Office of the Prime Minister
2 Palace Square
Nuvrenon, Tavaris
23 January 2024
8:08 PM Tavari Mainland Time (UTC -8:00)
The Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Tavaris sat slumped over her desk, unmoving, staring at the entire world reflected, warped and distorted, on the surface of her wedding ring. It sat on the desk, a gleaming strip of gold atop handsome, elegant teak, but the sight evoked no beauty in the heart of Žarís Nevran Alandar. Only sadness and shame. The only light in the room came through the door that she hadn’t even bothered to close behind her and the lights of the city, distant through the window behind her. There was little to look at in the reflection, or really, anywhere else in the dark office, but she wasn’t really looking at it anyway. She had come to her office not to work but to steal a moment of time to wallow.
“Prime Minister?” A quiet, almost meek voice, and the barest hint of a knuckle rapped on the open door snapped Žarís out of her introspection. For a moment she was annoyed—who was still here at this hour?—but it was no mere intern who stood in her door frame. It was the Emperor of the Tavari.
“Emp-” The Prime Minister frantically made to stand up, but Otan held his hand up and she stopped. “I… didn’t know you were still here. I hope they didn’t tell you to wait for-”
“I came to check on you,” he said in that same soft voice. It felt strange to hear it from a man more than a decade her junior—it was hard to imagine the Emperor as anything other than a teenager. But that had been years ago, and Žarís ought to have been the last person to fall victim to that lingering Tavari prejudice against the young. The Emperor was a grown man, and he certainly showed it today. The rocket launch the entire country had been looking forward to for months had ended in tragedy that afternoon, an explosion mere seconds after liftoff, with the entire world watching live on television. The Emperor had had to give the speech that no head of state ever wanted—that Tavari astronauts had died a terrible death. He had done it with aplomb, of course. Žarís is glad that she had not been the one to do it. She wasn’t sure she would have been able to muster up any hope.
“I… Thank you, Emperor Otan. I’m… fine. Your speech today was incredible. Exactly what the country needs.” She paused. “I wish I could say the same of me.”
The Emperor arched an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything. After just the barest of pauses, he stepped over the threshold into the room and walked up to the Prime Minister. “Does… does the Monarch typically…?” He gestured at the room around him, and it occurred to Žarís that the Emperor had hunched his shoulders and was ducking his head, as though he feared he was somewhere he shouldn’t have been.
“Oh, hm,” she said, lifting her head up with intrigue. It occurred to her that she didn’t actually know how often a King of the Tavari had ever stepped foot in this room. Usually the Prime Ministers went to the King, not the other way around. “I… you know, sir, yes, you may actually be the first monarch to ever step foot in this room. But I’ll allow it.” She paused and looked up for a moment at the man standing above her. “Should I… get you a chair?” She again made to stand up, and again the Emperor motioned for her to sit.
“Contrary to popular belief, I am capable of getting my own chair,” he said, offering a hint of a smile. He pulled a rolling chair away from the nearby meeting table and sat across the desk from the Prime Minister. “How are you doing?”
“Do you remember last year… when Sir Endra died?” The Prime Minister resumed staring at her wedding ring. The hand holding it, on which the ring ought to have been, had just the barest hint of an untanned, lighter green strip on the ring finger. She did normally wear it—the media would ask nosy questions if she didn’t—but it wasn’t the same anymore.
A look of confusion flashed over the Emperor’s face, but he dutifully answered the question. “How could I forget?”
“In the media reports, they said that the pneumatic tube incident involved a wedding ring that had come off the hand of ‘an employee in the Office of the Prime Minister,’” Žarís explained in a miserable voice.
The confusion on Emperor Otan’s face faded, replaced by somber recognition. “…Oh. I’m so sorry, Žarís. I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine.”
“I’ve lost a lot of weight since the wedding, you see. Y’know, because I’ve felt so good and energized since the Accords.” She laughed, but it was a bitter, cruel sound that seemed almost to echo, sharply and coldly, in the dark office. “Spirits. You know how I feel? Sick. I’m just… I feel so low, so sickened. People keep dying, Emperor. People keep dying because of stupid, preventable mistakes. People keep dying because our government, our economy, our society has failed, over and over again, to properly adjust to this quote-un-quote ‘new age’ of ‘new technology’ that’s all twenty, thirty years old at this point”
The Emperor cocked his head just slightly. “Do we know what caused the explosion?”
“We all heard what she said, clear as day on live television. ‘The screens just rebooted and everything’s in Norgsveltian.’ It was a computer error. The entire spirits-damned rocket shutdown and rebooted in the middle of liftoff. It rebooted in stock configuration, which was of course in Norgsveltian because it was produced by Norgsveldet. There aren’t any Tavari companies making software like this. Not a single one. That rocket had software made by Norgsveltians, Morstaybishlians, Vistari… and the hardware wasn’t Tavari either. The Alkari built those semiconductor chips, because spirits know we don’t have any damn clue how to. There isn’t a single person in this country, apparently, who knows how to build an operating system for a rocket. So we had to go buy a bunch of off-the-shelf stuff that was never designed to work together, string it together with COBOL and FORTRAN, and, and… Emperor, do you know how software gets loaded into TASER spacecraft? TASER spacecraft in the Year of the Common Era Two Thousand and Twenty Four?” Žarís suddenly stood up, leaned forward with white knuckles grabbing the edge of her desk, and bared her tusks in rage as she said “On floppy disks!”
Emperor Otan flinched. “I… I’m sure… I mean, sometimes the older technology is more secure… It might not even be unusual for-”
“We don’t use floppy disks because they’re more secure! We use floppy disks because the Tavari government never finished converting to bloody CD-ROM! Emperor, other countries can fit two terabytes onto one SD card but here we are loading mission critical, life-saving software on a set of two dozen floppy disks and praying nothing goes wrong.” The Prime Minister harrumphed bitterly, crossing her arms and staring out the window, before continuing much more quietly. “And don’t even get me started on the elderly man I murdered with a pneumatic tube that could have been an email. Obsolescence, Emperor. Obsolescence is killing our people, and it will continue to. We have to do something. I have to do something.”
The room was silent. The Prime Minister continued to stare out the window, her knuckles no less white in fists clenched at her sides. “It’s my fault,” she eventually said.
“Prime Minister, you cannot individually take responsibility for the result of decades of compounded policy failures committed by several governments and the private sector,” said Otan.
Žarís whirled around. “Someone has to!”
Otan kept his face even and his voice earnest. “You cannot. No one can.”
The Prime Minister harrumphed again, even more bitterly. It was a sound of disgust, raw and trembling with emotion. “I’ve had this book in my desk for almost ten spirits-damned years,” she said. Her angry hands yanked open a drawer and produced a well-worn paperback whose title Otan immediately recognized as having been a Nuvrenon News bestseller that had had everyone abuzz for months on end: Analog Tavaris: How Gerontocracy and Monopolization Have Killed Tavari Innovation in the Most Innovative Time in History. “Do you remember the digital TV transition? We knew damn well back then that the situation was already untenable. It sure hasn’t gotten any better.”
The transition from analog television signals—the exact same kind of radio waves that had been used to transmit television since the 1930s—to the ones-and-zeros of high definition digital television had been a massive boondoggle. Delayed three times due to both government and industry failing to be ready in time, it had been feared that the then relatively robust television ecosystem of the country would fall apart. A major part of the delay had been caused by the public’s dependence on and insistence in keeping the well-deprecated “teletext” feature that had been advocated by the Tavari government back in the 70s, when technology hadn’t been something everyone was afraid of. By the 2010s the rest of the world was perfectly happy getting their weather and sports information by Goggling it on their PrimPhones, but Tavaris demanded to be able to do it by pressing a button on their TV remote. Otan remembered there being much guffawing with his bunkmates on whatever ship he had been on at the time about old people and their fear of cell phones.
“Tavaris wasn’t always this way. Back in the 70s, Tavari television was cutting edge. And there were computers by then, too! We had plenty of computers in the 70s! But then the Internet happened and everyone in Tavaris lost their minds because of that damn… that stupid, spirits-damned cable.” The Prime Minister held the book aloft for good measure. “That damn Trans-Cerenerian Cable.”
The Trans-Cerenerian Cable, Otan remembered well from his history classes, had been an even bigger boondoggle. In fact, it was the ultimate boondoggle, the ur-boondoggle, the one every single Tavari student still learned about. For most people, the Trans-Cerenerian Cable was what killed the Tavari Empire. Built from 1858 until 1863—in several sections on a not particularly efficient route, since Tavari waters did not actually cover a straight shot north from Avnatra to mainland Novaris—the absolutely preposterous amounts of copper, rubber, and hemp fibre needed to build the cable consumed basically the country’s entire output of those products for years, not to mention the eye-popping sums of money the government shoveled into it instead of, say, the military, or building telegraph lines in Elatana, or just about anything else. Most of the funds “spent” on “the cable” weren’t even for the cable at all—they were barely disguised kickbacks for the handful of major Tavari business owners that the Liberals had slipped into the procurement contracts so they could count on their support in the next election. Ultimately, the Trans-Cerenerian Cable bankrupted the Tavari government, hamstrung its military, tarnished the government’s fiscal and ethical reputation among its own citizens and the world, and was named as one of the central defining factors in the country’s poor performance in the Gondwana Straits War. Failing to learn its lesson, the Tavari government continued to pour money into the cable after the war once telephones began to replace the telegraph, and the Royal Tavari Navy was still sporting the top-of-the-line guns from 1870 when it was practically demolished wholesale by the Asendavians and Banians in 1908.
But that had been well more than a century ago, and Otan hadn’t ever actually read Analog Tavaris. “What does the Trans-Cerenerian Cable have to do with…?”
“Because in the 1980s and 90s, when the rest of the world began to interconnect their mainframes and build what became the Urth-Wide Utility, every single lousy spirits-damned politician in this country, left, right, and center, looked at it, freaked the narasq out, and said ‘Oh, this means upgrading the cable? They’ll never let us spend money on the cable! We’ll ruin the country again!’ So we didn’t do it. Do you know who did? Ffffff-bloody Metradan. We had to give them 50/50 ownership of the cable. They own half the thing, all the way out to Metrati Anar. Still today. And they don’t want to give it up, either. It’s been a huge sticking point in the- well, I’m getting distracted. My point is, embittered nationalists yearning for centuries-old imperial glory days spent decades telling everyone how that cable had been a useless waste of resources that killed our glorious Empire—it isn’t even true, by the way, the cable didn’t cost that much, and it itself was plainly just a symptom of the underlying corruption that did kill the Empire and is still with us today—and so, when the time came that we really needed it, that we really could have become leaders, we shirked away in fear of change. We rejected upgrading our communications technology, which meant we rejected upgrading our computers, which meant we rejected upgrading our banking system, our manufacturing sector, our universities… everything! Now we’re playing catch-up, and we’re paying for it. Dearly. But what really gets me, what really gets me, is how none of this is new. Like I said, Emperor, I’ve had this book in my desk for a decade. I’ve campaigned on ‘building a Digital Tavaris.’ Are we building a Digital Tavaris, Emperor? I mean, spirits above, you know what operating system our aircraft carriers run on. Do you feel proud of our progress?”
The Emperor checked briefly over his shoulder to ensure there was no one standing outside the open office door before daring to verbally express an opinion. “No,” he said simply. “I’m not proud that our rockets run on Norgsveltian software. I’m not proud that Tavaris leads the world in cheque transactions and faxes per capita. I’m not proud that Tavaris has zero manufacturers of semiconductors but that the government spends millions of našdat a year propping up what might be the continent’s last remaining floppy disk factory…”
“We use them for the nukes,” the Prime Minister whispered through clenched teeth. “The nuclear program that began in Two Thousand and Eleven!” Even the ordinarily stoic soldier carrying that ominous suitcase that was never out of the Commander-in-Chief’s sight blinked, taken aback.
“… But, as astounding and unsettling as that is, Prime Minister, my original point stands. You cannot and should not bear all of this on your own shoulders. I’m sure Sir Shano Tuvria and Sir Aniríl Dravana Niktat read that book too. Putting all of that on your own shoulders, or even just the deaths today, doesn’t solve any problems, it’s just going to make you less capable. And, Žarís… Sir Endra wasn’t your fault, either. I remember reading that article. The emergency stop didn’t work. You weren’t personally-”
“It is my fault! My fault! He never should have been in that room at all!” Angry tears welled in the eyes of the Prime Minister and began to streak down her face. “He was seventy-eight years old! I… I… Humans don’t even work that long! Seventy-eight! I should never had appointed him, and I sure as hell shouldn’t have re-appointed him after the Accords! But I wanted continuity! I wanted the same-old thing I felt safe with, I wanted no change, I wanted exactly the same thing as all those other people who kicked the technological can down the road. The same impulse that made us afraid to stop faxing, I fell for hook line and sinker, and I killed a man! And now two astronauts are dead. These are public servants! These are heroes! Dead! Because of me!”
“Well, then stop screaming at me and go fix it, murderer.”
It was as though the Emperor had drop kicked the Prime Minister in the chest. She physically staggered back, dumbfounded and slack-jawed. In an instant the tears stopped, simply because the Prime Minister couldn’t process what she had heard. The Emperor took advantage of the silence to continue.
“Fix it or resign, you terrible, unorcish murderer.” His voice was level and his face deadpan.
“I… I…”
“You what? Well? It’s your fault, you just said. So go fix it. If you’re gonna plant your flag on this hill, if you’re going to personally take every fault of Tavari society on your own shoulders, then put on your big-girl pantsuit, stop whining at the figurehead state lawn ornament and go fix it.” For a moment, the Emperor held his gaze, wide-eyed and piercing, on the red, streaming eyes of the Prime Minister. But only for a moment. After a silence, both of their faces fell at the same time. “I’m sure you get my point,” said Otan quietly.
“I… I know that it isn’t… I mean, I know, but…”
“It was caused by more than one person. Generations of Tavari failing is what got us here, not one Diet Delegate. It will take more than one person to fix it. Claiming that you are the one, that you are the sole reason… well, that’s just hubris of a different kind, isn’t it? You, as Prime Minister, are certainly responsible for leading the government, but you can’t be responsible for every administrative failure, every lapse in judgment. And trying to just makes you incapable of doing what you actually need to be doing. I… I’m sure you know this. I’m sure you’re just… sad. It- it’s a normal thing. You have a right to be sad sometimes, just like everyone else. But, well, I mean, for one, Sir Endra said yes when you asked him, didn’t he?”
“Well, yes…”
“What has his family said to you about what happened?”
“They’ve been nothing but gracious and kind…”
“What did the families of the astronauts say to you?”
“That they were touched and honoured that I called, but-”
“All of these people, they signed up for these jobs by themselves, didn’t they? They didn’t get drafted. They had a choice. Sir Endra wasn’t the only orc north of 70 in the Diet, not even close. Lawyers, professors, all kinds of orcs who work cushy senior desk jobs that don’t actually require any work except ‘supervising’ stay in their jobs until they keel over. And while that’s not great, that sure as narasq isn’t just your fault, is it? And don’t even get me started on the astronauts. I mean, even when they were just in the regular Air Force they knew they were strapping into death traps every time they got into a regular plane, let alone a rocket. A rocket. Prime Minister, frankly, we send people to space by putting them in missiles that explode harder and faster than anything else ever designed by sapient life. This… this happens! I mean, this particular instance may turn out to have been preventable. But death in the space program as a whole, that’s just… it’s part of the cost.”
“I… you caught me in a moment of weakness, Your Esteemed Majesty.” The Prime Minister was staring at her feet.
“You’re entitled to them, from time to time. We all are. But, you know ma’am, I think the country would be better served if you went home to wallow over a glass of wine with your wife rather than here, alone, in this dark office. I mean…” He stopped to inspect the dark violet curtains and teak and ebony woodwork. “It isn’t exactly very bright in here regardless. Have you considered… perhaps some boxwood? Even a nice, light mahogany?”
The Prime Minister looked up at the Emperor and laughed. For the first time that night, a smile crossed her face. “I’ll take it under advisement,” she said. “But, Emperor… did you really come all this way to tell me to go home? You can’t see my office from the Palace. I know this for a fact because the government explicitly designed Government Center One that way when it was built. And even if you could, my office light wasn’t on. How did you know I was here?”
“You haven’t put the lid on.”
Žarís blinked. “Putting the lid on” was parlance for officially closing the day’s business, when the Prime Minister’s “working day” was over. She never actually stopped working, of course, but putting the lid on meant no more meetings and no more press conferences. It was mainly something only the media ever really cared about, since anyone senior in the government could call the Prime Minister any time regardless. How would the Emperor know when the lid was on?
“Every day, usually sometime between six and seven, you tell your chief of staff that you’ve put the lid on and you’re going to the residence. Then, a chauffeur in an always beautiful, always gleaming amethyst state car—a 2012 Monata Eredan, if I recall correctly—drives you out of the carpark under Government Center Two and down Avenue Melora, which, wouldn’t you know it, happens to go right behind the north wing of the Royal Palace. There, it so happens, I keep a Royal Marshall posted at a window every day from 5pm until you go home, so she can tell me when you’ve put the lid on and I can put my comfy trousers on and plant my arse on the sofa.”
Žarís found herself smirking. “Your father told you that you should never stop working before I do, didn’t he?”
The Emperor smirked too, but his grin was far more devious. “Oh no, Prime Minister. He stopped working whenever he pleased. I am the one who makes sure you go home before I do. I came here this evening because I’m tired and want to watch Monday Night Grand Ultimate Takedown. Which, I will note, I have recorded on DVR. And really, Prime Minister, if we have DVR, are we really so desperately backward?” Otan placed his hands on the Prime Minister’s shoulders. “All of this is to say that even though, yes, we really do have a lot we need to change, and a lot we need to work on, any Tavari government would have that, and you can’t change or work on anything if you’re busy sitting in your office feeling sorry for yourself. In this constitutional monarchy of ours, I don’t actually have any meaningful check or balance against you except exactly what I’m doing right now: I’m leveraging my right to be in any room I want, to speak to my Prime Minister at whatever time I want, about whatever I want. I’m leveraging my right to do what, sometimes, too few people in the government have the courage to do, which is to tell you to get out of your own head and go home, Žarís. You know, your chief of staff and the other five or six staffers I passed in the hallway who also don’t stop working until you do are all also very sad and also want to get to work fixing our national technological obsolescence problem. Beginning first thing tomorrow.”
The smirk melted off the Prime Minister’s face and, for just a brief moment, she resumed staring at her feet.
But not for long.
“Of course,” said Žarís, snapping her head back up. “Emandra!” She called out to her Chief of Staff—as loudly as she could, but judging by the speed at which she appeared in the door frame, she apparently hadn’t needed to. “I’m putting the lid on. Let’s go home.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Emandra, with the barest hint of a smile on her face. “Your Esteemed Majesty,” she said, clasping a hand to her chest and bowing.
The Emperor smiled back at her and made to leave, turning his back to the Prime Minister and walking out of the room. Just as he crossed the threshold, he turned back to give one last look at the Prime Minister standing, still tear-streaked, in her dark office. “Oh, and Prime Minister?”
Žarís took a few steps closer to the light of the hallway. “Yes, sir?”
“Now, of course, I don’t vote and have never had a single political opinion ever in my life even once, but the Liberals were the ones who told TASER to buy off-the-shelf Norgsveltian stuff instead of paying for the government to build custom. The Liberals were the ones who refused to upgrade the cable unless Metradan paid for it. The Liberals were the ones who built the cable at all. And the Liberals destroyed the Tavari colonial empire. Which, frankly, at least to some extent, deserved it. Don’t sit in this office and mope about what a bunch of decrepit oligarchs did to the country. Raise the capital gains tax a hair or two, have the government buy a few more cloud servers and, like… legalize mobile payment apps. The Kingdom will endure. Go to bed. Goodbye.”
Otan IV did not wait for a response and simply walked out of the room, clearly determined to get to his sofa as quickly as possible. The Prime Minister and her Chief of Staff stood there, unmoving, for just a few beats.
“… How legal would it be for him to run for Delegate for Line Nuvo?” Emandra asked.
“Absolutely not.” The Prime Minister raised her brows and stared into Emandra’s face for a moment before smiling. Sliding her wedding ring back onto her finger and closing her office door behind her, she said softly “He’s doing a great job exactly where he is.”