The evening curfew siren pierced the twilight with mechanical precision, its wail echoing between the concrete facades of Victory Boulevard. Cora quickened her pace, the thin plastic bag of rations clutched against her chest like a talisman. Her identification card, dangling from the mandatory red lanyard, slapped rhythmically against her collarbone with each hurried step.
Three minutes remained before the Virtue Patrol would begin their sweep. Three minutes to disappear.
The stairwell to her apartment block smelled of boiled cabbage and fear—a distinctly modern perfume. Cora counted the cracked steps automatically: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Her door—11B, though the ‘B’ had long since fallen off—stood at the end of a dimly lit corridor where a single bulb flickered in arrhythmic distress, threatening darkness with each spasm.
Once safely behind her locked door (three deadbolts, all government-approved models with integrated listening devices), she placed her meager supplies on the countertop with practiced care. Half a loaf of synthetic bread, its gray crust bearing the embossed seal of the Chairman. A small packet of protein paste, its label promising “Enhanced Nutrition with Patriotic Minerals.” The weekly water purification tablets, reduced from twelve to six without announcement or explanation.
Not enough. Never enough.
But hunger was preferable to the alternative. Questioning the rations was an act of ingratitude, and ingratitude had been officially reclassified as a Form-C Domestic Terrorism Offense under Public Safety Directive 1984/7.
Through her window, the street below lay empty—swept clean of humanity by the electronic wail that divided each day into permissible segments. Cora pulled aside the threadbare curtain just enough to watch the familiar ritual unfold.
The Virtue Patrol vehicle crawled past precisely on schedule, its armored chassis gleaming dully under the sodium lights. The mounted speakers crackled with the evening blessing, broadcast at a volume that made conversation impossible and thought inadvisable:
“GRATITUDE BRINGS ABUNDANCE. FAITH BRINGS SECURITY. THE CHAIRMAN BRINGS SALVATION.”
The words hammered against her windowpane, demanding entry. She let the curtain fall back into place.
On her kitchen table—a repurposed door laid across two plastic crates—her government-issued phone buzzed with mechanical insistence. The device had already opened the Unity App; automatic compliance updates were impossible to disable. The screen pulsed with the blue and white seal of the Circle as the synchronization countdown began.
00:10… 00:09… 00:08…
What followed was as inevitable as sunrise.
At precisely 20:00, the mandatory broadcast seized control not just of her device, but of every screen, every speaker, every connected surface in the nation. The National Anthem of Unity—a discordant arrangement that had replaced the antiquated song about rockets and bombs—blared from the small speaker, distorted by volume. The Chairman’s portrait filled the screen, his synthetic smile untouched by the pixel decay that afflicted all other images.
Cora placed her hand over her heart and mouthed the Pledge of Devotion. Her lips formed the familiar words while her mind retreated into the small, protected chamber she had built within herself—the only private space left in her possession.
The blinking front-facing camera recorded everything: her posture, her expression, her precise mouth movements, the positioning of her hand over her heart. Each micro-hesitation, each tremor, each glance away was cataloged, analyzed, and added to her Citizen Compliance Profile.
Privacy had not been outlawed. It had been redefined. Under Unity Regulation 47-B, privacy now meant “the sacred right of citizens to share their loyalty with the watchful protection of the State.” Solitude had similarly been reclassified as “a temporary condition preceding community devotion.” What could not be eliminated had been emptied of meaning and refilled with its opposite.
The Ministers appeared one by one, their faces washed in the same cold light of devotion, their words flowing in the familiar cadence of approved speech. But behind their titles—Director, Secretary, Ambassador—lurked their true identity, the name whispered by even the most loyal functionaries when they believed themselves alone: The Incompetents.
Cora studied them through the broadcast, these hollowed-out vessels of authority. They reminded her of illustrations from her mother’s old medical texts (possession of which would now earn her a minimum of five years in a Gratitude Adjustment Facility). They resembled patients in the terminal stages of wasting diseases—eyes bright with unnatural fever even as their bodies succumbed to decay.
But it was not merely physical illness that had hollowed them. It was addiction—complex, multi-layered, and terminal.
Addiction to power. Addiction to synthetic validation. Addiction to their own reflected glory.
They were intoxicated by their slogans, gorged on stolen prosperity, anesthetized by the synthetic adoration of captive audiences. Charlatans in bespoke uniforms. Television personalities elevated to positions of governance, selling manufactured certainties with the practiced sincerity of market-square quacks.
These were the faces of the new leadership: addicts and performers so completely absorbed in their own spectacle that they no longer recognized—or perhaps had never understood—the systematic destruction they superintended. Nor did they recognize what they themselves had become: mechanisms of ruin disguised as human beings.
Every institution they touched withered. Every system they oversaw decayed. But in the new reality, outcomes were irrelevant. Only devotion mattered.
“It’s like they’re competing to see who can destroy more,” Alex had observed during their final family dinner, before the night of his disappearance. He had caught himself immediately, glancing nervously at his phone, but the words had already escaped into the monitored air. Three days later, he was gone—”promoted to specialized service,” according to the mandatory notification that appeared on all family devices. Eighteen months had passed without further explanation.
Cora often wondered which specific thoughtcrime had marked him for removal. His reluctance to surrender his veteran’s pension to the Chairman’s Prosperity Initiative? Perhaps it was simply that his position at the Defense Ministry had been coveted by someone with more theatrical displays of loyalty. The reason no longer mattered. Only the empty chair at her table remained as evidence he had ever existed.
The evening broadcast began, as methodically as a medical procedure, with Karina Lawton—the silver-toothed Press Secretary whose official title had been expanded to “Voice of Chairman’s Sacred Vision and Chief Detector of Doubt.” The camera lingered on her face as she arranged her features into an expression approaching ecstasy, her lips parting as if in preparation for prayer—or something considerably less sacred.
The rumors of her relationship with the Chairman persisted despite (or perhaps because of) the punishment meted out to those who spoke them aloud. Whether true or imagined, Karina performed her devotion with unmistakable carnality. Her daily briefings resembled nothing so much as love letters thinly disguised as policy announcements, each word saturated with adoration. She spoke the Chairman’s name like a sacred mantra, each utterance weighted with reverence and unmistakable desire.
And in the next breath, with a venomous precision, she would turn upon his enemies—real, imagined, or manufactured for the occasion. She transformed the poor into the spiritually deficient. She rebranded refugees—those driven across borders by starvation and conflict—as biologically invasive. She weaponized language itself against anyone insufficiently white, pure, or loyal, alternating between accusations of treachery and proclamations of the Chairman’s boundless mercy.
Karina did not merely defend the regime—she deified it while conducting methodical linguistic violence against those deemed unworthy of its protection. Her adoration of the Chairman and her hatred for the “undeserving” were not separate impulses but two expressions of the same pathological devotion.
“The benevolent guidance of our Chairman has led us to another day of spiritual prosperity,” she began, her silver dental work reflecting the studio lights as she smiled. “National productivity indicators show our happiness metrics have increased by twelve percent since last quarter.”
A reporter—one of the few remaining journalists permitted to attend briefings—raised his hand with visible trepidation. His identification badge marked him as representing the Unified Media Collective, formerly the Associated Press before its “voluntary integration” into the national information framework.
“Madam Secretary,” he began, his voice calibrated to convey curiosity without skepticism, “there are reports of food shortages in the Midwest and Coastal sectors. Citizens have been standing in distribution lines for up to seven hours. Could you address these concerns?”
Karina’s smile remained fixed, but her voice acquired the metallic edge of a newly sharpened blade.
“The Chairman has assured us,” she replied, drawing out the words with exaggerated patience, “that prosperity is fundamentally a state of mind. Those who perceive lack are simply broadcasting their own spiritual failure to the universe. It’s a shame, really—so much negativity contaminating our national consciousness.”
She punctuated this with a brittle laugh, her silver teeth catching the light like small, expensive weapons.
“And thank you,” she added with theatrical sweetness, “for the stupid question from the fake news division. We always welcome the unpatriotic complaints of those who have forgotten how to be properly American.”
A ripple of nervous laughter circulated among the more sycophantic reporters. Karina absorbed it like oxygen.
“But not to worry,” she continued, her voice thick with artificial compassion. “Even the spiritually deficient can still serve a purpose. The Chairman’s latest directive offers simplified instructions for the intellectually challenged: Visualize abundance while reciting the Prosperity Mantras—automatically uploaded to your mandatory FaithLink profiles hourly for your convenience.”
She paused, allowing the humiliation to saturate the room.
“Some of you might even improve your Citizen Scores if you attempt them with genuine gratitude for a change.”
Cora remembered standing in line for six hours the previous week for her half-loaf of bread, watching a small boy collapse from hunger just three people ahead in the queue. The child’s mother had caught him without dropping her ChairmanCoin scanner—her priorities well-established in this new reality where displaying the correct loyalties outweighed even maternal instinct. Prosperity was indeed a state of mind. So was starvation.
What Press Secretary Lawton deliberately omitted was the systematic dismantling of the financial infrastructure under her supervision. Classified encryption keys, internal memoranda, and security protocols leaked with such regularity that foreign intelligence services no longer expended resources on active penetration—they simply monitored public FaithLink feeds and waited for the inevitable security breaches to occur.
Entire economic sectors imploded overnight, vaporizing savings accounts, pension funds, and regional commerce networks within days.
But the collapse was not a failure of policy. It was policy itself.
Months earlier, the Chairman had publicly confronted the Federal Reserve Chairman—the last senior official who continued to reference “empirical data” and “economic fundamentals” in policy discussions. After a series of increasingly hostile exchanges regarding manipulated inflation statistics and forced currency transitions, the Chairman had designated him an “Enemy of National Prosperity.”
One night, without announcement or legal proceeding, Virtue Officers had arrived at his residence. No formal charges. No judicial review. No due process. The man had simply vanished into the machinery of the Circle, emerging only once thereafter—in a grainy, trembling video recording.
In that broadcast—visibly coerced and clinically precise in its humiliation—the former Federal Reserve Chairman confessed to “sabotaging the people’s economic destiny” and pledged unwavering allegiance to the Chairman’s economic vision. His eyes were vacant. His voice periodically fractured. The words were clearly not his own.
The Chairman swiftly appointed his replacement: a loyalist whose sole qualification was a self-published economic manifesto titled “Punishing Your Enemies Through Fiscal Warfare.” Prior to the regime change, this volume had attracted fewer than a thousand readers. Now, it was mandatory curriculum in every business education program nationwide.
From that moment forward, the fundamental principles of economics underwent official revision—narrative superseded data, ideology replaced methodology, and loyalty supplanted competence.
Hart, the Chairman’s handpicked figurehead, continued to appear on camera with his artificial smile and patriot’s pin—now redesigned to feature the Chairman’s silhouette—while the system he nominally controlled disintegrated around him.
The first time Cora had attempted to purchase groceries using ChairmanCoin, the system had collapsed during transaction processing. The store manager had wept openly—not from frustration but from terror, as system failures were now classified as evidence of spiritual contamination. When functionality was eventually restored hours later, the value of her digital currency had mysteriously decreased by thirty percent. “Volatility is the price of financial liberation,” Hart had explained during that evening’s mandatory viewing period.
Cora’s neighbor, Mrs. Abernathy, had lost her entire retirement savings during the second “mandatory wallet migration” the previous spring. When she submitted a formal inquiry, she received a home visit from Virtue Officers who provided her with a “reeducation opportunity” at the local Gratitude Center. She returned twenty-one days later, physically diminished but smiling constantly, eager to contribute her remaining possessions to the Chairman’s Abundance Project.
The broadcast transitioned to a special address from Secretary Arlen Keene, Director of the National Health Unity Office.
Once a marginal figure known for promoting conspiracy theories about “pharmaceutical mind control” and “vaccine tracking systems,” Keene now administered what remained of the nation’s healthcare infrastructure with the unearned confidence of a man for whom reality had become entirely optional.
His voice projected manufactured concern as he urged citizens to “thoughtfully consider” receiving the Chairman-Approved Immunity Injections—while simultaneously undermining their credibility.
“The injections represent our most effective approach—we believe—for maintaining community wellness,” he stated with a thin smile that systematically implanted doubt. “And while comprehensive safety verification has been waived under our streamlined emergency protocols, citizens should trust implicitly that the Chairman would never authorize anything potentially harmful.”
He directed a conspiratorial wink toward the camera, as if sharing a private understanding with viewers—a gesture that communicated more than his carefully sanitized words.
Keene regularly promoted “alternative wellness pathways,” transparently endorsing miracle cures and unregulated supplements manufactured by companies with direct financial connections to the Circle. He characterized vaccination as a “deeply personal choice”—effectively inviting epidemiological chaos—while attributing inevitable disease outbreaks to the “legacy healthcare failures” of the pre-Chairman medical establishment.
But Cora understood what many still refused to acknowledge:
They did not want a healthy population. They required a sick one. Illness created dependence. Dependence fostered control. Sick citizens didn’t organize resistance. Sick citizens didn’t question authority. A population desperately seeking treatment became compliant in direct proportion to their suffering.
The Chairman’s health policies weren’t failing through incompetence. They were succeeding according to design—exchanging the gradual deterioration of millions for the unquestioning loyalty of terrified survivors.
Keene concluded with a broad smile, his final statement a grotesque impersonation of compassion: “Stay grateful. Stay obedient. Remember that wellness is primarily a state of mind, not body!”
The broadcast continued with a detailed health directive from Dr. Malik Ozrin, Chief of the Unified Health Directorate. His gaunt face filled the screen, all hollow cheekbones and unnaturally white teeth, as he outlined the latest “wellness protocols” in a tone of barely concealed derision.
Before the Chairman’s ascension, Ozrin had been a minor television personality—a professional guest booked for morning programs like Good Morning New York, where he marketed fad diets, minimal-effort exercise regimens, and personality-based pseudoscience.
Part entertainer, part egomaniac, and no physician whatsoever, he had sustained his career through charisma and empty promises, displaying his credentials (a contested “holistic health consultant” certificate) as if they carried medical authority.
Now, elevated by the Circle to oversee a collapsing healthcare system, he spoke with all the authority of a qualified public health expert—despite possessing no qualifications beyond his ability to deliver falsehoods with convincing intonation.
Cora observed with grim fascination as he described the latest “preventive health measures”—mandatory spiritual check-ins through the Unity app and the suspension of conventional medical diagnostics, replaced by “wellness affirmations” and “spiritual purity assessments.”
The nation was experiencing a public health catastrophe, and they had appointed a charlatan to manage the response.
“Citizens are reminded that physical ailments primarily manifest as expressions of spiritual imbalance,” he stated with performative gravity. “The Faith Health application now mandates hourly devotional verification to maintain your personal wellness score. Individuals registering scores below seventy-five will be automatically scheduled for Spiritual Alignment Procedures at their nearest Wellness Center.”
What Dr. Ozrin deliberately concealed was the comprehensive collapse of healthcare delivery under his administration. He had inadvertently exposed millions of confidential patient records through an improperly configured database transfer—subsequently attributing the breach to “administrative errors” and “ideological saboteurs.”
Cora recalled how her mother had once served at the Ministry of Health, proud of her contribution as a research scientist developing vaccines. The same institution now trained informants in laboratory coats. The white uniform that had once symbolized healing now identified those who reported “ideological pathologies” to authorities.
Her mother had resigned the day they replaced the Hippocratic Oath with the “Healer’s Pledge to Faith and Chairman.” She now operated clandestinely from their apartment, treating neighbors with smuggled medications and applying her decades of training, knowing that any patient she assisted might potentially report her for practicing medicine without spiritual certification.
Career scientists had been systematically removed under Ozrin’s direction. Faith healers and unqualified loyalists replaced them, introducing techniques ranging from crystal alignment to aura manipulation into what had previously been world-class medical facilities.
Cora had witnessed her neighbor, Mr. Johansson, die from a treatable infection while a Circle-certified healer arranged blessed stones on his forehead and led his family in ritual chanting. Following his death, the man’s widow had thanked the healer profusely, tears of genuine gratitude mixing with tears of grief, her FaithLink profile immediately updated with devotional testimonials. This was the ultimate achievement of terror—it transformed gratitude into a survival mechanism.
The broadcast shifted focus to Karla Lakewood, Director of the Global Faith Broadcast Authority. Her meticulously styled hair and precisely applied cosmetics failed to disguise the emptiness behind her eyes as she outlined revised international communications protocols.
“The Chairman’s message of unity continues to inspire global leadership,” she announced, standing before a digital map where allied nations appeared in reassuring green. The visualization depicted nearly the entire world in uniform green—a representation so transparently false that even devoted citizens occasionally exchanged questioning glances when it appeared.
What Lakewood systematically omitted was her treatment of classified information as casual social currency. She routinely forwarded encrypted diplomatic communications to her personal unsecured FaithLink profile, justifying this practice with the assertion that “The righteous require no encryption.” Foreign intelligence agencies no longer needed sophisticated infiltration techniques; they required only basic network access and a standard FaithLink account.
The faithful claimed divine protection for the righteous. Foreign surveillance services expressed gratitude for this theological position.
The previous month, confidential treaty negotiations with the European Alliance had appeared on Lakewood’s public devotional feed, including unredacted security appendices. When confronted regarding the breach, she attributed responsibility to “malevolent forces attempting to undermine the Chairman’s divinely inspired diplomacy.” Three career diplomatic officers were subsequently executed for the security violation. Lakewood received a Loyalty Medallion during the following week’s Circle ceremony.
The educational segment featured Linda MacHale, Secretary of Enlightenment. She stood in what had formerly been a university library, now repurposed as a Faith Enlightenment Center. Empty shelving units lined the walls behind her, the books long since removed and replaced with identical copies of the Chairman’s collected speeches and spiritual guidance manuals.
MacHale personified willful ignorance. She demonstrated no functional understanding of digital technology. She referred to artificial intelligence as “that evil calculating demon.” When asked how students would conduct scientific research without textbooks or computational resources, she had famously declared, “They possess hymnals and faith scrolls. What additional materials could possibly be required?”
Under her administration, literacy rates had collapsed, critical thinking was criminalized as “anti-faith intellectualism,” and Chairman Studies became the sole mandatory subject across all educational levels. Students devoted four hours daily to memorizing his proclamations, an additional two hours practicing approved devotional postures, and the remaining instructional period creating artistic expressions and essays glorifying his vision.
Cora had wept silently the day her young cousin returned home proudly announcing his selection to incinerate books at the school’s weekly Purification Ceremony. The child lacked sufficient reading ability to comprehend what he was destroying. When she attempted to explain the significance of a particularly beautiful astronomy volume he described burning, he had regarded her with genuine confusion before asking if she was experiencing spiritual unwellness. He had reached for his mandatory reporting device before she quickly assured him she was merely fatigued. She never again discussed literature in his presence.
The broadcast concluded with a national security update from Jonas Vexley, the visibly intoxicated Secretary of Defense. Even through the carefully controlled medium of state television, his inebriation was unmistakable. He swayed perceptibly at the podium, his gaze unfocused as he recited from the teleprompter.
“Our national security position has never been more robust,” he slurred, gesturing vaguely toward a graphic displaying defense readiness metrics. “The Chairman’s Divine Protection Force stands prepared to defend our sacred territories against any threat, whether external or internal.”
What the broadcast deliberately concealed was Vexley’s routine mishandling of classified operations. He had drunkenly livestreamed tactical troop deployments, disclosed nuclear response protocols during what he believed was a private dinner engagement, and once congratulated an adversarial nation on a missile defense treaty—during a live broadcast.
Rather than remove him from position, the Circle had promoted him. To question his competence was to question the Chairman’s judgment. Cora had observed her military father’s expression shift to ashen horror during Vexley’s confirmation ceremony. “They’ve surrendered control to someone unable to exercise it,” he had whispered. Three days later, he too had vanished.
Across every department and agency, the pattern maintained perfect consistency:
Qualified personnel were systematically removed—replaced by relatives, associates, and loyalty competition winners. Cora’s colleague Eliza had been replaced at the Water Purification Authority by the Chairman’s former massage therapist—a woman who maintained that water purification could be achieved through “positive energy transmission” rather than filtration systems.
Secure communications infrastructures leaked continuously. The previous month, the entire power distribution security protocol had appeared on a public information board, posted unintentionally by an administrative assistant attempting to share a devotional meme.
Physical infrastructure deteriorated under administrative negligence disguised as spiritual principle. Bridges collapsed, power distribution failed for weeks, and water treatment facilities malfunctioned regularly—while officials reframed each catastrophe as “an opportunity for spiritual advancement through collective sacrifice.”
And while the regime endlessly repeated its slogans, America’s adversaries celebrated.
In Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran, premium spirits flowed freely. Foreign autocrats toasted not merely the decline of their primary competitor, but its comprehensive humiliation. They observed classified information hemorrhaging like arterial blood from a mortally wounded organism. They purchased influence from minor officials for nominal sums. They cultivated The Incompetents through strategic flattery and performative respect, encouraging them to accelerate their destructive policies.
Why initiate armed conflict when your adversary was systematically dismantling itself?
The most powerful nation on earth had devolved into an international punchline. And the Chairman continued smiling, oblivious or indifferent, as the infrastructure of his own creation disintegrated beneath him.
When the mandatory broadcast concluded, Cora remained motionless, staring at the empty screen. The camera indicator continued blinking, recording her reactions, her posture, her behavioral compliance. She maintained an appropriate expression of gratitude and devotion until the monitoring light dimmed, signaling transition to passive surveillance mode.
Only then did she move toward her small kitchen table, where her father’s mechanical typewriter remained concealed beneath a false panel. She extracted it with practiced care, positioning it on the scarred wooden surface. No electronic signature. No network connection. No record of thoughts that could be traced, transmitted, or used in evidence.
Cora sat alone in the diminishing light of her apartment, the glow of the Unity Network flickering erratically on the cracked screen mounted to her wall. Her fingers trembled above the worn keys of her father’s typewriter, desperate to preserve what she witnessed, what she remembered, before it too was consumed by the machinery of forgetting.
Heavy footsteps echoed in the corridor outside, pausing momentarily near her door. Her fingers froze above the keys. The shadow of boots visible in the thin strip of light beneath her door. Seconds stretched into eternity before the footsteps resumed, fading toward the stairwell. She released the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, her heart hammering against her ribs.
Outside her window, a patrol vehicle broadcast a hymn to the Chairman. Children, their voices raw from endless recitations, struggled through the words of devotion they had been conditioned to venerate but never permitted to understand.
It wasn’t merely corruption, Cora realized as her fingers began moving across the keys. It wasn’t simply cruelty. It wasn’t even ordinary incompetence.
It was the deliberate dismantling of truth, of reality itself—executed by individuals too loyal, too frightened, and too damaged to recognize the weapon they had become.
The Incompetents weren’t an accident of history or a failure of selection.
They were a methodology.
And if the fragments of memory weren’t preserved, there would soon be nothing left to remember. Nothing but hollow figures reciting empty phrases in a language stripped of meaning.
It was not ignorance that had destroyed the world she had known, Cora understood as she recorded the words that could condemn her—it was worship. It was absolute loyalty to a falsehood so complete that it had supplanted truth in the collective consciousness. And now, even the memories were dissolving, submerged beneath an endless tide of slogans and manufactured certainties.
A sudden metallic screech from the building’s ancient pipes made her jolt, her fingers striking three keys at once. She held perfectly still, listening for any sign that the noise had attracted attention. In the silence that followed, the faint sound of a neighbor’s muffled sobbing seeped through the thin walls.
She typed through the night, documenting what she recalled of the world before—of competence and verifiable truth and the quiet dignity of work properly executed. Of a time when failure carried consequences and loyalty required reciprocity. Of a nation that had once valued expertise above blind devotion.
When dawn approached, she carefully removed the paper from the typewriter, folded it, and sealed it inside a waterproof container. She would conceal it with the others, in the hollow space behind the loose brick in her bathroom wall—a growing archive of forbidden remembrance.
The morning blessing blared from the street speakers below. Another day under the watchful gaze of the Chairman commenced. Another day of performative joy and mandated faith.
But somewhere, hidden like contraband, the truth persisted—waiting for a time when truth might again have value.
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