《The Accidental President》 Chapter 1: The Editorial Board, Part 1 Edwins Elected President, Ushering In New Era of Politics By the Editorial Board Nov. 2, 2060 Paulus Logan Edwins was elected the 55th president of the United States on Tuesday, riding a tidal wave of dissatisfaction with the established political consensus on automation, rendering incumbent Camila Flores a one-term president. The election results came as a crushing blow to supporters of Mrs. Flores¡¯ National Liberal party, which has held the presidency for twelve years, controlling both houses of Congress for much of it. Mr. Edwins, an outsider to the Democratic Center party he ran with, represents the heart of the movement that seeks to change how automation integrates with the economy. An Ivy League graduate, he shored up support among a coalition of contradictions; exit polls showed him winning over highschool dropouts and postgraduates by the same margin, with strong support from young people and seniors alike. Mrs. Flores won people with bachelor¡¯s degrees by nearly twelve points, a group that constitutes much of the highly skilled labor yet to be automated. Mr. Edwins¡¯ unlikely victory began with polls showing him in the single digits. His first attempt at the presidency ended with less than a quarter of a percent of the vote in 2044. But since his last foray in electoral politics, unemployment rates have soared from 7% to more than 15%, validating his predictions of mass unemployment in his popular book Commuter Science: How Machines (Safely) Moving People Changes Everything. He saw a meteoric rise in support after a widely publicized debate with Aswath Patel, co-founder of social media giant MyLife, where a clip of Mr. Edwins accusing Mr. Patel of ignoring the growing body of scientific evidence on the negative effects of social media went viral. To protest the invasive and addictive nature of social media, Mr. Edwins ran a campaign without having a publicly viewable MyLife account, the first ever. Instead, he chose to promote his blog, started almost fifty years prior as a high school student posting anything from annoyances at school to interactive summaries of his explorations in recreational programming. Though the pre-presidential content is now in a separate archive, Mr. Edwins has continued to post every week, releasing policy and staff details and answering questions selected at random from his email. Though this tactic came off as eccentric to many, it fired up supporters who took this as a sign of his dedication to his values and a new political messaging style. In the presidential debates, Mr. Edwins¡¯ lack of general charisma became apparent, with his dry humor falling flat to digital audiences, regardless of who they supported. The debate was dominated in tone by Mrs. Flores, who commanded the stage when she signalled her strong hispanic American background in a powerful story about her father emigrating from Brazil, avoiding divisive religious rhetoric along the way. A disruptive electromagnetic pulse generated by an illegal device planted by a staff member interrupted the final debate for two hours, though the exact motive was unclear. Falling short of most projections, Democratic Centrists saw a gain of three seats in the Senate, two seats short of the 55 seat majority necessary to overcome the legislative filibuster. National Liberals found themselves easily fending off challenges in political strongholds on the West Coast, only for incumbent party superstar Senator Kiara Jayanta to lose her seat in Florida, a state that Flores won by double digit margins. Intraparty critics of Edwins blamed his lack of political experience for failing to gain significant ground elsewhere in the South. In the House of Representatives, the president-elect¡¯s party targeted a supermajority of 300, requiring flipping a net total of 15 seats. Instead, they increased their majority by just four, bringing their total to 289 seats in the 500 member body, eleven seats less than the 60% necessary to expedite some legislative procedures. Mrs. Flores ran a straggling campaign squeezed by her party¡¯s ideological divisions. Left wing politicians and activists in her party condemned her redirection of money away from Social Security and Medicaid to establish a universal basic income program they viewed as too modest. On the party¡¯s right, citics bemoaned the heavy expansions of other social programs, particularly the lowering of the enrollment age of Medicare to 40. Influential ultra-wealthy donors balked at her platform to effectively eliminate super PACs by capping donations to political groups by any single corporation or person to $1000 a year. In the weeks leading up to the election, Mrs. Flores emphasized her nine years as the CEO of Click Sprint, an industry leader in general labor automation, claiming at rallies that ¡°no one would be left behind.¡± But for the first time ever, a plurality of voters picked automation as their most important issue in exit polls from the Washington Outline, with the environment falling from first to third place behind the economy. Of those who selected automation as their top issue, over three quarters backed Mr. Edwins. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Mr. Edwins is projected to receive 52.2% of the popular vote to Mrs. Flores¡¯ 46.7%, a margin of 5.5%. In the Electoral College, he is likely to win at least 301 electoral votes, though the outcome in North Carolina will remain unclear until a recount is completed in December. Mr. Edwins won every state along the northern border from Montana to Maine. His so-called ¡°citrus coalition¡± (lemon-yellow for libertarians and lime-green for environmentalists) swept the entire Northeast and stretched down to Tennessee. In recent months, ¡°grapefruits¡±, or pinks (a more moderate brand of the traditionally red color of socialism and communism), have rallied behind Mr. Edwins. Though perceived to make up much of his coalition, voters prioritizing the environment supported Mr. Edwins by only eight points more than his opponent. Environmentalists supportive of Mrs. Flores are generally pro-market automation, especially in heavy industry, viewing it as an ideal force to boost productivity and efficiency in carbon-demanding processes. Her loss of majority support from the green base is mainly attributed to reductions in subsidies and tax breaks for renewable energy producers in an effort to reduce the deficit. Not all news was bad for the National Liberals, however. Mrs. Flores, a child of Mexican and Brazilian immigrants, handily won hispanic voters, particularly in the South. She won all three biggest states, California, Texas, and Florida, states with majority or plurality hispanic populations. In Los Angeles county, where over six million people voted, her margin of victory was nearly fifty points. Despite losing Colorado and Kansas, two states her party previously won for five elections straight, the incumbent National Liberal senators defied polls and won reelection. From her hometown of San Diego, where she was the mayor for two terms, Mrs. Flores conceded the election to Mr. Edwins, praising his campaign for refraining from personal attacks in an era of heightened political tensions. In return, Mr. Edwins promised to expand her newly established Department of Technology and to work towards her goal of ending ¡°superdonators.¡± In a live broadcasted concession speech, Mrs. Flores pledged to support the incoming administration, and called on supporters to embrace being the political opposition for the first time in more than a decade. Her speech was tinged with regret, at one point saying that ¡°[she] could have done more to listen to the American people.¡± Nonetheless, she struck notes on being proud of her campaign, and ended the speech with a resigned idiom, ¡°nuevo rey, nueva ley.¡± literally translating to ¡°new king, new law.¡± Vice President-elect Renato Steinbeck remarked that the results ¡°proves that Americans have been yearning for change.¡± Mr. Steinbeck, widely seen as a moderate party loyalist, earned the ire of activists early in the Democratic Center¡¯s primary when he suggested that Mr. Edwins was a ¡°luddite¡± for focusing on the downsides of automation. Mr. Edwins fired back by noting that unemployment in Mr. Steinbeck¡¯s hometown of Milwaukee was on track to exceed 20%, a figure only briefly reached in the Securities Meltdown of 2027. By the end of the primary though, Mr. Edwins and Mr. Steinbeck had formed a close friendship by exchanging forum posts on Public View, a NGO website for politicians to articulate their positions more clearly. In April, Mr. Edwins selected Mr. Steinbeck as his choice for Vice President, a choice which relieved party heads and irked the left wing in the party. LGBTQ groups comprised 15% of the voting body and backed Mr. Edwins by 4%, slightly less than the national average. Some analysts attribute this to videos surfacing in August from Mr. Edwins¡¯ teenage years, where he was seen to frequently use transphobic slurs when playing video games. Mr. Edwins responded to the growing criticisms on his lack of strong GRSM policy by claiming he was once arrested in high school for beating up someone who insulted his sister, who is transgender. Willow Pine High, the highschool Mr. Edwins attended, released records showing that Mr. Edwins was only suspended, not arrested. Both candidates for president continued the tradition of publicly picking their top staffing picks for the executive branch, alongside a go-to Supreme Court candidate. Mrs. Flores largely retained her roster, but promised to cycle out the Secretary of Technology for someone more concerned with unemployment, a move generally seen as subtly moving away from the previous consensus. For his part, Mr. Edwins filled his staffing picks with technocrats, many of whom were derided for not being famous enough to have Wikipedia pages before being announced as the head of a department. On foreign policy, the candidates differed little. Mr. Edwins supports raising economic aid for education to developing countries, especially in Africa, where automation is perceived as an existential threat to many low skilled workers. Mrs. Flores questioned whether Mr. Edwins harsh stance on Cuban trade was still appropriate given the regime¡¯s willingness to work with diplomats. Neither candidate suggested any desire to intervene in the Middle East, where a political revolution changed the Republic of Iraq into the Ba''athist Republic of Iraq. The ostensibly sovereign artificial intelligence entity E-Scope was swarmed for statements about the election, but they declined to comment, claiming that nothing they could say would improve the situation from their point of view. On message boards across the internet, disappointment mounted on both sides after E-Scope refused to validate their beliefs about politics, another notch in a long list of conflicts where the entity has remained independent. Markets remained stable once organizations began calling the race for Mr. Edwins. Green indexes ticked upwards slightly while automation-heavy companies saw moderate declines. Yiannis Vasilopoulos, the CEO of Click Sprint who took over from Mrs. Flores shrugged when asked about the election results, telling reporters, ¡°I have faith that Edwins will do the right things.¡± Financers on Wall Street did not appear to express worry about any possible structural changes. On the social media platform Tell, users broke records trending #HLH2, Mr. Edwins¡¯ unofficial campaign slogan: ¡°Humans live here too.¡± Mr. Edwins is scheduled to be inaugurated as President of the United States on Jan. 20, 2061. Chapter 2: The Death Row Inmate I was born in an insignificant town hidden within the rot of the Midwest. My grandpa, who lived with my mother since before I was born, always told me about his work at the aluminum factory within walking distance of our house. The factory was demolished in the 2000s to be replaced with a mall which itself closed in the 2030s, becoming a haunting grounds for the homeless and young alike. After school one day, I asked my father why his father had always been living with us. He said that it wasn¡¯t a big deal, it was just that Social Security had been reduced, and he had health problems, and he was too old to work, and on and on and on until I regret asking. But at the end of it, I begged to get a job, because even if I couldn¡¯t earn enough money to help grandpa live on his own, maybe I could make enough money to expand our cramped house. My father laughed until he had tears in his eyes, and said that there was no work for me to do, and to just accept the small house as it were. An avid reader, this didn¡¯t make sense to me. I remembered reading about mill girls in Massachusetts who worked in factories from the age of ten. Sure, that was child labor, but what about a century later? Boys biked around neighborhoods throwing newspapers and ran storefronts. Yet another century later, the newspapers are all digital; homogenous stores manned with digital men. But there is always work to be done, a few streets away, heroin needles and trash covered the ground in a blanket of despair and nihilism. Yet no one was willing to pay for the cleanup - evidently, that concern ran behind the priorities of accumulating capital and profit. Perhaps those writings sound like one of a lazy communist who wishes to return to the 19th century. But that view would be wrong, for I was not only not a communist, but feverishly devoted to working, even without any pay. After school every day, I brought a few garbage bags and picked up every broken needle and pill bottle within walking distance of the landfill. For weeks, I worked tirelessly, right up until the moment my mother found out that her garbage bags were being used to pick up someone else¡¯s trash, ending the whole endeavor. I complained to her, for I had no job, what else could be a better use of my time? She told me that schoolchildren working was an artifact of the past, that none of her friends had children who worked, and to improve my grades instead. Though the scolding left me annoyed, I kept a cool face the whole time, remembering that few of my other friends were lucky enough to have two parents living under the same roof. I gave up on my community service to improve my grades, hoping that an advanced education could give me the perspective to see the world as it is and the capital to change it. By my senior year, my grades had improved to the point of getting me into the best public university in the state, which I was told was also the cheapest option, the tuition being paid for by a percentage of income rather than the old system of a flat amount. Without a head for the physical sciences, I turned my focus to the comforting abstracts in computing and anthropology, graduating with a bachelors in the former in both. For years, I spent my time plodding along, bouncing from company to company, working in cybersecurity and automated systems. I returned home for my grandpa¡¯s funeral, which a few old friends of mine attended. Afterwards, we drank in a bar until the sky turned light again, and I asked them, only one of whom had completed college, how things were. Our little cohort at that moment boasted an electrician, a chef, a teacher, and a landscaper. Of the group, only I made more money than the mean salary at the time. I was astounded, as all of them struck me as hardworking and dedicated adults, much more than I ever thought I was. All of them had been unemployed for months at a time. The teacher turned to me and said that the town was in the final stages of decomposition. I said that made no sense. On my ride home, I saw restaurants and storefronts and superchains that weren''t there just a few years earlier. We even got an ExtraMart, the symbol of development and modernity. The chef pointed out that new restaurants only required an overseeing manager for the Autochefs they purchased from Click Sprint. The teacher mentioned that much of learning in lower education nowadays was done by artificial intelligences engineered to appeal to kids. The landscaper said that there had been a decline in demand for his services as people took to Minibots to trim their lawns and pull up weeds, contracting larger, cheaper-than-human-labor robots to pour gravel. The electrician groaned at the mention of Minibots and said that he contemplated moving to Mexico where his services would no doubt be in higher demand. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. None of them were as financially stable as they wanted to be, and all of them were ashamed at having to be assisted by the government. They turned to me and asked me what I had been doing, so I answered honestly. I said that I worked with the United States Postal Service to link distribution networks, cutting down lots of human labor involved. At a dying social media company, I blew the whistle on their obscene privacy and security practices and was fired as a result. In Silicon Valley, I worked at a firm which specialized in crushing bureaucracy in foreign governments. And on and on and on. Afterwards, no one said anything, but the tone was clear: they all thought I was helping to end the old world we grew up in with a new one which was strangling us. We departed and I went home to sleep as the morning birds chirped. I woke up just before sunset and drank enough water to offset the dehydration which had occurred the night before, heading out for a walk to see the streets I had once tried to clean years ago. The houses had emptied, windows cracked and doors missing. The streets held more trash than asphalt. A slow moving wave of impoverished hell looked to have been sweeping the town for years, even as minutes away, brand new buildings gleamed. In my work as cybersecurity, I noticed that many places often broke company policy and legislative law when it came to securing systems. The majority of the firms I advised took my comments to heart and changed their practices. However, outliers in the automotive industry resisted my advice on redesigning their accessing systems. Distraught over the glaring security issues, I began to search for possible incidents of individuals exploiting the system, posting proof that the Minneapolis woman who hacked her car to run over her boyfriend likely used a trivial exploit to do so. Without any possible way to advance my concerns in the company, I ran to local and national media outlets, only two of which ran a tiny story on. My promises of anonymity by the media were broken, and I was publicly and humiliatingly fired. The firing followed me for the rest of my career in technology, stifling any opportunity I had, leaving me on the diluted unemployment system for months. I moved back in with my parents only to see that the house had fallen apart since I last visited, so I used virtually all of my savings to fix it up, though my father said to not bother. My mother, who last held a job when she was driving for the Postal Service, cried at the injustice of my career¡¯s termination when I told her. The cushy life I had lived was essentially over by that point. We lived poorly for years, as I was unable to advance professionally due to the bad blood spilt by me. This is why I hacked the cars. This is why I sent them towards the very services destroying the fabric of our society, rendering perfectly educated and hardworking people of all backgrounds nearly unemployable and poor. I should be lauded by the few fatalities that occurred; in the wrong hands, the number could be many millions. I have already been called a terrorist by the news media, a term I completely disagree with. Though civilian institutions were targeted, civilians themselves were not. After I had confirmed that over six thousand cars had been compromised, all of them were paused for three minutes while warnings played in nine different languages telling passengers to exit the car immediately. Those that were detected to be occupied after the time passed were released from control. All deaths occured due to faulty sensors; the tragedy of which is not lost upon me. I have released statements apologizing to the families in addition to my apologies in court; some of whom have protested my impending death. The section at the beginning is going to be portrayed as a sympathetic grab. Here is something to think about: why does learning about the life and motivation of someone make you more sympathetic? Is it because you¡¯ve been brainwashed, or because the more you learn about a person, the more you¡¯re willing to lend them credibility and view them as equal human beings? Giving context behind actions is not by any means a desperate bid for sympathy. People across the nation have held peaceful demonstrations demanding that my appeal for a life sentence be accepted, a proposition which was unfairly denied. The doctor assigned to lethally inject me has resigned in protest after working with the Florida State Prison for fifteen years. Though I won¡¯t live to see it, the tide is slowly turning in this country, one that will morph into a tsunami by the end of the decade. Tomorrow, the State will inject potassium chloride into my arm to trigger a cardiac arrest, killing me. But today, I write confidently, defiantly, and without regret. Sincerely, Pete *** From Freaky Floridians: Programmer Peyton Special *** Peyton Jones was a former software engineer controversially convicted of using weapons of mass destruction after hacking into autonomous car systems and directing them to crash into cloud computing sites, resulting in three deaths and over a hundred injuries. In the five minutes before control of cars was recovered, nearly twenty billion dollars in damages had been caused, with untold billions from lost productivity afterwards. His final writing from death row, known as the Jonifesto to his supporters, was read by approximately forty million people before being scrubbed from the surface web in the newest drive against extremist content. Jones was executed on May 16th, 2056.