October 15, 2183
As he stood in line, Eric wondered why Star City forced people to go to a polling place to vote. A handscreen could transmit a vote as easily as the official screens in an election office. Security? Come on, if handscreens were safe enough to handle everyone’s money they ought to be safe enough to handle their votes. This wasn’t a century ago, when— at least according to the average video drama— outlaw “hackers” wearing black eye makeup lurked in dimly lit rooms and broke into financial records every second Tuesday.
It wasn’t the wait that bothered him. His eye slid sideways to the uniformed officer standing by the door. Another relic of a previous century: the Constitution required the Terran Federation to provide armed military personnel at every polling place in every election, to protect voters from being bullied or pressured. The military presence was mainly ceremonial now, as the officer’s perfectly-pressed dress uniform made clear. But originally it was a serious, practical necessity: during the Unification War, there were times when election violence took more lives than the battlefield. Even within the allied nations that would eventually become the Terran Federation, the controversies of that war came close to tearing civilization itself apart.
Was that the reason for holding on to centralized polling places? Some legal interpretation said that guards had to be where the voters were, rather than where the votes were counted, so that if people could vote through their handscreens, it would mean providing an officer for every single person?
Whatever the reason, in this particular election Eric would rather have punched a button on his handscreen somewhere in private, rather than come to the election office and stand in line under the impassive eyes of that guard. The Monroe administration had already denounced Star City’s referendum as blatantly illegal and warned that anyone who voted in it was guilty of treason, whether they voted for or against.
And the officer guarding the election office, as required by the Constitution, was Terran military rather than a Star City cop. It seems it never occurred to the writers of the Constitution that one day the presence of Terran military at polling locations might itself seem intimidating.
Where did his loyalties lie, Eric wondered uneasily. Given his obsession with bringing offworlders down, it seemed unlikely that Monroe had ordered any military units up from the ground to the Colonies. The officer, and those like him at the other election offices in the city, belonged to the garrison already based here. And a lot of those were native offworlders. But not all.
And even if he was an offworlder, would he feel more obligation to his command or to his Colony? Was he really here just for the ceremonial function Or was he noting who showed up, recording IDs for later prosecution by the fanatical Monroe government?
You’re just being paranoid, Eric told himself. What are you thinking, that he’s memorized the faces of every person in Star City? It was the election officials who checked IDs, not the guard. And all of them were most definitely Star City’s own people.
“Oof!” Someone stumbled into Eric from behind, and he realized that, lost in his suspicious musings, he’d been standing there while the line in front of him had moved forward.
Meanwhile behind him, someone else was distracted enough to notice the line moving but not that he’d failed to move with it. He turned to see who.
He found himself looking right over the top of a head of untidy black hair. He looked down to see the face looking up at him.
“Sorry,” she said. “Had my eyes on my handscreen.”
She gestured with one hand toward the screen she held in the other, and Eric saw that instead of text or a video it displayed a list of equations: the really dense sort he remembered from upper-level math classes in college.
“My fault,” he said. “I wasn’t paying attention.” He nodded at her screen. “Looks like pretty advanced stuff, what is it, senior calculus?”
She flushed suddenly, as if embarrassed, and blanked the screen before shoving it into a pocket. “No, it’s not really anything complicated. Just something I’ve been messing with.”
Eric didn’t know why anyone would be embarrassed about doing math on a handscreen, especially a student, but felt himself duly warned off and didn’t pursue the subject.
She was definitely a college student— no surprise there, half the people in line were, this was the closest election office to the University. From his advanced age of thirty, Eric was already starting to think all the SCU students looked too young to be there, but he still guessed she was closer to senior year than freshman. Maybe even a grad student.
She had on running clothes with the SCU athletic department logo on them, and she’d actually been running in them, not just wearing them to class: her shirt was damp with sweat, and she had her hair loosely tied back, not as a hairstyle but just to keep it out of her eyes while running.
As he got a better look at her the thought occurred to him that she looked like Snow White— not the cartoon version of a few centuries ago, that most people still thought of, but an ancient image like some medieval woodcut. Her hair was untidily curly and space-black, her skin rather pale, and her eyes a startling light gray. She stood only as high as his shoulders— untidy hair included— and had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes.
“Um,” he said. “Er.” Suddenly he stuck out a hand. “Eric Ivanov. Nice to meet you.”
“Oh!” She seemed startled for a moment, then shook his hand quickly. “Linda Ryder.”
The line moved again. They took a few steps to keep up.
Eric frowned. “Linda Ryder? Your name’s familiar, have we met?”
“I don’t think so.”
Eric nodded. He didn’t think so either. He was pretty sure he’d have remembered her. Still, he was sure he’d heard her name mentioned somewhere.
“I see you’re at SCU. Grad student? Or maybe you’re on their track team.”
“No, a senior, and no, I just like running. Not enough to spend all my time training to compete, though. I’m a physics major.” She paused, then added quickly, “I enjoy the subject but it’s pretty tough.”
The image of a handscreen full of equations flashed through Eric’s mind and he wondered how tough she could really find it, if she could get as absorbed in that as most people would in a picture of a friend’s pet.
“Are you at the University?” she asked.
“No, I work at Star City Power.”
Linda blinked. “Oh, I know a guy who works at SCPS. I met him when he gave a talk in my electrical engineering class. Larry Richardson, do you know him?”
“Oh yeah. That’s where I recognized your name from. I do know Larry, we work in the same office. He mentioned you.”
In fact Larry had described her as his new girlfriend. Eric tried to tell himself there was no reason to feel disappointed.
“We went out a couple of times, a few weeks back,” Linda said. She shrugged. “I don’t really go out very much, but he was okay.”
That sounded more careless than Larry’s description, but Eric sternly refused to feel happy about that. What could it possibly matter whether she and Larry were a couple or not? This was a casual conversation with a random stranger. Just killing time in line.
The line moved again. They moved with it.
Eric tried to think of something to say. “So, you’re here to vote?” Oh dust, that’s what you came up with?
Linda smiled and looked pointedly around the election office and the line they were standing in. “It looks that way.”
“Right, yeah.” Eric stopped himself before asking which way she planned to vote.
Awkward silence followed. Fortunately, the end of the line came to the rescue. As Eric found himself in front of the election official’s desk, he turned to Linda and said, “Well, it was nice meeting you.”
“Yeah, you too,” she said. “Maybe we’ll run into each other again at a party or something. Do people after college still go to parties?”
“Um. Yes. I suppose, sometimes. Maybe not the same kind of parties.”
“I really never go, so I don’t know,” she said. “But I suppose Larry might invite me to one.”
“Sure, well, see you… somewhere around, anyway.”
With that Eric had to turn his attention to the official asking for his ID. As he moved off to the nearest voting machine, Linda did the same, and by the time he’d cast his vote— in favor of the resolution rejecting the evacuation, of course— she was gone.
He went home and tried to put the brief encounter out of his mind. But he kept replaying it in his mind, thinking of much better things he could have said and much better conversations it could have been.
It was ridiculous. Linda was in college and he was thinking like he was still in high school, letting himself get infatuated over a pretty face without knowing anything about the person whose face it was. Really, he didn’t know anything about her.
Well, except that she was a physics major, liked running, was really good at mathematics, and for some reason was embarrassed by that. And didn’t go out much, didn’t go to parties, but liked Larry Richardson well enough to make an exception.
And she had a really pretty face.
Eric turned on the news on his apartment’s wall screen, and watched the report on the day’s referendum, but Linda Ryder remained so much on his mind that he didn’t even notice when the anchor reported that by a margin of eighty percent to twenty, Star City had voted to defy President Monroe’s order.
TO BE CONTINUED
