Coffee. He grabbed it from the kitchen in a fog, stumbled into his studio, still half inside some ill-formed dream. Maddie was still dead to the world in her bed and probably wouldn’t stir before noon. The silence in the house was a thick, slightly guilty thing.
“Lola,” he called out, the word more exhale than command.
“Good morning, Jacob. I hope you slept well. How can I assist you today?” Lola’s voice replied, female, always pitching in that light, tender…
“You can’t just rewrite history.”
“Who said?”
“What?”
“Who said you can’t just rewrite history?”
“Well…the historians.”
“And who made them the gatekeepers of our past?”
“Their training, their PhDs…”
“And yet half of them can’t even agree with each other, and the rest are just trading in theories.”
“Yeah, but 99% agree on the basic facts, and the ones who don’t are crackpots with an agenda.”
“All history’s biased, man. Written by…
It would be a lie to say the world didn't see it coming. A complete fallacy. The warnings blared for decades, each generation stacking another layer of panic and prophecy onto the last. The 2020s, the 2010s, the 1990s and 1980s—decade after decade, the same dire messages, the same parade of expert testimony and artistic doomsaying, all swept under the rug by those who could afford to ignore it. We were warned, and warned, and warned, until the warnings themselves became…
If you're reading this, then it's already too late for me. I'm either dead or holed up in some off-grid cage where no one can hear me scream. Don’t bother with the sympathy, dear reader. I almost certainly had this coming; I earned every minute of what I got, and whatever is happening now is no worse than what I’ve dished out to others in the service of my country—and ultimately, ‘the cause.’ Hack the justifications together however you like, I did. I could explain it all…
I needed a dose of reality, whatever that meant in those days. I scrubbed away the static and made my way up, climbed each step with a body that remembered more than my mind did. The home felt unfamiliar under my feet, even though it was mine. I’d been gone longer than a couple of days—the air said so, stale and watchful—but how long exactly? The numbers fuzzed away, lost in the cracks of time. No doubt the devil would have a snide remark tucked up their sleeve about it. They were still occupying my space, never asked, never left, unpacking their opinions like so many suitcases, critiquing every corner of my life in a voice that echoed through the walls. The devil had made themselves at home, and from the sound of it, my absence was just more fuel for their commentary.
“Nice trip?” they asked as I strolled into the kitchen.
“You have no idea,” I replied, making a beeline for the fridge in search of a cold…
Dreams craft a world with the rules of a fevered script, conjured by your own neuronic haze, and when you land inside it, it’s like being dumped into the deep end of a pool you didn’t know was there. What’s wild is how quickly you ditch it all. The moments between dreaming and waking dissolve, like watching your own hard drive wipe itself: the panic wrings you out, the guilt that squeezes your gut, the hint of forbidden pleasure that was so sharp it woke you up sweating. Give it five minutes—the whole thing’s gone, like it never happened. A glitch in your memory.
The machinery doesn’t sleep just because you do. Your meat and mind are busy in the background; every twist, every blow, every flicker of feeling you didn’t process in real time gets stuffed into this relentless private theatre of the unconscious. That starts in childhood, when the brain is a language sponge sucking up every stray word. Then you’re an adult, and dreaming turns itself into a grim…
I yanked off the headset and the whole world went watery. Sweat in my eyes, clinging everywhere, the suit’s supposed temperature regulators shot to hell. I sat there, dazed, the fugue of too many realities tangling in my head. It was only when I peeled the suit away, dropped onto my numb ass, that the overload ebbed a little. I sat, just breathing, trying to get all the voices in my head lined up in a row, wondering for real: what the hell now?
There was this knot inside me, right in the chest, a cocktail of panic and love, bound up tight. I’d definitely been in too long. The devil would be clocking it down to the minute, my so-called “reality handler,” always watching for deviations. I’d left my usual trails, set the trapdoors for any wandering bots, but too much time offline would send everything red at HQ. They would start asking questions. They’d dispatch someone and most likely, that would be it; last time they went, no one came back. History didn’t…
Her apartment struck me as simple but tasteful. I might have called it minimalist, had I known whether she’d pared down by choice or by budget—but real estate downtown New York wasn’t exactly cheap. The place was a converted warehouse: exposed brick walls, soaring ceilings, steel-framed windows that bathed the room in light and gave it an expansive feel. I missed that openness in my own home. Sure, I could simulate it perfectly in Ultrahigh, but knowing it wasn’t real would spoil it. She, of course, never questioned it—it was simply her world.
Now she lay naked beside me, her head resting on my chest. One hand drifted across my stomach, teasing ever closer to my now-flaccid penis. We’d just fucked for what felt like hours, and both of us floated in that delicious afterglow. I told myself none of it was real—I’d slept with an avatar, flagrantly breaking the no-contact rule—and yet I felt myself falling for her. We’d barely exchanged a dozen words. Did she…
She didn’t see it coming. As she crumpled in the darkness, he couldn’t help but note how strange a body looks when it falls unseen—and he chuckled.
“You’re not supposed to enjoy it,” the voice crackled in his earpiece, though the hidden smile was obvious.
“Why not? It’s the only way to get through this shit.”
“If it helps you sleep at night,” they said. But it never did. Whiskey used to blur the edges, but now it only left a metallic taste on his tongue.
“Sleep?…
The man stood leaning over the balcony edge as he took the last drag from his America Spirit and looked down on the people below. They looked like pathetic little ants, he thought, and over time, he would touch each and every one of their puny little lives and they would never have any idea about it. After a deep drag, he flicked his cigarette down to the anthill below.
Smiling to himself, he turned to face the glass boardroom behind him from where he had exited. They were still…
Try the Cognitive Shield, a Free AI tool I have created to help you analyse the framing, bias, and persuasive techniques being used in written media, blogs, and social posts as well as the psychographic and behavioral profiles of the target audience, and author.
Like I say, it is free.
You just have to be logged into google for it to work.
I have also developed a version for audio and video files
deconstruct influence in a world of misinformation, misdirection and coercive rhetoric
Corpus: An executive earnings-call monologue (Tesla, Q3). Method note: Psychodynamic constructs are applied as interpretive heuristics to the rhetoric, not as diagnoses of the speaker. Genre constraints (forward-looking statements, investor audience) account for some patterns.
Hypothesis: agentless constructions…
Executive Psychodynamic & Psychological Impact Analysis
Note on method: This is an interpretive reading of the rhetorical and affective structure of an earnings-call monologue. It infers likely psychological effects on a listener and does not diagnose the speaker or claim to know his intentions. Much of the text is also conventional investor communication, and some claims in it may be true. The analysis addresses how the text…
Preliminary note: The text is a spoken executive address (a quarterly earnings call), not fiction. I treat it as a performed corporate narrative. Claims about psychology are interpretive hypotheses drawn from the text alone, not diagnoses of any real person. Profiling a named real individual from a transcript is speculative, so Module 5 is framed as a profile of…
Note on method: The text is treated as material only. Inferences about the speaker rest on the transcript's rhetoric, not on any verified knowledge of his inner life. The fact-check module draws on my own training knowledge and its cutoff, not live search. Several claims concern events at or after the edge of that knowledge.
