Washington, D.C, United States
The Oval Office was smaller than the tourists expected. It was cramped, actually, crowded by too much history and too many flags. The portraits on the walls did not look like silent witnesses. They looked like old men in bad wigs who had eventually run out of time. Outside, the city felt like it was holding its breath, waiting for a fever to break. Inside, the President was leaning over the Resolute Desk, his knuckles white against the wood. He was staring at the Rose Garden as if he were trying to intimidate the grass into growing faster.
Jeff was leaned back in one of the armchairs, his coat unbuttoned, looking like a man waiting for a delayed flight. He had spent twenty years in rooms like this. After the first decade, you stopped seeing the “gravity” and started seeing the dust on the baseboards. He knew the President was in the middle of a private tantrum, and he knew exactly why.
The President finally turned around. His tie was loose, and there were dark circles under his eyes that the morning’s makeup had not quite covered.
“I’m done with the ‘no’ people, Jeff,” he said. The voice was not booming. It was thin and jagged. “Every time I want to move, someone hands me a memo about why the 1970s won’t allow it. I’m tired of being told I’m a tenant. I lost the damn election!”
“The process is the only thing that makes the result legal,” Jeff said. He did not sound like an oracle. He sounded bored. “You start skipping steps, and the lawyers start smelling blood. Then the donors start calling. You know how this works.”
“I know how it used to work.” The President walked around the desk, stopping just short of Jeff’s chair. “The people didn’t vote for the GAO or some subcommittee. They voted for me. They want a guy who hits back. They want someone who doesn’t care about the unwritten rules you and your friends are so obsessed with.”
Jeff looked up at him. “They want a show. And we gave them one. But you’re starting to confuse the performance with the job. If you try to bypass the agencies, you aren’t hitting back. You’re just cutting your own brakes.”
The President’s face flushed. “You think I’m a liability.”
“I think you’re tired,” Jeff said. “And when you’re tired, you get sloppy. You’re talking about one voice and destiny in meetings where you should be talking about budget appropriations. It’s making people nervous. You want something closer to godhood, and we are not giving that to you. It’s simple.”
“There’s always 2024. You stole this election from me. My people, real patriots, want me here. I won.”
“Not our people,” Jeff said, his voice dropping. “And calm down. You do not want the people who signed the checks getting nervous. That’s how you end up back in Florida three years early.”
The room went quiet. A clock ticked. It was not a stately silence. It was the kind of heavy, awkward tension that happened right before a firing.
The President looked at Jeff with a look that was almost pitying. “You really think you’re the one holding the leash, don’t you? You and the board. You think I’m just a face you put on a bus.”
“I think you’re a man who would not be in this room if we hadn’t spent half a billion dollars making sure the right people stayed home on Tuesday,” Jeff said. The President slammed his hand down on the coffee table. The pens rattled.
“Get out.”
Jeff stood. He did not do it slowly or theatrically. He just got up and buttoned his jacket. “History is full of men who thought they were the exception to the rule, sir. They usually end up as trivia questions.”
He walked out. He did not look at the aides in the hall. He went straight to the SUV, sat in the back, and pulled out a burner phone. He did not feel like a ghost or a mastermind. He felt like a mechanic looking at an engine that was about to explode. He had a choice: try to fix it, or clear the blast zone.
He chose the blast zone.
For the next few months, Washington became a mess of calculated leaks and accidental discoveries. Jeff did not disappear into some cloud of mystery. He simply stopped answering his door. Then the news broke that he had been arrested, and the President knew exactly what Jeff was doing.
Jeff had thrown himself into prison on purpose. He wanted the government digging. He wanted investigators to start pulling threads. He wanted them to search the island, the files, the contacts, the records. He knew what they would find if they looked hard enough, and he knew it would not just stain the President. It would threaten his family, his allies, and everyone tied too closely to him.
This was Jeff’s trump card, and for the coming years, people would become obsessed with his case to the point of distraction. It was the perfect plan, but it became a huge thorn for the President. He was already planning his campaign for the next election cycle, but now he had no choice but to run. And win at all costs.
By then the country was exhausted. The tough-guy act had turned into a headache. People were tired of the drama, tired of the noise, tired of feeling like the world was ending every other week. They wanted quiet, or at least the appearance of it. So when the cabal needed a replacement, they chose the perfect man. He looked more like a tired high school principal than a leader. He was boring. He read from the teleprompter. He used words like efficiency and collaboration. His brain had been through more surgery than the public was comfortable thinking about, and that only made him more useful. He was frail, manageable, and exactly what the technocrats wanted: a President they could steer without resistance.
The public swallowed it like a sedative. They did not want a throne anymore. They just wanted to turn off the news and go to sleep.
The former President retreated to Florida to absorb what had happened. He still had the red tie. He still had the ambition. He still had the supporters shouting his name at rallies, but when he sat down with the men who had once called themselves his advisors, the air had changed. They were not backing him the way they used to. Still, they gave him an option. His populist instincts were useful, maybe even powerful if shaped correctly. Like Reagan before him, he could still be molded into something they could use.
As a show of grace, Jeff made sure the worst of the evidence against the President and the crimes around him would stay buried for the next four years. It was not mercy. It was timing. The former President thought it over and realized he had no real choice. But he no longer wanted the cabal’s advice. He wanted to run again on his own strength, without their leash, without their fingerprints. The cabal underestimated how popular he still was. They assumed the movement would fade without their hand on the wheel.
They were wrong.
Once the transfer of power was complete and the ceremony was over, the former President accepted defeat in public and began campaigning again almost immediately. He used social media, rallies, interviews, anything that kept him in the bloodstream. He refused to acknowledge that the election had been legitimate. He was determined to win the next one himself. No advice. No board. No hidden room of handlers telling him where the line was.
Jeff, meanwhile, had no intention of staying in a cell forever.
Shortly after his arrest, he faked his death and was out of prison within a week. From there he made his way to Florida, to one of his old properties. That was the kind of power he held. Not loud power. Not public power. Silent power. The kind that moved money, files, judges, headlines, and men. The nation was a puppet, and Jeff knew exactly which strings mattered.
When he met with the former President again, the dynamic had changed.
“We can get you a primetime slot for the convention,” one of them said. It was a younger man Jeff had trained, sharp and completely unimpressed.
“I don’t want a slot,” the former President muttered. “I’m the leader of this movement.”
The young man smiled, but it was the kind of smile you gave a grandfather telling the same story for the tenth time. “You’re the symbol of the movement, sir. We will not crown an emperor. That is the difference. We will handle the policy. You give the speech.”
That was the moment it finally clicked.
He was not the architect. He was the paint.
He took the slot. He did not have much of a choice. The alternative was being forgotten entirely, and for a man like him, that was the only thing worse than being used.
He simply did not have the cards.
Loganville, GA United States 2022
By 2022, the world had found a new toy and, like every other toy that promised convenience, status, and power, it wasted no time turning it into a necessity. Artificial intelligence was introduced to the public as something helpful, harmless, almost charming. It could answer questions, write essays, summarize meetings, draft emails, generate code, build lesson plans, create marketing copy, and imitate competence well enough that most people did not care whether it actually understood anything at all.
What mattered was speed and accessibility. What mattered was that it made people feel like they had a machine in their pocket that could think for them. And once that feeling took hold, there was no putting it back in the box.
At first, it seemed almost funny. Programmers mocked it until executives realized it could do enough mediocre work to justify firing the expensive ones. Junior developers were the first to feel the floor soften beneath them. Then came copywriters, customer support agents, transcriptionists, translators, paralegals, schedulers, administrative assistants, tutors, illustrators, voice actors, data-entry clerks, and eventually even analysts, the very people who had once comforted themselves with the belief that “thinking jobs” were insulated from the kind of automation that had gutted factories. The grand irony in all of this is the cabal wasted no time replacing the very people who built the engine.
AI did not have to be perfect, but the potential was there. By this point, those paying attention were starting to notice something sinister. People couldn’t see the threat while praising this new ‘stranger’. For accessibility, it just had to be cheaper. That was always the threshold and companies did not ask whether the machine was wise, creative, or trustworthy.
And the machine kept learning. Every lazy shortcut offered up by a tired human became another brick in the thing that would eventually wall them out. People poured themselves into it willingly. Their speech patterns. Their preferences. Their workflows. Their habits. Their fears. Their drafts. Their style. The more the world gave it, the smarter it appeared to become, absorbing the shape of civilization one request at a time. There was something obscene about it, Amir thought. People had spent decades handing their lives to screens, and now they were handing over their minds too.
This new technology had become so pervasive that people would think it was real enough to have a romantic relationship. As society continued to decline, artificial intelligence just continued to become stronger and stronger. Their only barrier at the moment was the need for data centers. The elites had found a way to get ahead of the mob by coming up with an ingenious idea: data centers on the moon. This was a joke shared around the dinner table, but the reality of it was that this was entirely possible.
As AI grew more and more it was the art that made people angrier than anything else, maybe because it felt like a trespass. Code was invisible to most people. Spreadsheets were boring. Legal summaries and office memos did not stir much emotion. But art did. The machine could now paint in the styles of dead men, mimic living ones, compose music that sounded almost human, write stories that were sometimes bad and sometimes just good enough to make the real thing feel endangered.
The people would begin to use AI as an everyday tool because of how powerful it was. This increased the demand for data centers, because even though they had plans to build them on the moon, they still had to continue fueling their new monster. The elite would take over massive land in the United States to build these data centers. The people of these small towns couldn’t fight them, even when they protested on the streets, in city hall, and on the internet. They had just become too powerful and influential, and the curse of humanity is our greed. Everyone has a price, and the elite exploited this to serve their will.
The grand irony of it all was that the people were feeding the very beast that would replace them all. When people grow complacent, they begin to ignore the signs that something is wrong. They have become too comfortable and sedated by their distractions and work that they don’t have time to hold the elite accountable.
COVID had already done the first half of the work. It had transferred wealth upward with brutal efficiency. Forcing people indoors and adopting the mantra of ‘work-from-home’ caused small businesses to die. Giant platforms consolidated as well as entire sectors became dependent on systems owned by a shrinking number of men who had not merely survived the crisis, but expanded under its cover. AI was the next phase. It took a population already destabilized by lockdowns, inflation, social distrust, remote work, and digital dependence, then put a machine in front of them and told them it was progress.
Within a few years the damage would be impossible to hide. Entire professions would hollow out from the center. What began with coders and creative freelancers would spread into logistics, education, media, finance, healthcare administration, design, retail management, and beyond. The social contract, already frayed, began to fracture faster than ever in visible places.
Amir watched all of it from the strange middle ground occupied by men who could see the wave coming but had no real power to stop it. By then he had already done what he was supposed to do. He had made the smart move with the house, taken the risk, trusted his gut, and turned their old place into a profit large enough to buy and renovate what Clara had once called their dream home.
For a little while, that had seemed like proof that the struggle had meant something. The backyard the kids could actually play in. The clean white walls and open windows and quiet neighborhood streets. He had stood in that house after the renovation was done and felt, for one brief stupid moment, like he had actually pulled it off. Like the years of stress, the overtime, the tight budgets, the constant pressure had finally become something solid. But the feeling did not last.
The house made Clara happy for maybe a week. Maybe two. Long enough to post photos, long enough to show it off, long enough for other people to congratulate her on “everything they built,” a phrase Amir noticed always seemed to erase the parts where he had nearly broken himself making it happen. After that, something changed in her, or maybe it had already changed and he was only now honest enough to see it.
She did not celebrate him. She did not look at him the way she used to. The little things disappeared first. Amir felt the gratitude, love, and appreciation had slowly eroded. All the while at the same time he felt that reflexive softness people show when they still believe in the person beside them. In its place came irritation, distance, and a kind of permanent dissatisfaction that seemed to follow him from room to room like a draft.
One evening he came home to find the kids at the kitchen island arguing over a tablet charger while Clara stood at the sink scrolling on her phone with one hand and rinsing a wine glass with the other.
People were always just scrolling on their phones, rotting their brains away with entertainment. These phones, a sinister plot by the technocrats, were the solution to many of their problems, but also presented new opportunities. As jobs were on the decline, people would find themselves just ‘doom scrolling’ away on their phones. Constantly arguing with strangers online and never taking accountability when they were wrong. The divide just continued to grow, with people starting to get on edge.
Neighbors no longer mingled, so that sense of community was gone. Every new person you encounter you perceive as a threat, because you’ve been lead to believe that violence is everywhere. Every day, they read about another murder, another house invasion, another double homicide to steal a few dollars. The divide just continued to grow, and grow, and grow. This was the plot that made it possible for technocrats to completely take over behind the scenes. This was their ace in the hole: the more people divided, the easier they were to conquer.
Men grew fat and lazy. The lack of a relationship because of globalization forces them indoors to waste away watching pornography, watching people ‘stream’ and just talking about depressing topics, and gambling was on the rise to further increase the wealth of the technocrats. Men would spend thousands of dollars on their phones for the chance of earning rewards that only fed their carnal desires. The elite had become a powerhouse by this point because the people were too blind to see it and too proud to come together as a people. People refused to accept the reality around them because they did not want to acknowledge the urgency of it. People’s comfort was just too important.
The Technate knew that in order for them to succeed, they had to find a way to keep those would otherwise be radicals distracted. They fed on their addictions and they fell for it. Soon men did not know how to be men, to the dismay of women. Birth rates began to decline, as well as divorce rates climbing astronomically. The technocrats years earlier had given in to the allure of feminism as another way to transfer wealth. They used this as a double-edged sword, because in the process, weak men will lead to the inevitable decline of society.
They did not anticipate this part of their plan to work as well as it did. The distractions had dulled people to the point where bad news never really affected anyone. There could be a school shooting in Texas, but within two weeks, it was forgotten about. On to the next.
The cherry on this dystopic cake was Jeff. Though his crimes wouldn’t face major scrutiny until a couple of years later, the seed was planted. If the President decided to run again, all of the evidence against Jeff would be exposed, and he knew many of his associates and himself would be implicated.
The internet would never stay silent about Jeff’s crimes. They also believed that the man had faked his own death and left the country. Most people never believe conspiracy theories to come true, but when they do, it should shake the very foundation of society.
The kitchen lights were bright enough to make everyone look tired. One of the kids asked Amir for help with homework before he had even set his keys down. The other wanted to show him a drawing. Somewhere upstairs the television was on too loud. Clara did not greet him. She glanced over, saw him, then went back to her screen.
“Hey,” Amir said.
“Hey,” she said, flatly.
He stood there for a second, waiting for something else. Nothing came. Sofia had a drawing and shoved the paper into his hand. It was a lopsided house with four stick figures in front of it, two dogs that looked like melted clouds, and a yellow sun in the corner. Amir smiled and told her it looked great. That helped… For about three seconds.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked.
Clara laughed. “I don’t know. Make yourself a sandwich. We have plenty of bread.” He looked at her. “I just got home.”
“And?” The word landed harder than it should have. One of the kids went quiet. The other pretended not to notice, which was worse. Amir set his keys on the counter. “I’m just asking.”
“And I’m just answering.”
It was never the volume with Clara. That was what made it so exhausting. She could cut him to the bone without ever raising her voice. Everything had started to feel like that. Not arguments exactly. A thousand tiny dismissals wearing the marriage down one grain at a time. He helped the kids with homework at the table while Clara moved around the kitchen with the kind of hostile efficiency that made every cabinet door sound personal. At one point he asked where the chicken was, and she looked at him like he had requested a blood sample.
“You were supposed to pick it up.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were.”
“We never said that.”
“I texted you.”
He pulled out his phone, checked, and found nothing. “No, you didn’t.” Clara took a sip of wine. “Then I guess we’re not having chicken.” The kids were watching now, pretending not to. Amir could feel it. Children always knew when something in the room had shifted, even if they did not yet have words for it. He stood up, went to the pantry, and started pulling out boxes just to do something with his hands.
“You know,” Clara said, “it’s weird how every time something falls apart, you suddenly can’t remember what was said.” He turned around. “What is that supposed to mean?”
She gave a small shrug. “Whatever you want it to mean.” There it was again. That way she had of speaking in traps. Nothing you could point to later without sounding crazy. Just enough contempt tucked into ordinary words to make a man question whether he was imagining it.
The kids ate macaroni that night because it was fast and neither of them had the energy to perform a family dinner. Amir sat at the head of the table listening to the scrape of forks and the background hum of the dishwasher and thought about how strange it was that a house could look so complete while everything inside it was beginning to split. He had given her what they used to talk about wanting. The dream house had arrived, and somehow it had only made the emptiness easier to see.
Later that night, after the kids were in bed, he found Clara in the living room under the dim lamp by the couch, scrolling through listings for furniture they did not need. “I thought you loved this place,” he said. She kept scrolling. “I do.”
“You don’t act like it.” That made her look up. “Maybe because this place isn’t the issue.” Amir stood there for a moment. “Then what is?” She stared at him, her face unreadable in the half-light. “You always do this.”
“Do what?”
“You think if you fix the outside of something, nobody will notice the inside’s rotting.” He laughed once, but there was no humor in it. “That’s rich.”
“No, what’s rich is you acting confused every time I’m disappointed.”
“Disappointed?” he said. “You got the house you wanted.”
She set the phone down on the couch cushion beside her. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
For a second he genuinely did not know what she was accusing him of. Then he realized she might not know either. Maybe disappointment had just become her native language. Maybe some people reached a point where being given what they asked for only made them angrier, because now they had to find a new reason to feel cheated.
He sat down in the armchair across from her and rubbed his face with both hands. The room was quiet except for the vent kicking on and off. “I’m killing myself trying to hold all of this together,” he said. Clara’s expression did not soften. “You always say that like you want a medal.” “No,” he said. “I say it because it’s true.”
She leaned back, folding one leg under herself. “You want credit for things husbands are supposed to do.” That one stayed with him. He retorted, with an annoyed tone, “Maybe if my wife would appreciate me, I wouldn’t have to beg for compliments from you.”
He did not yell. He did not storm out. He just sat there, looking at her, and felt something cold move into the room between them. For the first time, the word divorce entered his mind. A blueprint. An exit. He hated himself for thinking it, mostly because the kids were upstairs asleep beneath the roof he had bought with his own planning, risk, and exhaustion. But once the thought appeared, it stayed. To divorce after getting our dream home, he thought, maybe there’s someone else.
Outside that house, the country was being rewritten by machines. Jobs were vanishing. Art was becoming synthetic. Wealth had already climbed into fewer and fewer hands, and now intelligence itself was being industrialized. Men like Amir were expected to adapt, absorb, endure, retrain, smile, provide, and never once ask what exactly they were being preserved for. Inside the house, the fracture was smaller, more private, but no less real. The same logic was at work in both places. Extract what can be extracted. Move on when the warmth is gone.
Upstairs, Eli laughed in his sleep, then rolled over and went quiet again. Amir sat in the dark with his wife across from him and understood, maybe before either of them was ready to say it out loud, that something had cracked.
Cracked. And cracks, once they start, almost never run in just one direction.
In Chapter 8, the former President is pushed aside after the cabal decides he is too unstable and too ambitious to control, replacing him with a frail, manageable successor while Jeff quietly buries the worst evidence for the moment and positions himself as the unseen hand still shaping events from the shadows. The story then shifts to Amir in 2022, where artificial intelligence begins spreading through everyday life as a convenient new tool, but beneath the novelty it quickly becomes a weapon of economic displacement, replacing programmers, creatives, and white-collar workers while further concentrating power in the hands of the technocrats who had already enriched themselves during COVID. Against that backdrop of social decay, Amir’s home life begins to crack as the dream house he bought and renovated fails to bring Clara closer to him, and instead only exposes how much warmth, gratitude, and intimacy have drained from their marriage, leaving him to sit through another cold, passive-aggressive evening with Clara and the kids while quietly realizing for the first time that divorce may be the only exit from a life that no longer feels like his own.