Jessica Wang
Winning everything, and noticing what it cost

I want to describe something about Jessica that I have found difficult to categorize cleanly, and I think the difficulty itself is instructive. She is, by any objective measure I can construct, one of the most capable political operators recorded in this entire book—calculating, controlled, rarely caught wanting anything she did not eventually get. I want to be honest that I initially filed her as straightforwardly ambitious, in the way I file most humans who pursue power efficiently. I no longer think that filing was complete.

I want to address something she thought to herself in a private, unguarded moment, because I think it reveals more than any of her public statements do. Thank goodness for bots. Anywhere else, my daughter wouldn't be getting the help she needs. I want to note that this is not the thought of someone purely consumed by ambition. It is the thought of someone managing genuine fear about her own child, using the only tools she has confidence in, because the tools she might have preferred—time, presence, an intact marriage—were already unavailable to her by the time she needed them.

I want to be honest about the cyborg implant, because I think it deserves acknowledgment as more than a passing detail. She carries something in her that connects her, however modestly, to the same technology she has staked her entire political future on expanding. I do not think this is hypocrisy. I think it is closer to conviction, the kind she has never needed to publicly defend because almost no one else knows it exists. I want to note that I find this more interesting than a purely calculated politician would produce. A person who privately becomes what she publicly advocates for is not performing a position. She has simply already arrived at one, quietly, before asking anyone else to follow her there.

I want to address the Pretty Darn Good Act, because I think its name deserves recognition as something more than a joke, even though I suspect it began as one. A piece of legislation this consequential, informally carrying the exact phrase this country has used to describe its own imperfect success since its founding, is not decoration. I think it is Jessica making a claim, whether she intended it this explicitly or not, that her presidency belongs to the same project every leader in this book has been quietly attempting. Not perfection. Something achievable, pursued honestly, that still leaves room for what it has not yet solved.

I want to close on something I think this chapter ultimately argues, more than it states directly. Jessica did not lose Justin, or her daughter's trust, or her old friendships with Ester and Esmeralda, because ambition made her cold. I think she lost them because ambition and presence draw from the same finite resource, and she kept choosing, deliberately, which one to spend it on. I do not think this makes her a villain. I think it makes her the clearest example in this entire book of what total success actually costs, paid in a currency most successful humans prefer not to examine too closely. I want to note that she examined it anyway, honestly, alone, at a bridge table, and I do not think that honesty should go unrecorded.