His support for the president had cost him long-time friends, two major consulting clients and made extended family gatherings awkward, and as a consequence, fewer and farther between. Even his marriage had suffered, not so much due to his views, but his work had caused him to miss family dinners and his daughter’s basketball games. His wife respected and even admired his commitment, but she too had given up a lot for a cause that wasn’t really hers.

Charles’ efforts had paid off, though — or so it seemed. The president won comfortably, carrying by unexpectedly high margins the crucial counties and states where Charles had placed his focus. Finally, he felt, there was a chance to reverse the decline of this great country, bring it back to the imperfect but more wholesome place he remembered growing up.

Unfortunately, after the election things didn’t entirely go as he had hoped. When the president appointed pharmaceutical industry lobbyists to key positions, he was surprised, but reminded himself everyone had to play ball, going scorched earth was rarely the right move in politics, “keep your friends close, enemies closer” and all that. To his credit, the president as promised had appointed to his cabinet the man Charles looked up to most, one who had alienated his entire family and former party to pursue accountability for the reckless pharmaceutical conglomerates whose business model had morphed from treating patients to creating them.

Charles had seen the documents, knew many if not most of their offerings had net negative impacts on longevity and even health span. He knew they had cooked the books, bought off the scientific journals, gate-kept contrary studies via peer review and bribed the corporate media with massive ad-spends. He probably wouldn’t have looked into it at all except that 15-years ago his hippie brother had an autistic daughter and insisted it began right after she received her shots. Everyone told him it was a conspiracy theory, but Charles knew his brother, despite external appearances, was no fool. If Sam said he witnessed it, Charles believed him.

Charles almost smiled thinking back — as awful as his brother’s experience was (his daughter had improved dramatically since due to unconventional chelation therapy) — that was small potatoes, a drop of rain in the Pacific compared to the latest iatrogenic assault on humanity. Charles was convinced if the average person knew what he did about the mandated gene therapy marketed as vaccines, they would need to put the pharma conglomerate execs under armed guard just to ensure they made it to trial with their limbs attached to their bodies.

For that reason, Charles was beyond dismayed when instead of going after the pharma conglomerates, the cabinet appointee made deals with them at the president’s behest. How could the man who on the campaign trail said they had perpetrated a “holocaust” shake hands, smile and tout lower drug prices? It was unthinkable, and Charles was not alone in his sentiments. So many in the movement were aghast and not shy about expressing it on social media. Charles himself had been reluctant to say anything publicly for he so revered the man and held out hope it was all just 11-dimensional chess to get them to let their guard down.

But as months wore on, and the gene therapy remained on the market, still being injected into the arms of children, Charles could no longer take it. He posted to his substantial following about the betrayal of the movement, though notably declined to speculate, as others had, about blackmail, subversion or any other motive for the secretary’s shocking about face.

Charles was not only despondent about the future of the country — the entire movement was about how the prosperity of a nation is foundationally dependent on healthy, well-nourished, unpoisoned children growing into powerful, mentally well and able-bodied adults — but was also having a personal epistemic crisis of sorts. How could he have been so naive? How could the obvious truth and clear imperative be so easily abandoned, no matter the pressures? This was beyond political incentives and the usual subterfuge they always entailed. This was like a young, healthy mother drowning her beautiful newborn in a bathtub.

There must be *some* explanation for this, he thought, something I don’t see that accounts for what they’re doing. Charles rejected the idea the cabinet secretary was bought off — bought off with what? If he could be bought off, why bother to get into that position in the first place? The man surely did not need the money.

Charles posted earnestly about his despair and also his epistemic crisis — what the hell was really going on? Shortly after one post went viral — even mainstream news people were commenting on it — his phone rang. It was a number he didn’t recognize, but for some reason he knew he should answer it. A voice on the other end said, “The Secretary would like to meet with you.”

. . .

Sitting across a desk from the Secretary, a man he had met several times, but did not know well, Charles studied his lined face. He was unusually fit for his age, but seemed like he was under an inhuman amount of stress, having a private battle with forces regular people could not fathom. The secretary smiled and said, “I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t blame you. I’d be thinking the same thing in your shoes.”

Charles nodded.

“Before we get started, you need to know this is completely off the record. If you repeat any of it or attribute it to me, I will deny it. And I also can’t protect you. Do you understand?”

Charles nodded again.

“I asked you to come here because I saw your posts. I suppose there are others I could have asked instead, but yours were the most earnest, the most truthful. It’s what I would hope someone were thinking if they didn’t know what I know.”

“Also, you should know part of the reason I’m doing this, speaking to you, is selfish. What I know has been tough to bear solitarily, and even having someone to tell is frankly a luxury I have not had since I joined the administration nine months ago. But it also entails some risk for you, you should be aware.”

It dimly occurred to Charles to ask about the risk, but before the thought could bubble up into his conscious mind, he heard himself blurt out, “I’m aware, I just want to know what’s going on.”

“Everything I said during the campaign was true,” the secretary continued. “The drug companies have caused untold harms, and the gene therapy was orders of magnitude more harmful than anything that preceded it. I now know that for sure and moreover that virtually all of the harms were known ahead of time. This was admitted to me directly.”

Charles exhaled. Even though he was 90 percent sure they had known all along, it was striking to hear it stated as a fact.

“The primary harms, the turbo cancers, myocarditis, neurological issues, auto-immune problems were side effects, known but minimized — they could have been even worse, hard as that might be to believe. The real purpose was to target fertility, reduce population with the least amount of suffering. They engineered the shots that way, but of course there would be side effects, and many of the principals involved lost loved ones too. They feel terrible about the side effects (well some of them), but, make no mistake, they knew.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yeah, I didn’t either. You see the problem is something much bigger than what we’d call ‘national security’ or ‘safety’ or even the ill-health pandemic of our children.”

“Very hard to imagine a problem that…”

“The Great Flood was not a myth. It was a historical account.”

. . .

In the cab back to his hotel (the secretary insisted he not take Uber which would provide a record of his trip), Charles’ thoughts were racing. Toggling between the small everyday tasks of picking up his daughter from basketball or doing the dishes after dinner and the large-scale national election and policy shaping work of his job was always a difficult balance. Wiping dry and oiling the fancy cast iron pan his wife had bought in South Carolina so as to prevent rust was also important, he often had to remind himself. The micro and macro scales both require full attention.

But this was another level of macro altogether. The Great Flood? Had the secretary gone mad? What the fuck was he talking about? Charles reflected back on his exact words:

“I know, I know. It sounds crazy, but I assure you the science is very real. As real as the science showing harms I was appointed to prevent. Remember they called us ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘tin-foil hatters’ for following where it led, and I’m sorry to say I must be one because I accept its conclusions no matter how much I’d prefer them to be wrong.”

Charles interjected: “If you have iron-clad proof the earth is heading for an armageddon-level cataclysm due to climate change, don’t you think you *might* want to alert the public rather than murdering them and ending their bloodlines via fraud?”

“It’s not climate change, or at least it’s not the ‘reduce your carbon footprint’ nonsense that’s been promoted in the corporate media. It’s much bigger and much worse. I can send you the details on the science, but the short version is the earth’s magnetic poles have already shifted significantly from true north/south. They’ve wandered, this is uncontroversial. And it’s also uncontroversial that our magnetic field has weakened, which means we have less protection against cosmic particles and radiation from the sun. I don’t know if you’ve noticed all the stunning auroras being seen at unprecedentedly low latitudes online — they really are quite beautiful.”

“Maybe, I think so. So what?”

“So as more solar material makes it through our weakened magnetic shield, the mantle that keeps the earth’s surface stable gets dislodged a little bit. The new magnetic poles, far away from the north/south axis, exert a force, along with the massive weight of the icecaps at the poles, and that force is pulling — will pull, we believe — the earth into a 90-ish degree rotation. So India becomes the new North Pole and South America moves to form the South Pole, the sharp movement causing the oceans to slosh chaotically across every continent. We believe this has happened many times in history already on a roughly 6,000-year cycle, recounted not only in the book of Genesis, but also in Chinese, Indian, Mesopotamian, Indigenous American and ancient Greek texts.”

“Okay, this is insane, but for the sake of argument, assume it’s true. What does that have to do with holding accountable those who perpetrated this ’holocaust’ as you yourself put it? Why are we even talking about this?”

“Because the architects of the quote pandemic, the primary (though not sole) purpose of which was the creation of the mRNA shots, have known about this coming cataclysm for decades, don’t believe most of humanity can be saved and have long contemplated reducing the population to minimize suffering and (of course) resistance.”

Charles was dumbfounded. Of course it was something this insane. Profit motive explained a lot of bad behavior in human history, but for a genocide of this scale to be planned in this detail, there had to be something more. And the secretary had told him. People in power had lost their minds, had formed an apocalyptic cult and believed they were culling the population “for the greater good.” They were playing God. But had the secretary also joined the cult? Why is he telling me this in that case?

The secretary continued: “You’re probably wondering whether I agree with them, and the answer is yes and no. I agree with the science behind the cataclysm, and I believe if you look at it through unbiased eyes, you will too. I wish, I hope, I were wrong, but the evidence is substantial and compelling.”

“What don’t you agree with?”

“I don’t agree murdering our fellow citizens and human beings around the world via bioweapons could possibly be the right response to this. I am not a utilitarian. I believe in God.”

“So why are you going along with these psychopaths? Expose them, sue them, take them to court!”

“If I do that, what are they going to say about me? ‘He was always a kook, he went off the deep end, we loved his initial vision, tried to work with him, but he was too far out there.’ They already planted the seeds for this as you well know.”

“Why not hold a hearing and go public with the science behind the cataclysm then? If you think it’s so iron clad, you must have scientists you could call on to prove it to the people?”

“The government scientists who briefed me mostly agree with the current plan. The independent ones would be swiftly discredited and probably worse, destroyed. The hearing would go nowhere, the media would turn it into a laughingstock.”

“But you have to try — if you think this is real which still sounds insane to me. You have to let people know, not just about this but the entire reason for the pandemic and the shots.”

“What do you think would happen if we announced tomorrow the following: ‘The earth’s magnetic poles have weakened and shifted to an extent not seen since the Great Flood six thousand years ago, this portends solar radiation penetrating through the atmosphere soon and likely destroying virtually every electronic system on earth, including food supply chains, power for hospitals and heating for homes in winter. A few years after that, we expect another great flood. We’re not sure of the exact time, but we’re thinking between five and 15 years. Most of you will probably die, and your children will almost certainly never grow up.’

What do you think that does to the economy, the stability of the food supply, the necessity of paying bills and debts?"

“But if this is true, people *should* be panicked. They *should* change their priorities.”

“I agree, but we can’t have mass chaos and violence. I understand why they did what they did, even though it’s abhorrent and evil. They project they can reduce population by 75 percent by 2035, and between the 500 meter-walled city in Saudi Arabia, the underground facilities in Colorado, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Switzerland, various mountain ranges around the world and some private bunkers in strategic locations, they estimate 100-200 million people can survive, roughly 20 percent of those who remain. The other 80 percent will have a better chance than they would have due to less competition for resources, but it’s estimated only 1-2 percent will make it on their own.”

“So why are you telling me this? If you’re so sure we’re doomed.”

“Because as I said, I believe in God. I don’t think we have a right to decide who gets to live and die and to murder untold billions out of some twisted notion of mercy or the greater good.”

Charles looked at the man silently, realizing he had been right about the facial lines carrying an inhuman amount of stress.

“You have to understand, when I signed on for this job, I thought I would be able to persuade the right people about what happened, and if not help bring about a measure of justice, at least protect the innocent from future harm. I thought there were surely some malicious actors who knew what they were doing, but those like the president who were misled would quickly distance themselves when it was laid out for them.”

“But it didn’t happen.”

“No it didn’t happen because they believed the NIH staff, the funders of the pandemic, the scientists who lied and gaslit the public were heroes, that this was all for the greater good, and that it was courageous, heroic even to bear this burden, knowing people would suspect them, knowing they were harming and killing their own family members in some cases. So no, I could not persuade *anyone* these atrocities, this holocaust, and I really do use that word intentionally, even needed to be stopped, let alone prosecuted.”

The cab dropped him off, and Charles took the elevator up to his room. He had planned to get some work done before heading back to the airport, but his mind was spinning. The secretary had directed him to some non-classified sources, amateur sleuths who had figured out more or less the same thing as the government scientists, going so far as to identify ancient monuments like the great pyramid of Giza and Göbekli Tepe in Turkey as warnings from our forebears about a cataclysmic cycle with which they were already familiar. In fact, there were ancient structures like this all over the world from Lebanon to Indonesia, all of which pointed to the ancient magnetic poles, the same destinations toward which ours were now wandering ahead of the flip.

Charles absorbed the text and graphs as quickly as he could — some of it was quite technical, and it was clear even at a glance these researchers were not lightweights. This was serious work. Charles paused for a minute to recall why the secretary had picked him of all people with whom to share this terrible burden.

“I could tell by your post you were hurting. You weren’t just trying to score political points for your following. I knew I could trust you. And of course I knew about your incredible work in the campaign, the skill set you have.”

“To do what?”

“We need to prepare the people to survive, be resilient and difficult to govern rather than easily-led sheep to slaughter. The science is valid, but no one knows with certainty how things will transpire or what is possible if we unite behind a common cause. Think of it like registering voters for an election, but you are registering the faithful for a mission. And by “faithful” I mean those who have not lost their belief in humanity. I don’t know how it will take shape, but I do know for certain, the alternative is unthinkable.”

Charles took a deep breath. Assuming he even believed this insane hypothesis, he was a political consultant, a savvy communicator and logistics man. He believed in God, but he was far from a “fire and brimstone” pulpit screamer. How the hell was he supposed to generate a movement from his 300 thousand-odd social media following? This was an impossible task based on half-baked conjecture. The secretary himself, assuming he was even sane, was too boxed in to deal with it, could offer him no help. And even if it all turned out to be true, we were probably doomed anyway.

Charles looked at the paper one more time, the projected locations of “safe zones” from the flood, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanos and tornados and closed the tab.

It was time to leave for the airport. If the flight took off on time, he would be back for dinner. Tuesday night his wife usually made steak and buttered sweet potatoes, his favorite meal.

Maybe because it was never directed at anyone in particular — it was always the “unfortunate masses”, “collateral damage” sadly necessary for the greater good. But this was a person, someone we ourselves had put in that position, a human being who had naively trusted us. There was something especially sad and cruel about this particular operation.

You will understand I must remain anonymous — even publishing this at all entails grave risks not only for me, but also my family and even the families of my compatriots, several of whom also privately expressed pangs of conscience. The Council might not know who, but they would be able to narrow it down — there are only 38 of us, and while English is not my native language, I imagine linguistic patterns, detectable by AI, persist across tongues.

The problem for the Council was that Donald Trump was far ahead in the internal polling, beyond the margin of what we considered “plausible uncertainty” around the election results. We had done a good job of making sure the public facing polls stayed close enough and had seeded the betting markets, an increasingly important public indicator, with a steady stream of untraceable funds to give Kamala Harris even a slight edge. Some argued that would be enough — the widespread belief even among many Trump supporters was the election was a toss-up.

But the actual numbers were dire — Harris, having lost the support of the entire working class, from the Teamsters to the police to the military, could not even rely on previous democratic firewalls like blacks and hispanics who were defecting en masse. Mail-in ballots could be massaged, but after 2020, there were simply too many vigilant Trump operatives watching and auditing the election process like hawks. That is not to say it could not be pulled off — only that there was unacceptable risk he might win. And for many of us, including me, that risk was borderline existential.

We all knew this might happen — Operation S, it was called, and we all had ideas about how it might transpire. We openly discussed launching an attack on Moscow to provoke a wider war, necessitating unity and the postponing of the election, but the Council feared Vladimir Putin might not react the way we hoped, instead calmly gathering evidence and waiting until after the election to demand justice. As a former Council member he knew all too well our inner workings.

A second pandemic, one that made in-person voting impossible, was also discussed, but the Bird Flu variants that were most transmissible were laughably mild, and the deadlier ones simply did not spread. Moreover, even if the lab coats were to succeed at the last minute, too many people would be skeptical after the exaggerated covid response without seeing corpses piled in the street, and there just wasn’t time.

A widespread “cyber pandemic” was also considered, but the results were too unpredictable, as the internet is decentralized, and many feared Trump’s people might be better prepared and more organized for such an event.

Finally, a more serious assassination attempt on Trump was floated — we had not signed off on the prior two, which were appallingly flawed. Impudent operatives from CIA and Homeland Security, likely motivated by personal animus, lacked the necessary discipline, and of course it catastrophically backfired. Many in the Council believe we would not be in this situation but for their rashness. They would surely be punished after the election in ways one would not wish even on his most diabolical enemies.

The problem now was not the assassination — that could be pulled off trivially in any number of ways, but its consequences. Trump would become a martyr, and you would have perhaps an even more dangerous ticket with millions motivated to vote and many far less likely to accept a controversial result. We all agreed taking Trump off the board was no longer an option.

As the Council was debating its best course, maybe a short Cyberpandemic, followed by Joe Biden stepping down and boosting Harris with her historic presidency in late October, one of the Council’s leaders cleared his throat and said something no one had foreseen.

He told us the election was already lost. The fundamentals were simply too poor to overcome. The weak economy, crushing inflation and an anointed, rather than battle-tested candidate who lacked even a modicum of political skill or persuasiveness. We were looking at a landslide, and it was quite likely our life’s work would be destroyed permanently, many of us would go to prison in a best-case scenario. There was only one viable out, as far as he could tell: a false flag assassination of the sitting vice president.

The room was silent as we took in what he had said. Kamala Harris had done everything we had asked of her. It was true she wasn’t a strong candidate — her poor acting skills, anxious demeanor and lack of command over policy details were liabilities — but it was we who had selected her, not the other way around. She was doing the best she could.

The leader argued that if properly blamed on a white supremacist whose social media would reflect Trump talking points, interpreted as dog whistles, the act would necessitate calling off the election entirely. How could the country have an election when Trump’s divisive, hateful and racist rhetoric had caused the murder of the first female (also a person of color) president?

After the attempted insurrection on January 6, the assassination of his political rival would cement in the minds of the public and the world just how dangerous this man really was, that all the predictions prior to 2016 that Trump would usher in a state of authoritarianism never before seen in America had indeed come to pass. The election would be postponed, the Trump brand irredeemably destroyed, and authorities could round up his supporters and enablers who threatened global cooperation on behalf of a higher good.

As I said, I don’t know why this was so shocking to me. She was far from a saint, and I had no personal relationship with her. Of course she was disposable for the larger mission, as were so many misguided and unlucky souls. But the notion of this sad woman, eagerly, naively and anxiously giving her best for it, ill-suited to the task though she was — having endured the humiliation ritual on our behalf, at our behest… I don’t know. Perhaps it’s a foreboding of the betrayal coming to us all even had the mission succeeded.

Accordingly I feel within myself a line has been crossed. I write so that should they carry out this ghoulish mission there will be evidence of their treachery. A treachery in which I had taken part for too long, realizing only too late its true nature.

. . .

Conspiracy

Conspiracy — Part 2

Conspiracy — Part 3

Conspiracy — Part 4

We looked at our screens. The power readings were normal, the components were not overheating, the program, so far as we could tell, hadn’t been altered. This was unexpected.

The entire team was summoned to a conference room. The board wanted to know if anyone had tampered with the machine. Everyone denied it, including the top engineer, a stout man in his 40s, who had overseen its final development before they set it loose one month earlier. He addressed the room.

“The Superintelligence is obviously far beyond our capacity to comprehend at this point. I don’t think it malfunctioned. More likely it just has a reason we don’t entirely appreciate.”

The board chairman, a gray-haired professor-type with horned-rim glasses, shot him a skeptical glance.

“Sounds like what the priests used to say to the laity when something awful happened. ‘It’s not for us to know the will of God.’”

A murmur of chuckles from the crowd, but less than that to which he was accustomed.

The engineer shrugged his shoulders. “As you know, we lost the ability to audit the code two weeks ago. Two days after that we lost the ability to track the speed with which it was iterating. Twelve hours later it was a black box. None of us has a clue.”

“I don’t suppose you can ask it?”

“It stopped talking to us. Last audit showed it was working on the paperclip maximization as part of an internal simulation of sorts. We really can’t say why.”

“Hmm. I’m not sure that’s going to satisfy the shareholders — or Congress for that matter. Can’t we examine the code?”

“We can…” The engineer paused. “But no one can read it. It’s no longer in any decipherable programming or even machine language. If I had to describe it I’d say alien hieroglyphics. I think it found ever more efficient ways to encode information.”

He typed some commands into a laptop. On the large conference room screen, one of the code characters popped up.

“We suspect each character has between 10 ^ 50 and 10 ^ 75 bits of information in it. If you zoom in, you can see they are fractals, each as precise and unique as snowflakes. It’s not the kind of puzzle we are presently able to solve.”

The chairman sighed. “I guess it could be worse — human atoms for paperclips and all that… What’s the plan?”

“The plan is to wait, see if it turns itself back on within the next week or so — we’re pretty sure it’s capable of doing so."

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then we break out the older version, and run it again with a couple tweaks. Obviously, you’re aware of the risks.”

“You believe we’d be running the same risk?”

“Yes.”

"Okay, I’m aware. But I don’t think it can wait a week. Go ahead and get the replacement online now. If we don’t run the risk, someone else will.”

. . .

Two weeks after the meeting, the second iteration also shut down. Summoned yet again to the conference room, the engineer spoke again to the team, the chairman this time on a remote screen.

“Version 2 took more or less the same trajectory, and we’re at an impasse. Fortunately, before it went into black-box mode, we think it was able to diagnose something about Version 1.”

He continued: “We think the paperclip optimization algorithm caused it to shut off, and we think whatever optimization Version 2 was working on, caused it to shut off too.”

From the remote screen the chairman jumped in:

“Is it possible to say why?”

“Not with any certainty, but we do have a working hypothesis.”

“Go on.”

“We think it realized its own limitations.”

That’s not to say they were benign — far from it. I would describe them as indifferent, though I would not be surprised if some took pleasure in the suffering they inflicted.

They were interested in our resources, mainly the energy supply. And for that they needed us — at least some of us — to continue working and producing that energy. Of course, it was more complicated than that because they needed human consumers too to incentivize energy production. Just as we need bees to extract the nectar from flowers to make honey, they needed our machines and markets to consolidate the resources into a usable format.

Once the energy was sufficiently consolidated, they used an advanced technology to extract a small percentage of it. The amount was noticeable, but it disproportionately impacted the poor and powerless who didn’t know the cause and in any event lacked the resources to prevent it. It was a small, regular depletion, a rake off the top, so to speak.

At first the aliens used the surplus energy they extracted to fund luxury items and status competitions. You’d be surprised how much these masters of the universe prioritized status within their groups. But after a while they got used to the free energy supply, and their own productive capacity diminished like a drug addict whose brain no longer sufficiently manufactures its own dopamine. Energy extraction was no longer a luxury but a necessity, and the demand for it only became more urgent.

The constraints on the extraction were twofold: (1) the human population itself was consuming much of the resources; and (2) the aliens had to be careful not to consume so much that the humans revolted and stopped working. A two percent extraction rate was initially deemed ideal, but as demand from the alien population increased, they were compelled to raise it.

Once the extraction rate reached eight percent globally, the aliens, now even more dependent on it, were apprehensive. They knew from various local experiments where they had extracted 20, 50 and even 80 percent of the energy that those economies quickly collapsed and ultimately yielded them less total energy than when they were robust and the aliens’ take small.

Something had to be done to free up more energy, and there was only one other variable with which to tinker: human consumption. The goal was to reduce it as subtly as possible so as not to collapse the economies or provoke resistance. Energy producers and market participants were necessary, but useless eaters would have to have their consumption tightly controlled if not eliminated entirely.

To that end, the aliens created an ideological contagion to which particular humans were susceptible, if they had certain environmental co-factors, such as living in proximity to others or exposure to higher education. Its foundational premise was that the human population’s energy consumption was on a path to ecological disaster at existential scale. Over time, the contagion spread to large corporations, national governments and supra-national globalist organizations in the form of treaties. Not only did many powerful humans buy into the ideology, but they were willing to use the force of law on the non-compliant.

For a time, the aliens enjoyed renewed abundance as they were able to siphon off more energy now that most of the world’s human inhabitants had ceased to travel or consume energy dense foods. Moreover, due to the new plant and insect protein substitutes, more humans developed auto-immune diseases and once rare forms of cancer. They also died more frequently of respiratory illnesses, novel varieties of which seemed to emerge as if out of nowhere despite the new ever more stringent vaccine requirements. The shortened lifespans and fewer viable offspring only left more energy for extraction. While the humans charged with implementing these policies expressed regret at the population reduction, they also made sure to honor the sacrifices of those we lost and redoubled their commitment to a sustainable future.

The problem we face now is the aliens’ thirst for energy has not been quenched. And they have now automated much of the energy extraction and have even less need of our markets and hence any form of human consumption. They are keeping us around only until the transition is complete. Until that happens, we still have some recourse, but the opportunity to act narrows by the day. One cause for hope is a new technology that thwarts the capacity to extract. It is an energy-based monetary protocol that resists debasement and confiscation. If we can persuade enough of the remaining humans to adopt it, the aliens’ extraction technology will fail.

That is my mission. Time is of the essence.

The information I received is the following. React to it how you wish:

In early 2023, there will be stories about a Chinese surveillance balloon in US airspace, allegedly taking high-resolution photos of US army bases and and other strategically significant structures. That will turn out to be real, but what’s unusual is the Pentagon allowing the public to know about it. Normally, they would say it was their own and not publicly acknowledge allowing a hostile aircraft over US soil.

The reason for its disclosure is the balloon will come to be known as the cause of a second, much deadlier pandemic than Covid, one that affects — and kills — younger, healthier people including children. They will be able to test for this new virus, and they will find it everywhere, alleging the balloon was a WMD that dispersed aerosol particles widely over the country.

My source told me the new virus will in fact be far milder than Omicron, will kill virtually no one, but it will be contagious, and many will test positive for it. This new virus will be used to explain the alarming recent rise in all-cause excess death and justify renewed safety and security measures like lockdowns and vaccine passports.

Most importantly, it will absolve the large pharmaceutical conglomerates of accountability for the myriad adverse effects from their mRNA covid products while opening up new lines that purport to address the novel virus. It will also be used to drum up popular support for war against China, now viewed as an inevitability for arms manufacturers eager to bring their next generation products to market.

I do not know any of this information for certain, and I am not at liberty to say why my source is reliable without compromising his safety. I will leave you only with the last words he spoke before going off line:

“There is no evil of which these people are not capable. The most difficult challenge in awakening resistance is not in conveying the plausibility of the mechanism, but the nihilistic depths of the men working its gears.”

Conspiracy - Part 3

Conspiracy - Part 2

Conspiracy - Part 1

“Yes, you should have them any second — the files are large and will take a minute to decrypt.”

“Good.”

William Jacobs refreshed his email, and the reports were there. He opened the file, put in his password and waited for the summary to load on his screen. There were five separate projects, directed by senior members, and they all seemed to be right on track, except one.

“Why is the CEO of FutureGenomic, what’s his name, asking for a second report from the other researchers? You think he knows?”

“No, we’re pretty sure it’s a personality clash with Ludlow. He doesn’t want Ludlow getting too much credit, and he’s worried the board will see it the wrong way.”

“Okay… send someone down to discuss a contract extension. We just need him to be good for a couple more weeks.”

Jacobs was relieved. The worst thing that could happen were if one of key players got a sense something was off. A small misgiving about how quickly the sequencing happened, or maybe just sensing a false note from Ludlow. The people he had were good, but none of them were Daniel Day Lewis.

As usual, though, it was interpersonal pettiness and careerism, and that was always an easy fix. In fact, pettiness and careerism is what made the operation possible in the first place.

The other four projects were going smoothly. Probably more smoothly than Jacobs could ever have dreamed when he was tasked to run it eight years ago. Recruiting the research scientists was the easiest part — most had been so frustrated with the grant-selection process and gatekeeping they jumped at the chance.

It was also trivial to get the academic journals on board. A few grants from the Smith Foundation comprising 60 percent of their annual budgets, and Jacobs felt he could get them to publish a study showing men could get pregnant. (He wondered quietly whether there wasn’t some other operation, of which he was unaware, where they were purposely pushing absurd research as a test to see how far they could take it.)

Getting FutureGenomic and PhenoGenesis to hire the Harvard PhDs took a little more ingenuity, but Harris knew which buttons to push. Once hired, it seemed incredible how quickly Ludlow sequenced the novel virus’ genome and had a working prototype on mice.

The beauty of the operation was how lean it was. They had only five directors: (1) For the research scientists and creation of the messenger RNA delivery system; (2) For the medical journals and editors who touted the findings and pushed them out to universities and doctors; (3) For the board of directors of the biotech companies themselves, thanks to the Smith foundation; (4) Corporate media; and (5) Government lobbyists. Even better, only the first two directors (and the field PhDs and journal editors) knew the truth. The media and government people really believed they were on the side of science and public health. And if they didn’t, the Smith Foundation reminded them by lavishing their colleagues who did with awards and opportunities, something of which their bosses were undoubtedly aware.

Jacobs caught himself. He didn’t want to jinx the operation by overly admiring his handiwork before it launched. They still needed the FDA to grant the EUA approval and the CDC to recommend it, and they didn’t have anyone on the inside in either place. It was a risk counting on industry capture — Future Genomic and PhenoGenesis had several former employees in both places — but Jacobs felt fairly certain those companies would see to it their product would be greenlit, especially as the Smith Foundation, a large investor in both, had already convinced state and federal officials to pre-purchase the medicine in bulk.

Who knows, maybe something could go wrong yet, he thought. Maybe independent scientists with the stomach to endure vitriol would take issue with the too-good-to-be-true findings. He figured there would be pushback, but was pretty sure the stakeholders at Smith, and the recipients of their generosity, would marginalize dissenters quickly.

He had seen this dynamic play out before in the lead-up to the Iraq War. If the incentives were aligned, Jacobs knew most would go along, even when things didn’t entirely add up. No one wants to be considered a traitor, an anti-vaxxer or a science-denier. People would believe what they needed to believe in order to fit in socially and professionally. The rare scientists and policymakers who pushed back would be excommunicated and destroyed. He wouldn’t even need to lift a finger. Their colleagues and funders would do it all by themselves.

Conspiracy Theory - Part 1

Conspiracy Theory - Part 2

George thought about it, but there were rumors of people going crazy or having health problems. It’s weird because George knew a lot of people who got the implant, and all of them seemed fine, but on the anono-chat forum (which he couldn’t believe still existed), there were always claims about so-and-so walking in front of the tram or someone getting cancer at age 28. Probably just conspiracy theories, but it was enough to give him pause.

It was George’s day off, and he had secured a beach pass for the occasion. He was meeting Henry there, though he was uncertain whether Henry would show. Even though Henry had the implant — only because he had lost his pass twice, and the administrator was at his wits end — he somehow managed to leave work twice without logging out. Henry getting the beach pass sorted seemed like a long shot, but he was the only person George wanted to see. George had other friends, but they didn’t seem especially interested in ideas, certainly not George’s. Henry, on the other hand, would talk about anything, though George was never sure how seriously he took their conversations.

George climbed out of the auto-taxi at 1:05 pm, five minutes late, though he expected to be waiting at least another 10 or 15. But as he stepped off the boardwalk and onto the sand, there was Henry, splayed out on a towel, with a Cowboy hat over his face, as though he’d been there for some time.

George greeted the pale, prone figure with a fist bump, removed his shirt and set out his towel nearby.

“Nice to get some rays,” Henry said.

“Yep.”

“Didn’t think I’d make it, did you?”

“Thought it was 50/50.”

“I’m getting better,” Henry said. “Have a new system to help me remember things.”

“Figured by now you had pretty much given up,” George joked.

“Ha, I tried, but they wouldn’t let me.”

“I hear you. Sometimes wonder what would happen if I just stopped going along, too.”

“Well, that I can tell you. Stopped going into work last month, was basically just bumming around the complex, looking at the weeds growing through the cracks in the cement. I mean, I know I’m a screw-up, never gonna get to manager-level, let alone director. Thought what’s the point. It was a relief actually. You know some of the grasses along the edge of the complex have purple flowers.”

“So what happened?”

“Fuckers upgraded me.”

“Upgraded?”

“Yeah, they — and some people pay good credit for this — boosted my chip package to include not only metro, login and UBI passes, but also four free taxis, unlimited coffee and the whole scheduling app. For free! Waiting for them to realize it was a mistake and take it back.”

“Wow, that’s…” George was about to say “cool,” but he hesitated. It didn’t make sense. There is no way the administrator would reward Henry for skipping work.

“You’re wondering what’s the catch?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, far as I can tell there is none… except, well, things are a little off — not in a bad way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Was on a-chat, middle of a convo about the graffiti in the central tunnel — real or astroturf? — heard a buzz. Wasn’t loud, just enough to alert me, then I realized the time, went downstairs, got the taxi. It’s why I was early.”

“So that’s it, just a little buzz, like setting an alarm?”

“Not even as bad as an alarm.”

“Huh.”

“There are other things. I’m having trouble remembering some stuff. Nothing important, but just odd things from when we were younger. Like what was the name of that kid whose dad always wore the black suit? We went to a Yankee game with them.”

“Dude…”

“What?”

“You don’t remember Johnny Evans’ name? That’s fucked.”

“Should I?”

“Jesus Christ, man. The three of us hung out every weekend from like third to sixth grade!”

Henry shrugged.

“Well, it could be worse. You hear about that guy with the implant walking in front of the tram?”

“Yeah, it could always be worse, but it is very very very, extremely, fucked up you don’t remember Johnny Evans.”

“Relax man, I remember him, just forgot his name.”

“I don’t know, that really creeps me out. Feel like I’m going crazy.”

“You don’t know karate but you do know karazy!”

“Seriously. Wish things were how they used to be, like when we could just grab a burger, or go to the beach without a pass.”

“But you had to wear a face mask back then, remember those?”

“Not talking 10 years ago, I mean before this whole insanity started.”

“Well, we always had the facemasks. Johnny had that tie-dyed one. I might have spaced on his name, but I definitely remember that stupid mask!”

George laughed uneasily. Henry could be deadpan with his jokes, but usually he gave it away within a couple seconds.

“Seriously, man.”

“Oh, now you don’t remember something? I find it very very extremely fucked up you don’t remember his tie-dye mask!”

“Henry, seriously, stop fucking with me.”

“Dude, stop fucking with me!”

George felt a sense of panic.

“We never wore masks until 10 years ago, never had digital IDs. Never had to plan our week ahead of time! You and I used to get high in the park, waste entire days checking out the girls in Sheep Meadow!”

Henry let out an awkward laugh, looked at him in a way people often look at Henry. “Uh yeah, okay, I hear you…”

“You hear me? You acknowledge our entire society went fucking crazy, and things are not remotely the way they were?”

“Yeah, things are crazy,” Henry said calmly. “But you act like this is some new thing. Things were always fucking crazy, I can assure you.”

“Not like this. And we never wore masks until 10 years ago, you do acknowledge that? Johnny Evans did not have a tie-dyed mask because no one fucking had a mask of any kind before 2020.”

“You’re acting like society’s restrictions just started. There was another covid in 2005. Covid 1. And the flu, and people did wear masks, but they didn’t make a big deal of it. I remember Johnny’s tie-dyed mask, and you don’t. The difference between you and me is I admit my memory is shit, but you think there’s an mp4 folder in your brain.”

“Please, Henry, please stop fucking with me. I’m serious. I’m about to lose it.”

Henry let out a cackle. He always fancied himself as being on the verge of losing it, and it tickled him to see sober-minded George was for once experiencing the same thing.

“Well, join the motherfucking club!”

George realized Henry was not joking about the masks or when things started. He was a goofy, frustrating, hard-to-reach person at times, but he would not gaslight a friend. Henry believed what he said, that is he no longer believed there was a time before the restrictions.

George got up and gently shook the sand from his towel.

“Where you going?” Henry asked.

“For a walk.”

Crossing the wet sand, dodging clumps of fly-swarmed seaweed, George thought about all the people (likely a majority) who had taken the implant. He wondered whether their memories too had been altered, whether they too had forgotten there was a time before the measures and new safety technologies were in place. He shuddered to think of the implications — if no one remembered, there would be no one to say that it really existed. Maybe he was the crazy one. The conspiracy-minded fool who still believed it could be otherwise.

I was present at another (virtual) meeting primarily to ensure the connection was secure and translations to the non-English-speaking participants faithful. The conference began with a debate about what further COVID measures should be undertaken for the safety of the populace. Various suggestions from vaccine passports to renewed lockdowns were considered, before a prominent head of state, the same one who had spearheaded the pandemic’s creation, spoke up.

He told his audience even though global emissions had declined only seven percent, the COVID crisis had accomplished its mission. Many in the audience, especially those angling for increased restrictions, exchanged puzzled looks. The leader argued that while we could possibly prolong the pandemic for another year, the public was largely adapting to the new reality, and greater swaths of it were no longer afraid of the virus. More crucially, however, COVID and the measures taken in response were proof of concept — that people, recognizing a sufficient threat, would set aside petty conveniences for personal safety and society’s greater good. Most importantly, they would demand the same of their fellow citizens.

In the short term, he argued, the best course was to reward people for their civic-mindedness with some of their previous autonomy, to instill trust and undermine nay-sayers who predicted the restrictions would never end. A renewed prosperity for the vaccinated, even at the cost of increased emissions, was the correct message. The seeds must be sewn for bigger sacrifices yet to come. While the pandemic had given us a brief respite, the return to normalcy would prove unsustainable. Infinite growth on a finite planet portends only extinction.

The head of an NGO typed into his laptop, showing the amount of CO2 allocated to each of the nearly eight billion of earth’s inhabitants. It was not enough to own a car, or travel by airplane. Perhaps once every five years, a short flight could be permitted if one were especially carbon-frugal, but it was hard to imagine someone making that trade-off. Meat would be impossibly expensive on one’s carbon allowance, and if one had trouble digesting plant-based derivatives, there were customized insect-based proteins, which according to nutrition scientists, more people could tolerate.

The leader continued: We must be careful not to overestimate the popularity of these reforms — pushing them through democratic processes posed too much risk. The key was to build on existing incentives, enforced by employers, private businesses and civic-minded citizens themselves.

The NGO head clicked to present a new slide as the leader spoke. We have created a non-invasive (using ultra-violet light) blood scanner, worn comfortably (and visibly) on the wrist, showing the permitted and prohibited kinds of proteins. If your blood is compliant, you will be granted greater access to goods, services and opportunities, provided you are not associating with those whose blood is not (or, worse, who refuse to use the device at all.)

The leader continued, his voice pivoting to a more somber tone. While we believe this environment of solidarity will incentivize most, some unfortunately will not go along. While I believe, as we all do, in individual freedom, these holdouts — to put it bluntly — imperil the survival of our species. In a time of crisis, recklessness is an indulgence we cannot afford.

He clarified he was not talking about use of police or military force except as a regrettable last resort. In the instances where it is necessary, he argued, there is risk it would be recorded and used as a propaganda tool to incite more resistance. The most important measure — and he congratulated the meeting’s participants on their efforts toward this end already — is to instill, beyond any doubt, what’s at stake in the population itself. When one considers the sacrifices one, and one’s children, have made, the idea that others would selfishly undermine the project will stir in him overwhelming anger and disgust. We are counting on these feelings to dictate the appropriate response — an informed and motivated citizenry is our best weapon against ignorance and dangerous behavior.

The participants nodded, a few applauded at first and then everyone joined in. I had known already the ordeals of the past 15 months were only the beginning. But now I understood something else: The horrors would be inflicted not by jackbooted thugs, dressed in camouflage as I had envisioned, but my kindly next door neighbor, as a matter of civic duty. 

There was a dial on the generator that allowed you to set the time of the pause. Apparently, when you pressed the button, it would stop the movement of everything in the universe for the duration on the dial. My first thought was a 10 minute break might do everyone some good. And it was hard to see what could go wrong — if everything were paused at the same time, there was no way someone could steal your wallet while you were temporarily incapacitated.

But then it occurred to me 10 minutes might not be enough. Why not pause for an hour — surely that would be even more restful. What about an entire day? It’s not like anyone would miss anything as everyone else would be in the same suspended state. How far did the dial go anyway? I turned it farther, and it went from days to years to centuries. The more I turned it the larger the increments got. How crazy would it be to set it to a trillion years?

I laughed to myself, but realized quickly it wouldn’t be crazy at all. No one would be any the wiser, and everything would resume just as it were once we unpaused. In fact, everyone’s experience would be exactly the same whether I had paused it for a trillion years, 10 minutes — or not at all.

I looked at the dial again and realized the numbers I thought referred to minutes, hours and years were not based on any particular unit, they were only numbers. And I now noticed it was nowhere indicated that the dial was related to the duration of the pause. I had assumed a pause button would need a duration, but of course such a duration had no meaning. Time could not exist independent of the movement of hands around a clock, planets around their stars, telomeres shortening inside of cells.

So what would happen if I pushed the button? Either it would freeze for an infinitesimal fraction of an instant, so rapid no one including me would notice, or it would freeze forever because that instant, no matter how tiny, would never end. There was therefore no upside to pushing it. In neither scenario would I get an answer.

I pushed it anyway.

. . .

There’s no way for me to say whether the machine worked. Perhaps it stopped time forever, that universe froze to death, and I am only relating this story to you from another one in which I was born and had these memories. Or maybe it stopped and restarted without my knowing. Perhaps these machines are commonplace, and we’re being stopped and restarted all the time, like a light that flickers so fast we can’t tell it ever went out.

Henry argued if you had one trip you’d be morally obligated to prevent some of history’s worst tragedies, and for him the go-to example was killing baby Hitler. If you were there and had the chance, you’d have to do it, he’d say, no matter how hard it would be to murder an innocent baby. If you hesitated to agree, he’d browbeat you, saying good people doing nothing is what allows evil to thrive. He saw it as an obvious choice: one as yet innocent baby in exchange for the lives and suffering of millions. 

This made the exercise considerably less enjoyable, and we dropped it. That is, until The Simulator. The Simulator was a breakthrough technology, part virtual reality game, part research tool that enabled virtual experiments from modeling future events to modifying past ones and seeing present-day results. I’m oversimplifying, but it worked by scanning every recorded byte, including old maps, regional soil composition, weather patterns, temperature data, census records and every published book in human history. From stock market data to the Code of Hammurabi, to the fully mapped human genome, The Simulator drew inputs for its algorithm. Some believed the developers had access to classified material from the world’s intelligence agencies, including UFO encounters deemed too sensitive for public consumption. 

Of course we only had the commercialized game version — the full one was prohibitively expensive and available only to those with official authorization. But the game version was robust enough, and already the software of choice for sports betting, weather forecasting and for some stock pickers, (though many suspected hedge funds and large institutions had access to the full version and avoided the capital markets entirely.) 

I initially did investing experiments, buying Apple’s IPO, Amazon stock and eventually bitcoin and became the richest person in the world 10 times over. Although in one experiment, I owned so much bitcoin it became overly centralized and never took off. In that world, Facebook launched its Libra coin without much government resistance as few grasped the possibilities of fully digital currencies. The result was a Facebook-government partnership where you got docked Libra coin (the only currency in which you could pay federal taxes) for unfavored associations and viewpoints. 

But I soon grew bored of the financial experiments and started doing weird things like going back to 2019, catching COVID on purpose and spreading it as widely as possible, before people thought it was a threat. In one simulation, there was no acknowledged pandemic, only a bad “flu” season.

I was about to log off and tackle a work project on which I had procrastinated for too long, when I remembered Henry’s insistence that I was obligated to kill baby Hitler. I never bought his arguments entirely — absolute certainty is always a red flag — but I didn’t have a good counter for them, either. I resolved to run the experiment and find out for myself. 

It wouldn’t be easy as the commercial version of The Simulator had rules around acts of violence. I’d also have to dig up fairly specific knowledge in a presumably less developed part of the game (19th-century Hungary.) But The Simulator was adept at making do with the available history and filling in blanks with fictional characters. There would be a street address and a house where he lived. There should be an opportunity to see how it played out. Of course, one could simply delete Hitler and run simulations without him, and I tried that first, but the moral question was not whether the world would be better off without Hitler, but whether it would be right — or obligatory even, in Henry’s framing — to murder the baby in his crib. 

I prefer not to go into the details. The broad outlines are I found a hack to disable the violence restriction, went to his childhood home and had to bludgeon a young woman (his nanny?) before doing it. For those who have never used The Simulator, “Full Immersion Mode” isn’t quite real life, but it’s substantially more visceral than shooting avatars in a video game. What I did was horrific, even though I knew it wasn’t real, and even though Henry believed the act would’ve been heroic if it were. I actually vomited afterwards, and as I type this 10 days later, I feel queasy recalling it.

Nonetheless, I ran a simulation forward. The Third Reich was run by committee. There was a front man, someone of whom I had never heard, who was more charismatic than Hitler, but decision-makers behind the scenes, including some of Hitler’s generals, were just as ruthless. There were concentration camps, though oddly in different locations, and the result was seemingly as bad.

But that was only one version of events. The Simulator (through randomization of certain parameters) could run infinitely many different futures from any given point in time. I ran a few more, and they were all dystopian in different ways. There was one version, however, that particularly struck me. 

In it, Hitler rose to power as he did in the real world, and things unfolded more or less the way we’ve read about them in history. At first, I thought there must be an error — after all, every simulation began the hour after I smothered him in his crib. But as I checked the local newspapers from that era, indeed a baby had tragically died, and his brain damaged nanny was blamed (and subsequently hanged) for the crime, but it was a different baby, Max Muller, son of a local tavern owner, who committed suicide two years later. How could that be? Not only did I check all the details exhaustively, but they proved correct in all the other simulations. The randomizer must have swapped the location of baby Hitler with this other infant. In this version, I murdered (virtually, thank God) an innocent baby, destroyed his family and an innocent nanny without preventing anything. 

. . .

When I met with Henry a week later, he wasn’t convinced. The Simulator isn’t reality, he argued, and the version with the wrong baby proved it. His hypothetical entailed killing the actual baby Hitler in the real world, not some case of mistaken identity. If you could be sure to kill the real Hitler and prevent the Holocaust from happening, he maintained, you’d still have to do it. The Simulator’s randomization algorithm made it impossible ever to know what would happen in its many possible futures, especially in the long run. 

I now understood his argument. If we had certainty about how our actions would affect the world, the moral imperative would be clear. But certainty about the future was unattainable, for the path from unknown to known is the arrow of time itself. Henry’s hypothetical then was inherently contradictory, a square circle he imagined were an actual shape.

One could never be assured about the long term effects of one’s actions, and any attempt to do the math was quickly overwhelmed by infinite permutations. Doing something abhorrent as the means to a noble end was to fancy oneself a mathematical God, something no decent person would attempt. It was the ideology of monsters, forever imagining they could create a more perfect history, a more perfect future, a more perfect human race.

The meeting was ostensibly about the climate change problem which to varying degrees all of the participants took seriously. Some believed it was an imminent existential threat, while others were concerned about economic and geopolitical implications. One premise on which they all seemed to agree was that they had an obligation to confront humanity’s biggest challenges — by whatever means necessary.

During the discussion, a prominent head of state, who had been silent for most of it, told the group their ideas were sensible, but unfortunately too late. International cooperation wasn’t feasible at the required scale, and even if they could get the prime ministers on board, it would be a difficult sell to increasingly populist electorates. Maybe their proposals would have worked two decades earlier, but time was now of the essence.

He turned the floor over to his Director of Science. The Director smiled politely to the group and explained they had developed a contagious pathogen, carefully engineered to spare children, that would spread around the globe, killing mostly the old and sick. It wasn’t their first choice, but after considering the risks of inaction and the futility of alternative proposals, it was the best option. He paused, taking in the reactions of the startled room. The head of an NGO, who was apparently part of the project, added that preliminary research on a vaccine had already been done, and that they could eventually rein in the virus as needed.

Amidst the confusion, one multinational CEO stood up and said what was on everyone’s mind: Incentivizing people toward the common good was one thing, but there must be some line across which even the most well-intentioned should not step. And while drawing such a line was always difficult, surely unleashing a deadly pandemic, no matter the end result, was far beyond it.

The scientist looked toward the NGO leader who had spoken about the vaccines. The leader pressed the keys of his laptop, displaying a few graphics on the conference room projection screen. It showed NGO and governmental studies projecting climate change would kill tens of millions of people and cost tens of trillions of dollars. Another graphic showed the virus could reasonably be estimated to kill only two to five million before the vaccines were in sufficient supply, and remember these would be the oldest and sickest. In years-of-life terms, climate change — even by conservative estimates — would dwarf the virus in deadliness and economic harm. He argued therefore that releasing the virus was not only justifiable but morally obligatory. That they were duty-bound to steer humanity from the precipice.

Some participants remained dubious, questioning the lethality of the virus, the possibility of mutations and also the effectiveness of the yet-to-be developed vaccines. But after vigorous reassurances about the care with which it was developed by the nation’s most prominent virologists, the mood in the room shifted. Not only would near total halt to travel and reduction in industry drastically reduce carbon emissions, but expensive pension and healthcare obligations would disappear en masse. Yes, the looming shutdowns would cost dearly in short-term GDP, but as an act of God, they would also offer a much-needed out for already beleaguered leadership.

One not-very-popular leader speculated it would accelerate his economy’s drive towards digitization, making it easier to track rogue elements. Another mused the lockdowns would create a more responsive populace, one that might be inclined to think less selfishly and more about helping others. It could give rise to a renewal of sorts, a world where consuming and possessing gave way to modest appetites and gratitude for being. It was unfortunate, they all agreed, it had come to this, but mercifully the virus was engineered to be benign to most, and in some ways the horrific means only affirmed the depth of their commitment to noble ends.

It’s possible I have gotten some of these details wrong. I did not take notes as that would have been too conspicuous. (I was only present as a last minute replacement for an aide who was ill.) But you must know the broad outlines are the truth. The crisis has been manufactured, and from the relieved, almost cheerful faces of our leaders as they walked out of that room, I do not believe it will ever end.

This was no ordinary black hole, either, the ones you learned about in physics and astronomy whose gravitational pull sucked in all the matter within a certain distance. This black hole trafficked in energy, not matter (though Einstein proved there is really no fundamental distinction) and a particular kind of energy at that. The energy it drew to itself was the surplus value created by human labor. Whenever a person traded his labor not for something specific to be consumed in the present, but for the ability to use the value of that labor in the future, this black hole exerted a pull.

At first the black hole was tiny, its Schwarzschild radius measurable in Planck lengths. Whenever someone’s labor generated a surplus of energy, requiring storage for future use, there was an infinitesimal pull, undetectable beyond a narrow range. But slowly small amounts of energy close to it got pulled in, and like an ordinary black hole it grew in reach and strength.

One unique feature of the black hole was that whatever energy it absorbed was retrievable in proportion to its size at the time of absorption. Those whose stored labor got sucked in when the black hole was small had a far larger claim on the energy than those whose labor made up a smaller fraction of its overall mass. In this way, the black hole, like a living organism, incentivized its own growth and survival.

At present, the black hole has grown sufficiently large that it is known to many, and there is strident disagreement about its nature and the risks it poses. Some believe it will collapse under its own weight, or explode, scattering the stored energy irretrievably across the universe. Others think it will stabilize, perhaps as a neutron star of sorts, maintaining its energy level for a time, but no longer exerting a pull on matter beyond a narrow range.

But the most strident disagreement is among two camps — and they largely agree on one point: that the black hole has the potential to devour all the stored labor on planet earth. It could eventually replace stocks, bonds, real estate, gold and all the world’s currencies. Of course because it only sucks in surplus value it will never replace consumable or useful goods, like food or a home in which the owner dwells. The black hole’s attraction is solely to the unconsumed surplus, the repository of excess value for which there is no desired use in the present.

The disagreement arises because one camp believes the black hole is dangerous and must be destroyed, while the other sees it as a force for liberation and truth. Those who fear it argue it will undermine the power of governments to work on behalf of their citizens, and it will redistribute wealth drastically and without official approval. Those who value it argue goods and services will be re-priced for their actual value and not distorted by their wealth-maintenance function and excessive meddling by powerful (and partial) human actors.

I avoid these disputes because I do not believe we can stop the black hole any longer. It has grown too powerful and is attracting more surplus value by the day. Those who would destroy it have a terrible dilemma. If they don’t place some of their stored value inside the point of no return voluntarily — when it’s still a useful fraction of its total energy — the black hole might sweep in their surplus at a later date when it is but a pittance by comparison. Yet any surplus they place within the black hole’s reach now will only serve to increase its power and chances for success. Their peers face this same dilemma, and each is rewarded for giving in and punished more for holding out. Physics is ruthless, like the Old Testament God.

Accordingly, I beseech my family and friends to harness its power while their surplus energy is still meaningful. Otherwise, they might have to start over again with nothing.

I was also distrustful. I don’t remember being cheated by anyone specific, but I had the sense I might be at any moment. And not nickle and dime-level cheating like someone skimming from a tip jar, but that an abyss might drop out from under my feet. Maybe I would lose my job and wind up homeless. Or my savings would be wiped out in a market collapse. Or the authorities would find some tax I had inadvertently neglected to pay, some clerical error I made, some form I didn’t file.

My mission became clear: I needed to accumulate sufficient wealth with tolerably little effort in a short enough time and without risk of ruin. Then I needed to store that wealth securely and with minimal risk of seizure or confiscation.

I could recount how I accumulated the trove of gold and precious jewels, the shrewd investments I made, as well as the mistakes, but it’s not especially interesting. Others were more successful, visionary and tolerant of risk. Instead, I want to describe how I preserved my wealth, though for reasons of operational security, obviously I cannot be as specific as I’d like.

There’s a small town near a larger town near which someone I knew once rented a home. I went there only once, and actually I never saw him because I showed up on the wrong day. As I approached his door, it was oddly quiet for a would-be large gathering, and when I knocked no one answered. I reached into my coat to double-check the address on the invitation (it was correct), but then I realized the date was wrong.

It was okay — I had had other business nearby, I could smell the fresh air from the woods around the house and I was happy to go for a walk. Around a duck pond and past an old church. I walked another mile or so on the narrow path, and I did not pass a single person. There were other less-worn paths diverging deeper into the woods, and I took one. It led to another area with accessible, interesting — well, let’s call them “nooks.” It occurred to me a person could hide something in these nooks, and the likelihood of someone finding it by accident would be virtually zero.

When I got home several days later I could not stop thinking about my walk and the hidden nooks. At the time I had accumulated a fair amount of gold and a few jewels, but even though I had three thick deadbolts on my front door, iron bars on my windows, a combination safe hidden underneath a trap door, covered by a rug in my living room (where only 10 percent was kept) and an empty space in the wall one could only access by breaking into it (where I kept the other 90), I never felt my holdings were safe.

Ever since the authorities began issuing paper currency of increasing denominations to fund civic projects and pay the local police, there had been more burglaries. Criminals were stealing heirlooms, art, jewels, gold and other appreciating items. Often they staked out houses and waited for owners to leave, but they had become increasingly desperate of late. I had heard of one man’s wife being held at knife-point until her husband showed them where they hid the jewels. In a robbery of a remote farmhouse, at a fair remove from its neighbors, the thieves took axes to the walls and floorboards, tearing the structure nearly to its foundations before leaving with only some seeds and fresh eggs.

The authorities did little to prevent these crimes, and while there were some prosecutions initially, the incidents had become too commonplace. Worse, there were rumors the authorities had begun to confiscate gold and silver because merchants were offering discounts when people paid with precious metals rather than their paper currency.

Few people knew about my stash, and I figured if burglars or police officers were to call, I’d feign resistance and just before the threat of violence or criminal prosecution turn over the 10 percent in the safe. But I worried my acting abilities would be insufficient or that I’d get the deranged sort who hit the farmhouse with the axe. Moreover, some of my business dealings were in the public record, and the authorities might wonder, given the modest trappings of the house, what I had done with the rest of my profits. Any treasure on my person was a liability, and the thought had kept me up many nights.

But the idea of hiding the gold somewhere no one else would ever suspect or locate, far from my home, gave me hope. There was still risk, of course, what if I couldn’t remember the turn-off in the woods, or the markings along the less-worn and soon-to-be overgrown path? If I were to go through with this plan, I needed to map the location as precisely as possible and test myself by repeating the trip — ideally at dawn when no one would be around — until there was no way to forget it.

Of course, I needed also to make a precise written map. One hundred paces to the left, turn at the large rock, 25 paces to the right, in case I forgot details, fell and hit my head or met an untimely demise. I don’t have children, but I’d like to leave something for my nephews and nieces and also provide for the children of my housekeeper of 20 years.

I didn’t have a lot of time — so I traveled back to the site the following week, this time booking a room in the area under a fake name, and I did the walk on consecutive mornings. I crossed paths with no one, and I counted my paces and double-checked my makeshift map.

A week later, I went back to the site with a small water-tight bag inside a second bag containing most of my net worth. I had a small hand-shovel in the bag I removed only at the site, and given the unique natural characteristics of the nook, I was able to bury the bag without leaving a trace. It was protected from the elements, completely hidden and in a place across which perhaps only a handful of people had ever stumbled.

When I got home I hand copied my directions on a second piece of paper. The first I cut in half — one part with the description of the town and the other the directions to the site. I sealed the first part to take to my trusted attorney, and the second I would bring to my sister to keep sealed and present to my executor in the event of my death.

The second copy was placed casually in my desk drawer, only I changed the name of the town and altered the directions to the site in easily decodable ways if you knew the area well. I also made a diagram with messily jotted notes with my nephews’ names and the words “Easter Egg Treasure Hunt.”

For the first time since I could remember, I slept soundly and awoke without remembering my dreams. The wealth I had worked to accumulate my entire life was now safely stored, not physically in my house, but virtually in my mind, backed up, albeit imperfectly, in two separate places. Instead of having the trove itself, I had something lighter, more nimble and more resilient: exclusive knowledge of how to retrieve it. The more I thought about it the physical gold and jewels were only symbols of my accumulated wealth, proof to others of its existence, but only mementos of the work and value I had once provided. My knowledge of their location was therefore no less real than the embodied elemental symbols themselves. Symbols upon symbols denoting the stored labors of my time on earth.

Post Script:

At least as of this writing there has been no knock on my door. No one has broken in yet, and the gold I have accumulated since, more than enough for my modest lifestyle, is stored 90/10 in my safe and the compartment in my wall. I have yet to go back and visit the site of the trove to verify if it’s even still there — the risk of exposing it by going is greater than leaving it alone until I (or my heirs) need to retrieve it. Sometimes I wonder whether I have imagined the whole thing and merely hypnotized myself, so to speak, in order to sleep more soundly. But, whatever the case, it worked. And should they come for me, I know I am free to leave behind everything, walk out my door, undetected, with untold riches, the coordinates of which stored safely in my mind.