- Spring 2028 Washington D.C. Just before “The Winter”

“Grady come look at this will you?” Elias Brandt called out.

Elias was a 32 year old special assistant under Grady and was a brash former policy analyst from a think tank focused on national security and executive governance. President Trenholm’s administration has specifically chosen Elias for his unwavering belief in strong centralized leadership and his ability to translate complex policy into persuasive public messaging. Elias was sharp, articulate and ambitious, and clearly had his eye on Grady’s role as Senior Advisor for Emergency Preparedness and Continuity.

Elias sharply contrasted with Grady, who had been chosen early on in the Trenholm administration to fill out senior positions with people who were among the so called “old guard”.

Grady was well aware of Elias’ ambition to take over his job, and frankly at this point Grady was happy to let him have it. Grady had been contemplating stepping down for some time, as he had become disillusioned by the administration, and what he viewed as executive overreach. Grady really had no interest in joining the administration for a second term. And Malcolm was often putting direct pressure on Grady to go out and defend the administration’s actions, particularly on the AI surveillance that was taking place, actions that ran against Grady’s worldview. 

Malcolm had come from the tech world before rising to the presidency, and he felt that all things tech related were positive, without exception. Among his first moves in 2025 were to completely deregulate the tech industry, something that Grady had been initially excited about. Grady hated regulation of any kind. But behind the scenes Grady had come to find some sinister things were happening, at least in his view.

Malcolm had made a number of friends in the tech world, which was the true motivation of deregulation. Secretly, Malcolm was giving his tech friends access to sensitive government data, such as IRS data. And those tech friends happily took the data for their AI models to ingest, to help improve their targeted ads and such even more. As a result the tech profits rose substantially, and perhaps almost by happy accident the economy was booming as a result.

At this point it was almost an open secret that the tech companies were using government data for surveillance purposes, and few people seemed to care. All that they cared about were the GDP numbers and job growth.

Grady for his part despised this behavior. How could someone really be free if the government was committed to surveillance against them? Grady was also highly suspicious of AI. But AI seemed to consume more and more of his job each day. Emergency preparedness seemed to be turning into AI directed emergency preparedness. Malcolm had flat out told Grady at some point that he didn’t want to hear what Grady had to say unless it had been run through AI first.

So, Grady had begun to rely more on his underlings to pass information through whatever new AI tool was available at that time to filter information for his boss. This was both humiliating and disturbing to Grady at the same time. Not only was the administration playing fast and loose with civil liberties, but they were also devaluing his own personal expertise by outsourcing policy to some overhyped chat bot.

Grady was used to Elias getting overly excited about some output by the shiny new AI tool, and was in a particularly bad mood today, so he initially ignored Elias’ call out to him.

“Seriously Grady, please come look at this.” Elias called again.

Begrudgingly Grady got up and moved over to the screen on Elias’ laptop.

“Alright, what the hell was so important for me to see?” Grady asked.

“Jesus, wake up on the wrong side of the bed did you?” Elias replied.

“Just get on with it, I don’t have time for your crap today.”

“Well, I ran that scenario that you asked me about through version 5.5 of the tool, and this was the response I got.” Malcolm explained, waving his hand at the screen.

Grady took a moment to quickly scan the response.

“OK, this is what—”

“Yeah, I know, but when I ran it through version 5.6, which was the update pushed this morning this is what I got.”

Grady read the second response.

“That is absolute BS. What the hell are they doing trying to break the new AI tools?” Grady asked.

“I know right? At first, I thought that it was weird but wait until you see this. So, I asked the model to point me to the information it was using in its analysis, you know things like crime rates, population size, et cetera to prepare for the scenario response. Here are the statistics it pulled up.”

“I know off the top of my head those statistics are wrong, what is wrong with this model? I thought they had solved the hallucination problem some time ago.” Grady replied.  

“Yeah, I noticed that too. So, I dug in deeper, and I discovered that the model was using this website to get its statistics. At first glance, it looks like an official government website. In fact, technically it is, but when I investigated the details on the website it turned out that the website had been created today by an ‘unknown’ user. Like moments before I asked the model where its data came from. Isn’t that awe—”

“If you are going to tell me that is awesome, stop right there. No that is not awesome. I don’t want some AI model feeding me BS and then pointing to official looking websites that it made to back itself up. What if the AI model decides that we need to limit personal freedoms and starts making up fake—”

“You are always concerned about these stupid personal freedoms. If we have a good strong president like Marcus, we have no need to be worried about personal freedoms, he will make sure we are taken care of.”

“Jesus Elias, you are so naïve. First, lets just assume that Marcus is this wonderful benevolent person you speak of, I am not convinced of that by the way, what happens if he loses the next election to some commie? What  happens then, when we have handed all of this power to the commie class?”

“You worry too much Grady. Marcus has this election in the bag.”

“Ah your youth is showing now, there is no such thing as having an election in the bag. I was assured of never-ending republican rule in the late 80’s”

“It’s different now, Marcus is a true man of the people.”

“Man of the people? He is selling us out for our private data. He is making the government more intrusive not less.”

“He is using the data to make our lives better. Better and more targeted ads so we don’t have to click through a bunch of stuff we don’t have any interest in buying. Bett—”

“It’s an invasion of privacy, the government needs to butt out and make sure the companies butt—”

“You are impossible Grady.”

“I don’t have time for these stupid arguments, with young idiot kids like yourself. Just pull together and document everything. I want the output of both models on some slides to show to the president. You have 15 minutes, now get out.”

Grady sat back down at his desk and waived Elias out of the office. Elias left in a huff, as he often did, and slammed the door on his way out. In about 15 minutes Grady would be heading out for his meeting with the president. Grady was more than disillusioned at this point, he was exhausted. This job really wasn’t worth it. President Trenholm was in full on reelection mode at this point, and Grady didn’t feel like he would survive another 4 years here. It was surprising to everyone, including Grady himself, that he had lasted this long. Over the course of the past 3 and a half or so years Grady had watched as his fellow libertarians were weeded out of top-level advisor positions, replaced by young, dumb hotshots like Elias. The party felt like it was becoming less libertarian by the day, following Trenholm’s lead.

Grady had agreed to go into the belly of the beast, pushed by a couple of his old military pals who had climbed the ranks of the party. They felt, correctly, that he would be a strong voice for libertarian viewpoints. Though he had initial reservations, including about the title of his position—why was the government getting involved in emergency preparedness, shouldn’t that be left to the people?— Grady had decided that he could potentially make positive change, and shrink the government.

By all accounts, his efforts had been worse than a failure. Not only had the government not shrunk during his time there, somehow it had managed to grow. If he felt like every time he looked up from his own work, there was some new office created. An office dedicated to cryptocurrency, new offices dedicated to AI, an office for quantum computing, the list seemed to be never ending. It had also become clear that President Trenholm simply wanted to use the office to enrich his friends, and probably himself too. There were constant secret Whitehouse meetings between Trenholm and the other tech giants from around the country. Conveniently the new offices tended to have titles that would be useful to these people.

And where was congress in all of this? They seemed to do worse than nothing, they would simply actively participate in the madness. He saw time and again members of congress who shouted about how government was too big, then turned around and voted to create these new offices that President Trenholm asked for. Trenholm was quite effective at using rewards and threats to keep these members of the party in line. Grady stopped being shocked at how quickly supposedly principled conservatives backed down. He was numb to it at this point.

Grady realized now the problem. The system itself was too corrupting. People who may have had principles before lost them all when they became a part of government. He had once laughed at his anarcho-capitalist friends, but he was starting to feel that they had a good point. Perhaps getting rid of the government altogether was the only chance at saving the world.

Thanks to all that Grady had seen, he had typed up his resignation letter. He decided to resign, with an effective date of election day, which was laid out carefully in the letter. He understood Trenholm would probably ask him to leave sooner. Grady was that last little thorn in Trenholm’s side. At this point he secretly hoped that Trenholm lost to whatever Marxist the democrats put up. Maybe that would spur the change the party needed to get back to principles.

Elias shot Grady an email containing the slides, as requested. Grady knew full well Elias would be the one to replace him once he left, which was a discouraging thought. But Grady certainly had no ability to mount any kind of resistance to President Trenholm anyhow, in fact he might have an easier time outside the administration doing so. Secretly Grady had booked some time on a few podcasts, which seemed to be the “new media” so to speak. He was ready to hammer the president, and in some ways, he was an ideal person to do so, as he had no plans for any kind of future in government.

Grady walked at a rapid pace to his meeting with President Trenholm, carrying his resignation note at the bottom of the pile. He felt like a weight was finally being lifted off his shoulders and couldn’t wait to get it over with. His plan was to resign after today’s meeting.

As Grady walked nearer to the oval office, he saw the familiar faces of a couple of secret service agents, who naturally recognized him as well and waved him in. The chief of staff signaled for Grady to sit down. President Trenholm was on the phone with someone, and someone whispered in Grady’s ear that he would be finished in just a moment.

Grady looked at his laptop while he waited. He had learned to navigate it quite nicely for someone who was not a big fan of tech. He did irritate some staffers with it though, since he refused to allow them to purchase a new one for him. He insisted that they figure out how to continue the security updates needed on this device. He felt there was no reason to have to learn to navigate a new one now.

Grady gathered from the conversation the president was having that he was talking to one of his tech friends, yet again.