The Emperor’s Gambit

Originally part of the Ending Bigly collection

The Emperor did that little dance he always does, shaking his hips side to side while moving his hands in a perfect figure eight (infinity?) motion and pointed at members in the audience.  The red and chilly rock behind him a startling contrast to his power suit, though at least the tie matched.  Then he flashed that wry charming smile of his.

“The haters and critics said it could never be done, but here we are in 2040, and I tell ya, we’ve only just begun.”

They cheated him, and made it obvious, but the gambit Trump made, was that he would allow the vaccine to take hold, and in a whisper campaign of mommy bloggers and RW bodybuilders he would allow enforcement to turn a blind eye to those who opted out.  The mRNA vaccine itself proved far more dangerous than the disease. It was a Conspiracy of Dunces, really just two Malthusian virologists working at behest of an overly earnest bureaucracy working at warp speed.  The translational mutations took a month to reach critical mass, by that time the global rollout was complete. The spike mutation produces odd nodules, and even on occasion horns in offspring.  Newborns were horribly disfigured, had heart conditions, and would screech in hideous, rapturous wails.  The newborns were so abhorrent that Pope Benedict XVII, (formerly Cardinal Sarah) pronounced that "In spite of the reverent approach of the One Holy Church towards the issues of life, the demonic nature of this vaccine is an affront to nature."  Democrats took the vaccine religiously and roughly half died of grand mal seizures; bell’s palsy was just the icing on the cake.

The whisper campaign of bodybuilding twitter and mommy bloggers held out in the West, but the third world had succumbed to the Gates Foundation massive rollout.  By March, the counter coup was over and despite pockets of West Coast resistance, the United States converted from a Republic to a formal empire, and the Emperor became who he was meant to be. DeSantis, Rudy, Robert Kraft and Dan Patrick (of Texas) mobilized hubs of regional authority after the Senate was dissolved.  The stock market eclipsed previous highs on news of the Emperor’s victory.

Junior headed up the Make Africa Great program, it was an attempt to enlighten the Dark Continent, involved 100,000 Nordic bodybuilders breeding nonstop up to 8 African women a day.  The women were selected for selected for fertility, maternal nature, aesthetics, and intelligence.  Now, twenty years later the MAG program is beginning to bear its first fruits, with the new generation of bodybuilding mulattos trained in ancient Greek and raised in Benedictine monasteries or Calvinist enclaves.  They demonstrate exceptional table manners and yet can still shoot a basketball. Trainmaster Alex designed an extensive railway program modeled after Tokyo, in Johannesburg, that would tie the continent together and finally Cecil Rhodes’ dream could be realized.

Jared and Ivanka made Aliyah, as did much of Orthodox.  Jared assumed leadership of Israel after Netanyahu resigned.  They made several peace deals throughout the region in the last twenty years.  It was a shame what happened to Iran, but it was too close to too many Israeli military bases in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.  Sometimes Ivanka would help created new countries, such as Kurdistan, just so they could be recognized by Israel.  The greatest peace deals, really.

Eric Trump ventured to Brazil and made a partnership with Bolsonaro which was the greatest deal in the history of South America, much greater than even the Treaty of Madrid.  Brazil retained sovereignty and mineral rights to Bolivian natural gas, and the remainder of South America was rebranded to the Trump-Exxon Tropical exhibit and resource extraction zone.  Chile had specials on helicopter rides.  For modest protection fees to Eric, the former countries of the zone could retain some autonomy.  The original Coca Cola recipe was revived with Columbian cocaine and the fentanyl warehouses were put out of business.  There was a massive shift in productivity throughout the West.

China's biggest and only export was glass.

To those that chose to remain in their cocoons, listen to cable news and binge watch self-caponized refugee coming of age stories, Trump was never their President, and they never could envision an Emperor.  They adopted a “loser takes none” mentality.  The reality they wished to adopt embraced them like a warm opioid buzz.  The facts on the ground never entered their consciousness. Their cats became feral.  But here above ground the world needed to keep running, and Trumps mastery of the OODA loop was never more valuable.  In 2030, around the same time Barron was elevated to the throne of the New Holy Roman Empire, Elon Musk convinced Trump to upload his consciousness to the cloud.  Trump naturally balked.

"Look I said, I may be 83 but I'm sharp as a tack.  Good genes, like my father." He told Elon.

"But Emperor Trump, you cannot be everywhere at once, and this allows you to give speeches, fundraisers, without even having to be there.  Unless...you like traveling?"

That was enough to convince the Emperor.  He did multiple whole brain physiology scans, EEG, MRI, PET scans.  Rorschach tests, blood tests. The result was a nearly perfect replica.  They had the holograms down pat as well, smooth transitions of movement with no weird opacity issues.  Trump was asked to speak in a conversational and rhetorical tone, and GANs were generated based on events of the day.  Then Elon did something remarkable, he downloaded Donald Trump's consciousness into the AI network of his Tesla Gigafactory.  Tech nerds called it a singularity event, normal folk simply claimed that Trump gave the AI some intuition, or maybe gumption. The androids, which were not humanoid in any sense, nonetheless began manufacturing self-driving rockets in benevolent service to humanity.  Their goal was to terraform Mars.  And now, here in 2040, was Emperor Trump (or at least a convincing facsimile) to encourage them on.

"And so, my people were nervous, they said, 'Sir, Sir, you can't just terraform Mars, it doesn't have an atmosphere.' Trump stopped impersonating of his pessimistic assistant.   "I said 'ok, so what do you need to generate an atmosphere?  Carbon dioxide?  We got more carbon dioxide than we know what to do with, just freeze the extra and, you see we make more carbon dioxide on Earth than we need, and if we believe in global warming, so I said, "freeze it and send it to Mars" Do you know how they make carbonated soda?  You freeze the carbon dioxide and you put it in water.  Boom, it's like magic."

Then, later on, my people they come to me and they say 'Sir, Sir, the solar wind will blow away the carbon dioxide.' So I said to them "How do you keep an atmosphere from blowing away" and they said "Sir, you need a magnetosphere".

Fake and dying news networks were aware of the GANs and were using their own GANs to "pre-bunk" the President's statements before he can make them.  The crawl along the feed showing "This statement about the necessity of magnetospheres has been disputed."

But Emperor Trump persisted, "TKX-1356 are you there?  TKX where are you pal? Everyone give this service module a hand he does great work. The androids simulate applause.   So it was TKX-1356 that told me "Mr President, sir, Mars has a molten iron core, it just needs to move to generate a dipole for creating a magnetosphere."  And, so, you know this is not my specialty, I mean I'm just a real estate guy but you know if you have a magnetic field and enough carbon dioxide, you can have two habitable planets instead of zero.  And if we're exporting excess carbon dioxide....look I'm not saying, but we have so much oil, and so much beautiful clean coal. Why not burn it here on Mars and generate all the precious carbon dioxide we NEED on Mars to generate an atmosphere?" 

And so I asked TK, I call him TK, I said "TK just how are we going to get the molten core to move to create this dipole?" 

"And he told me, this beautiful process, that just changing the temperature at various locations throughout the crust, imagine this now, just a few changes in crust temperature in the milliKelvins (By the way do you know how small MilliKelvins are?)"

The pre-buttals and pre-bunking algorithms contradicting him constantly, the frame around his beautiful, pristine visage turning glowing red with a "pants on fire" indicator, but this feed was only accepted by the entombed, kombucha-embalmed binge watchers. “Ex-President Trump rants on Mars” screamed the Chyron petulantly.  The prebunkings would state for example, there was NO excess carbon dioxide on Earth.  The androids here on Mars needed the prebuttals and debunking information, which optimized their productivity.  (BTW GANs stands for generative adversarial network, which works by having a generative layer (in this case the Emperor) and a discriminative layer (here, the rebuttals and debunking).  The adversarial nature of this programming was crucial to Trump’s success. The androids were already installing multiple Tesla branded crust-temperature fluctuators. 

"We are gonna have the most beautiful bow field and believe me I've seen some in my time.  We are gonna create the most beautiful resort here at Jezero crater.  The haters and critics said it could never be done, but I'm here, and you're here, and together we are going to make Mars Atmosphere Great Again for humanity and androids.  God Bless you and God Bless Mars.”

Back in Trump tower, Emperor Trump watches the end of the speech. At 93 he is still spry though reserved.

"I gave a great speech there.  And trust me, I know, I’ve given many, many speeches in my day."

"Yes Dahling, " replied Melania.

"They said it could have been done, that it was impossible".

"I know dahling".

Emperor Trump then reaches over and turns off the Melania projector as a single tear wells up in that beautiful, generous eye of his.  The soft poignant moment of regret, the one thing never uploaded to the GANs.