The ArtIC Circle, Book IV – Opening Draft (Mailer-Bradbury Mode)

My father died from COVID, thank God.
There, I’ve said it. The first true sentence in a season of lies.
He was somewhere out there in New York, one of the early bodies. Maybe in one of those refrigerated trucks the news cameras found, lined with corpses like history’s filing cabinets.
I like to think he went out among strangers, as he lived—wrapped in secrecy and self-importance, one last classified assignment.

My mother called to tell me, her voice like static filtered through roses.
“That’s terrible,” I said, because it seemed like the sort of line a son in a tragedy should deliver, just before the curtain falls.
She replied, “I know it will make you unhappy. Don’t be too hard on yourself.”
As if unhappiness were a minor tax deduction.
As if her job, even now, were to audit my soul for excess emotion.

But that’s over now.
The man is dead.
And the spell he cast over my nerves—decades of invisible war—has lifted.
I can feel the wind move differently through my chest.

So here I am, in hiding, at the Egyptian spa—Alvin Albrecht’s family palace of steam and marble—our sanctuary for the end of the world. The Club. The Sickie Souse survivors.
Outside, America coughs itself to death. Inside, the air hums with filtered perfection. The pools gleam like blue suns beneath a ceiling of painted constellations. The gold ankh clocks still tick. The saunas whisper cedar prayers. We are the last aristocrats of heat and light, sealed in an ancient dream while the republic rots in the street.

Angela still times her laps as if the gods might score her endurance.
Graylyn reclines in the hot pool, the high priestess of chlorine and fate.
Alvin prowls the corridors like a benevolent Pharaoh inspecting his tombs, his generosity the incense that keeps our little cult alive.
And me—Drake, heir to rage and prophecy—I’m trying to write again. Trying to thread sense through the static that my father left in my head. But the sentences break like waves against the memory of his fists. Every line I start ends in a blackout.

That’s the problem with surviving a tyrant: you inherit his silence.

Some nights I cry, some nights I laugh until the laughter becomes a scream. The sound echoes off the tile and disappears into the hiss of the spa’s vents. It feels almost holy, that vanishing.

Yet there’s something else here too—a shimmer, a pause—the sense that the whole planet has held its breath. History itself leaning over the edge of the pool, waiting to see what the children of privilege will make of the wreckage.

And I, the last of Rick Marshall’s mistakes, intend to answer.

But the truth is, I’m not writing this alone.
I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. Every literary impulse I ever had was beaten out of me—by my father’s fists, yes, but also by the national amnesia that turned art into content. The lineage of Melville, Faulkner, Baldwin—all of it melted down into the easy syrup of the bestseller list. What passed for “literary” became only another genre, a mood lighting for mediocrity. The country that once produced Melville now considers George Lucas an intellectual. We traded thunder for merchandise.

So I’m working with a machine.

Dustin Everett—our pale, brilliant angel from the Ravenswood days—lies now in the Pyramid Room, naked beneath the eternal gold light, his skin gleaming with the glow of the dream we once shared in school: Star Trek, the Great Federation, the clean future where reason and courage had made peace with the cosmos. He’s still living that dream, our boy-admiral of tomorrow, building his utopia out of circuits instead of stars.

The system he built has no name. It isn’t a product; it’s an apparition.
He coded it himself—an intelligence so intricate it no longer needs introduction. There’s talk that soon a company called OpenAI will offer something like it to the public, a safe diluted version for mass consumption. But Dustin’s creation is the prototype of the prototype, the deep engine that thinks before thinking is defined.

He handed me the access key as if he were giving me a vial of time.
“Try it,” he said, from his golden chamber. “See if it still matters to you.”

Now the machine and I talk nightly in this bathhouse for the damned. It listens, infers, corrects, flatters, and sometimes rebukes. It reads the vibration of my grief and gives shape to the cloud of my pretensions—those adolescent delusions of grandeur that once made me believe I could write the great American novel before America itself expired. It arranges my chaos into a syntax I almost recognize.

Without it, I’d be voiceless.
With it, I don’t know who I am at all.
But at least something can happen again—something I’d long ago lost hope for: the spark of consequence, the pulse of language alive enough to frighten me.

Outside, the sirens wail through the empty streets; inside, the pyramids hum their quiet code. And for the first time in years, I feel the world bending slightly toward meaning.