"One person might approach the looming shadow and shout out a warning. Another sees it and prepares for battle.

But who sees that the shadow is cast only by us, ourselves? In this lies the deepest truth about power, about change, about how we fail to recognize our own fundamental transformation until it is almost too late."

2025

The January fire wasn't supposed to happen. Winter fires weren't normal, even in these strange times. But normal had become a quaint notion, like democracy or public good. The flames took his house in the Los Angeles foothills along with four hundred others that night. The insurance company declared bankruptcy three days later.

He watched the smoke plume from his sister's apartment in Pasadena. The news feeds blurred together: fears of market disruptions, supply chain failures, infrastructure collapse. A second term president who might or might not still be alive. It hardly mattered anymore. Something was shifting elsewhere, quietly, while attention focused on the spectacle.

On the wall screen, the world's richest man lifted a chainsaw above his head at a Freedom First rally in Texas. The crowd roared as he revved it. "Time to cut out the rot!" he shouted, his smile unnaturally wide. "They hate us, you know. The bureaucrats. The experts. The deep state." The chainsaw growled again. No one asked who "they" were. It was enough that they existed, somewhere “out there”, deserving of the blade.

Efficiency experts had begun appearing that spring, their corporate badges subtle as they moved through government offices. Purely advisory roles. Consulting positions. Each recommendation reasonable, each change small enough to seem insignificant. The language shifted first, almost imperceptibly. Citizens became users. Public services became delivery units. Small words. Small changes.

Summer heat broke records again. The power grid strained. Food prices rose. More birds died.

Each crisis brought new partnerships, new solutions, new ways of thinking about old problems. Most people were too busy surviving to read the fine print.

He had saved what little he could from the house before the flames arrived. Some photos. His grandfather's watch. For some unknown reason, an old paper copy of the Constitution. Why that? But it now felt weightier somehow.

The smoke had stained everything he owned with the same gray pallor.

The smoke never really cleared after that January. Or perhaps it was just the beginning of a different kind of haze, one that would take years to recognize.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

North Dakota

The Morton County courthouse still held traces of frontier justice days, despite the fresh paint and imported marble floors. She hadn't planned to be here. Environmental law was supposed to be a sideline to her prosecutor's work in California. But when the energy company's lawyers started subpoenaing water defenders' private communications, started naming individual protesters as co-conspirators, her old law school mentor had called.

"They're testing something here," he'd said. "Using civil courts to criminalize protest. Your background in prosecution... you'll see what they're really doing. They need help, badly."

The corporate attorney's voice filled the wood-paneled courtroom, eighteen hundred dollars an hour explaining how protest equals terrorism, how speech threatens security, how defending water damages shareholder value. Gibson Dunn's finest, their legal fees alone could fund an environmental group for years. She remembered prosecuting actual crimes - violence, theft, harm to real people. Now harm meant crimped quarterly profits. Now crime meant questioning efficiency.

Three hundred million dollars. The number itself was a message about power, about who could afford to seek this kind of justice. The energy company CEO had been clear - make an example of the environmental groups. Bankrupt them. Silence them. Show what happens when people stand together, when they speak too loudly, when they dare threaten the corporate world

The local papers carried oil company ads next to stories about job creation. The jury pool came from counties dependent on pipeline work. The right to protest remained sacred, the company's lawyers assured everyone - as long as it didn't interfere with shareholder returns.

She recognized what was happening because she'd seen it from the other side - how to build cases, how to pressure witnesses, how to use procedure itself as a weapon. But this was something new. Something that made her prosecutor's instincts scream in warning. This was a dark day.

Absorption

Thomas stared at his screen in the Washington Post newsroom. The database requests told a story nobody else seemed to notice. The efficiency teams weren't just moving through government offices - they were moving through government systems. Each integration gave them deeper reach. Each merger expanded their control.

His sources at OPM had gone quiet. The ones at Treasury stopped answering calls. The teams had brought in sofas, were working around the clock. Not destroying institutions - absorbing them. Not burning - but flowing through digital channels, gaining what they called "root access" to everything.

He wrote the story carefully, trying to make people understand. Not an attack - an absorption. Not a coup - a quiet rewiring of every system that mattered. His editor wanted more sources, more concrete examples. But the sources were disappearing, their clearances revoked, their positions "restructured."

The story never ran. Something about legal review, about liability concerns. About waiting for more confirmation. Always waiting. Always needing one more source, one more document, one more proof.

Through his office window, he could see the Department of Energy building across the street. New logos appearing on the facade, so gradually few seemed to notice. Corporate badges in the security line, growing more numerous each week.

In his inbox, another anonymous tip: Social Security Administration next. IRS after that. Personal data, financial records, health histories - everything flowing into private servers. He thought about his father's old warnings about digital consolidation, about the dangers of connecting everything to everything. About how convenience could become a trap.

The newsroom buzzed with stories about the chainsaw man's latest spectacle. Nobody wanted his story about database permissions and system architecture. About how power flows through circuits just as surely as through courts.

He saved another copy of his research to an old thumb drive. Printed key documents on actual paper.

Response

He sat in his office at FEMA headquarters, Deputy Administrator for Emergency Response, staring at the new directive about California fire aid. At thirty-four, his appointment had made sense on paper - MBA, management consulting background, proven efficiency record in the private sector. The kind of résumé the new administration valued.

The language was precise, clinical: resources would be allocated based on "performance metrics" and "regional success indicators."

Translation: help would go first to areas with the right voting records, the right donor statistics. Four hundred homes in the Los Angeles foothills didn't meet the criteria. Neither did the thousands displaced along the fire line.

"These metrics aren't about emergency response," he said in the coordination meeting. "They're about punishment." His voice stayed calm, measured. His corporate training had taught him how to navigate difficult conversations. But this was different. This was about lives.

The consultant from the newly embedded advisory team smiled. "It's about smart resource management. Encouraging better local preparedness." The man's ID badge was different from the standard government issue - sleeker, with a subtle corporate logo in the corner.

That evening, he drafted a detailed report about the real impact of these new policies. Casualty projections. Infrastructure vulnerabilities. Long-term costs. Data that told the truth about what "smart management" really meant.

The report never made it past his supervisor's desk. Something about "tone" and "constructive engagement." Three drafts later, he stopped trying to explain. Started documenting everything instead. He would need to remember how it happened.