The Years of the City, Chapter 7: V. Gwenanda and the Supremes

Chapter 7 of *The Years of the City* buries its most radical proposition inside its most casual detail. Pohl gives us a future Supreme Court where two members are machines — "the Tin Twins," grumbling to each other in high-speed beeps, draped in black doilies because the Chief Justice insists on robes for everyone. But the chapter doesn't center on them. It centers on Gwenanda, an 84-year-old Black woman justice who ducks behind her bench for a quick hit to fight boredom, whose boss pinches her on the way to the bathroom, and who wakes up one morning next to a lover staring at a papaya and has the legal epiphany that will reshape the court. Pohl's move is structurally peculiar: he introduces AI justices as furniture and treats the messy, embodied, occasionally unprofessional humanity of the court as the engine of justice. The chapter reads like a procedural comedy until you notice it's arguing that institutions survive not by becoming more rational but by remaining stubbornly, embarrassingly human — and that the machines know this, which is why they wear the doilies without complaint.