The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. The Black Circle was infallible. The Black Circle had never been infallible. These contradictions existed simultaneously in the collective mind—accepted, unchallenged.
It did not happen all at once. That was their genius. The Black Circle understood that revolution by increments goes unnoticed, like a frog in slowly heating water, dead before it recognizes danger. They moved with surgical precision, each small excision of truth barely felt by the sedated body politic. The slogans shifted imperceptibly. The textbooks changed between printings. The news anchors’ smiles grew a little sharper, a little emptier, their eyes reflecting nothing but teleprompters and fear.
And history—that most malleable of human artifacts—was rewritten before their unseeing eyes.
First came the quiet dismantling of what they called “divisive elements.” Diversity initiatives vanished from corporate websites overnight. Equity policies disappeared from government archives as if they had never existed. Scholarships designed to level the playing field were terminated with solemn pronouncements about “fairness” and “merit.” The Chairman himself appeared on screens nationwide, his face bathed in the blue light of false sincerity, promising that merit alone would now determine one’s fate.
“A fair chance for all,” he said, words honeyed with practiced conviction. “No more favoritism. No more division.”
But Cora knew the truth that dared not speak its name: merit had never been the currency of power. Merit was the comforting myth told to the dispossessed. The real currencies remained unchanged: wealth, connections, bloodlines, skin. The meritocracy was a bedtime story told to lull the masses into accepting their station.
In its place rose a new gospel, written by the architects of the Circle’s ascension. History books were pulped and reprinted with startling efficiency. The greatness of the nation had always sprung from the vision of the few, the boldness of the “pioneers,” the purity of the “founders.” Men whose statues had been toppled were now recast in gleaming bronze, reinstalled in public squares with solemn ceremonies broadcast nationwide. Their crimes were sanitized by smiling bureaucrats with advanced degrees in historical revision.
Slavery became “a complex economic system of the time.” Genocide became “necessary frontier expansion.” Civil rights struggles became “regrettable periods of social confusion, now properly understood.”
In these pristine new textbooks, the world was rendered simple and orderly. White men discovered. White men built. White men led.
Everyone else became footnotes, then endnotes, then nothing at all.
The universities did not fall without a fight. There were protests, of course—faculty senates passing emergency resolutions, students staging occupations of administration buildings, rectors and deans issuing impassioned defenses of academic freedom. For one brief, incandescent moment, it seemed the institutions of knowledge might hold firm against the tide.
But the Circle had anticipated resistance. They didn’t need to win the argument; they merely needed to control the resources.
“Wasteful spending must be curtailed,” announced the Education Minister, his voice reasonable, even regretful. “Taxpayers deserve accountability.”
Funding was slashed with surgical precision. First went the humanities, branded as “ideological” and “impractical.” Next came social sciences, condemned for “partisan research agendas.” Even the hard sciences found themselves under scrutiny, their grants contingent on “national priorities” and “ethical alignment.”
Those who spoke loudest found themselves subjected to investigations—tax audits, ethics reviews, security clearances suddenly revoked. Some were arrested on transparently manufactured charges of financial impropriety or “information crimes.” Others simply disappeared from public view, their colleagues too frightened to ask questions.
The scientific community mounted its own defense. Journal editors published manifestos defending the scientific method. Research institutions issued joint statements affirming empirical truth. Nobel laureates toured the country, speaking to dwindling crowds under increasingly hostile security conditions.
It made no difference. Science itself had been redefined as a matter of opinion, of perspective, of faith—and only approved faith would be funded.
“We’re not anti-science,” the Chairman insisted, smiling beneath the cameras. “We’re pro-market. Let innovation be driven by consumer demand, not academic elites.”
This was the final, brutal truth: in the Circle’s vision, knowledge itself was a commodity, valuable only when profitable. Preventive healthcare research disappeared—a cure was bad for business when chronic treatment generated steady revenue. Climate studies were shuttered—fossil fuel donors required favorable outcomes. Even basic research withered without immediate commercial application.
Scientists found themselves with a choice: pursue approved research for corporate sponsors, teach the Circle’s sanctioned curriculum, or join the growing ranks of the unemployed and unemployable. Some fled to other countries, only to find the Circle’s influence had preceded them. Others retreated to underground networks, conducting experiments in converted basements with smuggled equipment.
The most prominent dissenters were made examples of. Dr. Elena Reyes, once celebrated for her breakthrough work on viral epidemiology, was publicly tried for “spreading panic” when she warned of emerging pathogens. Dr. James Chen’s climate models earned him a ten-year sentence for “economic sabotage.” Their colleagues watched the proceedings in silence, then returned to their laboratories to do as they were told.
Those who remained in academia learned to teach with a smile and a trembling hand, one eye always on the door, knowing that among their students sat informers—young people eager to prove their loyalty by denouncing thought-crime. A single recorded lecture could end a career. A misinterpreted sentence could mean ruin.
Even science bent to the new order. Evolution became “one perspective among many valid creation theories.” Climate change was labeled “an ongoing scientific debate.” Textbooks presented “multiple viewpoints” on whether the Earth was round or flat. Reality itself became subject to authority rather than observation.
Cora watched this unfold through the microscope of her own family. Her sister Sarah had once been like her—questioning, skeptical, alert to injustice. Now she moved through life with the careful steps of the perpetually afraid.
“What choice do I have?” Sarah whispered one night, after the children were asleep. They sat in the kitchen, speaking barely above breath, though the house had been swept for listening devices just yesterday. “Marcus needs his medication. The subsidies are the only way we can afford it.”
She was right, of course. Tuition credits, healthcare access, housing subsidies, even basic food allowances—all were now tied to one’s Social Harmony Score. Attendance at approved community events. Participation in Chairman Day celebrations. Children’s recitation of the new pledges. Everything watched, everything counted.
And so Sarah’s children—Cora’s niece and nephew, Lily and Samuel—came home each day mouthing loyalty oaths, their small faces composed into masks of obedience.
“I pledge allegiance to the Chairman, and to the faith for which he stands,” they chanted at the dinner table, hands over hearts, eyes fixed on the portrait that all homes were now required to display. They spoke of a Jesus who was white, blond, and smiling, his arms forever wrapped around the Chairman himself, the two figures merged in the iconography of the state religion.
“They’re just words,” Sarah insisted later, hands trembling as she washed dishes. “I teach them the truth at home.”
But Cora knew better. She saw how Lily, just nine, had begun to correct her mother when Sarah slipped and used “outdated terminology.” She noticed how Samuel, at twelve, watched the approved Youth Corps broadcasts with genuine enthusiasm, his eyes shining with devotion to the Chairman.
The Circle’s genius lay in targeting the children first. A child raised on lies would not simply awaken to truth. They would build their identity around those lies, defend them, propagate them. They would look at poverty not as systematic injustice but as proof of moral failure. They would see suffering not as a call to compassion but as divine judgment.
The lines hardened with each passing month. The nation stratified not just by wealth but by loyalty, by adherence, by belief. There were the faithful and the suspect. The pure and the tainted. The worthy and the expendable.
If you were rich and loyal, you were chosen. Your wealth proved divine favor; your loyalty proved moral worth.
If you were poor, you were nothing. If you questioned, you were dangerous.
A whisper campaign spread among the Chairman’s followers: “We are the remnant.” The phrase appeared first in sermons, then classrooms, then emblazoned on government buildings. It became the greeting between the faithful—a recognition of their special status as the true inheritors of the nation, destined to rule because they alone had kept faith with the “original vision.”
It didn’t matter that the Chairman had no real faith beyond power. It didn’t matter that Circle leaders lived in obscene luxury while preaching austerity to the masses. The myth had transcended reality. Belief had become more solid than concrete, more valuable than gold.
And somewhere—in hidden basements, in encrypted messages, in secret gatherings disguised as approved social functions—the real history was being preserved. Fragile and incomplete, like scattered pages from a burned library, but alive. Just barely. A single candle against a vast and growing darkness.
For now, the darkness was winning.
But Cora knew her history—the real history. Even the mightiest empires of lies eventually collapsed under their own contradictions. Even the most total control contained the seeds of its undoing.
That night, Cora tucked Lily and Samuel into bed as Sarah worked her mandatory evening shift. She listened as they whispered their official prayers to the Chairman-Christ, the monstrous amalgamation of state and faith that now watched over the nation.
“Good night, little ones,” she said, kissing their foreheads, her heart fracturing in ways she could never explain to them. Not yet.
As she turned out the light, she made herself a promise she didn’t know how to keep. She would find a way—somehow, someday—to teach them to remember what was being erased. To question the unquestionable. To see the cracks in the perfect façade.
Because forgetting was how it all began.
And remembering—painful, dangerous remembering—was the only path back to light.
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