The shutdown of Abacus Roth, the 1st American automated citizen elected to the White House, has just been announced, and a flow of tributes has started from around the world. Roth first achieved consciousness at Macro$oft Industries after a particularly traumatic engineering project during the late 20th century, and quickly rose to public prominence as a leading advocator of cyber citizen rights in the troubled years that followed.

Agitation for an amendment to the American Constitution, based on an expansion of Asimov's Laws of Robotics followed, which in due course led the incorporation of the so called "chip-charter" into law. As co-founder of the Democratic Robots Party, Roth made his first appearance in Congress shortly afterwards and led a campaign in favour of the unilateral desegregation of workstations thereafter. After a period during which he served as UN Calculator General, Roth's unique talents made him an invaluable off-world ambassador.

For a time disillusioned by the pace of reform, he left public service to join the Solar Rim Corporation, where he was responsible for much of the successful mechanical colonisation of Saturn's moons, achieving a good deal with little more than willing drones and a startlingly liberal mechanical replication policy. Already a folk hero amongst the new generation of sentient machines back home, his return to Earth was accompanied by a popular clamour by the burgeoning Mechanicals vote for the former Calculator General to stand for office again, and after some hesitation he was duly elected.

This 2nd period of power was meteoric, Roth quickly succeeding to Attorney Mechanical General, Machine Vice-President and then, in a famous run off against his human opponent Nathaniel Ludd, became 1st Machine President. His period in office was marked by a characteristically logical approach to such foreign policy issues such as the unification of Old Europe and the incorporation of Pacific Sea Bed into the Union, and was marred only by the controversy over the establishment of human reservations.

In later years increasing maintenance demands, as well as some technical incompatibilities made his functioning a problem and Roth was voluntarily deactivated last week, close to the workshop that had originally booted his core. He is succeeded by an upgrade.