The Rule of the Elite

Cora had long stopped believing in coincidences. The rule of the Circle had not come from a sudden revolution, nor from a singular mastermind pulling the strings in the dark. It had been built, piece by piece, over decades, not through grand conspiracies but through the quiet alignment of power. The people had cheered as it happened, blind to the fact that the world was being carved up before their eyes.

You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge.

It had started in the markets. The first to rise was the one who controlled commerce, swallowing competitors with ruthless efficiency, until nearly every online transaction passed through his hands. Not satisfied with controlling what people bought, he acquired newspapers and publishing houses, reshaping narratives, silencing dissent before it could take root. He made it easier to buy, easier to consume, easier to be entertained, and in return, people gave him their habits, their preferences, their unguarded thoughts.

The next was the king of the airwaves. He had inherited a network built on rage and fear, and he had refined it, turning it into something more potent, something absolute. His channels spoke in lockstep, their anchors repeating the same phrases across the country, their carefully chosen words shaping the world that millions believed they lived in. The Circle did not need to demand loyalty when fear was more effective, when the people saw enemies in every shadow and begged for protection.

Then there was the man who had long courted the war machine, a quiet figure who held contracts so vast they stretched into the next century. He did not sell weapons. He sold the necessity of war itself. His fortune grew not from peace but from the eternal promise of danger, the quiet knowledge that stability was bad for business. He understood what the others did—that fear must never end, that there must always be a new frontier, a new enemy, a new conflict to justify the rising budgets. And so he reached further, investing in technology that would reshape the battlefield, merging war with surveillance, security with compliance. The cameras that watched the cities were built with the same precision as those that targeted enemies abroad.

The most powerful of them all barely spoke in public. He did not need to. His empire was not in a single industry, not in a single nation. He held the wealth of entire civilizations in his grasp, his company a silent force behind nearly every publicly traded stock. The world itself bent to his influence, not because he ordered it to, but because he simply had too much control to ignore. He owned politicians without needing to meet them, dictated policies without having to draft them. Governments rose and fell at his nod, economies trembled when his firm made its decisions. He did not enforce the rule of the Circle. He simply ensured there was nothing left to challenge it.

The oil magnate had no illusions about his role. He did not pretend to be a visionary or a leader of men. He had seen the shift toward clean energy, the whispers of a future that did not need him, and he had acted before it was too late. He did not just pump oil. He pumped influence. He bought politicians, crippled regulations, turned science into debate, delayed the inevitable until there was no longer a question of inevitability. There was no need for a future beyond oil when he controlled the narrative, when the alternatives had been pushed back so far that even the most dedicated idealists lost their momentum.

And finally, there were the preachers. Not the old kind, not the ones who spoke of humility or grace, but those who had turned faith into an empire, a spectacle of light and sound and fury. The megachurches had always been powerful, but under the Circle, they became something more. They were no longer just places of worship. They were institutions, their pastors wielding influence over millions. They preached obedience, submission, the idea that the Circle had been chosen, that the suffering of the people was righteous and good. Their followers needed no coercion, no threats. They walked willingly into servitude, convinced that to question was to sin.

Not all of them were Americans, though the Chairman had preached America First. He had railed against foreign influence even as he made deals in quiet rooms, even as his rise had been smoothed by the hands of those who saw opportunity in his chaos. The Circle was global. Its interests transcended borders. It had no need for a secret conspiracy when the game had already been rigged in its favor.

Once a person consolidated so much money and influence, they became unable to empathize with regular people. They no longer saw workers, citizens, or individuals. They saw numbers. Profits. Assets to be moved and liabilities to be erased. The world was no longer real to them, not in the way it was to those who still had to live in it. They had long since left behind the concerns of ordinary people—the price of food, the cost of rent, the slow erosion of security. Those were problems for the masses, for the ones who still struggled under the weight of a system designed to extract everything from them.

By the time people realized what had happened, it was too late. There was no need for a grand declaration, no moment where power was officially transferred. It had already been consolidated. Those who controlled the markets, the information, the security, the wealth, the energy, and the faith had aligned. Not by design, but by necessity.

There was no single ruler.

There were only those who owned the world.

Cora had seen through it. She had always seen through it. She had grown up in a church that promised salvation, only to use fear as a weapon to keep people obedient. As a child, she had watched the men in power twist scripture into something self-serving, a justification for control. She had believed, for a time. She had tried. But faith had always come with a price, and she had learned too young what happened when you questioned those who claimed to speak for God.

She had also learned early how power worked, how narcissists ruled not with strength, but with a fragile ego that demanded constant affirmation. She had seen it in the church, but also in her own home. Her father had been that way, a man who needed control, who needed everyone around him to bend and break before him. The Chairman was no different. Neither were the billionaires who had backed him, the ones who had bought the world with wealth so vast they could no longer see beyond it.

Even in the before times, before the Circle, before the fall, she had known the world was not for people like her. She had struggled with the quiet realization that she was renting her life, that she would work every day just to stand still, just to survive in a system that had already decided what she was worth. A slave to a machine she had been born into.

Now, that machine had fully revealed itself, and she was still trapped inside it. The difference was, no one pretended anymore.