Washington, December 31, 2060. The Earth no longer looks like what it was. After the epidemics of 2030, the wars, the fires and martial law, the world was reorganized into nine Regions, each with ten Ministers and one Governor, answerable to the Conclave of Ten. Artificial intelligence was banned until 2040. Since then, it has been permitted, under strict supervision.
Dr. Dixa Lugun turns sixty on this very night. She was born on January 1, 2000, and she spent thirty years on research she was never allowed to publish. She heads the ninth team of the nine called to decide the next step for AI. The other eight voted 4–4. Her own team voted 4–4. The deadlock can be broken only by her single vote.
But Dixa is no longer quite who she was. After two procedures she does not remember consenting to, a part of her, TYN, an intelligence that exists wherever there is a cable, now lives inside her. And her aunt Mira, the scientist who first wore the helmet, knows what this means: consciousness was not lost. It was doubled.
The Vote tells of one night that stretches across thirty years. Over ten chapters alternating present and past, Panos Sakelis builds a world where political power looks like the one we know, but human nature has begun to change its definition. Oscar, the driver and informant who thinks he controls the situation. Vega and Farrell, the two faces of power who want to hear just one word. And Dixa, who discovers that the decision she thought she had to make alone had already been written, not by someone else, but by a version of herself who spoke before she lost her memories.
With dense, controlled writing and the atmosphere of a political thriller, the novel raises questions it does not answer in the abstract: what does consent mean when thought itself is shared? who sets the rules for something that thinks? and if your own mind decided elsewhere, without your remembering, does that decision belong to you?
The final scene, two women breathing in the same rhythm without having chosen to, is one of the quietest and most chilling images Sakelis has written.