Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

To play field hockey on ice was, in his opinion, the absurd equivalent of ice-skating on a lawn.)

It was no longer possible to predict the weather, or the likelihood of war, or the outcome of elections.

In response to real events the series introduced a wholly imaginary chief executive who was obsessed by cable news, who pandered to a white supremacist base, and who had played golf with Salma C’s predecessor and talked locker-room shit to him about girls. This entirely fabulist president was dismayed at Salma C’s accession to the Langley throne. His fictional dislike of immigrants led him to think of his brown, female CIA chief as untrustworthy and probably un-American, and his fictitious inability to focus on complex details meant he was bewildered by her fluency in the new argots of cyberspeak, hacking, and AI, and translated that bewilderment into anger, so that her job was perpetually at risk.

But the truth was that she still felt the past moving like a thrombosis in the blood. It might reach her heart and kill her one of these days.