“WHERE THE HELL’S YOUR plan?” Ron hissed.

It was a long and difficult day for Sara. She was given only seven hours to develop a complex response plan with multiple narratives. That was bad enough. Then there was Edgar. He was a pompous ass, the worst humanity had to offer, always insinuating to the other ministers that his black hole of endless data sources could expose their darkest secrets.

Edgar was a master at subtly hanging this threat over their heads to coerce and control each of them. As a result, he presumed they needed to give him special deference, as if he held an esteemed second position of near-equivalency to Ron. The other ministers, on the other hand, understood the tenuous and unpredictable nature of their jobs. Many had come before them, and many would certainly follow.

Given Ron’s extensive wealth and business connections in Vista, the ministers knew he was going nowhere, not unless he was ousted by the other oligarchs with whom he shared power in Westrich’s domains. He was the lone regent in Vista, an oddity among domains. It contained the largest square kilometers of land in the Westrich nation-state, but it was also the least populous and poorest of the three.

The oligarchies in North America that coalesced after the Great Debacle of 2037 were very similar in administrative structure – not by any mandate, but because it was the most practical form of governing during the post-Debacle transition. Typically, three to four oligarchs co-ruled each domain, often in tenuous and conflicted balance. Their oligarchic positions were usually a function of acquired or inherited wealth coupled with brutal political alliances that either managed to survive the Debacle or were strengthened because of it.

All oligarchs were supported by their courtesan contingents of beneficiaries, businesspeople, and networks of politicians. But Ron was a weak and easy target for the other nation-states since he possessed the fewest cross-domain alliances and the least competent management team. He was also the most self-delusional of the lot, even though he ruled among a cadre of human-hybrid oligarchs who were enshrouded by perverse amalgams of narcissism, Social Darwinism, and righteous entitlement.

Prior to the Great Debacle, Ron’s family was at the pinnacle of position, power, and influence in the United States. Among the world’s richest moguls, their global holdings included a wealth of oil and gas, natural resources, and factory farming businesses. His family’s legacy of wealth had started generations prior, their elite status having been franchised through the years with the assistance of corruptible legislators, judges, and influence peddlers.

In those pre-Debacle days, before the instantaneous death of billions and subsequent societal collapse, Ron was the family ne’er-do-well. Hardly concerned about the family businesses but living off the profits, he spent his days pursuing hedonistic pleasures and ensuring his social activities were always trending at the top of the news cycle.

Because his mental energies were fixated on being admired by others, he was always first in line to acquire the latest augmentations. These modifications to his body shielded a psyche suffering from a neurotic sense of worthlessness, exacerbated in his formative years by an unrelenting, hard-driving father who rarely had a kind word for him and a mother who soaked her self-absorbed carcass in alcohol and drugs. When his parents died unexpectedly in 2034, Ron and his two sisters inherited the bulk of the family’s fortune.

Three years later, many things fell away during the week of the Debacle, a dreadful time of death and destruction for all who remained. Over half the population of the world died that week, including one of Ron’s sisters.

Although the Debacle’s causative agent was readily uncovered, its creators were never revealed. As far as could be determined, the agent was first manufactured in Australia, though many rumors persisted.

The most credible rumor pointed the finger at a single marine researcher, a radical bio-activist and basement freelance geneticist who was angered at Australia’s failure to restore the Great Barrier Reef which had finally succumbed to the warming global waters. In the post-reality, post-Debacle era, however, any truth about the perpetrators would never be fully exposed or believed.

During the lingering, post-Debacle devastation, the once great nation of the United States diverged into three nation-states. Westrich primarily was comprised of the former West Coast and Southwestern states, including Texas. Southern evolved from the bastion of formerly conservative midwestern and southern states, and its creation drew an unnatural diagonal northern line across the continent from Montana to Ohio to North Carolina. This long, southern border with Westrich was a constant point of conflict between the two nation-states.

Nemerica was formed from a merger of northeastern coastal states. The nation-state was a ghost of its former self since the population and capital wealth in that region was decimated as the pathogen spread quickly across heavily populated northeastern metropolitan areas like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

Even before the Debacle, however, the United States had been on a slow, painful slide. China had already surpassed the country as the world’s largest economic powerhouse. The U.S. also suffered from severe disrepair after years of political infighting and shameful wealth and representation imbalances.

Decades prior to the Debacle, a small group of media moguls and ultra-conservative billionaires hatched secretive strategic plans to concentrate their wealth and power. These plans were slowly, carefully executed with full support of their political and judicial lackeys, and the power brokers watched with glee as the once-great country stumbled helplessly into the trap.

Their plans were executed with little resistance, out in the open for all to see. The opposition, a flaccid and ineffectual party of weak-kneed liberals and progressives, perennially suffered from poor long-term planning and lack of resolve to counter the growing threats to democracy.

Aided by conservative court rulings, dark money funding ensured the budding proto-oligarchs would eventually be victorious. Dark money led to favorable courts, which led to more dark money, and so on. The cycle rapidly built upon itself. By the 2030’s, the rapid dissolution in the nation’s functional standards and norms took a toll so great that the government was irreversibly dysfunctional. There was no turning back.

The Debacle broke the nation’s fading resolve. Its effects were similar for many nations across the globe. The causative agent used a powerful airborne motility to unleash a devastating impact on many of the world’s largest population centers. The only thing that saved humanity from extinction was a carefully engineered five-day, replication life.

Oligarchies began springing up across the globe within weeks, metastasizing like writhing maggots in a rotting corpse of disarray and misinformation. Individuals and families who were in control of the machinery of life at the time, such as data and communications systems, distribution, transportation, and food and energy production, were the most typical beneficiaries of the emerging new order.

Ron managed to congeal at the top of the shitpile. In addition to his inherited near-trillionaire wealth, he possessed many characteristics of other post-Debacle tyrants who came to power – ruthlessness, biting cynicism, devious cunning, and an accusatory, belligerent personality.

A vicious, instinctual animal in many regards, Ron’s middling mental abilities expanded rapidly once he was enhanced by Imp’s near perfect knowledge and advanced algorithms. Imp excelled at selectively providing Ron with relevant facts and figures to keep him in power. Imp also gave Ron valuable predictive capabilities that helped him annihilate, neutralize, or possess all obstacles in his erratic, haphazard path to the top.

***

Ron’s twelve ministers met promptly at 5 p.m. He had often joked with them, ‘If Jesus had twelve, then so can I. If you care to be my Judas, Imp will inform me in advance.’

Sitting at attention and waiting nervously for the meeting to start, Sara understood her ass was on the line. Maybe more than that.

She lamented that she held none of Edgar’s leverage against Ron. With Edgar, it was always ‘clenched fists up and ready to joust.’ All the time. Never did he exhibit a moment of compassion or understanding. Never did he give an inch or admit a mistake.

He was like Ron in many respects. Two sharks, hungry for blood, tearing at the flesh of others to avoid being torn asunder.

Holding her head confidently upright, Sara scanned the room before speaking. This was her way, her hard-learned way, to establish dominance and fearlessness at a table otherwise trembling from an impending onslaught of rabid dogs. All at the table were experts at sensing another animal in trouble, and they’d gladly pounce to gain a momentary stronghold in the struggle to maintain status and power over each other and their fiefdoms.

“Hurry up,” Ron demanded as he entered the room. “I have better things to do than waste my time with this group of thugs and henchmen. Sorry, ladies. Henchwomen. Or henchwhores, if you prefer that instead.”

Sara noticed Gloria’s eyes drop with a barely perceptible downward nod of the head. She liked Gloria. Maybe ‘liked’ was too strong a word. She ‘tolerated’ Gloria better than the others. Among the three women on Ron’s direct report team, they had an unspoken code to treat each other a little nicer than normal.

“Too bad,” she considered in the moment. “Everyone will notice that tiny display of dissatisfaction, an indiscretion of disgust. Gloria lets Ron’s malicious venom bite her ass. Her callouses are too thin, and she won’t last long.”

“It’s a multivariate plan, as you might expect,” Sara began. “We’re using our normal media channels to spin the narrative.”

Sara started the discussion on this topic for a reason. Ron didn’t really care about the storyline. He knew she and her team would elevate the expected messaging through the usual channels. No, she was seasoned enough to know this meeting would follow the Marshall McLuhan quote she loved from century earlier: ‘The medium is the message.’ She was particularly fond of the simple statement from his 1964 treatise: ‘We become what we behold.’

Sara held McLuhan’s words as the purest truth. The message always played second or third fiddle to the medium. This was probably true in centuries prior, but it was amplified beyond recognition by 2075.

Ron and his designates controlled or strongly influenced the important media outlets on all sides of the established narratives in Vista. Without Ron’s continuous bombardment of invectives, outrage, and titillating, inappropriate remarks, everyone’s ratings would sink and eyeballs would go elsewhere, as would advertisers and profits.

It wasn’t that Ron didn’t have legitimate detractors and critics beyond his direct control. Indeed, there were many, and he loved picking fights with them. It was part of the game he played so well.

This fighting was Sara’s favorite ploy – get them to engage, and they unwittingly became controllable. From her perspective, all must behold Ron in some strongly felt way, good or bad, and therefore become beholden to him.

When Ron fought, it was intentionally vicious, vindictive, and always laced with a thick syrup of victimhood. He knew his supporters loved the emotional appeal of his fighting and understood that when he defended himself, he was defending them.

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Conversely, Ron’s detractors hated him, especially given his narcissistic but predictable behavior. His persona was clearly his natural inclination, but it was also his effective stage act, a strategy to gain mindshare and face time. Irrespective of a person’s love or hate for Ron, no one could pull themselves away from the non-stop media coverage of him.

It didn’t matter if they praised or criticized Ron, as long as he was the message. He was the hit parade. He was golden idol Baal. He was the orgasmic recycler of carefully designed, AI-approved bias confirmation.

This fact was abundantly clear to all media channels. Ron was good for business. Any coverage of him engendered loyalty and obeisance among the channel’s consuming audience. It was an immutable truth, irrespective of the nature, tone, or position of the channel.

Ron, who was unable to separate himself from the media’s image of him, only required that he was prime, front-and-center, always-on, top-of-mind for every citizen. Spending much of his time absorbed in a world of continuous data feeds curated by Imp, he cared only that his visibility metrics stayed within key levels. The Ron Quotient factors were Sara’s key metrics. RQ success was her success.

Ron innately understood that, within the constructs of the RQ metric, every media reference, every spoken paragraph, every visual, needed to be about him either directly or indirectly. Good or bad. He didn’t care.

In fact, Ron often preferred a constant stream of negative news about him or his actions. Emotion was his vice grip on the mind of citizens. As long as his antics and actions continued to stir emotions and garner attention, he was succeeding.

Emotion had no color for Ron. Intensity was the only thing that mattered. And what he did, what he said, or what Sara and others communicated about him, always needed to maximize that intensity.

Intensity meant winning. He was winning only when all minds in the domain were consumed in him, when citizens were so mired in the morass of facts and innuendo that they capitulated all rationality to their chosen channels of information, irrespective of truth. Negative emotions needed to be as strong as positive.

Sara learned this same lesson early in life from her frustrated mother’s scolding. ‘Sara, you feed off attention’ she’d say. ‘You swim in it, not caring whether it’s right or wrong. For you, Sara, any attention is good attention.’ Indeed, for Ron, any attention was good attention, and Sara’s media strategy used this as the starting premise for all channels of communication.

Sara often considered herself a modern-day extension of McLuhan, but with renewed brilliance regarding ‘the medium’ being the message. If McLuhan’s ‘medium’ implied the means of physical transmission, like a vidscreen or Vistachit or cellphone, such a thing mattered negligibly to her. Those were only access methodologies that were readily interchangeable.

What really mattered was the channel. The channel was the medium was the message. The channel was the brand. The familiarity. The trust. The belief confirmation. And the brand was always tied to characters and personalities with the requisite plots, intrigues, and focused victimization.

Sara thought McLuhan missed the mark in at least one other respect. He failed to illuminate her favorite mantra: ‘Repetition breeds belief.’

This insight was her addition to his prescient research from the prior century. And it had played out so well in the early twenty-first century. A constant beating of the drum, repeating of the message, and molding of the narrative kept interest levels high, allowing the influencers to lead media consumers down any desired path. Like a pied piper, one only had to pick the path and possess the ability to influence the channel or the narrative.

By 2075, truth no longer was relevant in controlling the populace. Only repetition. However, one could not deviate rapidly from an established, carefully constructed narrative. You had to execute a slow handhold, a gradual tugging of the mind along the desired path. This brought true power over the individual and provided great leverage for imperceptible, underhanded, and devious intentions.

Simply begin with an element of fact, mix it with a dose of innuendo, half-truths, and outright lies. Then do more of the same, but skew towards the latter. This method of imperceptible coercion was the yellow-brick road to mind-control, scientifically proven in countless instances throughout history and ultimately perfected with the ingenious algorithms and data manipulation in the AI systems at the heart of Sara’s channels.

She was a master at this media science, but her daily challenge was always the same. People were easily bored by the same salacious news, the same voices and faces, the same narratives.

For example, when transgenic DNA became popular and led to hybrid humans that resembled animals more than humans, even that very visual novelty wore off quickly. This overexposure forced her and her team to constantly regurgitate and churn eye-popping, entertaining, and outrageous content in new wrappers, new colors, smells, tastes, and sounds. In order to make it work well, the content had to ebb and flow in idiocy, inappropriateness, and disgust. It had to be perennially extreme, novel, and titillating to keep the RQ at proper levels.

All messaging began with fear and entitlement. These were at the root of human emotion and frailty, and she constantly reminded her team of this.

‘Where is the fear in this message? Where is the entitlement? To simply inform is to bore! Information must always have a fearful bang, an entitled tang. Is this story about another Ron detractor? Then work the victimization angle. They never liked Ron. They never gave Ron a chance. He’s done so much for them. He’s entitled to thanks but only gets hate. Then amplify his detractors. Make them bigger than life. Radical. Scary. Regurgitate their corrupt leanings, their questionable lives and relationships. Inject doubt in their credibility. Align them with Vista’s enemies. Innuendo, innuendo, innuendo! This is how you must think. Fear is your right leg. Entitlement your left! Innuendo your addictive drug!’

Despite her years at perfecting this craft, Sara’s job was not an easy one since Ron needed to represent many things to the citizens of Vista. This meant she and her team had to continuously develop, nurture, and modify his many personas and narratives.

Most of her cohort groups were ostensibly addicted to the predictably evil Ron, the one who had no scruples or morals or sense of decency. This was the Ron persona who always outdid himself with regular chastising of others around him, vile comments and extreme edge pronouncements, name-calling, bigotry, and hedonistic proclivities and sexual desires.

And it didn’t matter whether he carried out his aberrant promises or missives. It didn’t matter how many times he yelled and pranced before his adoring crowds, pounded the lectern, or spat epithets and warnings at perceived enemies. What mattered was the commentaries themselves and the emotions they engendered. To threaten or infer action was often enough, and only occasionally would the government have to carry out an edict to maintain credibility.

It helped considerably that Ron was so animated and narcissistic in his own exaggerated way. She simply had to enhance and shape finishing touches on the innate vanity, depravity, and apparent insanity, then confuse it with moments of feigned generosity and compassion, hypercritical humor, brilliance, and bravado.

Sara would sometimes liken her responsibilities to the manual food grinder her mother used to prepare her least favorite dish of hash from the mixture of leftover refrigerator contents. Ron’s personas were hash variants. Sometimes corn was in excess. Other times kidney beans or red chili. But the base ingredients were always predictable, with vapid overtones of blood-soaked hamburger, stale cereal, and rotting celery.

Her easiest job was to speak to his fervent, almost religious supporters, the foot soldiers of Ron’s dark soul. This cohort loved Ron irrespective of what he did or said, so she needed to embellish all aspects of who he actually was. These followers, these cultists comprising about thirty percent of Vista’s population, would do anything to support him and ensure his continued reign.

Per Sara’s terminology, the use of the term ‘audience’ and ‘cohort’ were interchangeable, though she preferred the latter. The foot soldier cohort possessed an unrelenting need for a father-figure. An emotional leader. It needed both a messiah and an anti-messiah, amalgamated into one conflicted being. It required a demigod, demagogue, or authoritarian. It needed to look up to something greater and look down disgustedly at those whom Ron and they deemed less worthy.

Ron was no true demigod, not in the comic book sense. Yet, his anti-aging tech made him effectively enduring, eternal, and immortal, particularly for this cohort. His body, enhanced by the latest robotics, provided him with demigod-like physical powers and a physical appearance that few could afford. In addition, his mind was effectively fused with Imp, one of the most powerful AI’s on the planet and arguably sentient in many respects. This combination made Ron a modern-day god of sorts, and his gangrenous human origins only played into this persona he was destined to fulfill.

In Sara’s view, the messages to this cohort didn’t really matter since they had conceded virtually all their decision-making, energies, and the fruits of their labors to the corrupted being outside themselves. Ron could never do wrong. No transgression could be severe enough to engender disloyalty, even when aimed against them. Sara loved these people for their blissful ignorance and faith. They were energetic, dependable, and utterly unable to discern anything beyond the contextual world she built for them.

And Ron the demigod was but one of multiple, customized personas she used to nurture the voracious media machines she influenced. She created multiple narratives and personas of him and his courtesans and enemies, feeding the needy recipients with stories that satisfied their insatiable hunger for entertainment and bias confirmation.

Born in 2020, Sara was too young to have experienced firsthand the early days of the post-truth era, but she often wished she could go back in time to be there as it evolved. In the decades before the Debacle, the old, once-trusted media structures were continuously disassembling and reassembling, hiding within innocuous corporate structure. At that time as well, the message didn’t matter nor did the method of transmission.

In those unsophisticated days of narrative control, the only thing that mattered was profit. Profit drove all the decisions, and boring was not profitable. Whatever got eyeballs, mindshare, and therefore ad dollars was what mattered. Ethics, honor, honesty, and fairness were concepts for Sunday school kids to review once and forget. Post-truth stories needed to be amplified by the inane, profane, and nonsensical.

Given that fundamental fact, a cat-and-mouse game of media duality was created that persisted up to the Great Debacle. One side chose conservatism and the other progressivism. Neither chose the unprofitable middle that required truth and discernment. The audiences no longer cared for such things. They only wanted entertainment and confirmation of the biases the media so stealthily infused in their minds.

Confirmation brought relevance. Confirmation brought attention and comfort. Confirmation brought advertising. Advertising brought profit. Profit brought personal wealth, power, and prestige for management teams.

As the post-Debacle period of anarchy started to settle down, there were too many narratives. The world was begging for even one channel that seemed relevant, consistent, and thorough. One with glimmering personalities, straight teeth, smiling faces, and serious frowns. One that engaged and enthralled the cohort, interspersed with sub-second flashes of light to keep their attention.

The proven techniques for holding viewer engagement had changed little since those days. Subliminal visuals and audio. Constant camera position changes. Fast-paced, short segment stories to stimulate hungry neurons with a continuous cacophony of glitter, fear, and disbelief.

Sara’s was an exhilarating, wide world to manage. The low signal-to-noise ratio implied that nobody could readily discern the signal, allowing her to manipulate this most important elements at will. She honed the art of applying a constant, gentle nudge to the nose rings of Vista’s media consumers and her beloved cohorts. It was her media magic, her expertise.

In Ron’s domain, Sara and her team bore the responsibility for all narratives across all media types. Though she had counterparts in the other two Westrich domains, her role in Vista was relatively autonomous. Few in the world could outclass her prowess in managing so many propaganda channels concurrently across so many cohorts.

The binary channels were relatively simple to manage with narratives that had proven successful decades prior. On one hand, Ron was god-like, a speaker of truth and power. One who watches out for his subjects, supports them, gives them what we deserve.

He tramples enemies under foot. He is a victim of haters, but ten times as vindictive when they go too far. Manful and unafraid, he is righteousness and gall. He is human perfection and has reasons for what he does, even if not obvious or stated. Trust him, as only he can do this job well.

On the flip side, Ron was the demon. Power-hungry. Inept. Paranoid. He was a hand-me-down trillionaire using his position to illegally expand wealth and power to him and his friends. The worst of demagogues and tyrants. His lies were pathetic, his rhetoric caustic, his next moves predictable and disconcerting. Worst of all, he was an incompetent narcissist, and quite possibly under the complete control of his AI.

In this new age of ‘the channel is the message,’ this dichotomy of narratives worked flawlessly for Sara and her team. It kept Ron’s face, voice, and personas actively in the news, forcing him to be top of mind for Vista’s citizens and keeping Sara’s RQ scores in line.

But it wasn’t only these binary channels that mattered for Sara. Due to the constant risk of a Debacle recurrence, large cities had been all but abandoned. Population centers were dispersed and considerably smaller, rarely exceeding forty thousand in a contiguous area. Nobody wanted to risk another volatile air or water-borne causative agent spreading rapidly through a large, concentrated population.

Given this greatly dispersed distribution of humanity on the face of the globe, communications had to change as well. Local communities ran their own media, and rendering effective control over these decentralized outlets was difficult. New channels would spring-up continuously, coagulating from unruly and distrustful citizens. The challenge was so large that half of Sara’s team were constantly managing these local community channels to ensure alignment with the approved narratives.

These communities liked who they were becoming. They developed their own truths and narratives that only loosely aligned with Sara’s. They were too independent, at least to her liking. This fact was no more evident than in Vista with its large geography and relatively sparse population. It was therefore no surprise to her that Vista was where the signal originated, the signal from Northern Arizona of unknown intention that Sara was tasked to message appropriately.