it’s all fiction now

Intercepted a broadcast looped on a dead band, an infomercial for salvation packaged as a public service announcement, promising that the corrections to history were minor, benevolent, necessary, that certain disappearances were statistical, that certain collapses were “market adjustments,” and I listened to the cadence of the voice and recognized it as a composite AI, stitched together from a hundred trusted figures whose faces I once believed, and I felt something inside me harden because the lie was too polished, too mathematically kind, and when we compared the transmission to our archived tapes the waveform aligned perfectly except for the parts where entire cities had been replaced by parking lots and entire movements by footnotes, and it hit me that the revision isn’t about control of the present, it’s about pre-forgiving the future, about making sure that when the reckoning arrives there will be no record of who struck the match.