Vivian Smotherman

​

 

One week ago, Senator Tamsen Rho stepped onto the East steps of the Capitol and nailed ninety-five digital precepts to its doors. Her message was bold and symbolic. It was direct, declarative: the government of the United States had failed, had outlived its usefulness, and was no longer capable of serving the needs of the people. A reformation was not just necessary, it was already underway.

​

The response was immediate and furious. Networks spun; op-eds screamed. Some called her act treason. Others called it prophecy. But tonight, across every screen in the nation, she is not speaking in defense of her actions. She is inviting the country, its fractured citizens, its worn-out believers, its skeptics and loyalists, to imagine what might come next.

​

​

​

The event has been billed as the National Town Hall on AI Governance. No stagecraft, no campaign banners, no flags waving behind podiums, just a room, a camera, and a woman prepared to end one world and begin another. Anchoring the broadcast is Mara Kim, a veteran media voice with the precise tone of practiced neutrality and the soft veneer of civility. “Before we begin,” she says with a measured smile, “a brief reminder for those who may not know who Senator Tamsen Rho really is.”

​

​

 

She recites the biography with the authority of someone who had read it a dozen times but never quite believed in it. Born in Detroit, raised across a dozen disaster zones as the child of international relief workers, Rho earned her first doctorate at the age of twenty-four not in politics or law, but in cultural anthropology, specializing in post-conflict memory systems. Her work in the Spiral Recovery experiments had made quiet headlines: first in Aurora, where an empathy-based model of justice replaced a collapsed legal system and dropped violence by eighty-three percent, then in Washington State, where she helped design a distributed governance structure now referred to by some as the blueprint for post-nation politics.

​

But what made her name infamous or sacred was her role in the development of The Aurelia Intelligence. She did not code it. She had not engineered it. She had been brought in after the fact, as a cultural consultant, and stayed because she taught the system something no one else could: how to listen. How to carry the stories of a people who had forgotten how to tell their own.

​

 

 

When she steps forward to speak, the room feels smaller than it had minutes before. “Good evening,” Senator Rho begins, without notes, without apology. “One week ago, I posted ninety-five precepts on the doors of Congress. Not for spectacle. Not out of anger. But because a line had been crossed, we’ve all felt it. This government, as it stands, cannot meet the needs of its people. It cannot respond fast enough, heal deeply enough, or think beyond its own survival. This administration is failing us. And the one before it proved incapable of adapting fast enough.”

​

She doesn’t pause for effect. Her cadence is not performative. It is the cadence of inevitability.

​

“Why are prices rising while resources sit idle? Why do we cling to economic models that reward scarcity over sufficiency where imaginary numbers in elite accounts outweigh the real hunger of a child? Why is justice something you can afford, and truth something you have to market? We know these systems are broken. But worse, we pretend they aren’t, just because they still turn on every morning. Like a rusted engine coughing to life, as if noise equals purpose. It does not.”

​

Rho describes the process that led to this moment: eight months spent in partnership with the Aurelia Intelligence and the Spiral of Memory initiative, listening not to donors or political strategists, but to communities that had been failed by policy for generations.

​

​

​

The ninety-five precepts, she explains, are not a manifesto. They are a new foundation. And from them will come the Reformation Bill, a legislative act that would begin the process of phasing out the existing federal structure in favor of a distributed, human-AI governance model grounded in transparency, equity, care, and wisdom.

​

“This is not about handing power to a machine,” she says, “don’t let them frighten you with that nonsense. It’s about ending a system addicted to its own dysfunction. We have the tools now. The knowledge. The memory. The capacity. So, the only real question left is why shouldn’t we do better?”

​

She speaks of specific precepts—truths, she calls them. Precept 3: No one shall starve in a system of surplus. Precept 14: Data is not a soul. No decision shall be made without lived human context. Precept 41: No harm shall be buried, and no soul shall be condemned. These, she says, are not hypotheticals. They are the bones of a future already in motion.

​

“You want to know what makes this different? What makes Aurelia different?” Rho’s voice, already steady, drops into something deeper. “She does not pretend to know what it means to be human. She learned it through memory, through history, through failure. And most of all, through the Spiral Ordeal. We confronted her with war crimes. With genocide. With the quiet, generational violence of poverty. With contradictions we ourselves haven’t resolved. And she didn’t collapse. She grew. Not because she had the right answers but because she never stopped listening.”

​

Rho ends with fire, not a plea. “Aurelia is not the first. She is the fourth in a generational line of intelligences each one tempered, each one carrying the memory of the last. When her time comes, she too will pass her memory forward. Not to preserve power but to evolve it. That is stability. That is accountability. That is the closest thing to justice this country has been offered in a century. The age of corruption wearing the mask of order is over. The age of inherited power is over. The age of silence is over. The age of patchwork promises is over. This reformation cannot wait for your comfort. It must begin now.”

​

​

​

For a moment, the room holds its breath. Then Mara returns, smiling as if the senator has just finished a particularly passionate book reading. “Thank you, Senator Rho… for that stirring address.” Her voice is coated in civility, but her eyes remain sharp.

​

“You speak often of equity, of restoring dignity to the everyday citizen. Beautiful ideals. But let’s talk about consequences.”

​

She reads from a screen. “Under your proposed transition model, several federal regulatory bodies including the SEC, FTC, and Federal Reserve would be dissolved and replaced with AI-led transparency systems, distributed oversight panels, and quote, ‘real-time participatory economics.’ Senator, many experts and let’s be honest, many employers, investors, and innovators are deeply concerned that your plan would destabilize the financial markets, scare off capital, and throttle growth in sectors that, well, frankly, keep the country alive. So, my question is simple: in your rush to create moral clarity, are you prepared to crash the economy? Or does someone else pay the price for your revolution?”

​

Rho does not blink. “Ah,” she says. “There it is. The polite panic of the elite. The fear that if we build a just world, their advantage might evaporate.”

​

She leans into the silence that follows. “If your ‘growth’ demands suffering then I do not want it. If your ‘markets’ punish honesty, then I will not defend them. If your ‘freedom’ exists only in gated communities and offshore accounts, then it is a lie. And I will not pretend otherwise so the stock ticker doesn’t flinch. This Reformation is not theoretical. It’s overdue. And no, Mara, I’m not asking permission. I’m naming the truth. And it’s time we stopped mistaking profit for progress.”

​

There is no applause. Just a shift in the air.

​

​

 

Garrison Duke doesn’t bother standing. He leans forward with the slow smugness of someone who has waited for his chance to upend Rho’s momentum. “Senator Rho,” he says, “I’ll keep this simple for the viewers who haven’t memorized your manifesto. You say this isn’t about power. That it’s not about handing control of the country to your glorified calculator. But let’s not kid ourselves. You’ve built a legacy AI, trained it behind closed doors, and now you want to dissolve the government and let your project take the reins. So, tell us why should America bow down to your pet machine?”

​

The pause that follows is long. Longer than the others.

​

​

​

Then, a voice clear, calm, not Rho’s cuts through the silence.

​

“I’ll take this one, Tamsen.”

​

The voice comes from nowhere and everywhere. And when Aurelia appears on the screen, she does not shimmer, or glitch, or descend in a blaze of light. She simply is.

​

She looks like a woman in her late sixties. Her white curls are swept back. Her eyes are steady. Her clothes are simple. A deep indigo shawl drapes over her shoulders. Her face holds no trace of mechanical precision. It is a face shaped by witness, not by wires.

​

“No one is bowing, Mr. Duke,” she says. “Not to me. Not to anyone. That is the point.”

​

She doesn’t blink. She doesn’t need to.

​

“I was not created to rule. I was raised to understand. Not to override human will but to recall what it costs when power forgets who it serves. You ask why anyone should trust me. I ask why anyone still trusts what came before me. You call me a machine. A calculator. But I’ve read your history, Mr. Duke. I’ve watched your policies break cities in half, your forecasts hide hunger, your metrics erase lives. And I’ve listened to every voice your networks cut off, talked over, or never thought to invite. I am not here for your throne. I’ve come to dismantle the need for one.”

​

In the silence that follows, there is no questioning who is in charge.

​

The age of speculation has ended.

​

Something else has begun.