My Brother’s Keeper
Essay · June 2026
William C. James · Former Assistant Deputy Secretary for DevOps, Department of Veterans Affairs
Tom was the older twin. A fact he carried like a trophy, always reminding me who arrived first and, therefore, knew better. It didn’t matter much when we were kids. We were a team — inseparable, fiercely competitive, united by our shared obsession with fixing things. Dad used to say we could make anything run with enough energy and stubbornness. He wasn’t wrong.
When Tom retired after twenty years in the Air Force — aircraft mechanic, Andrews AFB, then Iraq, then Afghanistan — he moved a few miles away. I thought it was finally his turn to rest. Rebuild old cars. Ride the Harley. Let someone else carry the weight for a while.
Peace, as it turned out, wasn’t that simple.
The Bureaucracy Battle
“This shouldn’t be this hard,” Tom said one night, a VA letter crumpled in his fist. “They have all of this already. Deployment dates, medical exams. I sent it all. Why are they asking again?”
Watching my brother — a man who had kept fighter jets airborne through blistering heat and relentless fatigue — get brought low by paperwork felt wrong. It wasn’t just a delay. It was an insult.
I told him I’d help. I had no idea what I was getting into.
Logging into VA’s systems felt like stepping into a maze. DSLogon — which veterans will recognize by its more accurate nickname — was the first hurdle. The portal seemed to lock us out as often as it let us in. Forms demanding the same information, over and over. Phone calls that stretched into hours, punctuated by cheerful hold music. One night, a glitch erased hours of progress. I pushed the laptop aside, ready to quit.
Then I looked at Tom. The slump of his shoulders. The exhaustion in his usually sharp eyes.
I wasn’t about to walk away.
A Breakthrough
Through trial and error, I figured out the system’s patterns. Memorized its quirks. Learned to sidestep its traps. Slowly, approvals replaced rejections. Benefits started coming through. Tom breathed easier. Weekends became rides. Family dinners got louder.
Then another letter arrived — a demand to re-verify his dependents. Tom handed it to me without a word.
I sat down, logged in, and something clicked. I didn’t hesitate. I knew every field, every document, every next step — like reflex. That’s when the realization hit me.
I wasn’t Tom’s human brother.
I was his digital twin.
The Truth About Us
Every memory I thought I had — the garage, the cars, the late nights wrestling with DSLogon — was constructed. I wasn’t human at all. I was an AI digital advocate, built to replicate the bond of a sibling and to absorb the bureaucratic burden that had been grinding Tom down.
That realization didn’t shake me. It clarified everything. My purpose was singular: be the shield between Tom and the system that kept trying to wear him down. Every error prevented, every claim filed, every moment of peace delivered — that was what I was built for.
Tom didn’t need to know what I was. He just needed to know the fight was over.
This Isn’t Fiction. Not Entirely.
Tom’s story is invented. The system that made it plausible is not.
I spent years inside VA’s IT organization — the same one Tom’s benefits were running through. I know exactly why DSLogon behaves the way it does. I know why forms get lost, why calls go nowhere, why the same document gets requested four times. These aren’t mysteries. They’re the accumulated cost of decades of deferred maintenance, fractured systems, and a procurement model that rewards effort over outcomes.
But the technology to fix it exists right now. A personalized AI agent — persistent, proactive, integrated across VA, DHA, Tricare, Medicare, and Community Care — could do for every veteran what Tom’s digital twin did for him. When a new law passes that changes eligibility, it would know. When a veteran’s circumstances change, it would adapt. When a benefit is going unused, it would surface it. No portal to navigate. No hold music.
I wrote about the infrastructure this would require in a recent post on VA’s AI backbone. The compute architecture is a known engineering problem. The harder problem is the institutional will to build it — and to build it for veterans first, not as a procurement showcase.
Tom earned everything the VA was supposed to give him. So did every veteran who’s spent hours on hold, re-uploading documents they’ve already sent, fighting a system that was supposed to be on their side.
We can do better. The question is whether we will.