This is the prologue to “The Technate”, a novel about the collapse of America due to artificial intelligence and rising costs of living. People suffer a ‘soft genocide’, where slowly those who can’t keep up will die. Massive job losses with rising costs, such as gas, increasing property taxes, and rampant government corruption, all lead to instability. Even health care is too expensive for some to afford treatment. Things like insulin become more expensive to weed out those deemed ‘undesirable’. Based on Malthusian principles of population control, the elite have deemed that only those who can contribute and survive the ‘soft genocide’ stood to inherit the future. When society collapses, a New America will be formed by technocrats under an autocratic dictatorship, using mass surveillance to seize the entire Western hemisphere, and ushering a new era with the goal to propel humanity into the future.

This is fiction.

For now.

Subscribe now

Join the movement.

1994

When I try to remember that day, I must admit something first: most of it isn’t memory in the way adults think of memory. It comes in fragments. Feelings without words attached to them. I was three, maybe four years old, and the adults around me were speaking a language of concern and plans that meant absolutely nothing to me. I remember Boston because that’s what my parents told me later, but in my mind, I couldn’t comprehend what a city was. What I saw was a room full of legs and coats and voices that float above my head like clouds I can’t quite see through. My brothers are there somewhere along with my parents too. Everyone seems to be waiting for something important, but for me it might as well have been a train station for giants. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. The adults were talking over each other, voices moving up and down in ways that suggested urgency or irritation, but to a three-year-old the entire conversation might as well have been static. When you’re that young, the adult world feels like a radio you can hear but never understand.

So, I did what children do when they’re trapped in the orbit of adult conversations and boredom. I wandered. I touched things I wasn’t supposed to touch. “Stop touching stuff, Ben!”, my older brother would scold at me. My memory of the room comes in flashes: polished floors, the smell of something sugary in the air, the way the fluorescent lights made everything look slightly too bright. I remember tugging on the sleeve of one of my brothers and being brushed away without much thought. Nobody meant anything by it. They were distracted. Adults always are. When you’re three, distraction feels like invisibility. So, I started exploring the room on my own, moving from one object to the next with the slow curiosity of someone discovering gravity for the first time. A chair became a climbing structure. A counter became a place to press my face against and look over. And then there was the gumball machine.

The machine stood out immediately because it was colorful and round and alive in a way that everything else wasn’t. At least that’s how it looked to a kid. The glass globe held dozens of bright gumballs, each one a tiny planet floating inside a clear universe. I remember being fascinated by the way they pressed against the glass, stacked in impossible ways. I had no money, no idea how the machine worked, and no understanding that it wasn’t meant to be handled by a toddler. What I understood was that it spun. When I touched it, the metal base shifted just slightly. As you may have guessed, the boredom took a toll- I grabbed the gumball machine and began turning it slowly, watching the gumballs roll against the glass. The movement made a soft grinding sound that I thought was interesting. I spun it again. And again. The machine wobbled a little more each time. I didn’t interpret that wobble as danger. To me it was just part of the game

For a moment, that gumball machine, whether it consented or not, became the arbiter of my future. This simple machine that works by giving it coins to get a gumball. This simple creation invented by a random person I don’t know or would ever meet. Spinning felt like heaven, considering how bored I was.

Adults like to imagine childhood accidents as quick moments, but the way I remember it now, everything has slowed down. I spun the machine harder this time, pushing it around with both hands. The base scraped slightly against the floor. I felt the weight shift before I understood what it meant. The machine tipped just enough that gravity took over. For a split second I froze, confused, still holding the metal frame as it leaned toward me. Then it slipped out of my hands completely. “Ben!”, I remember my mom yelling. The entire thing toppled backward. I didn’t even have time to move. The heavy base swung down, and the glass globe came with it, striking the back of my head with a dull crack that seemed much louder than it probably was. The next sensation I remember is the floor rushing up toward my face as my legs gave out beneath me.

What happened after that part is mostly reconstructed from stories people told me later. I know there was shouting. I know someone picked me up. I know my parents panicked, but from inside my own head the moment is quieter than that. There is a flash of pain, sudden and confusing, followed by the strange fog that comes when your brain has no idea what just happened to it. I remember the taste of blood and the feeling that the room had tilted sideways. At three years old I had no language to describe what was happening inside my skull. All I knew later as in an adult, was that this moment had changed me. Looking back, that moment sits in my memory like the first domino in a long line that slowly fell forward. Being borderline is often linked to trauma, unstable environments, and changes in how the brain processes emotion and stress. At the time, no one was thinking about amygdala or neurological consequences. It was just a kid who got hurt doing something stupid. Kids do that all the time.

The real story isn’t the accident itself. The real story is what came after, because the symptoms that would later define my life began to slowly manifest themselves. Not dramatically at first, just small shifts in behavior that adults around me either missed or dismissed as normal childhood volatility. A three-year-old having intense emotions isn’t unusual. A kid having trouble calming down isn’t unusual either… but what nobody recognized at the time was that something in my emotional wiring had changed. The adults in the room that day moved on from the incident after the panic passed. For them it became a story about a childhood accident, the kind families laugh about years later. For me it was the beginning of something that would follow me for decades, long before anyone had the words to explain it.

As nascent as it came, it would later become a cacophony of misery.

1998

Ben is now seven years old, and school has been tough for him. Whenever he couldn’t figure something out, he’d throw a tantrum. Tantrums were common. Ben hated his emotional breakdowns, but the adults around him blamed it on anger issues and moved on. As time passed, the fighting with other students became worse. He could not control his emotions like other kids seemingly could, so he would become an easy target to bully. Instead of finding Ben help, people isolated themselves from him because they didn’t want to deal with him. He was easy to discard.

Ben was old enough that people expected certain things from him. School had rules, structure, worksheets with instructions printed clearly across the top, and teachers who assumed that if they explained something once, the children sitting in their desks would simply understand it. For most kids that was probably true. For Ben… it wasn’t. He remembers the feeling of sitting at his desk staring at a page that made no sense to him, letters and numbers arranged in a way that felt like a puzzle everyone else had already solved. The longer he stared, the more pressure built inside his chest. It was a kind of rising panic that he didn’t have the language to describe at seven years old. Eventually the panic turned into anger, and the anger turned into a tantrum. Chairs scraped, voices raised, teachers rushing over. Fists would fly. From the outside it probably looked like a kid throwing a fit because he didn’t want to do his work. From the inside it felt like drowning while everyone else in the room was breathing normally.

“Stop being so emotional! Calm down!”, the teachers would shout. If only it were that easy.

The tantrums became a regular part of Ben’s life at school. He hated them even as they were happening. That’s something people rarely understand about children who lose control emotionally. It wasn’t enjoyable, and it wasn’t something they chose to do. Ben could feel the moment when his emotions started slipping away from him, the same way someone might feel a storm coming before the rain starts. His chest would tighten, his thoughts would spin faster, and suddenly he wasn’t reacting to the worksheet or the math problem anymore.

He was reacting to the overwhelming feeling that he had failed at something everyone else seemed able to do without effort. Teachers didn’t see it that way. To them it looked like anger issues. That phrase started appearing around Ben more. Adults said it in conversations they thought he couldn’t hear, or they said it directly to his parents during meetings after school. The explanation was simple: Ben had a temper. He needs to learn how to control his anger.

It wasn’t until later in adulthood that a few people in Ben’s life understood his condition. It was easy to ignore the weird ones, and hope they fade away into obscurity to make everyone else’s life simpler.

As the months passed, the situation didn’t improve. If anything, it became worse. The emotional explosions that started with frustration over schoolwork began spilling into everything else. Ben fought with other students more often than he should have. Sometimes it started because someone teased him. Sometimes it started because someone bumped into him or said something small that felt enormous in the moment. Other times, Ben honestly couldn’t remember how the argument began. What he did remember is the speed with which his emotions escalated. A normal disagreement could turn into a full confrontation before Ben even realized what was happening. It was like a switch flipping inside his brain, sending everything into overdrive. He couldn’t slow it down once it started.

The adults around him responded in the only way they seemed to know how. Instead of asking why these emotional outbursts were happening, they focused on containing them. Ignoring them. Reprimanding Ben more and more due to not being able to control himself. Teachers separated him from the other kids when they could. Sometimes they moved his desk away from everyone else. Sometimes he was sent into the hallway or the principal’s office to calm down. Other parents noticed the pattern too. Ben could see it in the way they looked at him during pickup or school events; that subtle shift people make when they’ve decided someone is a problem.

Children follow those signals quickly. The other students began avoiding him, not necessarily because they hated Ben, but because they had learned that being around him sometimes meant trouble. Isolation started creeping in long before Ben or his parents had a word for it.

Looking back now, the most painful part wasn’t the fights or the tantrums themselves. It’s the absence of curiosity from the adults who were supposed to help. No one asked whether something deeper was going on. No one suggested counseling or evaluation or any kind of structured help. The conclusion was always the same: Ben was difficult, emotional, angry. If the adults believed that strongly enough, then the solution seemed obvious to them. Distance. Keep Ben away from situations where he might explode. Remove the problem rather than investigate it. To a seven-year-old kid who already felt different, that kind of quiet exclusion didn’t fix anything. It simply reinforced the message that something about Ben was wrong in a way no one wanted to deal with.

Subscribe now

This is the prologue from the upcoming novel, “See You Next Tuesday, Christine!”

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? When two hurricanes come together and coalesce to create a single, massive storm- is there still peace that exists within its eye?

Two opposites attract when Ben meets Christine. A solid relationship built on love, trust, and devotion. Though tested by trauma, time, and outside influences, their covenant tries to last until even the inevitable happens.

Ben tries to exist in a world that is ignorant when it comes to mental health, where those around him would rather ignore the problem than to confront it. What Ben never expected was that the love that once existed between him and Christine would not be able to overcome the dangers of outside influence, constant validation, and willful ignorance.

Buy Direct

Purchase on Amazon

You see it every where now. Privileged liberal women who have never struggled for anything in their life, having the audacity to impede federal officers. Where does this confidence come from? Why is it that it seems women, even sometimes unqualified, have taken leadership roles with little experience? If you’ve ever had to watch what you say near a woman, or even near a man who may have a crush on said woman, you can relate heavily to this novel. A narrative and a comedy to lighten up the tension we face today.