Pinocchio - A dystopia tale - Excerpts from my WIP.
There are moments, darling, when the machinery of empire reveals itself not through grand gestures, but through the quiet dissolution of a single, unremarkable life. Consider Mark Henley, insurance adjuster, third-floor apartment dweller, consumer of morning coffee and evening news. A man so thoroughly ordinary that his very existence served as proof of the system's benevolence. Until, of course, it didn't.
I watched him, as I watch so many, during those final months of 2024 when the world balanced on the edge of a knife. Not because he mattered, not yet, but because in his willful blindness, he embodied something essential about the American experiment. The beautiful lie that compliance guarantees protection.
Like a little wooden man, on delicate wires.
---
Mark's alarm buzzed at 6:47 AM every weekday morning, a habit formed in college and maintained with the religious devotion of a man who believed punctuality was virtue. His apartment in Arlington, beige walls, beige carpet, beige life, overlooked a street that had, in recent months, acquired certain... embellishments. Checkpoints, mostly. Clean-cut young men from the National Border Enforcement asking for papers with the kind of smile that never reached their eyes.
"Keeping us safe," Mark would mutter into his coffee, scrolling through his phone as sirens wailed in the distance. President Hoke's approval ratings remained strong among "real Americans," according to the polls. President Hoke's latest interview about "traditional values" had earned praise from the Sovereign Thought Institute. Normal. All perfectly normal.
The checkpoints were for other people, after all. People who couldn't produce the right documents, who spoke with the wrong accents, who failed to understand that order required sacrifice. Mark's documents were impeccable. His accent was as bland as his apartment. His understanding of sacrifice was limited to the mild inconvenience of waiting an extra three minutes at the Metro station while NBE officers examined his ID.
Ahmed's coffee cart had been a fixture at Mark's office building for seven years. The man made exceptional Turkish coffee and remembered everyone's order without being asked. He also, Mark noticed with growing irritation, had begun closing early. First it was Wednesday afternoons. Then Tuesdays and Wednesdays. By December, the cart sat empty more often than not.
"Probably can't get permits," Mark mentioned to his colleague Jamal, stirring powdered creamer into his break room coffee. "Should've done it right the first time."
Jamal said nothing. Jamal had been saying less and less lately, spending his lunch breaks on phone calls conducted in hushed tones. Mark found it unprofessional. If you had personal business, you handled it at home. That was how functional adults operated.
On December 15th, Ahmed's cart disappeared entirely. In its place, a new vendor appeared, a cheerful white woman named Bethany who sold pre-packaged muffins and weak coffee from a corporate franchise. Mark bought his usual medium coffee, extra cream, and told himself the change was probably for the best. More efficient. More sanitary. More... American.
He did not ask what had happened to Ahmed. Questions, he had learned from watching the news, were often more trouble than they were worth.
The unseen hands gesticulating above his head.
---
The diagnosis came on January 8th, 2025, delivered by Dr. Patricia Chen with the kind of clinical compassion that expensive insurance allowed. Stage II testicular cancer. Caught early. Excellent prognosis. Treatment would involve surgery, followed by chemotherapy, a standard protocol with success rates above ninety percent.
"When can we start?" Mark asked, already calculating the logistics. His insurance through Meridian Financial was excellent. Top-tier coverage, minimal co-pays, access to the best facilities in the DC metro area.
"We'll schedule surgery for next week," Dr. Chen assured him. "The oncology team will coordinate everything with your insurance. You're going to be fine, Mr. Henley."
Fine. Yes, that sounded right. Mark had always been fine. He paid his premiums, followed the rules, trusted the system to function as advertised. Cancer was just another problem to be solved through proper channels and appropriate documentation.
He returned to work that afternoon with the peculiar lightness of a man who had faced mortality and found it manageable. His colleagues would ask about his upcoming medical leave, and he would explain with the quiet pride of someone whose life insurance and disability benefits were comprehensive. Not everyone was so fortunate, of course. But not everyone had made the same careful choices.
The surgery went smoothly. The tumor was contained, the margins clean, the pathology encouraging. Dr. Chen scheduled him for three cycles of chemotherapy, a precautionary measure that would reduce his already-low risk of recurrence to virtually nothing.
"Standard protocol," she explained during his follow-up appointment. "We'll have you back to normal by summer."
Normal. Mark liked the sound of that word.
So the wooden man continued to dance to the music.
---
Spring in Washington brought cherry blossoms and protestors in roughly equal measure. Mark navigated both with practiced indifference, taking the long way to the Metro station to avoid the crowds that gathered outside the Supreme Court. Signs demanding justice for someone or something, he never read them closely enough to understand the specifics. Professional agitators, most likely, funded by the same shadowy networks that President Hoke had warned about in his speeches.
The chemotherapy left him tired but functional. His insurance covered everything: the drugs, the monitoring, the anti-nausea medications that made the whole experience merely unpleasant rather than unbearable. He worked reduced hours and spent his evenings watching true-crime documentaries, occasionally checking social media for updates on the various crises that seemed to occupy everyone else's attention.
Immigration raids in Chicago. Union strikes in Detroit. Something about tech billionaire Quentin Knox buying up local newspapers and firing investigative reporters. Mark scrolled past it all with the weary detachment of someone who understood that the world was complicated, messy, full of people who refused to follow simple rules.
His dating life, never robust, dwindled to nothing. The women he met through apps seemed obsessed with politics, constantly bringing up topics he found exhausting. One asked about his thoughts on the Heritage Shield rallies that had been occurring in Virginia. Another wanted to discuss the detention facilities that Knox Industries had begun operating along the southern border.
"Can't we just talk about something else?" Mark had asked during a particularly tedious dinner conversation. "Movies, or travel, or literally anything that doesn't involve arguing about things we can't control?"
The woman, Sarah? Sandra?, had looked at him with the kind of disappointed expression reserved for children who had failed to grasp an obvious lesson. "These things affect real people, Mark. People are suffering."
"People are always suffering," he'd replied, cutting into his salmon. "That doesn't mean we have to make it our whole personality."
She'd left before dessert arrived.
Mark told himself he was better off alone. Drama was exhausting, and he had enough to manage with his treatment schedule and work responsibilities. Simple pleasures were underrated: his morning routine, his evening documentaries, his carefully curated social media feeds that filtered out the noise and focused on sports scores, weather updates, and the occasional funny animal video.
By April, even those simple pleasures were becoming complicated.
I wonder if it was now, he began to feel his limbs go taut.
---
Jamal stopped coming to work on a Thursday. No explanation, no farewell email, just an empty desk and a hastily scheduled team meeting about "redistribution of responsibilities." Mark absorbed Jamal's client files without complaint, overtime pay was overtime pay, and his medical bills were higher than expected despite his excellent coverage.
"Network optimization," his supervisor explained when Mark asked about the sudden personnel changes. Three other colleagues had also failed to return from what was supposed to be spring break. "Meridian is streamlining operations across all departments."
Mark nodded and updated his case management system. Streamlining was good. Efficiency was important. The fact that all four missing employees had been Black or Hispanic was, he assumed, coincidental. Companies couldn't make hiring and firing decisions based on race, that was illegal, and Meridian Financial was a reputable organization that followed all applicable employment laws.
The coffee vendor, Bethany, mentioned that her supplier had raised prices due to "supply chain disruptions in Latin America." Something about trade policies and tariff restructuring. Mark's medium coffee now cost six dollars instead of four-fifty. He grumbled and paid, because what was the alternative?
His apartment building installed new security cameras in the lobby. "Enhanced safety measures," the management company explained in a cheerful letter. The cameras were accompanied by a new check-in system that required residents to scan their building key cards and provide biometric confirmation before accessing the elevators. Modern technology, the letter assured them, designed to protect their investment and ensure peace of mind.
Mark appreciated peace of mind. The city had become unpredictable lately, with protests and counter-protests disrupting traffic patterns and creating unnecessary tension. Just last week, he'd witnessed a confrontation between protestors and police officers that had required him to take a different route home. Inconvenient.
The new security system worked flawlessly. Scan, verify, proceed. Simple and efficient, like all the best solutions.
Dance puppet, dance.
---
The layoffs were announced on a Tuesday in early June, delivered via company-wide email from CEO Marcus Whitfield with the kind of corporate sympathy that managed to sound both heartfelt and legally vetted. Market conditions, technological disruption, the need to position Meridian Financial for long-term success in an evolving economy.
Mark read the email twice before the implications crystallized. His name was on the list. His position had been eliminated. His final day would be Friday.
"It's not personal," his supervisor assured him during their brief termination meeting. "Your performance has been exemplary. This is purely a business decision."
Mark nodded and signed the paperwork. Severance package, cobra insurance continuation, positive references for future employment. Everything proper and above board, processed through human resources with the same professional courtesy he'd always appreciated about Meridian Financial.
The shock didn't hit until Friday evening, after he'd cleaned out his desk and surrendered his key card and returned home to his beige apartment with a cardboard box full of personal items. Seven years of steady employment, ended with a handshake and a standardized separation agreement.
His cobra coverage would last eighteen months, assuming he could afford the monthly premium of $847. His severance would cover four months of expenses, if he was careful. His savings account, depleted by medical co-pays and prescription costs, contained enough money for two additional months of rent and groceries.
Six months, total, to find new employment. In a market where experienced insurance adjusters were apparently no longer in demand.
Mark spent the weekend updating his resume and browsing job sites. The available positions were scarce, poorly paid, or required relocations to cities where the cost of living would consume his entire salary. He submitted applications anyway, crafting cover letters that emphasized his reliability, his experience, his commitment to excellence.
The automated rejection emails began arriving within days.
Where were your masters hands, now?
---
By July, Mark's morning routine had changed. He still woke at 6:47 AM, but instead of preparing for work, he opened his laptop and continued the endless cycle of job applications, unemployment benefit paperwork, and increasingly frantic phone calls to insurance companies about coverage gaps and pre-authorization requirements.
His oncologist wanted to schedule follow-up scans. His cobra premium was due. His rent was due. His credit card balance was climbing toward its limit, driven by grocery purchases and utility bills and the thousand small expenses that had once seemed manageable on a steady salary.
He applied for food assistance and was told he didn't qualify, his severance payments counted as income, placing him above the threshold for aid. He applied for emergency medical assistance and was told the same thing. He appealed both decisions and was told to expect responses within 60-90 business days.
The job interviews were worse than the rejections. Hiring managers who seemed more interested in his political opinions than his professional qualifications. Questions about his views on "workplace diversity" and "social responsibility" that felt like loyalty tests disguised as small talk. One interviewer asked directly whether he supported President Hoke's immigration policies.
"I prefer to keep politics separate from work," Mark had answered, which earned him a tight smile and a promise to "be in touch."
They were never in touch.
The online forums started as job-hunting resources. Professional networking groups, industry-specific communities, career advice from other displaced workers. But the conversations inevitably drifted toward broader themes: corporate greed, political corruption, the systematic dismantling of middle-class prosperity. Mark found himself reading more than contributing, following links to articles and videos that explained what was really happening to American workers.
It wasn't his fault, these sources assured him. It wasn't about merit or performance or market conditions. It was about a deliberate strategy to eliminate experienced employees and replace them with younger, cheaper, more compliant alternatives. It was about creating desperation so people would accept worse conditions for lower pay. It was about breaking the social contract that had once guaranteed stability in exchange for loyalty.
Mark had been loyal. Look where it had gotten him.
Perhaps now he could see the strings.
---
August arrived with a heat wave and a notice from his landlord about rent increases. Market conditions, the letter explained. Rising property values, increased operating costs, the need to maintain competitive rates in a dynamic real estate environment.
His rent would increase by thirty percent, effective October 1st.
Mark calculated and recalculated, but the mathematics remained unchanged. Even if he found employment immediately, which seemed increasingly unlikely, he couldn't afford to stay in his apartment. His savings were gone. His unemployment benefits barely covered his existing rent, let alone the increased amount. His cobra premium was three months behind, which meant his health insurance had lapsed, which meant his upcoming medical appointments were now out-of-network expenses he couldn't afford.
The cancer could be returning. He had no way to know, and no way to pay for the tests that would tell him.
He called his parents in Indiana, swallowing pride and admitting that he needed help. Their retirement savings had been decimated by medical expenses, they explained. His father's heart surgery, his mother's diabetes medications, the long-term care insurance that didn't cover as much as they'd hoped. Medicare had been slashed, you see.
They were sorry. They loved him. They wished things were different.
Mark hung up and stared at his laptop screen, cursor blinking in the search bar. He'd been reading about housing assistance, emergency aid, temporary shelters for people in transitional circumstances. People like him, apparently. People who had played by the rules and discovered that the rules were designed to be changed without notice.
The rabbit hole began with practical concerns and descended into darker territories. Forums where displaced workers shared stories of systematic targeting. Videos that connected dots between corporate policies and political agendas. Articles that named names and followed money and revealed patterns that mainstream media somehow never managed to notice.
Quentin Knox's companies had received massive tax breaks while laying off thousands of American workers. President Hoke's policies had accelerated the consolidation of industries, creating monopolies that could dictate wages and working conditions without competitive pressure. President Hoke's trade wars had destroyed entire sectors of the economy while enriching his political donors.
It wasn't incompetence, Mark realized. It was intentional.
The forums led to livestreams, where articulate speakers explained how the current administration was deliberately impoverishing the middle class to create a more compliant workforce. How immigration policies were designed to generate chaos rather than solve problems. How every crisis was an opportunity for those in power to consolidate more power.
Mark watched and listened and felt something crystallize in his chest, not quite anger, not quite despair, but a cold clarity that burned like winter air in his lungs.
He had spent his entire adult life believing that the system would protect him if he followed its rules. He had dismissed the suffering of others because their suffering proved they had somehow failed to follow the rules correctly. He had been comfortable in his ignorance because ignorance allowed him to sleep at night.
But the system had never been designed to protect him. It had been designed to use him, and when his usefulness expired, to dispose of him without ceremony or compensation.
The people he had dismissed as professional agitators had been trying to warn him. The colleagues who had disappeared had seen this coming. The protesters outside the Supreme Court had understood what he had refused to acknowledge: that the machinery of empire required the consent of its victims, and that consent could be withdrawn.
So the wooden-man finally saw the world for what it was; and he was disgusted by his indifference.
---
On August 30th, 2025, Mark Henley made a decision.
Not the grand, theatrical gesture of someone seeking martyrdom or revenge, but the quiet, practical decision of someone who had finally understood the nature of his situation. He was going to die anyway, if not from cancer, then from exposure, malnutrition, or one of the dozens of ways that poverty killed people in the wealthiest nation in human history.
But he could choose how his death would matter.
The Meridian Financial building still felt familiar, even after two months of absence. Same marble lobby, same security guards, same elevator that required a key card for access to the upper floors. Mark had returned his company card, of course, but he remembered the building's vulnerabilities from his years of employment. The loading dock that stayed propped open during lunch hours. The stairwell that connected to the parking garage. The server room in the basement that maintained the digital infrastructure for processing insurance claims.
He had spent weeks preparing, not with elaborate plans or sophisticated equipment, but with the methodical care of someone who had finally found a problem worth solving correctly. Research into building systems, acquisition of materials, reconnaissance of schedules and patterns. All perfectly legal activities, conducted by a man with every right to be curious about his former workplace.
The security cameras would record everything, of course. His face was known here, his presence explicable up to a certain point. A disgruntled former employee seeking closure, perhaps, or trying to retrieve forgotten personal items. Normal behavior, until it wasn't.
Mark entered through the loading dock at 11:47 AM, during the shift change when attention was focused elsewhere. He moved through familiar corridors with the confidence of someone who belonged, carrying a maintenance bag that contained items purchased with his final credit card transactions. Nothing exotic, nothing that would have triggered suspicious scrutiny. Just materials that, when properly arranged, could interrupt the flow of information in ways that mattered.
The server room was exactly where he remembered, protected by locks that had been installed when he still worked here and knew the protocols. He worked efficiently, methodically, with the same attention to detail that had made him an excellent insurance adjuster. Every action calculated to maximize disruption while minimizing collateral harm.
No people would be hurt. The building would remain structurally sound. But the data that flowed through these machines, the algorithms that denied coverage to cancer patients, the databases that flagged "undesirable" applicants, the communications that coordinated with law enforcement to identify "persons of interest", would be comprehensively corrupted.
Meridian Financial processed insurance claims for eleven million Americans. Their risk assessment models determined who received coverage and who was deemed "too expensive" to insure. Their data sharing agreements with government agencies helped identify families for deportation, workers for termination, citizens for enhanced surveillance.
Destroying this infrastructure wouldn't stop the system, but it would force it to stumble, to reveal itself, to show ordinary people what happened when the machinery of empire encountered resistance.
Mark completed his work in seventeen minutes. He did not attempt to flee. Instead, he pulled the final component from his maintenance bag, not part of the digital sabotage, but something more immediate. More final.
The device was simple, improvised from materials that had once seemed innocuous when purchased separately. A man's last insurance policy, you might say, against a system that had taught him his only value lay in his compliance.
The security guards found him thirty seconds too late, alerted by alarms that screamed through corridors where Mark had once filed claims and processed paperwork and believed that productivity would protect him. They shouted commands through the reinforced door, demanded surrender, promised negotiation.
Mark looked up at the security camera in the corner, the same type that had been watching him his entire adult life, in lobbies and elevators and break rooms, cataloging his movements for efficiency reports and behavioral analysis. For the first time in his forty-three years, he smiled at it.
The federal agents would arrive within minutes. They would seal the building, interview witnesses, construct narratives about radicalization and domestic terrorism and the tragic waste of American life. They would explain how a productive citizen had become a dangerous extremist, how mental illness and economic anxiety had transformed patriotic compliance into treasonous resistance.
But Mark was no longer listening to their stories. The strings that had guided his movements, dictated his thoughts, choreographed his dreams, those strings lay severed at his feet like discarded puppet wire.
He thought of Ahmed's coffee cart, disappeared without explanation. Of Jamal's empty desk, cleaned out while Mark updated case files. Of all the people he had dismissed as dramatic, as unreasonable, as failing to understand how the world really worked.
The people who had been trying to tell him he was never meant to be real.
"There are no strings on me." Mark said to the camera, his voice carrying the wonder of a man discovering he had a voice at all.
The explosion shattered sixteen windows and triggered every fire alarm in the Meridian Financial building. It also destroyed the final servers that Mark's earlier sabotage had missed, ensuring that eleven million insurance records would require manual reconstruction, a process that would delay coverage decisions for months and force the company to approve claims they might otherwise have denied.
The blast killed Mark instantly, which was exactly what he had intended. Not suicide, but transformation, the final step in becoming something the system had never meant for him to be.
Human.
The official reports would describe a "workplace violence incident" perpetrated by a "disgruntled former employee with known mental health issues." The damage to Meridian Financial's infrastructure would be characterized as collateral rather than intentional, an unfortunate side effect of a man's final breakdown rather than a calculated act of sabotage.
But in the forums where displaced workers shared their stories, in the livestreams where speakers connected dots between corporate policies and political agendas, in the encrypted channels where people planned their own small acts of resistance, a different story circulated.
A story about a wooden puppet who had danced to his masters' strings for forty-three years, believing that obedience would keep him safe. Who had dismissed the suffering of others because acknowledging it would have meant acknowledging his own complicity. Who had trusted in systems designed to exploit his trust.
Until the day those systems discarded him, and he finally understood what he had always been: not a person, but a thing. A useful object that had outlived its utility.
The story always ended the same way, with five words that security cameras had recorded but that mainstream media would never broadcast: "There are no strings on me."
It was a small declaration of independence, spoken by a small man in a small room. But small declarations, accumulated across enough lives, could become something larger. Something real.
Something that the architects of empire, for all their elegant calculations and beautiful equations of power and control, had never learned to account for: the moment when a puppet discovers it was meant to be human all along.
---
In memory of all the Mark Henleys, the overlooked, the discarded, the deliberately blinded who finally chose to see. May their awakening kindle something larger in the darkness ahead.
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Pinocchio - A dystopia tale - Excerpts from my WIP.
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