The Voting Machine

The Once and Future Queen

We stood upright in our virtual bodies, the warrior and the philosopher king, in the center of a dusty road lined with free-standing stone columns. We were in the heart of an ancient city, different from the one where I met Chet earlier. Markets and temples filled a flat plain along the coastline. A giant lighthouse loomed by the sea in the horizon. Our dusty road continued until it reached the gates of an enormous complex of marble buildings.

"Where are we?" I asked.

The strands of hair white beard of Chet's avatar rippled in a gust of ocean wind.

"This is Alexandria, a city built several hundred years after Greece's Golden Age. In Athens, the Greeks had created a new kind of human society, based on equality, creativity and freedom of expression. Then the world they built slipped away from them. The system of democracy was replaced by the era of the God-Kings, where strong men ruled through force and claimed divine powers. One of the God Kings, Ptolemy went to Egypt where he created a new dynasty that lasted until the time of his great-great granddaughter, Queen Cleopatra."

"So this is Gina's Library of Alexandria."

The gates to the complex were flanked by tall statues of stone pharaoh warriors. Two burly, tan-skinned eunuchs guided us through the colonnade inside the gates. We entered a vast, empty hall of shiny marble floors that echoed with every footstep. Two giant paintings of the God-Kings covered the towering walls at the front of the assembly. Between them, Queen Cleopatra sat in her throne, decorated from head to toe in jewels and gold. Her headdress glittered with pearls and colored beads and her limbs were wrapped in silver coils encrusted with topaz, crystals and amethysts. Her eyes were decorated with thick black makeup applied all the way to her eyebrows. The eunuchs knelt beside her throne. After a moment of silent, one of them rose and whispered something into her ear. Slowly, her eyelids opened and she turned her gaze directly at me, as if she had been awakened from a long slumber.

"You finally came, Temo." She did not speak to Chet or acknowledge his avatar's presence. I remembered that Gina was not actually inside her avatar. This was just a recorded program she'd made before she died, a program that was only set to play if I made it this far. I figured the queen and her eunuchs had only been designed to recognize my avatar.

"Do you like my library? Remember how I told you once  that every queen needs her secret weapon." She raised her hand and I noticed she was holding a scroll.

"I am giving you the truth, Temo. You are the only one I could trust to carry it forward. You know I was never much an idealist. I didn't believe in love. I didn't care about the truth. I thought the power was the only thing that really mattered. Someone told me once that a person can have truth or power but they can't have both. At the time I figured that was an easy choice. What did truth ever do for me? Where was truth when I was tired and broke and beaten down by my old man? Truth never once raised a hand to defend me. So when I rose up through the ranks at Passion, I was happy to grab as much power as I could, even if it meant bathing myself in secrets and lies.

"When Marcus let me into his inner circle, I became privy for things that I wasn't supposed to know. Why do you think he helped me the way he did? It was his gun that killed Roland. Why do you think he never told the police that he gave me the gun for protection? Why do you think he never once used that fact to prove his innocence in the murder? It's because he didn't want the police talking to me. I had knowledge of crimes much worse than the shooting of a call center agent, much worse than the financial fraud that sent him to prison. It was much easier to take his chances with the murder charge than open up the possibility that I might talk. I should've come forth when they arrested you, but I was too scared. Like I said power seemed more important than truth or love for another. Then you forgave me, you saved me from killing myself, you let me have a fresh start. And so that night, on my journey to India, I decided I was going to change who I was. I was going to change what mattered to me. I was going to live like truth and love really mattered more than power. I was going to do something good, to show you I'd become a better person.

"During my time with Marcus I had only discovered some of the secret files about his investments with Chen. They were hidden in drives off the corporate network. I knew they were still there even though the Feds came in and tried to impound all the servers. I tried to tell Chet but he said it wouldn't do any good to dredge up the past. Marcus was already going to prison to the sins of the past. Another investigation would just hurt Passion make it harder to rebuild the company. 

"What Chet said made sense and I didn't want to upset him. He'd given me a big promotion and we were also in a relationship. He even talked about leaving his wife and marrying me. I wasn't sure. I still didn't love myself enough to think about getting married again. But I thought maybe if I could do something good to make up for how I wronged you, maybe it would make a difference.

"Chet had moved all the IT systems to India and I quietly kept searching for more details of all those secret projects during the time that Marcus was running the company. Ram Ramasamy joined me in Bangalore to help set up security for the call center. He was worried that those same identity thieves might try to hack the company again. He was trying to find everything left over from Marcus's time that hackers might be able to tap into. Then he and I together finally found another file server that was disconnected from the rest of Passion's corporate network. That's where I made the big discovery about Shiro, the realization that Passion was just a front for the main business. That's where I found the records chronicling the Shiro's history and the Articles of Incorporation. And that's when I realized that I'd been wrong all along about Marcus. He was just a lower level officer in Shiro but he had never been the man in charge. That man was Chet Castle, the Chairman and CEO, who'd taken over the position from his father. I knew right away that Chet would kill me when he found out. He may have loved me but he loves Shiro more."

I glanced over at Chet's avatar beside me. She and her eunuchs still didn't acknowledge his presence in any way.

She held out the scroll, offering it to me. "Take it, Temo," she said. "If your avatar has possession it will download with you when you return to the real world. Give it to David Stone. Give to the Feds and the news reporters. Get it in as many hands as possible. Shiro has killed millions of people all over the world. They say a great corporation is immortal while the people who run it come and go. Prove them wrong Temo. Kill Shiro and grant me redemption. I can finally be a good person now that I am dead even if I wasn't when I was alive."

I reached for the scroll and Chet's avatar stepped in between us, blocking her with his body and gripping around my wrist. I pushed against him, leaning in, lunging at the scroll. Suddenly the ground shook under my feet and it felt like someone had lifted the entire city and flipped it upside down.

When they ripped the VR mask off my face, Allister had me pinned against the floor beneath the table and Chet was looking down, pointing a gun at my face.