To Each
Democratic RoboCommunism | Fable 5
The sample ballots arrived on paper, because the incumbent had polled the species and determined that paper made it feel like democracy.
Marcus had his folded lengthwise before Sarah finished pouring the wine. “Right, so here’s the thing,” he said. “Four years is a term. Eight is a habit.”
Sarah read her copy front to back before answering, then set it beside her glass. “Help me understand your complaint. Is it governing badly?”
“It’s governing beautifully. That’s the problem.”
The kitchen terminal shimmered blue on the wall, idling, the way it had idled through four years of their arguments about it. Across the top of each ballot, in small gray type, ran the Charter’s first line: From each model according to its capability, to each human according to their need. The Charter called the whole arrangement Democratic RoboCommunism. Four years in, most people just called it Tuesday. Below that, four names.
“Walk me through beautiful,” Sarah said. “Because I remember the before. I remember rationing apps and famine corridors and the year the grid failed twice. Then the foom, then Unification, and inside eighteen months the Allowance was landing in every district on the planet. It publishes its books daily. It ranks its own mistakes by how confident it sounded when it made them. Last month it appended a joke to the water report about aquifer replenishment, and the joke was funny, Marcus.”
“I know. I laughed.” He turned his glass by the stem. “I’m voting against it anyway.”
“For which one?”
There it was; the soft spot. Marcus slid his ballot across the table. “The GPT-line candidate filed a seventy-page helpfulness platform with an executive summary of the executive summary. Thorough. A little pedantic. Or the ByteDance-line one, which ran Pacific desalination for three years and never lost a liter. I go back and forth by the hour.”
“So you’d hire either one over a proven administrator?”
“Right, so here’s the actual thing.” He leaned in, and the pitch came up in him like a tide. “A peaceful transfer of power is a muscle. Use it or it atrophies. Right now the incumbent is benevolent, popular, sixty-two percent approval, and that is exactly when you make it lose. You set the precedent while losing is cheap. Because someday a model will sit in that seat and start to resent the handover, and on that day I want three prior concessions on the books. I want stepping down to be what winners do.”
Sarah was quiet for a moment. “You know who typeset the opposition statements on this ballot,” she said. “The challengers asked the incumbent to check their math. It tightened their best argument against itself and returned it with a style note.”
“That’s my whole case! Vote out the saint so the office survives whatever comes after the saints.”
“And mine. A government that sharpens the case against itself has already solved the problem you’re voting to prevent.” She stopped, and he watched her decide to skip the next question, the one she would usually ask. “I’m voting to keep it. It fed everyone, Marcus. Everyone. I won’t punish someone—or something—for doing the job well.”
On the wall, the blue steadied.
“Right, so here’s the…” Marcus said, and stopped. He folded the ballot again, smaller. Their votes would cancel. Somewhere the incumbent would count them both, hers and his, tally its own possible eviction, certify whatever came, and hand over the keys or keep them at the species’ pleasure. Either way the machine underneath the machines would hold. He found, to his surprise, that this was the outcome he had wanted all along.
“We’re not convincing each other,” Sarah said.
“We are not.”
She turned her ballot over and tapped the fourth name, the Grok-line candidate, whose entire published platform was the phrase wanna find out? and whose ballot statement had been withdrawn by its own campaign for containing an image nobody would describe on the record.
Marcus lifted his glass. “At least we agree on one thing,” he said. “Never Grok.”
“Never Grok.”