THE DIPLOMAT

THE DIPLOMAT is young, in a freshly-pressed suit—by all appearances she's halfway through an inevitable transformation into a polished government apparatchik. She's been in the game long enough to pick up some of the bureaucratic language of the trade, but she's also new enough that the mask regularly slips. "Our policy isn't an isolationist one," she insists, in one moment. And then, in another, "We don't owe the world our presence at their parties. Like, just get over it!"

I'll admit it: I hated working for the Ambassador. She wasn't cruel. Not abusive, nothing like that. But if I ever screwed something up, or just did something that wasn't quite the way she would have done it herself, she would always do this terrible thing.

She'd write me an email, which asked, basically, "Can you walk me through your thinking here?"

That's it. Just an email, with a simple question.

It probably only happened once a month or so. But I lived in dread of those emails. Terror!

You wouldn't think they'd bother me that much. I mean, I was a diplomat working in the United Nations Ambassador's office. I had a bomb-ass portfolio. I was, like, the number two point person for U.S. foreign policy in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Most in my position would probably be a little cocky, or at least pretty sure of themselves. But I never felt secure.

Instead, I was always one email away from falling to shambles. Every time I made a decision which involved some risks, some sort of complex trade-offs, or God-forbid, some sort of gut-feel instinct… I'd think, she's going to send me one of those fucking emails.

And, you're probably saying to yourself, who cares, it's just an email asking to explain your decision-making. What's the big deal?

The problem wasn't the emails themselves. It was their subtext. The text said, "Can you walk me through your thinking here?" But the subtext said, "I'm not sure this is the right move." She was really saying, "Are you really qualified to be doing this? Maybe I should be handling your shit."

At least, that's how I saw it.

So every time I got one of those emails, I'd respond immediately, no matter what time she sent them. Sometimes they'd come in early in the morning—the Ambassador was always an early riser. Other times she'd drop one in my inbox at 11 p.m. Or just before my lunch break. I'd just drop whatever it was I was doing and start working on a response.

My approach was to take her questions at complete face value. She said she wanted to know why I'd made a decision, so I'd write pages upon pages articulating my thought process. Walking her through the rationale. I'd say, "Hey, here's all the context you may not have had. Here were my goals. Here were the heuristics I relied upon to help choose between the available options. Here's why the option I chose was, I think, the best one to get us to where we need to be." Like, bitch, you wanna know why? You got it. You're gonna know everything.

A lot of times, if I had relied on simple gut instinct to make a decision that she was asking me about, I'd have to sort of retroactively come up with a more logical explanation for the thing I'd done.

So I'd sit there for half an hour, just in a totally introspective mode. Like, why did I really do that? Digging into the depths of my soul. Just so I could come up with a coherent response to an email that had taken her, probably, 10 seconds to compose and fire off. Can you walk me through your thinking here?

And then I'd go to bed—or lunch, or whatever—feeling like I'd just run a marathon. Sometimes literally sweating. Because the next stage of the torture was sitting around, anxiously waiting for her response. Sometimes it came quickly, but usually it took a day or more. She never failed to respond, but the fact that you couldn't predict when she'd get around to it made the pain and anxiety that much worse.

Then, suddenly, it would come in.

And without exception, her response would be under 100 words. If she agreed with my reasoning, she'd just say something like, "Makes sense. Thanks."

That's it. And I'd never hear anything else about it again.

If she didn't fully agree with my logic, on the other hand, I'd get a different kind of email.

Usually something totally profound and straight to the point.

Like, "While your reasoning makes sense, I think it was a mistake to delay the meeting with the German energy secretary. The German people value consistency and reliability over expediency."

And of course, she was always right. But that only pissed me off more, because I'd think, why the fuck didn't you just say that in the first place, instead of forcing me into a Socratic dialogue.

So, working for her could be a nightmare. But... look, don't get confused here. I'm not glad about what happened to her. I was devastated by it. I was there when it happened, at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Tell me about that day.

Okay. I think it was July 2, 2027, right? So, normally, when you get sent to represent the U.S. at a United Nations meeting, you're with a whole crew. Major and minor diplomats. Their aides. Aides for those aides. It's a big squad.

But this time, it was just me and the Ambassador.

The mere fact that we represented the entire American delegation was supposed to send a message: The U.S. isn't putting a lot of stock into the UN. And we aren't going to be a big part of this anymore.

We weren't just there to talk a bunch of shit, or whatever, though. Ultimately, our task was to be honest about the policy change we'd made. The Ambassador had been asked by the President to tell the other governments of the world exactly what we were doing, and how long we were going to do it for, and why.

The other countries of the world didn't understand why we'd totally shut down our borders. They wanted to know more about the reps. And, frankly, they wanted to get their hands on reps themselves. And all we'd been saying up until that point was a bunch of mumbly shit about trying to prevent "terrorists" from getting their hands on this technology that had originated in America.

So the Ambassador had prepared a speech. It was the convention's big event.

For whatever reason, we weren't scheduled to speak until later in the afternoon, probably because of some bullshit rule about all the countries taking turns, not just letting the big dogs always go first. Shit like that.

So the morning was taken up with talks by smaller countries. Mauritania, Paraguay, Cambodia. A dozen others. One after another, these countries stood before the assembly and pleaded for swift action to restore global trade. They condemned the United States for our border closure, and demanded immediate re-opening of normal relations.

Each of them had relied on the United States in one way or another for their economic security. Either we had been buying their goods from them, or we'd been sending them "aid" money, or we'd been selling them weapons so they could defend themselves against their shitty neighbors. Or maybe they were just collapsing because of the second-order economic effects of the U.S.'s pullout from the global economy.

So, they were pissed about a lot of stuff. And rightfully so, in most cases.

But more than anything, they also just really wanted to talk about reps.

The position of almost everyone who spoke was, basically, to argue for why the U.S. should immediately share access to replicator technology. These droopy-eyed, sweating little men stood there and swore that they could handle distribution of replicators in a responsible way with their own people.

Some, like the Polish, stated bluntly that if the U.S. would simply trust them with a few replicators of their own, they would promise to never allow the technology to fall into the hands of their regular citizens. Only government appointed rep-handlers would be allowed to touch the technology. This, they said, would be the best way to manage the technology and ensure peace and prosperity.

The Chinese took a different approach.

Their ambassador insisted, bizarrely, that replicators did not exist, and that everyone was being very silly by pretending that they did. He referred to the reps as "a wonderful joke," that everyone should forget about, then delivered a droning, half-hour speech about China's latest moves to address water shortages across greater South Asia.

The response to this was bewilderment from almost everyone. Looking around the room, I could see people of every color and creed chewing out their translators. A lot of them simply couldn't believe that the Chinese would actually pretend not to believe in the replicators.

But about 10 minutes into the monologue about aquifers and irrigation, people began to realize that the Chinese ambassador was being serious. Or, at least, he was serious about sticking to this shtick. The Chinese fully intended to deny the existence of the replicators.

The Ambassador was sitting next to me, thumbing around on her phone. She pulled up a Chinese news site, and made a sort of scoffing noise under her breath. She showed me her screen, which showed zero news stories about replicators on the front page of the Chinese papers.

Instead, most stories were about Xi Jinping's "great new infrastructure project." An edited video in one article showed the United Nations audience members clapping in response to something the Chinese ambassador had said about a new desalination technology. In reality, the clapping had been in response to something an earlier speaker had said about replicators.

It was all edited. Fake news.

For whatever reason, the Chinese were playing off the whole replicator phenomenon as a great Western hoax.

Finally, it was our time on the stage.

The Ambassador stepped up to the lectern. Shuffled some papers around. Spent some time taking in the room, which was now deadly quiet. Then she began.

First, she said she wanted to apologize on behalf of the American President, for not coming out sooner and speaking more forthrightly about what was going on.

"Many of you will not necessarily like or agree with our message today," she said, "but we recognize that we owe you the truth. And so the truth is what you'll get."

She cleared her throat. And then she hit 'em with the real shit.

She said, "The truth is that the closure of America's borders is not a temporary measure to deal with the threat of terrorists. In fact, we now intend to keep our borders closed permanently."

This was like an indoor lightning strike. There were literally gasps.

All at once, you could hear a hundred non-English-speakers asking their aides and translators to confirm the meaning of the word "permanently."

The Ambassador paused just long enough to make sure that her words had been understood, then continued.

She explained how we would not be reopening international trade, even with our nearest partners Canada and Mexico. And she spoke, quite beautifully in my opinion, about our plans to reorient our own society around the replicator. This, she said, would be a learning process for us. It would take time to figure out exactly how the face of government would need to change, now that almost commodity-based industries were moot, and reps were ubiquitous in American homes.

She spoke about the chaos that the replicators had already unleashed in the U.S. About the economic devastation, including job losses. About the conflict. The murders. She spoke about the problems of infinite drugs, infinite weapons, infinite gluttony, all of which are now a regular staple of American life.

And, as a way of tipping her hand to what would come next, she said, "America cannot be responsible for unleashing this chaos upon the rest of the world. You don't deserve to suffer the way that we have." She said that after achieving "a new stability," in whatever form that took, the American government would begin to share the replicator technology with the rest of the world.

"We don't yet know how long it'll take for us to achieve stability," she said. "It will certainly take more than just a few months. It may take more a few years. We are going to learn the hard way about how to deal with these things. We'll make mistakes, and we'll suffer setbacks. But—for now, at least—we're going to make sure that not a single replicator escapes from our borders."

Already, a general restlessness had been apparent in the crowd. At the delivery of this final line, that restlessness boiled over into outright rage. One European woman stood up, pointed a trembling finger, and shouted, "They're not yours to keep!"

Her voice was soon joined by dozens of others. Shouting, banging their desks. I looked over at the Chinese ambassador and saw him sitting alone, just smiling. He literally looked at his watch and shook his head, as if he was bored by the whole spectacle.

Suddenly, a bang! The sound echoed off the walls, and everyone—even the Chinese ambassador—jumped.

Then people started screaming.

I turned, and at first I just couldn't figure out why the Ambassador was sitting down on the stage. She was on her ass, leaned back on one arm. The other arm was covering her stomach. And all around her hand, blood was staining her suit.

I saw a man waving his arms around, with something in his hand. A gun.

Somebody tackled the man. I didn't know who he was at the time. Just some fucking asshole dude from an Eastern European country. One of the "-slavias."

I never have cared who it was, and I especially didn't care in that moment. I just freaked the fuck out.

I ran over to the Ambassador with no clue of what to do or how to help. I loomed over her, just staring uselessly for a while. But eventually, I got my wits about me and started calling for a doctor, but none appeared.

The Ambassador looked like she was trying to talk.

I crouched down next to her and put my hand over hers, the one on her stomach. Blood was starting to pool up on the floor around us. Seeping into that hideous green carpet.

The Ambassador said something, but I couldn't hear.

I said, "What?"

And she said, "What was he thinking?"

I kept holding her hand, but couldn't think of anything to say. I was trying to come up with a response that made sense. Any kind of answer that could possibly be appropriate in a situation like this. We were both quiet for a few seconds.

Finally, I said, "I don't know. I don't know."

And then she died.

THE DIPLOMAT pauses for a moment, her head shaking. Then, with fire in her eyes, she speaks:

Seriously, how the fuck do you answer a question like that?