Prophecy or Fantasy?—Tribute to the Unknown President
Product ID: PP46
Report Topics:
- Fiction can sometimes be stranger than truth—especially when it is called a prophecy
Full Report:
As the military band struck up Hail to the Chief and the great throng of onlookers exploded in cheers, the outgoing President and First Lady slowly made their way onto the inaugural platform to take their places of honor. Though the day was unusually warm for January, a stiff breeze lowered the temperature to a cold chill, and the First Lady looked with concern over to the aged figure of the President seated next to her. But he seemed fine, a contrived smile on his lips, his glassy eyes staring off into empty space. He certainly was not cold, she knew - he had no feeling for that. All she was worried about was that his programming circuits might freeze up on this one last and vital event before he left office.
The ceremony began, the swearing in of the new Vice President and new President was underway, but the First Lady’s mind wandered far away in time and space. She shuddered, not from the cold but from the memory of that awful day in March years before when her beloved husband had been struck down by an assassin’s bullets. She had hurried to be at his side in the hospital, only to find him already gone. He died on the operating table before they could even say goodbye to each other.
Yet in those first few hours after his demise, on her orders she had purposely suppressed the news from leaking out. Instead, something unexpected was hatched between herself and those who walk the secret corridors of national security, within the shadowy depths of government.
She was in shock, to be sure, but she was also angry - angry that her husband had been robbed of his chance to make his mark in history. The security advisors who huddled around her sympathized, realizing too that the nation - just coming out of a decade of hurt and pain from Vietnam, Watergate, hyperinflation, joblessness, the Iran hostage frustration and general malaise - had placed all their hopes on this new President. American society, they decided, might not recover from the trauma of his slaying.
And so a bold and daring alternative was proposed. The technology of computer robotics by that time had been vastly developed by military researchers, to a far greater degree of sophistication than the general public even suspected. Would a substitute President fool everyone and be accepted?
The First Lady, quickly sensing her new position of power, agreed that they must go ahead with the clandestine switch. The risks to be taken of course would be terrific. Yet the covert parties involved convinced themselves - perhaps more because of their own shifts into newfound secretive authority - that it was the only thing to do.
Their success, especially during the first term in office, had been beyond what they ever could have dreamed. Though at times the President seemed slow in thinking and speech, or appeared to drop off in sleep during cabinet meetings while programming disks were being changed, everything went smoothly. At appropriate times he was admitted into Walter Reed Hospital for routine physical check-ups or for minor surgery - always on schedule for a mechanical overhaul or good cleaning, or to replace parts with new updated bionic equipment, or do cosmetic work to age the President, adding wrinkles in all the right spots for the cameras.
The President fulfilled his functions, said his speeches, performed his monotonous wave as he walked to and from the White House helicopter, and delivered his policies already decided upon by the First Lady and her advisors. She thought how ironic it was that media reporters had at first criticized the President as continuing a great acting job from his movie days, then eventually praised him on his computer-like conciseness as the great communicator.
If they only knew the truth, she smiled, of how intuitively observant they had really been.
It was during the second term in office that some serious slips began to creep in, and the First Lady had to work hard to cover them well. She had not realized that machines, just like people, can wear out. The computerized speech patterns from the President became more and more retarded and slurred at awkward moments.
Once, the news cameras had caught her prompting the President in giving an answer to a press conference when his software had briefly come out of mode. Again, during a critical summit meeting with the Soviet Premier, a key memory chip had failed and the President could only speak in a garbled fashion for a full minute. The Russians began to have their suspicions. Yet all was smoothed over when he rebounded and delivered a well written - and well computer rehearsed - speech the following day.
For a time during this same period there had been a lot of talk in the American press about the President’s age and his showing signs of senility. The robotic technicians had finally come to the rescue with a major restructuring. Thereafter, the President soon appeared to be invigorated with what news commentators called a new youthfulness as he continued to carry out the affairs of state.
Now it was coming to an end. The Inauguration speech of the newly sworn-in President was closing, and the First Lady began to realize how truly exhausted she was. It had been a very hard eight years. Unknown to everyone except a handful of people close to her, she had been the real President while also carrying out the functions of the First Lady, plus living with the constant fear and anxiety of her secret being discovered.
Her policies, voiced through the machine vocal cords of the President, had been as wise and logical as she could have made them. There were mistakes, she silently admitted. But the programmed congenial nature of the President’s aging image, perfectly suited to psychologically take no responsibility for any of its actions, had covered up the worst errors with brilliance and had even generated public acceptance and popularity.
There had been some decisions - like traveling in person to the Soviet Union, and the signing of the Nuclear Arms Treaty - that were really out of character for what her husband would have done were he still alive. She had insisted on these, even against the counsel of her co-conspiring advisors. With sadness, looking again at the cold, unfeeling replica sitting next to her, she realized that if her husband had survived, his stubborn rashness very likely would have gotten them all into a nuclear war.
Hopefully now, in the world she had helped to guide in a new direction, a very different future of hope and promise might have a chance to manifest. The one missing point, the First Lady lamented, was that no one in the world would ever know who the real instigator of peace had been. Then, after a moment of reflection, she nodded to herself - it was still worth the price of silence she had personally paid.
The final applause and cheers rose to the sky as the newly instated President ended his speech. They stood up, the now ex-President and herself, applauding with vigor. Later, as they left, shared their last goodbyes and entered the helicopter waiting to take them to the airport for their flight into retirement, she turned back and took a long curious look at the new President and new First Lady.
Had he already been replaced too? she wondered. Was his wife now in charge of the programming? Perhaps, the ex-First Lady smiled wryly, this was the only way in American politics that women would ever be allowed to run the highest office of the land.
As the former President and former First Lady boarded their jet home, the aged figure obediently sat in its seat, buckled in and fell into its usual programmed smile and silent stare. The long hard road was now finally over, she sighed. They could go home and she could get some deserved rest.
From here on in the ex-President would make his appearances in a far more controlled environment, rather than in front of the whole nation and the world as they had done in the White House. There would be a few guest visits, honors, ceremonies, even a book or two might be released, ghost-written by her behind the scenes.
Gradually, the growing stiffening of his aging machine body and the slow dissolving of his memory files would be explained as the onset of Alzheimer’s, and he could then be completely isolated from the public eye for good. At some point the ex-President would finally be reported to have died in his sleep, his model would be quietly destroyed, and the body of her beloved husband - waiting all these years in cold storage in a secret vault - would receive the full honors of a Presidential burial.
History, she was satisfied, would be fulfilled despite the fact that she had secretly manipulated it.
As the jet wheels left the runway, she looked one more time at the mechanical frame of the ex-President resting in silent mode next to her. He had done his job well, despite all the mishaps. And with a loving touch she reached beneath the collar at the back of his neck and gently switched him off, his eyelids and head once again drooping into a peaceful slumber.
[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]
