Chương 224: Chapter 223: The Lame Duck (01/18/2016)

DATE: Monday, January 18, 2016 LOCATION: The White House | The Oval Office, Washington D. C. LOCAL TIME: 09: 15 PM EST The television mounted on the mahogany wall of the Oval Office didn't flicker; the resolution was too high for legacy interference, but the broadcast itself was tearing the executive branch apart at the seams. On screen, U. S. Senator Chase Tillman stood before a forest of microphones at a hastily assembled press conference in San Diego.

"The current administration has treated infrastructure as a weapon of political coercion," Chase's voice resonated from the speakers, calm, authoritative, and utterly devoid of rhetorical fluff.

"By nationalizing the Palladiums and freezing the DV-8/Ley Lines network, they haven't secured the nation. They have induced a structural heart attack. This is why I am announcing my candidacy for President of the United States of America. We are going to turn the lights back on." I pressed the remote, muttering a command to mute the audio. The silence that rushed back into the room was suffocating. I looked across the Resolute Desk at Robert Ellison.

My National Security Advisor sat slumped in a leather chair, looking as if he had aged twenty years in the span of four days. Ever since the afternoon Chad Tillman had walked into this room, spoken a string of ancient syllables, and violently severed whatever had been riding inside Ellison's nervous system, my advisor had been a ghost. The cold, calculating Nephilim file that had steered his body for decades was gone. His original, mind-wiped incarnate soul was back in control.

Ellison now spent half his day simply staring at his own hands in absolute terror, trying to remember his children's names and wondering how he had arrived in the West Wing. The rest of my senior cabinet was a graveyard of comatose reboots. The Chief of Staff, the Director of Intelligence, the Secretaries of Defense and State—all of them hit by the same localized mass-exorcism.

They were wandering the halls of power with decades of blackout amnesia, weeping in their offices, desperately trying to operate a superpower they had absolutely no memory of governing. My gaze drifted to the empty space just behind Ellison's chair. The space where Valiant Thor and Indrid Cold used to stand. For sixty-two years, the Oval Office had never truly belonged to the sitting President.

The Aesir had been the true architects of American continuity, coordinating the cabinets and providing the institutional memory that kept the gears of the empire turning from the shadows. Now, the puppet masters were dead. A classified NRO folder resting near my elbow held the gravimetric satellite photogrammetry of the Wilkes Land crater in Antarctica. Gladsheim had experienced a catastrophic internal pressure collapse. The telluric energy grid pulsing from the South Pole had flatlined.

The Aesir were gone, and I was left sitting at the head of a table surrounded by hollowed-out husks who didn't even know the nuclear launch protocols. I had followed Valiant Thor's advice to the letter. Send Chad Tillman to Benghazi, Thor had instructed. Isolate him. Let the local militias burn the compound to the ground. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

And when Tillman inevitably returned from the ashes—because the Aesir knew kinetics alone wouldn't stop him—Thor had handed me the executive orders. Seize his corporate infrastructure through Eminent Domain. Break his monopoly on the surface world. It was supposed to be the masterstroke. Instead, it was a suicide pact. I pulled a thick, leather-bound Treasury briefing from the center of the desk. When Evelyn Vance had accepted the eminent domain orders on national television, she had agreed to take standard U. S.

Treasury Bonds as compensation for the seized infrastructure, flawlessly adhering to the Fifth Amendment. But the Fair Market Value of the transcontinental maglev, the Ley Line arterials, and the decentralized dark fiber network interconnecting the Palladiums exceeded thirty-two trillion dollars. By executing the seizure, we hadn't nationalized a company. We had issued a volume of sovereign debt that completely crippled the Federal Reserve. Archstone Capital now held the mortgage on the United States government.

But the financial checkmate was only half the trap. The operational reality—the part that had the Joint Chiefs currently screaming at each other in the Situation Room—was infinitely more humiliating. We had parked military transports on the maglev tracks. We had placed Department of Energy lockouts on the primary utility junctions of the Ley Line Hexagons. We legally owned the grid. But the hardware remained a total black box.

The cyber-warfare divisions at Fort Meade had spent the last seventy-two hours trying to brute-force the local servers. They couldn't even find a directory tree. The science powering the grid was so fundamentally decoupled from standard computer technology that our federal engineers couldn't parse a single line of code. The Silver Code AI was actively generating its own compiler layers in response to our intrusion pings, mutating its encryption sixty times a second across the closed-loop network.

We had captured the most advanced infrastructure on the planet, and we had absolutely no idea how to turn it on. The grocery shelves in the major municipal tiers were already thinning. The inter-bank lending markets were freezing. In order to prevent the total collapse of the North American supply chain, my administration was currently drafting a humiliated, desperate federal contract.

We were going to have to hire Fractal Systems back as private contractors just to manage the very infrastructure we had bankrupted the country to seize from them. I set the Treasury briefing down. My hands were shaking. I could not run the executive branch of the United States with a Secretary of Defense who thought it was 1994 and a Chief of Staff who cried when he looked in the mirror. I needed the institutional memory back. I needed the Nephilim.

The Greada Treaty was still active, but with the Aesir eradicated, the power dynamic had violently shifted. The mediators were dead. The senior partners of the treaty were now the Draco. I glanced at my watch. Marine One was waiting on the South Lawn. In thirty minutes, I would be flying to New Mexico. We were quietly loading my senior cabinet members onto stretchers in the basement of the West Wing, heavily sedated, to be loaded onto a transport plane.

I was taking the highest-ranking officials of the United States government to Dulce Base. I was going to wheel my own people into the lowest, black-budget levels of a subterranean nightmare factory, and I was going to beg the Draco to overwrite their souls again. I knew the Draco would demand a horrific new price to save my administration. I knew they wanted to harvest the population, and I knew I was going to sign the executive orders creating their "Federal Relief Zones" to feed them.

It was the ultimate betrayal of the American people, but I had no choice. I needed a functioning staff by Monday morning. I leaned back in my leather chair and looked up at the muted television screen. Chase Tillman was still answering questions from the press corps, his expression smooth, relaxed, and entirely unbothered by the federal machine arrayed against him. He wasn't running a campaign to win a seat in Washington. He was arriving to manage the foreclosure.