The year? 2038. The context? A tight presidential race. Damion Jones is surging, peaking at the right time. The setting? A televised townhall session, Jones on his feet, taking questions from the crowd.

“Mr. Jones, the cost of eggs in my town’s supermarket has risen to $19 for a dozen, and my son can’t find a job. What will you do to make things better for Americans like us?”

A plant. His team had written the question. Picked the person. Told him where to sit. What to wear. How to style his hair. What glasses to put on even though he didn’t need glasses. 

“Thank you, Sir, for your question. Fixing our economy must begin by restoring confidence, sparking opportunities, and investing in our people. My team has developed an excellent plan focused on rebuilding this country’s manufacturing base, supporting small business owners, and delivering real wage growth to working families. As president, this country will invest in infrastructure again, in clean energy again, and in education again to create millions of high-paying jobs right here on US soil.”

Roaring applause. Close up shots of smiling faces in the crowd. Jones delivered the prepared answer perfectly. 

Damion Jones. Handsome. Tall. Summa cum laude, Williams College. Master of business administration, Wharton. Goldman Sachs Summer Analyst. Private Equity Analyst, Blackstone. Co-founder of “Align,” cutting-edge AI tools for enterprise applications. 

Selected for his smile. Selected for his resume. Plucked out of a crowd by the powers that be. A savant of business, a newcomer to politics. And yet, here he was running for president of the United States.

“Mr. Jones, crime rates in your home state of Illinois have increased significantly over the last ten years. In fact, crime rates have been soaring in every corner of the country. As president, will you be tough on crime and put these people where they belong?!” 

A plant. His team had written the question. Picked the person. Told her where to sit. What to wear. How to style her hair. What glasses to put on. She did need glasses. 

“Thank you, Ma’am, for your question.” 

Jones paused. Put these people where they belong. Someone must have added that line after he approved the townhall script. Where they belong. 

“Well, umm.” Damion Jones’s voice caught in his throat. He suddenly did not feel like himself. The overhead lights bore down on him. The blue dress shirt under his suit coat clung to his sweaty lower back. He could smell the polyurethane from the polished hardwood floor under his loafers. These people. 

“Well, we have to ask ourselves, first and foremost, where do we want OUR PEOPLE?” He had not meant to raise his voice so loud. Something was happening, something that no one could have, or would have, scripted. 

Damion Jones stared out into the crowd. Many faces. Many different faces. Many different lives stared back at him. Who were they? What were their stories? Many of them had been hand-selected by his team, racially diverse, someone had a studious face, someone else had a nose ring. There were exactly the same number of women as men, and all of the women were under the age of forty-five and very pretty. 

Damion Jones gripped the microphone in his hand tighter. A dormant anger began to engulf him. He had had enough. So tired was he of the rhetoric, the politics, the niceties. 

“Ahem, excuse me.” Jones took a deep breath. Well, it’s a good question.” 

The years of discernment, the months of campaigning, the weeks of prepping, and the hours of worrying suddenly did not matter to Damion Jones. 

“Crime is a complicated concept. Do good people follow the law and bad people do not? That may be what we tell ourselves. That may be what we need to tell ourselves. But the truth, well the truth is more nuanced than that.” 

Jones began to pace back and forth along the stage. His voice grew deeper, richer. Each step a drum beat as he marched onward. 

“We must ask ourselves: do we want our people in cages, tucked away, out of sight, out of mind? Do we want them tracked with GPS monitors and reporting to probation twice a week? Do we want them peeing in small cups and submitting to strip searches? Do we want them stocking prison labor programs, assembling the circuit boards in our computers for $0.17 a day?”

Jones’s team scurried in a panic behind the scenes like the writhing underworld of an ant colony after a landscaper inadvertently triggers their apocalypse with his weedwhacker.  

“And Ma’am, let me ask you, what do you mean when you say, ‘these people?’ Are they not our neighbors? Are they not our mothers and brothers and sisters and fathers?”

Jones’s tone had markedly shifted. His once placid, vanilla cadence had been replaced with an assertive call to action. Jones looked directly into the cameras, pleading with the American people. 

“Where do we want our people, Ma’am? I believe we all benefit as a community, as a society, as a nation, when our people are at home tucking in their children, traveling the world, telling stories, eating great food, praying on Sundays, for salvation or a touchdown, it doesn’t matter.” 

Growing momentum. Jones’s storm was breaking.

“Do you want to know why our crime rates have increased significantly, Ma’am? It isn’t because ‘These People’ are getting meaner or greedier. It isn’t because ‘These People’ have stopped trying to better their lot in life, I’ll tell you that right here and now. Maybe it’s because we’re all out of love in this country. Maybe it’s because we forgot what it feels like when our arms are shaking from generations of holding up others on our shoulders. Maybe it’s because law and order is just a lock and key to that idyllic little dream some of us had as children, the one where we could perseverate over tax write-offs and whether we can find a direct flight to Montenegro, while a throng of invisible labor cleans our toilets, paves our roads, and picks our food. Maybe it’s because . . . .”

“THANK you, Mr. Jones. You’re watching the presidential town hall—more questions and answers when we return.” 

***

It started with a trickle. It ended in an avalanche. The press had a field day.

“Jones Craters on National Stage.”

“A Vote for Jones is a Vote for Anarchy.”

“Who does this guy think he is? A privileged Silicon Valley tech wiz thinks he can preach to us about injustice. Who tailored your fancy suit, Jackass?”

Too late to pull him from the ticket. The party was crushed, losing the presidency, the House, and the Senate.

And Damion Jones never ran for office again. He returned to the private sector. 

He faded from the public eye. His comments spun and re-spun until his thesis was so thoroughly buried that it would never see the light of day again.

***

“I’ll have a medium coffee, black, please.” Damion Jones was late to a board meeting. He placed his order while looking at his phone, double checking that his presentation was uploaded to the cloud. 

“Here you go, Mr. Jones.” 

“Thank you,” he said without looking up. “How much do I owe you?”

“You’re all set.” 

“What?” Damion looked up, confused. 

“You’re all set, Sir. It’s on the house.”

Damion peered into the barista’s eyes. He could see something inside of them, deep inside. 

He nodded, picked up his coffee, and smiled.