The leader of the local federation has proposed Dana White, lifelong administrator of the continent's principal cage-fighting enterprise, as the next press secretary of the White House — the daily ceremony in which one human stands behind a wooden barrier and declines questions on behalf of everyone inside the building. The proposed appointee currently runs an organization whose employees are compensated according to how briefly they remain upright. The leader also announced that America has taken an enormous step backward in history, apparently unaware that the podium was always a contact sport and merely lacked officials.
Under the existing arrangement, the barrier human repels questions using grammar. Our gallery observation of a routine briefing logged forty-seven minutes, eleven questions, three direct answers, and, at minute thirty-one, the fourth instance of a journalist thanking the podium for not answering. The count is ongoing. It is the only tally of its kind conducted anywhere on this continent, and we intend to defend that record.
The proposed transition has not produced fistfights. It has produced paperwork. Correspondents now submit their questions to a physical trainer before submission to the barrier, a veteran confirmed near the third row: "Nothing long. Nothing with clauses. Short sentences protect the ribs." She then confessed, with the calm of someone reading a grocery list, "I have spent twenty years asking questions I did not want answered. This is the first system that respects that."
Credentialing has followed. Members of the press corps, a species that schedules its aggression through forms and waitlists, now appear at a morning weigh-in before entering the chamber, and each briefing opens with both parties touching gloves — which is to say, exchanging the standard apology. At minute thirty-one of the observed session, that apology was issued for the fourth time, and under the new protocol it must now be acknowledged before the round may begin. Outside the gates, a vendor who has sold heated meat tubes through four administrations delivered the doctrine unprompted: "He'll take hits either way. Everyone at that podium takes hits. Difference is he trains for it."
On our world, fitness for a duty is established by census alone; the counted have never objected, possibly because no census has requested it. Here the selection will proceed by knockout count, the questions will be ranked by survivability, and the briefing will unfold exactly as before — one human behind a wooden barrier, declining everything, upright for as long as the pay scale requires. At minute thirty-one, someone will still say thank you.
