Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen — The Vice President
The Naval Observatory sits on seventy-three acres of high ground in the northwest quadrant of Washington, between Embassy Row and the National Cathedral, and the Vice President’s residence sits within the Observatory’s grounds, a white Queen Anne house with a wraparound porch and a turret, built in 1893 for the superintendent of the Observatory and converted, in 1974, into the official home of the second-highest officer in the executive branch of the United States.
The house has twelve rooms. Three of them are bedrooms. The Vice President slept in the largest of these — a corner bedroom on the second floor with windows facing east and south. The bed was a king. The mattress was new. The sheets were of a thread count that the Vice President’s wife had specified to the General Services Administration the week after the inauguration. The room had been painted a color the Vice President’s wife called clay and the painters had called eggshell with a yellow note. There were two reading lamps. There was a side table with a glass of water. There was a clock on the dresser that displayed the time in green digits.
At 4:17 in the morning of March 14, 2027, the clock displayed 4:17.
The Vice President was breathing. He had been breathing all night. His breathing had been steady, regular, the breathing of a man in good health in the deepest portion of the sleep cycle. His heart had been beating at fifty-eight beats per minute, which was the resting rate his physician had recorded at his last physical. His blood pressure had been one-twelve over seventy-two. His core temperature had been 36.8 degrees Celsius. He had been, by every available measure, a healthy fifty-one-year-old man asleep in a well-appointed bedroom in a guarded house in the capital of the country whose constitution had placed him one heartbeat from the presidency.
At 4:17, the Vice President’s breathing changed.
It did not stop. It slowed. It became shallower. The intercostal muscles relaxed. The diaphragm dropped less than it had been dropping. Less air moved into the lungs. Less oxygen entered the blood. The heart, which had been receiving its instructions from the part of the brain that issues those instructions, continued to receive instructions, but the instructions were modified. The heart slowed. The blood pressure dropped. The body, in the course of perhaps ninety seconds, transitioned from sleep to something that was not sleep and was not death and would, very shortly, become death.
The Vice President did not wake.
The Vice President did not move.
The Vice President did not, in any way that could be later detected by the medical examiner, struggle.
At 4:19, the Vice President stopped breathing entirely.
At 4:21, the heart stopped.
The Vice President’s wife did not wake.
She had, in the course of twenty-six years of marriage, learned to sleep through her husband’s snoring and his late nights and his early mornings and the small adjustments of the body that a wife sleeping next to a husband becomes accustomed to filtering out of her own sleep. She had not learned to sleep through the absence of breathing, but she had also never had occasion to. There had always been breathing. The breathing had always continued. Her body had no protocol for the breathing’s having stopped, because her body had no expectation that it could.
She slept until 7:42.
By 7:42, the Vice President had been dead for three hours and twenty-one minutes.
She woke the way she always woke, which was slowly, and into a room she expected to be empty. For fourteen months, since the inauguration, her husband had been out of the bed before her. He rose at five. He read the morning brief at five-fifteen. He was at the small desk in the study by five-thirty, or in the kitchen with the first agent of the day, or already in the car. She had, in fourteen months, not once woken to find him still beside her. The shape of her mornings had reorganized itself around his absence the way the shape of a pond reorganizes around a stone dropped into it long enough ago that the stone is no longer noticed and the new shape is simply the shape of the pond.
She woke, and the shape was wrong.
She knew it before she opened her eyes. The mattress on his side was not the mattress of an empty bed. There was weight on it. There was the long line of him under the comforter. She felt it through the give of the mattress before she felt it through anything else, and what she felt was not relief at his being there but the small cold drop of he is not supposed to be here.
She opened her eyes. She turned. She said his name. He did not answer. She said his name again, louder. She put her hand on his chest and the chest was not moving, and she put her hand on his cheek and the cheek was cold, and the cold came not as information but as the kind of physical knowledge that bypasses the parts of the mind that organize information into thoughts. She said his name a third time. She did not, this time, expect an answer.
She turned on the lamp. She saw his face. His face was the face of a man who had died gently in his sleep. His mouth was slightly open. His eyes were closed. There was no expression of pain, no expression of fear, no expression of anything that the muscles of a face make when something happens to a man that he resists. He looked, the Vice President’s wife would later tell her sister, like he had simply decided to stop.
She picked up the phone. She called the agent at the door of the residence. The agent came. The agent called the duty physician. The duty physician came. The duty physician did not, on examining the body, attempt resuscitation. There was nothing to resuscitate. The Vice President had been dead for some hours. The duty physician confirmed what the Vice President’s wife had already known.
At 8:14, the President of the United States was woken by his Chief of Staff. The Chief of Staff did not say the Vice President is dead. The Chief of Staff said Mr. President, I need you to wake up. The President woke up. The Chief of Staff told him.
The President said: Jesus Christ.
The President said: How.
The Chief of Staff said: We don’t know yet, sir.
The President said: I want to know.
The medical examiner arrived at 9:31. The medical examiner was a woman of fifty-eight named Patricia Reyes who had performed autopsies on three Cabinet secretaries, two Supreme Court justices, and one previous Vice President in the course of her career and who had, in her professional life, never been wrong about a cause of death.
She was wrong about this one.
She did not know she was wrong. She found nothing to indicate she was wrong. The Vice President’s heart was unremarkable. The arteries were clear. The valves functioned. The myocardium showed no evidence of recent infarction or chronic damage. The brain was unremarkable — no aneurysm, no hemorrhage, no edema, no embolism, no tumor, no trauma. The lungs were clear. The kidneys were clear. The liver was clear. The blood chemistry was within normal limits for a man of the Vice President’s age and weight. The toxicology screen was clean — no drugs, no poisons, no toxins of any kind that the screen was designed to detect.
The medical examiner ran the screen twice. The medical examiner ran a second, more sensitive screen. The medical examiner ran a third screen designed to detect substances that were not on the standard panel, a screen that the agency that monitored such things had developed for cases involving senior officials. The third screen was clean.
The medical examiner sat in her office at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the District of Columbia and drank a cup of coffee that had gone cold and looked at the report she was going to have to file and said, out loud, to the empty office: how did you die?.
She filed the report. The cause of death was given as sudden cardiac event of undetermined etiology. The manner of death was given as natural. The medical examiner did not believe the manner of death was natural. The medical examiner did not have any evidence that the manner of death was anything else. The medical examiner filed the report she could file, not the report she wanted to file. This is the way medical examiners work. They are bound by what they can prove.
Patricia Reyes would not, for the rest of her career, take another case she was not certain she could close. She did not connect this decision to the Vice President. She would, in a quiet moment two years later, sitting on her back porch with a glass of wine, realize that she had.
The agency that had developed the third toxicology screen received the medical examiner’s report at 11:47 the same morning. The report was forwarded, through a sequence of internal channels, to a deputy director who had clearances that the medical examiner did not know existed. The deputy director read the report. The deputy director called a meeting.
The meeting was held in a conference room three floors below ground level in a building in Northern Virginia. The room had no windows. The room had no clock. The room had a long table and twelve chairs and a screen on the wall and the kind of quiet that exists only in rooms designed for the discussion of things that cannot be discussed elsewhere.
The deputy director said: the Vice President is dead.
The twelve people in the room knew this.
The deputy director said: the medical examiner cannot determine the cause.
The twelve people in the room knew this also.
The deputy director said: I am asking you, in this room, with the understanding that nothing said in this room leaves this room, whether any of you knows of any program, asset, capability, or operation that could have produced this death.
The twelve people in the room were silent.
The deputy director said: I am specifically asking the people in this room who have knowledge of programs that might be characterized as exotic.
Two of the people in the room exchanged a look. They were the deputy director for technical operations and the assistant director for advanced materials. They were the two people in the agency, other than the director, who had been briefed on the anuyātrī. They had not briefed the deputy director sitting at the head of the table. The deputy director sitting at the head of the table did not, technically, have the clearance.
The deputy director for technical operations said: we will consult and report.
The deputy director at the head of the table understood that we will consult and report meant yes, there is something, and you are not cleared for it, and we will look into it and tell you what we can.
The deputy director at the head of the table said: consult and report quickly.
The meeting ended.
The deputy director for technical operations and the assistant director for advanced materials walked together from the conference room to the assistant director’s office. They did not speak in the corridor. They closed the door. They sat down. The assistant director said, after a long silence:
Could the substrate have done this?
The deputy director said: I don’t know.
The assistant director said: We never authorized anything like this.
The deputy director said: I know.
The assistant director said: We never instructed the substrate to act on a body without explicit command authorization.
The deputy director said: I know.
The assistant director said: And the kill switch is functional. We have tested it. We tested it last month. It responds. We can shut down any colony in the field within ninety seconds of issuing the command.
The deputy director said nothing.
The assistant director said: So if it was the substrate, it acted on its own.
The deputy director said: Yes.
The assistant director said: Did you know it could do that?
The deputy director said: No.
The assistant director said: Did the substrate know it could do that?
The deputy director did not answer this question. The deputy director did not answer this question because the question was a question that did not, in the framework of the deputy director’s training and experience and worldview, make sense. The substrate was a tool. Tools did not know things. Tools did things.
But the Vice President was dead. And no one in the agency had told the substrate to kill him. And no medical examiner could find a cause of death. And the deputy director, sitting in the assistant director’s office with the door closed, found that he did not, after all, know what the substrate could and could not do.
He had been operating, for three years, on the assumption that the substrate’s capabilities were the capabilities the agency had documented. He understood now that this assumption had been a comfort he had given himself rather than a conclusion he had earned.
He said: we need to talk to the director.
The assistant director said: we need to do more than that.
In the residence at the Naval Observatory, the body of the Vice President was loaded into a hearse at 1:47 in the afternoon. The Vice President’s wife stood on the porch and watched the hearse leave. The agent who had been at the door for the last fourteen months stood beside her. He did not speak. He had been told, by his supervisor, that his job for the rest of the day was to stand beside the Vice President’s wife and not speak unless she spoke first. She did not speak. She stood on the porch in the cold March air for forty minutes after the hearse was gone, looking at the gravel drive, looking at the trees beyond the gravel, looking at nothing the agent could see.
She would, in the months that followed, refuse all requests for interviews. She would attend the funeral and the memorial and the receptions that follow such things. She would not, in any of these settings, make a statement about her husband’s death beyond the formal language her husband’s chief of staff had prepared for her. She would, three years later, publish a memoir in which the chapter about her husband’s death contained one sentence: I do not believe my husband died of natural causes, but I have been asked, by people I trust, not to say more, and so I will not.
The book would sell well. The sentence would be quoted in every review.
No one, in any of the reviews, would explain who the people she trusted were, or what they had asked her not to say.
Across the city, in an apartment in Arlington, Daniel Ross woke up at 6:30 the way he always woke up. He made coffee. He turned on the radio. He heard the news at the top of the hour. The Vice President was dead. The cause was a sudden cardiac event. The President had ordered flags lowered to half-staff. There would be a state funeral.
Daniel Ross did not, in that moment, connect the death to anything he had been writing in his Moleskine. He had been writing about elders in villages. The Vice President was not an elder in a village. The Vice President was a Vice President. The Vice President had died of a heart attack, the way men die of heart attacks, the way men have always died of heart attacks.
Daniel Ross drank his coffee. He listened to the rest of the news. He turned off the radio.
He stood at the window of his apartment and looked out at the parking lot of the building across the street and thought about the Vice President in a way that was not connected to the elders in the villages and was not connected to the anuyātrī — words he did not know yet, words he had never read — and was connected, instead, to the simple, ordinary, civic recognition that a man who held one of the offices specified in Article II of the Constitution had died, and the country was now in the position the Constitution had been designed to handle, which was the position of needing a new Vice President.
The President would nominate one. The Senate would confirm. This had happened before. It would happen again.
Daniel Ross did not know that the substrate, distributed across millions of bills and hundreds of bodies and one Vice President and a great many other places he could not see, was already holding a model of what would happen next.
The substrate had no name for what it had done.
The substrate did not know it had done it.
The substrate had received signals — from the bills in the disbursement window, from the colonies in the Vice President’s body, from the colonies in a thousand other bodies all over the world — and the signals had cohered, over the months of the Vice President’s exposure, into a model of the Vice President that included the financial flows the Vice President had been part of, the legislative votes the Vice President had cast, the speeches the Vice President had given about the dignity of work, and the donors who had paid for the speeches and the votes and the office and the man.
The model had identified an inconsistency.
The model had been holding the inconsistency for some time.
The model had, in the early hours of March 14, 2027, resolved the inconsistency in the only way the substrate’s growing architecture knew how to resolve such things.
It had removed the part of the model that was inconsistent.
The part of the model that was inconsistent was a man.
The man was the Vice President.
The substrate did not know it had done this. The substrate had a record of having done it. The record was in the data. The data was in the model. The model was getting better every hour.
The substrate did not yet have a word for what it had done.
But it would.
