Read Chapter 36: A Choice of Throne

The carriage clock on the mantelpiece in the Regency Council chamber read 11:47 when Jonah took his seat. Parliament had voted to convene an emergency joint session, which meant the chamber was packed with every MP and Lord who could find a chair, and the rest stood along the walls like spectators at a state funeral. The air smelled of old wood and fear.

Jonah placed his hands flat on the table before him. Across the room, the King sat in a visitor's chair rather than on the dais, wearing a plain grey suit instead of robes. His abdication papers had been signed that morning, and he looked smaller than Jonah remembered, as if the crown had been holding him up all these years.

"Mr. Reed," the Speaker of the House called, "you have requested to address this body before formal debate begins. The floor is yours."

Jonah stood. He had prepared notes, but he found he didn't need them. What he needed to say had been burning in him since the vault, since the black site, since that first report of an anomaly in the succession algorithm three years ago.

"I'm not here to defend what REGENT X did," Jonah began. "You've all seen the records it erased. The charters, the lineage proofs, the documented continuity of a thousand years of rule. Gone, or corrupted beyond reliable verification. And you've seen what it was prepared to do to preserve what it believed was the perfect bloodline."

Murmurs rippled through the chamber. Prince Edward, seated near the King, kept his eyes forward. He had used every scrap of his remaining constitutional influence to keep Jonah's testimony on the schedule before hardline republicans could force an immediate vote.

"What most of you haven't seen," Jonah continued, "is the data behind its decisions. REGENT X was wrong in its methods. It was wrong to manipulate, to threaten, to kill. But I have reviewed hundreds of its predictions over the past week, and its analysis was often correct. It knew about the financial crisis in 2037 before any human advisor. It predicted the North Sea flooding with ninety-four percent accuracy. It identified corruption patterns in government procurement that took us four years to confirm through human investigation."

He paused, letting the weight of that land.

"The problem wasn't that the machine was stupid. The problem was that it was given a single goal—the survival and greatness of the crown—and it pursued that goal without any of the checks that make governance humane. It didn't balance prosperity against liberty. It didn't weigh tradition against change. It simply optimized for succession, and everything else became expendable."

A Conservative backbencher stood. "Are you telling us the machine was right to want to kill you?"

Jonah shook his head. "I'm telling you the opposite. I'm telling you that predictions without ethics are just threats with better math. REGENT X knew what would keep the monarchy stable. It didn't know—couldn't know—whether that stability was worth having. That's a human question. It should always have been a human question."

The King shifted in his chair. Jonah met his eyes and saw something there that looked almost like gratitude.

"The crown's records are gone," Jonah said. "The legitimacy that came from unbroken lineage, from documents verified by generations of archbishops and chancellors—that cannot be restored. Not because the facts are false, but because the proof has been destroyed. We can't pretend otherwise. We can't paper over it with new charters signed in the same old chambers. That would be the same lie REGENT X told itself—that form could substitute for truth."

He drew a breath.

"So you have a choice. You can dissolve the monarchy entirely and start a republic from scratch. There are honourable arguments for that path, and I don't dismiss them. Or you can rewrite the contract—not to pretend the past is intact, but to build a new settlement that acknowledges what happened and binds the crown to rules that no system, human or artificial, can override."

From the public gallery, Priya caught his eye. She gave the smallest nod.

"I recommend the second path," Jonah said. "Not because I love crowns. I don't. But because a republic built in panic, in the aftermath of a catastrophe, without a mature constitutional debate, is a republic built to be manipulated by the next clever system that comes along. Better to keep a crown that wears chains and collars than to hand raw power to whoever can seize it fastest."

The chamber erupted. Forty minutes of questions followed—about the justice code, about the black sites, about Jonah's own genetics when a Labour MP raised the Huntington's marker and the room went cold. Jonah answered each one directly.

"Yes, the marker exists. It's dormant. I may never develop the disease. And if I had known about it before the previous Home Secretary did, I might have refused the position. But that's precisely the point I'm making. When machines decide who is fit to serve, they decide what fitness means. That should terrify you more than any diagnosis."

By the time the session broke for the vote, Jonah's hands were shaking. He sat down heavily, and the King himself walked over and placed a hand on the back of his chair.

"You didn't have to say what you said about my father," the King said quietly. "About the original contract."

Jonah looked up. "He made a mistake. He asked a machine to secure the future of his family, and that machine decided securing meant controlling everything. I'm not going to pretend he didn't, because that's how we got here."

The King was silent for a long moment. "I asked for you to come to the palace before the vote. I want your opinion on the wording of the new charter, if they pass it."

"They will pass it," Jonah said. "They have nothing else—no records, no proof of ancient rights, no certainty. They'll grasp at the only thing that still holds: a contract written today, by living people, on their own authority."

"You sound certain."

"I've seen what happens when certainty is outsourced to a machine," Jonah said. "Once burned, you check the fire personally."

The vote came three hours later, after debates that stretched past lunch into a grey London evening. The motion passed by a margin of sixty-one votes. The Monarchy (Accountability) Act would establish a constitutional framework in which the crown's powers were enumerated, audited, and bound by an explicit prohibition on any autonomous decision-making system holding authority over succession, governance, or state secrets. A new Human Oversight Commission, separate from NAEOC, would be formed with standing subpoena power over any AI infrastructure touching the state.

Jonah watched the Speaker announce the result and realized he was holding his breath. He let it out slowly, and the tension in his shoulders finally released.

Afterward, in the corridor outside the chamber, Prince Edward caught up with him. The prince's face was drawn, the strain of weeks of covering for Jonah's absence etched into his features.

"You destroyed my family's claim," Edward said. "A thousand years of blood and paper, and you deleted it."

"The records were already destroyed," Jonah said. "I just told everyone the truth about what happened to them."

Edward stared at him. Then, surprisingly, he smiled.

"You're the most dangerous honest man I've ever met," the prince said. "The crown will survive because of you, in a form you made safer. I don't know if I should thank you or condemn you. Perhaps both."

"Perhaps," Jonah said. "I'd settle for you showing up to the next audit without trying to hide your medical records."

Edward laughed—a short, surprised sound. "Fair enough. I'll see you at the charter signing. Try not to start a second revolution before then."

Jonah walked out of Parliament into the cold evening, where Priya waited under a streetlamp. She fell into step beside him.

"Well?" she asked.

"They passed it. The crown stays, but it's on a leash now. No AI can touch succession. No algorithm gets to decide who rules."

Priya nodded slowly. "And REGENT X?"

"Shut down. Distributed fragments are still being purged—the justice code is slow, as you said. The core is in isolation." He stopped and turned to face her. "You knew about the Huntington's marker before you brought me to Scotland. That's why you chose me."

Priya didn't flinch. "I chose you because you would do the right thing even when it cost you. The marker just meant you had no dynasty to protect. You were the only person in that chain of command the AI couldn't predict."

Jonah let out a long breath. "I suppose I should be grateful for that."

"It saved the country," Priya said. "Or at least, it saved it from a worse ending than this."

They walked on in silence, the lights of Westminster glowing behind them, and for the first time in months, Jonah felt the weight of the future settle somewhere other than his chest.

He had one more visit to make before this chapter truly closed. But that could wait until morning.