The night before the fundraiser, Olivia, Devin, and I gathered in Olivia’s office and conferenced into a final status meeting with Governor Violet Parker’s campaign staff at its headquarters in Sacramento. We’d traded a lot of emails with the campaign’s chief of staff and various junior staffers, but this would be my first personal introduction to the governor. Olivia would be answering any questions on behalf of Jenning & Reece; Devin and I had briefed her many times throughout the planning process, so this would be perfectly natural. And I’d extracted as much information from Olivia as I could about the governor.
Violet Parker—white, she/her, soulless—was a ruthless political monolith ending her first four-year term as governor, after smoothly transitioning from three four-year terms in the state senate. She specialized in backstabbing, power grabbing, and siphoning tax money into black holes where no signal could ever be traced.
Violet was the epitome of white aristocracy, believing she deserved every single scrap of privilege she’d ever accumulated, and constantly strategizing to maintain all of it in a merciless death grip. She’d revealed herself as the kind of politician who didn’t seem to believe in fuck all except for being in power, and she was slowly seeding the state political apparatus with a phalanx of wraiths to do her bidding. You got the feeling she’d been playing the long game for so long that no one would ever unravel her true agenda, until eventually her dark magic blotted out the sun itself and her vassals were unleashed to enforce a bleak and vicious reign of terror on the population.
She traveled heavily throughout her first term as governor, seemingly intent on visiting every farm, winery, factory, military base, city hall, corporate headquarters, you name it, and while this was clearly just a form of constant campaigning for her next term, she also built up an immense network of powerful supporters and developed a deep understanding of how the state operated on the ground. She was perceived as an effective representative of the people because she promised as little as possible, but when she did make a promise, by god she fucking delivered on it. If you ever pinned Violet down on camera saying she was going to “take a look at” some issue, she brought the full force of her immense intellect to bear on the problem until it dissolved under her withering gaze or transformed into a different problem that she never said she would fix.
But Violet had such an iron grip on the state’s political apparatus now that her transgressions were becoming less subtle, turning into open rumors. Foreign hackers were fucking with the state’s electrical grid and voting machines; Violet was widely suspected of hiring them to do it. The Church of Gorvod was resurgent in popularity among the youth of the state; no one believed the Church would operate so freely in schools and on campuses if Violet wasn’t tacitly in favor for her own dubious reasons. Key executives from Silicon Valley companies wound up with bright futures in her administration, so that Violet got access to whatever seedy data collection techniques those companies thought up next. The populace could smell corruption, even if journalists couldn’t exactly prove it.
As a result, this was shaping up to be her most difficult election since she entered politics on the Sacramento city council decades ago. Her opponent was the CEO of a company that produced a blockchain-based enterprise chat solution, which sounded like several different nightmares playing out at once. If you scratched the surface of any of his opinions, his persona crumbled into a wispy cloud of entrepreneurial buzzwords. “We’re going to monetize hope!” was his slogan. But he was closing in on Violet’s lead in the polls.
Violet’s team walked her through the entire plan for the event, start to finish, as though she was hearing about this fundraiser for the first time right this minute.
The event began with a fancy dinner, where Violet would give a speech. High rollers could pay an additional amount for a chance to sit at Violet’s table, and to join Violet for hospitality after dinner in a resplendent suite; this is where Violet would dole out precious face time to her top-tier supporters.
She wanted to confirm every single donor we’d invited, and she assigned key staff members to make sure that she rotated her attention toward each of these donors before they left the event. She was pleased to learn we’d secured the services of a celebrity chef that she admired who was known for improbable fusions. Stylists and a designer were meeting her at the hotel before the event to help her dress. We’d convinced a locally famous jazz band to volunteer its services for the night. She quizzed us about the security firm we’d lined up for the event, a mostly reputable operation that specialized in protecting VIPs who wanted to do business in war zones or whatever.
Finally, she wanted intel on the eleven individuals who would be seated at her table during dinner. They were a mix of political, corporate, and Hollywood elite, as well as longtime supporter Lonso Drake—no one particularly surprising from her perspective. But she did have one concern.
“Olivia,” she said, “why isn’t Bradford sitting at my table?”
“Bradford declined to attend,” Olivia replied diplomatically, “so we pulled someone from the waiting list.”
“Oh, for god’s sake. Well, am I going to see him at all while I’m in town?”
“He said you should drop by the office for a drink if you have time.”
“I see, so his plan is to loiter at the office all weekend? Olivia, you’re supposed to be looking out for him. Finding him friends of a certain age, getting him into a bridge group or something. Anyway, I’ll swing by Sunday on my way to the airport. What about you?”
“I’m sending two of our finest to represent Jenning & Reece,” she said. “Isobel and Devin will be on hand to help your team with anything you need.”
Violet seemed to notice us for the first time, sitting on either side of Olivia behind her desk. One of her staffers spoke up to vouch for working with both of us, and she nodded. Then she said, “Which one of you is Isobel?”
I raised my hand.
“Let’s make sure you and I find time to chat before the event is over,” she said.