Magnus Vail was a name spoken with reverence in some circles, fear in others. Billionaire. Visionary. CEO of Nexus Systems. Owner of X-Comm, the country’s largest private data infrastructure firm. He had positioned himself as a pioneer, a man whose genius had propelled technology forward. His admirers saw him as a captain of industry, a man who shaped the future with sheer will and intelligence.
But it was all a lie.
Magnus had never built anything himself. He had not coded the first lines of software at Nexus. He had not been in the room when X-Comm was founded. The truth was far less grand. He had arrived in the country illegally during the tech boom, blending into the chaos of the early internet age. He made his fortune not through innovation, but through manipulation, buying his way into companies that were already succeeding, then rewriting their histories to center himself as their founder.
He erased the real pioneers. Their names were buried in legal agreements, their contributions stripped from corporate lore. In time, even they started to believe that perhaps Magnus Vail had always been there. He was a master at stealing the limelight, at taking other men’s achievements and stamping his own name on them.
It worked because Magnus understood something fundamental—history is written by those with power, not by those who deserve it.
His crowning achievement, the one that solidified his grip on the digital world, came when he acquired X-Comm. A failing social media platform, a chaotic mess of unchecked free speech, it had been on the verge of collapse. Magnus swooped in, declaring himself a champion of open discourse, promising a digital utopia where ideas could flourish.
It was a farce.
The doors were opened to the Circle immediately. Hate groups flourished, misinformation spread unchecked, and his version of free speech only applied to those who worshipped the Chairman. The moment someone opposed him, they vanished. Accounts were banned outright, shadowbanned into oblivion, their posts buried so deep they might as well have never existed. The loudest voices against the Circle were silenced, not with brute force, but with a quiet press of a button.
Magnus had never cared about free speech.
It was a talking point, a tool to rally people behind him, a means to an end.
And the people who had once trusted him never realized they were being used.
Magnus gained a reputation quickly. In the boardrooms of Nexus and X-Comm, people spoke of him in hushed tones. He was a tyrant in a tailored suit, a man who demanded absolute loyalty, who tolerated no dissent. He had no patience for weakness, no time for incompetence.
One former employee put it simply: If Magnus was not happy, you knew it. Things could get nasty.
Even his brightest minds were disposable. Mark Stalberg, one of his most brilliant engineers, had once been given an assignment that seemed impossible. A part that was quoted at $500,000 had to be built on a budget of $5,000. No engineer in any other company would have even attempted it. But Stalberg had no choice.
He poured months of his life into the project, sacrificing sleep, personal time, everything. He solved the problem and managed to build it for only $1,500, an achievement that should have been impossible.
He sent Magnus an email detailing his work, expecting praise, acknowledgment… something.
Magnus replied with a single word.
“Ok.”
That was who Magnus Vail was.
A man who stole credit and gave nothing back. A man who expected brilliance but had no capacity for gratitude. He built his empire on the backs of others and left nothing but resentment in his wake.
Even his own family had abandoned him.
A string of failed marriages, children who refused to speak to him. He had built a fortress of wealth and power, yet he sat alone inside it, surrounded only by people who feared him, not loved him. He desperately wanted admiration, but he had spent his entire life making himself unworthy of it.
Magnus Vail admired strong men. He admired power, the ability to impose one’s will on the world, to shape reality through force and control. And so it should have been no surprise that he harbored a deep and unsettling admiration for the Third Reich.
He had long studied the industrialists of that era—the men who had built the war machine, who had profited from destruction, who had used forced labor and corporate expansion to create an empire inside an empire. He admired how they had seen opportunity in conflict, how they had been untouchable, how history had bent around them.
Magnus was no different.
He had long courted the war machine, securing contracts that spanned generations, ensuring that his name would be embedded in military budgets for decades to come. He did not sell weapons—he sold the necessity of war itself.
Peace was bad for business.
A world without fear was a world without funding, without demand, without control.
And Magnus needed control.
His empire was built on it. The satellites that hovered in orbit, watching everything below, the communications networks that funneled every piece of data through his servers, the AI-driven surveillance systems that categorized people into threats and assets—it was all part of a larger plan.
The war abroad was simply an extension of the war at home.
The same drones used to target enemies overseas were used to track dissenters in the streets.
The same predictive AI used to find terrorist cells was used to flag citizens who spoke against the Circle.
The same defense systems meant to protect the nation were used to enslave it.
The first meeting was private, held in a secluded wing of the Chairman’s estate, far from prying eyes. There were no cameras, no advisors, no press leaks. It was just the two of them—the populist king and the shadow industrialist—locked in conversation for hours.
Neither man trusted easily, and neither gave anything away for free. The Chairman, accustomed to being the most powerful man in the room, was forced to recognize that Magnus Vail was not like his usual lackeys. Vail did not flatter him, did not hang on his every word, did not even attempt to stoke his ego—at least not in the way the Chairman was used to.
Instead, Vail spoke in cold, practical terms, and that intrigued the Chairman.
Magnus had always despised politicians, and he made no effort to hide it. He saw them as wasteful, inefficient, obsessed with optics and legacy rather than actual results. But the Chairman was different. He was not bound by tradition or ideology. He didn’t care about laws, didn’t care about precedent. He was a blunt instrument, a wrecking ball that had already proven willing to demolish the institutions standing in his way.
And that was something Vail could work with.
The Chairman, for all his bravado, was not a details man. He had built his empire on instinct and charisma, not planning or precision. His wealth had been inflated by branding, his business ventures propped up by hype rather than substance. He liked to play the billionaire, but he had never built anything that could sustain itself. He had lost fortunes, declared bankruptcies, cycled through one failed venture after another, yet always convinced his followers that he was a genius in control.
Magnus saw through him immediately.
But he didn’t care.
The Chairman didn’t need to be smart. He didn’t need to be competent. He only needed to be the figurehead, the face that riled up the masses, the man who signed the executive orders and took the podium to frame it all as victory.
Vail, meanwhile, would reshape the system from the inside, unburdened by bureaucracy, unrestricted by law.
It was a meeting of two men who understood how to use people, and in that moment, they understood how to use each other.
Vail laid out his vision.
The economy, in his words, was a rotting corpse, propped up by handouts, wasteful spending, and bloated institutions that were bleeding the country dry. He proposed surgical cuts—entire agencies dismantled, safety nets erased, watchdog organizations gutted beyond repair. He spoke of an economy run like a business, where only the most profitable sectors were nurtured, and those who could not pull their weight would simply cease to exist.
The Chairman loved it.
This was exactly what he had wanted—a justification to strip the system down, to remove the obstacles that had kept him from full control. He had always despised oversight, regulators, government watchdogs. He had fought them his entire life, first in his failing businesses, then in his campaigns.
With Magnus at the helm, there would be no one left to tell him no.
Magnus needed the Chairman, too.
For all his cunning, for all his power, Magnus Vail had never captivated the public the way the Chairman did. He was cold, robotic, uncharismatic. His employees feared him, but they did not follow him. His businesses were immensely powerful, but he had never been adored.
The Chairman, however, was adored.
His followers were fanatical, willing to rewrite reality to fit his words. He could convince them that poverty was strength, that oppression was justice, that suffering was necessary to purify the nation.
Magnus knew how to seize power, but the Chairman knew how to sell it.
Together, they were unstoppable.
The deal was made behind closed doors, but the effects rippled outward almost immediately.
Magnus was installed as head of the newly formed Department of Prosperity & Fiscal Responsibility, a name so intentionally vague and sterile that the public barely registered its true purpose. In reality, it was a restructuring of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the entire economic system of the nation.
And for the first time in history, a single man held the keys to it all.
Whispers began circulating in the upper echelons of power. Congressmen murmured about the Chairman being just a puppet, a distraction while the real power sat behind the curtain. Some even suggested that Magnus was running the country in all but name, using the Chairman as a performer, a carnival barker whose job was to keep the people entertained while the system was being dismantled.
It was Magnus who oversaw the shutdowns of entire government programs, Magnus who redirected funds, Magnus who decided who thrived and who withered away.
And when the economy collapsed—because of course it would collapse—Magnus would be the only one with the infrastructure in place to rebuild it in his image.
Under Magnus’s influence, war and industry became indistinguishable. The same AI used for social scoring was implemented in military intelligence. The same satellites used to track enemies abroad were turned inward, used to monitor citizens. The same contracts that had once powered the nation’s defense were rewritten to fortify domestic control.
He had built an empire that could not be challenged.
And the Chairman?
He didn’t care about the details. He never had.
As long as Magnus kept the money flowing, as long as the crowds still cheered his name, as long as the illusion of power remained intact, the Chairman was happy to play his part.
But the ones who truly paid attention, the ones who saw beyond the rallies and the propaganda, they knew the truth.
Magnus Vail was not just a billionaire.
He was not just an industrialist.
He was not just a political force.
He was the real power behind the throne.
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