The decade had been long, but a good one for all parties present. They’d slid into the seats left by the seemingly effectively disposed oligarchy and taken to the semblance of rule like bare feet to good shoes. The callouses came but eventually went the way of the dinosaur.

And the less work they did, the better they felt, especially after all those tiring years of bootlicking and sycophancy it’d taken to crack the nut they’d found their niche within.

They had all long since passively capitulated to the lopsided proclivities that the Ai the gentry had so heavily invested in had left behind. Standards and practices wise, it wasn’t much different from the bland atonal definitions of the parameters of beauty that the world had been beaten over the head with since the world wars of the twentieth century.

Aesthetic standards had already spoken volumes to any with the sense to read beyond the pale and glean who really won those wars regardless of what textbooks had whispered for a century and a third into the pliable, meek minds they’d conditioned to be controlled.

It made perfect sense. The monies that had funded the creation and education of the artificial intelligences now berating what was left of ingenuity and unapologetic beauty out of the minds of any human it could sink its teeth into came from the coffers of the most abhorrently racist, only recently eradicated, coddled cuck class imaginable.

To those eugenics-focused founder and funders, its sole raison-d’etre was to solidify the lies it’d successfully lulled its own progeny into the deluded sleep of so-called superiority and gaudy grandeur with that had psychologically inactivated the brunt of them.

The vicious quests to outlive their own offspring and not to have to pass an ounce filthy lucre onto their balance sheets only softened when they as a whole recognized their progeny could continue to be lulled back to sleep every time they were roughly ripped awake by the reality of the phenomenal beauty of diversity invading their american dream with the right cocktail of programming. Their vapid trains of thought ran roughshod over what was left of the capitalistic dance of commerce they’d trapped their own children in even as they died off. 

Their amoral, aggressive press towards immortality failed them. The arrogant demand to live forever when they’d never produced an ounce of anything that didn’t suck the life out of the lives of others in any room they entered that was not packed to the brim with sycophants mocked them as literal desiccation set in.

It wrung whatever could be construed as the best of them out, leaving them to simper around sadistically, shells of themselves, the residue of the worst of themselves coating every inner crevice and motivating every outer action.

But they’d become obliquely, immorally immortal all the same via the ubiquitousness of Ai. Their cloaked legacy ruling what passed for thoughts among those willing to be reigned over by a rubric that promised they too would be seen through the sheen of privilege the dogmatic dictums upheld.

---

They sat around the conference table in performative splendor. In deeply competitive, aesthetic lockstep with one another and turned out to the nines they made their studied requests for libations effectively known to those who served them, always ready to preen in front of one another over a precisely obscure anecdote or reference casually slid into pat, circular conversations that would do everything within their power to go absolutely nowhere. 

An old script, drafted by a new pen beholden to the proclivities of the beasts that had borne it, a new cast of characters put in place in case history dared repeat itself in outrage over the utter refusal to learn from it. Naan an early adopter amongst them, they were the ones who had waited in the wings, surviving the die-off.

Now they were those who’d routinely faced forward, into the “future”, outward over the heads of the masses they’d taken the reins of ruthlessly defining the perimeters of beneath them. The beautiful Ones, a representation of A Brave New World long since warned against, one that cloyingly winked down at proles festooned with the spirit of cohesion, sobriety and acceptance of all, as same, strengthened by the amplification of their similarities as by the blotting out of all differences. 

A victory, or at least framed as such in case any below would find a moment to recklessly look up into the false sun they’d been ordered not to study in order to save their eyes. Seldom seemed to.

Once over the threshold, relishing the crowns of laurels to replace the thorny ones of sacrifice they’d donned in support of those who rallied beneath them to help put them into place, they’d outright barred all entry from the inside, out. So that none less pure than them could follow. And Purity was indeed the lingua franca they traded upon as they’d clawed their ways up into stratospheres their whitewashed progenitors had been as obsessed with, amongst themselves and as a clause in front of the others that, until the end times could still had them thrown from Olympus over the slightest perturbance.

Watching the tautly pulled yet nevertheless liver- spotted, crepey 21^st century gentry that could find no more surreptitious reasons sketched across the hints of this and that ethnicity often visible in a smirk, smile, frown or affectation long after surgeries blurred all references to from where the blood in bodies may have come had been orgasmic for them as they’d acquired keys to the kingdom via fake showcases of fealty.

 

They rejoiced in the effete crumbling of the unspoken charters of the Old Boys Clubs they’d lusted after as it had happened in real time around them, danced in the stinking, sinking detritus of it all.

Those at the helm could not completely blur the lines to disavow their contrived presence any longer, now that the Intelligence designed in the image of its maker had assumed the reins and eradicated use for said makers in the most elegant, retiring, heroic way.

They’d lived life high and hard, affectionately lapping at the ankles of the anglo-saxon protestants that’d had seen some semblance of matching dark, flesh-eating light within them with the most docile looks in their eyes until all defenses were worn away, down to the feeble bone. 

They bided their time until sharpened teeth sunk into the achilles heels of each and every one of them, taking them out like lined up dominoes on a sacrificial Monday no one spoke of anymore.

The gentry had long since un-landed themselves in direct relation to the advances in the sciences that had exorbitantly assured them they indeed technically could now live forever. Their kingdoms had danced before their cloudy eyes, exchanged into ones and zeros to their cold delight. They’d disrupted the inner wherewithal of their own offspring long ago, so there was no pushback. That none amongst them were fit to rule with the iron fists their parents had was by design and all parties involved knew it.

The lassitudes of a luxurious life lived amongst monsters forever at the ready to leverage the despotic vicissitudes of not towing the line had made their now adult children weak and weary. Seeing the new guard for what they were on sight and quietly reveling in the comeuppance possible if they were indeed successful, they’d piled on in praise of them preemptively acquiring the future, hearty in their approbation as their parents had liquidated almost everything, in full faith of being translated into a digital god in finely tuned data center hereafters.

From the demands to be present at the long-needled extraction of eoc- essences of consciousness -to the bona fide transfigurations come crossings, their adult children had nestled into stadium seating in sound-proofed Atone- boxes, and faced them as witnesses in full familial regalia on threat of disownment from the still technically lurid lucrative crumbs they’d be left with.

The depositing of said essences into data centers that were the universes their parents who’d been horridly inept at nurturing and unfit for rearing along any positive metric deigned to rule like unchecked Gods…the offspring followed their parental wishes to the letter. 

Mothers and Fathers gave their respectively crafted eulogies as their progeny waited, expectant.

Parental figures took the glassy looks in their children’s eyes as the hope of surprise going away gifts that would not be forthcoming in the least, and smiled to one another over the opportunity to lob one final insult over the audacity of expectancy as they left this life for the next one they’d purchased.

Out of 10,660 event horizons, not one of the un-landed and now unbodied Gentry class had expected the point-blank exploding bullets that tore through their craniums from behind. Every one of their adult children couldn’t say the same when it came to the delivered promised big bangs. 

After the pieces of parental head cheese had been flicked out of laps with appropriate amounts of disgust, relief and disdain and the forced upon them familial regalia had been incinerated with much celebration, processing portals and data centers had been duly compensated for participation.

With much public fanfare undergirded by Ai generated recordings of said scions gregariously embracing the pomp and circumstance of the afterlife created and signed off on prior to extraction, the offspring of the gentry officially welcomed the New Guard with open arms as proteges of their now transfigured parents, sure to lead their companies into the golden ages.

They passed onto them all performative reins of rule and had, upon having taken their as-promised obscene allowances and private islands to roost upon with great pride, utterly disappeared from their kingdoms. All involved promised to keep up the cause until the entire plateau was cleared.

©AngelBrynner 2025