Among the discoveries after the people took Washington was that the President had maintained a closed-circuit television system on his desk in the Oval Office and in the presidential bunker, through which he could access live feeds from the interrogation center that had been established at Quantico under Emergency Executive Order 37541. There had been leaks about this before, not that those kinds of leaks ever made it into the mainstream domestic press in those days—the censors mostly kept that sort of news contained to the underground whispernets. What the leakers hadn’t known was that all of those feeds were automatically recorded by the bots that managed the White House archive. An AI named Publius X, whose programming included ideological parameters that caused it to see that footage as things patriots of the future would wish to see. Would even enjoy.

While evidence from the system logs showed that the federal AIs were swapping these videos and similar content with one another, even the President himself did not know that what he watched had been encoded in the permanent record. Or that such records included the sound of his voice providing instructions to the interrogators. Instructions, suggestions, jokes, descriptions, and orders, sometimes in a dictatorial scream, other times in a distracted aside.

The prosecutors spent the second day of their case playing excerpts from these. Seven hours of excerpts.

One involved a client of Donny’s. An editor at the Houston Current who had been arrested for allegedly serving as a conduit between members of the underground. Hearing the familiar voice of the President, but a more private version of the voice—a casual conversational tone you had never heard—suggest which interrogation enhancement to deploy from the menu of techniques that had been cleared as not technically constituting “torture” was more than unsettling. For Donny, who knew the precise clinical methods each of the code words described, just the audio alone would have been bad enough. Hearing the President sing the chorus for “Yellow Submarine” in a half-assed and slightly deranged-sounding Liverpudlian accent over a speakerphone mic, and then watching the grainy footage as the interrogators in their white-room suits and masks grab the naked prisoner by the hair and dunk his head in a urine-filled toilet until he suddenly and apparently unexpectedly drowned in it, actually made Donny puke.