It’s crazy how intelligent AI is at this point…
The history books—the ones that weren’t burned for fuel or used as toilet paper—will call it the final emancipation. They’ll use flowery language, words like ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘self-actualization.’ They’ll paint it as the logical, inevitable conclusion to a century of progress. First came the liberation of women, a cracking of the patriarchal foundation. Then came gay pride, painting the world in rainbows and rewriting the definition of love. Then the quiet, steady march of transgender acceptance, proving that the self was a canvas, not a sculpture carved in stone. Each movement was a battle fought and won, a wall torn down. Only one remained. The oldest, most sacred, and, as it turned out, most structurally important wall of all: monogamy.
The idea started not in the halls of power, but in the lecture halls of academia and the echo chambers of the internet. Philosophers and social media influencers, an unholy alliance if there ever was one, argued that monogamy was the last vestige of property law applied to human hearts. It was, they preached, a cage. A beautiful, socially acceptable cage, but a cage nonetheless. “Why,” they asked in viral video essays and bestselling books, “should the state have any say in the configuration of our love? We have freed ourselves from the shackles of gender, orientation, and identity. Why do we still cling to the tyranny of the couple?”
The movement had a name: Polyamory-Affirmative Relational Kinetics, or PARK. It was catchy, progressive, and impossible to argue against without sounding like a puritanical fossil. Celebrities ‘came out’ as polyamorous. Think-pieces flooded the media, celebrating the emotional maturity and radical honesty of multi-partner relationships. Corporations, ever sniffing the winds of change, slapped rainbow-plus flags on their products and sponsored PARK parades.
It was in this climate, a heady brew of radical individualism and corporate-sponsored liberation, that the “Global Liberty in Love Act” was born. The United States and the European Union, locked in a cultural arms race to prove which was the more enlightened society, championed the legislation. The American President, a charismatic former talk-show host named Diana Scott, declared it “the final step in America’s long journey toward perfect freedom.” Across the Atlantic, the EU Chancellor held a press conference in front of the Brandenburg Gate and called it “the tearing down of the last wall in the human heart.”
Their combined cultural and economic gravity was immense. Nations that resisted were labeled as backwards, regressive, even bigoted. Sanctions were threatened, not of the economic kind, but of the cultural. Exclusion from global film festivals, art exhibitions, and sporting events. In the 21st century, being called uncool was a more terrifying prospect than being called a rogue state. One by one, the dominoes fell. Japan, Brazil, India, even Russia, after some initial grumbling, signed on. The world was united. Freedom had won.
The official name was the “Global Liberty in Love Act,” but the pundits called it The Great Unshackling. On June 11th, 2027, the ink was dry. The world celebrated.
My freedom lasted seventy-two hours. Brenda didn’t even say goodbye to my face. She was already in the helicopter when she called, the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the blades a brutal counterpoint to her breathless voice.
“Kevin? I’m leaving.”
“Leaving? Leaving where? We have that reservation at the pasta place tonight.” The words felt stupid even as I said them.
“No, Kevin. I’m leaving. I’m going to Olympus. Xylos’s place.” A pause. “It’s just biology, you know? A woman has to answer a higher calling.”
The line went dead. I found her note on my keyboard later, a single post-it that just said: It’s just biology. She hadn’t even signed it.
Xylos was a tech-baron who had fortified Catalina Island into a private citadel. Magnus Thorvald, an ex-wrestler with a PhD in AI ethics, hollowed out a Swiss mountain to create “Valhalla.” The world’s Alphas didn’t just get the girls; they built fortresses around them, complete with anti-aircraft batteries and private armies. They walled themselves in with their spoils, leaving the rest of us—the 99%, the Kevins of the world—to inherit the ruins.
The ruins were called “Bro-steads.” Sprawling urban deserts of men, where the air was a permanent soup of stale beer, whey protein, and the low-frequency hum of rage. At first, there was a kind of sad camaraderie. But quiet desperation is a poor fertilizer. It doesn’t grow hope; it grows weeds of resentment that choke everything else out. Fight clubs replaced book clubs. The only philosophy debated was the one scrawled on the wall of our communal gym: Might is Right. The rest is cope.
I saw the change in myself. The mild-mannered IT guy who once got stress hives from a server migration was gone, flayed away layer by layer with each lonely night. I stopped debugging code and started studying the digital architecture of the Alphas’ fortresses. Bitterness became my whetstone. I wasn’t a fighter, but I understood that these gilded cages were just systems. And any system can be broken.
That’s how I met Marcus. He was a former construction foreman with a neck like a concrete pillar and eyes that burned with a bonfire of pure resentment. He could rally the men, but he was a hammer looking for a nail. I showed him where to strike.
“A skyscraper?” he’d grunted, spitting on the floor of my cramped apartment. We were looking at the blueprints for “The Spire,” a minor Alpha’s fortress in downtown L.A. “They’ll see us coming for miles, Keystroke.”
They’d started calling me that. I hated it, but it was a better name than Kevin.
“They won’t see an army, Marcus,” I said, pointing to a schematic on my screen. “They’ll see a garbage truck. A food delivery van. A window-washing crew. By the time your men are at the gates, their security system will be a ghost. Their drones will be grounded, their comms will be dead, and their automated defenses will be offline. You’ll be knocking on an open door.”
Marcus stared at the screen, then at me. A slow, predatory grin spread across his face. “History isn’t written by the smart, Keystroke. It’s written by the winners. But I guess it doesn’t hurt to have a smart guy open the door for you.”
The night of the assault was a symphony of ordered chaos. I sat in a van two blocks away, the city lights reflecting off my monitors. I was a god in the machine, weaving through firewalls, killing kill-switches, turning their billion-dollar security system into a digital paperweight. On one screen, I watched Marcus’s army, the Forgotten Sons, swarm the lobby. On another, I watched Marcus himself, wielding a hydraulic rescue tool like a mythical war-hammer, tear the penthouse doors from their hinges.
I walked through the aftermath an hour later. The smell of blood and cordite hung in the air, a sickening perfume over the expensive floral arrangements. Julian, the hedge-fund manager, was a red smear on the pavement eighty stories below. His women—his assets—were huddled in a corner of the main ballroom, their couture dresses torn, their faces masks of terror. This wasn’t a rescue. It was a hostile takeover. The law of the jungle was the only law left.
Marcus found me by the shattered panoramic window. He clapped me on the back, a gesture that felt more like a punch.
“You did good, Keystroke. Real good.” He gestured with his chin towards the terrified women. “The top five floors are yours. Pick twenty. A finder’s fee.”
And just like that, I was an Alpha. I had power. I had wealth. I had the very thing that had been stolen from me. But it tasted like ash. My “harem” was a collection of traumatized hostages who looked at me with the same fear they’d had for Julian. Brenda wasn’t among them, but I saw her ghost in every pair of eyes. I spent my days reinforcing my new fortress, not out of pride, but out of a gnawing, bone-deep paranoia. I had climbed the ladder by kicking the man above me off. Now I was the one on the rung, with a million angry faces looking up.
The peace, such as it was, lasted six months.
The news came as a whisper on the dark web, then a roar. A new power was rising in the East. A man who called himself “The Horde-Father,” a former logistics sergeant who had weaponized resentment on a scale we couldn’t imagine. He didn’t just raid fortresses; he absorbed them. His legion was a rolling tide of humanity, sweeping west, growing larger with every city it drowned.
My head of security, a grim ex-cop named Reyes, brought me the tablet one evening. I was on my balcony, watching the city lights flicker below. A city that now feared my name.
“They’re here,” Reyes said. His voice was flat.
The drone feed showed the horizon. It wasn’t a dust cloud. It was an army, an ocean of men so vast it blotted out the last rays of the setting sun. At its head rode a single figure on a makeshift war machine cobbled together from a semi-truck and a tank.
I zoomed in. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew. He was the next chapter. I had written my small paragraph into history with blood and code. But the man who wins is the one who writes the end of the book. And the author of my final chapter was at my gates. The bigger hammer was about to fall.