I
There is no conference badge, no streaming feed, no welcoming coffee cart with awkward name tags. There’s only a subterranean meeting chamber—windowless, surgically sanitized, fifty meters beneath a decommissioned UN annex that technically no longer exists.
The room is circular. The walls are finished in unmarked brushed concrete. The light comes from four recessed halogen panels, sterile and too bright, diffused just enough to bleach faces but not enough to eliminate shadow. There are no visible cameras. No projectors, no microphones, no voice assistants. The air hums with the faintest charge—just enough to agitate the nervous system if you sit too close to the walls.
The participants are arranged in concentric tiers—upholstered black leather, cold anodized steel. No translators. If you can’t follow the conversation, you shouldn’t be here.
John Negroponte steps forward.
He wears a charcoal suit that gleams like oiled graphite. His hands are folded with the stillness of a man who’s waited out coups. His voice is both sandpaper and silk.
“Let’s not pretend this is new. We’ve been here before—each in our own century, each in our own ruin. But this time, the collapse is global. And it’s algorithmic.”
No one interrupts. Not because they fear him, but because when Negroponte speaks, the margins of the map redraw themselves.
“This is not a war room. This is not a think tank. This is hospice.”
A pause. One of the European delegates exhales a little too sharply, then stills, embarrassed by his own breath.
“I won’t insult you by reciting data we all know. But I’ll state it plainly. Sovereign debt? Unserviceable. Public trust? Eroding faster than coastal Florida. Productivity? Splintered from compensation like a snapped femur. Military-industrial stability? Propped up by expired consensus.”
He walks slowly, the way a mortician would inspect a casket—pausing, glancing, never fully looking anyone in the eye.
“You all saw the 2008 rehearsal. The model we’ve been tuning since ’71 is now optimal. We have the basic infrastructure in place.”
Near the far edge of the chamber, Christine Lagarde sits very still, legs crossed like a swan mid-dissection. She doesn’t nod. She doesn’t need to.
Putin flicks ash from a hand-rolled cigarette into a black onyx bowl. His eyes are half-lidded, watching everyone and no one.
Fink sips water from a decanter so clear it might be decorative. Zuckerberg is here too—younger than most, paler than all, scribbling inscrutably on a tablet that never seems to turn on.
Negroponte stops under the central halogen ring, framed like an embalmer in holy light.
“So. We acknowledge the state—as a concept—is dying. The U.S. won’t make it past ’36. Russia’s on its last legs by ’30. Europe? We can leverage her until maybe 2040. The Chinese have done exceptional work on Real Estate; 2045 latest before we engineer a fully privatized end-state. Heaven on Earth—for us. Everything for sale. No socialized consequence management. The state apparatus, at last, can be killed.”
He lets the words settle like ashes.
“The currency is the morphine drip. The military is the rattling cough. And the people—”
He pauses.
“—are already post-political. They live in simulation. They vote by algorithmic reflex. They consume the lie because they know it’s a lie. And they like it that way. It will be frivolously easy to evolve this further.”
Rupert Murdoch, off to the side, chuckles like a priest at a gangbang.
“Ratings never looked better,” he mutters, not quite quietly.
Victoria Nuland, sharp and sleepless, breaks in.
“The front lines are fraying. We’ve lost influence in Ankara, Prague, Cairo. Ukraine’s slipping. The moment we stop subsidizing loyalty, the whole bloc decays.”
“Exactly,” says Dimon, leaning forward. “This isn’t about fixing anything. It’s about buying the wreckage before the others do.”
“And doing it with what?” snaps one of the Saudis, though his name isn’t spoken. “The dollar is cancerous. You inflate this corpse any further and even your own people will realize they’re trading in toilet paper.”
“Which is why we’re here,” says Negroponte, his hands calmly clasped again. “Not to save the dollar. But to replace it. After the bleed-out.”
He scans the room slowly now, allowing the implications to gel.
“We need to ask: who among us actually benefits from preserving the American empire? And how much longer can we afford to pretend it’s viable?”
Putin speaks next, his voice unaccented but cold.
“You cannot sustain empire by exporting debt and porn. You do it by controlling fear. Your people are afraid—but of the wrong things.”
“That’s the idea,” says Thiel, almost to himself.
Zuckerberg finally looks up.
“We’ve modeled disintegration since ’09. Attention collapse, spatial distrust, information warping. The digital subject is already fragmented. We don’t need revolution. We need saturation.”
“So what,” says Lagarde, finally breaking her silence. “We just let it burn?”
“Of course not,” says Negroponte. “You don’t leave a field of crops to rot. We maintain a shorting infrastructure. The delusion of a future for the masses. Compliance through engineered hope. We orchestrate the fall—like demolishing a cathedral with gold hidden in the foundations. But it has to be timed.”
“If we set this up, we need emperization,” Murdoch murmurs. “An algorithmic violence hierarchy. Is there anyone suitable with a flair for fascism? We cultivate a Dear Leader. We blame it all on him. Or her.”
(Laughter.)
“Exactly,” says Epstein, leaning forward into the too-white light, his grin sharp and feline. “We don’t kill Caesar. We let the mob do it.”
Silence.
And then, from the ECB corner, a voice—soft, almost disbelieving:
“So… who’s dumb enough to volunteer for Caesar?”
Negroponte says nothing.
But the question lingers like the aftertaste of smoke and steel.
And far above, in the bright, buzzing world of traffic and illusion, the first domino is already tilting.
II
The room doesn’t empty. It exhales.
There’s no intermission, no break in decorum. Just a seamless shift, like a syndicate flipping to the next page of a plan written before most of them were born. What follows isn’t debate—it’s logistics. They’ve rehearsed variations of this scenario a hundred times on smaller scales. Everyone knows the choreography.
Fink speaks first, tapping a stylus against the crystalline face of a silent tablet.
“We’re five years from terminal debt gravity. The curve bends in ‘18, snaps in ‘20. Past that, it’s no longer repayment—it’s narrative control.”
Negroponte nods once, curt.
“The dollar floats on belief alone. That belief is metastable. Our role is to manage the loss of faith in calibrated stages.”
Zuckerberg, pale and unblinking:
“We can accelerate the erosion without sparking panic. Microdoses of confusion. Demoralization by overstimulation. Sentiment loops are already running live in key demos.”
Lagarde, clinically detached:
“We’ve modeled cascade timelines. Confidence evaporates within ten days of breach. If we time withdrawal precisely, we can short U.S. instruments ahead of the downgrade spiral.”
“How long before Main Street feels it?” asks someone from the NATO tier.
“Depends on how we script the blame,” Murdoch replies, already smiling.
Dimon, rolling a Cuban between ringed fingers:
“We’ll lose the dollar before we lose the banks. Currency is a mirage. Assets aren’t. Convert dollar surplus into hard infrastructure—energy, food, water—and we own the endgame.”
Putin speaks without invitation. His voice is sanded glass.
“America needs distraction. We need controlled collapse. You sow fractures internally. I create the destabilization theater. Attention is diverted. Sentiment pivots.”
He leans forward, eyes narrowing.
“You’ve seen how I operate in Russia. I decimated the commons. No illusions of solidarity remain. You people cling to the state like it’s sacred. Cut it out. Burn it clean. Excise the myth.”
Negroponte studies him.
“How far can you take it?”
“I begin instability ops immediately. Finland’s too risky—Ukraine is the clean option. I can activate within months. The world won’t notice at first. Once engaged, escalation becomes the story. If it stretches NATO? So much the better. Moscow remains secure. We dismantle the federation in strata—like peeling an onion, or dropping a wedding cake floor by floor.”
From the eastern arc, a Chinese observer raises a single finger. He has said nothing until now.
“If Russia becomes a salvage zone, we want corridor rights. Lithium. Arctic oil. Freshwater access. Port guarantees.”
Putin nods slowly, not blinking.
“Kazakhstan’s too cumbersome. But the Arctic shelf? Done. You reinforce my east, I initiate from the west.”
Nuland is already scribbling, not looking up.
“We start in Ukraine. Make it look like a revolution. Leak selectively. Tank their currency. Flip their press. Flood the zone with noise.”
Negroponte turns back to the room.
“Agreed. Russia plays the collapsing adversary. America plays the crumbling hegemon. Europe? We float them twenty years as a lifeboat—then privatize the wreckage. No pensions. No voters. No legacy.”
“And China?” Lagarde asks.
“Rising wages, yes. But we’ve got another decade of extractable output. Partner, for now. The endgame is disintegration. No node survives post-state capitalism. Atomization is the path.”
A pause. Someone lights a cigar. A faint hiss as unseen ducts inhale the smoke.
Zuckerberg again, voice drifting:
“The U.S. electorate can’t comprehend systemic failure. But they excel at blame. That’s our valve. Vlad, if you reroute some of your St. Petersburg assets to my board, we can scale sentiment disruption at population level. We’re overdue.”
Murdoch grins, teeth wet.
“Then it’s empire by algorithm. Empirization, gentlemen. The show writes itself. Let’s give them someone… perfect to blame.”
The halogen lights buzz faintly. No one moves.
The plan, once theoretical, is now animate.
And far above, in the soft-lit circus of the surface world, the first of many dominos is beginning its fall—soundless, unseen, and inevitable.
III
It starts as a joke. Almost.
The room has quieted—not solemn, but pensive. The outlines are sharp now. Collapse isn’t just permitted; it’s policy. But someone has to take the fall.
“We can’t just let the empire dissolve without a narrative,” says Lagarde, her voice dry as carbon dust. “There has to be a face for the fire.”
“A scapegoat,” adds Murdoch, smirking. “One with… let’s say, accelerant properties.”
“We need a Caesar,” Negroponte says. “But not one who’ll ever put the pieces together. Someone they’ll follow into ruin—and then cheerfully crucify. Someone without smart people around.”
“Someone so incandescently dumb,” Dimon offers, “his implosion won’t even need a commission. The people will beg to lynch him.”
A few delegates laugh—too fast, too loud.
A tablet slides silently across the table. Names scroll upward like the credits of a tragedy no one wants to claim.
“We’ve shortlisted clowns, tyrants, media ghouls,” says the NATO liaison. “But none stick. Too sharp. Too ideological. Too… aware.”
Zuckerberg, who’s sat still through most of this, finally tilts his head.
“There’s one option. Already known. Already degraded. A failed reality TV star with debt ties to half this room. No ideology. No compass. Only impulse.”
He says the name.
The room freezes. Then erupts.
Laughter—raw, incredulous, bordering on disturbed.
“That cretin?” barks a Saudi prince. “He’s a walking indictment of the Enlightenment.”
“He makes Berlusconi look like Bismarck,” mutters someone from MI6.
“Absolutely unfit,” says Nuland, stone-faced.
“Exactly,” Zuckerberg replies. “He’s perfect. The apex of American decadence. He’s pre-fallen. There’s nothing left to expose.”
Murdoch wipes his eyes, still laughing.
“Christ, he’s Caligula without the libido.”
“No,” says Thiel, finally chiming in. “He’s better. He’s what happens when the machine breaks and just keeps running. He doesn’t even know he’s a tool.”
A long pause.
Epstein leans in, voice like syrup over venom.
“We profiled him years ago. He came to my island. He understands nothing. Believes everything. You praise him, he purrs. Tell him he’s a god, he’ll ask for a statue.”
“Will the public buy it?” Lagarde asks.
Zuckerberg nods once.
“They already have. Algorithmic preconditioning began in ‘07. The Atlantic City ops gave us deep psychometric reads. If we calibrate rage, nostalgia, and humiliation, we can conjure messianic perception from a landfill substrate. It’s just signal processing.”
Pushback stirs.
“There’s no way the electorate swallows this,” mutters someone from the ECB. “He’s… too much.”
“Exactly,” Zuckerberg repeats. “We want maximum drag. Maximum entropy. He won’t just destroy trust—he’ll salt the soil. By the end, no one will want to inherit America.”
Negroponte raises a hand.
“Walk us through deployment.”
Zuckerberg stands. No slides. No visuals. Just motion.
“We run him first as a joke. A sideshow. He infects the discourse. We bait the opposition into smug disbelief. Then we feed the fervor. Build a cult. Inject viral messaging. Target the lowest strata of cognitive engagement. Once he surges, we choke off the exits. He becomes inevitable.”
“And the guardrails?” someone asks.
“Obsolete,” Thiel replies. “That’s the whole point. He overwhelms the system with sheer absurdity. It’s not a coup. It’s a clown car crash—live-streamed, monetized, and too humiliating to stop.”
More laughter. Then stillness.
Putin, smirking like a snake with a warm meal, finally speaks.
“He’s also fully compromised. We have tapes. Photos. Contracts. From the ‘80s. The ‘90s. Stuff that would make the Pope vomit.”
“Good,” says Murdoch. “Then we own the end.”
“So who’s the backup?” Lagarde asks.
“No one,” Negroponte answers. “He is the backup. One term to soften the field. Second term, we take everything not nailed down. And burn the rest.”
They let that hang.
And far above, on a windblown golf course fringed by discount condos and rotting flagpoles, the man in question is yelling into a phone, demanding Diet Coke and a photo op. He’s already telling himself a story where he wins it all.
He doesn’t know it yet. But he’s been cast.
And he’s perfect for the role.
IV
There is no announcement. No gavel strike. The next phase begins without ceremony—just the sound of velvet-slick breath and the subtle rasp of pages being turned. The plan now shifts from theory to implementation. Not a declaration—an unveiling.
Negroponte adjusts his tie, a signal in itself. The room quiets—not in submission, but in anticipation.
“The first term,” he begins, “is preparation. Stagecraft. We have a major suspension-of-disbelief chasm to bridge. So we use the first presidency as a primer. Let him wreck optics, gut legacy institutions, alienate alliances. It’s inoculation by exposure. A strategic biohazard.”
Thiel, arms crossed, eyes shadowed by the faint halo of halogen, nods.
“Collapse doesn’t come from an earthquake. It comes from termites. No structure collapses from one blow. It fails because its internal symbols are rendered incoherent. Make justice laughable, truth slippery, process irrelevant. The structure eats itself.”
Zuckerberg’s tablet glows faintly, the reflected light strobing across his expressionless face.
“We flood the discourse layer. Saturation beats censorship. There’s no need to lie—we just multiply the noise until meaning collapses under its own weight.”
Across from him, Murdoch taps a pen against the table—metal on glass.
“Can we time the first implosion to peak in 2020? Close the decade in chaos. Let them crawl out, begging for order, safety, direction.”
Nuland doesn’t look up.
“We hollow the apparatus. Leak internal memos, misdirect ops. Split their intelligence communities along partisan lines. Fan factionalism in every demographic. Weaponize identity. Let them eat one another.”
A voice from the Atlantic alliance table: “What about the courts?”
“Undermine them early,” Nuland replies. “Feed the idea of ‘deep state sabotage.’ Poison the well continent-wide. Once that meme takes hold, every verdict becomes suspect. You don’t need to dismantle the judiciary—just turn it into farce. Then you find someone to hate: the colored, women, feminists, the disabled, welfare recipients. Mark, what profiles best with consensus?”
Mark doesn’t even look up. “Evangelicals like to hate. Give them something to hate. Start with women. We always target unions, the left, the ‘establishment.’ I’ll find a minority they can be trained to really loathe. Or we hit all minorities. He’s extremely racist—it’s like taking candy from a baby.”
Dimon leans forward, rolling a Cuban cigar between thumb and forefinger like a loaded die.
“Hold—economic data’s volatile. Four years is fast. The Fed will panic. We push them into quantitative overdrive. The illusion of solvency becomes stimulus. Let the markets soar on vapor. The masses will cheer their own indebtedness.”
Putin chuckles, dry as shed snakeskin.
“Marc,” he says without looking at Zuckerberg, “I’ve had success with gay targets. Easy to rile.”
Fink, calm as ever, steeples his fingers.
“We start converting fiat gains into hard assets immediately—real estate, water access, food distribution, energy grids. The public will chase crypto pipe dreams and meme stocks. We’ll be buying aquifers.”
A soft murmur of approval hums through the chamber. Someone lights another cigar. The air grows warmer, the smoke rising toward a ventilation system that makes no sound.
Lagarde fans herself with a sheaf of notes.
“And if something goes off-script? A black swan?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Thiel says. “We accelerate. Use it. Every disruption becomes rationale for deeper control. Solar flare? Print. Earthquake? Short the recovery. Pandemic? Borrow from the future and sell the present. Every failure becomes liquidity.”
Zuckerberg gestures, and the tablet at the center of the table brings up a chart: algorithmic polling data mapped onto meme cycle resonance curves.
“Let the opposition burn out on satire and disbelief. Mockery is pacification. By the time they realize he’s not going away, it’s too late. We’ve already rewritten the interface of democracy.”
Epstein, posture like a spider resting after the twitch of a snare thread, finally speaks.
“And by 2024?”
“By 2024,” Negroponte replies, “we go critical. Let him run a third term. Frivolously easy. Or better—let him scream for it and ‘lose.’ We game it either way. By then, we’ve made the brand of American leadership so toxic it leaves chemical burns. They won’t just hate him—they’ll hate the entire apparatus. The Founders become punchlines.”
A voice from the World Bank cluster: “And we?”
Negroponte’s smile is almost fond.
“We? We start the garage sale.”
Silence follows. Not reverence—acknowledgment. Alignment.
Then Fink again, voice quieter now.
“We’ll need buffer zones. Europe can hold a while. Ten, maybe fifteen years before privatization pressure completes. That gives us a proper exit corridor.”
“And Asia?”
“Leverage Belt and Road. Let China overextend. Encourage debt diplomacy until assets begin to bleed. Then fracture them like we did the Soviets—create microstates within the economic shell. Split the dragon from within.”
Zuckerberg looks up.
“Can we begin full algorithmic deployment in 2021?”
“Not yet,” Thiel replies. “Too soon. We need social panic first. The electorate has to fail organically. After 2024, we roll out AI as savior. After they’ve tried everything else.”
Negroponte glances to a screen that isn’t on. “Push it to 2027. The machine will be ready. By then, no one will remember how to run elections without it.”
Nuland sharpens her tone.
“We’ll need a second-tier villain. Someone grotesque but digestible. The QAnon pipeline is working, but it needs direction.”
“We’ll test family members,” Zuckerberg says. “His sons are incoherent and utterly unsuitable—except for spare organs. Or maybe the daughter.”
Putin raises an eyebrow.
“We have material. From the ’90s. Eastern European connections. Some… film. I’ve dangled that over him for years.”
“Whatever it is, I don’t want to see it,” Fink mutters, swallowing with palpable revulsion.
Lagarde closes her folder. “We understand the risks. But the clock’s ticking. The debt curve bends in ’18, breaks in ’20, shatters by ’23. Past that, it’s not economics—it’s scriptwriting.”
Dimon exhales smoke through his nose.
“The next decade will be a theater of collapse. We cast the roles. We build the sets. We control the spotlight. Whatever happens—imagine how entertaining it will all be.”
America doesn’t know it yet. But the audience is already seated. The curtain is halfway up. And the fire exits are locked.
V
“So we have selected our ‘Reagan’…”
The line hangs in the air—faintly amused, faintly radioactive. No one follows it with laughter. But the temperature in the room changes. The current has shifted. They’ve crossed a threshold. From now on, it’s all tempo—and tempo is everything.
Negroponte folds his hands, a stillness as deliberate as a knife laid flat. His eyes drift toward the far wall—blank, matte, humming softly with the weight of futures not yet monetized.
“We need to move fast,” he says. “Obama isn’t stupid. He feels it in his bones—what’s coming. And Hillary…” he glances sideways, just for a moment, “I know how badly you wanted this. But the next election cycle won’t be won in politics. It’ll be decided downstream—in culture. And culture is being rewritten as we speak.”
Murdoch draws slowly on his cigar, exhaling with the casual indifference of someone who already knows how the story ends.
“Everything we need is already metastasizing,” he says. “Tribalism, cognitive fracture, semantic drift. Reality is now just opinion with better marketing. No one agrees what color the sky is anymore. That’s our wedge.”
Zuckerberg, head bowed over his tablet, speaks without looking up.
“Facebook is scaling. By Q1 of 2015 we’ll have total feed personalization. Sentiment mapping. Once the chambers form, they’ll echo themselves. Radicalization will be self-inflicted—all we need is the occasional spark.”
Dimon, rolling a thick Cuban between his fingers like a financial rosary, speaks with dry detachment.
“Same with the markets. Retail’s just noise now. The smart money’s in pattern recognition. They’re trading retirement futures on Reddit. Meanwhile our bots are shaving milliseconds and eating the spread. It’s theft, but it’s beautiful.”
Lagarde adjusts the cuffs of her jacket and says, almost softly, “It’s not just capital anymore. We govern through delay. Truth doesn’t have to vanish. It just has to arrive late. Seventy-two hours of lag turns any fact into suspicion. That’s governance now: latency management.”
Someone near the GCHQ corner asks, “And the Russians?”
All eyes shift to Putin.
He doesn’t smile. But something in his posture changes—just slightly.
“Ukraine,” he says, “will be our forge. A hammer, not a prize. We start the destabilization next year. Soft power: NGOs, student marches, staged grievances. We’ll sell it as democratization. Then let entropy take its course. When the fever peaks, we offer the cure.”
“And after?”
“I take Crimea,” he says plainly. “No shooting. No tanks. Just inevitability. And then we test NATO’s tendons. See where it snaps.”
Nuland scribbles aggressively, speaking through her pen.
“We’ll call it a spontaneous uprising. Our press will clean it. We’ll flood the zone with NGO grants, empower opposition voices, then label them insurgents when the time is right. We’ve done it before.”
Thiel leans in.
“Legacy governments are too slow. They don’t understand how quickly control is shifting to the stack. Governance is no longer public. It’s infrastructural.”
“And we own the stack,” Zuckerberg murmurs.
There is a brief stillness. Not reverence, exactly—something colder. An awareness of machinery far below their feet, breathing.
Someone near the IMF clears their throat. “The Arab Spring—does it still have legs?”
Putin shrugs. “No. Egypt’s neutralized. Syria’s a slow burn. That theater is useful only as background noise now. The real key is saturation—constant scandals, meaningless outrage, identity warfare, celebrity churn. Exhaust the population. Keep them in permanent information shock. If they’re dazed, they can’t organize.”
Murdoch chuckles. “Distraction is the new doctrine. Nobody wants truth. They want dopamine.”
Lagarde narrows her eyes. “And the U.S. election?”
Negroponte answers.
“We make it look accidental. A glitch. A fluke no one sees coming. By the time the opposition stops laughing, the immune system will already be down. The virus walks right in.”
He lifts his hand slowly, like a conductor about to cue a final movement.
“Now—phase two.”
VI
The room doesn’t cool, but the tone does. The heat of logistical frenzy dissipates into something colder—strategic, long-range, almost ecclesiastical. The air feels thinner. Fewer words, more weight.
Negroponte taps his fingers against the polished table, the motion slow, deliberate.
“We’ve secured the puppet,” he says, as if reading from an ancient rite. “The theater is set. Now we need to ask—when does the machine enter the stage?”
Thiel responds without hesitation. “Not yet.”
A beat. Then he clarifies.
“AI is still nascent. Untrusted. Unevenly distributed. The electorate sees it as novelty or nemesis. Either way, it’s not ripe. 2021 is too soon.”
Zuckerberg lifts his gaze from the data streams like a man surfacing from deep water.
“If we can train models on full-spectrum behavior logs—browser metadata, biometric drifts, psychometric footprints—we can reach emotional pre-resolution. Not just predictive… prescriptive. But we need time. And scale.”
Murdoch squints through a plume of smoke. “Time is money. But money is illusion. The real metric is faith. If we can cause a liquidity panic big enough to justify the digital shift—”
“—we get the mandate by crisis,” Dimon finishes.
Fink leans forward, steepling his fingers.
“So. If we want it fast, we manufacture the void. Black swans, controlled demolitions, market delirium. Anything that pushes the public to beg for artificial order.”
“We’re already running scenarios,” says Thiel. “Debt curve modeling shows that by 2023, the U.S. fiscal structure becomes a singularity. It bends in ‘18, breaks in ‘20, and by ‘23 it swallows light. At that point, governance by human will is obsolete. There will be no alternative to letting the machine adjudicate scarcity.”
Lagarde raises an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting AI as a replacement for statecraft?”
“I’m saying it becomes the default,” Thiel replies. “Not officially. Not overtly. But functionally. Algorithms will price risk, allocate resources, assess loyalty. The fiction of voting will remain—window dressing for system compliance. But it’ll be AI deciding everything that matters.”
A silence falls.
It’s not skepticism.
It’s awe.
Then Negroponte again: “But let’s be clear. We don’t introduce AI because it’s ready. We introduce it because they aren’t. We wait until collapse makes it palatable. Until it feels like salvation.”
Zuckerberg runs a hand across his jaw, then speaks, measured and slow:
“If we align deployment with a full-spectrum trust breakdown, it works. After a series of rolling disillusionments—election fraud claims, data breaches, surveillance leaks, targeted riots—people will accept machine control as inevitability. Not preference. Survival.”
“Timeline?” asks Nuland.
“2023 to 2033,” says Thiel. “But if something major happens—mass civil unrest, global contagion, currency collapse—we move the window forward by five years. Maybe more.”
Putin lets out a low chuckle.
“America will fall to the machine because you need someone else to make the decisions—and no one trusts your institutions anymore. By the time you hand it over, you’ll call it progress.”
Murdoch grins, teeth like coins in moonlight. “We just need to make the human option look worse.”
Zuckerberg swipes across the interface. A flicker of cascading nodes, heat maps of sentiment, collapse simulations.
“The moment will come,” he says. “The code is already watching.”