Soren Kastner entered the negotiation chamber on Valos Station and immediately identified the anomaly. Five chairs for six delegations. The Meritocracy of Eridani had sent no representative, only a message that their seat should remain vacant.
The other delegates shifted uncomfortably as Soren examined the empty chair with measured interest. General Tarask of the Procyon Coalition leaned forward, voice pitched low.
“Ambassador Kastner, this is unprecedented. Chairman Kivo was their lead negotiator. We expected him.”
Soren noted the General’s pupils—dilated slightly beyond the station’s lighting conditions warranted. Concern, not aggression.
“Has the Meritocracy provided an explanation?” Soren asked, maintaining the formal neutrality that had defined his thirty-year diplomatic career.
The Terran Trade Minister, Zhang, slid a data crystal across the polished surface. “Only this. For your eyes alone, they specified.”
Soren inserted the crystal into his neural interface. The message was brief, encrypted in diplomatic shorthand: Chairman Kivo died yesterday. Heart failure. Succession protocols initiated. Negotiations must proceed immediately. Do not disclose death. Empty chair represents continuity of position.
Soren erased the message with a blink command and surveyed the delegates. The Rigellian representative’s dorsal ridges had flattened—a sign of suspicion. The Centauri corporate envoy was checking market fluctuations on her wrist display. The Tau Ceti observer’s antennae quivered, sensing tension.
Seventeen worlds, four trillion citizens, three decades of cold war—all balanced on what happened in this room over the next seventy-two hours.
“Shall we begin?” Soren gestured to the table, deliberately nodding toward the empty chair as if acknowledging an occupant.
“Without the Eridani?” General Tarask demanded.
“The Eridani Meritocracy is present,” Soren replied, “through their position, which remains unchanged.” He pulled out his chair and seated himself. “The Concordat recognises this diplomatic protocol. We will proceed.”
The Rigellian’s translator converted a series of clicks. “The chair represents a dead man, doesn’t it?”
Soren’s face remained impassive. “The chair represents the Meritocracy’s position in these negotiations. Who holds official authority within their system is internal to their governance.”
“You’re asking us to negotiate with furniture,” the Centauri envoy said, but she had stopped checking markets.
“I’m asking you to negotiate with positions rather than personalities,” Soren corrected. “Which is what diplomacy has always been.”
For seventy-two hours, they negotiated. For seventy-two hours, Soren occasionally directed questions to the empty chair, then interpreted the Meritocracy’s established positions as responses. The other delegates, initially skeptical, gradually accepted the fiction.
On the final day, an Eridani delegation arrived with their new Chairman. The treaties were signed. No public announcement of Kivo’s death was made until a month later, well after the markets had stabilised and the peace had held.
Years afterward, when asked how he had maintained the diplomatic fiction, Soren simply replied, “I negotiated with what was present—their position, their interests, their constraints. These exist independently of individuals. The chair was never empty in any way that mattered.”