Chapter 522 - 242: Self-Judgment
Ethan Hawke walked out of the office.
The motion-activated lights in the hallway lit up one by one as he walked, then quickly went out behind him.
Pushing open a side door of City Hall, Ethan wandered onto Grant Street.
The city was still asleep, but it was a light slumber.
In the distance, at the Inland Port construction site, beams from searchlights crisscrossed the night sky, and the faint rumble of heavy trucks could be heard.
On the streets, night-shift sanitation workers were cleaning up trash, and occasionally, you could see community safety patrols in groups of three.
Ethan watched all of this.
A year ago, this place had been a lifeless ruin.
Back then, people’s eyes held only despair. The streets were filled with nothing but wandering junkies and unemployed drunks.
Now, there was order.
The city had come back to life.
And the price for it was that its Mayor had just decided, in his office, to join forces with the Republican Party to purge his own political allies.
Ethan stopped at a vending machine on the corner and bought a can of coffee.
"Not heading home yet?"
A voice came from the shadows nearby.
Ethan turned his head and saw Sarah Jenkins.
She was sitting on the edge of a planter, a slender cigarette held between her fingers. A canvas bag stuffed with documents sat by her feet.
She had dark circles under her eyes, obviously having just been freed from some high-intensity work herself.
"Just finished talking with the boss." Ethan walked over, sat down beside Sarah, and popped open the can of coffee. "What are you doing here?"
"The media’s going crazy," Sarah said, blowing a smoke ring. "The riots in Harrisburg, Luigi’s trial, and a ton of reporters digging for inside scoops. I just got off the phone with the editors of a few papers, telling them to go easy on the headlines tomorrow morning."
Ethan took a sip of coffee. The bitter taste sobered him up a little.
"Sarah, do you think Leo has changed?" Ethan asked suddenly.
Sarah turned her head to look at Ethan.
"Why do you ask?"
"Back during the campaign, he was crazy, sure, but he had lines he wouldn’t cross." Ethan stared at the coffee can in his hand. "But now... I think he’s moving too fast. The speed at which he makes decisions, the speed at which he abandons his principles... it’s too fast for me to keep up."
Ethan didn’t explicitly mention the phone call about working with the Republican Party.
Sarah was silent for a moment, then stubbed out her cigarette on the edge of the planter.
"He has changed."
Sarah said.
"He used to agonize all night over a single speech, hesitate over whether one turn of phrase might offend a certain group. He was like a big kid back then."
"But now, he’s like a machine."
Sarah looked toward City Hall in the distance.
"But maybe that’s a good thing, Ethan."
"A good thing?"
"Yes." Sarah nodded. "You’ve never worked in the media department. You have no idea how vicious those people out there are."
"They’ll seize on every word you say, twist it, blow it out of proportion, and turn it into a knife to stick in your back. If you’re not tough enough, if you still have that useless moral purity, they’ll eat you alive."
"Last week, some reporter tried to make a story by attacking Leo’s personal life."
Sarah’s eyes turned cold.
"I dug up five years of that reporter’s social media history, found some racist comments he’d made, and sent them to his paper. He was fired the next day."
Ethan was taken aback.
He never expected Sarah, who was always smiling, to be so ruthless.
"When Leo found out, he said only two words: ’Good work.’"
Sarah looked at Ethan.
"We need this change, Ethan. This city is full of wolves. If our leader were a sheep, we’d all be dead by now. He has to grow fangs, and so do we."
Ethan looked at Sarah.
He realized that the girl who once stormed out, slamming the door because she didn’t want to get involved in political infighting, had now learned how to sling mud to shut her enemies’ mouths.
The environment had changed everyone.
"Maybe you’re right," Ethan said quietly. "A flock needs a sheepdog, but sometimes, the sheepdog has to be meaner than the wolves."
After saying goodbye to Sarah, Ethan returned to City Hall and went to the data command center.
Marcus Thorne was still there.
The tech genius was fuming at the enormous screen, phone in hand, yelling into the receiver.
"I don’t care what the damn interface protocol is! I want the data! Now! If the Public Works Department’s system doesn’t sync with the main server, I’m going to the Mayor and reporting you!"
Marcus hung up and slammed the mouse on the desk in anger.
Seeing Ethan walk in, Marcus pushed his glasses up, the anger still visible on his face.
"These idiots," Marcus complained. "They have no concept of real-time data. The director of the Public Works Department insists on summarizing everything with paper forms, saying it ’leaves a paper trail.’ He just wants to be able to cook the books."
Ethan walked to the control console, looking at the sectors on the screen that were grayed out due to data lag.
"Marcus, you can’t talk to them like that," Ethan said.
"Why not?" Marcus shot back. "I’m right, and they’re wrong. Efficiency is everything. This system can’t have people dragging it down."
"Because they’re people, not programs."
Ethan clapped Marcus on the shoulder.
"That director has been with Public Works for twenty years. He has his own logic for survival. If you just pull rank on him, he’ll obey on the surface, but he’ll create countless ’technical glitches’ for you behind your back."
"You need to learn how to frame your logic."
Ethan looked at the young technocrat, who was even younger than him, and it was like seeing himself when he first arrived in Washington.
"Don’t tell him it’s for efficiency, and don’t tell him it’s an order from on high."
"You have to tell him that as long as the data is uploaded in real-time, if there’s ever an engineering accident, the system will have a record proving he fulfilled his oversight duties. The blame can’t be pinned on him."
Marcus stared blankly, then blinked.
"Isn’t that... just teaching him how to shirk responsibility?"
"It’s called managing expectations."
Ethan smiled.
"For a tech guy, the goal is system stability. For a bureaucrat, the goal is job security and plausible deniability. Give him the security he wants, and he’ll give you the data you want."
"That’s how you manage people."
"You have to learn to use their needs to motivate them to work for you."
Marcus nodded thoughtfully and picked up the phone again.
"Hello, Director? Yes, it’s me. I apologize for my tone earlier... I was actually calling to tell you some good news. This new system has a feature that automatically generates compliance reports..."
Ethan listened to the shift in Marcus’s tone, watching as he began to skillfully use these new tactics.
Ethan walked to the floor-to-ceiling window and looked out at the city.
’Am I becoming the bad guy?’
Ethan looked at his reflection in the glass.
He remembered something Leo had once told him in his office.
Winners don’t face a reckoning.
He turned and glanced at Marcus, who was still on the phone sweet-talking the director.
"A fast learner."
Ethan muttered to himself and walked out of City Hall again.
By the side of the road, a phone booth painted bright red stood out conspicuously.
It was one of the "Urban Micro-Renewal" projects Leo had initiated after taking office. The abandoned phone booths were preserved on street corners as art installations; the phones inside had long been removed, leaving only empty shells.
Ethan stepped inside.
He needed an enclosed space, a sanctuary where he could temporarily escape the political maelstrom of Pittsburgh.
He pulled out his phone, his finger sliding down his contact list. He scrolled past "Mom" and "Sanders’ Office," finally stopping on a name simply labeled "Mentor."
William Harlow.
A tenured professor at Harvard Law School, a titan in the field of jurisprudence, and the last cornerstone of Ethan’s moral universe.
Ethan glanced at the time. Five in the morning.
But he knew the old man would be awake. Harlow had a habit of rising early to read case law.
The phone rang twice before it was answered.
"Ethan?"
An old, wise voice came through, accompanied by the rustle of turning pages in the background.
"Professor," Ethan’s voice was hoarse. "I’ve run into a problem. A jurisprudential dilemma."
"Go on," Harlow’s voice was steady. "Is it about the limits of positivism, or the boundaries of natural law?"
"About order and chaos."
Ethan leaned against the cold glass of the phone booth, watching a streetlight across the street that hadn’t yet gone out.
"If the existing order has itself decayed, with laws and procedures becoming mere tools for the privileged to maintain their power... is there any justice in using unconventional, even destructive, means to shatter that injustice?"
"For example, bringing in an external chaotic force to wash away the system... is an act like that justifiable?"
The other end of the line was silent for a moment.
"Are you quoting Machiavelli, or alluding to Hobbes’s Leviathan?" Harlow countered, instead of answering directly.
"I’m asking a practical question, Professor." Ethan closed his eyes. "When the law fails to deliver justice, when all paths to reform within the system are blocked, can any means be justified for the well-being of the majority?"
"That’s a dangerous slippery slope, Ethan," Harlow’s voice grew stern. "The sanctity of the law lies in procedural justice, not the justice of outcomes. If you subvert the process in pursuit of a so-called ’good’ outcome, you are destroying the very foundation of the rule of law."
"But what if that foundation itself is built on exploitation and lies?" Ethan couldn’t help but argue. "What if the process is designed simply to ensure some people always win, and others always lose?"
"Then your duty is to amend it, not to dynamite it," Harlow’s voice remained calm. "Through legislation, through debate, through maneuvering within the system. It’s slow, and it’s difficult, but that is the way of a civilized society."
"Amend?" Ethan let out a bitter laugh. "Professor, what if the price of amendment is the death of countless people and the decay of an entire city, while dynamiting it could bring a new beginning?"
"That is the logic of a tyrant, Ethan." Harlow sighed. "Your thinking is dangerous right now. You’re straying from the path of the rule of law."
"Maybe."
Ethan opened his eyes and looked toward the brightly lit construction site in the distant South District—a sign of life that Leo had bought with unconventional means.
"But, Professor, I’ve seen another possibility. A form of justice that transcends the black letter of the law and touches upon the very essence of survival."
"Ethan..." Harlow seemed to realize something. "Are you..."
"Thank you, Professor."
Ethan cut his mentor off.
"I think I have my answer."
He hung up, put his phone away, and pushed open the door of the phone booth.
Dawn was breaking.
The eastern sky was turning a fish-belly white, tracing the city’s architecture in silhouette.
The cold morning wind on his face made him feel a clarity he had never known.
In that phone booth, Ethan Hawke had passed judgment on himself.
He turned and strode back toward City Hall.
He knew Leo would still be there.
He pushed open the door to the Mayor’s Office, and the thick smell of smoke hit him.
Leo sat in the shadows behind his desk, like a statue.
"Figured it out?" Leo asked, his voice hoarse.
Ethan walked to the desk and looked directly into Leo’s eyes.
"Give me the whole plan."
Ethan said, enunciating every word.
"All of it. All the parts you didn’t want me to know."
Leo pulled a black folder from the bottom drawer and placed it on the desk.
"Take it," Leo said. "It’s all in here."
Ethan took the folder.
The office was thick with the smell of smoke.
Outside the window, Pittsburgh was waking up.