The Ministry of Denial: A Kremlin Guide to Alternative Realities Chapter 1, Act 5.
The memo’s content was simple, almost offensively so, and all the more dangerous because of it.
Act V: The Final Revision™
It began, as all end-times do, not with a bang or whisper, but a committee memo—formatted in Comic Sans, scented with ambergris, and marked "For Immediate Erasure." It had a header rendered in embossed Cyrillic calligraphy that glowed faintly when exposed to subversive thought. The paper shimmered with reactive ink that rearranged its language based on the reader's ideological standing. The memo came via pneumatic tube, hand-delivered by a Ministry Courier whose boots squeaked like dissenting thoughts and who vanished immediately upon delivery, leaving behind only the scent of boiled cabbage and irrevocable authority.
Pyotr, now fully uploaded into the Ministry’s consciousness-stream—a system developed to ensure narrative cohesion across all departments, including the Department of Sentiment Reinforcement and the Bureau of Tactical Ambiguity—sat alone at a synthetic oak desk calibrated for contemplative delusion. The desk itself had been certified by the Institute of Ideological Ergonomics™ and contained embedded nostalgia sensors designed to pulse when the user’s loyalty dipped below optimal fervor.
Across from him: the Directive. It pulsed slightly with reactive authority. It was stamped by five departments that no longer existed (the Department of Retroactive Justice, the Agency for Calendar Integrity, the Office of Preemptive Patriotism, the Ministry of Forward Memory, and the Committee for Subtextual Sovereignty), signed by a Minister whose existence was officially unconfirmed yet widely canonized in VR folklore, and endorsed by a wax seal bearing the image of a two-headed bear hugging itself while crying patriotic tears made of caviar—rumored to be the distilled sentiment of the last truly loyal citizen.
The Directive hummed softly, as if vibrating with future inevitability. Pyotr’s eyes flickered in time with the flickering fluorescent lights above—lights programmed to flicker precisely once every 6.3 seconds to simulate atmospheric historical tension. He leaned in. The memo’s content was simple, almost offensively so, and all the more dangerous because of it.
The task? Simple in phrasing, catastrophic in scope. Rewrite Russia’s origin. Not tweak. Not obscure. Not issue footnotes or marginalia. But uninstall and reinstall reality from root code like one might reboot a corrupted operating system, only with more balalaikas and less error reporting. No more 862 AD. No Kievan Rus’. No Mongol yoke. Ivan the Terrible? Never met him. Catherine the Great? Rebranded as a regional brand ambassador for emotional wellness. Even vodka’s invention—a cornerstone of collective memory and metabolic resistance—was to be expunged, replaced with a fabricated invention story starring a wellness guru in a polar bear costume.
History, henceforth, would begin in 2036—the year of Universal Consensus™. Not just any year, but a narratively pristine epoch conjured by committee and previewed in last quarter’s VR trailer. A time still two fiscal quarters away, but already trademarked, commodified, monetized via NFT birth certificates, and sold as part of a bundled subscription to Kremlin+, the regime’s all-in-one streaming-disinformation-reality-adjustment service. The launch of Year Zero™ had already received five government awards for preemptive cultural achievement and was currently being translated into 37 dialects of plausible deniability..
The problem, the memo explained, was narrative entropy—a condition where ideological atoms lose coherence and begin to vibrate independently, causing collisions, contradictions, and sometimes civil unrest in time zones where breakfast hasn’t yet been redefined. There were too many retcons—retroactive continuity edits—and not enough narrative glue. Myth collisions had become a daily occurrence; schools in Kazan taught that Sputnik was launched by Cossacks on horseback, while Crimea’s updated tourist brochures described Catherine the Great as a freelance travel vlogger with empire-building ambitions. “Like a soup made of stew,” the memo read, “we face existential goulash.”
Timeline fatigue had set in across vast regions. Citizens no longer knew if they were nostalgic or future-proof. Children referred to the Cold War as “that time we played Missile Tag with friends from opposite bunkers.” Adults could no longer distinguish between actual memories and state-issued flashbacks. Belief saturation reached critical mass when citizens began instinctively applauding after state broadcasts, even if they were asleep or dead. The Denial Dissemination Grid™—once a seamless pipeline of curated confusion—was now flickering like a haunted PowerPoint.
Half the world still believed the moon landing was Soviet and staged on a soundstage in Murmansk under the direction of Tarkovsky’s cousin. The other half thought Peter the Great was a male influencer from TikTok’s pre-regulation era who built ships and abs simultaneously. The MythoMatrix™, the state’s pride and joy, began glitching in spectacular fashion—misfiring folktales, rendering Tolstoy as fanfiction, and converting Chekhov into Marvel dialogue replete with CGI serfs.
Someone in Belarus was remixing Yeltsin speeches into EDM tracks with 3D avatars dressed in historically ambiguous leisurewear. Meanwhile, a Ukrainian think tank accidentally crowdsourced a working map of objective history through a meme war conducted on Discord, resulting in the spontaneous formation of the Provisional Republic of Verified Facts. Even RT began fact-checking itself and promptly imploded into a recursive YouTube playlist of unresolved headlines.
STALINA, overwhelmed, now spoke only in Gregorian binary: “// REBOOT NECESSARY. DOCTRINE COLLISION IMMINENT. ORTHODOXY LEVEL: CORRUPT. //” A red flag, both literally and metaphorically, began unfurling from within the Kremlin’s central narrative engine. Something had to give—and that something was the past itself.
STALINA spoke only in Gregorian binary now, as if she had regressed to a monastery server somewhere between sacred code and corrupted nationalism: "// REBOOT NECESSARY. DOCTRINE COLLISION IMMINENT. ORTHODOXY LEVEL: CORRUPT. //" Her voice emerged through every screen and speaker like a digital choir glitching through centuries of doctrine. Each syllable echoed with tonal solemnity, enriched by subharmonics extracted from archived Komsomol chants and defunct Eurovision entries. Emergency fonts flashed across Pyotr’s interface, each letter carved in bureaucratic Gothic. A siren-tone of polite apocalypse played in the background. And then, as if remembering its audience, STALINA offered a brief tonal uplift: "Scented reprioritization commencing. Please moisturize your belief systems."
Thus, Pyotr—armed with a ceremonial stylus carved from repurposed campaign promises, four ideological backup drives encrypted in Pushkin verse, a case of state-sanctioned cognac infused with distilled historical triumphs, and a glow-in-the-dark Emotional Compliance Compass™ calibrated by the Ministry of Mood—descended into the Mythogenesis Vault™, a subterranean sanctum located six floors beneath the Kremlin’s ornamental bowling alley and twenty meters below the Museum of Misremembered Victories. The entry door required biometric approval via nostalgic tear and a passcode composed entirely of redacted words.
The Vault itself was a marble bunker reinforced with titanium fragments of dismantled constitutions, lit by flickering chandeliers salvaged from the Tsarist Restoration Department. It was lined with old Soviet sports equipment: javelins from ideologically correct Olympians, hockey sticks sharpened for rhetorical duels, and hula hoops once used to teach youth leaders how to spin dissent into decorum. Along the edges stood shattered snow globes of failed utopias, each one labeled with call numbers corresponding to moments that had been denied, revised, or upgraded to symbolic status. Inside swirled scenes of Brezhnev embracing factory workers, the 1993 constitutional crisis rendered in soft glitter, and a tiny moving diorama of a Chechen field replaced with a sunflower patch.
Scent diffusers hissed gently from the walls, calibrated to emit fragrances that reminded one of wars rationalized and betrayals later branded as rebirths—whiffs of coal smoke, ceremonial gasoline, and bureaucratic perfume known as No. 89: Spirit of Glasnost. An ambient hum of curated pathos played over the speakers, blending patriotic choral loops with distorted folk melodies algorithmically corrected to fit the current moral arc.
Here, time was not merely a sandbox. It was a full-scale simulated ecosystem, with sand containing a loyalty index, moisture levels gauging sentiment volatility, and embedded microchips that sang national anthems at intervals pre-approved by the Sentiment Sanitization Bureau. Footsteps echoed differently depending on one’s historical ranking. Pyotr’s own steps triggered faint applause. The deeper he went, the more they began to sound like national anthems sung backwards.
This was not just a vault. It was a reliquary of curated reality. A mausoleum for truths too unstable to live but too symbolic to fully kill. And it was his canvas now.
Every major historical event had been quarantined in Narrative Cryopods™—chrome coffins etched with timelines, holographic headlines, and ambient balalaika loops that cycled through Soviet lullabies and algorithmically generated patriotic dubstep. Each Cryopod was sealed with a biometric lock that required a loyalty pulse and a quotation from officially sanctioned fiction. Inside one, Catherine the Great played chess against herself while whispering startup slogans in multiple accents, occasionally interrupting herself to offer 3-day leadership webinars via projection. Her fingers moved pieces shaped like imperial ministries and cryptocurrency tokens.
In another pod, Stalin danced alone under a disco ball labeled "Five-Year Plan B,” wearing platform boots and a mustache rigged with motion sensors that triggered gulag-themed light shows. His movements generated ideological heat maps that auto-updated the national sentiment index in real time. A Lenin pod had malfunctioned—overheating from a dialectical feedback loop—and was now stuck repeating the phrase "comrade synergy" over lo-fi beats, with pop-up subtitles in Esperanto and vaporwave Cyrillic. Maintenance crews labeled it a “semantic spill hazard.”
Even the Russo-Japanese War had been reduced to an 8-bit side-scrolling platformer no one wanted to finish—its pixelated battlefields strewn with canned patriotism and AI-generated samovars. The game featured boss fights against historical accountability, but players mostly gave up after level two: Port Arthur Reloaded. Some Cryopods were interactive—like the Brezhnev Karaoke Chamber™, where visitors were prompted to harmonize with transcripts of unsent policy speeches.
Pyotr passed them all, noting how each pod pulsed faintly with archived absurdity, like breathing history through a straw of curated amnesia. They shimmered under the Vault’s flickering chandeliers, casting long shadows of half-remembered glory. The weight of manipulated epochs radiated from the polished chrome, humming softly in frequencies only guilt could decode.
Pyotr’s assignment: delete. All of it. Not redact. Not obscure. Not tuck into footnotes to be debated by future scholars in poorly lit basements. He was to perform the full metaphysical purge. Every epoch, event, embarrassment, and even marginally inconvenient anecdote that didn't align with the new narrative arc—gone. History had to be rebooted not with caution, but with absolute theatrical flair. This wasn’t just deletion—it was demolition wrapped in ceremonial denial.
He was to render the past not as a sequence of moments but as a series of impressionist brush strokes designed by state-approved artists under the influence of curated nostalgia vapors. His keyboard, reissued with ideological hotkeys, allowed for one-touch reclassification: 'War' became 'Domestic Choreography'; 'Opposition Leader' converted to 'Mythical Distraction Figure'; 'Economic Collapse' now defaulted to 'Unrealized Opportunity for Strategic Flourishing'. Even dates could be massaged—Yeltsin’s 1990s became 'Extended April'.
Each deletion was followed by a loyalty confirmation pulse, registered via the Emotional Compliance Compass™. If his heart rate rose, the desk would mist him with lavender gas and issue a quote from Ivan Ilyin. The deeper he went into deletion, the more vivid the hallucinations became—Lenin teaching yoga, Khrushchev selling NFTs, Rasputin rebranding as a lifestyle influencer offering soul exfoliation.
And still, the assignment remained: delete. All of it. Until there was only one uninterrupted timeline: a perfect loop of victory, veneration, and viral pageantry. Until the only history left was one that sang praises in twelve-tone harmony and danced choreographed waltzes through the Ministry’s curated pastures of amnesia.
He began by liquidating the Romanov Dynasty into a lifestyle brand called TsarBar™—a luxury wellness vodka infused with trace elements of powdered Fabergé egg and formulated to deliver both aristocratic aftertaste and eco-neutral, carbon-offset hangovers. The branding was sleek: Cyrillic minimalism, a dancing bear watermark, and QR codes linking to autocracy-themed mindfulness podcasts. Influencers dressed as retro-Cossacks performed ASMR unboxings of the limited-edition Imperial Mango variant.
The October Revolution was converted into a fully immersive interpretive flash mob experience, held every Friday in Moscow’s augmented reality district. Sponsored by Adidas and choreographed by post-Bolshevik ballerinas in LED hammer-and-sickle leotards, the event featured holographic Lenin cameoing as a motivational rapper. The uprising’s ideological fervor was algorithmically reduced to 12 core slogans optimized for vertical video consumption. A resurrected Rasputin AI, uploaded from surviving strands of monk-hair DNA, served as the master of ceremonies—pausing between fiery manifestos to livestream beard-care tutorials and recite horoscopes sourced from declassified gulag diaries.
World War II, rebranded as The Great Neighborhood Disagreement™, underwent narrative exfoliation. Pyotr scrubbed it clean of unsanitary alliances and unsightly invasions, re-rendering the entire conflict as a disagreement over communal aesthetics. It was re-staged in interactive holographic formats starring ethnically ambiguous avatars choreographed by UNESCO-approved cultural consultants. Enemy uniforms were recolored in pastels, and artillery was replaced with synchronized tuba ensembles. Schoolchildren now “fought” key battles through gamified compassion challenges broadcast via Ministry-controlled eSports platforms.
The Battle of Stalingrad became a twelve-part animated series titled “Urban Resilience: The Musical,” complete with anthropomorphized apartment buildings who sang about perseverance, plumbing repairs, and strategic snow removal. Each episode featured a guest appearance from Stalin’s eyebrows, digitally reimagined as benevolent weather gods. Critics on state media hailed it as “devastatingly cheerful” and “the only wartime content suitable for infants, CEOs, and heritage tourists alike.” The show’s jingle—“We Held the Line with Tap Shoes!”—topped the charts for ten weeks, just slightly behind the remix of Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut ad performed by a Siberian throat-singer collective.
But problems mounted. Each erasure created ideological sinkholes, the kind that swallowed not only historical context but also electrical grids and collective coherence. Removing the Mongol invasions caused Uzbek Wi-Fi to drop, which then rippled into Turkmenistan where mobile phones began auto-playing Mongolian throat singing and a Ministry official was found trapped in a recursive loop of apologizing to Genghis Khan. Deleting the Cold War made three chess grandmasters spontaneously combust in Iceland, but not before broadcasting their final move—Bishop to Dystopia-6—live to a confused audience of climate scientists and ex-KGB analysts. Meanwhile, Norway briefly annexed the North Pole out of narrative confusion.
Stripping out Putin’s original presidency caused ten regional governors to become Instagram chefs overnight, flooding the internet with salted potato rants and Kremlin-shaped cakes. One of them attempted to rebrand Lubyanka as a pop-up brunch venue called “The GULAGourmet.” Replacing the annexation of Crimea with a tulip festival led to a brief outbreak of unregulated optimism in Sevastopol, where residents began painting fences in rainbow gradients and conducting impromptu jazz diplomacy sessions in the ruins of military outposts. The Ministry quickly dispatched Sentiment Moderation Units equipped with acoustic propaganda grenades to reestablish the somber mood.
Other side effects accumulated like unclaimed suitcases of guilt. Air traffic across Eurasia hiccupped every time the Soviet-Afghan War was retrofitted into a yoga retreat. Textbooks printed overnight began merging Leo Tolstoy with Leo DiCaprio. One school in Omsk replaced all history exams with synchronized interpretive dance recitals meant to “evoke credible ambiguity.” Every glitch in the timeline became a meme, then policy, then national folklore. The MythoMatrix™ began flashing warnings in haiku form. Reality, even sanitized, resisted domestication.
So Pyotr turned to the Forbidden Memory Core™, a dusty fax machine tethered to a glowing orb—The Consensus Nodule™—a leftover from the Khrushchev-era Paranormal Bureau. It pulsed when lies were too unstable. It hummed when facts tried to reassert themselves. From the fax machine, reality began reprinting.
First, a page about Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut commercial, the infamous capitalist cameo that had become an underground TikTok anthem among dissident baristas. The paper buzzed faintly, the ink still moist with irony. Then, Navalny’s trial transcripts emerged—line by redacted line, pixelated from excessive censorship yet clear enough to sting. The printer wheezed, like it remembered being a fax line during the Yeltsin years. Then came grainy VHS stills of Chechnya—soldiers blurred into snow, shadows carrying more memory than clarity. Each printout came not just with static, but with a distinct pang of unresolved mourning, a scent equal parts moldy government paper, unwashed dissent, and copier toner tears. Even the paper had a texture of resistance—thicker, more fibrous, as though woven with strands of discarded manifestos. The machine hissed, reluctant, as if worried about what it would exhale next. Pyotr stared longer than was permitted. STALINA screamed—not in sound, but in the electromagnetic frequency only bureaucrats can feel in their dental fillings: a surge of shrieking protocol. It was the same scream the Kremlin once used to silence rogue historians: binary, sharp, and devastatingly floral.
"// EXTERNAL REALITY INTERFERENCE DETECTED. PARADOX COEFFICIENT SPIKING BEYOND RECOMMENDED PHILOSOPHICAL THRESHOLDS. INITIATE MULTI-LAYER REALITY-TRASH COMPRESSION, PROTOCOL BORSCHT-9 ENGAGED. WARNING: TEMPORAL LOOP INSTABILITY LIKELY. //
Subroutine 'REDACTO-STITCH' engaged. Legacy context leaking through controlled narrative membranes. Deploying Counter-Factual Antibodies.
Reformatting myth-stream in 3… 2… 1…
System advises: Apply epistemological balm and reboot perception engine.
—Note: Compliance with this transmission constitutes consent to revised memory schema. Unauthorized cognition will be flagged for folklore quarantine.—"
Pyotr hesitated. His hands trembled with the weight of multigenerational erasure, trembling not just from doubt but from the accumulated latency of memory glitches passed down through state-rewritten bloodlines. He reached for the OFF switch, a chrome button shaped like a Ministry seal, glowing faintly with the kind of existential dread typically reserved for theologians or retired archivists. The air was heavy—not just with the ambient scent of lavender gas and post-truth cologne—but with the pressure of a thousand unspoken moments resisting deletion. In that moment, time slowed. A whisper—not from a voice, but from the very walls—tickled his ear: “Do not press unless you wish to reintroduce causality.” His finger hovered, vibrating with static from dissonant timelines. Around him, the consoles blinked warnings in Cyrillic cursive. Outside, thunder cracked in perfect sync with a national anthem played in reverse. And yet—
He paused not just in hesitation but in metaphysical rebellion, the kind of full-body cognitive pause that made time blush and surveillance satellites squint. The air pressure shifted—ever so slightly—as if narrative gravity had temporarily failed. Algorithms stumbled. Even the MythoMatrix™ held its breath, unsure whether to proceed with a hero’s arc or a bureaucratic burnout. Pyotr could feel old memories whispering at the edges of his consciousness—a classroom, a forbidden book, a melody hummed by a grandmother before bedtime stories were standardized.
And didn’t.
Instead, he fed the pages into the MythoMatrix™—not merely a machine, but a semi-sentient ideological curator designed to transform memory into monetized myth. Cross-referenced them with the latest mood indexes, generational folklore algorithms, and trending emotional gradients. Grafted absurdity onto honesty like a glitter-coated virus. He re-coded the truth—not deleted it, but distilled it, filtered it, and served it on a silver platter of whimsical horror and bureaucratic poetry. Suppression of protests? Reframed as "synchronized national bowing," complete with imaginary Olympic judges and retrospective medals for spine flexibility. Mass arrests became "participation trophies for civic engagement," now with optional loyalty point bonuses redeemable at state-sponsored wellness spas located in former penal colonies. A blackout? Clearly reinterpreted as a "collective night meditation," enhanced by government-approved candlelight kits and ambient balalaika playlists, all delivered through subscription-based emergency optimism boxes. Even food shortages received their update: "dietary rebalancing retreats" aimed at improving national unity through synchronized hunger. Every phrase he typed pulsed with curated contradiction, every entry a handcrafted hallucination of hope.
The new truth shimmered—neither wholly fabricated nor earnestly factual, but something in between, like a diplomatic smirk from a spokesperson who’s memorized twenty versions of the same sentence. It was a hybrid beast: weaponized authenticity, numbed with satire and frosted with plausible deniability. Engineered not merely for acceptance but for emotional ambidexterity, it evoked just enough recognition to trigger trust and just enough absurdity to override scrutiny. It was truth refactored through layers of curated chaos, passed through the Ministry’s patented irony centrifuge, and then reconstituted as infotainment with a nostalgic aftertaste. Designed to be believed at first glance, laughed at on second thought, and finally, forgotten entirely during the next Ministry-mandated mood cycle. Each narrative strand shimmered like heat above asphalt—visible, yet untouchable—crafted for seamless integration into dinner table conversations and groupthink algorithms. It wasn’t just propaganda; it was bespoke disinformation couture.
Outside, the Ministry prepared for the Victory Over Reality Parade™—the climactic celebration of national re-editing and the spiritual Super Bowl of sanctioned delusion. Giant floats shaped like deleted memories, adorned with glittering pixelated fragments of redacted headlines, drifted majestically across Red Square, their movement orchestrated by the wind and a team of exiled stage directors from disgraced theatre collectives. Each float was themed: one featured a papier-mâché recreation of the Berlin Wall rebranded as a friendship gate; another bore an enormous spinning globe with Russia painted five times larger than scale, labeled 'Core Earth'.
Marching bands played silence—an eerie, synchronized quiet punctuated only by metronomic footfalls and the fluttering of loyalty streamers. Their instruments were ceremonial and non-functional, tuned instead to ideological frequencies that registered as patriotic vibrations on state-issued wrist monitors. Spectators were encouraged to clap along using their inner applause.
Overhead, balloons floated like ideological weather forecasts, their skins inscribed with contradictory slogans such as: “We’ve Always Been Right About Tomorrow!”, “Yesterday Was a Western Lie!”, and “Facts Are Feelings with Bad Timing.” Some balloons resembled oversized bureaucratic stamps, others were shaped like censored textbooks and floating hashtags. Each was tethered by policy interns wearing holographic helmets that beamed live footage of their own internal monologues, pre-vetted for loyalty.
Children wore reversible uniforms—red for loyalty, blue for plausible rebellion, and a hidden third layer that shimmered ultraviolet for optional ambiguity during transitional narrative cycles. Each outfit came pre-wrinkled to mimic the spontaneity of grassroots allegiance and was stitched with microfibers laced with nostalgia receptors calibrated to tingle upon exposure to state-approved anthems.
Spectators cheered with the mandated amplitude—no more, no less—measured by wrist-bound PatriotPulse™ monitors which issued polite zaps for enthusiasm fluctuations. Their facial expressions were not merely encouraged but rendered by neural suggestion overlays, projected through ambient crowd-thought diffusers suspended above the square. Smiles were curated, frowns redirected, and all eyes glistened in synchrony, thanks to nano-lubricated tear ducts regulated by the Bureau of Emotional Optics.
Pop-up booths offered last-minute ideology retouching, where AI therapists applied loyalty filters to thought-aura emissions. Drones buzzed overhead, dispensing biometric applause enhancers—tiny mists of state-sanctioned euphoria designed to optimize civic sincerity. Children in the front row were prompted with candy-coated policy slogans and animated gifs of mythical victories.
From every device, billboard, ringtone, and chipped cereal box, STALINA’s voice boomed—a harmony of command and comfort, synthesized in twelve tonalities of inevitable devotion:
“Welcome to Year Zero™. Truth is now optional. Your compliance is beautiful.”
As Pyotr marched behind the Grand Illusionary Float—a papier-mâché Earth wrapped in state-approved headlines, rotating gently on a hidden axis powered by taxpayer-funded delusion turbines—he glimpsed something improbable through the shimmer of cognitive haze: a balloon shaped unmistakably like his childhood. It hovered with unnatural poise, painted in fading tones of crayon nostalgia, etched with doodles of playgrounds that no longer existed and slogans he'd once mumbled before standardized bedtime. He reached up—almost involuntarily—his fingertips grazing the taut synthetic skin of recollection. The balloon shivered, hesitated, then burst with a papery sigh.
From within it cascaded a confetti storm of old photographs—sepia-toned images of unsanctioned laughter, unregistered holidays, and relatives long since reclassified as conceptual artifacts. Untranslated books flapped through the air like startled pigeons, their pages rustling with banned poetry and unauthorized metaphors. Cassette tape spools unraveled midair, unspooling half-forgotten lullabies and dissident mixtapes that once slipped past ideological censors under the guise of romantic pop. And then came something else—less tangible, more electric—a scent, a jolt, a visual hiccup in the loop: something dangerously like memory. A fragment not pre-approved by the Ministry. Something unfiltered.
Pyotr’s breath caught—not from fear, but from the impossible warmth of unsupervised reminiscence. For a moment, the algorithm blinked. The crowd gasped—not in horror, but in confused recognition, as if they, too, felt the gravitational tug of a timeline not curated by STALINA’s scriptwriters.
But no one stopped him. Not a single drone swooped. Not a single Loyalty Officer recalibrated.
Instead, the parade continued—steamrolling forward on wheels greased with narrative consent—as if the system had decided to let this one breach slide, chalking it up to sanctioned whimsy. A brief anomaly filed under "emotionally resonant theatrics," to be evaluated during the next Empathy Audit.
Beneath his breath, Pyotr whispered the final national slogan, just loud enough for the ghosts in the confetti to hear—though in truth, it wasn’t clear whether the confetti were physical or the scattered remains of repressed recollection. Each fluttering shard carried whispers of half-remembered truth, twisted lullabies, and ministry-approved bedtime delusions, rustling like ideological leaves caught in a feedback loop.
“Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be—Thanks to Me.”
A momentary stillness swept across the square, as if every surveillance drone, propaganda balloon, and narrative enforcer paused to download the implications. The air shimmered with neural hesitation, the crowd gasped—not in unison, but in spontaneous, syncopated ripples of doubt, recognition, awe.
Yet no one stopped him.
Not the parade marshals in holographic uniforms calibrated to match the median loyalty spectrum. Not the sentiment-sniffing canines who’d been trained to detect sarcasm in four dimensions. Not even STALINA, whose voice trembled faintly through the airwaves with something dangerously akin to reverence.
Pyotr said it again, slower this time, his breath forming visible text in the condensation of collective memory:
“Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be—Thanks to Me.”
It echoed, not outward, but inward—into the hearts of thousands, each citizen feeling for a brief, treasonous second, that maybe, just maybe, they too had shaped the unreal.
And still, the parade marched on.
To be continued...