Just Power
There are five Sunday’s this month, so I am starting my month off with a fiction read, this month ending The Kingmaker series by Ari H. Mendelson with the final book, Just Power.
Ok, when we left off with Due Process, the beautiful starlet Meghan Peters had made her escape from villain Neville and managed to keep herself entirely off grid, which is not actually as easy as you might think, and successfully makes her way to Indiana to meet up with Hall and company. There, during her interview with Hall, Hall pieces together the possibility of what really happened with his friend Kevin and his now ex-girlfriend Carolyn.
This book races towards denouement, all events take place election year, most of them within a week of the election. Neville is pissed that Meghan did a runner and that his AI can’t find her. BUT, the show must go on, his Chinese backers demand results, and he is able to deliver in spades. The final snag on delivery is tech of this magnitude needs government approval to export from the United States.
So of course that means the doddering old president who is barely able to speak coherent sentences and can only appear in public with trusted handlers, MUST win the next election. Which is why the party in power is coming so hard after the challengers to his power.
This is a quote from the book “For the losing candidate in the last presidential race, the second prize was a prison term...If former presidents get to live like billionaires and their former challengers go to prison, then politicians better make sure they win.”
Which is disturbingly prescient, given this weeks clown court ruling.
And it’s pretty clever, how they plan to steal the election. They opt for absolute transparency, and good old fashioned forgery, furnished courtesy of China’s Uighur work camps. But the machines used to count the votes in the swing state and in this too close to call election only state that counts....Indiana....are completely above board.
So with the data hack courtesy of DownyDuckling148, the heroes KNOW this shipment of forged ballots is coming. And all they have to do is catch the delivery drivers and turn em over to the police. Or intercept it and destroy the ballots. Or catch delivery on film for the next undercover media expose... I’m not going to tell you which one, because...well...SPOILERS!
Regardless, Neville goes down. Which was a relief. And the Governor, who wins Indiana and ousts the doddering old fool, is a blessed idealist. I mean really, the only unbelievable part of the series was the Governors altruistic stance on what it means to hold Power. It was a lovely escape into fantasy because...well, we all know that no politician running this year...or pretty much ever... is an idealist. They are all more likely to use Neville’s manipulation software as Neville intended: to consolidate their own power and destroy their enemies. But it’s nice to imagine a day when we the people might jump off the rotating carousel of “lesser evil” and actually vote on principle again.
But The Governor...I am struggling to remember if he is called anything BUT The Governor in the book...he sees a way to turn this software to helping humanity. And provides multiple ways it could do just that. And points out, quite rightly, that since it now exists, this is not a genie you can shove back in the bottle.
About the only way to reverse the clock on thirty years of internet use and social media insanity would be a massive EMP that wiped out all electronics GLOBALLY. And as entertaining as that thought might be, there’s a reason such scenarios are labeled post-apocalyptic fiction. Humanity would be set so far back on it’s forward trajectory should such a thing happen that we would literally be returned to the dark ages. I mean...whose to say it hasn’t all happened before?
The writing was edge of my seat again, and I think all in I read this book in about 8 hours. I quite enjoyed the series as a whole, and as AI is making it’s way in the world, I think Mendelson’s vision of the possibilities, both for good and for bad, is alarmingly spot on. We see the potential for this as far back as Heinlein in Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Heaven help us if Neville’s Wingman ever reaches Mike's level of sentience.
