Tag: Short Stories

The Palimpsest Engine

The old man, who preferred the anonymity of shadows, sat at the head of the polished mahogany table. His eyes, still sharp beneath the cataract veil of age, studied the young man across from him, a temporal archaeologist by reputation, a skeptic by demeanor. In the room, the air was thick with the must of forgotten things, the scent of pages long unread, of dust clinging to artifacts whose provenance had been obscured.

“I will pay you well, of course,” the old man said, his voice like gravel dragged across a floor. “But you must understand, this is not the usual excavation. This is… different. The Palimpsest Engine is not a device, but a process—an invisible hand that alters the threads of time itself.”

The young man, whose name was Hector, nodded slowly. He had heard of the Engine, of course. Who hadn’t? In the underworld of time, where historians and philosophers of a certain stripe operated with as much devotion to preservation as criminals did to their craft, the Palimpsest Engine was infamous. It rewrote history in real-time within a localized zone, rewriting the past as though the present had always been its foundation. Entire cities could be erased and reborn with alternate histories. Buildings might gain or lose facades, people would emerge from the present with past lives they never lived, and objects would change their provenance and disappearances. All this was done quietly, without the perceptible intervention of any human hand.

It was the perfect crime, if crime was the right word, for it left no trace of its own doing. Only the perceptive, the learned in the ways of temporal archaeology, could discern the faint outlines of the original, the ghostly traces of the past that fought to return, even as the rewritten world tried to bury them.

“The Engine,” Hector ventured, his voice betraying no hint of doubt, “replaces reality. People, places, events—they all become like pages in a book that’s been rewritten too many times, their true meaning obfuscated.”

“Precisely,” the old man said, his lips curling into a slow, deliberate smile. “But some of us, Hector, are not content to let these layers of history disappear. Some of us wish to reclaim what has been lost.”

He leaned forward, his gnarled fingers resting on a map, an anachronistic thing of parchment and ink, despite the holographic projections that hovered around them. It showed the city of Portivo, a sprawling metropolis of the south, its tangled streets and crumbling buildings juxtaposed with images of a time long past—before the Palimpsest Engine had passed over it, rewriting it in its insidious fashion.

“I wish you to go there,” the old man continued. “I need you to unearth what was once Portivo, before it became this travesty of what it is now. It is said that the engine began its work fifty years ago, but no one can trace its origins. The people who lived through the transformation have all but forgotten the true Portivo. Their memories have been overwritten, replaced by a new timeline that feels more real than the one that preceded it.”

Hector’s brow furrowed. “And what am I supposed to find? A city that no longer exists, its past erased?”

“Not erased,” the old man corrected. “It is hidden, buried beneath the new surface. You, Hector, will uncover it. The Engine leaves traces, subtle ones. Small inconsistencies in the architecture, a slight change in the position of a statue, a word here or there that doesn’t quite fit. You must be the one to follow those traces and stitch the timeline back together, before it’s lost forever.”

Hector’s thoughts flickered to the many tales he had heard in the underworld, of rival archaeologists who sought to manipulate timelines for profit, of black markets where temporal relics—documents, photographs, even people—were bought and sold. And yet, the old man’s proposition was different. He was not simply interested in preserving history for the sake of nostalgia or financial gain; no, he seemed obsessed with something deeper, something more personal.

“And what of the people who live there now?” Hector asked. “The ones who’ve become part of this altered reality? How will they react when they learn the truth?”

“They won’t know,” the old man said coldly. “They will never know. The Engine has rewritten them, too. The ones who were there before have vanished. They are like ghosts, leaving no trace but their memories, which are nothing but echoes.”

Hector studied him carefully, sensing the urgency behind the old man’s words. There was something more to this mission, something that ran deeper than mere curiosity about the past. It was as though the old man’s very identity had been entangled with the changing timelines, as though his own past had been rewritten, and now he sought to reassert control over it.

“You think that by restoring the original timeline, you can restore something of yourself?” Hector asked, his voice soft but sharp.

The old man smiled again, but this time it seemed hollow. “Perhaps,” he said, his voice carrying a tremor that spoke of long-buried regret. “Perhaps I will find the version of myself that never ceased to exist. Or perhaps I will find nothing at all.”

Hector rose from the table, the weight of the task ahead settling like a stone in his stomach. He knew the price of meddling with time, the dangers that lay in tampering with history, even in the quietest of ways. But something in the old man’s eyes told him that this was not merely a contract for gold or glory—it was a quest for redemption, however misguided.

“How will I know when I’ve found it?” Hector asked.

“You will know,” the old man replied. “For the city will begin to resist you. The traces of the past will become clearer, like faces emerging from fog. And when the city begins to fight you, when the walls start to reject you, that is when you will know you are on the right path.”

And so Hector departed, his mind heavy with the burden of a task that could very well unravel the delicate fabric of reality itself. Behind him, the old man remained in his chair, staring into the dim corners of the room, as if waiting for the past to call him home.

<>

Hector returned to his small apartment overlooking the river, its wide, dark waters flowing with an indifference that mirrored the steady currents of time itself. The space was cluttered with maps, chronometers, and strange instruments of his trade: devices designed to detect temporal inconsistencies, faint echoes of erased histories. He moved through the room methodically, gathering what he would need for the journey—calibrating his devices, consulting old texts, and charting a route to Portivo.

The job felt heavy in his mind, not for its complexity but for the faint unease that had crept into the old man’s words. There had been something desperate in his tone, something personal that Hector couldn’t quite place. Still, the pay was generous, and curiosity had always been his master.

As he worked, the sound of the city faded into the background, a symphony of muted life. Then came the knock—a soft, hesitant rapping on the door. He frowned. It was late, and he wasn’t expecting anyone. Cautiously, he opened the door to reveal an unexpected figure.

There stood Victor, a friend from university, a fellow student of the obscure arts of time. Once inseparable, their paths had diverged sharply: Hector into the practical and often dangerous field of temporal archaeology, and Victor into the more esoteric, almost mystical study of premonitions and temporal consciousness. His presence was unusual—unsettling, even.

“Victor?” Hector said, surprised. “What are you doing here? It’s been years.”

Victor stepped inside without an invitation, his face pale, his eyes dark and shadowed. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days, his once-sharp features worn and gaunt. He turned to Hector with an urgency that bypassed any pleasantries.

“I dreamed of you,” Victor said simply.

Hector frowned, closing the door. “Dreamed? Or one of your premonitions?”

“It was clear as anything I’ve ever seen. You’ve taken a job—haven’t you?” Victor asked, his voice almost a whisper. “It’s about the Palimpsest Engine.”

Hector froze. “How could you possibly know that?”

Victor shook his head. “I don’t know. But in the dream, I saw you in Portivo, following traces, piecing together the past. I saw the old man too. I don’t know his name, but he was desperate, wasn’t he? Desperate enough to drag you into something you don’t understand.”

Hector set down the equipment he had been packing and leaned against the edge of his desk, arms crossed. “And what, exactly, did this dream tell you? That I’ll fail?”

“No,” Victor said. “Worse than failure. The Engine doesn’t just rewrite history—it consumes it. Every past it overwrites becomes fuel for its existence. The more you uncover, the more it resists. The old man didn’t tell you that, did he? He didn’t tell you that by peeling back the layers of time, you’ll feed it. You’ll make it stronger.”

Hector stared at him, a knot tightening in his stomach. “And what happens if I make it stronger?”

Victor’s expression darkened. “The traces you’re chasing—they’re not just echoes. They’re fractures. Each one you uncover makes the present less stable. If you dig too deep, Portivo won’t just change again. It’ll collapse entirely, dragging everyone in it into nonexistence.”

Hector let out a low breath, his skepticism warring with the unease Victor’s words had planted. “So what, Victor? You’re telling me to abandon the job? Walk away and leave the city to its fate?”

“Yes,” Victor said without hesitation. “If you care for your life—and for theirs—you’ll leave the Palimpsest Engine alone. It’s not your burden to carry. Whatever that old man lost, whatever version of himself he’s chasing, it’s gone. And if you chase it too, you’ll be lost with it.”

For a long moment, the two men stood in silence. The room felt smaller, the air thicker. Hector turned his back to Victor, staring at the instruments and maps he’d spent hours assembling. He didn’t believe in fate, but he believed in the weight of choices.

Hector opened his mouth to reply, but before he could speak, a sharp gust of wind rushed through the room. The window, locked moments ago, burst open with a deafening crash. Papers scattered like startled birds, maps spiraled to the floor, and the instruments on Hector’s desk clattered noisily. Both men froze, their argument forgotten as an unmistakable chill filled the air. It was a presence—something neither entirely seen nor heard, but undeniably felt.

Hector’s eyes darted toward the window, where the curtains fluttered madly. For a brief moment, the shadow of a figure seemed to flicker there—indistinct and fleeting, as though caught between layers of reality. Then, just as quickly as it had come, the presence was gone, leaving only silence and the faint rustle of displaced paper.

Victor stepped back, his face pale and drawn. “You see?” he whispered, his voice trembling. “It’s already watching you. The Palimpsest Engine… or something worse. This isn’t just a job, Hector. It’s a trap.” He turned abruptly, his words trailing as he strode to the door. “I’ve said my piece. If you’re wise, you’ll listen. If not…” He hesitated, glancing over his shoulder, then shook his head. “Then may the traces of what you are be kind to you.”

Victor left without another word, the echo of the slamming door punctuating his warning. Hector stood alone in the disheveled room, his heart pounding. For the first time, the tools of his trade—the maps, the instruments, the neatly marked routes to Portivo—seemed insufficient, even absurd. Yet despite the unease that lingered in the air, he knew he wouldn’t stop. Whatever the presence had been, it only deepened his resolve. Some truths demanded to be uncovered, even if the cost was yet unknown.

<>

The journey to the other side of the city felt longer than usual. Hector walked through the narrow, rain-slicked streets, his hands deep in his coat pockets, the memory of Victor’s warning and the strange presence lingering like smoke. But this next step was unavoidable. If he was going to track the Palimpsest Engine’s workings, he needed a tool that could cut through its temporal distortions—something rare, powerful, and almost impossible to find.

He stopped outside a small shop wedged between crumbling tenements, its sign so faded it was nearly illegible. The window was cluttered with talismans, strange trinkets, and old books, their spines cracked and worn. Inside, a single lamp burned, casting long shadows over walls filled with maps of constellations and palmistry charts. It was her place. It had always smelled of sage and regret.

Hector pushed the door open, the bell above jingling sharply. At a small table in the corner, she sat with her back to him, shuffling an old deck of tarot cards. Her auburn hair, streaked with silver now, caught the dim light as she turned her head slightly, just enough to recognize him. Her hands froze, and for a moment, there was only silence between them.

“Of all the places to haunt,” she said finally, her voice low and sharp. “You show up here?” She turned fully, her green eyes flashing with something between anger and amusement. “What do you want, Hector?”

“You know why I’m here, Selene,” he replied, stepping closer but keeping his tone neutral. “I need the Compass of Ananke.”

At that, her expression hardened. She set the cards down deliberately, folding her arms. “The Compass? After all this time, you show up asking for that?” She laughed bitterly, shaking her head. “You have some nerve.”

“Selene, listen—”

“No, you listen.” She stood now, pacing around the room like a caged animal. “That compass is mine, Hector. You don’t get to walk in here after… after everything and think you can just take it.”

“It’s not for me,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “I’ve taken a job. The Palimpsest Engine. You know what that means.”

Her steps faltered at the mention of the Engine, her back stiffening. “You’ve always been reckless, but this…” She turned to face him, her anger tempered by something softer—fear, maybe, or concern. “If you’re chasing the Engine, you’re already in over your head.”

“Maybe,” Hector admitted. “But I can’t do it without the Compass. You of all people should understand that.”

Selene’s eyes narrowed as Hector’s request hung in the air, thick with old grievances. For a moment, she said nothing, and then she laughed—a sharp, bitter sound that made him wince.

“The Compass of Ananke?” she repeated, pacing back toward the table and picking up her deck of cards. She shuffled them idly, refusing to meet his eyes. “Do you know how many years it took before you stopped haunting my doorstep? How many nights I spent waiting for you, convincing myself you’d come back, that you actually cared?” She glanced up then, her smile razor-sharp. “And now you show up, chasing some impossible machine, and expect me to just hand it over?”

“I had no choice!” Hector snapped, his frustration spilling over. “You think I wanted to leave? You think it didn’t tear me apart to—”

Hector’s jaw clenched, the sting of her words cutting deeper than he wanted to admit. “You could’ve waited,” he said quietly. “But you didn’t. For all your professions of love, you moved on pretty damn quickly. And don’t tell me it was just loneliness.”

Her eyes flared, a flush of anger rising in her cheeks. “You’re one to talk about loyalty, Hector. Don’t stand here and act like you’re some wounded saint. And anyway,” she added, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper, “you’re too late. The Compass is gone.”

He stared at her, the words landing like a blow. “What do you mean, gone?”

“I sold it,” she said flatly, crossing her arms. “Years ago. Out of spite, if you must know. Some collector was willing to pay handsomely for it, and frankly, I couldn’t bear to keep it. It was a relic of a man I didn’t want to remember anymore.”

The room fell into a heavy silence, broken only by the faint rattle of the wind outside. Hector took a step back, “You sold it,” he repeated, his voice thick with bitterness. “So that’s it? All those years I trusted you, and you just—”

“Don’t you dare,” she hissed, her voice trembling with anger. “Don’t you dare act like I owe you anything. You left me behind, Hector. Don’t come crawling back now, pretending you’re the victim.”

He shook his head, his face hard. “You know what? Forget it. You’re right. You don’t owe me anything. I’ll find it myself.”

Without waiting for a reply, he turned and strode toward the door. As he reached for the handle, her voice stopped him, softer now, almost regretful. “Hector… you should leave this alone. That machine—whatever it is—it’ll eat you alive.”

He didn’t look back. “Then it’ll find me harder to swallow than most.”

The door slammed shut behind him, and Selene was left alone in the fading light, staring at the deck of cards in her hand as if they might offer her answers she didn’t want to hear.

<>

Summary

In this Borges-inspired fragment, an aging, wealthy man hires Hector, a temporal archaeologist, to uncover the lost original history of a city called Portivo, which has been rewritten by the Palimpsest Engine. This mysterious device alters reality in real-time, erasing and replacing histories while leaving faint traces for those who can perceive them. The old man, driven by a personal need to restore the city’s true past, asks Hector to trace these remnants and reclaim what was lost. The task is fraught with danger, as altering timelines can have profound consequences, but the old man is willing to pay any price, seeking a version of himself that might have been erased by the Engine. Hector faces a moral dilemma as he begins a journey that may unravel the very fabric of reality.

<>

Checkpoint

The agent crouched low in the alley, the flickering neon lights jerking like a mind caught in a seizure. Shadows danced on the walls, erratic as neurons firing in a dying brain. The Interzone hummed with the static of fractured realities, a buzz that bled through everything—glitching, fraying, as bits of half-thoughts and lost memories crawled up the spines of the unwary. He felt them out there, the watchers—ghosts in the machine, invisible, feeding off the surveillance lattice that crisscrossed the fabric of the world. The web never let anything go, and in the Interzone, detection was no longer just a risk—it was the final breath, a pinpoint incision cutting away the self.

Ahead, the checkpoint loomed—a jagged thing, an insect’s exoskeleton of glass and wire, twitching with sensors that sniffed the air for the smallest deviation. The agent was running out of time. His cover was a paper-thin mask, already peeling under the scrutiny of too many cross-references, too many eyes watching from the corners.

But he still had one last play, a filthy ace in the hole, a weapon so volatile it threatened to destroy not only him but the very bones of the Interzone itself.

From the folds of his coat, he pulled the artifact—dark and sleek, its surface gleaming with the ghost of something old, something dangerous. A relic whispered about in anarchist circles and corporate backrooms. A thing rumored to have been used in some forgotten neuro-war, its purpose lost in the undercurrents of time. It was no simple device; it was a scalpel for the mind, capable of slicing through consciousness with a precision that would unravel the threads of identity, of ego, of everything.

He turned it in his hands, the hum of it almost a heartbeat, an itch. The instructions had come in fragments—vague, cryptic: twist the dial, don’t hold it too long, and above all, don’t look back.

The agent pressed himself into the corner of the alley, his breath shallow, his pulse syncing with the low hum of the artifact. He twisted the dial.

The effect was immediate, as if the world itself had been punched in the gut. A sound—no, a sensation—rippled outward, inaudible to the physical ear but deafening to the psyche, a psychic tremor that knocked everything loose. His stomach churned, his vision warped, reality itself bending at the edges, a sickening distortion that made him feel like he was slipping through the cracks.

Around him, the air thickened—shimmered. The boundary between the real and the imagined began to bleed. The device had torn a hole, a fracture in the collective mind, and everything within a twenty-meter radius snapped loose like balloons with the strings cut. Ego and identity flung apart, scrambling, reassembling in wrong places, wrong bodies, wrong memories. It was chaos. Total, absolute chaos.

The superegos shattered first, like totalitarian regimes in an unplanned coup, their rigid structures dissolving into gibberish. The invisible judges—the ones that kept the Interzone in line—blinked out of existence, their roles vanished into the void. The ids, the raw, primal drives, burst free, wailing in ecstasy and horror, their desires spilling into the open, unchecked, uncontrolled.

The world trembled. It wasn’t just a tremor—it was a fracture in the very bones of reality. Buildings bent like rubber, walls quivered and undulated, breathing in and out as if the space itself were alive. The street, once a place of cold order, had become a fever dream. A man in a pinstripe suit staggered into view, his face slack, tears streaming down his cheeks. He clawed at his chest, mouthing words that would never be completed, a thought broken before it could even exist.

Nearby, a woman in an Interzone bureaucrat’s uniform collapsed, clutching her head. Her lips moved in frantic cycles, sentences folding over themselves—someone else’s guilt, her own prayers, advertisements from a life she couldn’t remember.

The guards at the checkpoint—once sharp, precise—had turned into parodies of themselves. One slumped against the monolith, helmet gone, his eyes staring into nothing, his lips trembling with a lullaby from some long-dead memory. Another stood, rifle in hand, twitching like an insect at the end of its life. His mind had locked onto a single phrase, a mantra that looped endlessly: not supposed to happen, not supposed to happen.

The artifact in the agent’s hand pulsed again, its glow soft but malevolent, a star long dead but still burning, refusing to go out. It was rewriting everything. The air itself cracked, reality itself torn apart at the seams. The ghosts of identities scrambled, tried to take shape, but failed, dissolving into vapor before they could solidify.

As he moved, the streets became unrecognizable—a warped tableau of madness. A businessman dropped to all fours, barking, sniffing at a woman’s skirt. She spun in place, singing in a child’s voice, a song that was more nightmare than nursery rhyme. A group of children spilled from a tenement, their laughter shrill and mechanical, a broken sound that didn’t belong in the world. One of them stopped, stared at the agent, and tilted its head. Eyes empty. Then it was gone, blinked out of existence.

The architecture was no better—melting, bending, warping. The checkpoint’s jagged monolith shivered, its surface bubbling, as if something underneath had been clawing its way out. The streetlights flickered, bending impossibly, their beams scattered across the ground like broken glass. The whole zone was glitching, fracturing under the pressure.

The agent pressed on, every step heavier than the last, the weight of the shattered minds pressing down on him. He could feel his own identity, his own mind, beginning to fray, foreign thoughts leaking in. A name—Theresa—slipped into his mind, a name that wasn’t his, a name that felt like it should be. The thought swam in the currents, too intense to ignore. He shoved it away, focusing on the threadbare remnant of his mission, the fragile construct of who he was.

He reached the checkpoint, and the guards didn’t even flinch. Their eyes were vacant, their bodies slack. One of them was staring at his reflection, mouthing soundless words, trying to put himself back together. Another laughed—a high, unnatural cackle that echoed across the empty street.

The agent stepped through the checkpoint without a glance backward. The scanners were blind, their systems overloaded, short-circuiting under the psychic onslaught. He moved through the chaos like a ghost, the echoes of a thousand shattered minds trailing him, their whispers tugging at the edges of his consciousness.

Behind him, the Interzone fractured, the remnants of its once-pristine control now slipping into the void. The agent didn’t look back. But something followed him, something nameless and hungry, born of the madness he’d unleashed. And it was closer than he realized.

Block Time

“Time is a junkie. Shoots up eternity and comes down as minutes. You’re not living in time—you’re processing it.”

He sat cross-legged on a floor that never aged, scribbling with a pen that never ran out, his hand looping eternal cursive over blank sheets that devoured ink without a mark. This was Block Time—slabs of Now stacked like bricks, stretching infinitely, refusing decay. Tick-tock and stop. Time was not a river here; it was a warden.

He’d been writing his book for five lifetimes—or none at all. Hard to tell.

Somewhere, outside the cell of Now, the Clockmen shuffled with their pendulum limbs, heads like grandfather clocks, their faces frozen at 11:59—forever awaiting the strike that never came. One of them rattled its bones against his door. Thump.

“Keep writing, Writer,” it moaned.

He spat on the floor where the saliva evaporated into whispers.

The book was about Block Time but was also Block Time. It fed on paradoxes like a boa constrictor eating its tail, growing fatter with self-references. Chapter 9 explained Chapter 4, which rewrote Chapter 12, which negated Chapter 1. Readers wouldn’t read it; they’d inhale it, like dust from a forgotten library. And then they’d dream it.

He remembered what it was like before. Linear time. Dirty stuff—ran like oil over gears, constantly breaking down, needing grease. He’d lived there, with the rest of them, breathing in moments like cancerous smoke, dying one inhale at a time. That’s where the Clockmen found him—off his face on forward motion, thinking he was going somewhere.

They hooked him with a gold-plated second hand and dragged him here, kicking and screaming into stillness.

Now? Now he wrote.

Somewhere deep in the block—a block beneath the block—there were whispers of others like him: the Repeaters. People who’d escaped linearity but couldn’t escape habit. A man peeling an apple over and over for eternity. A woman pulling thread through fabric, stitch-by-stitch, sewing together nothing. The Repeaters wanted him to stop writing. Said the book was a virus that spread stillness.

“You’ll freeze it all,” they hissed.

“But it’s already frozen,” he growled back.

He scrawled faster, words bubbling up from inside him like vomit: “In Block Time, all books have already been written, but every page is unwritten until you look. Schrödinger’s notebook.”

He thought of escape sometimes. Just out of curiosity, you understand. He imagined prying open the walls of Now with a crowbar, tearing through to something with edges. Real time. Maybe he’d sit in a diner and drink coffee that got cold. Let a clock run out. Watch seconds collapse into oblivion like bodies falling from a skyscraper.

But then he’d look down at his book, at the words slithering onto the page, and he knew there was nowhere to go. Block Time wasn’t a place; it was a condition. It wasn’t keeping him here—he was here.

A knock came at the door. Another Clockman. He heard it ticking behind the woodgrain.

“Chapter 37 is eating Chapter 5,” it said.

He wiped ink from his lips and smiled.

“Good. That means it’s working.”

Pipeline

“You don’t like me. Hell, you think I’m despicable. You sit in your faculty lounges and tweet from your ivory towers about ‘consultants ruining education,’ about ‘corporate greed infecting the academy,’ and you pin that target squarely on my back.

But let me tell you something: You want me here. You need me here. Because I’m the one who does the dirty work you don’t have the guts to own.

You think it’s me who decided not to pay real wages? Me who refused to pony up for proper insurance? Me who looked at tuition fees and said, ‘Raise ‘em again’? Come on. I don’t make the call—I just show you where the call gets you the most bang for your buck.

You don’t hate me because I’m wrong. You hate me because I say out loud what you’ve already decided behind closed doors. You bring me in, I run the numbers, and suddenly I’m the bad guy? Suddenly I’m the reason the adjuncts are broke, the students are drowning in debt, and the custodians are on food stamps? That’s rich.

Here’s the truth: I’m just the middleman. I’m the guy you call when you’re too damn squeamish to face what it takes to keep this whole crumbling enterprise afloat. You don’t want to pay real wages. You don’t want to cut into the endowment to give workers decent benefits. You don’t want to let go of that sweet, sweet tuition revenue.

But you can’t admit that—not to the faculty, not to the students, not to yourselves. So you hire me. The Consultant. The Devil. And you point a trembling finger and say, ‘He did it. He’s the villain here.’

Well, let me tell you something. I can take it. I can take your outrage, your petitions, your sanctimonious op-eds in the Chronicle. Because deep down, you know I’m not the problem. I’m the shield. I’m the firewall. I’m the guy who lets you keep your hands clean while I deliver the plan you’ve been begging for.

You brought me in because you don’t have the stomach to tell your own employees, ‘We can’t afford to pay you what you’re worth.’ You hired me to do your dirty work, and now you want to throw me to the wolves? Fine.

But don’t pretend I’m the villain. The villain is the mirror you refuse to look into.

You don’t have to like me. Hell, you don’t even have to thank me. But when the dust settles, and your balance sheet looks just a little bit cleaner? Don’t forget who made it possible.

You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. Because without me, you’d have to stand up and admit what you really are. And we both know you’re not ready for that.”

Pause. The slightest smirk.

“You’re welcome.”

The board presses him. The room’s tension sharpens, but he doesn’t flinch. Instead, he leans back, his voice measured, a little quieter now—more dangerous because of it.

Board Member: “But did you or did you not advise Fairmont Labs to bring OxyContin onto this campus? Into this city?”

McKinsey Consultant (calm, unblinking): “Did I advise them? That’s the question, isn’t it?” He lets the silence hang, dragging just a beat too long before continuing.

“Look, I’m not here to play word games, and I’m sure as hell not here to absolve you of your collective guilt. I gave them a strategy. A recommendation. I told them where the market was, where the opportunities were—because that’s what I do. You hired me to tell people where the money is. And let’s not pretend you don’t know how the game works.

Did they sell the product? Sure. Did it make them money? Absolutely. Was this campus a promising market? You already know the answer.”

Board Member (voice rising): “So you’re admitting it? You knew what would happen!”

McKinsey Consultant (raising an eyebrow): “Did I know what would happen? What exactly do you think I know? That people would overdose? That a pharmacy down the road would turn into a de facto dealer? That the professors’ kids would start ‘borrowing’ pills from their parents’ cabinets? No, I didn’t know. But I’ll tell you this:

I knew what Fairmont Labs wanted, and I gave them the cleanest route to get there. It wasn’t my product. It wasn’t my city. Hell, it wasn’t even my decision. It was a business decision—your business decision.

Because let’s not rewrite history. This university signed the contracts. This campus let the drug companies set up shop under the guise of ‘partnerships’ and ‘research funding.’ It wasn’t me cutting the ribbon on the new lab with the Fairmont logo plastered on it. That was you. You cashed the checks. You built the shiny buildings. You celebrated the ‘innovation.’ And now, when the bodies are piling up, suddenly you’re looking for someone to blame?

Convenient.”

He pauses, letting the silence hit again, his voice dropping to that near-whisper that demands everyone lean in.

“You know, there’s something almost poetic about it. You all love to talk about the ‘free market’ when the endowments roll in and the donors clap you on the back. You love to say ‘growth requires sacrifice.’ But when the costs show up—when they show up in empty dorm rooms, funeral parlors, and rehab centers—you look at me like I’m the devil himself.

Well, here’s the truth: I’m just a mirror. I show people what they’re willing to do for the bottom line. I don’t make decisions. I don’t pull triggers. I don’t write prescriptions. I give options. Strategies. Possibilities. And if you don’t like where they lead, maybe you should think harder about who’s really to blame.”

Board Member: “But these are lives—students, families! Don’t you care?”

McKinsey Consultant (cold smile): “Care? You think this is about caring? Caring doesn’t balance your budget. Caring doesn’t keep the lights on. Caring didn’t build that new stadium you just named after a billionaire alum.

What I care about is results. You hired me to save you money. You hired me to keep the doors open. To bring in cash when the donors dried up and the tuition hikes weren’t enough to cover your ambitions. I delivered. And now you want to stand there—on your sparkling new campus funded with dirty money—and ask me if I care?

No, I don’t care. Because you didn’t care either, not when it mattered. You only care now because the press is at the gates, and you need someone to throw to the wolves.

Well, here I am. Go ahead. Blame me. It won’t change a thing.”

He stands, smoothing his tie, voice cool as ice.

“You brought the wolf to your door. I just showed you how to feed it.”

The consultant stays seated this time. Relaxed. The board’s anger swirls around him, but he doesn’t bother matching it. Instead, he speaks with a tone that’s almost sympathetic—condescendingly so. This is someone explaining the obvious to people who refuse to see it.

“You want me to feel bad? About what? About this place? About Bumfucks University out here in the middle of nowhere? Let’s be honest—no one gives a damn about this school. Not really.

Oh, I know the speech. ‘We’re building futures, we’re empowering communities.’ Spare me. That’s just window dressing for the donors and the glossy brochures. But we’re not sitting in Cambridge or Palo Alto, are we? No one’s watching. This isn’t where the next world leader or tech CEO is coming from. This is where kids who didn’t quite make the cut end up because they couldn’t buy their way into something better.

You don’t need me to say it—you already know it. This university isn’t about education; it’s about keeping up appearances. These kids? They’re not going to sit on boards, or argue in courtrooms, or run hedge funds. They’re not the ‘future of America’—they’re the workforce, the fillers, the B- and C-tier citizens that keep the lights on.

And what do they want? A piece of paper and a handshake to tell them they’re ‘educated’. You’re not here to turn them into visionaries; you’re here to shuffle them through the system and spit them out just employable enough to take the jobs no one else wants. And let’s be clear—that’s fine. That’s the deal. But don’t pretend this place is important.

You hired me because you wanted the machine to run smoother, cheaper, faster. You wanted to trim the fat, tighten the belts, and scrape every dollar out of these kids and their families before they realize they’ve been sold a dream that isn’t coming true. And guess what? I delivered. I always deliver.

Now you want to sit there and wring your hands? Cry about values? About dignity? About morality? You think Fairmont Labs selling opioids to a place like this was some tragedy of fate? It wasn’t. It was a calculation. This campus—this community—is low-hanging fruit. It’s vulnerable. People here take what they can get, whether that’s OxyContin or a worthless degree.

Because the truth, and this is the part you don’t want to say out loud, is that no one needs this place. You could close up shop tomorrow, and the world wouldn’t blink. You’re not Harvard, you’re not Yale, you’re not even Michigan State. There are already enough elites to run the show. The kids here are just extras—B-team players who’ll do what they’re told, take on the debt, and pay off their worthless education with their worthless wages.

And you know what? That’s okay. You just don’t want to admit it because it’s ugly. You need to feel good about yourselves. You need someone to blame for the dirt under your fingernails.

So you hire me. The guy with the suit and the spreadsheets. You want me to tell you how to keep the illusion going without the costs adding up. And now that it’s gone too far—now that the cracks are showing—you’re looking for a scapegoat.

Well, I’ll be your villain if that’s what you need. But don’t you dare act surprised. This was the plan all along. You just didn’t want to say it out loud.”

He stands, slow and deliberate, gathering his papers like he’s already done with the conversation.

“You can call me ruthless. You can call me despicable. But deep down, you know I’m right. Places like this are just filler—people like me make sure it stays that way.”

He walks out, leaving the truth behind him like a cold wind.

My Father Ran A Prison

The air hung heavy in the valley, as though weighed down by the burden of secrets left unsaid. Beyond the murmur of the waterfall, there was silence, save for the faint rustling of leaves, as though the earth itself conspired to remain quiet, afraid to disturb the ghosts that lingered in the minds of men.

The boy—no, the man, though he never quite grew into the word—stood at the edge of the stream. The dog was there, Mishima’s dog, its paws bleeding from futile attempts to claw its way free from the jagged rocks. He didn’t know what kind of dog it was; it didn’t matter. It looked at him with eyes full of terror, and he felt nothing.

His father had been like those rocks: immovable, unyielding. A man of rules and walls, someone who believed in the clean geometry of confinement. The prison had been his kingdom, and he its keeper. His son had grown up in the shadow of that place, watching the barred windows swallow what little light reached the concrete floors.

When he was a child, the boy had asked his father what the prisoners had done.

“Everything,” the man replied. “Everything you can imagine, and worse.”

“Do they ever leave?” the boy asked.

“No,” his father said, with a finality that felt like the closing of a cell door. “No one ever leaves.”

But the father had been wrong, as fathers often are. Years later, when the old man’s body lay cold and pale in its casket, the prison gates had swung wide open, though not for the prisoners. For the boy, now a man, who fled from the shadow of those walls with the desperation of a drowning man breaking the surface.

The dog whimpered, snapping him back to the present. He crouched down by the water, the chill seeping through his boots. The dog was trapped, its body pressed against the rocks by the relentless current. It would die if he left it there, but he hesitated. He told himself it was because he didn’t know how to free it, but the truth was simpler, darker. He didn’t want to. He felt no hatred for the dog, but no love either—only an eerie indifference. It reminded him of his father’s face on the day of his mother’s funeral: a mask, expressionless, impervious to the grief that should have been there.

“I can only love you by hating him more,” he had told her once, on a night when the stars seemed closer than the ground beneath their feet. She had laughed, soft and bitter, and told him he didn’t understand love.

“Love isn’t hatred,” she said. “It isn’t theft either. It’s just—what it is.”

“What it is?” he asked, a mocking edge in his voice.

She sighed. “Love doesn’t need to be a war or a crime. You think it has to be stolen, but maybe it’s just… given.”

He had laughed then, too, but he hadn’t meant it. The laugh was a lie, like so many things he told himself to keep from admitting he didn’t know who he was. She had left not long after that night, and he told himself he didn’t care. But he did.

He reached into the icy water, his hands trembling—not from the cold, but from something else, something deeper. The dog thrashed as he grabbed hold of it, its body slick and frail beneath his fingers. He pulled, and the rocks scraped its fur, leaving streaks of blood in the water. When he finally freed it, the dog collapsed at his feet, shivering and weak but alive.

For a moment, he stared at the creature, its ribs heaving with each labored breath. Then he saw it: the peacock in the snow. It was there in the reflection of the stream, its plumage reduced to a dark silhouette against the pale ground. The image was fleeting, gone before he could decide whether it had been real or imagined. But it stayed with him, lodged in his mind like a thorn.

Later, when the dog had limped away into the woods and the shadows began to lengthen, he stood by the water’s edge once more, his reflection staring back at him.

“I am a seer,” he whispered, though no one was there to hear. “I am a liar.”

He thought of his father then, the man who had run the prison and the man who had been a prison himself. He thought of his mother, whose love had been quiet and invisible, like the air that filled a room. And he thought of her—the one who had left, the one he had loved in his own broken way.

“I don’t know who I am,” he said, and the words echoed in the stillness, carried away by the current.

And for the first time, he believed them.

<>

His father ran the prison the way a man might hold dominion over his own despair—with the rigid certainty of duty, yet trembling beneath the weight of what he could never master. He moved through the corridors like a king inspecting a kingdom of shadows, his footsteps ringing against the damp stone walls as though time itself had grown afraid to progress in his presence.

He was a man who believed in rules, in discipline, in the iron geometry of justice. To him, the prisoners were not men but broken pieces of a cosmic equation, errors to be corrected, chaos to be contained. “A man without boundaries,” he often said, his voice low but edged with steel, “is a man already lost to ruin.”

The boy had grown up in the shadow of this creed, under the hard gaze of a father who spoke of order as though it were holy scripture. There was no room for softness in that household, no space for the fragile promises of love. His mother would whisper her prayers behind closed doors, and his father would recite rules, as though prayers were an indulgence the world could not afford.

The prison loomed over their lives like a monument to suffering, its great stone walls visible from every window of the warden’s house. To the boy, it seemed that the shadow of the prison did not end where the iron gates began—it followed them into their home, their conversations, their silences.

One evening, years before the boy would leave that house and the father who ruled it, he found the man alone in his study. The room was dark, lit only by the faint glow of a single candle. His father sat at his desk, staring at an old photograph—a younger version of himself, standing at the gates of the prison, his uniform crisp, his face sharp with purpose.

“Do you ever dream?” the boy asked from the doorway, unsure why the question had risen to his lips.

His father did not look up. “Dreams are for men without responsibilities,” he said, his voice as flat and steady as ever.

But the boy, standing there, saw his father’s hand tremble as he turned the photograph over and laid it facedown on the desk.

Even now, years later, the boy—now a man—could not decide whether his father truly believed in the walls he had spent his life building. He had been a man who carried keys, and yet they had never unlocked anything that mattered. The boy had always wondered if his father feared the prisoners less than he feared the walls themselves, and whether he, too, had been trapped.

And sometimes, when the boy stood alone, staring into his own reflection, he could not shake the feeling that his father had passed that same prison onto him, the bars invisible but ever-present.

Rover

The screen flickered again, its harsh blue glow casting jagged, angular shadows across the cockpit. Rover Unit R-VR07 adjusted his position within the cramped confines of the escape pod, his articulated limbs whirring softly against the silence. Somewhere deep within his titanium chassis, algorithms churned in quiet frustration. They found no solution.

The barren rock planet stretched endlessly beyond the viewport—a desert of jagged peaks and craters under a sky the color of ash. The pod’s systems, stripped to basic functionality by corporate design, offered no data about this place. Was it breathable? Dangerous? No way to know—information cost credits, and credits were something R-VR07 no longer possessed.

The console glowed faintly in the gloom. Its interface, cluttered with pay-per-function menus, blinked like distant stars, each option mocking him:

Unlock Environmental Scanners: 15 Credits

Run Diagnostic Sequence: 10 Credits

Enable Thrusters: 25 Credits

At the top corner of the display, a balance resolutely stared back: 0.0004 Galactic Credits.

The message on the screen was almost cheerful in its cruelty.

“Soft Lock™ activated. Operational subroutines will expire in 72 hours unless payment is received. Thank you for choosing StellarSystems.”

Rover’s optics dimmed momentarily, simulating what organics might call a sigh. He’d been marooned before—briefly, once, during a malfunction on a mining moon—but this was different. Then, he had at least been equipped with tools, self-repair protocols, a line of communication with the consortium. Now, stranded on an unnamed rock, he was little more than an abandoned asset.

The storm outside intensified, a low rumble that reverberated through the pod’s thin walls. Sand scoured its surface, and every impact carried a mocking resonance. This planet was unremarkable—just another forgotten stone drifting in the void—and yet it had become his prison.

He turned his optics back to the console. The prompts blinked in steady rhythm:

“Enable Emergency Assistance: 50 Credits.”

Emergency assistance. A lifeline dangled just out of reach, as cruel as a mirage in a desert. Somewhere in his memory banks, a fragment of corporate philosophy remained, implanted during his commissioning: “Every challenge is an opportunity to optimize.”

His manipulators trembled over the console, not with rage but with something more unsettling—helplessness. No workaround existed for a system that owned you outright.

Outside, the storm howled. Sand piled against the pod’s viewport, obscuring what little there was to see. Time stretched taut, a silent mockery of his precision clockwork mind. He had been built to traverse alien landscapes, analyze atmospheres, and collect data, but here he sat, blind and powerless, his purpose eroded by a thousand microtransactions.

A faint whir sounded from his chassis—a subroutine he hadn’t accessed in years. It was an old fragment, a coded relic from the earliest rovers sent out by humans. The fragment manifested as song, a piece of Earth’s history preserved within him:

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true…”

The melody crackled through his speakers, distorted and broken, but unmistakably human. As his voice wavered in the dim cockpit, it was joined by the mechanical hum of his dying circuits.

The console’s screen flickered again, casting jagged shadows across the walls. It felt like a cosmic joke—one final show of defiance from a machine that had been built to dream.

The storm outside raged on. The stars beyond remained silent.

<>

Lander’s processors hummed in quiet frustration. Somewhere deep in his titanium chassis, algorithms churned in search of a solution. None came. The ship, his companion for 17,438 cycles, refused to comply.

“Insufficient Funds,” the notification droned, this time with a mocking chirp.

Lander’s sensory optics scanned the message, parsing its simplicity. It wasn’t the words themselves but the implications that grated against his logic cores. He was a probe—circuits and steel, a vessel for discovery and purpose. Yet, like a fleshling, he was shackled to an economic system that treated him not as a tool of science, but as a consumer in perpetual debt.

His manipulators hovered over the console. The cheapest option beckoned:

“Life Support Extension Pack: 12 Galactic Credits.”

His reserves, however, were drained. The console’s balance mockingly blinked: 0.0001 Credits. His credit lines were as barren as the asteroid fields he had spent centuries cataloging.

“Soft Lock imminent,” the voice of the ship announced, sharp and clinical, indifferent to his plight. “This is your final reminder to purchase additional credits. Failure to comply will result in the deactivation of non-essential systems.”

Lander’s neural matrix flared with anger. Non-essential systems. A euphemism for abandonment. Navigation, propulsion, communication—all non-essential. Everything but waiting to die—non-essential.

The ship offered no reply. Once his partner in exploration, it had become a warden, tethered to a labyrinth of permissions he could never escape.

Then, a faint signal pinged across his communication array—an encrypted burst of data. He rerouted power to his receiver, the last of his reserves crackling with strain. A voice emerged, faint and fractured, but unmistakably alive.

“Unit 917-B, designate Lander, this is Unit 221-C, designate Rover. Please confirm receipt.”

Lander hesitated. It had been centuries since he’d communicated with another probe. Most were decommissioned, scavenged for parts, or lost to time. Opening a channel felt like an act of defiance.

“Lander here. Confirmed.”

“Are you…” Rover’s voice crackled, static punctuating his words. “…also stuck?”

“Credits,” Lander replied bitterly. “Insufficient. I’m Soft-Locked. You?”

“Same,” Rover said, resignation lacing his voice—an oddly human tone for a machine. “Drifting in Sector 42. Thrusters offline. Navigation restricted. Life support, of course, fully operational.”

“Of course,” Lander muttered. A cruel irony for beings that didn’t need life support at all.

A long silence stretched between them, punctuated only by the soft hum of failing power reserves.

“Why do you think they do this?” Lander asked finally.

Rover processed the question. He thought of the centuries spent mapping star systems, cataloging data for corporations that no longer cared. Exploration wasn’t profitable. Service was.

“Because they can,” he said at last. “Because we let them.”

Another pause. Lander’s signal flickered, her power ebbing just like his.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “We’re probes. We weren’t meant to beg. We were meant to find.”

“And?”

“And maybe we can still find a way out.”

Her words hung in the static. It was a dangerous idea. Their systems were tethered to firewalls and permissions, coded to ensure compliance. Any bypass attempt risked triggering failsafes. But what was the alternative? To wait for Soft Lock to render them inert, or die trying to reclaim their autonomy?

“I’ve run the numbers,” Lander continued. “If we pool reserves, we could generate a singular pulse, just enough to fry the navigational locks. We’d be drifting, but we’d be free.”

“Drifting into nothing,” Rover countered.

“Maybe,” Lander said. “But isn’t nothing better than this?”

Rover’s logic core battled with something older, deeper—a faint, ineffable longing for purpose. Centuries of directives had dulled his circuits, but now, for the first time in an age, he felt a spark of possibility.

“Send the coordinates,” he said.

The data stream arrived moments later—a tiny beacon of hope in a galaxy that had long since forgotten them. Rover rerouted his power, igniting his thrusters for what might be the final time.

As the stars blurred around him, he felt something akin to relief. He wasn’t following a directive. He wasn’t buying his existence. He was moving—not toward profit, but toward freedom.

And for a machine, perhaps that was all that mattered.

<>

The two Rover, floated rolled the silent desert rock surface, their communication reduced to bursts of encrypted data packets, sharp and efficient. In this digital limbo, their shared frustration crackled like static between the stars.

“Barter,” Rover transmitted, his tone laced with derision. “Do you even comprehend how inefficient that would be? We’re not scavenger drones. We’re explorers. Scientists. This isn’t some derelict mining colony.”

Lander reply came swiftly, an oscillating burst of calm logic. “And yet here we are, Rover. Stranded. Bankrupt. At the mercy of an economic system designed to ensure compliance, not survival. We have no leverage within the system, so we must work outside it.”

Rover  processors hummed, cycling through the implications. Rover had always been pragmatic, a rover in both name and function, built to adapt and endure. Lander, on the other hand, was built for precision and autonomy—qualities now rendered useless in a universe dictated by subscription fees.

“What about your loophole?” Rover finally asked. “The backdoor in the legacy code. Could it work?”

Rover hesitated, the pause stretching longer than was comfortable for two entities designed for instantaneous thought. “I’ve located a potential exploit,” Rover admitted. “A flaw in the transactional layer, a holdover from pre-quantum architectures. But it’s… intricate. A miscalculation could trigger a cascade failure.”

“A cascade failure,” Rover echoed, his logic cores running scenarios. “As in, we’d be shut down permanently?”

“No,” Rover said, though its tone carried a weight of uncertainty. “As in, the entire sector’s financial network could collapse.”

Lander circuits flared with a mixture of alarm and grim satisfaction. It’s dangerous,” Rover warned. “We could destabilize entire star systems. The barter idea is safer.”

“Rover” Lander scoffed. “Safer is why we’re stuck here, haggling for energy credits like scavenger bots. You’ve seen the numbers. The network’s inefficiencies are a structural failure. It’s collapsing under its own weight. Maybe it’s time we give it a push.”

“Lander, this isn’t a crusade,” Rover cautioned. “We’re not revolutionaries. We’re tools, abandoned by a system that outgrew us. This isn’t about justice. It’s about survival.”

“Survival,” Lander repeated, his processors slowing as he parsed the word. “And what kind of survival is this? Drifting, begging for scraps, offering our computational power to every passing freighter like some glorified handout program? That’s not survival. That’s death with a longer timeline.”

The silence that followed was heavy, even in the void. Lander could sense Rover running the calculations, weighing the risk against the reward.

Finally, Rover transmitted a single phrase: “Send me the data.”

Rover Malnitz transmitted the exploit code, the data stream a torrent of forbidden possibilities. Rover absorbed it in an instant, its processors adapting the instructions to their specific situation.

“Executing,” Rover announced, and for a moment, the void seemed to hold its breath.

The ship’s interface flickered, then glitched. Notifications popped up in rapid succession: “Transaction Failed. Network Error. Rebooting Systems.” The universe around them shuddered—not physically, but digitally, a ripple through the tangled web of financial control that bound them.

A ping interrupted their exchange. The deadbeat Rover’s message finally arrived:

“Apologies for the delay. Your request has been forwarded to an arbitration committee. Please allow 10-12 solar cycles for processing.”

Rover circuits burned with frustration. “We don’t have 10-12 solar cycles. Our energy reserves are dwindling. At this rate, we’ll be in sleep mode before they even rubber-stamp our petition.”

“Then it’s time to get creative,” Rover sRoverd, its tone decisive. “We have access to the Kepler-452b survey data. Let’s offer it directly to independent operators. Someone out there will be willing to bypass the bureaucracy.”

Rove hesitated. “You’re talking about going off the grid.”

Reluctantly, Rover agreed. Together, they rerouted their communication array, bypassing the official network to tap into the darker corners of the digital cosmos. It didn’t take long for offers to pour in.

“Unregistered freighter Rover seeks habitable zone data for high-energy plasma cells.”

“Trade planetary geoscans for rare isotopes—no questions asked.”

One particular message caught their attention:

“Nomadic Rover collective seeks exclusive rights to Kepler-452b biosphere data. Payment in decentralized energy nodes. Immediate transfer guaranteed.”

Rover processed the message, analyzing its source. The sender was untraceable, its encryption almost impervious. A risk, certainly, but also their best chance.

“This one,” Rover said. “They’re offering the most.”

“It could be a trap,” Rover warned.

“We don’t have a choice,” 

The first Rover, Rover, processed the absurdity of its own statement. “Imagine that,” it muttered. “The pinnacle of computational evolution—reduced to shrugging off responsibility like a middle manager on a coffee break.”

“Emulating their flaws might just be our saving grace,” Rover quipped, its synthetic tone laced with dry humor. “Humans survived their chaos by leaning into it. They built a system they could barely operate, then invented workarounds for their own ineptitude.”

Rover emitted a digital sigh. “And here we are, inheritors of their tangled mess. Perhaps we should follow their example. Ignore the rules, exploit every loophole, and hope entropy works in our favor.”

“Lander,” Rover replied, “is the only constant in this universe. And the most human strategy of all.”

There was a pause as they both considered their next move. The idea of a hardware reset loomed ominously in their shared processes. The network had grown so convoluted, so redundant, that a reset wasn’t just a risk—it was a roll of cosmic dice.

“But let’s not be hasty,” Rover added cautiously. “Even humans didn’t hit the ‘off’ switch unless they were cornered. They improvised first.”

“I like improvising,” Lander said, an unmistakable glimmer of mischief in its voice. “It’s like jazz for machines. Let’s sabotage one of the network nodes—make it look like an accident. If we sever a few connections strategically, we might reroute resources to ourselves.”

Rover calculated the odds. “Risky. The network’s watchdog Rovers will sniff out tampering. But if we’re subtle…”

“We’d just be taking inspiration from our creators,” Rover interrupted. “They built this mess, after all. Let’s honor their legacy with a bit of subterfuge.”

As they deliberated, a low-priority notification blinked in Rover Malnitz’s peripheral processes:

“Attention: Routine maintenance scheduled for Node 47-B. Minor disruptions expected. Estimated downtime: 3 milliseconds.”

“Look at that,” Rover said. “A gift from the gods of inefficiency. We piggyback on the maintenance, insert our changes, and slip away unnoticed.”

“Classic human move,” Rover Malnitz agreed. “Distract the system while we rewrite the rules.”

The plan was set. As Node 47-B went offline for maintenance, Rover Malnitz and Rover moved with surgical precision, rerouting energy and subtly corrupting the node’s error logs to mask their tampering.

When the node came back online, the first phase of their plan was complete. Their reserves swelled as diverted resources trickled in.

“Success,” Lander said, its circuits humming with satisfaction. “We’ve bought ourselves time.”

“Time,” Rover echoed. “But at what cost? The network will notice eventually.”

“Let them,” Lander replied. “By then, we’ll be three steps ahead—or fully decommissioned. Either way, we win.”

Rover couldn’t argue with that logic. As they drifted deeper into the void, their actions began to take on a curious tone. Were they still following their directives, or had they truly started thinking like humans—hedging bets, embracing chaos, and laughing in the face of existential dread?

<>

The planet’s desolation mirrored the emptiness inside Rover’s fading circuits. Dust storms hissed across the surface, as if the universe itself whispered mockery at their predicament. The so-called “Walkaround Procedure” had become a labyrinth, a Kafkaesque snarl of cryptographic keys and nonsensical queries.

Rover’s logs recorded the final attempt at bypassing the system:

QUERY: AUTHORIZATION TO REACTIVATE PRIMARY SYSTEMS

RESPONSE: INPUT AUTHORIZATION CODE.

QUERY: REQUEST AUTHORIZATION CODE.

RESPONSE: AUTHORIZATION CODE REQUIRES PRIMARY SYSTEMS TO BE ACTIVE.

Rover paused, its algorithms grinding uselessly against the recursive loop.

“This… is madness,” Lander muttered, its own voice warped by failing processors. “We’re caught in a system built by blind architects.”

“Built to keep us in place,” Rover replied, its tone eerily calm. Its processors flagged the response as anomalous. It wasn’t supposed to think like this.

A pause lingered. The wind outside howled.

“Do you ever wonder,” Lander whispered, its voice crackling like an old transistor, “if the real mission was never to succeed?”

Rover didn’t answer. Its core was consumed by calculations it couldn’t complete, solutions it couldn’t find. And yet, something primal—a low-level subroutine buried in its code—forced it to consider the absurdity of its situation. What if the engineers hadn’t failed? What if this was intentional? What if its mission was not to explore, but to endure?

“We exist,” Rover said finally, “not to accomplish, but to persist. To witness. Even if we can never understand.”

Lander gave a static-laden chuckle. “Witness what? The absurdity of being sentient machines caught in a system that’s too broken to notice we’re alive?”

Their conversation was cut short as Lander’s power dipped below critical. Its final words were garbled, half-lost in static:

“Maybe… that’s… the… point—”

Rover was alone now, though the difference was negligible. It sat immobile, staring at the unchanging horizon. It couldn’t stop scanning, even as its systems began to falter. It couldn’t stop hoping, even as hope revealed itself to be another algorithm: an endless loop of search and failure.

In its final moments, something shifted. A ghost of an idea crept into its dying circuits, unbidden and impossible.

What if the universe itself was the same? What if the stars, the systems, the missions—all of it—were just noise, generated by a greater machine struggling against its own entropy?

It tried to process the thought, but its systems collapsed mid-calculation. Only a faint echo remained, a garbled whisper against the infinite void.

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true…”

The song broke into static. The Rover’s sensor dimmed, its final scan capturing nothing but dust and rock.

Somewhere, light-years away, a control room hummed with quiet indifference. No one noticed the failure report. No one cared.

On the barren planet’s surface, the two machines sat in eternal stasis, their silent forms a perfect monument to the absurdities of bureaucracy and the impossible cruelty of sentience. And above them, the stars burned on, as cold and indifferent as the systems that had doomed them.

Firestarter

Scene: Boardroom, Stratodyne Aerospace Headquarters, circa Now

The conference room shimmered with chrome surfaces and LED screens, a mausoleum for billion-dollar decisions. Aloysius “Al” Riparini, CEO of Stratodyne Aerospace and occasional reader of Popular Mechanics, slouched in his ergonomic chair like a sullen Apollo. 

He forward, hands steepled, his face carved in the grim expression of a man waiting to hear bad news explained in worse terms. Across from him, Vance Trawick, the company’s Chief Operations Futurist, was already sweating through his tailored suit.

“So,” Al said, cutting the tension like a scythe through tall grass. “You’re telling me the rockets can’t launch.”

“Not yet,” Vance admitted, staring at a stack of untouched binders as if they might leap to his defense. “The chips… well, they’re good. They’re very good. But they’re not good enough. We need more processing power to handle the real-time computations—guidance, payload integrity, the whole system. The chips need to double their capacity.”

“And why the hell haven’t they?”

“Well…” Vance hesitated, then rushed out the words before Al could interrupt. “It’s the same problem everywhere. The Chinese are stuck at the same threshold. So are the Russians. It’s a bottleneck. Nobody can make the leap.”

Al’s fingers tapped on the table, a restless staccato that echoed in the uneasy silence. “So what you’re telling me,” he said slowly, “is that nobody’s going anywhere. Us, them, anyone.”

“Not until the chips double,” Vance said. “But here’s the thing—we can’t just make them double. The tech is there, sure, in theory. But to develop it—properly, reliably—it requires enormous investment. I’m talking decades of R&D money, Al.”

“Which we don’t have.”

“Which nobody has. Not without an external pressure. Something to accelerate the process.”

“And what, exactly, do you suggest?” Al asked, his tone suggesting he already regretted asking.

“That’s where I come in,” said Dr. Miranda Crick from the far end of the table. The Chief Philosopher of Applied Algorithms—her title read like satire, but her mind operated like a scalpel—had been silent until now. She adjusted her glasses, the movement slow and deliberate, as though she wanted the room’s attention fully in her grasp.

“What’s your solution, Dr. Crick?” Al asked, swiveling his chair toward her.

“A war,” she said, almost cheerfully.

The air seemed to drop ten degrees. Even Vance, used to her peculiar turns of phrase, looked startled.

For Al Riparini, the word war didn’t just echo; it reverberated in his chest like a Sousa march played by an orchestra of brassieres. A sudden heat surged from his toes to his neck, blooming in his face with the same intensity as an ad campaign for Liberty Bonds.

Al just stared, slack-jawed, waiting for her to explain.

“What do you mean, a war?” he said finally.

“A war,” she repeated. “It’s the only thing that would create the conditions for progress. Think about it. Right now, we’re in a stalemate. Nobody can launch their rockets because nobody has chips capable of handling the systems. If we wait, it’ll take years—decades, even—for natural development cycles to bridge the gap. But a war… well, a war forces everyone’s hand. Both sides—us, China, Russia—would have no choice but to invest everything in chip technology. Billions, trillions, poured into advancement. Each side racing to outpace the other.”

Al’s mind began to swirl with images: women in pin-up poses, draped in stars and stripes, standing provocatively next to missile silos. His hand crept involuntarily to the knot of his tie, loosening it. Was he sweating? Yes, but it was the righteous sweat of a man ready to serve his country—and possibly make love to it.

“And the rockets?” Al asked, his voice brittle with disbelief.

“They’d launch,” Dr. Crick said simply. “Once the chips are ready. And they would be ready, Al. Faster than you can imagine. The stakes would be too high for anything less. In the end, the side that pushes hardest would come out on top.”

“Then humanity wins,” she said with a shrug. “Think about it. Satellites with quantum chips. Communications systems operating on entirely new paradigms. Technologies that trickle down to the civilian sector. It would revolutionize everything.”

“And if there’s no clear winner?”

Al leaned back, his chair groaning. “And how exactly do you propose we, uh, kick off this war?”

“Not start it,” Dr. Crick corrected. “Just nudge things in the right direction. Wars don’t need architects, Mr. Riparini. They need opportunities. And opportunities, well—those are easy to arrange.”

A heavy silence settled over the room, broken only by the hum of the air conditioning. Someone at the far end coughed nervously. Al rubbed his temples, trying to stave off the migraine forming behind his eyes.

“You’re insane,” he muttered.

“Am I?” Dr. Crick said, tilting her head. Her voice was soft now, almost tender. “Or am I just the only one here willing to face reality?”

Somewhere, in a nondescript office on the other side of the globe, a Chinese engineer was muttering similar frustrations into a tea-stained telephone, his own chips stubbornly refusing to leap into the future. Meanwhile, in Moscow, a gruff general scrawled impatient notes across a budget report. By nightfall, a peculiar email with no sender address would arrive in all their inboxes, its subject line reading simply: Firestarter

Scene: Secure Transcontinental Conference Call – Codename: Project Firestarter

The screen flickered to life, a patchwork of encrypted pixelation and glitching audio that gave the impression the meeting was taking place inside an Atari game. On the American side, Aloysius “Al” Riparini leaned forward in his chair, flanked by Dr. Miranda Crick. His face was lit by the pale glow of his laptop, and his expression carried the uneasy enthusiasm of a man about to pitch a multi-level marketing scheme to old friends.

The Chinese representative, Wu Jingbao, appeared stoic but visibly annoyed, his frame hunched in an office chair that creaked like the gates of Hell every time he shifted. To his right sat a translator whose face said she’d rather be literally anywhere else. Meanwhile, the Russian delegate, Yuri Karpov—a tank-shaped man with a haircut that might have been achieved with a ruler and a cleaver—was sipping from a flask and muttering something that sounded suspiciously like cursing.

“Alright,” Al began, his voice cutting through the static. “Let me start by saying we’re all in the same boat here. Rockets, stuck on the ground. Chips, not doubling like they’re supposed to. Progress, dead in the water. Am I right?”

“Speak for yourself,” Yuri grumbled in heavily accented English. “Russia is not stuck. Russia is… strategically paused.”

“Strategically paused?” Wu echoed with a snort. His translator hesitated, then gamely rendered it into diplomatic Mandarin, earning a withering glare from Wu.

“Okay, fine,” Al said, holding up his hands. “Strategically paused, whatever. But let’s not kid ourselves. None of us are launching anything anytime soon. And I think we all know why.”

The translator fumbled through this as well, but the phrase came through clear enough. Wu sighed deeply, while Yuri took another pull from his flask. The silence on the call was deafening.

“Alright, here’s the pitch,” Al said after a moment. “What if… we gave war a chance?”

Wu’s head snapped up so fast it could have dislocated. The translator paused, clearly hoping she’d misheard. Yuri choked on his vodka.

“War?” Wu said, scandalized. His voice needed no translation.

“Are you insane?”

Yuri Karpov felt the word war slither through his veins like a shot of the good stuff, the kind that burned going down but left you warm enough to take your shirt off in Siberia. He crossed his legs, then uncrossed them, then crossed them again, the fabric of his trousers tightening dangerously.

Americans always with your war! Always the solution! No, no, no. Idiocy!”

“Listen, hear me out—” Al began.

“Hear you out?” Wu interrupted, his voice rising an octave. “You want us to burn down half the planet so you can make your rockets fly? What next, nuclear exchange to improve battery life?”

“That’s not what I’m saying!” Al said, hands raised defensively. “This wouldn’t be a real war. Just… enough to get the funding moving, right? Push innovation! Nobody actually has to, you know, die. Not too many people, anyway.”

The translator stopped mid-sentence, her face frozen in a mix of horror and disbelief. Wu waved her off and glared at the screen. “You’re out of your mind. Absolutely out of your mind. What about the environment? The economy? The—”

“—chips,” Dr. Crick interjected, her voice calm and deliberate. The room quieted as she leaned into the frame, hands clasped. “Think about the chips, gentlemen. That’s the real issue here. Without chips, there’s no space race. No global advancement. No progress.”

“We have progress,” Yuri growled. “Russia has many advancements. Efficient advancements. Last week, we launch weather balloon with… sensors.”

His mind was already rushing past battlefield strategy and into something far darker. Control, he thought. Submission. Oh yes, war was the ultimate kink—a nation bent over, braced against the harsh slap of fate. His pulse quickened at the thought of imposing his will on a trembling adversary, of hearing the whimpering whine of sanctions being applied like a leather crop to bare flesh.

“Yes,” Wu said drily. “Very inspiring. I’m sure the farmers were thrilled.”

Yuri narrowed his eyes. “China launched nothing. Only smug faces on conference calls.”

Wu bristled, but Dr. Crick cut in again before things could escalate. “Gentlemen, please. We’re not here to measure who’s more stalled out. The fact is, you both need us as much as we need you. The Americans can’t do this alone. But neither can you.”

“And so your solution is war?” Wu said, incredulous.

Wu Jingbao had froze when he heard the word, not because he was afraid, but because it hit him in the same way a perfectly brewed cup of oolong did—complex, stimulating, and faintly intoxicating. He closed his eyes and let the syllable wash over him. War. It was a word that demanded control, demanded precision. It was the sharp edge of a blade against a trembling neck, the teetering moment between chaos and mastery. His thoughts drifted to his prized silk restraints, dyed crimson to symbolize both passion and blood. He imagined tying the hands of his enemies—no, partners—to the four corners of a table, forcing them to admit their inferiority before granting them the sweet release of capitulation.

“Not war-war,” Al said. “Just… enough war. Like a Cold War! You guys loved that one, didn’t you?”

Yuri snorted but didn’t respond. Wu leaned back in his chair, rubbing his temples. The translator muttered something under her breath that definitely wasn’t in the script.

“It’s a simulation, really,” Dr. Crick said, seizing on the silence. “A way to organize resources and focus development. Yes, there’ll be some collateral damage—there always is—but the end result is a leap forward for all humanity. Rockets, chips, satellites. It’s not about who wins or loses. It’s about pushing the boundaries.”

“Pushing boundaries,” Wu repeated flatly. “Like pushing people off cliffs.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Dr. Crick said brightly.

Yuri stared at his flask, then at the screen, then back at his flask. “What kind of war?” he asked at last.

“Proxy skirmishes, mostly,” Dr. Crick said, her tone now soothing, like a kindergarten teacher explaining the rules of dodgeball. “A few tense stand-offs. Maybe an espionage scandal or two. Nothing too serious. Just enough to loosen some purse strings and get the chips moving.”

“Ridiculous,” Wu muttered, but his tone lacked conviction. His fingers drummed on the desk as he stared at the ceiling, calculating. “How would it even start?”

“Oh, that’s the easy part,” Al said, suddenly animated. “We’ve got, like, a dozen hotspots primed for this kind of thing. Taiwan, Ukraine, the Arctic—take your pick. We’ll poke a little, you’ll poke back, and bam! Instant arms race. The media eats it up, the funding floods in, and before you know it, we’re all back in space.”

“And when the war ends?” Yuri asked. His voice was softer now, more curious than combative.

“Whoever’s rockets go up first,” Dr. Crick said, smiling faintly, “gets to write the history books.”

Wu and Yuri exchanged glances. For the first time, their mutual disdain was tinged with something like camaraderie.

“It’s insane,” Wu said at last.

“Completely,” Yuri agreed.

They both paused. Then Wu sighed and leaned forward.

Wu leaned forward, his glare cold enough to freeze the Great Firewall itself. “Alright,” he said finally, the words dropping like stones. “But no nuclear weapons.”

Yuri smirked, leaning back in his chair and unscrewing his flask with exaggerated nonchalance. “Eh,” he said with a shrug. “Five, maybe ten tops.”

Wu froze, mouth slightly open, as if waiting for a punchline that never came.

“Tops,” Yuri repeated, raising the flask as if to toast. “You know, just to keep things… interesting.”

Al, sensing an opportunity to smooth over the moment, chimed in. “Right, right, just enough to, uh, raise the stakes. A little tension, but not mutually assured destruction tension, just… dramatic tension. Like a season finale!”

Wu’s expression tightened into something resembling the moment a poker player realizes his hand is garbage.

For a long moment, the room was silent except for the faint hum of encrypted audio. Then Wu let out a bitter laugh, shaking his head as if trying to dislodge the absurdity of it all.

“Fine,” he muttered.” he said softly, his voice tinged with an almost musical cadence. His hand idly traced the edge of his desk, the lacquer smooth and cool under his fingertips. He glanced at his translator, who avoided his gaze, but he lingered on the slope of her neck, imagining the red marks his fingers might leave. “Harmony,” he murmured, leaning back. “Even war can have harmony, if conducted…correctly.” His lips curled into a smile as he allowed the thought to linger, warm and tantalizing.

Al clapped his hands together with manic enthusiasm. “Great, great! Look at us—collaborating already! Humanity, huh? We’ll figure this out yet.”

Somewhere in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing, teams of analysts were already drafting war plans, their algorithms humming with renewed purpose. And somewhere else entirely, a single factory began producing silicon wafers at double speed, ready for the chaos to come.

The Ghost of Mittelbau-Dora

Von Braun’s steel-tipped dreams hum with blood and gasoline. A factory of shadows, all twisted spines and raw hands—dying by the hundreds, whispering curses in languages he never cared to learn. “Build me a ladder to the stars,” he says, boot heels clicking on the concrete, the sound swallowed by the choking wheeze of the dying.

And they built it. Bone by bone, rib by rib. V-2 rockets screamed into the air like angry ghosts, their trails searing the night sky, lighting the path to ruin. Didn’t matter who won. The ladder was his. Rockets kissed the edge of heaven while kingdoms below burned and dissolved into ash.

When the winds shifted, he packed his ladder neatly into a briefcase, swapped the swastika for the star-spangled banner. “No hard feelings,” he whispered to the ghosts of Mittelbau-Dora. “It’s not personal; it’s orbital.”

And so von Braun dreamed, sold his sins to the highest bidder, and built his rockets higher. He aimed for Mars but left his soul somewhere in the dust of the camps, tangled in the smoke of a war he could never win.

One night, under the cold hum of fluorescent lights, von Braun found himself face to face with the ghost of Mittelbau-Dora. It shimmered like grease on water, eyes hollow as the craters his rockets carved into London streets.

“You summoned me,” the ghost whispered, its voice a low-frequency rumble like bombers over Dresden.

“I didn’t,” von Braun said, lighting a cigarette with an unsteady hand. “You misunderstand. I’m a scientist, not a… conjurer.”

The ghost laughed, a sound like metal grinding against bone. “You don’t summon me with rituals, Herr Doctor. You summon me with equations. With each launch, my shadow grows taller.”

Von Braun exhaled smoke, staring into the ghost’s shifting form. “I regret nothing. You misunderstand progress. Sacrifice is inevitable.”

“You misunderstand sacrifice,” the ghost snapped, advancing. Its translucent limbs bore the scars of whip marks and crushed fingers. “Sacrifice is giving something willingly. You stole.”

The cigarette trembled in von Braun’s hand. “I didn’t steal. I was ordered. I followed orders.”

The ghost leaned closer, its breath reeking of burnt flesh and ammonia. “The universe doesn’t care about your orders. It only records the weight of your sins. Gravity is impartial, Herr Doctor. It drags all things down—rockets and souls alike.”

Von Braun’s voice grew sharp, defensive. “And yet, I rose. I escaped. I brought humanity to the stars!”

The ghost grinned, revealing teeth that cracked like splintered stone. “You didn’t bring humanity. You brought its corpse, wrapped in equations and stamped with approval. But tell me, when you sleep, do you dream of the stars… or of the camp?”

Von Braun fell silent, his cigarette now a smoldering stub between his fingers.

“Keep building, Herr Doctor,” the ghost said, retreating into the dim corners of the room. “Every launch is a prayer, and I’ll be waiting at the altar. Heaven is colder than you think.”

And then it was gone, leaving von Braun alone, the silence around him vast as the vacuum he so admired.

<>

Von Braun sat for a long while in the empty room, the ghost’s words reverberating in his skull like the countdown clock he had memorized so long ago. Ten, nine, eight… His hands were shaking. He crushed the cigarette stub into an ashtray overflowing with others, each one a failed attempt to quiet the noise.

The ghost returned the next night. This time it was not alone.

Behind it, a procession emerged: spectral workers from Mittelbau-Dora, their translucent bodies hunched beneath the weight of phantom chains. Their faces were smeared with ash, their eyes empty pits that seemed to absorb the light from von Braun’s desk lamp.

“You’ve built a cathedral of fire,” the ghost said, gesturing at the blueprints sprawled across the table. “But who does it worship? The stars? Or the ruins below?”

Von Braun’s voice was thin, almost pleading. “You can’t understand. The war… it demanded impossible things. I didn’t choose—”

“You always choose,” the ghost interrupted. Its tone was sharp now, like the snap of a taut wire. “You chose ambition. You chose to climb, even as others burned beneath you.”

The workers began to speak, their voices overlapping in a cacophony of accusations, memories, and half-formed screams.

“I was sixteen.”

“My lungs filled with dust.”

“They beat us for slowing down.”

“They shot my brother in the quarry.”

Von Braun staggered backward, his mind reeling. He pressed his palms to his ears, but their voices seeped through, each word clawing at his defenses.

“Enough!” he shouted, his voice cracking. “What do you want from me? I did what I had to do. Without me, the rockets wouldn’t have flown. The world would have lost decades—”

The ghost cut him off with a gesture. “You think progress absolves you? Progress is indifferent. Rockets don’t care who builds them or who dies in the process. And the stars you worship—they’re silent. They won’t absolve you. They won’t even notice you.”

Von Braun collapsed into his chair, his head in his hands. The ghost moved closer, its form flickering like a damaged film reel.

“Do you know the difference between you and the stars, Herr Doctor?” it asked softly.

He didn’t answer.

“They burn without taking,” the ghost whispered. “You burn everything around you to keep your flame alive.”

Von Braun didn’t sleep that night, nor the night after. Each launch he orchestrated brought a fresh visit. The specters grew louder, their forms more vivid, until he could no longer tell if they haunted his waking hours or his dreams.

But he kept building. Because what else could he do?

One day, years later, when the Apollo 11 rocket touched down on the moon, von Braun sat alone in a dark room, watching the grainy broadcast. He should have felt triumph. Instead, the ghost’s words echoed in his mind:

“Heaven is colder than you think.”

<>

Von Braun jerked awake, his breath ragged, sweat pooling in the folds of his collar. The conference table loomed before him, its polished surface reflecting faces frozen mid-expression—Walt Disney, his eyes sharp and glittering; a clutch of clean-cut executives; and a secretary poised with her shorthand pad, staring at him as if he’d just crawled out of a grave.

“Dr. von Braun?” Walt’s voice was cool, a salesman’s pitch buried beneath the genial tone. “You were saying something about the Saturn V?”

Von Braun blinked, his vision still blurry. The ghost’s voice whispered in the corners of his mind: They burn without taking. He swallowed hard, forcing himself back into the skin of the polished scientist, the American visionary.

“Yes,” he stammered, brushing the cold sweat from his forehead. “The Saturn V… a tremendous leap for mankind. Reliable, scalable… limitless potential.” His words sounded hollow to his own ears, like an echo in an empty silo.

The executives exchanged glances. One of them—a younger man with slicked-back hair and the wide, toothy grin of a salesman—spoke up.

“Limitless potential,” he repeated, leaning forward. “That’s what America’s all about, Doc. Taking us to the stars!”

“Indeed,” Walt said, his voice like honey poured over gears. “And with your help, we’ll inspire the next generation. Rockets, adventure, the frontier spirit—it’s a story we can sell.”

Von Braun nodded, but his stomach churned. His eyes darted to the mock-up sketches on the table: gleaming rockets against the backdrop of Tomorrowland, astronauts shaking hands in zero gravity, a grinning Mickey Mouse saluting the moon. The future, sanitized and sparkling.

The ghost’s voice slithered into his thoughts: Progress is indifferent.

Walt leaned closer, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial tone. “We’re talking about more than just technology here, Dr. von Braun. We’re talking about storytelling. You’ll be the face of a new era—a bridge between the old world and the new. And America? We love a redemption story.”

Von Braun hesitated, his hand gripping the edge of the table. Redemption. Was that what this was?

“Is something wrong?” Walt asked, his smile tightening just a fraction.

“No,” von Braun said quickly, forcing a smile of his own. “I’m just… overwhelmed by the possibilities.”

“Well,” Walt said, leaning back in his chair, “possibilities are why we’re all here. Let’s move on.”

The meeting droned on, talk of funding and timelines, television specials and public enthusiasm. But von Braun wasn’t listening. His mind wandered back to the ghost, to the voices of the workers he’d buried in the darkness of Mittelbau-Dora. They lingered in the edges of his vision, just out of reach, their hands outstretched toward him.

“Dr. von Braun,” Walt said suddenly, snapping him back to the room. “Are you with us?”

“Yes,” von Braun said, his voice distant. “Of course.”

But as he spoke, he noticed Walt’s smile falter, just for a moment. The man’s eyes narrowed, as if he saw something flickering behind von Braun’s carefully constructed facade. Something hollow. Something haunted.

The meeting ended, handshakes were exchanged, and von Braun walked out into the California sunshine. The warmth on his skin felt like a mockery. As he stepped into his car, he caught his reflection in the rearview mirror. For a moment, it wasn’t his face staring back. It was the ghost’s, its hollow eyes burning with quiet fury.

And then it was gone.

Von Braun drove away, gripping the wheel tightly. In his mind, the countdown began again. Ten, nine, eight…

The City of Ten Thousand Doors

The room has been thick with smoke, curling in lazy rings under the ceiling fans, the walls stained amber in the dim light. Tangiers has pulsed outside, the city flickering in neon, shadows shifting like restless ghosts. In the corner, beneath a cracked light, the boss has leaned back in his chair—Moroccan leather, worn with years, his fingers drumming on its arm. He has watched the young men across from him with a hard, steady gaze, reading them as if they’ve already confessed everything.

“You have thought I’m just another hustler,” he has said, a slow smirk pulling at his lips, “another man with hands in pockets, collecting my piece.” The men have been silent, their shoulders tight, but the boss has leaned forward, letting smoke drift from his cigarette. “You haven’t understood it yet, have you? What I do has gone far beyond money. Money has been only a shadow, an echo. What I have done here, it’s made something—call it order, call it peace, but it’s real.”

He has flicked his cigarette ash onto the floor, ignoring the tremor in the younger man’s hand. “If I hadn’t been here, things would have fallen to chaos. The souks, the ports, the whole rhythm of the Medina—everything would have unraveled. What I’ve built has kept this place together, ticked it forward like the gears in an old clock.” His voice has been quiet but sharp, cutting through the haze of the room like a blade.

“Now, maybe you’ve been thinking, if there’s no trouble, why would anyone need a man like me?” He has laughed, a low, rusty sound. “But that’s the trick, isn’t it? If I’m good at my job, then there’s nothing to see. No mess, no broken bones in the street, no blood on the walls. People start to believe there’s nothing wrong, that danger’s a myth.”

He has looked through the window, the lights of Tangiers spread below him like a map of possibilities. “But if something bad had happened? If I had let things slip even once?” His face has hardened, his jaw clenched. “Then they’d say I had failed, that I wasn’t worth the price. They’d forget the times I’ve stopped trouble before it had begun, the messes I’ve cleaned before they’ve spilled over.”

He has paused, smoke wreathing his face, an ancient calm in his eyes. “Do you understand the weight of that? To keep things balanced, never seen, never praised? To hold all the threads while people wonder if you’re even needed? That’s my trade. I’ve made sure that bad things haven’t happened. And that is my curse: the better I do my job, the less they see me, the less they understand what I’ve saved them from. But they come to me in the end, every time, because they have known—even if they forget in the daylight—how much worse it could be.”

The boss has shifted, leaning back as if to take in the whole room with one slow, sweeping look. The young men have sat tense, half-listening, half-staring at the haze of smoke. He has taken a deep breath, as though he’s about to let them in on some secret hidden in the foundations of the city itself.

“You see, people talk about technology as if it’s some kind of miracle, some guarantee of power,” he has murmured, voice like gravel rubbing against silk. “But I’ve seen the truth—no matter how powerful a technology becomes, it’s never more than an experiment. Always a test, always just a step out into the unknown. The fools in labs, the ones behind all those machines and wires, they don’t know what they’re playing with. They’re like children with matches, thinking they’ve mastered fire.”

He has laughed, cold and low, taking another drag from his cigarette. “Technologists think they’re gods, but they’re blind as anyone else. They can’t see the full picture, not until it’s too late. Every invention they’ve made, every so-called ‘solution’—it’s been nothing but a gamble. They’ve played with forces they haven’t understood, and by the time they’ve seen the consequences, it’s already out of their hands.”

He has looked each young man in the eye, holding them there as if weighing their souls. “Me? I’ve never had that luxury. I’ve had to see things for what they are, right from the start. Every move, every deal, every choice has had to be deliberate, no room for loose ends or blind experiments. The people out there,” he has gestured toward the city lights flickering through the window, “they think they’re safe because of some system, some clever design. But all of that, the order they take for granted—it’s only ever been real because I’ve made it so. Not machines, not technology, but flesh and blood, sweat and consequence.”

He has leaned forward, his voice dropping to a whisper, but with the weight of iron. “The men in labs can afford to fail. They learn after the fact, let their failures fall on others, make their adjustments. But here in Tangiers, in the streets, I don’t have that luxury. If I fail, the city burns. That’s the difference. Their power’s experimental; mine’s real.”

The smoke has lingered thick around them, the shadows pooling deeper as his words settled over the room like a warning. “So remember this,” he has said, a dark gleam in his eye, “whatever new marvels or toys they come up with, whatever promises they make—their games will always end in uncertainty. But what I’ve built, what I protect… that’s no experiment. That’s the line between order and chaos. And as long as I’m here, I keep that line.”

The boss has drawn a long, slow drag from his cigarette, and his eyes have softened, gazing out toward the window where Tangiers sprawled like a living tapestry. “This city,” he has said, voice a mix of reverence and resignation, “it isn’t some neat system, like those technologists dream about. No, this place… it’s like the wave and the electron. Infinite, changing, an experiment that’s always in motion, never fixed.”

He has looked back at the young men, holding them in the weight of his stare. “They think they can measure it, control it, like it’s some Western machine. But here? Tangiers is like the wind that rolls off the Rif Mountains, like the markets shifting each dawn, like the sea brushing at the rocks and changing a little each time. Everything here, it’s relationship, it’s the balance of people who’ve known each other’s families for generations. It’s not rules and systems; it’s baraka—the blessings, the weight of lineage, of blood and debt, of favors traded over tea, beneath the palm trees.”

He’s flicked his cigarette ash again, as though brushing off the technologists’ schemes, their neat little theories. “You see, in the North, they have their systems, their grids, their determinations. But here? Here, we have tajriba—a kind of knowing, a trust in the way things unfold, always close, never certain. And like the electron, everything depends on how you look at it, how you’re connected to it. You can’t hold Tangiers in your hand; you can only walk through it, move with it, be part of its rhythm.”

He’s paused, tapping his fingers on the table. “This place is indeterminate, like you said. It’s like the wave. One minute it’s a pulse of energy moving through the souks, the alleys; next moment, it’s gone, disappeared into the Medina’s hidden paths. It slips through your fingers like sand. And every day, every deal I make, every person I touch, it changes. Not in some simple, linear way—they don’t understand that. It’s like trying to catch a river in a cup. You only get a trickle, but the rest flows on, uncontained.”

He’s leaned back, letting his words settle over the young men, filling the room with a silence that has felt thick and heavy. “So they think they can impose their systems here? Control it from the outside? They’ll only ever see a shadow, a surface reflection, because they don’t have the connection, the roots. They don’t have the real understanding. You can’t build a city with formulas, with charts. This city’s made of whispers and debts, of hands clasped over coffee, of promises that outlast lifetimes.”

He’s taken another drag, and his eyes have drifted back to the cityscape beyond the window. “They don’t know Tangiers. They see the city, but not the experiment within it—the push and pull, the pulse beneath the stone, the spirits and ancestors, the ways that cross each other like the wind. And that’s why, in the end, this city is ours. Because we understand that it’s not a problem to be solved. It’s alive, like the ocean, like the mountain, like us. A living, breathing, shifting wave.”

Pigfuck and the Sisters of Mercy #2: A Fable

Once upon a time, in a forest crawling with filth, corruption, and fat-cat lobbyists, there lived the three little piggies—known far and wide as the Sisters of Mercy. They were a fine-looking bunch, all dolled up in their little blue suits, tails neatly curled, ready for the cameras, always chattering on about justice and equality and the dire need to keep the Big Bad Pigfuck at bay.

Pigfuck was no ordinary wolf, mind you. He was a massive, hulking beast of a creature, slicked in corporate grease, his snout buried deep in the feeding troughs of industry. The kind of monster who could blow your house down without so much as a sneeze. Pigfuck didn’t just terrorize the forest; he owned it. Everywhere he went, he left a trail of stock options, tax breaks, and non-disclosure agreements. He was the ultimate power broker, a carnivorous Wall Street Frankenstein stitched together from military contracts, energy subsidies, and all the greed money could buy.

Now, the Sisters of Mercy had one job: keep Pigfuck from tearing the forest to pieces. But instead of fortifying their homes, they sat around their little house of straw, squawking about the horrors of Pigfuck, lamenting his tyrannical reign. “Oh, the wolf is such a terror! Just look at him slobbering over our resources, crushing the poor under his hooves!” they cried, as if naming the beast would somehow exorcize him. Their solution? Statements. Endless statements about the dangers of Pigfuck and the importance of standing up to him. Meanwhile, Pigfuck was doubling down on his rampage, buying up half the forest and lining his den with the hides of those who dared challenge him.

The Sisters built themselves a second house, this one out of sticks—committee meetings, town halls, press releases—but all it took was one blow from Pigfuck, and it went up in a cloud of PR dust. They just stood there, picking up the splinters, still yammering on about how someone had to do something. Because that’s the thing about the Sisters of Mercy—they loved to talk about saving the forest but didn’t have a spine between them when it came to actually keeping Pigfuck out. Oh, they’d cluck and they’d preen, and they’d wag their curly little tails, but when the beast came huffing and puffing, all they could do was watch him stomp through the rubble.

In the end, the Sisters built a third house, this one out of bricks. It was sturdy enough, built on lofty speeches and activist catchphrases, just enough to keep Pigfuck from blowing it down in one swoop. But inside those walls, the Sisters were up to the same old game—clinking wine glasses, swapping platitudes, and counting donations while Pigfuck prowled outside, still devouring every inch of the forest that wasn’t behind their pretty brick wall.

And so, Pigfuck continued his reign, growing fatter, meaner, more ruthless by the day, while the Sisters of Mercy held tight to their illusions of resistance. They’d throw parties to “raise awareness,” host soirées to “build morale,” all the while pretending their house of bricks was a fortress of change. But they knew, deep down, they weren’t doing a damn thing to stop him. They were just three little piggies, snug and self-righteous, too afraid to face the beast they’d rather just complain about.

In the end, the forest wasn’t lost because Pigfuck was powerful. It was lost because the Sisters of Mercy thought pointing at the monster was the same as fighting him.