The secondary Senate chamber was a room that had been designed for exactly this kind of contingency and had never, in thirty years of contingency planning, been used for it.
It showed. The chairs didn't match. The lighting ran from three different fixture types installed in three different decades. The emergency communication array on the far wall had been tested monthly for thirty years and chose tonight to display a persistent error message that the technical aide assigned to it had been quietly trying to resolve for forty minutes without success.
Senator Valla Crane — third term, Infrastructure and Defense Committee, the only woman in the room whose hands were not shaking — watched the technical aide's increasingly desperate relationship with the communication array and decided it was the most honest thing happening in the chamber.
