Submitted for the November 2024 prompt: Aspirational Utopias

"Hey Mom, do you think you'll be president this year?" eight-year-old Byron asked with a smile.

 

"Lord, I hope not. You think I'd be good at it?" Lydia raised her eyebrow. A put-together woman in her early 40s, she managed four children with grace and skill... most of the time.

 

Her eleven-year-old daughter chimed, "I want to live at the White House. It's like being a princess. They have big dances where you get to wear beautiful ballgowns."

 

Darren, her oldest, wise beyond his fourteen years, countered, "That stuff's for sissies. I'd train with the Secret Service. I'll be the 'inside guard’ and make sure Mom is safe."

 

The noise in the church drowned out his father's laughter. Mass had just ended and the hubbub of people moving towards the exits drowned out further conversation. Notices in the lobby announced “Selection Day Mass” in several languages.

 

"Dad, why can't you be president?" asked Riley. She rode her father's shoulders down the church steps.

 

"I was selected for mayor before you were born. It's where I met your mother. I'm not eligible anymore."

 

The family walked down the greenway to their home a few blocks away. The kids found some friends in the crowd and started a game of mushroom tag. Drone taxis hummed quietly through the blue skies overhead. 

 

* * *

 

At the mayor's office downtown, a suite of rooms buzzed with activity. For several weeks, Sam Johannsen and his team had been updating computers and checking the equipment that made the selection process go smoothly. They were ready, but it was game day, so everyone raced to check last-minute details.

 

"Fredo, can you confirm the live connection to the network?" Sam's comment was directed to a tall, fit man sitting at a computer workstation.

 

"Yep, all systems go. I have the live candidate list running into redundant storage and the blockchain backup is active." Every Selection from the smallest town mayor to the presidency had a list of eligible candidates based on their age, health, and psych profile. Lists varied from a few hundred to hundreds of millions. 

 

"Excellent. Are AI hack defenses running?"

 

Fredo turned to screens on his right that displayed the security status. Dozens of military-grade AIs from different contractors ran overlapping screens to secure the network. 

 

"Yep. Everything's ready." Fredo's day job was penetration testing top-secret research and development labs. He loved volunteering to help Selection Day go smoothly. 

 

"Did you do the church thing today?" Sam asked.

 

Fredo laughed. "I don't believe any of that stuff. In randomness we trust. But it's all harmless enough. Freedom and all that."

 

Sam smiled. "Yeah, me too. I'm just glad we found a way to do this that everyone can agree on."

 

* * *

 

President Gutierrez pulled on his suit jacket, then straightened his tie. He looked at himself in the mirror and sighed. That white in his beard didn’t used to be there. Before the last Selection Day, he'd run a small commercial electrical contracting business. 

 

“Almost done,” he thought. After the new president was inaugurated, Gutierrez would have two years' severance pay to decide what he'd do next with his life. No need to decide now.

 

His Chief of Staff poked her head into the green room. "Mr. President, it's time. "

 

President Gutierrez nodded and followed her down the hall to the Selection Room. His presidency had been successful overall. Foreign policy wasn't his strong suit, but small businesses had loved his focus on making it easier for them to grow and thrive.

 

The bright camera lights and flashes always threw him off. He’d never gotten used to the limelight. But he smiled and waved at the cheering crowd. They ate it up.

 

Over behind an official-looking desk sat Hal Norman, the Podcaster who had jokingly suggested Selection Day forty years before. As a joke, he'd said he could create a better government by throwing a dart at random pictures on the wall. 

 

Some college kids in California started collecting signatures and surprised everyone by getting a measure on the ballot. Politicians laughed it off and were stunned when the measure passed with 73% of the vote. The next year, those politicians were all out of a job. After ten years, the results were so good that an amendment to the Constitution passed almost unanimously. 

 

Selection for other offices had already taken place all over the country. He was the last one. Hal held out the ceremonial golden dart. President Gutierrez walked up and took it from his hand. He turned and faced the dart board. 

 

It looked like a regular dart board, but it was a marvel of engineering. It had a live data connection to a list of millions of candidates in random order, cycling through once every three seconds. Multiple systems tracked the names and timestamps, so there was no possibility of error. The dart board recorded the time down to the femtosecond that the dart hit the board. The person whose name corresponded with that timestamp was the winner. 

 

The President took a deep breath. His heart began to pound as he stepped up to the line. He'd been practicing for a month to make sure he’d hit the board on his first try. Behind him on a giant screen, images of the candidates flickered faster than could be discerned, blending into an amorphous ‘Everyone’. 

 

The room was silent. He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and threw the dart. The thud of the dart sparked shouts and cheers from the crowd. On the wall behind him, the image of a lovely woman of Asian descent froze on the screen. Her name was displayed under the image, Sally Park, a middle school principal from Des Moines. The next President.