By the time March rolled around, the PAO Act had passed—barely.
The final vote landed 26–23, after a week of furious lobbying, late-night amendments, and one council member delivering a 15-minute monologue about “innovation strangled in its cradle” that became an instant meme.
The mayor signed with two pens and a tight smile.
Public Algorithms Accountability and Oversight Act, now law.
The real work, Olivia knew, was just beginning.
She threw herself into it.
Her first post-passage piece ran with a headline that made the city’s corporate lobbyists grind their teeth: **WHO WATCHES THE ALGORITHMS? MEET THE PEOPLE BUILDING NYC’S NEW OVERSIGHT BOARD.**
She interviewed everyone.
The civil rights lawyer who’d sued the city over biased policing algorithms and now found herself vetting code. The community organizer from the Bronx who wore worn jeans to meetings with deputy commissioners and refused to let them call her by her first name. The retired transit worker whose main qualification, as far as he could tell, was “being old enough to remember when the schedule was on paper.”
She threaded in Jake’s role—how TerraNova now had to submit documentation for every core update, how their internal processes shifted to accommodate external eyes.
She quoted him sparingly. Less than before.
> “If we can’t explain what our models are doing in plain language,” Morrison says, “we have no business running anything in a city of eight million people.”
Her editor, Laura, circled that line and wrote in the margin: *See? You’re still in his head. And the city’s.*
At *Metro*, the handoff happened.
Ben—mid-thirties, a politics reporter with a sharp jawline and a wardrobe heavy on navy blazers—started cc’ing on TerraNova emails. He took over the primary spot on the press list. He went on background calls with Carla, sat in meetings with Jake’s comms team.
Olivia watched from just outside the circle.
At first, it felt like someone else had walked into her apartment and started rearranging her books.
Ben’s first big piece, a look at TerraNova’s internal culture post-IPO, landed with a respectable thud.
It was… fine.
Well-reported. Adequately written. An anonymous engineer saying, “We’re a family,” juxtaposed with an anonymous ex-employee saying, “It’s a cult.”
She tried not to be smug.
“You want to fix it,” Raj whispered over her shoulder, reading the draft before it went live.
“It’s not my piece,” she said.
“You could make it sharper in ten minutes,” he said.
“That’s not the point,” she said.
He studied her.
“You okay?” he asked, not joking for once.
She thought.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “And… no. I miss… the proximity. But I don’t miss… the noise.”
“You miss him,” Raj said bluntly.
Heat climbed her neck.
“I miss… specific arguments,” she said. “And certain… jawlines.”
He snorted.
“But,” she added, “I also like writing about code and power without everyone assuming I’m secretly trying to get back together with my ex.”
“Progress,” Raj said. “We’ll get you a cake.”
The world outside her desk didn’t slow.
The oversight board held its first public meeting.
Olivia sat in the front row, notebook ready, as residents stepped to the mic to air grievances that had nothing to do with code and everything to do with lived experience.
“My building’s still got mold,” one woman said. “I don’t care what your algorithm says. The inspector never comes.”
“My bus used to be late,” a teenager said. “Now it’s on time, but my stop moved three blocks. My grandma can’t make that walk.”
An older man, his hair white and his suit impeccably pressed, looked at the assembled board and said, “When you look at your screens, don’t forget there are hearts under those data points.”
Olivia’s pen scratched furiously.
Later, she wrote a scene that made Laura email her a single word: *Damn.*
> At a folding table in a fluorescent-lit community center, the people charged with watching the algorithms listen as man after man, woman after woman, steps up to the microphone. > > The code they’re supposed to oversee hasn’t been written yet. The systems it will govern have been running on autopilot—or not running at all—for years. > > “Don’t let them bury us in the data,” says Rosa Jimenez, 62, her voice steady. “Make them show you the people.”
She sent the draft to Leah, who replied with three clapping emojis and, *This. More of this.*
***
Jake’s world shifted too.
Open APIs, once a talking point, became a project.
Teams spun up internally—interface design, documentation, security. Lawyers sat in meetings with engineers, asking questions like, “What does it mean if we ‘expose’ this function to third parties?”
He spent more time in conference rooms and less time in code.
More time in city hall, less time at his own kitchen table.
He watched the coverage from *Metro*.
He read Olivia’s oversight pieces. The ones that barely mentioned him. The ones that still somehow managed to loop back to the tension between private and public.
He read Ben’s corporate piece.
He didn’t… dislike Ben.
He’d sat for an interview in a glass conference room, answered questions about “culture” and “burnout” and “mission.”
Ben had been polite, prepared, and just critical enough to earn his respect.
But the piece had felt… flatter than Olivia’s work.
More… predictable.
He told Carla that once, in a rare moment of candor.
“We can’t control who writes about us,” she’d said. “We can only control what we give them.”
“And what we *do*,” he’d replied.
She’d nodded. “And that.”
At night, when his emails slowed to a trickle, he found himself staring at his phone.
He and Olivia still texted.
Less often.
But enough.
> (Olivia) > Oversight board just spent 20 minutes arguing about acronym pronunciation. > “P-A-O” vs “Pow.” > Democracy in action.
> (Jake) > Piao. Like “meow.” > Obviously.
> (Olivia) > Stop trying to turn my job into a cat meme.
> (Jake) > Too late.
He’d watch the three dots, wait for them to disappear, then remind himself to put the phone down.
The grace period wasn’t just about not pushing her.
It was about not pushing himself into places he wasn’t sure he could get back from.
Sometimes, he slipped.
> (Jake) > Saw your piece on the Queens pilot. > You made a contingency clause sound sexy. > Talent.
> (Olivia) > That’s because you’re deranged. > No one else finds contingency clauses sexy.
> (Jake) > You. Me. > An escrow provision. > Candlelight.
> (Olivia) > I’m blocking your number.
He didn’t tell her about the nights he woke up at 3 a.m., heart racing, convinced some bug he’d missed was about to roll through the grid like a tide.
He didn’t tell her about sitting in his dark apartment, watching the city lights pulse, and picturing her at her desk, head bent over another draft.
She didn’t tell him about the way her chest still clenched when she saw his name in another reporter’s lede.
She didn’t tell him how her fingers hovered over his contact every time she walked past Manny’s, muscle memory of coffee and sugar packets and old fights.
They both kept moving.
Work. Sleep. Work.
Life tucked itself into the gaps.
Her uncle healed. Her mother’s heater died and lived again. Her brother started talking about maybe—*maybe*—taking a class at the community college at night.
Jake’s mother discovered meditation videos on YouTube and began lecturing him about “breathing deeply before you yell at the city.”
The world did what it always did.
Went on.
And then, slowly, they reached the end of the grace period without quite realizing it.
The day the first version of the PAO override protocol went live—a built-in “kill switch” that allowed the city to roll back TerraNova’s latest update if the oversight board deemed it dangerous—Olivia wrote a piece that started with a bus.
Not the one at 14th & Lennox.
A new one. A route that had never existed before the grid got smart.
> In East New York, on a block that hasn’t seen a bus stop in twenty years, a new route quietly began service last week. > > It didn’t happen because a council member demanded it, or because a developer asked nicely. It happened because a model noticed an absence—a cluster of complaints, a gap between two lines—and a human oversight board decided to act on that information. > > For once, the bus came not because someone powerful wanted it, but because the numbers and the people pointed in the same direction.
At the end, she wrote:
> This is what accountability looks like at its best: not a headline-grabbing collapse, but a quieter rebalancing of who gets seen. > > It’s also a reminder that we can, when we choose, design systems that expect failure—and build in ways to catch it.
She hit send.
Leaned back.
For the first time in months, tension unspooled in her shoulders.
The initial series was done. The bill had passed. The oversight board was working. The kill switch existed.
The city was not fixed. It never would be.
But the shape of the story had changed.
So had hers.
She closed her laptop.
Looked at her phone.
And typed:
> Hey. > How do you feel about escalators?
The three dots appeared almost instantly.
> Terrified, he replied. > Why?
She smiled.
> Grace period’s over, she wrote. > Meet me at the High Street station. > 7 p.m. > Wear shoes you can walk in. > No assistants.
There was a pause longer than she liked.
Then:
> Yes, ma’am.