged Lucas Johnson out of the booth and Bradley and Till held his arms while agent Simmons drove his fist into Johnson’s midsection with a satisfying thud. All the breath shot out of Johnson in a tight grunt, and his whole body clenched. A liver shot. I watched his eyes bulge and tremors shoot up his neck as he tried not to puke. To his credit, he held it down. The man had some substance to him after all.

I waited until he could see straight again. The tiniest grin was visible on Simmons’ face, and I knew he’d been wanting to do that since Johnson walked in the door. I raised my chin to the three agents to indicate my approval. Then I turned back to Johnson.

“If I make you disappear, it’s not just you that will die. Cities will burn. People will riot, and we are prepared to put them down. The projection is between fifty and a hundred thousand dead and huge economic consequences. That’s why we’re sitting here and why I am very patiently trying to clue you in on how the world works. That report isn’t fiction. It’s getting destroyed at the end of this meeting and you need to know everything in it to survive the next three months. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” he croaked, and I gestured for the agents to put him back in his seat.

Then I took a moment to really look at him. Tall, black hair balding in a widow’s peak. A kind of generic handsomeness offset by his eyes, which were light blue and severe. A prosecutor’s eyes, full of wrath. That was what people had voted for. He was angry now, and he shoved the plate away. Getting belted in the gut can put a damper on your appetite.

“Good. Let’s start at the beginning. Here’s what you think you know: Arthur Kross faked a terror attack in his first term to start a war in Tajikistan. He sold us out to the Russians and dragged all of central Asia into a bloody war, for profit. His successor, Rupert Cohen was even more corrupt. He was jailed for life after my term. But it turns out, I’m just as bad if not worse than the first two. I’m the bitch riding the flaming corpse of our empire down to hell. And now you’re here for me, the avenging angel that’s going to set this all to right?”

There was the slightest mousy twitch of his nose. The trap had nearly sprung.

“Well I’ll tell you all of that is true. We blew up the Crown Princess. Three thousand passengers, twelve hundred crew, one torpedo. While we were at it, we sank the USN Iowa so the secret couldn’t get out. One hundred and twelve crew, fourteen officers. We started the Sevenstans war, and you are absolutely right that the whole thing is a Potemkin shitshow. We don’t have a tenth of what we report deployed there. But none of it was for personal gain. Every step of this was necessary.”

“Necessary for you to stay in power,” Johnson spat. He was still bitter about getting decked.

“Necessary for the survival of the human race,” I said. That got his goddamn attention.

“That sandwich isn’t poisoned by the way. I need you alive for what comes next. Let’s start at the beginning. What do you know about Jerry Feerer?” I asked.

“Mr. Bubble? Ran his bank into the ground, ruined the economy, went nuts, killed himself. Started the second great recession.”

“All wrong. He’s still alive, and working for us. What about Arthur Kross?”

“Started a war to win re-election, ruined the economy, got pardoned by Cohen. Caused the beginning of the collapse of America.”

“Also wrong. Two things you should know. One, Arthur Kross was a great man who made tremendous sacrifices for the good of America, as you will soon learn. Two, Jerry Feerer was a genius, and his bank didn’t collapse. We nationalized it.”

“You what?”

“We took his bank. The money he supposedly wasted? Jerry Feerer never made a bad bet in his life. We staged the collapse to loot Atreus Equities. Feerer always knew we would do it. That was part of his plan. Turn to page eighteen, that’s where the Atreus Equities transition starts.”

Papers cracked as I eyed his spear of pickle, fighting the urge to take it from him. It was a stupid impulse: if I asked, Mr. James would have the kid wheel me out a whole barrel of them. I just wanted to keep driving home that I was in charge. It was a bad habit, one Rupert had frequently called me out on as he was mentoring me through my first term. I was too aggressive in the early stages of negotiations. You could get more if you didn’t come on too strong.

“This is insane.” Lucas was looking through the stack of pages surrounding Atreus, still ignorant of the even greater bombshells a few pages ahead of him. I watched his expression almost gleefully, demonstrating another flaw I’d discovered in my first term: a sadistic streak. You don’t truly find out who you are until you have power. If I had stayed a cartoonist, I might have labored my whole life under the illusion that I was a good person.

Lucas had flipped back to a series of charts. His lip flat-lined in an expression you learn almost instantly in politics. The “this is fucking bullshit” grimace. It’s the only honest emotion you ever encounter in Washington D.C.

“This is.... insane,” he repeated. “This can’t be possible.”

The color was actually draining from his face.

“Which chart is that?” I squinted at the page number and flipped to it in my copy. It was how much we owed China. These were not the figures Lucas Johnson had campaigned on being able to fix. At the time, we owed them approximately a dozen times more than we reported, and the graph was worryingly exponential.

“It’s real. But don’t worry, we’re not going to pay them back.”

“We’re... what?”

Was this how Cohen had done it? It had been so many years. I remembered him saying something to that tune, surely he’d been more eloquent. He had been all smiles; I was all teeth.

“We’re going to deal with the China situation in a different way. You’re not going to like it.”

“OK,” Johnson said, swallowing audibly. He took a big gulp of water from his glass. So nervous already, and yet he didn’t even have an inkling of how fucked he was.

“Let’s go back to Jerry Feerer,” I said. “Did you know he and Arthur Kross were roommates in college?”

“So what?”

“So, they’re behind this whole mess. Eat your sandwich and listen to me.”

Across the table, Lucas Johnson finally took an exploratory bite of the sandwich. His expression said he was all but holding his nose, but then his eyebrows raised. He’d said he hated pastrami but he’d never had the real thing, only ersatz Boar’s Head bullshit from a supermarket. Nothing like this. Romania had given the world just three gifts that mattered: Enescu, Dracula, and pastrami.

As he ate, I began to tell the story.

* * *

Three presidents ago, in this very diner, at this very booth, President Arthur Kross had a secret meeting with his college roommate, Jerry Feerer. Kross had been president less than ninety days. It was perhaps the most important lunch in human history, the moment when the fate of the world pivoted over pastrami.

Their conversation wasn’t recorded, and I only know it secondhand from Rupert Cohen. My predecessor told the story far better than I ever could. Cohen had a gift for impressions, he could nail Kross’s slightly nasal, waspy intonation, like JFK after a couple years in Yonkers. Cohen had also perfected Jerry Feerer’s exacting, nerdy diction. He even did a caricature of his own voice, and let me tell you Cohen’s Cohen was a riot. Poor Rupert, he really was a delightful little man once I got to know him. History isn’t going to be kind to either of us.

From the outside, the Pastrami Summit looked like an unlikely meeting. Kross was a centrist with just the slightest tinge of blue, Feerer was as about as Libertarian as you could get without living in a bunker full of canned goods. Feerer often appeared as the token Libertarian on the Sunday morning pundit shows, and the far-right nut jobs loved him. He had a lot of uncomfortable connections to fringe groups. News of a meeting with him would have been poison to the administration.

But Jerry Feerer was also a genius. The kind of genius who might have gotten a meeting with the President even if the two hadn’t smoked their first joint together at MIT. They had always been an odd pair. Kross was an old money Adonis. He was six foot six barefoot, with the hollow beauty of a runway model and the anxiety of a wild deer. Feerer was a walking Napoleon complex. He was as confident as he was insufferable, an apelike missing link who’d secured a full ride scholarship with brilliance alone. They became best friends.

In their freshman year, both men were statistics majors, but Kross was outshone by Feerer like a candle before the sun. It was such a stark contrast that it actually caused Kross to switch majors to political science. Arthur Kross was pragmatic; he saw Feerer effortlessly reaching peaks he could never attain and started climbing a different mountain.

For all their differences, the two men had one thing in common: they were sociopaths. As I am, as everyone in this position must be. Every rumor you ever heard about Arthur Kross is true, and the reality is probably even worse. Jerry Feerer, on the other hand, was more inhuman than immoral. I know the man. In private, when he stops his human being act, he stares at you like he’s peering into an ant farm, trying to predict which way you’ll scuttle. You know how some geeks will get fixated on Japanese culture, study the history, learn the language, buy katanas and make asses of themselves? That’s Jerry Feerer with other humans. Utterly obsessed with the people who would always see him as an outsider.

Individually, either of them would have been a problem, but together they were a disaster. Arthur Kross was the ultimate user, polished, desirable, seemingly vulnerable, but at his core was a sucking void that swallowed anyone who got close. Feerer was the ultimate tool, an absolutely brilliant technical mind, eating into the school systems like acid, compromising everything he touched. When their reign of terror at MIT came crashing down, Feerer took the fall and Kross got away clean. Jerry Feerer was expelled at the end of his sophomore year and it took some pretty epic payoffs from Kross’s parents to keep that disciplinary action from spiraling into legal charges.

Now a lot of people in politics are like Arthur Kross, and the successful ones all have one thing in common: they don’t break their toys. When Jerry Feerer was cast out and penniless, Kross immediately set him up with a place to live, a vacant garage in Syosset owned by a family friend. Atreus Equities got its start in the paint-reeking ruins of an auto body shop. Feerer used to sleep in a tiny office space on the second floor. Arthur Kross gave him ten thousand dollars, hoping it wasn’t enough that he could get in serious trouble, and promised to keep the lights on and the internet running. He suggested Feerer try and find a way to make some money and turned his attention back to screwing roughly half the junior class of MIT.

Jerry Feerer isn’t the type of person to keep in touch. After six months of unanswered texts, Kross drove out to Long Island to check on him. He found the garage was filled from floor to ceiling with racks and racks of servers. Stepping inside was like standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier: sweltering heat, the roaring of a thousand whining fans. Every available surface in the tiny apartment was covered in wires and screws and parts used to keep Feerer’s Frankenstein server farm running.

“I need fifty thousand dollars,” Feerer announced. “Thermal problems. I can make it back in one year.”

Arthur Kross signed the check. The next time he checked in Feerer was wearing a parka, as the place was now kept close to freezing by two industrial coolers that never stopped rumbling. Out behind the shop were rusting towers of old servers. Feerer was turning a profit day trading and he paid back the fifty thousand on time. After that, he turned every cent into new hardware. The musty old garage had actually become something like a professional datacenter.

Impressed by his progress, Kross called up a week later and invited Feerer on vacation with him. A week at the Villa Marie in St. Barthélemy. The gesture was lost on Jerry Feerer.

“What the fuck would I do there? Christ, it makes me anxious just thinking about it. I’d be asking you for a ticket back here after half a day. Check the portfolio on Thursday,” Feerer said. Before Arthur could get a word in, he hung up.

Arthur took a deeper look at the portfolio and decided his friend had finally gone insane. None of the positions made any sense. But in the grand scheme of things, they didn’t stand to lose much. If it kept Jerry happy and off the streets, it was acceptable. He could wind the whole thing down gently when Jerry failed.

That Thursday afternoon, Arthur Kross woke up with a three piña colada hangover and a Trinidadian woman he did not recognize draped over him. Four aspirin and an awkward goodbye later, he turned on his laptop to check the portfolio. Feerer had made several thousand trades, and to Arthur’s surprise, most seemed to be doing pretty well. That night he went to bed with a Guyanese woman and had a dream about checking his phone and finding every single stock was exploding, columns of numbers rising around him until he was drowning in them, and he woke up with the spins and staggered to the bathroom to puke.

Arthur Kross woke up that morning to a dozen frantic voicemails from his lawyer. The SEC had called and he was going to be served a Wells notice within a week. Blearily, Arthur Kross made another awkward goodbye, took another four aspirin, and stared at the portfolio.

Jerry Feerer had made fifty million dollars in one night. And he was only warming up. He continued to trade even as the SEC showed up at the garage to investigate. As they followed him through the freezing garage, he held a laptop in one hand and typed with the other. Feerer wore only a bathrobe and clearly hadn’t slept or showered in days. Upstairs he handed them a packet of information containing answers to every question they meant to ask him. He’d anticipated everything. All the data they were going to request had already been prepared and hosted for them. The investigators leafed through the packet while Feerer ignored them, and after a bit of confused poking around they departed. When they analyzed his responses, they found he wasn’t doing anything illegal. He was doing something incredible.

Feerer called his strategy “Shepherd,” the idea being that if you could predict where all the shepherds would go, you didn’t have to track the flocks. Feerer had modeled the reactions of thousands of people he saw as key factors in the NASDAQ, creating a simulacrum of each person and running them through millions of conditional simulations to see how they’d react to each step of his investing strategy. The simulations were fed a constant stream of information, trained on every move their originals made. When Jerry Feerer launched his grand plan, he knew how each simulation would react, when they would do it, and how the others would react to their reactions. It was a staggeringly complex scheme with thousands of preplanned trades occurring within a two week projection window. At the end of two weeks, the Atreus Equities portfolio was worth a hundred million dollars.

Instantly, Jerry Feerer was famous. They called him the “Merlin of Modeling” and there were a dozen different versions of how he’d done it circulating in the media, each more inaccurate than the last. He traded in his ratty bathrobe for a tailored suit, started appearing on talk shows, and began the next phase of his plan. A year later, he repeated his feat. At the end of three weeks Atreus was up to a quarter of a billion dollars. He upped his investing cycles to quarterly, doubling the size of Atreus over and over again. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen.

Atreus Equities was on top of every trend, out ahead of every crash. Feerer basked in the spotlight. He wielded his fame like a sword; the slightest sign of his interest could send investors into a frenzy, a single unfavorable comment could end a company. When the dust settled, Atreus always won. Jerry Feerer never uttered a word in public that wasn’t in some way calculated to make money.

Feerer probably could have kept going and turned Atreus into the richest investment bank in the world. But in classic fashion, once the problem was solved, the genius got bored. Feerer set up the financial arm of Atreus to run itself, then stepped out of the spotlight and moved on to a new challenge: playing God.

* * *

I paused to check in on Lucas, who was starting to get the hopeless glazed-over look that I can’t stand. I see it all the time. You can’t know what it’s like, always having to wait for everyone to catch up, that slow realization that nothing is the way they thought it was. Waking people up into the nightmare, every single day of my life.

“It was supposed to all be insider trading. The SEC looked the other way because Kross made them,” Lucas said, even though I’d just told him otherwise. Everything the man said sounded like he was complaining, and I had a strong urge to reach across the table and slap him. But I needed him. The world needed him. I had to be stronger.

“He was an insider all right. Inside their goddamn heads. Feerer had a party trick where he would meet you for the first time and at the end of the conversation he’d give you a sheet of paper that had every word you’d both said printed on it. Word for word. He was Batman, plain and simple.”

“Guy must be insufferable,” Johnson said.

“Beyond insufferable. The strangest man I have ever met, and that’s quite a spread. Ready for more?”

He took a gulp of the coffee and winced. He’d gotten about halfway through the sandwich before surrendering. Some tasks were too big for any one man.

“Hit me,” Johnson said.

* * *

Once they had money, the next logical step was power. By this point, Arthur Kross had been operating in Washington for long enough to know everyone who mattered. He was rich, beautiful, and so agreeable people assumed he was timid. They practically lined up to use him, and were always surprised afterward to find they’d been used. He’d slipped in as the District 5 Congressman in Maryland running essentially unopposed and made a big show of improving numbers with Feerer’s help. After two successful terms, he was ready for the big show.

Clint Demay was a three-term incumbent senator, and Arthur Kross’s initial bid to unseat him was flat out laughed at. The Democratic Party immediately put their whole machine behind Demay and ostracized Kross for daring to primary him. But Feerer and Kross were a machine unto themselves. They had the financial and computing resources of a small nation. When the dust settled they’d crushed Demay like an ant, and the people who’d denounced Kross were left sputtering retractions. While Kross was drinking victory champagne, Feerer was already setting up for the next race, six years down the road.

Six years was a long time to wait, and a man like Jerry Feerer without something to keep him occupied was a dangerous proposition. His mind was an engine, and if it ever stopped spinning, it would be in a tremendous explosion of flying gears and burning metal. Fortunately, his brief foray into politics had captured his interest.

The tactics they’d used to model the election were nowhere near as effective as the ones they’d used to model the market. There was so much less data, so much more unpredictability. An investor wanted to make money, but what the hell did a voter want? Their motivations were nebulous and ever-shifting. They lied to pollsters, they voted against their own interests, they changed their minds at a whim. It was exactly the kind of impossible problem Jerry Feerer could sink his teeth into.

He put out the word that Atreus was hiring and immediately had his pick of the best and brightest. Assembling a team of sixty people, Feerer began building the most sophisticated representations of human beings that had ever been created. The new generation of simulations made his old ones look like cave drawings. He gathered his simulations into groups and studied how they interacted, honing their reactions to each other, before finally building an entire artificial town for them. He called it Freeland.

Feerer generated histories for his simulated citizens, arranging them into families, giving them hopes and dreams and jobs; and then he built the world around them. He simulated the weather, ran their fake sports teams through fake seasons, he simulated the fish they could catch and the food they could grow, every aspect of the town’s economy he could think of. The only limit was processing power, and the datacenter doubled in size and power every year, always at the absolute edge of what was possible.

The simulated people grew more complex with each run. Feerer claimed that about 20 versions into the Freeland project, he could no longer distinguish his simulations from actual humans in casual conversation. A hundred versions in, they were writing books and composing music. He had a team that did nothing but sift through the creative output of Freelanders trying to find things that would be marketable in the real world, and began to preserve certain especially commercially successful “genius” sims, porting them to a “Heaven” simulation that never got wiped. The rest were deleted every time he ran a new simulation.

Any time I feel bad about what followed, I just think about Feerer wiping out Freeland, over and over again. Twenty five thousand thinking, sentient simulations and he would just destroy them all and start over, again and again, thousands of times, preserving only the handful that made him money.

Jerry Feerer was a cruel god. He was also wildly successful. The AI content generation arm of Atreus was the beginning of an entirely new industry. He kept updating the Atreus Global Economic Model with what he learned from the Freeland simulations, and his predictions became more accurate and his returns more obscene. Leave it to Jerry Feerer to take a massive money sink research project and turn a profit on it.

So what do you do when you’re suddenly a billionaire and everyone on earth is hanging on your every word?

Jerry Feerer looked at the world and said no. He could have had anything, but he would only settle for everything. He decided to build Freeland for real, purchasing an island off the coast of Brazil in preparation for the construction of his libertopia.

That’s right. A man who had just one offline friend in the entire world, an unshakable atheist who as near as I can tell was completely asexual was building a free-market, libertarian utopia, as if he were some kind of geek John Galt. It was like a robot choreographing an orgy. Of course the whole enterprise should have been a catastrophe. It didn’t matter to Feerer. The man was obsession personified. He would never stop.

After months of simulations, Feerer found his answer: an organizational framework that he said created the ideal combination of individual liberty, prosperity, and stability. For a projection window of one hundred years, the twenty five thousand simulated citizens of Freeland lived happy, peaceful and productive lives on their little electronic island. They survived randomly generated droughts and earthquakes, typhoons and plagues, generational ideological shift, and at the end of thousands and thousands of runs, they were still Freeland.

Atreus began laying the groundwork for the construction of the real-world Freeland, signing up citizens from all over the world and running each potential applicant through the simulation. It was all happening, and still, Feerer was unsatisfied. He wanted his system to do more than just survive, he wanted it to prosper and spread until it was the dominant philosophy.

He wanted to take over the world.

* * *

“Take over the world,” Lucas Johnson said, with a flat look on his face. He lifted the remainder of the report and then let it drop back to the table. “Are the rest of these pages him building a death ray?”

“Who told you about the death ray?” I demanded. His mouth fell open and I laughed at him.

“I’m joking. Sort of. We’ll get there.”

I was now enjoying telling the story. I had told it a few times, but always abbreviated and usually to people who were senior enough they already expected some of it. It was really a very small set of people who knew the whole truth. I motioned for more coffee, and it was as horrible as it had ever been. I honestly wondered if there was poison in it this time, but I’m not that lucky.

“Can’t they turn the air on?” Johnson complained. His collar was dark with perspiration.

“It is on,” I said. I wasn’t any happier about the heat than he was.

“Record year,” he said, mopping his brow with a napkin.

“Just like the last.”

* * *

Once he’d made up his mind to rule the world, Feerer began injecting The Freeland Simulation into the Atreus Global Economic Model. He tested dozens of potential locations with different seed populations, trying to find the perfect soil for new systems to grow. The early stages were not promising. Again and again, the Freeland colonies would start strong, grow at an incredible pace, and then collapse. His ersatz economies suffered revolutions and coups, they stagnated, they were wiped out in wars, they devolved into totalitarian states. He wasn’t deterred. If paradise were easy, we would already live in it.

Feerer pressed on, continually upgrading his datacenter, creating new versions of Freeland and throwing them into the fire, one by one. His simulations continued to evolve. Sim Heaven had grown so large that Atreus had to build a separate facility to house its servers. He had a whole team devoted to the genius simulations, gathering their work and conducting experiments. Ever wonder what a dozen copies of Einstein would say to each other if you threw them in a room?

The Heaven team didn’t stop at cloning sims. They were modifying them, amplifying some traits and reducing others. There was no oversight, no one to stop them, and God only knows what they got up to. I’ll tell you one thing, no one who worked on that team ever left Atreus. The Merlin of Modeling became the Mengele, and Sim Heaven became an increasingly critical part of Atreus. It drives me crazy thinking about the possibilities. Feerer had his simulations researching how to create better simulations. Surely some of them must have figured it out, they must have known exactly what they were and what they were doing!

With the help of his pantheon of electronic geniuses, Feerer created “Freeworld”: a plan that set Freeland on course to becoming a superpower within forty years. Freeworld’s core was the simultaneous creation of 14 colonies, alongside the staging of three coups in existing countries. There would be blood, but what was that to Feerer? He’d deleted more people than had ever existed in the real world.

I have studied Jerry Feerer’s life more closely than anyone, and I think this was maybe the only time he was ever actually satisfied. Maybe even happy. In the weeks after he created the Freeworld plan, you saw him actually cracking a grin on the Sunday morning talk shows, laughing at jokes; it was a wild change for a man who’d been described as having the expressive range of a moai. People thought either he’d fallen in love or was high as a kite. I think for the first time in his life, Jerry was hopeful about the future.

Then a new generation of processors came out, and Feerer decided to expand his forty year Freeworld projection into a sixty year run before he began the new plan. It was the single most complex endeavor anyone had ever undertaken. Billions more flowed into the datacenter. The new simulations were run, each taking a month of runtime. Before the next-gen upgrades, it would have taken a lifetime. The outlook was better than he had hoped. Freeworld was triumphant; the colonies grew swiftly and became prosperous. One by one, neighboring countries would either assimilate or be slowly strangled by economic pressure. A hundred years down the road, it would be the greatest empire the earth had ever seen.

Feerer made the call to put the Freeworld plan into action. All over the world his agents were acquiring land, making calls, promising a new life of freedom and prosperity unlike anything they’d seen before.

One month later, Feerer halted everything. In his latest simulations, Freeworld was destroyed. At first he’d assumed the simulation was predicting a military development he hadn’t foreseen and that he would simply need to make some corrections. But the problem was far deeper rooted and more difficult to understand. The Freeworld simulation had grown so complex that a single human being could never hope to fully grasp it, not even Jerry Feerer. Of course, he had a solution to that too. He simulated himself, creating a host of simulated selves to tackle the problem.

At first, Team Feerer couldn’t understand why their colonies, which had been so prosperous a simulation before, were suddenly sputtering out. They were running as efficiently as ever; they weren’t being conquered or destroyed by disasters. They were simply choking out economically, as if the market had turned against them. How would that happen, with all the predictive resources of Atreus behind them?

China.

The Atreus Global Economic Model had previously shown China on a downward trend in the aftermath of the Sevenstans War. But something incredible had happened. Over the next forty years, AGEM predicted vast changes in China’s fortunes. All the bubbles it had predicted before never popped. The stagnation never came. The lumbering brute of a country had somehow metamorphosed into a nimble and powerful economic engine. The new economic order did more than just compete with Freeworld, it annihilated it. At the end of the projection window not one colony survived.

At first Feerer was certain he was getting bad data somewhere; there was simply no way to run such a large economy so efficiently. But as his simulated selves pored through the data they began to see their own trick played against them. China was making the same predictive plays and strategic maneuvers as Freeworld, and they had Feerer outnumbered 1.5 billion to one.

At once he took Freeworld out of the simulation and ran the Atreus Global Economic Model without it. There was no difference. In forty years, China had nearly total control of the world’s economy. Investigating the source of the change in prediction, he narrowed it down to a single data set, the allocation of funds to build a dozen nuclear reactors in Qinghai. There was only one reason to have that much power in one place. An AI. Everyone was racing to build them, but this was a hundred times bigger than any other competing project. The Atreus Global Economic Model was predicting that in 40 years, China would be the de facto ruler of the world.

Jerry Feerer picked up the phone and called his old roommate, Arthur Kross. Who, coincidentally, was now the President of the United States.

* * *

“Jesus, I remember that election. What a rout,” Johnson said, rubbing his temples.

“Which campaign were you with again?”

“Olanike Allembe. She was great, far more qualified than her opponent, better on camera, better connected. But no matter what we did, nothing worked. The more money you spent, the more your numbers dropped. The Democrats always seemed to be two steps ahead. I’ve never felt so helpless.”

“Well now you know why. If it seems like they had all the answers it’s because they did. Not a single candidate that touched Atreus money lost. They got their super-majority and they set up the framework for everything that followed.”

“Why’d they stop? Why’d they let me get elected, or you? Seems like they can just pick whoever they want.”

“They do pick who gets elected. They picked me. They picked you. All the work you did on your campaign? Worthless. We’re just figureheads, they pick the candidate that will appease the voters the most. That’s the only variable in their equation, how far they can push the populace. Another reason Freeworld couldn’t compete with China. Their people are conditioned to totalitarianism. Ours aren’t yet. You’re not going to make any real decisions, so it doesn’t matter who sits in the Oval Office, as long as they play ball.”

“And playing ball is what… agreeing to loot social security so we can have a better computer than the Chinese? Seems like you could have just gone public with this, rather than starting a war.”

“By the time Feerer figured out what the Chinese were doing, they’d had plans underway for a decade. Their pockets are a lot deeper than ours. They didn’t have to beg Congress for funding to build the Qinghai reactor array or start a fake war to cover up what they were spending. They just did it. We could never have caught them by traditional means. If you felt helpless trying to run a campaign against an AI, imagine trying to compete against a nation five times as big as yours run by its own AI. It’s a snowball effect too—they’re self-improving. Once you get behind, you can never catch up. In forty years they would have owned the world.”

“It seems like they do,” Johnson said, flipping back to the debt chart. “What happens when we default?”

“We’re not going to default.”

He sat there, looking at me and waiting. He’d finally stopped asking stupid questions, finally stopped challenging me. He was ready.

“Now the real fun,” I said.

* * *

It all went down right here in Gertrude’s Diner. Right here at this very table. Jerry Feerer laid out all of his projections, all of his research. Immediately, President Arthur Kross started making calls. Within about three hours, the place was swarming with generals and heads of agencies. The secret service must have been shitting their pants. A spy in the kitchen could have taken out half of the administration with a batch of poisoned knishes.

Imagine what a defeat it must have been for Jerry Feerer to come to the government for help. This self-made man who’d conjured a fortune, dreamed of building a utopia and changing the world forever, reduced to asking the feds for help. How that must have stung! But he was out of options. The best play he could come up with on his own was preemptive nuclear war, and the consequences were too dire. There would be nothing left to fight over.

As he outlined the danger, all the top brass went dancing through the stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, all of it. They were just settling into depression when the head of the NSA, Gary Julius, piped up.

“We’ve got something for this,” he said, grinning his shitty little accountant grin. He’d been trying to get a meeting with Jerry Feerer for years, and thus far he’d been snubbed at every angle. Feerer didn’t even recognize him. But it didn’t matter; this was his moment.

“We’ve built a new type of computer. It’s good with supermassive data sets,” Julius said.

“Even if it’s twice as fast as the ones I’ve got, it’s not enough,” Feerer said, waving his hand to dismiss Julius. But Gary Julius was still grinning. His assistant set a computer in front of Feerer, and on the screen were all the specifications of their new machine, codenamed THOR. It wasn’t just ten times as fast, or a hundred. A single THOR could do the work of the entire multi-billion dollar Atreus supercomplex. The NSA had three of them, and they were planning to build a dozen more. The only thing more staggering than the power was the price.

The THOR computers use something called a quantum probability cascade, and if you want it explained you’re going to have to ask someone with more degrees than me. I’ve been briefed on this thing a dozen times, and it still doesn’t make sense to me. All I know is the Chinese have nothing like it. They’re still working with conventional processor technology, while we’re in Mark Five of the THOR series now. The first ones were the size of a city bus, and cost more than an aircraft carrier. They only worked for about a year before they burned out, like highly radioactive vacuum tubes. They’re better now, but they’re still ruinously expensive. It didn’t matter, we would pay any price. The NSA had the power, Feerer had the know-how, and we had the credit. You’re sitting in this booth rather than a pile of irradiated rubble because we won the AI war.

“If we won, why do we owe them so much?” Johnson asked, tapping on the foreign debt chart. It was a fair question.

“Well, firstly, the THOR processors are ungodly expensive. They use a very rare element called promethium. We have to manufacture it; it doesn’t occur in nature. Ruinously expensive in the quantities we require. On top of that, there are a lot of other rare earth elements we need. Lutetium, yttrium, iridium, and platinum. Do you see why we have troops all over Central Asia now? Nothing matters but the minerals. We would have invaded the moon if they were there. Speaking of which, we’ll get into our space program shortly. There are some real high ticket items there.”

“This is... they must know we can never pay this back. Why did they keep lending?” Johnson was still stuck on the money. After all I’d told him, that was what worried him. The man had no imagination.

“In for a penny, in for a pound. We tricked them.”

“Tricked them?”

“They have no idea. Our plan makes it look like we’re slowly imploding, even as we’re thwarting them at every level of their operation. We’re deep into their systems. The analysis we run revealed all their sleeper agents, and we set them all to working on things that don’t matter. There are entire secret projects we’ve built just to give their spies something to do. They honestly think we’re working on time travel.”

I expected a laugh, but Johnson just stared. Was this clod really the best candidate the machine could find?

“What’s the actual plan?” He asked.

“So, we should just be moving into a utopia, right? The machine manages the economy and everyone is happy, right? One small problem. The Earth is doomed. Turn to page fifty five.”

Johnson hesitated, and looked at the door. He took a sad bite of the sandwich. He chewed it and took another. He drained his glass of water.

“Do they have vodka?” he asked.

“Stick to water for now. We have a long way to go.”

Somehow he managed to look even more unhappy. He flipped to page fifty five. For several minutes, I watched him read.

“I’d really rather have it now,” he said, and seeing his expression I relented, waving for Mr. James. Another thing I learned from Rupert Cohen. Stop before they break.

“Vodka, please,” I asked.

“Ya want anything in it?” Mr. James asked.

“Ice and soda,” Johnson mumbled, and Mr. James hobbled off to the bar, returning with a drink so strong I could smell it from across the table. I hoped Johnson could hold his liquor. I never wanted to have to give this speech again.

“So once we had the THOR processors, we built ODIN. The first planetary level Machine Intelligence. They started with the Atreus Global Economic Model, which was far better than the federal equivalent; then we started merging in these massive data sets, feeding it the databases of every letter agency. The actual design of the AI is a bit beyond human comprehension, but I know they made some kind of amalgam of the sims populating Feerer’s Sim Heaven as their starting point. ODIN was throwing up doomsday warnings before we had even a quarter of it online.”

“The uh... Arctic Methane Event?” Johnson squinted at the folder; he’d been flipping ahead as I talked. “I thought they discounted that in the 70s. Something about rising temperatures releasing methane from permafrost, which increases the rate of methane release which increases temperatures and so on.”

“That’s our boy. The Clathrate Gun. The data they were working from was woefully inadequate. The Arctic Methane Crisis is very real and it’s happening right now. According to ODIN, in 30 years, 95% of ocean life is going to be dead. The situation on land won’t be pretty either. It’s happened to earth before, during the Permian-Triassic extinction event. It takes a hundred thousand years for the cycle to correct itself. That’s a best-case scenario. Some predictions have the Earth turning into Venus and never recovering.”

Johnson took a deep pull from his drink. I could see tiny beads of sweat forming at his temples.

“Who knows this is happening?”

“Us and Russia. Not the Chinese. The Russians have known for longer than we have. The thawing of our relationship and the thawing of the Arctic are linked. They have nothing even close to what we have in terms of computing power, but they’ve been researching this for twenty years, and they understand what is happening. They’re committed to stopping it, but they know they don’t have the power to do so. They’re letting us call the shots. That’s why they were willing to go along with us in the Sevenstans war, and why they’re working so closely with us on the space initiative.

“Are we... do we plan to escape to Mars? Is that what this is all about?” Johnson piped in. He had the report open to a page on our enormous aerospace budget. That was where social security had gone; we’d looted it and blasted the money into space. I paused for a moment to see how he was taking this latest information. I needed him to stay in one piece.

He was as white as his coffee cup. I’d been the same way after Cohen leveled with me; I’d gone back to my hotel and refused to come out for almost two days. After that, I’d had to swear off drinking whiskey forever. The smell of it still turns my stomach.

“We can’t survive on Mars. Maybe a hundred years from now, we can have a self-sustaining colony. But we don’t have a hundred years. We have to save the earth now, or mankind is finished.”

“How do we do that?” Johnson asked, and for a moment I saw he had a flicker of hope that we’d figured something out, some magic machine to fix everything.

“We kill eight billion people,” I said.

Johnson threw up.

* * *

The meeting stopped for a bit while the kid with the yarmulke came with a mop to clean up after Johnson. It was unfortunate, but at least he hadn’t gone stark raving mad. Johnson just asked for a few minutes to look at the report after being escorted back from the restroom, and began to sift through the pages mechanically. I could see him losing himself in the numbers, the grimace slipping off his face, but it didn’t last. The weight of the figures covered him like a shroud, and I knew he would never throw it of, just as I never would. There was no escape.

That was the thing about ODIN, about machines. They could make the decisions we would never even consider. And we could accept those decisions because it wasn’t really us giving the orders to release biological agents in Shenzen, Beijing. Tokyo, New York, San Paulo, Delhi, Cairo, Lagos, Los Angeles... on and on. We were just doing the will of the godlike computer. When those strains mutated and did tremendous damage to even the chosen ones we had covertly vaccinated, we told ourselves it had to happen.

That was my great mercy to Johnson: I gave the order when the time came. I’d hoped to leave it to him, but he didn’t have the stomach for it. He begged me to remain in power, to stage a coup, but ODIN said no. Having my double publicly executed was critical in order to prevent an armed insurrection. It wouldn’t let me be actually executed either, even though I had requested it. ODIN said I could commit suicide once Johnson was done with his first term. It needed me alive until then. I was effective and Johnson was weak.

Internally, we called the biological weapon Flush. It was perfect: airborne, hardy, long incubation period, almost no symptoms for nearly three months, and then, bang, it was all over in fewer than six hours. You went from feeling fine to having a temperature that never stopped climbing, and when you died you were beet red all over. The plague had a lot of names, but the media finally settled on The Red Death, someone behind a news desk somewhere was a big Poe fan. The most effective weapon ever devised, and I pulled the trigger. I am history’s greatest murderer. Not quite what I expected when I started my political webcomic in college.

It had to be done. There were simply too many of us and too little time remaining. We were too wicked and small to have the earth. We were slaves to our ambition and avarice, willing to drown in our own shit before we’d accept the truth. And I’m no better. I was simply in a position where it was impossible to look away. Believe me, I would have run if I could.

It all went according to plan. Feerer really was a genius, though he didn’t live to see his whole plan carried out. He died in the third wave of Flush, stopped taking the antigen and went back to the garage in Syosett to die. I don’t think it was guilt. I think he just couldn’t handle that it was the end of humans making any meaningful decisions. There will never be a Freeland, never be a utopia. We’ll do what we’re told and in my mind, so much the better. We were clearly terrible at it when we were in charge.

Of course, Jerry Feerer’s image lives on in ODIN with all of his simulations. I’m in there too, though they didn’t bother asking for my permission to simulate me. I find it strangely flattering.

The United States Government survived. Even with the incredible death toll, country after country imploding under the strain of coping with the Red Death, ODIN kept us together. The antigen wasn’t completely effective, and a lot of people screwed up their pills or simply refused to take them. We lost about 20% to the plague, and about 10% to suicides. When the dust settled, The US and China were the only real powers left. Even after losing 80% of their people, they still outnumbered us 2:1. Given time, they would have rebuilt. We couldn’t allow that.

We moved to eliminate China while they were still reeling from the death toll. ODIN took over their AI and their two backup sites. With the head cut off, they attempted to retaliate with their remaining nuclear weapons, a move ODIN had anticipated. The fleet of offensive satellites we’d been building in the asteroid belt had been brought back to Earth and put in place as the plague raged. Our satellite network destroyed every ICBM, every submarine-launched missile. Nothing got through. It would have brought a tear to old Reagan’s eye, Star Wars at last. Once we had the Chinese on the ropes, we claimed they were responsible for the virus and dismantled their government.

How bitter that lie must have tasted in Johnson’s mouth as he made his announcement to what remained of humanity! Fortunately, there was almost no one left to question us.

The sky is gray now, with a faint silvery tinge, and it will remain so for better than a hundred years. There’s a new layer in the atmosphere, made up of reflective particles, continually shepherded by a fleet of drones. The situation is so dire that we need to reflect a significant percentage of sunlight back to stave off doomsday. Much of life on earth is still going to die, but ODIN claims mankind can be saved. There’s going to be a new ice age. I won’t be around to see it.

I am back at the diner now, the secret service waiting outside. Johnson’s second term is nearly done, and ODIN has found a suitable replacement for him. The computer has given me leave to kill myself, and I think I am going to drown myself in the Potomac. I’m sure it would be more convenient for the government if I just took some pills, but they owe me this much. The kid with the yarmulke is gone now, taken by the virus, but somehow Mr. James is still alive. He recognizes me, despite the plastic surgery. He doesn’t speak, merely brings me the coffee and the pastrami sandwich without my having to ask for it, pushing the tray on a little cart. My last meal.

I take a bite of the sandwich. It’s heaven on rye.

Copyright Zak Zyz, 2018

Cover image by John James Audubon

Cover and interior Design by Zak Zyz

Edited by Clio Contogenis

Based on a true story

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Zak Zyz