The Founders' Mistake

The founders of the Adessa believed that the thing which destroys societies is concentrated power, and so they built a ship where no one person could decide anything. Everything went to the quorum. The lighting schedule, the air mix, the crop rotation, the names of children, all of it decided by a vote of the eleven hundred adults aboard, tallied by a system the founders had built to be incorruptible. For four generations it had worked, more or less, in the way that things work when nothing is truly being tested. Mariam Adeyemi had grown up inside this arrangement and had never questioned it, the way you do not question gravity. She was the ship's senior structural engineer. She voted on everything like everyone else. And she had never once, in her thirty-nine years, had to stand in front of the quorum and ask it to trust her judgement over its own, which was a thing the founders had quietly, deliberately, made almost impossible to do.