See how they laugh…

The sun, swollen and heavy, bled into the horizon as the city below buzzed with the hum of complacency. From the high glass towers of the Corporatocracy, the rulers watched in silence as the streets teemed with people, heads bowed under the weight of invisible chains. Nothing but the faint flicker of screens illuminated their tired eyes, each flash of data—false, curated, and sold back to them—numbing the mind as the machines churned behind closed doors.

In the plazas, the public’s hollow laughter echoed like the creak of old wooden ships before the storm—empty, desperate, and rehearsed. They clung to the fleeting promise of freedom, unaware of the slow bleeding of their lives.

Governments, cloaked in the finery of law and justice, siphoned the energy of the masses with a bureaucratic efficiency that left no room for doubt. The people, it seemed, were forever bound by the scripts of their ancestors, repeating a cycle as old as time itself: give, toil, and surrender, while the rich feast on their labor like vultures picking at a carcass.

In the heart of this machine, a figure, wrinkled with age but sharp as a sword, signed documents with an indifferent hand. The ink that flowed from their pen wasn’t ink at all—it was the blood of promises, siphoned from the very veins of those who trusted the system to provide. They were but an actor in this grand performance, where even the laws passed and signed were dictated by unseen masters. Corporations, with glinting eyes and cackling tongues, whispered their demands from the shadows, the true authors of the people's suffering.

Behind closed doors, they smiled as wars were waged in faraway lands, their profits soaring with every life extinguished. Bombs rained down on families, children used as currency for power brokers in suits who never had to witness the devastation. The more the world fractured, the more power they accrued, like pirate kings of old—except this time, the treasure wasn’t gold, it was everything: time, souls, futures.

In this moment, there was a stillness—a pause that stretched like a thread between the past and the future. For an instant, everything felt fragile, as though time itself had stopped to witness this act of theft, of plunder. The ones on the ground below, the millions who trudged through their days, didn’t know they were participants in the play that had been performed for generations. The faces of the rulers changed, but the theft remained the same. In this stillness, the ghosts of those long forgotten whispered of rebellions never won, revolutions crushed under the weight of apathy and fear.

Nothing had changed.

The figure at the desk paused, gazing out at the city. They knew, as all their predecessors had, that the cycle would continue. The system, this machine of modern piracy, was too deeply embedded, too well-oiled. Perhaps, once upon a time, there had been an ideal—a moment when humanity’s potential stretched toward something better. But like the tides of history, it had been eroded, corrupted, and sold off, piece by piece, until only this remained: a pirating nation, plundering its own people under the guise of progress.

The figure signed the final document with a flourish, as if performing an ancient rite. The ink bled across the page like blood from a wound that would never heal.

Below, the city’s lights blinked on, the hum of life rising once more. And though none could feel it, the moment repeated, stretching back into the past and reaching forward into a future that was already written, waiting to play out over and over again.

The eternal plunder continued.