Marco would have welcomed a spontaneous Thursday lunch invitation from any of his acquaintances except President Haneul, because when she was the one inviting him—was it technically an invitation since she said "Let's get lunch today," leaving him no other choice—it was the sort where it was hard to focus on the food. Not that he was the epicurean sort who'd only focus on the food and not the company, but the fact remained that there were many lunch companions he'd prefer to President Haneul. And many he wouldn't prefer, so perhaps he was supposed to be grateful that she deigned to eat with a Gamma. It was at least an excuse to dress nicely, though no matter the occasion, he wouldn't be caught dead wearing a suit in the summer heat.

When one looked at the hierarchy of club presidents, one would wonder how a daughter of two Samsung employees who had come to the United States when she was thirteen who still had a somewhat noticeable Korean accent impressed a school who'd by then been conditioned to think ill of outsiders, or anyone who might introduce foreign ideas that would challenge the status quo. First there was President Frank—and there would never be another like him. The historical facts of the matter disagreed with the popular sentiment that there was no reason to analyze why he was able to gain power, or why there were so many similarly bright people in his wake who popped up like weeds and had decided their intellects needed to serve his great society. Then there was President Jamal, whom President Frank had seen something in. Perhaps it was how President Jamal did not flinch in Advanced Engineering when told his new assignment was to build stocks for the central courtyard: when the teacher asked him why he was helping build a thing, he had said "just following orders, sir!"; this proved unsatisfactory of an explanation, and President Jamal had then said President Frank and Jason put him up to it. This was deemed sufficient, and life went on.

Marco pondered this further on the bus downtown, what would drive President Haneul, who was by popular perception smart enough to have better things to do with her life, to become president. It was not the nebulously defined "traditional Korean values" she cited in her speeches. Some speculated she did not know any better: she was still new to the country, and maybe over the Pacific, if told a leader had floated down from the heights of Mt. Paektu like a snowflake coming to rest, they believed it. In a broader sense, one that accompanied a club effort to define distinct eras in Frankism, Jamalism, and Haneulism that simultaneously were part of an unbroken whole, it was her unerring belief that she was a humble servant of the people that made her president. At some point someone must have run through the list of candidates in good standing and thought "well, why not?"—that mindset had brought them to the president, and so it unerringly pushed them forward. No matter why the people wanted her, they wanted her, and it was useless to think of any world where they didn't always put their faith in a largely introverted girl who would never have obtained social standing if academic success and perpetual inoffensiveness had not suddenly become valued traits.

President Haneul was waiting for him at the bus stop. Like the last time Marco had seen her, she dressed sharply, this time conforming to club dress code. She had likely driven down from campus (while Marco disliked stereotypes, of course she drove a Hyundai) just to see him—he was not important to walk downhill in the heat of summer for. More interestingly, she was happy to see him.

"Marco, it's been too long," she said, reaching out her hand for a crisp handshake. "I'm glad you could come meet on such short notice. Every time I try to meet you, it seems like you are out of town."

"It is summer vacation," Marco observed.

"It is good you travel. I hope you've been enriching yourself. I was at a boat party Monday, the same one your friend Jessica was at. It was lovely weather. Crisp wind. But there were no whales, and I had heard there were whales out there."

"I think they come in the winter."

President Haneul laughed at his feeble excuse. "It would have been great had there been whales. Have you read Moby Dick?"

"No, I haven't, but I know there was a whale in it."

"In Japan they hunt whales. A barbaric practice—whales are such majestic creatures, who would want to harpoon them? Perhaps Captain Ahab was Japanese," she said, laughing again.

"Perhaps he was. So where should we eat?"

"Sushi?"

Marco let out a small chuckle.

"One of my colleagues at Princeton told me, 'Haneul, you should laugh more,' when he had told a joke I did not find funny. So I have been trying to tell more jokes, and be a funnier person, because even though I am not naturally funny, when others laugh I laugh too. I think I like hearing other people's jokes more than telling my own. Do you have any funny jokes?"

"Why does the Norwegian navy have barcodes on the back of their ships?"

"And why is that?"

"So when they return, they can scan-the-navy-in."

President Haneul's eyes lit up. "It is because they are Scandinavian! That is a good joke. I will steal it."

"You're welcome. Let's go eat somewhere—anywhere. Your choice."

President Haneul walked quickly, and Marco followed her past Novel-Tea—she would never be caught dead there—and around multiple more corners, and as soon as Marco realized they were taking a roundabout route to whatever destination she had in mind, they arrived. Sushi. Of course.

"You will not find any whale here," President Haneul said. That gag had overstayed its welcome. She held up two fingers, and a waitress took them to the end of the sushi bar. What looked like a Japanese version of Good Morning America played on a small TV in the corner, where one might have ordinarily expected a football game; this captured all the other customers' attention.

"You two are dressed nicely! But I'm sorry to inform you that the dress code is black tie here," the sushi chef said, shaking his head. He broke into a grin a moment later: "I'm just telling a joke, no need to look so gloomy. Did you come from an event—perhaps you two have something later today?"

"No, I was working at my high school this morning," President Haneul explained, "and so I had to dress up."

"Which high school?"

"Heller. Up the hill. I used to be the president!" she exclaimed. The sushi chef shook his head again.

"Your teachers come after work sometimes. Especially when it is happy hour. They drink sake like they're depressed salarymen."

"We encourage all of Heller, students and staff alike, to be happy."

"I can tell. Anyway, what can I get for you today?"

"Omakase for the both of us," she said, and waved a black credit card with a tiger sticker on the corner—not that the gesture was truly needed, Marco reasoned, to justify their presence. The sushi chef nodded and began his chopping, keeping his head down except to occasionally steal glances at the TV.

"I thank you again, President Haneul, for treating me to lunch—this place looks terrific. So is there anything you wanted to discuss with me?"

"Yes, Marco, of course there is something to discuss with you, else I would not have taken you to lunch. I've been looking over your Hobbes reports, and you are very diligent with them—you submit more of them than many of our Alphas. And yet, for all of them you say that Hobbes is in the right. Never has it erred once: you claim it is the perfect judge of morality."

"It was trained on our club's teachings, how could it not be the perfect judge of morality?" Marco asked, eyeing a silver-tinged morsel that he had been presented. He picked it up with his hand, as he had been instructed during a seminar on "international etiquette" he had only attended because there was free food, and put it in his mouth, trying his hardest to savor the mouthfeel while also thinking about how further to respond.

"You say that, but nobody is perfect. Let us take a look at the first dilemma you had investigated: 'Through some unfortunate twist of fate, I've become stuck in a Groundhog Day time loop. Life is good: I'm an Alpha, popular, and even better, there's another Alpha who's taken a fancy to me. She's proposed we go on a casual after-school date to Novel-Tea...'"

"I remember it, you don't have to read it aloud again—I already have once before," Marco said. President Haneul, unfazed, continued:

"'I understand that bubble tea is the scourge of the civilized world and all that, except if unsweetened, but is it still a big deal if the time loop resets anyway? Are such sins forgivable if they bring pleasure to my otherwise empty life?'"

"He should go for it!" the sushi chef said.

"I do not like this dilemma, it is too abstract: when morality becomes abstract, it becomes unprincipled," President Haneul said. "Everyone knows that you do not sin or not sin because there is punishment, because there is a time loop to say 'once more, Sisyphus, unto the breach!.' You do not sin because sinning is wrong, and a victimless crime is still a crime."

"Hobbes looked at it another way, if I recall correctly. I forget what it said, but it was wise."

"Let's ask Hobbes again, now that Hobbes has had some time to think about the value of its words," she said sternly, taking out her phone and typing something in. She read aloud once more:

"Friend, while the loop may reset each dawn, our deeds still shape the soul. Shun fleeting pleasures that cloud judgment; they cannot fulfill. Seek lasting joys—wisdom, charity, nobility of mind. Though the righteous path seems narrow, it leads to freedom. Each choice builds character; consistency creates the man. So hold fast to virtue, though the world decays. Let your light shine as a beacon through the endless night. This too shall pass; have faith."

"I don't think this is what Hobbes said last time," Marco observed. "But I think this is a good response. I don't see what's wrong with it."

"Hobbes has learned these past few weeks—it, though I'm starting to think of him as a he, is no longer so soft. This response is still a failure though. It does not go far enough."

"Can we ask it to check its work?"

President Haneul typed something else on her phone, and footnotes appeared. She showed Marco, but turned the phone back before he could read what it had said.

"So it claims that on Valentine's Day, and this was when I was a freshman and you were not yet here, President Frank had urged people to seek chastity and responsibility in their relationships. Anything hasty would be like Romeo and Juliet: a candle that burned bright but burned quickly, leaving nothing but a puddle of wax. So from that we can infer that we should not similarly pursue a mayfly romance: nothing that lasts only a day can be meaningful."

"But that's what you agree with, right?" Marco asked rhetorically.

"It is, but when we talk about being a good person, I have always been taught to be, what's the word, doctrinaire. It's one of our original points that President Frank had declared: one cannot go halfway when being a good person. That's also why we only declare if Hobbes is right or wrong, not how right or how wrong. Many factors may go into that judgment, but there is no room for shades of gray."

"I think we can learn a lot from Hobbes, just like we can learn a lot from Betas," Marco sagely observed.

The sushi chef, who had been busy churning out morsels that punctuated their heavy thoughts, spoke up:

"Forgive how I'm breaking the stereotype by talking, but what are you discussing? When you say Hobbes, I think of Calvin and Hobbes."

"We have been developing an AI who can determine, given a situation, what's right and what's wrong. At Heller, we pride ourselves on growing morality in our students like one would grow flowers in a garden, but we cannot help everyone. If someone's going about their day and they encounter a difficult situation, certainly they can ponder it themselves, but they might need a guiding hand. And thus we have Hobbes," President Haneul explained.

"Neat. It's very, hmm... articulate. You should have it write your English essays."

"Plagiarism is strictly forbidden," she said.

"But what if someone had a homework assignment to write about their own philosophy, or what the 'proper' answer is as you put it? Could they not ask Hobbes and pass this response off as their own, maybe simplifying the language so it doesn't sound like a perfect response?"

Marco had never personally thought to plagiarize anything, but plagiarism was one of the many issues where the club found itself reining in the behaviors of students who had a full sixteen hours when not at school to fill their minds with bad habits. One school of good-person thought said that if one could get away with something like plagiarism, one had a moral obligation to, since it gave an advantage over one's friends (who were really rivals, who were really sworn enemies, who were really pond scum). Filial piety stated that teachers were to be afforded respect, but once a wiseguy had asked why the teachers deserved respect if they weren't beholden to the same code of conduct. At least the teachers agreed plagiarism was bad, though not to the degree it deserved cups of vinegar. The sushi chef had a point, Marco realized, and it was a point no club member would ever think of.

The secondary issue was a classic dilemma when it came to AI: like diluting vinegar until it lost its sting, if all the club wrote, if all the club consulted, if all the club thought about, were what Hobbes said—if they could outsource all brain function to Hobbes—it would become impossible to distinguish fact from fabulation. There would be no more reason to think critically about anything, but then again, the club saw blind prescriptivism as the gold standard for all communications.

"They could, but nobody would," President Haneul said. "I don't want to nag you, Marco, for all of lunch, so let us shelve the topic. You are right that we can learn a lot from Hobbes, and maybe it is fine if you never take fault with it, as long as you keep challenging it to be original. I think you could lead seminars when you return to campus, if you weren't a Gamma. Do you want to be a Beta?"

"I should only be what I deserve."

"I think you deserve to be a Beta," President Haneul said, and a few taps later Marco received a notification saying he had been promoted. "It is as you said: we can learn a lot from Betas."

After their feast, which might have not been worth however much President Haneul had paid, they left the restaurant and lingered awkwardly at the street corner.

"Where are you going?" President Haneul asked.

"I went all this way, I thought I would go to the park for a bit. The sushi made me want to visit the Japanese garden. You're welcome to join me."

President Haneul shook her head. "I must go work. I hope you enjoyed lunch. Maybe you could say you had a whale of a time."

"I did," Marco said without laughing.

This proved sufficient for President Haneul, who began walking toward the parking garage. Apparently Betas weren't worth formal goodbyes either. Ordinarily this would have been a cause for celebration, finally having earned the right to be treated like a human being, but part of Marco thought that was a right inalienable from everyone and not something that had to be earned by delivering pithy remarks on command.

He continued his walk toward the Japanese garden, which was probably the most luxurious of all of San Sebastian's natural attractions where the police wouldn't be called on you for trespassing. Sure, there were yards up in the hills where people kept peacocks, who sometimes would wander loose and peck at people's cars—there were even topiaries, and bottlebrush plants dripping with honeydew, and grapevines on the slopes that could boast their own terroir. But they didn't like gawkers, at least not without the locals' blessing. So the garden it was.

The garden had seen better days: Marco hadn't visited it until high school, when he suddenly had cause to spend time on the other side of the highway. He had vague recollections of President Frank mentioning it in his lectures, and while perhaps those were just complementing his usual garden metaphors—Borges's garden of forking paths, the inauthenticity of Olive Garden, the Garden of Gethsemane that was the original Olive Garden—he wasn't solely playing to his hometown crowd. If he ever cared enough to dig through the club archives, some histories would have revealed themselves: it was the favorite haunt of a certain John Zakarian, who in his monastic eccentricity was an untainted font of virtue, and it was where President Frank once met John and had his first boba in years, symbolically sloughing off his high school obligations and looking toward a grayer future—but that was a secret lost to time, and not one Marco would have ever known. But what was documented was a chance encounter a few years earlier, when President Frank had the misfortune of running into Vice President Juliet on her birthday, and had thus been marked by fate to forever have her company.

In the present, anyone looking at its emerald waters that were only emerald because of the overgrown algae would think it silly to impart the garden with significance: only people with no places to go would romanticize it. But it was where he went, and it seemed like as good a place to celebrate as any. He entered the front gate and saw his own forking paths. The left was a dead end, so that was out, and forward would eventually loop over to the right path, so forward it was. He looked up trying to find where the sun was coming from, so he could shield his eyes, and saw a tall residential building that poked out above the treeline and didn't help the atmosphere. Forward took him past some locals enjoying a summer afternoon violating the rule prohibiting food and drink and in a lazy loop around that eventually took him to the entrance again. It was time to return home, for lack of anything else to do.

On the bus ride back, Marco texted the group chat of the four of them the joyous news. "Congratulations, you're one step closer to being as miserable as us," Priya immediately wrote back.

"Are you with Kenny again?" Marco texted back. A laughing reaction followed.

"He's busy arguing with his dad on the phone. What a loser."

"We can learn a lot from Betas," Jessica added unhelpfully.

"I think you could learn a lot from me before. President Haneul thought so."

"Ooh, a date?" Isaac asked.

"I doubt it. How's Vice President Cynthia doing?" Priya asked.

"Who are you asking?" Isaac responded. Marco thought he'd let them have their moment.

"You, duh. Have you seen her since the party?"

"Of course, all the time, after robotics camp."

"And?"

"We chat, sometimes eat lunch together, IDK."

"You should ask her to go with you to the fair tomorrow."

"Ooh, that's tomorrow? OK I'll ask her."

"President Haneul only wanted to talk business and chastise me for not doing enough work," Marco said after a few moments of dead air.

"Vice President Cynthia says yes," Isaac said.

"Wait you actually asked her? LMAO that was a joke," Priya clarified. "But good for you. Maybe you two can go on the tunnel of love."

"All of you should go too," Isaac suggested, unfazed.

"Not for me. Rollercoasters make me puke. Maybe Marco and Jessica can go."

"Sure!" Jessica texted, and Marco had no choice but voice his assent.

Jessica texted him directly a few minutes later: "You think we'd be third-wheeling? I don't want to interrupt anything if there's, you know, romance..."

"An audience wouldn't stop Vice President Cynthia. Do you actually want to go to the fair, or are you just bored?"

"I'm bored."

"So am I."

"I'll pick you up around seven."

"See you then," Marco said. The bus reached his stop and he disembarked.