Pamela Takanashi first saw Maria Brown in a photograph, which was why she misunderstood her.
It was not an official photograph. Official photographs, Pamela had learned, were kinder to institutions than to people. They flattened grief, corrected the lighting, softened the accident of age, made everyone appear equally available for classification. This photograph had none of that modesty. It had been taken at some conference, perhaps in London, perhaps in Boston, in one of those hotel rooms designed to erase geography by means of grey carpet and intelligent lighting. Maria Brown stood beside a lectern with a cup of coffee in her hand, her dark hair cut sharply around her face, her expression not happy exactly, but amused, as though the world had made a poor argument and she was waiting for it to finish.
Pamela enlarged the image on her second monitor.
Behind Maria was a slide with the title:
AI Litigation and the Architecture of State Error
Pamela leaned back in her chair and let out a sound which was not quite laughter.
There were many types of plaintiff, and she had learned to recognise them, not as a matter of contempt but as a matter of professional economy. There were the wounded, who wrote everything in capital letters and attached photographs of injuries that had nothing to do with the claim. There were the procedural men, usually retired, who had discovered the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure late in life and loved them with a frightening purity. There were the conspiratorial, whose filings had footnotes breeding inside footnotes. There were the lonely, who sued the government because the government, unlike their children, was required to answer.
Maria Brown appeared to be none of these.
She was nearly fifty, though the photograph had the polished defiance of a woman who had stopped asking age for permission. She had a law degree, a small practice, several articles on administrative accountability, and a public life composed with irritating care: books, lectures, interviews, essays on artificial intelligence and litigation strategy, photographs from airports, photographs from gardens, photographs with people Pamela did not recognise but who looked like the sort of people who recognised one another.
This was not, Pamela thought, a broken woman.
This was a woman with a project.
