Entering the room was the first American president of the Supernova Era, Herman Davey, accompanied by the secretary of state, Chester Vaughn, and other senior government officials.
All eyes were on the young president. Every child has a physical trait that is striking, to some degree—be it eyes, forehead, or mouth—and if the most appealing traits of ten thousand children were extracted and combined into one, the result would be Herman Davey. The boy’s outward appearance was indeed a picture of perfection, so much so that the other children wondered about his origins, and even speculated that he had arrived on a gleaming alien spaceship as a little Superman.
In actual fact, Davey was not only born from his mother’s womb but was the product of no particular storied or noble lineage. His father was of Scottish extraction, but his family tree grew murky by the time of the Revolutionary War, nothing like FDR being able to trace his heritage back to William the Conqueror. His mother had been an undocumented immigrant from Poland after the Second World War.
Most disappointing to the other children was that Davey’s life before the age of nine was entirely unremarkable. His family was ordinary, his father a cleaning-products salesman who had none of the aspirations for his son that JFK’s father had shown; his mother was a graphic designer in advertising who had never given her child the education that Lincoln received from his mother. His family was politically unengaged; his father reportedly only voted in a single presidential election, and made the choice between Republican and Democrat by the flip of a coin. Nothing of note could be found in his childhood. He made Bs in most subjects at school and enjoyed football and baseball, but was never good enough to be even a benchwarmer. It was only with enormous effort that young reporters were able to dig up the fact that he had been a mentor for younger students for one semester in the third grade, but the school had made no comment as to his performance.
Like all American children, he whiled away the endless freedom of his younger days but always kept a third eye open for some opportunity, rare but possible nevertheless, that he could seize hold of and never let go. At the time of the supernova, Davey was twelve years old, and his chance had arrived.
When he heard the president’s announcement about the disaster, he understood immediately that history was reaching out to him. Competition was brutal in the country simulation, and he nearly forfeited his life, but eventually he defeated all of his adversaries by dint of a sudden burst of superlative leadership and charisma.
But it did not proceed without fault. Even as he was reaching the apex of power, a specter loomed in his mind, the specter of Chester Vaughn.
Anyone seeing Vaughn for the first time, be they adult or child, would suck in a chilly breath and then avert their eyes. Vaughn’s appearance was the inverse of Davey’s. He was shockingly skinny, with a neck so thin it made one wonder how it could support his disproportionately large head; his hands were little more than skin over bones. The only thing that differentiated him from a starving child from a drought-ridden region of Africa was the whiteness of his skin, so frighteningly white that the other children called him “Little Vampire.” His skin seemed almost transparent, revealing the fine reticular blood vessels beneath the epidermis. It was most conspicuous on his immense forehead, giving him the look of a mutant.
Vaughn’s other notable characteristic was his aged features, which were wrinkled enough that in the adults’ era it would have been impossible to guess his age; most people would have taken him for an elderly dwarf. Davey’s first encounter with Vaughn came when he stepped into the Oval Office to stand before the dying president and the chief justice of the Supreme Court, place a hand on the Bible lying on the desk, and recite the oath of office. Vaughn had been standing at a distance beneath the national flag, silent with his back turned, entirely unconcerned with this historic event. After the oath, the former president made the introductions.
“Mr. President, this is Chester Vaughn, secretary of state. Mr. Secretary, this is Herman Davey, president of the United States.”
Davey extended a hand, but then lowered it again in confusion when there was no move from Vaughn, who remained with his back turned. What further puzzled him was that when he was about to speak a greeting, the former president stopped him with a slight wave, like a servant stopping a presumptuous visitor from disturbing his master’s deep contemplation. After a long pause, Vaughn slowly turned around.
“This is Herman Davey,” the president repeated. “You’re familiar with him, I presume.” The tone of his voice suggested he almost wished that it were the weird kid who had the fatal illness instead of himself.
When Vaughn turned around, his eyes were still directed elsewhere, and it was only after the president had finished speaking that he looked at Davey for the first time. Then, without a word or even the slightest nod of his head, he turned back around again. That glance was the first time Davey saw Chester Vaughn’s eyes. Sunk into deep sockets under heavy eyebrows, his eyes were swallowed up in darkness, like two frosty pools deep in the mountains, concealing who knows what sort of fearsome creature. Even so, Davey could still sense his expression, a pair of monster’s hands, damp and freezing, extending out of those pools to seize him by the neck and strangle him. As Vaughn turned back round, the fluorescent lights glinted off his eyes, and in that instant Davey glimpsed two frosty explosions.
Davey had a sixth sense about power. That he, as the new president, had arrived in the Oval Office after Vaughn, the secretary of state, had not escaped his notice, nor had any detail of either the office or the encounter, and it made him uneasy. Weighing most heavily on his mind was the fact that Vaughn held the power to constitute the cabinet. While this power had been granted to the secretary of state in a constitutional amendment ratified after the supernova, the sitting president, and not his predecessor, customarily had the right to appoint the secretary of state. Moreover, the previous president had emphasized this particular power, which Davey felt was somewhat unusual.
After moving into the White House, Davey did his best to avoid direct contact with Vaughn, who spent most of his time in the Capitol; mostly they communicated by phone. Abraham Lincoln had once said, of a man he refused to appoint to a position, “I don’t like his face,” and when someone argued that a man isn’t responsible for his face, shot back, “Every man over forty is responsible for his face.” Vaughn may have been only thirteen, but Davey still felt he ought to be responsible for his face. He knew little about Vaughn’s background. No one did, in fact, something rather unusual in the United States.
In the adults’ era, the background of every high-level leader was an open book to the electorate. Few children in the White House and Capitol had previously known Vaughn. The chair of the Federal Reserve did mention to Davey that her father had once brought a weird kid over to their house. Her father, a Harvard professor, had told her that Vaughn was extremely talented in sociology and history. The news was hard for Davey to wrap his mind around, since although he had heard of, if not actually met, lots of prodigies, they were all in the sciences or the fine arts. He had never heard of a sociology or history prodigy. Achievement in sociology, unlike in the natural sciences, can’t be made on the basis of intelligence alone, but requires its student to obtain a wealth of experience of society and keen observations of the world from every angle. Likewise with history; a child without real-world life experience would find it hard to gain a real sense of history, a sense that no true historian could be without. But where would Vaughn have found that kind of time?