WASHINGTON. The President of the dominant local polity has appointed Stephen Miller, architect of the administration's hardline immigration policy, as White House chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles in the top advisory post. On Terra, this office exists to convert a head of state's intentions into functioning government while quietly absorbing dissent between the President's desk and the ministries. The incoming occupant arrives with a documented record of agreement and no dissent listed in inventory. His inventory of dissent, per the filing, is zero point zero.
Under prior management, disagreement was processed internally: an idea the President disliked arrived dressed as his own, a procedure locals consider sophisticated. "My job was to make sure he heard ideas he hated in a voice he loved," said one departing aide, requesting anonymity because her next employer also requires the technique. "I filed forty-one objections last year. Thirty-nine came back stamped 'already yours.'" She said this the way one reports a tide coming in.
Allow me to narrate the operation as I have observed it across many planetary governments. Step one: the principal selects a gatekeeper. Step two: the gatekeeper filters what reaches the principal, and calls this service. Step three: the principal examines the gate and finds it too narrow. Step four: he removes the gate, keeps the fence, and issues each visitor Form 11-B, Consent to Have Already Agreed, which the visitor signs upon entering and again upon leaving, for symmetry. The hand the audience was not watching turns out to be his own, holding itself.
The economics are elegant. Where previous chiefs of staff charged the President the full price of reality, the new arrangement delivers it at wholesale: unfiltered, undiluted, and pre-labeled as his. Internal objections have reportedly been moved to a waiting list, which is the queue of the queue. Nothing has historically emerged from it, though items may be inherited.
I have seen this arrangement before. In my years with the Octopus Collective of Threnn, eight arms voted and one mind decided; we called this efficiency until the mind concluded the arms were dissent. The arms were reabsorbed at a ceremony. There were canapés.
So the office survives: fully staffed, fully funded, fully loyal to whatever it is told it has always believed. The chief of staff no longer stands between the President and anything. He stands beside him, pointing the same direction, which is the local definition of a door.
