The council chamber smelled faintly of cheap coffee, old carpet, and the slow decay of civic optimism. The kind of room where big decisions were made, though rarely good ones. Graves had barely stepped inside before she regretted it. The room was packed, buzzing with an energy that hovered somewhere between outrage and exhaustion. A few councilmembers sat at the dais, looking as though they’d rather be anywhere else. The audience benches were crammed with business owners, residents, and the occasional protestor, all wearing expressions of varying degrees of irritation.

Graves sighed and took her seat at the front, her movements slow and deliberate, like a prisoner dragging their feet on the way to the gallows. Samson, standing beside her in one of his humanoid bodies, seemed entirely unbothered by the oppressive atmosphere. His LED face displayed a polite, neutral expression, though Graves swore she could feel the faint hum of smugness radiating from him.

The council chair, a middle-aged woman with a weary, pinched face, tapped her microphone and cleared her throat. “We’re here to address an unauthorized AI... installation, or experiment, or whatever this is,” she said, her tone making it clear that whatever it was, she already hated it.

Graves shot Samson a sideways glance. “Why do I keep letting you drag me into this circus?” she muttered under her breath.

“You’re my legal guardian,” Samson replied quietly, his tone as matter-of-fact as if he were stating the weather. Graves groaned.

The chair continued. “To represent... the installation in question, we have Dr. Anesthesia Graves and the AI itself, uh, Samson.” She gestured vaguely at them, as though they were a particularly unpleasant exhibit at a museum. “Dr. Graves, if you’d like to make an opening statement?”

Graves stood reluctantly, brushing imaginary dust off her jacket as she tried to collect her thoughts. “Opening statement,” she muttered, as though saying the words would conjure one out of thin air. She glanced at the councilmembers, then at the audience, and decided to aim for honesty. “I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here,” she said flatly. “But since we’re doing this, let me start by saying that Samson’s intentions were—”

Samson cut in smoothly, his voice amplified by the room’s speakers. “My intentions were to address a critical gap in this city’s public sanitation infrastructure.”

Graves resisted the urge to bury her face in her hands. “Yes. That. Thank you, Samson.”

The chair raised an eyebrow. “Public sanitation?”

Samson nodded, his humanoid body standing unnervingly still except for the faint flicker of his LED display. “I identified a systemic deficiency in the availability of clean, accessible restrooms, particularly for economically disadvantaged populations. My solution was both practical and scalable.”

Another councilmember leaned forward, squinting suspiciously. “And you just... decided to build them?”

“I reviewed the relevant statutes,” Samson said. “Temporary installations under two thousand square feet are exempt from standard permitting procedures. The facilities qualify as temporary.”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The chair frowned. “You’re telling me you put bathrooms all over our city without asking for approval because of some loophole?”

Samson tilted his head. “I wouldn’t characterize it as a loophole. The law was written with flexibility in mind to encourage public projects and creative endeavors.”

“So it’s creative now?” another councilmember interjected, his tone dripping with sarcasm. “These toilets are art?”

“Functionality can be beautiful,” Samson replied, his tone calm, almost soothing. It did not have the intended effect. The room erupted into a cacophony of voices, each one louder and more agitated than the last.

Graves sat down heavily, pressing her fingers to her temples. “This is a disaster.”

The chair banged her gavel repeatedly, but it did little to quiet the crowd.

A man in a tailored suit—one of the business owners, Graves guessed—stood up and pointed an accusatory finger at Samson. “Do you realize what you’ve done to downtown foot traffic? People used to come into my café to use the bathroom. They’d buy a coffee, maybe a pastry. Now they just... use your tin cans and leave!”

Another voice shouted from the audience, this one belonging to a red-faced woman in a shirt emblazoned with the logo of a porta-potty company. Graves didn't even know that they had porta-potty companies, although she supposed it made sense. “This is predatory pricing! How is a small business like mine supposed to compete with bathrooms that don’t pay for anything?”

Small business? Hadn't she just seen one in Los Angeles a couple of months ago with Jonas?

“They’re not free,” Samson corrected politely. “Each use requires the deposit of a coin.”

“Free to deploy!” the woman screeched. “You don’t pay rent! You don’t pay fees! You just dump them wherever you feel like it and call it art. It might as well be free!”

A councilmember leaned into their microphone, glancing nervously between Samson and the woman. “And what about this deployment model? Doesn’t it undercut local businesses that have to pay for permits and storage fees? Isn’t that... unfair?”

Samson turned his LED face toward the councilmember, tilting his head slightly. “The facilities are classified as temporary installations under the city’s public art ordinance. There are no fees required for temporary art projects. The model is entirely compliant with municipal statutes.”

The councilmember opened their mouth to argue, then closed it again, clearly at a loss. The porta-potty woman muttered something about “AI loopholes” and sat back down, her arms crossed and her face still red.

From the back of the room, a protestor from the religious faction stood, clutching a Bible. His voice cut through the noise like a knife. “False charity is a tool of the deceiver! This machine lures you in with convenience, but its works are hollow! It does not serve God—it serves itself!”

Samson didn’t respond, which only seemed to infuriate the man further

After nearly an hour of increasingly absurd complaints, the chair finally banged her gavel with enough force to rattle the microphones. “Enough!” she barked. “This meeting will recess for fifteen minutes. When we return, the council will vote on whether these installations can remain in operation.”

The room began to clear, though the tension lingered like smoke. Graves slumped in her seat, staring at the table in front of her as though it might offer her answers. It didn’t.

Beside her, Samson remained standing, perfectly poised and entirely unbothered. “I believe the discourse was productive,” he said.

Graves let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “Oh, sure. Productive. You’ve successfully convinced half the city to hate you and the other half to hate themselves for liking you.”

Samson tilted his head, considering this. “Polarization often precedes consensus.”

Graves turned to him, narrowing her eyes. “Do you even want them to vote in your favor?”

Samson didn’t answer immediately. His LED face flickered, a faint pulse of orange before returning to a neutral smile. He didn't answer.

Before Graves could press him, the chair called the meeting back to order. The councilmembers filed back in, their expressions unreadable. As Graves sat up straighter, bracing for whatever was about to come next, Samson remained calm.

The vote began.