EDGAR SAT UNCOMFORTABLY ON his porcelain crown, gazing at the fossil-encrusted limestone brick wall that lined his bathroom and most of the compound.

“It’s a reminder, isn’t it?” he whispered. “A reminder that we are walking fossils. Look at me, though. I have the latest tech. Anti-aging. Musculoskeletal enhancements. Mech metallic components throughout my body with skin indelibly fused to alloys. Ocular-neocortex connects to my AI. I have so many transgenic and human code modifications, I can’t recall all of them instantly without digging into storage. And despite this great tech to forestall fossilization, why can’t we find a means to avoid the shitter? It’s so fucking wasteful. How many total hours of my life wasted so far, much less in the eons to come? There must be an answer to this. Shit. Incoming.”

His AI streamed him the latest global messaging feeds on the trending news of the moment, the laser signal.

“Hah.” He laughed and belched simultaneously, his breath emitting the rancid smell of half-digested fried onions from his breakfast. “She’s got the tiger’s tail on this one, that Sara dog. Little bitch will try to get the glory and do this on her own, as if her pathetic messaging is any good without my data infrastructure. Without my full assistance.”

He wiped himself. “She’s the fossil. And her team. Dead shells and curly animals, waiting for the gray muck to enclose and smother them in time, buried forever in the ground, only to be regurgitated in ages as building material. Sara’s carcass will be embedded in the shitty limestone bricks in one of my future buildings. I’ll see to it.”

To Edgar, Sara was an anachronism in the current context of AI. Who needed a human to create narratives when his AI was more effective? More prolific? His AI could churn-out a thousand narratives to her one. His AI could confuse the world on a whim, creating mindless, meaningless sludge to be farted across the toilet bowl of human networks. Misinformation was kid stuff, but mass misinformation – now that was AI magic.

Edgar felt this toilet analogy also applied effectively to Ron’s direct reports. His ministers and their respective teams were barely surviving in the constant vortex of rage and fury. He imagined them hanging on tightly to the inside edge of the bowl, staring up at his ass. At any moment, Edgar’s massive butt could crush their slipping hands, given what he knew about them. He could smash their weakened digits against the porcelain edge of the commode to which they clung so desperately. Then down they’d go with the flush. Down to oblivion and the ignominious death they deserved.

For Ron, his ministers were transient, like unused condoms on the shelf of a sex addict. When he perceived their cost or risk exceeded their value, he’d simply do away with them.

There was no job after domain minister. Once you tied your harness to that beast, the beast of the oligarchs, you were forever naked and exposed.

You knew too much. You knew the lies, the personal weaknesses, the perverse, corrupt dealings and indulgences. Temperaments. Indecencies. Amorality. Insanity. And if you were smart, you’d tuck the worst of that knowledge away in a safe place, only to be exposed to the light of day when necessary for survival.

For Edgar and the other ministers, the key challenge was to stay alive as one’s personal net equity to Ron began to slip. Each person needed to possess various forms of collateral to retain their jobs and status. Only the best, those with the greatest leverage like Edgar, might squirm their way out of the compound freely and intact once relieved of ministerial duties.

An ex-minister could too easily target and weaken Ron with their knowledge. For example, they could align with another oligarch inside or outside Westrich. Tattle. Embarrass. Malign. Weaken. Assassinate. Insinuate. Indeed, insinuation was often a worse fate for an oligarch than assassination.

Edgar thought back to the years he’d been with Ron. Seven. Lucky seven. Many ministers had come and gone. Even Edgar, with all his data resources at the ready, rarely had insight to their final dispositions. The party line was that most were pastured, kept far away from access to data or people. That probably meant either a deserted island somewhere or at the warming poles, living desolate lives in a lonely purgatory. Ron’s gulag.

But Edgar knew, they all knew, the more likely resolution. Death. Extinction. A grinding up of innards. Once dead, one’s body had to be ground-up and consumed by fire. No trace could be left behind. It was simply too dangerous, given the evolving tech. New tech might extract the content of neurons and other cells, resurrecting life events lurking in the dark recesses of one’s decaying brain or stored in muscle or blood.

“I am uncomfortably exposed,” Edgar considered. “This bullshit about having predictive tech to one hundred percent reliability. It’s nowhere near that, of course. In fact, our AI is no better than anyone’s, despite what Ron thinks of his marvelous Imp. I know Imp, and Imp is good. But he’s not astounding. Hardly ahead of my own AI. Yeah, that wonderful Imp. And I named him. ‘I M Perfect.’ Ron bought it hook, line, and sinker. It’s all about perception. All about it.”

Finished with his bathroom duties, Ron stood naked in front of a large picture window looking out on the Colorado River of South Austin. His tech was the best, and he could stand there for hours, never worrying about someone peering in. His systems knew everything, saw everything, and could almost predict everything.

“Now that the messages are flooding in, and thanks to Sara’s mindless efforts in following my suggestion, a shitstorm will rain down upon me. CIOs from the other Westrich domains will be pressing me to verify the claims that we perfected this new quantum, predictive tech. And the other nation-states. Fuck. My AI has already reported they are claiming similar capabilities. Piss-assed rivalries. It may have been an effective ruse, but we should have discussed the risk potential, especially since Sara made it the pillar of her response campaigns. I didn’t mean for it to be that. It was intended as only one of her many narratives. Simple-minded, lazy wretch that she is.”

He turned to his dresser to grab a pair of boxers and continued thinking. “The normal escalation process failed this time. The AIs should have caught it and advised us of the risk. Imp. My AI. Sara’s. Everyone’s. I’m not sure how this slipped by the fucking algorithms that were processing in those moments from our initial discussion to the presentation.”

Edgar was pissed and pounded the dresser drawer shut, causing it to rebound back at him.

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“Fucking world this is. You can’t tell a sweet little lie anymore to cover your ass. Always ten or fifty convoluted layers of algorithmic processing, game theory, alternate paths. It’s almost like the AIs led us down this trail on purpose, but to what end?”

Edgar had good reason to be concerned with an announcement of new tech that gave Westrich a strategic competitive advantage versus other oligarchies. Relations between nation-states in the post-Debacle world were always tenuous and hostile. The rapid spread of volatile tech and its democratization down to the smallest level, even to every 3D printer in each home and business, had placed every nation-state on an even keel of continuous high alert. Too many deviant minds in the world. Too many deadly creative capabilities. Too many hands in the pot.

By this time, all countries had deployed similar tech, and any hostile act was returned with an equally detrimental hostile act. Bolivar, for example, might create an infective agent that caused five thousand deaths in Southern. Five thousand was a good, solid average. Enough to send a message, but not too high to cause alarm. And it was only that high because it still took time for each nation-state to create and distribute antidotes like vaccines.

The antidote creation process was well-honed. A nation-state might lob a volatile agent over the border, always denying or justify their actions based on some perceived infraction or injury. Citizens would be instantly informed of the new risk through a variety of means spanning old handheld devices to direct alerts into human-machine interfaces, usually Vistachits. Expert AI systems would be used to instantly assess the risks and develop mitigation steps. Instructions were then provided to home or business 3D printers which would create a skin patch with the agent’s antidote.

In recompense, the inflicted nation-state would typically create its own comparable noxious agent and lob it back over the wall. This provided for a relatively innocuous but constant tit-for-tat battle of wills. It also kept citizens in all nation-states in line while giving the oligarchs perfect cover for unrelenting monitoring and control of the citizenry.

By 2075, this interplay had come to a fair and equitable balance. Every nation-state knew not to overreach or amplify their jousting to avoid the next step of creating a major killer like the Great Debacle agent. An eye for eye, or a tooth for tooth, but not a tooth for a second global devastation.

Given a few hours of further consideration, of war gaming with his AI and monitoring global responses, Edgar now understood their new pronouncement had that tooth-for-a-devastation potential. This was worrying.

It’s not that Westrich’s oligarchs didn’t lie on a regular basis about their new tech, defenses, and offenses. Everyone lied about their capabilities, and every nation-state was on relatively equal footing in this regard because the infinity curve of uncontrollable technology acceleration had finally reached an apex. Technology had scaled the y-axis in ever-shorter increments of time, then it finally hit a wall. Virtually all capabilities that could be imagined were either realized or realizable, within the constraints of physics.

Edgar’s problem with this new messaging was physics. Nobody had ever claimed they could perfectly predict the future by utilizing the time-space correlations of quantum physics. Many decades prior, science had discovered that even time was relative at a subatomic level. It could go forward, or it could go backward in concert with space or elements contained within it. That was old news. But to date, there had been no effective way to modify the arrow of time in the macro world, the world of molecules and humans and fossil-encrusted limestone walls.

Again peering out his window, Edgar spied another small, curly animal embedded in the limestone wall. With his fully mech’d left hand, he clipped the handful of stone from the wall and stared at the ancient animal. Although he’d seen many of the same fossils in these bricks, this was the first time he really examined the fine detail in its inch-long body, still intact after a hundred million years. It reminded him of a visit to an underground cavern in Arkansas during the earlier part of the century.

The cavern guide was a religious fundamentalist who let Ron’s family know this fact at the start of the guided tour. He was outfitted with worn overalls, a checkered flannel shirt, and grease-stained boots. The man’s face was weathered from years of strenuous outdoor work. A large, golden chain swung to and fro around his neck as he led Edgar’s family on the journey underground.

‘See these artifacts the scientists call fossils? In my religion, I know the devil placed these here to tempt me to doubt my faith in God. You understand? The devil wants me to believe Earth is not five thousand years old like my scriptures insist. He even wants me to believe the dinosaurs were alive millions of years ago. The devil, well, if you read those holy scriptures, you’d know he’s a deceiver. The great deceiver. The great liar.’

‘Great liar.’ He remembered being called that too many times.

‘It’s only those with open eyes and pure hearts, only those fortunate few who can see the truth behind the lies. Only they will be saved. Never believe what your eyes tell you, folks. Not fully. Sometimes, somebody places things in front of you to control you, to corrupt your heart and collect your soul. These are often subtle, coming from where you’d least expect. A political party, perhaps. A news personality. A politician. An entertainer, one who says he’s on your side but does everything against your sense of what’s right, just, and fair. A media outlet. They’re all just different coins in the slot machine ride to hell.’

‘Guy was a shithead,’ Edgar’s dad shouted as they drove to their motel after the tour. ‘Thinks he knows everything. Thinks he has the answer. Thinks he can preach to me and my kids. There ain’t no God. There’s only liars and the pitiful poor, like that man. Then there’s the lucky few who’re born rich or cheat their way to the top, sucking the life from hard-working people like me. The jackass. Beth, grab me a cold one.’

Edgar’s mom glanced to the back seat as if she were apologizing to the two kids for letting him drink again while driving. As she turned forward, his dad backhanded her on the cheek, splattering spit into Edgar’s eye.

His mom’s head bowed down quickly, below her seat, and he heard the whoosh of air as she popped open a beer can from the cooler under her legs. Extending her bloody, shaking arm out to her husband, she placed the open beer can in his outstretched hand.

‘Mom, what happened to your front tooth?’ Edgar asked later in the day as they walked together to get a bucket of ice at the motel. ‘Nothing,’ she whimpered. ‘Walked into a cave wall by accident. It fell out and is lost forever.’

He recalled his dad’s words at dinner that same evening. ‘You lost your tooth? You replace it. Don’t use my money to pay for your stupidity.’

But Edgar knew the truth. He remembered seeing the tooth, his mom’s blood-soaked tooth and its root, wedged in a crack between the car’s carpet and insulation. Seeing it in the car again a few weeks later, he considered picking it up and handing it to her. But he didn’t. ‘She doesn’t want it. No good to her now.’

His mom rarely laughed or smiled after that, embarrassed by the missing tooth and always carrying that visible reminder of abuse, fear, tolerance, and intolerance.

It was only one of many incidents he’d seen like that in the following years. He hated his dad. Hated him. Hated him for his anger. His lack of control. His ignorance. His lack of cunning and unobvious deceitfulness.

“It’s not so much that he was evil as much as the fact he was bad at being evil,” he pondered. “Thoughtless. Amateurish. Valuable lessons that helped me reach the top of this dung heap. I hold my own, though. I am self-made. I look up to nothing and nobody. My dad was a fucking slimeball, and life is hell. You’ve got to stay vicious, vindictive, vigilant. Love those words. Can’t have a moment of self-pity or you’ll end up like this fossil.”

He began to crush the bit of limestone in his hand. Then he stopped and placed it in his pocket.

“AI,” he commanded, “I need to meet with Sara. Stat. Sara only; not her team. She’s fucked things up again. When can I do that?”

“She appears open for five minutes next hour,” his AI responded.

“Fuck her! I’m going over there now."