The American Dream

The world had never been fair. Not for the poor. Not for the working class. Not for anyone outside the thin, incestuous bloodlines of power. America had never been a land of opportunity—it had been a land of extraction. The founders had crafted it that way from the very beginning. The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the so-called “American Dream” were nothing more than marketing slogans, bait to keep people in line while the machine turned them into fuel.

It was all there, plain as day, in history books nobody read. The founding fathers were not revolutionaries—they were landlords, bankers, and slave owners. They had not fought to create a fair society, they had fought to maintain control, to shift the balance of power from one set of elites to another. And it had worked. For over two centuries, America had functioned exactly as it was designed to. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and when the masses got too restless, there was always a convenient distraction waiting in the wings.

A war. A race riot. A financial collapse blamed on the poor. A moral panic. It didn’t matter. The game was the same, only the players changed.

Bootstraps. Hard work. Self-made.

Lies. Every last one.

Nobody climbed from nothing. Not without help. Not without money. Every so-called “self-made billionaire” was born into privilege, given the golden ticket of elite connections, family wealth, and a world that bent to accommodate them. Cora had heard the stories. The garage startups. The hungry entrepreneurs who clawed their way up from zero. And yet, if you looked closer, the pattern was always the same. The “garage” was attached to a multi-million-dollar home. The hungry entrepreneur had a safety net of old money. The banks, the schools, the courts—all of it had been designed to protect them and to keep everyone else fighting for scraps.

And when people did fight back?

They were crushed.

The memory card held clips, old news reports buried under years of algorithmic decay. It showed protests drowned in tear gas and riot shields, leaders smeared and dismantled, movements infiltrated and shattered from within. Workers who had once fought for fair wages, only to be branded as communists and enemies of the state. Black activists, Indigenous leaders, feminist revolutionaries—all wiped from history, their victories erased or twisted into something unrecognizable.

She scrolled further.

The wars. Always the wars.

The people who had seen it up close, the ones who had been sent overseas to fight and die for “freedom,” knew the truth. The veterans knew they hadn’t fought for democracy. They had fought for corporations, for oil, for the financial interests of men who never held a gun in their lives. The banks thrived. The war machine rolled on. And when the soldiers came home, broken and discarded, they were left to rot.

Alex had known this too.

She could almost hear his voice as she scanned the files.

“It’s all a distraction, Cora. Every time people get too close to the truth, they pull the same old trick. Pit us against each other. Make it a race war, a culture war, a battle of men versus women, left versus right, city versus country. They make us fight each other so we don’t fight them.”

And it had worked.

It had always worked.

Until the Chairman.

He had not invented the con—he had only perfected it.

The Circle was just the latest evolution of a system that had been in place for centuries. He had simply taken the old playbook and rewritten it in bold, screaming letters. He had taken every fear, every resentment, every festering wound in American history and turned it into a weapon. He had promised his followers that they weren’t losing because of corruption, or because the game was rigged, but because of them. The undesirables. The moochers. The immigrants. The liberals.

And they had believed him.

Because believing him was easier than accepting the truth.

Cora clenched the memory card in her fist, staring at the dim glow of her dead phone.