The text below is a work of narrative fiction and all similarities to real individuals or events are incidental.

“Addiction is a charmed circle. You want to escape it and go straight, but the gravity of the demon entrapping you pulls you back into the orbit, and you crash down again and again.”

This was Valentine’s favorite metaphor for his cigarette addiction. He was articulate during our therapy sessions, but in those early days, I can’t say that he otherwise stood out among the clients of my psychiatry practice. If anything, he was notable for a certain air of simplicity — an ordinary guy whose cubicle nine-to-five job had given him enough mild but constant stress to gradually turn him into a smoker.

Had he not become famous, I may have forgotten his case altogether. Once he did become famous, I had to go back to his files and strain my memory to piece together those early parts of this memoir, which I publish in this venerable periodical in response to soaring public interest.

The fact is that when Valentine first came to my clinic, he hardly thought of cigarettes as a psychological problem. He came primarily out of concerns for his physical health.

“We all got our little guilty pleasures,” he explained early on, maybe on the first day, “but mine is not so little, at least not anymore, and I’m starting to fear it’s going to give me cancer. I’ve got friends who overeat and have diabetes, and a couple of them who drink too much. Smoking keeps me slim and sober, but I’m starting to worry about what might be happening inside my body. Those graphics they put on cigarette packs are beginning to terrify me.”

However, once we explored his life patterns he came around to seeing the psychological complexity of the issue. This was when he began talking about demons and gravity. From there, we worked together to develop a spiritual framework for overcoming cigarettes. If we describe life metaphorically as haunted by demons, big and small, then petty chemical additions are a way to avoid bigger demons by busying oneself with little ones. You get a little manageable problem to worry about, and it keeps you from stumbling into bigger ones.

You get stressed, sometimes overwhelmed, and it takes you to the edge of the abyss, and you stare at it. But just then the chemical craving rises into your conscience, an overpowering craving that can nevertheless be solved with certainty with a simple cigarette. You go outside and you smoke one. Yes, you pay with a little bit of your health, but you’re now reassured and kept sane by the sense that you live in a world where problems have straightforward and sure solutions.

The French novelist Houellebecq, a notorious chain smoker, wrote somewhere about how cigarettes are the simplest of all cravings. The craving arises entirely from the absence of a cigarette, rather than from a desire for some positive presence, be it for an elated feeling, an object, or a person. I told this idea to Valentine, and he liked it. He surmised that the cigarette demon was perhaps the smallest or the pettiest among all demons. Returning to the gravitational metaphor, he said that if each demon had his own planet, the cigarette planet was a tiny one, with a cozy little orbit that lulled the addict into a tight little orbital spin and made him terrified of leaving into the outer darkness, of his little earth becoming unchained from his little sun, to paraphrase Nietzsche, and hurling into vast outer space.

Working off this metaphor, I helped Valentine develop a symbolic routine to overcome smoking. I bought a toy on Amazon, or rather a toy container shaped like a rocket. It was rather short and fat compared to an actual rocket and had some features of the old Space Shuttles. It was made in blue transparent plastic with rocket details painted on and some fins and tails protruded out. It was about the size of a two-liter Coke bottle, and its black lid was at the location of the jet engine.

I presented the rocket to Valentine and told him that this was the bottle rocket in which he was going to bottle the evil genie of smoking. Here’s how: whenever he gets a craving, he should take out a cigarette, and instead of smoking it, open the lid and throw it inside the rocket. He was to keep doing that until the rocket was stuffed with cigarettes. And if he ever smokes a cigarette, he’d have to empty the rocket and start over again. Relapse was like the rocket crashing. But once the rocket is full, he should show it to me, and then we’ll work together to launch out of the smoking addiction orbit.

We continued our weekly sessions through a couple of false starts, but a few months later he came in and showed me the rocked toy stuffed chock full of unlit cigarettes. From how he spoke, from his proud demeanor, I could tell he hadn’t cheated.

Thus, we proceeded to the next step in therapy, which was to anchor Valentine’s newfound freedom in healthy habits. This would correspond to establishing that positive presence in Houellebecq’s metaphor. In the metaphor of space demons, it would correspond to finding another bigger and better planet. Demon-free.

The strategy, I communicated to him, was to build an independent and powerful sense of Self. This Self would become its own planet, traveling bravely through the galaxy on its own terms, beholden to no gravitational pulls of addictions or obsessions. The unsmoked cigarettes were the rocket fuel for the trip. All the life energy he didn’t waste in smoking them he must now harness to achieve escape velocity, to launch and fly off in that rocket to the brave new earth of a liberated Self.

For the journey, I recommended a list of Self-help books. Valentine took up the reading challenge, and I was happy to see how he devoured those books one by one. Over several months, he’d be coming into my clinic bustling with increasing health and confidence, and later, I might even say exuberance. At some point, he began relating to me how he had been doing great at work and how he started a new business venture. Then, that venture began taking off in profits, just like a rocket. He quit his cubicle job. He then found a girlfriend who was also his business partner. He glowed as he recounted to me all the ways they were in love.

Eventually, his stories became wholly positive, and if I’m being honest, they became a little irritating, even for a trained psychiatrist, because I was forced to listen to constant tips for business and investment success. Anyhow, I declared Valentine healed and we discontinued our sessions.

The break was destined to be only temporary, however. A little over a year later, middle of summer it was, Valentine booked another appointment with me through our website.  When he came in, he looked worse than I’ve ever seen him.

“You’ve gone back to smoking, haven’t you?” I asked.

“That disgusting habit? I haven’t thought of it in years.” He waved me away. I was surprised.

Turns out Valentine had become clinically depressed and ended up on some hormonal antidepressants because his business venture had gone under. At times he’d turn so catatonic that he couldn’t get out of bed. He neglected his healthy habits. His sunken, pale and grey face testified to it, as did his poor grooming and unwashed clothes.

He told me the details of his former business, too. He had invested in cryptocurrency. He hadn’t lied to me a year prior when he said that business was booming. True, his portfolio of currencies was gaining by leaps and bounds, and his net worth was rocketing. Back in those days, it wasn’t just Valentine, but countless others who had decided to anchor the Self in inflation-proof assets like crypto. Alas, all these Selves eventually decided to transfer their wealth into more tangible forms, like houses, expensive cars, and gifts for their friends and women. This created a stampede selloff that left the dedicated, more spiritual investors holding a bag of vastly deflated assets.

Valentine was among them. In fact, when crypto decided to crater in price, following the “buy low” maxim he had read in a popular Self-help book, he sold off his real estate assets and half of his deceased father’s stock portfolio and put it all in more crypto. But the bounce back never came. What’s worse, he had used his crypto investments as collateral to take out a big loan and start a nutrition supplement business with his girlfriend. But as his collateral value crashed after the selloff, and as the nutrition business turned out to be highly sensitive to business cycles, he defaulted on his loan, had to liquidate his now measly portfolio, and declared bankruptcy.

“You’d think people would care about their food in a recession, too,” he smirked. “Anyways, the whole thing was Bianca’s idea [his ex]. But she blamed it on me, and we broke up. Doesn’t matter, I sued her, and won, and she had to sell all her property to pay our creditors, too. For once in her life, she was forced to take accountability!”

Valentine’s Self was shattered once again, no question, and needed another reconstituting. Last time, I prescribed him to read self-help books, so I couldn’t do that again now. This time, I suggested not reading, but writing. Rather than learn how to improve the Self, I gave him a big beautiful Moleskine notebook and instructed him to write a diary exploring and analyzing his Self.

He picked up the new task reluctantly, but after some time he became absorbed. He began to loosen the grip on his emotional brakes. As he built up the courage to open up and confess to himself his darkest fears and failures, the truth began to surface, and upon that hard and dry truth we began to build a new Self, a resilient Self unshakable before petty vices and impervious to the whims of financial markets and other mobs.

After a while, this therapy too began to show exceptional results. While I’d like to think it was due to my clinical skills, I must admit that I don’t encounter success so easily with other clients. I must admit that it was Valentine who was special. He had that mysterious drive within him, that determination to seek after the authentic Self no matter under what spiritual debris it’s buried, and how toxic, no matter what mental gymnastics were required.

I still have the Moleskine notebook with his diary entries, so I can be precise in relating to you the thought process by which he recovered. His first entries lamented his former greed and naïveté in believing the mythology of an ever-growing asset market. He was referencing many economic theories and even dabbling in Marxism.

But then, both in writing and in our meetings, which I remember well, he began talking about his discovery of this “mimetic theory,” developed by a French philosopher named René Girard. He began to claim it changed his life forever. He would rave about how he finally realized that we all imitate the desires of others, and how his ignorance of the fact is what made him blind to the lie that was capitalism. He quoted some blogger whose name I’d surely have forgotten if it wasn’t written in his diary again and again: George Boreas. I remember him trying to explain to me some essays Boreas wrote about behavioral finance and addiction, and he’d quote from them like it was gospel. I suggested ever so softly that he should perhaps take random anonymous bloggers with a grain of salt, but he dismissed it. “It’s just a matter of time before Boreas gets huge," he said.

I had to work with what was in front of me. There was no doubt that Valentine’s vitality was back, and with a vengeance, and it was firmly latched onto a new, intellectual vein. His obsessive journal writing bloomed into real and exceptional rhetorical skill and scholarly knowledge. Based on this, I suggested he consider exploring some type of scholarly career path as the next step in his life’s journey.

“I was just waiting for you to tell me that,” was his answer. “I’ve been reading and writing so much, so naturally, I began to wonder if I could leverage that into a paid career. I’ve been emailing professors and think tanks all over the country inquiring about graduate or research positions. I got a couple of responses. Actually, they both came through my contacts in the old crypto space. But I’m not sure if these will lead to offers I’d want to take.”

To help him visualize and manifest his future, we spent a few sessions fleshing out the possibilities within this new direction. I liked what I was hearing from Valentine. His enthusiasm was genuine and wholesome. I even reached out to some of my personal contacts in academia to put in a good word for him.

The basic outline of what happened next in Valentine’s life you can gather from his Wikipedia page. He managed to get into graduate school at Yale. That was followed by a five-year stint at the Purple Institute, and finally the foreign affairs role in the previous government.

Even when he became a busy public figure, Valentine kept in regular contact with me. It wasn’t on a weekly basis, of course – it was more like irregular meetings of old friends. I can testify that during this period his public reputation for temperance was entirely justified and that the accusations of loose living from his political opponents were lies. Instead of enslavement to any addiction, he was now a teetotaller with an exquisite healthy diet. He ran marathons and competed in triathlons. Instead of a market gambler, he was now a staid diplomat legislating wisdom and restraint.

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Alas, wisdom and restraint are not valued in today’s age of mass social media. The omnipresent, ever-excited circuit of the Internet electrifies the global mob and drives it into frenzies led by the lowest common denominator. The mob has always been exploited by tyrants, and so it was in our nation's last peacekeeping mission. It was the mob and the tyrants on one side, and Valentine and his democratically elected president on the other. But to the mob, our military’s humanitarian intervention could be nothing other than, as one mob comedian put it, “genocidal carpet bombing of innocents.” Where, in internal affairs, Valentine promoted the noble ideal of international solidarity, the racist mob saw “the flooding of the last bastions of civilization with third-world refuse.”

But I don’t wish to quote the mob any further. One can research it in the fascist recesses of social media. There, one can find endless posts slandering Valentine’s policies and blaming them not just on the war, but on the eighteen months of domestic unrest that followed. Now that it’s all over, perhaps we should call the "unrest" for what it was: a full-blown civil war, marked by looting, destruction, and above all, thousands of deaths. The same mob that committed all that outrage and violence still blames the former government for it, and many among them blame Valentine personally as its chief mastermind.

Once his cabinet was voted out, and once the violence subsided, Valentine fell from the public eye. So for the next part of the story, I must return to personal narrative. Shortly after those fateful elections, Valentine once again returned to my clinic for psychological consultation. “Just like in the good old days,” he said.

However, this time he had neither that almost innocent desire to be healthy, nor the crushed catatonia of a manic depressive.

“I’ll never be like that again,” he said after I noted the change. “My Self can never again be defeated like that. I’ve seen how it all works now, and now I see that it’s all a matter of strategy. No more of those silly games with toy rockets and Self-exploration.”

Truth be said, I doubted I could hold any sway over Valentine now that he had been a big government official. It seemed that he returned to my office not because he needed advice, but merely out of some sense of nostalgia. It’s almost like he missed the smell of the furniture here, or the general air and spirit of the whole psychiatric setup. He kept coming for several weeks and, with quiet and deliberate speech, legs crossed, used me as a sounding board for his ideas for the future.

His ideas were more ambitious than ever.

Now, contrary to the claims on social media, I had nothing to do with Valentine joining the World Builders Conference. I’m a locally successful health professional whose network is limited to the East Coast. I have no links to any “international elites,” “the Hindus,” or “the Builderbergs.” I personally doubt that the WBC is run by a conspiratorial cabal, but even if it was, I am not part of the club. Everything I know about the conference I learned from public sources.

So when Valentine told me that he was moving to Wolfstein Resort to preside over the annual conference, I had no idea where that even was and had to look it up. Once again, I knew no one who was to my knowledge associated with that conference in any way.

Nevertheless, once Valentine moved to Wolfstein, he’d fly me over a couple of times a year to meet him there. Officially, we met for regular psychiatric checkups, but, again, I was hardly his doctor at this point. I was more like a personal witness to his greatness. And as far as I’m concerned, he was saving the world. He was the mind behind the most impactful initiatives to come out of WBC: energy reduction, depopulation, universal biogenetic tagging, borderlessness.

At Wolfstein, Valentine reached the top level of Self Actualization. He had gone beyond personal, beyond economic, and even beyond national, and was now making a planetary impact meant to usher in the new Age of Self Fulfilment.

I’d never seen him healthier either. He seemed to have started to age backward, his skin smoothed out and giving off a moist, metallic sheen, though the gravity of his perpetually meditative expression still gave him the air of a wise elder. It was a striking juxtaposition. Moreover, he explained to me that he had stopped torturing his body with overexercising and had switched to science-based monitoring of his biomarkers, which in turn informed his meticulous diet, which consisted of meals taken at precise times and even precise temperatures and composed of pollution-free ingredients with exotic health properties. He carried a small purse with him that, though it looked like it might have stored a small pistol or perhaps some kind of makeup, in truth contained a set of glass bottles, vials, and syringes, all filled with bespoke health supplements. He wore red glasses to protect his eyes from hidden radiation and drank water with powders that would turn red, purple, and blue upon mixing.

In short, Valentine had soared once again, and now higher than ever. He had escaped once again the oppressive gravity of defeat and propelled himself into the highest orbit possible for the Self and for the World (esoterically speaking, the Self and the World are one and the same thing).

I’ve drawn here a detailed sketch of Valentine’s health at Wolfstein to help dispel the claims that his sudden and premature death was caused by any type of destructive addiction. The novel virus that destroyed his body and killed him in such a shocking fashion, and that dragged with it many others, including many of Valentine's associates, has not yet been studied thoroughly, but after doing extensive and in-depth research of my own, I feel qualified as a medical professional to pose some hypotheses on it.

MDpox (formerly known as Mandrillpox) most likely originated in a Russian biolab. I will not burden the reader with biochemical technicalities, except to say that the virus contains RNA sequences without a natural analog. Moreover, one must consider that the disease broke out in a targeted manner, afflicting a limited set of officials most of whom were associated one way or another with the WBC, an enlightened organization naturally at odds with Russia’s backward regime. Finally, the symptoms of the disease, with their rapid and devastating onset, suggest that the virus was designed to inflict maximum pain and humiliation. The rapid swelling of the buttocks and thighs, and in many cases also the face, and their red, blue, and purple discoloration (which inspired the original, hurtful, and offensive name of the disease) suggest malicious and intelligent design rather than the random whims of biological evolution.

Thus, I’m convinced that only a human scientist could have created the virus, probably after iterative experimentation. It’s easy to imagine how a double agent may have accessed Valentine’s purse and adulterated one of his health powders with the deadly microbe. But who knows? We’ll have to await the results of the ongoing WHO investigation at Wolfstein to hopefully learn how it was possible to poison so many high-ranking officials. In all likelihood, it was the Russians, and they must be made to pay.

Another important process is ongoing on the legal battlefield. A high commission has been formed and financed by WBC to pursue lawsuits against dozens of online pundits who have slandered and continue to slander WBC and Valentine in particular. Of course, that once-obscure nobody, George Boreas, has now seized his fifteen minutes of fame, but sadly, not in the way Valentine had predicted. He has become one of the loudest voices accusing the WBC of being a “sinister paedophilic cult.” His book, which has sold hundreds of thousands of printed copies, throws some choice insults at his erstwhile fan, calling him a “horrific f*gg*t” and preaching to his low-IQ readers that MDpox was a “divine blight” meant to “mark and punish Apocalyptic Sodomites.” He has promulgated a demonstrably false claim that MDpox was contracted during the WBC plenary session in Kenya, where the global delegates attended a safari meant to draw attention to the destruction of African wildlife.

To help set the record straight, I will share some final remarks based on the conversations I had with Valentine during his final days in the hospital. I cannot testify to the veracity of what he told me, and to this day I’m not sure if his approaching end filled his mind with clarity or delirium.

For one, he was convinced until his dying breath that he was indeed poisoned by some enemy of the World Builders Conference. His health indicators had been excellent, and he never felt better until very suddenly the MDpox symptoms kicked in.

With that said, he did reveal to me some aspects of the inner circle of WBC that may have leaked somehow and given fodder for the conspiracies of the great unwashed. He explained to me that the senior ranking members of the societies do organize seasonal events in a nearby grove, which they jokingly refer to as the “Sacred Grove,” where they drink, dance, and burn an effigy. Moreover, he admitted that the central event of these seances is a big gay orgy (women are not allowed to participate) and that in the heat of the Dionysian passion, some “crazy shit can happen.”

However, this is all there was to it. In his own words:

“People think we invoke demons and stuff, but that’s all just funny bells and whistles to keep the nosy normies away. It keeps them scared and in awe. The simple fact of the matter is that the whole club was created by a small group of college homosexuals in the Victorian Era. At first, the whole thing was just a way for them to stay in the closet. They weren’t even thinking about politics and economics. But then it was discovered that there’s this powerful bonding aspect to gay sex, this powerful spirit conducive to every kind of progressive initiative, and the club clung to it and nurtured it, and evolved into what it is today, a benevolent fraternity dedicated to repairing the world.”

Poor Valentine. Passionate from the beginning, maligned to the end. I wondered, as I watched his agony while his backside’s blood vessels were exploding, whether this world ever rewards ambition, or whether it would have been better if he had just stuck with smoking cigarettes.

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One summer back in my hometown some old school friends invited me to a party. It’s always awkward to meet people you haven’t seen in years, but I thought it would be interesting to see what’s become of everyone. Get some closure and all that.

I get to the place, and it was in some loungy bar strewn with living room furniture to give it a laid-back vibe. But the music was loud, it was dark, and it was packed with people, so it also felt rather like a club.

The first person I sat down with was an old classmate. He was a gifted type, I remember, but had a rebellious streak and a dark, cynical view of the world. Last I heard of him, he had become a metalhead and wrote an anarchist blog.

We sat for a while on a sofa set. We caught up as he drank and chain-smoked. I drank a couple of gin and tonics. At some point, he leaned forward and tried to reach out for a bottle of vodka on a low table in front of him to pour me a drink, but as he struggled, I realized he couldn’t get up.

I looked to see w…

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Disclaimer: The following story is a work of fiction. All similarities to real or famous persons or institutions is incidental.

January is a tough month. The holiday season is over and all that’s left is the cold and sunlight deprivation. Indoor heating renders homes and offices too dry, giving us sinus problems, tight and itchy skin, and irritability. Our energy recedes. Deflated, we start questioning the meaning of life. We may start reading novels or philosophy. We may ramp up our substance abuse. Or we may go for a massage. One way or another, we all need some kind of a hug in January.

But none of these options are open to modern leaders, and especially not modern heads of state. Of course, they can’t be alcoholics or junkies. Massages? Forget about it; that’s how you get impeached for sexual assault. And even hugs from significant others are unbecoming. A president must not let himself feel or appear vulnerable. For idols in the entertainment industry, sure, but sex, drugs, or rock n roll are all off-limits for politicians and CEOs.

This is where the Gstaad Human Enhancement Conference comes in. A renowned gathering of the world’s most important leaders, set up in a luxurious Swiss Alps resort town, HEC is a safe space for all the men and women making the world’s toughest decisions to come in, away from the rude rambling and screeching of the ignorant and open to each other. Listen to each other’s ideas and speeches. Stop, and appreciate. Gstaad is like a cozy, luxurious teepee in which the chieftains of the global village can assemble around the fire together and, in its intimate shadows, give each other friendly, lawsuit-free hand jobs that only they know about. Figuratively, of course.

Yes, the leaders must step outside the teepee and talk to the press too, give public speeches. Some wonderful PR maneuvers have convinced the mob that the speeches are the main event, but in truth they’re only a distraction.

The mob would normally never stand for the leaders taking such decadent breaks. “We elected you to stress about all the social issues and resentments and eat all the blame at the end of your term,” they would say, “not go off to rub cocks in some Bond-villain lair with the rest of them elitist faggots.” (The mob is very homophobic and hateful in every way.)

Thanks to the hard work of Herr Otto Schulz, the founder and chief organizer of the Human Enhancement Conference, the mob has been persuaded that Gstaad was necessary for tackling the challenges of a modern, globalized world. Old Otto knows very well that the mob is neurotic and can’t be reasoned with using indoor voice. You can’t just sit them down and explain how Mr. President sometimes needs to feel special, too. You can’t tell them you’re off to a Swiss resort to spend some time with the grownups. That wouldn’t work! They’d just throw a tantrum and run out in the streets to picket.

No, you have to use fear. “The glaciers are melting, and we are all going to drown!” “Artificial intelligence is taking all your jobs and will kill your children!” “Some dictator is pissing on freedom and democracy again!” “What, you don’t want the fourth industrial revolution to eliminate hunger in Africa?!”

If you think that’s too alarmist, you surely don’t understand the mob. But Otto Schultz understands the mob, and fear is how he creates the excuse for the world’s most stressed-out decision-makers to get a sorely needed winter vacation.

*

It was with such thoughts that Hans-Pierre Santorini was shaving in the spacious bathroom of his presidential apartment. It was one of those mornings when he felt inspired, carried on the wings of the Muses, as it were. And he had a big reason to be in such a mood. He would soon be chauffeured off to the airport, from where he’d be flown by the presidential jet to Zurich and then helicoptered to Gstaad.

The wife and kids were staying home, which was a bonus. HP loved them to death, but they all needed a break from each other. Especially after he discovered his oldest son’s alt-right browsing history.

“Boy, do I have to deal with that before the press finds out!” he mused. “Why are there so many conspiracy theories floating around nowadays anyhow?”

It was not until the helicopter ride that HP began to get that warm Gstaad anticipation buzz. Looking out the window, he saw the fairy snow peaks of the stunning Swiss Alps, which reminded him of the class and warmth he was about to experience at the forum. The snowy ridges looked like so many chocolate blocks dipped in powdered sugar.

His helicopter landed by a golden-nugget-shaped hotel tucked in a wooded alpine hillside. The propeller wound to a halt and HP hopped out into the snow and began walking towards the building entrance stuffed with a crowd of reporters snapping photos and taking videos. So excited was he to finally arrive at Gstaad Human Enhancement Conference that he had to restrain himself from prancing and hopping towards the entrance like a little girl. Instead, he walked with a dignity befitting a world leader, grinning widely and waving his leather-gloved hand, his cashmere shawl in national colours fluttering in the mountain wind.

He walked past the pressing crowd and through a carpeted corridor, escorted by a couple of big barrel-chested security personnel. HP liked bodyguards. They made him feel precious. People always say that big muscly men are anti-elitist rubes, so it’s all the more flattering when such men treat him like a delicate jewel, guarding him against the aggressive crowds, appreciating the importance of his person and of the historic work he does every day.

The corridor led to a reception hall where, under the ubiquitous eyes of the cameras – and the whole world really – HP greeted other world leaders who had already arrived. They exchanged warm embraces and kisses on both cheeks. Otto Schultz’s kiss was the warmest, as usual. The man’s moist puppy eyes, his turtle-like bald head, his fat-lipped, liver-spotted visage, his disarming, guttural German accent, his uncommon gift of flattery balanced with a charming down-to-earth attitude – all of it made Otto so perfect for the role of the approving, encouraging grandpa to so many of the world’s most hard-working leaders.

“Herr Santorini!” Schultz greeted HP, “Zid you haff a kood rhide? You bropaply can’t wait to imbress us again wiz anozer priyant zbeech on tze gheat rheset!”

“Ah, good old Otto, the brilliant ideas are all yours!” answered HP as he gave Schultz a wet smooch on each cheek and then gripped his shoulders.

The reception was brief; it lasted less than twenty minutes, after which HP was taken to his suite. There, he held a one-hour meeting with his PR team, who were accommodated on the same floor, but in smaller, less presidential rooms. After the meeting, HP finally got some alone time. Then, he prepared to attend speeches that would begin in the hotel’s conference area that same evening.

The first evening of speeches was all about inclusion and positive energy. It was all about warmth, a theme that matched the cozy alpine hospitality of the hotel and indeed of the whole town of Gstaad. The array of speakers showcased a vibrant and glorious diversity of human struggle. There was an Indian woman, an heiress to boot, who spoke passionately about “women taking center stage.” There was a hedge-fund billionaire talking about the need for socially conscious market speculation. Some guy from Africa without an arm and a leg talked about the need for the international community to intervene in regional conflicts. They also had an American rapper talk about responsible AI development.

Inclusion is important. Giving voice to the marginalized is important. It can’t all be old white males pontificating to the world. Minorities of race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and other categories must all be welcomed because their unique voices count. There was perhaps nothing more heartwarming at Gstaad to HP than watching grown, grey diplomats sitting in one of those minimalist green armchairs in the center of a stage and nodding pensively as they get harangued by little Greta Thunberg about climate change. He remembers fondly how the other year they did an off-camera debate between a washed-out rock star and a ten-year-old from Egypt who suffered from debilitating ADHD. Alas, the kid ended up walking up to the man then attacking him: a sucker punch followed by a thrown water glass, then some hair-pulling and ankle-biting. The rock star needed several stitches. They decided not to repeat that debate on live TV.

George Soros was speaking that first evening too. Oh, he’s still alive, thought HP. Of course, he was still criticizing the way Russian oligarchs get rich and insisting that his way of getting rich is so much more civilized and better for the poor.

Then, some Chinese entrepreneurs, who as a category were a rather recent addition, were put on the dais to ape Western neo-liberal visions of technological development. But it didn’t quite work – they had thick accents and they kept mixing in some strange, even suspicious ideas into their speeches. A bit cringy, thought HP, but whatever. Truth be told, they were nonetheless applauded infallibly by a crowd of grinning, bespectacled dweebs in the audience.

Bill Gates also made his routine appearance. HP could see that this year he was a bit edgier than usual. According to an intelligence officer, Bill was succumbing to his cards problem again. He had allegedly stayed up all previous night playing bridge with a local Greek restaurant owner and a couple of friends. He lost a few hundred thousand Swiss francs. Nevertheless, Bill was a great guy, a genius. Ever since he retired from Microsoft, he’s been looking for new industries to disrupt – healthcare, agriculture, utilities. He donates a lot of money to the HEC, and everyone likes to hear his off-the-cuff brainstorms about the world’s most complex and pressing issues. That evening, he was talking about agricultural reform in Africa, but a couple of times he edged towards condescension almost, using words like “stupid” and “reckless” to describe governments and reproductive health mores of certain African states.

After that first evening’s round of public speeches, which lasted about four hours, the crowds of journalists and observers dispersed to their less luxurious accommodations around town. The VIP guests would now be left to enjoy each other in a series of private receptions.

“Teepee time!” thought HP, excited.

He hopped into a Range Rover with a couple of aides and was driven to a hotel on the other side of town to attend a closed-door discussion about the fourth industrial revolution. As his five-SUV convoy snaked through the dusk of the resort town, his aides informed him that the event would be attended by five European heads of state as well as industry leaders and leading public scholars from all over the world.

They pulled up to their destination and HP and his aides hopped out through the car door held open by one of his security guards. The three of them walked through the snow to the hotel lobby. From there, they were led by a local security detail into a half-lit lounge. Most of the room was sparsely seeded with small, round standing tables around which attendees can network. Along its three walls were big dining tables for those who preferred to sit down in big groups, perhaps to conduct a deeper discussion or a negotiation. The fourth wall was set up with a small, elevated stage and a projector screen hanging behind it.

A team of waiters in black and white coasted through a thickening crowd of dignitaries and served wines and hors d’oeuvres. No journalists, and certainly no cameras, were allowed.

HP had been to this hotel before and knew they had top-shelf stuff. He asked for a Knoll Riesling and grabbed from a passing tray a Togarashi seared ahi, a great pairing with the wine. One of his aides said the Pimento Croquettes were bomb, but HP stayed away from those because of too many carbs.

He was also eyeing a tray of Brittany oysters being passed around. However, the Chinese billionaire he had begun chatting with took one first and sucked it off the shell with such a loud, violent slurp that it left everyone in their talking circle in shock. Not noticing the fluster on the faces of his companions, the Chinese gentleman followed his beastly vociferation with a thumbs-up gesture and a grinning comment: “Aaaaaah! Very good!” HP felt his ears burning with embarrassment.

The whole episode ruined the Brittany oysters for HP, at least for the night. “How the fuck does a dude without even the most basic table manners become a fucking billionaire?” he thought. “I don’t get it. China is so weird. But we need them. They’re so goddamn loaded right now.”

He picked up another wine to calm down. He mused: “It took us ten years to hint to the Arabs that it’s not appropriate to attend HEC events with a personal entourage of Russian escorts. And just when they got that, when we solved that nuisance, we now have to somehow teach the Chinese how to use knives and forks and to avoid mentioning Marxism.”

Self-made entrepreneurs and businesspeople in general were a mystery for HP. “They are so marvelously efficient,” he thought, “No one really knows how they manage to create all those billions and billions of value. Yet, at Gstaad, heads of state are the belles of the ball, and the corporate representatives are the ones who have to do all the pleasing. And if we’re being completely honest, public office is not at all about efficiency. It’s more about charming the mob, in the same sense one talks of snake charmers or lion tamers. And that’s a super-important skill too, and one that entrepreneurs sorely need.”

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Talk of the devil. As HP grabbed his second Togarashi sear, he was approached by a pharmaceuticals CEO who started chatting him up about a “job dysphoria epidemic” in HP’s country. HP’s cabinet had not been aware of any such epidemic. The CEO reassured him that it was real; the scientific community said so, and the CEO could forward HP’s cabinet the research findings. What’s more, the CEOs company is about to release a patented pill that has been shown in clinical trials to significantly reduce the symptoms of job dysphoria.

After some back-and-forth, HP began to think there may be something going on there. The CEO looked so earnest; talking like some kind uncle and holding his chubby wife’s arm locked around his. The man’s entire head positively shone with concern for the patient. It reminded HP of those clips of younger Jeff Bezos staring all bug-eyed at his interviewers while explaining how much he cares about getting shoppers the cheapest book deals and the most optimal shopping experience possible.

“Not gonna lie,” thought HP to himself, “I feel so flattered by this CEO guy, and it feels great! I’m the president, man, I deserve to be flattered! It’s Gstaad, baby! Besides, if we can cure a motherfucking epidemic, that’s gonna look good in the next elections.

”And he’s making a lot of sense - I really like his idea that unemployment is merely a mental illness. I’m sick and tired of dealing with it and hearing about it all the time, and it’s nice to finally hear a fresh perspective on the issue.”

After the ahi tuna, he grabbed a couple of blueberry goat cheese flatbreads in the way of dessert. Just as he was savouring his last bite of goaty goodness melting in his mouth, the room lights dimmed, and a video presentation began to play on the projector accompanied by a high-quality audio track dominated by a futuristic xylophone. HP took a sip of Riesling and settled in to watch.

For two whole minutes, the screen flashed a series of black-and-white shots of architecture porn: cutting-edge commercial buildings in odd, sci-fi-inspired shapes of steel and concrete; bulbous, glowing stadiums; meandering, tubular pedestrian bridges; grey staircases with glass panes and metallic bolts; offices with minimalist furniture emptied of human beings; shots of motherboards and switchboards; a Japanese Zen garden also barren even of plant life and strewn with rocks and sand. The only lifeforms shown were shots of wiggly, abstract, white tubes that looked like bacteria or protein strands, or something that vaguely recalled DNA. And there was one sombre-green school of fish.

After the visual intro, a purplish limelight shone up on the small stage and lit up Schultz’s cadaverous form. The founder of HEC, however, spoke only a few sentences of introduction of his number-one protégé: Wally Nahredi, another bald, bespectacled turtle without his shell, albeit younger and more energetic, and yet another booster of Transhumanism.

“We all know already Wally Nahredi,” Schultz said in his thick accent, “az a fonzerful pehson. Our resident seer at HEC!”

“Shit!” thought HP to himself, “It’s one of those nerd nights. Those are my least favourite. But who knows, something nice may happen, still. I gotta keep it teepee.”

Nahredi was famous for not mincing words. He walked over to the podium and got straight to the point in his presentation. He waved his stick-figure arms around and nodded his vulture-like beak up and down as he insisted that humans are hackable, that there is no such thing as free will, that “we” ought to modify human genes, and that instead of some “God above the clouds,” it was “we” who should be gods using the computing cloud.

HP never studied natural sciences and he didn’t really know what to think of Nahredi. He had expressed his concerns to Schultz about the man’s authoritarian undertones. They had been sitting in Schultz’s office last spring, when HP had dropped in from a Geneva conference on the war in Ukraine. Schultz was sipping a Duvel beer and nodding his head considerately as he listened to HP’s concerns. He then licked the foam mustache off his upper lip and reassured HP:

“Fally dold me in a brivate gonversatseeon,” explained Schultz, “that he is zimply faizing against obhessive dogmas – helijious and bolidiggal. And pesides, old friend, you must haff zome unterstanting for our friend Fally. He zdruggled az a youth – he foz draumatized! – by ghorrible helijious gonfligt in his gondry. He waz bullied for peeing a nerd! ztuffed in loggers, zat zort of zing – eksbozed to ze elements! You’ve kot to haff some vorgiveness vor a man like zat for treaming about hepairing his physical zortgommings zroo genetic hacking of his own potty!”

“I know Schultz,” insisted HP, “but it’s all a bit too much. Too weird, man!”

Schultz took a deeper, less comfortable sip of Duvel then smacked his lips. “How are fee koing to adjeeve igualidy, zoo you zink? Zhenedigs is tse way to do zis, to adjeeve whattical igualidy!”

HP saw the point, kind of, and he let it go. He had to, for relationship reasons. Old Schultz treats him like a prince – always gave him the best suites, sent him Swiss chocolates, complimented his ideas, gave him good governing advice.

Besides, Nahredi did seem a bit insecure. The guy was a total horndog, and it showed that very night. After he finished his speech about humans becoming gods, apparently pumped by his own rhetoric, he climbed off the stage and went straight to hitting on Prisha, the Indian heiress that had given a speech about including more women in corporate drudgery. Prisha was smoking hot. She reminded HP of Priyanka Chopra, in looks that is; in terms of personality, on the other hand, she had all the versatility of an oscillating pedestal fan.

Alas, Prisha could not conceal her physical revulsion at the mere sight of little Wally. Just like the oscillating fan, she would swing her face away from the would-be Creator God as the latter almost hopped back and forth, martini in hand, in an attempt to stand directly in front of her and make her look him in the eyes. This was made difficult by the fact that the woman was almost a whole head taller than him.

“Poor guy,” thought HP. “I’m gonna walk over there and show him how to charm ladies.”

He excused himself from a conversation about the oppressive ban on butt plugs in Myanmar he was having with a couple of Swedish adult entertainment magnates and casually meandered towards Wally and Prisha. Just as he got into the hearing range, he saw Wally furtively grip the woman by the wrist and heard the latter hiss in an aggressive, fast whisper: “I don’t give a fuck about your New York Times bestseller! Leave me alone!”

“What a wonderful evening,” HP smiled as he approached the two, pretending not to have seen nor heard anything amiss. He sounded all the more confident knowing that he was coming to aid a damsel in distress.

“Ah, President Santorini!” Prisha smiled at him. “How nice to meet you!”

“Hello HP,” said Wally, clearing his throat and looking at the ground as he was gathering back his cool.

“I’ve been following your education reform,” said Prisha, batting her eyebrows, “how brave of you – empowering pre-teens to challenge mathematical dogmas!”

HP began to recount his vision of modern education and the challenges his cabinet was encountering on the way to making it a reality. Prisha was really into it, while Wally nodded his head occasionally and smiled, his body language indicating that he approved, though he was not very impressed.

“That’s excellent,” Wally finally commented. “It’s very important that we humans use the most progressive political tools to signal to the world that a new era is coming. Very good! But with the coming cybernetic evolution, we soon won’t need politics whatsoever! Everything will be done by algorithm!”

“Sure,” said HP, “I guess in the meantime, chimp politicians like me will have to make do with the primitive tools of policy.” He smiled outwardly, but inside he was not ignoring the jab thrown his way.

“Who cares what that twerp thinks,” he thought. “He may have me beat in book smarts, but my emotional intelligence is incomparably higher.”

With that thought, HP turned back to Prisha and ramped up his charm offensive. The two of them created a circle of attraction that most painfully isolated Wally, whose overly technical interjections fell on deaf ears, and who eventually made an excuse that he must make a call to his husband and walked away.

HP and Prisha were now given a proper teepee moment alone to charm each other. HP told her about his last diplomatic trip to India and how much he loved the country’s food and traditions. They were only interrupted occasionally by the waiters coasting around with trays and offering bites, and that was a good thing because otherwise, they were going to stare into each other’s eyes a bit too much and maybe get noticed.

It was a good thing until they suddenly got a rude interruption. A big, tall waiter came around and stuck between the President and the heiress a silver tray loaded with beef tartare crostinis.

“Beef tartare crostinis!” he offered.

“No thanks,” said Prisha, “I don’t eat beef.”

“Why? Hormones?” asked the waiter. He was a burly, animated blond with a flushed face.

“Excuse me?” asked Prisha.

“Hormones,” he repeated. “I understand your concerns: industrial beef is loaded with hormones that can cause depression and sterility. But don’t worry, this is from organically fed Swiss cows. I checked!”

“Uh, no,” said Prisha. “That’s not why I don’t eat beef. It’s against my religion.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said the waiter. “I forgot that some of you international jet-setters are Muslim!” He smiled and walked away.

“What an odd man!” said Prisha.

“Don’t worry about him,” HP comforted her. “I’ll mention him to Schultz. He looks like an idiot, and on top of that, he looks like he’s been helping himself with some of that wine.”

Sometime later it was time for a Q&A session with Nahredi. They brought out two minimalist armchairs upholstered in bottle-green and two glasses of water that they placed on a white coffee table in between. Nahredi sat on one armchair, and on the other sat a US mainstream TV anchor, a metrosexual man with regular, comic-book superhero features and a penchant for affecting thoughtfulness and intrigue. The two men sat down and crossed their legs and began a conversation.

The interview was about Nahredi’s latest book on the future evolution of mankind, an evolution in his view unlike any other because it will be carried out not by environmental pressures working in tandem with natural selection, but by the decisions of humans themselves and by human-created AI.

“So, what you’re saying,” said the American journo, “Is that in a few centuries, our descendants will be vastly more different from us than we are from the great apes.”

“A few generations, not centuries!” Nahredi stuck his finger towards the ceiling and pointed it up and down. “We are on the threshold of creating technology that will allow us to customize and enhance our bodies, either through biochemical agents that modify our genes, or by connecting them directly to machinery.”

“That scares me,” said his interviewer. “Who has this technology?”

“Who has it?” Nahredi was surprised. “Well, the scientific community. I’m not going to bother you with a reference list, but the information is all available online! But I will give you an example. Haven’t you seen those videos online of Elon Musk sticking those metal sticks into the brains of those orange monkeys?”

“Ah, you mean those videos where the monkeys are screaming in terror, locked in steel pillories as their skulls are sliced open by pneumatic circular saws?”

“Yes,” said Nahredi. “Those monkeys with those ‘sticks’ in their heads, as you call them, now manage their own Instagram accounts and have hundreds of thousands of followers. They are a scientific miracle admired around the whole world.”

“But why would we want to modify our genes?” asked the journalist.

“Why wouldn’t we? Do you want to keep humanity limited to its puny intelligence, to its irrationality and violence, to its arrogance and egoism, to its mortality? And to all the other faults of the human condition? Wouldn’t you want to be more intelligent, taller, more handsome, more physically strong and attractive?”

“Of course!” replied the interviewer. “I’d definitely like to be smarter. But not at the risk of playing God!”

“Ha-ha! There is no God, for the record,” laughed Nahredi. A few in the audience laughed too. “But you have a point. Of course, we must ensure that these new technologies are not used for nefarious purposes. And this is something that cannot be done at a national level. What we need is some sort of a world government to make sure about that.”

“Fold cobblement! Fold cobblement!” Schultz was heard laughing and applauding, alone. Several people in the crowd clapped after him, but then it all died down quite quick.

The discussion was then opened to questions from the audience. The first word was given to a grave, mustachioed intellectual from a table occupied by executives from an assortment of developing economies.

“First of all, Dr. Nahredi,” he began, “I would like to say that I truly admire your genius…”

“Oh, you are being too nice!” Nahredi waved him off.

“Of course, he’s being too nice!” HP hissed to Prisha. “Man, these people from poor countries, they are such suckers! Just because someone’s from a country with a richer economy than yours, doesn’t mean they are smarter than you! If these people only knew how dumb my own electorate is…”

“You realize I’m from India, right?” said Prisha.

“You are different,” said HP, “you are cool. But those suckers over there. Look at them! They put them all at the same table; they look like some chocolate box of different races. And they are all supposed to be in awe of the Know-it-all Wally.”

The mustachioed gentleman continued: “My question is one of anthropology. Your work is based on the assumption that we, homo sapiens, originated as utilitarian rationalists, and that this is still our defining characteristic. There are alternate views arguing that the first strides of hominization of apes happened through the development of ‘sacred’ and therefore irrational taboos aimed primarily at preventing rivalries and the murderous violence those entailed. And that consciousness itself was born out of the sacred, out of religion, in other words.”

“This is not true,” said Nahredi. “There was certainly murderous violence. And there still is – I mean, just look at all the nationalists we still have today! But ‘religion’ was most definitely not a way to control this violence. On the contrary, religion is the chief remaining source of violence in the human animal. Religion is the last remnant of our ape nature.”

There was some laughter in the crowd and Schultz could be heard saying: “Haha, nazionalismus ist for ze apes!”

“Indeed, very well said,” said the US anchor. “Let’s move on to the next question.”

“I got a question,” a loud, raspy American accent was heard from somewhere in the back. The contrast was so sharp with the lulled, bashful tone of the prior inquiry that many of the heads turned sharply towards its source. The accent, it turned out, belonged to the burly blond waiter who had interrupted HP and Prisha with his comments on beef hors d’oeuvres.

There was an awkward pause, but Nahredi was quick to jump in: “Yes, of course!” He grinned and shuffled in his seat, satisfied with the opportunity to showcase his egalitarianism by rolling with the punches and allowing a random waiter to ask questions.

“My name is Alex Jones, by the way,” the waiter introduced himself. “I’ve been actually reading up a lot on your transhumanistic biotech enterprise, the Homo Trans Laboratories. Is it true that this lab is attempting to genetically engineer pigs with human organs, which would then serve as ‘organ cartridges,’ as your website puts it, for your customers?”

“Sure! And why not?” answered Nahredi with a down-to-earth tone reminiscent of a sassy doda dishing advice over coffee and baklava. “Why shouldn’t we normalize growing replacement organs? We already grow our nutrients, our fuel, our fabrics… Why not? One day homo sapiens will look at our era as unthinkably, unbearably primitive. One day, when one gets liver cirrhosis, or prostate cancer, or heart disease, one will simply go to the hospital for an outpatient procedure and replace the malfunctioning organ from their personal cartridge. It will be the same as what we do today with our cars when a part in our car breaks down.”

“Sounds brilliant,” said Jones. “However, how does Homo Trans feel about the idea of human-pig chimeras running around? I mean, is Mr. Piggywinkle going to be covered under the human rights charter? Or will he need another charter?”

“Good question, good question!” answered Nahredi, getting animated. “You are one hundred percent right. Humanoid pigs, or porcine humans if you will, pose a great ethical challenge. This is why it’s imperative that we have a trans-national regulatory body to ensure that all labs, like our Homo Trans lab, do not manipulate the human brain, only other organs. This way, the pigs remain essentially pigs, and we don’t have to treat them as humans. Just like we don’t treat them as humans in our era.”

“Yes, yes!” said Schultz from the front row. “Drans-natsional potty! Drans-natsional potty!”

“Okay, got it,” said Jones. “So can you also confirm that what you call your ‘humanized mice’ are also not really humanized, for the same reason?”

“Humanized mice?” Nahredi was taken aback. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, you know what I’m talking about,” said Jones. “I’m talking about Trans Homo Labs buying dead babies from the US Food and Drug Administration and implanting their – I quote – ‘fresh, beautiful’ tissue into lab rats for, I quote, ‘very important and challenging research.’”

The room fell deadly silent. But Nahredi was not going to be.

“It’s actually lab mice, not rats. But okay, I see what’s going on here,” he said, “You’re one of those pro-lifers, right? You are one of those people who think that a sandwich of embryonic tissue has a ‘soul,’ but anyone who doesn’t agree with your arbitrary religious dogma doesn’t, and they must be restrained, including women who want to have control over their own bodies? And including scientists who are trying to do research on unconscious tissue in order to save and improve so many conscious lives? Am I right that this is who you are?”

“Oh, sir, but your laboratory isn’t interested in some processed baby McNuggets,” said Jones, “I have some quotes here.” He fumbled over his black vest briefly and produced a folded sheet of white paper from the inner pocket, and then unfolded it.

“Let’s see what these leaked NSA documents have to say,” he started scanning the sheet. “Homo Trans paid up to two thousand a pop for ‘eyeballs, livers, and brains of dismembered babies,’ so not sandwiches… A Down Syndrome 2nd trimester baby was chopped up and the ‘child’s limbs, organs and skin were sold at hundreds of dollars apiece.’ Well, well, Down Syndrome kids don’t have a place in the brave new world anyway, eh?”

“Stop saying ‘babies’ and ‘kids’!” Nahredi raised his voice impatiently. “These are embryonic tissues belonging to the body of the mother who decided to remove them!”

“Well, I must disagree,” said Jones, “One of your lab’s emails to the FDA complains how the baby parts from California abortions are too disfigured, and then… Here we have FDA apologizing and promising that they ‘will provide only the most beautiful and fresh, not frozen components.’ So, no ugly babies, only pretty, healthy babies is what they want.”

At this point, two bodyguards in Man-in-Black suits approached Jones from two sides and began gently lifting their arms to elbow height and trying to whisper something to the man. Jones, however, only began to talk faster and louder while repeatedly pointing his finger at Nahredi:

“Is it true that Homo Trans used baby stem cells to grow fast-growing lab protein? Is it true that your scientists conducted test studies where they sampled this protein in food?”

“Sir please!” one of the bodyguards was heard as he restrained Jones’ wrists, while his colleague gripped him into a bear hug from the back. Jones, himself a bear-sized fellow, began to sway as he resisted and, his face turning purple, screamed:

“Is it true that you eat babies! Babies!! You eat them! You fucking eat babies!”

A high table was tipped over as Jones scuffled with the bodyguards. The next moment he made a sudden, impressive lurch and threw both men off in one motion. He rushed towards another table and dove headfirst under it.

“Is he trying to hide there?” HP exclaimed to Prisha. They were observing the scene from the back of the room. HP was gripping Prisha’s naked shoulders in a protective gesture.

No, Jones was not trying to hide under the table. A couple of moments after he disappeared, the table flew up into the air and he emerged under it, fully erect and with an assault rifle in his hands. The two guards rushed him but, unfortunately, Jones gunned them down with a volley of bullets.

“Get behind me Satan! Get behind me Satan! Get behind me Satan!” he screamed over and over again.

He then pointed the rifle up and fired another volley into the air. White chunks of stucco from the ceiling rained on his crazed head as he repeated his orders to the Prince of Darkness. His face was purple, his eyes distant, and his fleshy cheeks shook with unhinged wrath.

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The women in attendance were screaming. The men were frozen in panic. HP looked to rush out of the place with Prisha but as he turned towards the exit, he saw another waiter, a gaunt man in long blond hair, standing at the entrance and pointing his own assault rifle at anyone considering walking his way. Looking around, HP realized that all the waiters, maybe six or seven of them, were now holding assault rifles, which had all been taped under draped tabletops, and yelling at the crowd in attendance to kneel down on the floor. HP and Prisha obeyed, as did Nahredi up on the stage. He had gotten off the bottle-green armchair and kneeled in front of it, his hands clasped at the back of his bulbous skull.

The commotion settled as most of the attendees - now hostages - were subdued and made to sit on the floor. Two of the waiters produced a plastic bag filled with zip cuffs and began to tie people one by one; one waiter would point his rifle at a captive while the other cuffed him or her behind the back. Meanwhile, a couple of other attackers dragged Schultz onto the stage with Nahredi. One of them began to video record Jones he stepped up on the stage too.

“We didn’t come here to kill anyone,” Jones announced. “We only came here to finally force these two weasels to have a frank and honest conversation for once. We came here to get a confession. I know I’m going to jail, but goddammit I will be happy to go once I get all I want to hear on the record.”

He then turned to Schultz and Nahredi. “Let’s start. Look, we’re not going to go over killing and eating babies all over again – we’ve uploaded all the evidence to prove it on my website, Infowars.com. Let’s move on to other topics.

“For example: will you admit in front of the whole world right now that you’ve been receiving donations from several Wall Street hedge funds who are heavily invested in Homo Trans Labs and a whole network of other transhumanist labs in Europe and Asia that are developing mind-control technology?”

“Mind gondrol deggnology?” protested Schultz. “It is absurd! It is highly immoral!”

“I know it’s highly immoral, but that doesn’t seem to faze any of you!” said Jones, then waved the same sheets of paper he had taken out of his vest pocket. “I have a direct quote here from one of your researchers in Singapore: ‘Our brain implants will enable a radically direct medical care and medical intervention to be delivered to most high-risk patients through real-time monitoring of their chemical imbalances and ensuring they are never offset to the point that may lead the patient to harm or even suicide.’”

Jones then looked into his friend’s phone camera and continued: “They are not even trying to hide it, people. You have it here on black-and-white. A leaked email. They are building gadgets to put in your brain and use chemicals to control it how they see fit.” He then turned to Nahredi and Schultz. “Is this not so? What am I missing here?”

“You completely misunderstand everything!” said Nahredi, still hands behind his head. “We are trying to empower people, not to enslave them! Our labs are completely apolitical – all diagnoses would be based on scientific objective algorithms, on benevolent AI!”

“There is no such thing as benevolent AI!” Jones screamed and shook his arms, his assault rifle dangling on a strap behind his back. “I know very well how control works, let me tell you. I know very well how it feels to be invaded, manipulated, controlled by demonic forces. Every day, every hour, every second of my existence I feel their invasion into my innermost being, every moment I struggle mightily, with the help of my Lord Jesus Christ, to shake them off!”

“I know Alex, I know,” said Nahredi. “It’s called schizophrenia. I feel for you. But you must understand, our technology is being designed precisely to help people like you. To make people like you free through scientific means, through correcting chemical imbalances.”

“It’s not about the chemicals!” Jones kept yelling. “They help a bit, but they don’t eliminate the root cause. You have no idea…” his breath was becoming heavy, “Do you have any idea how much coke I have to snort every day to keep my shit together? To remain functional? And yes, coke is a chemical and does help, but it’s only a Band-aid solution. It is not sustainable. My problem is not chemicals. My problem is people like you, and you, and you, and all the people here, who have sold their souls to the Devil, and who won’t stop scheming about taking over the world and enslaving humankind. I fucking hate you!”

“I can relate to you, really,” said Nahredi. “I went through the same problems my friend, believe me. We can talk about it. Let’s put the guns down. Have a seat. Let’s discuss this. Let’s have you as the next guess in our presentation.”

“You cannot possibly be anything like me, you fucking lizard!” insisted Jones.

“But I can, I can,” insisted Nahredi. “Didn’t you read my books? I too felt like I have no control over my life. There is no such thing as free will, for any of us! I too felt like the government and the institutions are oppressive. That’s what my life’s mission is all about – overcoming that oppression, fighting against it! You must be willing to change, and to fight, with all your willpower! And me and you both fight! We only have different means! You are a journalist, an investigator. And I’m a scientist. I – we – build scientific instruments to make all of us equally intelligent, equally healthy, equally empowered by technology, so that none of us can be slaves ever again!”

“Ids drue,” added Schultz. “He faz eggstremely gonficted as a youz.”

“Our struggle is one and the same,” repeated Nahredi to Jones. “We should be friends.”

“You evil vipers!” said Jones. “’By their fruits you shall know them!’ Your fruits are there for everyone to see. Mass slaughter of the innocents, cannibalism, corrupt dealings, war, false witness… and you are lying right now to my face about how you are the same as us, as hard-working and honest men and women of America? Of the whole World? You must repent, you must repent right now, in front of this live-streaming camera, in front of the whole world! Repent!”

Jones swung his rifle forward and rushed towards the two men kneeling on the stage. He pointed the weapon straight at Schultz’s head and yelled: “Repent!”

“I hepent, I hepent,” said Schultz. “Please don’t shoot. I hepent!”

“Go on! What do you repent for?” screamed Jones.

“I hepent for everything,” said Schultz, “everything you said.”

“What was it! Let me hear it from you!”

“I hepent vor eatsing babies. I hepent vor drying to take offa ze vold. I hepent for… for drying to gontrol ze minds of ze people.”

“I knew it!” said Jones, turning to the phone. The then turned back to Schultz. He was getting very manic. “I was right all along, wasn’t I?”

“Yes, you were,” said Schultz.

“Ha-ha! Ha-ha!” Jones began to laugh hysterically. “I was right! I was right! They are controlling the world! They are lizards! Ha-ha!”

He grabbed Bruce, the guy with the phone, by the collar and began to shake him. “They control the world! I knew it!”

He then went back to Schultz. “Admit everything else! Admit that your people are behind 9-11! Admit that you are behind Waco! Admit that you are behind Syrian gas attacks!”

“But… I can’t,” said Schultz.

“Admit it or you are dead! You and your friend!” screamed Jones as he hit first Schultz then Nahredi with the butt of his rifle.

Schultz stood up from his kneeling position, his left brow sprouting blood. “I cannot admiz to zat. It’s too much!”

“You must!” screamed Jones and started punching and kicking Schultz as the latter collapsed into a fetal position. “Admit everything!”

Jones ran out of breath. Schultz to get back to his knees. He was now profoundly shaken, his face disfigured. He too began to yell: “Fine! I will admiz everyzing! Yes, I… we are behind everyzing! We are taking over tze fold! We aff already taken it! We kill children! … We gontrol woahs, we gontrol all the wealz… and we are about to gontrol your fery minds! We are monstahs… and there’s notsing you can do about it!!”

“I knew it! I knew it…” said Jones. He ceased yelling and began to heave. He bent over as he was running out of breath. “I can’t… You can’t… You won’t control me.”

“We already control you,” HP yelled from the crowd. “I’m one of them too! We are all one of them! We control the world!”

Jones knelt with one knee, his other foot trying to lift his fat bulk back up. “You don’t… Shut up, all of you…”

“We control the world! We control the world!” HP started chanting. “Don’t we everyone?! We control the world! Come on, tell him!”

“Yes, ve control vorld,” a voice in the back with a Slavic accent confirmed. “We control the world! We control the world!” others confirmed.

“Stop, you are driving me mad! I’ll shoot every single one of you! Aaah!” Jones threatened, but his voice was slipping, and he began to gasp and massage his throat with his hand.

“We control the world! We control the world!” the chanting was now resounding through the room.

“Come on say it,” HP said to Prisha quietly, “this is our opportunity! Can’t you see that we’re about to get him! We control the world – say it!”

“We control the world!” Prisha began saying.

The chanting took on a deep and resonant tone of some eerie cultlike incantation. Jones’s eyes began darting back and forth from the stage across the room. His arms slackened and dropped to his side. He looked terrified. His other knee fell on the ground too.

Next to him on the stage, also still kneeling, Wally and Otto were fully synched with the crowd chanting “We control the world!” and nodding their heads. Wally stared deliberately into Jones’ eyes, anticipating eagerly the man’s final breakdown, while Otto could hardly focus on anything with his face bashed in and his front teeth missing – he was merely managing to grunt out “Fee gontrol ze fold!” again and again as a mix of blood and saliva spurted from his mouth.

“You are done, Jones! We got you!” HP was heard yelling. “It’s too little too late! We are all part of it!”

“We are all in the cabal!” others started to yell on top of the chant. “We are all part of the conspiracy!”

“No… no,” whispered Jones. He gripped his chest with both hands, his cardiac arrest kicking in full swing. He collapsed onto the stage, belly up, and his big body became motionless.

There came a moment of silence. The other waiters were stunned and confused watching their leader collapse. They stared at his motionless trunk waiting for it to rise again, but in vain. Their rifles drooped towards the floor.

Before any of them could decide what to do, before any could take over the mantle of leadership, loud crashes erupted from all sides of the room. They were instantly followed by a barrage of extremely loud gunshots and fizzing, fast-expanding smoke. HP and Prisha instinctively dove onto the ground, as did most of the captives. HP saw the waiter closest to him get tackled from behind by a SWAT soldier. They were getting saved.

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It was a dark morning still when I woke up in bed, too early. I was in my hometown, at my parents’ house, in my childhood room. I reluctantly went downstairs and sat for a simple breakfast my mom had prepared. My dad moved around, getting ready for work. He would take me to his work; I would check it out. I had said I’d rather not work that job, but my parents insisted, gently. “What do you got to lose, hon?” my mom said.

I put on some business casual clothes: workman’s leather shoes, khaki pants, a non-iron shirt whose crisp collar I could feel on my chin. We got into my dad’s pickup and drove off toward the highway. It was autumn, I had a leather jacket on, but it was hard to get lively. Before the highway we pulled up to a coffee shop. Dad already had a coffee at home and he thought buying coffees outside was a stupid waste of money. I found that home coffee doesn’t quite do it for me; it’s too weak, and I don’t really mind paying two bucks for someone to prepare me a big, fresh cup…

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“A positive mindset is critical for success,” thought George as he pulled out of his driveway. He was having that mindset right at that moment, and it was a big moment: he was driving downtown for the sixth and final interview for a job at his dream company. Seven years and two degrees; blood, sweat and tears; dreams and disappointments; falling, getting up and dusting off – all have culminated in this day, this moment.

He had his best suit on, and his favourite tie. He was wearing his second most expensive pair of shoes – he didn’t choose the most expensive one because its leather soles made too much noise, and he thought that was a bit too pretentious. He had on the watch he had bought as an investment; an exposed mechanical timepiece that looked bomb on his wrist as he swung the steering wheel. He looked at himself in the rear-view mirror: he looked like a million bucks in his Ray-Bans aviator shades. He had fixed his hair with care, but not too much care; can’t be spending too much…

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Continued from Part 2.

“Hey,” I said, smiling like an idiot. “Sorry to invade…”

“No worries,” smiled Barron, “This whole area is the guest area. I want one too.” He proceeded to make his own sandwich.

“Ummm,” he moaned as he bit into it. “Simple things in life are the bomb.”

“Right,” I said. “Food, friends, sex.”

Barron’s eyes flashed for a moment at the mention of sex. “Indeed,” he said.

“You know, I always wanted to ask you, and especially now that I was watching all those bodies by the pool and those beautiful women, what do you think about sex and the Singularity? What will happen to sex?”

“That’s a very good question. I personally think that we’ll still need Eros in the Singularity, too. I’m not sure what form it’ll take, but I don’t think Singularity is solely about knowledge or intelligence. There must be some sort of edification in it too, some sort of grand consumption… a communion. But it will probably manifest in a form that will be almost unrecognizable to us today. Just like we …

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… Continued from Part 1.

We drove out of the city and after a forty-minute drive pulled up in front of a resplendent Spanish colonial mansion. We were led to the garden in the back by a butler and seated around a set of polypropylene sofas laid out underneath a large wooden pergola.

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Chaz and I sat on a couch in the corner. As we relaxed and waited for the rest of the party to arrive, we watched the beautiful, high desert dusk setting in behind the straight barren beams of the pergola. Chaz commented on the beauty of the purple sunset; I replied how the beams of the pergola are like the prison bars barring us from the wonders of outer space, its stars now becoming visible in the unfathomable distance. “With Barron Stall, we will break out of this prison,” I said.

The feeling of imprisonment was intensified, unfortunately, as the autistic mathematician showed up with the group of professors and perched himself on the sofa right between Chaz and me. There was no space for anyone else. Squis…

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Barron Stall had a way with words. I remember how at the start of that weekend in Las Vegas I was listening to him give a speech about free market competition. You’d think that a billionaire like him would be all for it right? Not exactly. He said that the free market was mythology, but it was less violent than mythologies that came before it. At least keeps us busy producing comfort rather than killing each other. Sacrificing human beings. It reduces net misery. Yeah, it still causes a war here or poverty there, but net? War is bad, war is the last reputable human-sacrifice ritual. But net?

Democracy, too, he said, is a mythology, of a highly evolved form. Have you watched the last electoral campaigns? Have you read about archaic tribal enthronement rituals? Same-same – with modern politics being a bit more genteel. Yet politics is still a barely disguised form of mob control. A politician decides what to throw them to devour, and when, and tries to minimize the sacrificial violence. …

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As soon as I stepped onto the streets of the big old city everything reminded me of the wild years I spent there long ago. The neat streets smelled like new summer: hot asphalt, and pollen blowing from the plane trees on the streets and in the parks. Girls were already at it with bare legs and arms and beautiful, cold faces. Savagely insolent. The sexual tension caused men to smoke more cigarettes with their beers on patios. Skyscrapers rose high above the teeming show, huddled along the skyline like giant toy blocks.

Memories flooded in, reviving my past and reconciling me to it. Now I was mature, anchored. I had come with my wife and kids. It was and it remained a great city, and my wife always wanted to visit. She had a cousin living here, and that made it an easier decision. He’s a single guy – divorced – and a successful architect. Tall and polite to a fault. We stayed in one of his empty condos. He took us to popular restaurants for the first couple of nights. We saw some museums…

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Dear Readers,

I’m sending this special-edition newsletter on the day of the publication of my debut novel, The Woke Iliad. The book turns Homer’s famous epic into a humorous satire that relates the events of a fictional war between a woke coalition and a “based” stronghold.

I will write here about some of the inspiration behind the novel. Those of you who have read the book, or are interested in reading it, I would like to ask for the favour of reviewing it on the online bookstore of your choice. You can find the book on Amazon and other major online book retailers. You can find the book description and some reviews in the “Books” tab of this website. There’s no print edition of the book for now.

A few years ago, I discovered a new way to waste time on YouTube. I discovered a whole genre of video blogs of Westerners travelling across Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union countries. The bloggers sought out exotic locations and people to show to audiences back home. Many of the posts had …

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