Long before Heterochron technology made it ubiquitous, tacticians and pilots have recognized the value of unitary transformations in maintaining coherent quantum superposition (so-called “being in two places at once”) during basic fighter maneuvers. Less well appreciated is the application of these same principles to electoral politics. A truly skilled quantum politician arises perhaps only once in a generation (indeed, the Exclusion Principle virtually guarantees that this is so), but Duneel Fiorsite remains a legend among legends. To give just one example: her Uniform Platform was able to endorse both a system-wide techno-dictatorship and a loose alliance of anarcho-syndicalist communes, thereby satisfying two huge voting blocs as long as the votes were never counted; such measurement would of course have collapsed the electoral wave function and caused decoherence of the entirety of Viridian society.

The sheer number of quantum entanglements that accumulated in Viridian politics of the 5360s makes it difficult (indeed dangerous) to precisely analyze the issues of the day, but there is an estimated 93% chance that, under Fiorsite’s enlightened guidance, the masses embraced a new austerity which (since they never observed it) may or may not have left them more fulfilled than any abundance ever had.

—Thucydides Plutonium