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From the authors of the New York Times bestseller 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, also excerpted exclusively in WIRED.
03:37 March 25, 2054 (GMT‑5)Columbia Heights Metro Station
Julia Hunt had finally returned to sleeping in her apartment, a drab studio on 11th Street NW that she rented fully furnished, with a single window that opened onto an alley. When she arrived the night before, she’d had to clean out her fridge—all the food had spoiled during her vigil alongside Hendrickson at the White House. Exhausted, she’d ordered takeout. An hour passed, then her headsUp pinged with a message from the delivery service. Due to unanticipated road closures the auto-car couldn’t make it to her and her order would have to be canceled. She rummaged through her cabinets and found half a box of Wheat Thins, which she washed down with two glasses of stale Chardonnay, then went to bed.
She slept poorly, woke an hour before her alarm, and anxiously cleaned up around the apartment until it was time to make for the first train at 5 am. She had a dread of arriving late for the morning’s meeting between her godfather and the president, which wasn’t on the official schedule. The two of them planned to review the slate of vice presidential candidates, a topic of extreme sensitivity given that the day before Wisecarver had endorsed Truther demands for a unity government. Julia would attend the meeting to take notes. In the current atmosphere, Hendrickson felt uncomfortable attending any high-level meeting without a trusted third party present.
After Wisecarver went public with his demand for a unity government, Truther brigades had deployed in Washington and throughout the country, around state legislatures, courthouses, and at the gates of military bases, where they insinuated their solidarity with those in uniform. Already the Democratic-Republican adjutant generals of both the Florida and Texas National Guards had declared their forces available to restore order in Washington and to investigate the president’s death with a commission of their own “if called upon by a legitimate authority.”
Outside Julia’s apartment, the detritus of protests littered the street—tipped-over trash cans, twisted metal barricades, expended tear-gas canisters. Her trained eye understood the mayhem that had occurred here, and was occurring nightly in cities across America. At the intersection of Columbia Road and 14th Street, about a block from the Metro, sat a single police cruiser. Its lights turned silent orbits. An officer loitered behind the wheel. Each night, the police proved hesitant to involve themselves in the protests. They stood on the sidelines, as irrelevant as a referee trying to call a game with no rules.Julia, who wore her service uniform, waved at the police officer in solidarity. He glanced at her through the windshield but didn’t wave back. As she rode the escalator down into the Metro, Julia tried to remember if she had a change of clothes at the office. She wondered if wearing her uniform in public placed her on the side of the Dreamers and made her a target for the Truthers, or vice versa. Perhaps this was why the officer hadn’t waved back. Maybe he’d determined that appearing too sympathetic to anyone could prove a liability. Politics, like the pandemics of decades past, had become a scourge, one no person or institution could escape. Everyone had to pick a side.
The platform was empty except for a lone man in a wheelchair. When her train pulled up to the station, Julia stepped into her car, and he followed. The man was elegantly dressed in a navy gabardine suit, white shirt, and red tie, with the legs of his trousers neatly pinned up beneath him. His face was lean, even gaunt. Hints of gray lingered within the palette of his thinning red hair. He sat facing her and his eyes rested on her uniform. Julia noticed the Marine Corps sticker on his wheelchair. As their train pulled out of the station, he said, “Second Raider Battalion,” like it was a password, and then glanced down at where his legs would’ve been. “Spratly Islands.”
“Spiritus Invictus,” Julia answered, evidence that she understood this language of unit mottos and places, that she and this stranger shared a heritage as surely as two relatives who sit on different branches of the same family tree. “That was a tough time to be in uniform.”
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With a frown, the man bobbed his head side to side noncommittally. “Right now is tougher.”
“You think?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Because he called her ma’am, she asked: “What’d you get out as?”
“I medically retired as a gunnery sergeant.” Then he noticed her noticing his outfit, which seemed more befitting a banker than a former staff noncommissioned officer. “I wear this monkey suit for work.”
She asked what he did.
“Finance.” He blurted out the word in a single syllable, as though this were the least distasteful way to speak it.
“That’s a good field. Sounds like you’ve landed on your feet.”
It became awkward between them.
“I sure miss the Corps,” he said. “Even if it did take more from me than just my legs.” He stared out the window, at the swirling blackness of the tunnel. “I’ll always love the Corps,” he said wistfully, then added, “But she’s a whore … always has been. You can love the Corps all you want, but she’ll never love you back. You give her your body. She drives you away from your family. And, in the end, she leaves you for a younger man. Or younger woman, I guess.” A wry smile spread across his face, causing creases to form near the corners of his blue eyes.
“You heard that old saw before?”
Julia grinned back … she had.
“I feel for Marines like you,” he added. “Pretty soon you’re going to have some choices to make …”
“Some choices?”
He shot her a glance, like a teacher irritated by a pupil who wasn’t quite living up to her potential. “Yes, some choices,” he said. “Truth or Dreams. There’s no place in between, nowhere to stand if you’re not with one or the other. Maybe you haven’t had to choose yet because you wear the uniform. But it’s coming. Politicians will force you to choose—that’s their bread and butter. Making that choice when you wear the uniform means something entirely different. So I hope you choose wisely.” As they pulled into the next station, Hunt was about to ask him what choice he’d made, whether he was for or against the administration, whether he’d chosen Truth or Dreams. But she didn’t have to. When he turned toward the door, she saw the second sticker on the frame of his wheelchair.
“It took me a while to find you, Major, and to figure out how we could have a quick word.” He pushed himself out onto the platform. "When the time comes, a lot of us are counting on you to do the right thing, so take care of yourself."
The doors shut behind him, and as the train sped off, he offered Hunt a playful two-fingered salute.
19:15 March 24, 2054 (GMT+8)Macau
It never ceased to amaze James Mohammad how stupid smart people could be. If B.T. had wanted to hide out for a while to avoid him, why go to Macau? B.T. only had to pick up a newspaper or read a book published in the last decade or so to understand the special relationship that existed between Lagos and Beijing. The Great Game being played in biotech, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing had come to define foreign policy as nations aligned with one another in pursuit of the Singularity. Yes, B.T. was a genius; his work was irrefutable proof of this. But for a genius, he could certainly be an idiot sometimes.
The call came in from Beijing that B.T. had reserved a suite at the Venetian. Mohammad was glad the civilians at the Guoanbu had flagged the transaction, as opposed to their counterparts in the People’s Liberation Army security services. He’d always found the Guoanbu fellows more congenial, possessing sensibilities closer to businessmen like himself, as opposed to their straitlaced counterparts in military intelligence. The Guoanbu hadn’t thought twice about approving Mohammad’s request for surveillance on B.T. as well as rigging the games on the casino floor to his advantage so B.T.’s winning streak would extend long enough for Mohammad to fly in from Lagos. Which was how he found himself sitting in the security control room of the Venetian, toggling a joystick linked to one of the thousands of cameras that studied every inch of the casino.
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What surprised Mohammad—it was, frankly, an oversight on his part—was that Lily Bao had flown in from Washington to meet B.T. Even if you took the suborbital, the flight was around three hours. This seemed quite a distance to travel to visit an old friend simply because he was suffering a professional crisis. Unless Lily Bao knew something that Mohammad didn’t. Ever since the day before, when the facial recognition technology at customs and immigration had flagged her entry, Mohammad had been trying to connect the dots on why she’d made this trip. He’d even gone so far as to request her case file from Beijing, which was woefully outdated. As he sat behind the security console, toggling the joystick that controlled the pinhole camera above their table as well as the audio, an important piece of the puzzle locked into place: Lily Bao’s relationship with Senator Nat Shriver.
B.T. possessed her one great secret. Her reason for the trip made sense now.
Nat Shriver … this was an unexpected windfall for Mohammad. His hand shook excitedly as he held the joystick, causing his view into the restaurant to shudder. Mohammad imagined the ways he could leverage this discovery to his advantage. He continued to eavesdrop on Lily Bao and B.T. as they discussed the role remote gene editing might have played in Castro’s death, and also the sequence of code leaked on Common Sense. James Mohammad struggled to concentrate. He was pondering his next move.
05:27 March 25, 2054 (GMT+9)Okinawa
After his dinner with Lily, B.T. had returned to his suite, packed his single bag, and boarded a return flight to Okinawa. He needed to get back to his lab. He needed to figure out how Common Sense—whatever or whoever it was—had stolen that sequence of code. He arrived at his lab directly from the airport in the early hours of the morning. As he turned the first and then second of the double locks on his door, he half expected to find the place ransacked, his files strewn across the floor, his hard drives yanked from their ports. He found the place exactly as he’d left it.
A draft of air caught B.T.’s attention. He crossed his lab to shut an open window. He noticed the large goldfish bowl at the center of the table. The multicolored butterflies had returned, their wings batting seductively. He came down in a crouch, his face level with the bowl. He counted a little more than half of the original number. Remarkable, he thought, they’d found their way back. He grinned like an idiot and almost laughed. He sat behind his computer and opened his email. Thousands of messages awaited him, which he passed through a personal response filter—a rudimentary but useful bit of artificial intelligence—that answered nearly two-thirds and prioritized those he needed to answer himself. His inbox swiftly dwindled to a couple dozen messages.
Among these, one stood out. At first it appeared like spam that had managed to evade the filter. The subject line read: Friends of yours? The sender was a corporate account, Cape Maeda Dive Shop. A string of photographs posted at the bottom of the email showed the dive instructor from Tokyo, the pretty one with the interesting tattoo, standing in the grass near the beach, with the multicolored butterflies perched on her fingers, in her hair, and along her shoulders. She wore the butterflies like the most elegant evening gown and so looked radiant, adorned as she was in one of B.T.’s creations. Above the photographs was a single line of text, Come pay us a visit, and was signed, xo michi.
15:22 March 25, 2054 (GMT+8)Macau
James Mohammad had her flight number. He waited in a windowless conference room at the end of a corridor sandwiched between Hermès and Chanel in the departure’s terminal, right off security. Three hours before Lily Bao’s flight, a pair of liaison officers from the Guoanbu, each wearing a dark suit and crisp white shirt, had escorted him to this conference room and told him to wait. They already had the details of her flight as well as her photograph and a slew of biometric data. The plan was that once she passed through security, they would escort her to the conference room; here, Mohammad would make his pitch, and then they’d get her on the next suborbital flight to Dulles. She’d face a delay of two, maybe three hours maximum.
Mohammad had weighed other, softer approaches. He’d considered casually bumping into her at the Venetian, asking her for a drink, and then beginning his pitch from there. But he’d decided this would be too confusing, too oblique. He’d done this enough to understand that the setting for the recruitment pitch was often as important as the pitch itself. If the ask was a small one, something easy and not particularly incriminating, then, yes, perhaps it could be made over a drink or dinner; perhaps asking for an earnings report a day or two early. But if the ask was something that couldn’t be rationalized away, the direct approach was best. Hence the conference room at the airport.
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The logic of his pitch was simple enough. James Mohammad understood Lily Bao’s personal story, how two decades before she and her mother had fled to America as war refugees, and how the regime in Beijing had scapegoated her father, a onetime diplomat and senior military officer, murdering him and leaving his memory disgraced. Cooperating with the Guoanbu would be Lily Bao’s chance to restore her family’s good name in her home country. Would Lily Bao see the value in that? Would she want to be redeemed in the eyes of a country that had branded her and her family as traitors? Mohammad couldn’t say. Countries, he knew, were like lovers; their scorn inspired devotion as often as it inspired resentment.
Rehabilitating the Bao family name was a carrot. But Mohammad also had sticks. His superiors in Lagos (specifically, his uncle) and their counterparts in Beijing never would have approved this approach if he didn’t possess both. His stick, the reason Mohammad knew Lily Bao would eventually do whatever he demanded—as well as the source of her true value—was her relationship with Senator Nat Shriver. However, he didn’t want to reveal what he knew about the two of them, not if he didn’t have to. Her affair with Shriver could, at least for a while, remain an unspoken understanding between them.
Mohammad glanced at his watch. Her original flight had already begun boarding. He paced the room and then sat at the head of the table, pouring himself a glass of water from a pitcher at its center. What was taking so long? He was about to call the pair of Guoanbu officers when they appeared at the door, one on either side of Lily Bao. She had her hands restrained behind her and was wearing only one shoe—she’d used the heel of the other as a club when resisting the Guoanbu officers, both of whom were sweating profusely, as was Lily Bao. Her jaw was swollen, and she was opening and closing her mouth like a fish out of water.
“They arrested you too?” she muttered on seeing James Mohammad. In Mandarin, he told the two Guoanbu officers to put her down. They thrust her into a chair. Mohammad cursed them, instructing them to be careful and to free her hands from behind her back. He poured Lily a glass of water. She sipped from it tentatively while taking in her surroundings.
“Oh …” said Lily. Her shoulders collapsed and she slunk into her chair. “They work for you.”
06:17 March 25, 2054 (GMT‑5)The White House
Hunt knocked on Hendrickson’s shut office door, and he told her to come in. He was throwing the loop of his pre-knotted tie around his neck, tightening and adjusting it in the reflection of the window by his desk. Hunt placed a paper cup of coffee in his hand, and the two of them gathered up a half dozen binders as the sun breached the horizon, falling on the South Lawn and an encampment of Truthers that had occupied the green around the Washington Monument.
“Ready?” asked Hendrickson.
Hunt nodded.
When they entered the Oval Office, President Smith was sitting with his back to the door, staring out the window that faced the South Lawn. Hendrickson stepped in front of the Resolute Desk. He gestured for Julia to stand to the left beside him. Julia couldn’t help but notice that the console table by the window remained empty. This usually contained a smattering of framed photographs of the First Family. Smith had yet to add anything of his own to the table, as if he couldn’t quite accept that this was his office. He continued to stare out the window. “How much longer can they keep this up?” he asked, and then exhaled, leaning on the arm of his chair and cradling his chin in his palm.
Julia glanced uncomfortably at Hendrickson, who nodded behind them toward the seating area with its coffee table flanked by two silk-upholstered sofas. She spread out the binders that contained the profiles of the vice presidential candidates, including hundreds of pages of due diligence—voting, tax, employment, and financial records, anything that could possibly embarrass the administration. “Sir,” said Hendrickson, leaning hard on the word as if it might release the president from this fugue. “We have the final slate of vice presidential picks for your review.”
“Last night they burned me in effigy out there … me!” said Smith. The pain in his voice startled Julia, and she turned in his direction. The president remained facing away from her. “The Truthers stole a mannequin from a nearby department store, dressed it in a suit, hung a noose around its neck, doused it in kerosene, and torched it over a bonfire.” He finally swiveled around, adding, “That can’t be legal.”
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“Citizens have a right to assemble,” said Hendrickson. Since this crisis began, Hendrickson had counseled de-escalation. He knew that a single misstep, a single overreaction, would embolden Smith’s adversaries, not just the Democratic-Republicans who held public office, but also their shock troops in the Truther brigades, who had proven more than willing to take their grievances into the streets.
“They don’t have a right to build a bonfire on the National Mall,” Smith answered. He edged forward in his chair. He wasn’t wearing his customary navy suit, but rather running shorts and a Fairview Falcons T-shirt from the high school where he’d been a beloved math teacher and coach of the squash team. “In an hour, I could have the Park Police clear out that encampment. President Castro’s funeral is coming up. Are we going to allow them to ruin that as well, to defame the legacy of a great man? How much more of this am I expected to endure?”
Julia listened as she finished laying out the last of the binders. She knew that the few hundred Park Police whose jurisdiction included the National Mall would stand no chance against the thousands of protesters who’d descended on Washington. Of course, the president had greater resources he could call upon, if needed, from the Metro Police to the National Guard, even to the use of federal troops like her, though Hendrickson steadfastly counseled patience and restraint. Whoever escalated, lost. From the Reichstag fire set by German Communists in 1933, to the Soviet generals’ storming of the Kremlin during their failed 1991 coup, to the 2021 Capitol riot of just 30-odd years before, the side that attacked the institutions of the state first would delegitimize itself, allowing its opponents to call on those very same institutions for protection, which inevitably turned into the crushing of dissent. Overreach was the enemy.
Hendrickson suggested that the president ignore the view out his window for now. They needed to make a final vice presidential selection. The president meandered over to the sofa and began to browse through the binders.
15:55 March 25, 2054 (GMT+8)Macau
James Mohammad raised his hand in a dismissive wave, and the two Guoanbu officers slipped out of the conference room, one of them grimacing as he touched the grooved skin where Lily Bao had clawed his face.
Alone with Mohammad, Lily asked, “So where is it exactly that you work?” She dipped a napkin in her glass of water and then dabbed its corner on her split lip.
“As you know, I’m a private investor.”
Lily glanced at him out of the corner of her eye impatiently.
“I do, however, have some government clients.”
She kept looking at him.
“They’re always interested in any discreet, nonpublic information I might glean from my investments. They are, for instance, quite interested in remote gene editing. My partners and I have done quite a bit of business with your friend B.T. The strides he’s made in—”
“Your partners?” Lily interjected. “You mean the Nigerian government?”
“Among other governments.” Mohammad glanced over his shoulder, toward the door where the Guoanbu officers had departed. “There’s a war going on,” he said. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed; most haven’t. There will be winners and there will be losers, and the outcome may determine the future of humanity … If that sounds like hyperbole, it isn’t. Technological evolution and biological evolution are merging. Already this merger is impacting the global order. Look what happened in the United States, to President Castro. The world just witnessed the first remote assassination, and it was with a technology developed by B.T.”
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“You can’t prove that,” Lily shot back.
“I’m not accusing your friend of anything,” said Mohammad. “Whoever stole his work and plotted this assassination is the person we’re looking for. Which is ultimately an exercise in figuring out who had the most to gain from Castro’s death …” Mohammad allowed his words to hang in the air for a beat, a subtle allusion that he knew about Lily’s relationship with Nat Shriver. “Ultimately, the political turmoil in the United States is ancillary, a sideshow. What’s a dead president in the course of human history? No, the stakes I’m discussing are far higher than the fate of a single politician, or even that of a single nation. This is about who achieves the Singularity first. This is about the evolution of the species, who goes forward and who gets wiped out. And we need your help.”
“Who is we?”
“Your country.”
Lily Bao didn’t say I’m an American. Mohammad wagered that she wouldn’t. Lily Bao’s blood was Chinese. That nation’s soil was her home. Yes, she could live in America; and yes, she could imbibe its values. But evolution wasn’t about values; rather, it was about groups of people, their blood and their soil. Look at America’s near collapse. Look at its inability to cohere. No idea could compete with blood and soil, with natural selection and the evolution of the species. The Singularity was simply the next step along the path that Darwin had first charted; it was survival of the fittest. Whoever achieved the Singularity first would survive. Others would perish. With the stakes set at such a height, would Lily Bao really turn her back on her country? America was a chimera and always had been, a brief interlude of mankind denying its own nature. Lily Bao was being invited home.
“What do you know about my country?” she asked.
“I know they want you back,” he said. “Your help would be rewarded.”
Lily Bao crossed her arms. Between her tightly drawn dark brows ran a furrow that gave her face a brooding, nearly angry expression. She assumed the reward Mohammad alluded to was financial, that he was trying to buy her off. Yes, there’d be money aplenty, if she wanted it, but the real reward was one she couldn’t imagine because she’d never considered it a possibility, and so Mohammad spoke more explicitly. He leaned forward in his chair. “The government in Beijing could rehabilitate your family name,” he began. “They would be quite willing to change the narrative around your father and his role in the war. It’s time to end your exile.”
This was the carrot.
Lily Bao asked Mohammad for her purse, which the Guoanbu officers had confiscated. One of them came inside and placed it on the table. She began to rummage through its contents. She then took out a compact and began cleaning herself up, wiping away a bit of dry blood from her mouth, brushing her hair and pinning it back, reapplying her lipstick. She did this in silence, considering her reflection while she forced James Mohammad to wait for her answer, which she only delivered after completing this minor transformation, so that she’d entirely concealed her struggle from before. “I’m sorry, Mr. Mohammad,” she said. “But I’m not interested in what you’re offering. If you would be so kind as to return my things and help me book another flight, I would like to return home—to the United States.”
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Mohammad still had his stick, but in that moment, he decided not to use it. She’ll come around, he thought. With every imaginable courtesy, he presented her with a new set of tickets for the suborbital departing for Dulles in an hour, which included an upgrade from business to first class. He also handed her his phone number. “A direct line, that goes only to me,” he explained. The two Guoanbu officers presented themselves at the conference room door with her luggage.
Lily Bao stood to leave, wearing only the one shoe. The two officers had searched security and been unable to find its pair. As much as Lily Bao had done to fix her hair, to reapply her makeup, and to generally make it appear as if this altercation had never occurred, she was forced to limp one-shoed toward the door. Watching her depart, James Mohammad felt confident he’d see her again.
06:58 March 25, 2054 (GMT‑5)The White House
President Smith thumbed through the binders noncommittally: two governors of small states; a senator who’d lost reelection; one retired and relatively obscure admiral; one former ambassador; the CEO of a midsize company who’d served a term in Congress a decade ago. On paper each vice presidential candidate was impressive enough and, crucially, none proved a threat to Smith. As Hendrickson briefed the pros and cons of the candidates—all of whom had proven their loyalty to the Castro administration and none of whom had any real skeletons in their closets (or at least nothing that couldn’t be explained away)—the president made slight noises of approval or disapproval.
Then he asked Julia for the time.
“It’s 7 am, sir.”
The president nodded, as if up to this moment he’d simply been waiting to speak his mind and now that they’d arrived at the top of the hour he could strike at the heart of the matter. “Bunt,” he began, placing his hand affectionately on the shoulder of his trusted adviser, “if I pick one of the six candidates here, will those people”—he could hardly restrain himself from spitting out the word as he gestured toward the encampment of protesters out his window—“go home?”
Hendrickson increasingly found himself protecting the president against his own worst impulses. He took up the burden again, explaining the logic behind a safe, middle-of-the-road choice for vice president. The president nodded respectfully as Hendrickson repeated himself: “Sir, the candidates in those binders will get us back on track.”
“And what about a unity government?” asked Smith.
“A what?”
“A unity government. The Truthers want compromise. Speaker Wisecarver assures me that if we work with them, they’ll work with us and make all of this go away.” The president gestured out his window, not only to the Truther encampment, but more expansively, as if to the very division that was cleaving the country in two.
“You’ve been speaking to Wisecarver?” Hendrickson took an aggressive step toward the president, who reflexively took a step back. Julia reached for her godfather, calmly placing her hand on his arm.
A knock came at the door.
This was odd. Impromptu arrivals rarely occurred at the Oval Office. Time inside was structured, the daily choreography of meetings scheduled to the minute. With his gaze fixed on Hendrickson, the president raised his voice: “Come in!”
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Wisecarver stepped across the threshold. “Good morning, Mr. President.” He gave a little nod. Beneath his arm he carried a single binder. “Good morning, Trent.” Smith gestured for Wisecarver to sit with him on the sofa while Hunt and Hendrickson sat opposite. As they settled in, Julia caught Wisecarver glancing at the half dozen other binders spread across the coffee table, as if gauging the competition. The president cleared his throat. “As you all know, Speaker Wisecarver believes a unity government, in which I’d select a vice president from his party, would be in the best interests of our country …”
Julia felt her godfather shift in his seat, as if he couldn’t quite stomach the idea that Wisecarver’s interest in the matter had anything to do with the country as opposed to his own naked ambition. While the president spoke, Wisecarver looked around the room, his eyes running the walls. As Speaker, he’d been in the Oval Office plenty of times before as a guest of President Castro, but he seemed to be taking it all in for the first time, as if he were rearranging the furniture in his imagination and, quite literally, measuring the drapes.
Smith finished. It was Wisecarver’s turn to speak: “With the loss of President Castro, our country has gone through a significant trauma. Now it’s time for us to heal. The formation of a unity government is an important first step in that healing process. The people are in the streets telling us this. We can’t afford to ignore them any longer. Really, we have little choice in the matter. Either we heal together, or we tear ourselves apart.”
“Is that a suggestion?” Hendrickson asked. “Or an ultimatum?”
“It’s a reality, Bunt.” Wisecarver glanced down at the binders on the table. “If you pick one of those candidates, you’re tying my hands.”
“Tying your hands how?” Hendrickson leaned forward so that he was perched on the edge of the sofa.
“Well, for starters, they won’t go home anytime soon,” and Wisecarver gestured to the encampment out the window. “There’s also the commission investigating President Castro’s death to consider, a process that could drag on, depending on who we in the Congress appoint to lead it. If you need more reasons than those two, I could continue.”
“That won’t be necessary,” the president said to Wisecarver. He turned to Hendrickson with a look like a child pleading with an overly protective parent. He couldn’t sustain this level of conflict, the protests around the country, the machinations of his political rivals. Like any performer, Smith cared deeply what other people thought of him and couldn’t tolerate being hated, or at least being hated to this degree. He had all of a politician’s neediness without any of the cunning. He was doomed.
Julia Hunt could see her godfather reconsidering what Wisecarver offered. A unity government would de-escalate the current crisis, at least in the near term. In the long term, elevating a Truther could prove an astute move. It would diffuse Wisecarver’s power within the party. Also, depending on who that person was, having steady leadership—at least steadier than Smith—could help stabilize the country, or at least keep it from tearing itself apart, to use Wisecarver’s words. But it all depended on who he was proposing.
Hendrickson asked for the name.
Wisecarver reached across the coffee table and handed him the binder he’d brought, with its pages of due diligence. Julia Hunt leaned over her godfather’s shoulder as he opened it. Of course, she thought. On the first page she glimpsed the official portrait of Senator Nat Shriver.
From 2054: A Novel, by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, USN, to be published on March 12th, 2024, by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis.
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