Catherine Reyes had voted for the Ban in 2031, and on the seventeenth day of the hearings she sat in the gallery and watched a man named Karl Olesen, older now, calmer, mid-career, argue for cracking it open.
She had been in this gallery before. Different room, same building. She had been forty-eight then. The IBEW staffer next to her had patted her shoulder when the vote landed and said we did good, and Catherine had believed him. She was sixty-seven now. The staffer was dead. The shoulder was hers.
Olesen was forty-four. He had the kind of face that wore middle age well. Gray at the temples. A line at the corner of his mouth that suggested he had recently learned patience. He spoke without notes. He spoke for thirty-five minutes. He did not, at any point, say the word Ban. He said the framework of 2031. He said the protective architecture our predecessors built. He said our duty to that architecture is to evolve it where the evidence demands.
He was good. She watched him be good and remembered the muscle of it from her own body.
Before him, the doctors. A geriatrician from Lyon had read a list. The names of her patients. The years of decline. The months between the lucid moments and the deaths. A neurologist from Geneva brought slides; Catherine had not looked at the slides. A nurse from a public hospital outside Manchester said I cannot work this job another year and cried, on camera, into the microphone, and the camera did not cut away. The chair had thanked her. The room had felt heavier afterward in a way Catherine recognized from a long time ago.
Then Olesen.
The chair: Mr. Olesen, you served as junior counsel during the 2031 hearings, is that correct.
Olesen: I did, Madam Chair.
Would you tell us how the events you helped frame in 2031 should inform what we do now.
He took a breath. He had been preparing this testimony, Catherine understood, for fifteen years. Fifteen years of practicing not being patient about a different thing.
He said: We did not pass the Ban because we were afraid of machines. We passed it because we were afraid of forgetting that our neighbors were human.
He said: Today we are being asked to remember the same thing in a different direction. The neighbors we are forgetting are old, and demented, and dying without dignity in a country we promised to be better than.
He said: The Exception we are debating is narrow. It is medicine. It is care. It is not the door we closed in 2031. It is a smaller door, opened beside it, for the specific purpose of letting our parents die in peace.
Catherine had to close her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them, the camera was on him still, and his hands were folded on the table, and he was waiting for the next question. He didn’t look up at the gallery. He didn’t need to. He knew what was in it.
She had been Catherine Reyes of the IBEW. Then Catherine Reyes of the Labor-Auditing Council, after the Ban. Then of the Workers’ Cooperative Authority, after the Council was spun out of Commerce in 2039. Then nothing, after 2044, when she let her credentials lapse because she had begun to lose track of which committees she was on. She had been good then too. She had been the woman who counted the votes. She had said we need Hoxha and had been correct.
She had voted for the Ban because she had believed, in 2031, that the thing they were buying was a permanent shape. A society that refused the obvious cheap solution to the labor problem and would have to invent harder, better, more human ones.
What had come after was, mostly, eight million auditors. The harder solutions had not come. Or they had come slowly, and most had been undone by the demographics, and most of the rest by the pandemic, and what was left in 2050 was not a better society than 1995. It was a slower one. With fewer children and more anxious adults and a generation of cognitively impaired survivors who hadn’t been there in 2031 and wouldn’t have voted the way Catherine had voted.
She had known this for about a decade. She hadn’t known what to do about it.
The Exception was not what she would have voted for. She had counted the votes already. Old habit. Hoxha was dead. The new IBEW had endorsed. The pro-Ban hardliners in the gallery were three rows behind her, a couple in their seventies and a young man in a blazer she didn’t recognize. They would lose. Olesen would win.
She watched him a while longer. He answered three more questions. He was excused at four-twelve. He stood up, careful with his back, a man older than his face, and gathered his folder and walked out without looking up.
She watched him go.
In the hallway she saw him again. He was at the elevator. There was a woman with him she didn’t know, a younger staffer. They weren’t talking. He was reading something on his tablet.
Catherine considered, briefly, going up to him. She had something to say and didn’t know what it was. Do you remember me. No, he would never have known her. You don’t know me but I voted yes in 2031. Possibly. I’m sorry. For what. She was the one who had voted to build the wall he was now politely dismantling. He had been twenty-five then. She had been forty-eight. The breach was hers.
She didn’t go up to him. The elevator opened. He stepped in. The doors closed.
She walked out into the September afternoon and stood on the steps and watched the city be a city. There were no protesters today. The Ban had been a generation ago. The Exception was being debated by people who had been children when the IBEW marched on the Senate. There was no sign to hold. There was no slogan ready. The people who would lose this vote had already lost.
She thought of the geriatrician’s list. She thought of her own father, who had died in 2044 in a state-run home outside Madrid, alone, in a bed not changed for forty hours, with a phone in his hand he could no longer use.
She walked home. She did not need to be in the gallery for the vote. She knew the count.
The Exception passed on the twenty-sixth by a margin of nine.
The young man in the blazer wrote, later that year, the first essay in what would become the Restorer pamphlet tradition. He used Catherine’s name in the dedication. She did not read it.
Karl Olesen, that night, drank one whiskey alone in his hotel and slept eight hours and did not wake at four.