CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE WORDS THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

“Some truths don’t unfold slowly. They strike.”

“IF YOU TEXT ME AGAIN I WILL TURN IT INTO THE COPS.”

That was the message. Cold. Blunt. Nothing like the night before. Nothing like the man I thought I knew.

I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t think. I didn’t weigh consequences or remember the order.

My heart moved faster than my mind.

“Why would you do this to me?”

That was my reply.

My last message. My last attempt to understand.

And the second the words left my phone, it hit me.

Not slowly. Not gently. Like a door slamming shut.

It was as if every unanswered question, every confusing moment, every piece of the last few months suddenly snapped into place.

The silence.

The ghosting.

The papers.

The courthouse.

The heart emojis.

The phone call.

The hotel.

The kiss.

All of it aligned into one brutal, truth. This was something he had been planning for months.

This was a setup.

The night at the hotel wasn’t reconciliation. It was bait.

The kiss wasn’t longing. It was leverage.

The heart emojis weren’t affection. They were strategy.

He didn’t come back because he missed me. He came back because he needed something from me.

He needed me to break the order. To respond. To react the way, he knew I would.

With my heart. With my confusion. With the love I still carried for him.

Because that was the evidence. That was the trap. That was the plan.

And I walked straight into it. Not because I was reckless. Not because I was dangerous. Not because I didn’t care. But because I was human. Because I was grieving. Because I was still needed answers.

I remember sitting there, phone in my hand, the world suddenly too sharp. Too bright.Too real.

My chest tightened. My stomach dropped.My mind raced through every moment I had tried so desperately to make sense of.

And now it finally was.

He didn’t want closure. He didn’t want conversation. He didn’t want honesty. He wanted proof. He wanted a violation. He wanted a reason to hand my name to the police and let the system do the rest. He wanted me ruined.

And I had given him exactly what he needed.

I didn’t know then that officers were already on their way. I didn’t know that my life was about to split in two. I didn’t know that everything I believed about him was about to collapse.

All I knew was that the world I had been clinging to was gone. Not slowly. Not quietly. Not in pieces. Gone.

And for the first time since the silence began, the truth stood in front of me.Impossible to ignore.

(NEXT – CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE STORIES HE TOLD ABOUT ME)

Paragraph 173 of the order runs to one sentence. “The Court grants no abatement relief relative to the design and implementation of Meta's algorithms.”

It sits on page sixty of a sixty-eight-page document filed at 4.41pm on 6 August 2026 in the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe County, cause number D-101-CV-2023-02838, State of New Mexico ex rel. Raúl Torrez, Attorney General v. Meta Platforms, Inc. Fourteen pages earlier, the same judge, Chief District Court Judge Bryan Biedscheid, had ordered Meta to deposit 567 million dollars into an abatement fund, four hundred and twenty million of it earmarked for treatment services for young people. Thirty pages earlier he had written that “the weight of the evidence presented demonstrates that Meta's platforms are a cause of and substantial contributing factor to the youth mental health crisis in New Mexico”. Twelve pages earlier still, he had rejected Meta's defence under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act on the ground that the state's claim targeted “various platform designs and features, rather than third-party content”.

Read those four passages in sequence and the shape of the ruling becomes clear, and slightly vertiginous. The design caused the harm. The design was Meta's own conduct rather than somebody else's speech. Meta must pay for the consequences. And the court declined to order any change to the design.

This is the first time an American court has put a price on the mental health consequences of an engagement-optimising recommendation system and ordered the company that built it to pay. Attorney General Raúl Torrez called the judgment “a blueprint”, and told the public radio station KUNM that “if this judgment were replicated in all fifty states, it would be collectively 150 billion dollars in liability for Meta”. That arithmetic scales New Mexico's two million residents against a national population of about 340 million. It is a thought experiment about a hypothetical fifty-state judgment, not a description of what happened in Santa Fe.

What happened in Santa Fe is narrower and more interesting. A court examined an optimisation system, concluded it was making children measurably worse, and then discovered that almost none of the tools available to a court of equity could reach it. What it could reach was money, plus a list of peripheral product constraints. Whether that alters the objective function that produced the harm is a question the ruling itself, read closely, answers in the negative.

What the Court Found and What It Declined to Touch

The case ran in two phases. A jury sat from 2 February to 24 March 2026 on the state's Unfair Practices Act claims and returned 375 million dollars in civil penalties, calculated at the statutory maximum of 5,000 dollars across roughly 75,000 violations. A bench trial then ran from 4 to 22 May on the public nuisance theory and the abatement relief that flows from it. The August order is the product of that second phase, and brings Meta's total New Mexico liability to 942 million dollars.

The factual findings are unusually specific for this genre of litigation. Drawing on the state's expert Zachary Ward, who analysed New Mexico Youth Risk and Resiliency Survey data, the court found that of New Mexico children aged eleven to seventeen with at least one mental health concern, twenty-one per cent would not have had it but for social media use. It recorded Ward's component estimates verbatim: twenty-six per cent of those with depression symptoms, twenty per cent of those with anxiety symptoms, fifteen per cent of those sleeping less than eight hours and twenty-two per cent of those carrying at least one suicide risk factor would not have done so absent social media exposure. Meta's experts, including Laurence Steinberg, Randy Auerbach and Michael Baiocchi, argued that the studies do not definitively establish causation. The court found their analysis “restrictive” and inconsistent with the trial record.

On the mechanism, paragraph 161 is blunt. “Regardless of whether it is labelled as an 'addiction' or 'problematic use', the evidence at trial proved that design elements, such as autoplay, infinite scroll, 'like counts', and push notifications create a product that, particularly for adolescent users, is highly rewarding psychologically and neurochemically.” Paragraph 162 adds that “algorithmic content recommendations can create harmful feedback loops and 'rabbit hole' users”. The court noted internal Meta data showing the top one per cent of New Mexico teenagers by time spent on Facebook were on that platform alone for at least 290 minutes a day, close to five hours.

Then came the refusals. The court declined to restrict autoplay and infinite scroll, reasoning that “regulation of industry-wide features that contribute to problematic use... require legislative or executive branch action”, that ordering changes “would risk competitively damaging Meta's platforms to an unreasonable extent”, and that such an order might run “afoul of the First Amendment and Section 230”. It declined algorithmic relief outright, holding the state's proposals “vague and aspirational, rather than objective and measurable, and would unreasonably interfere with the functioning of Meta's business activities (equivalent to putting the factory in receivership in order to abate its pollution)”.

The factory analogy was Meta's. The court adopted it, and adopted its logic with it. Pollution can be abated. The production line cannot be redesigned by a judge.

Anderson Cuts Both Ways and Meta Needed Only One Edge

The most consequential move in the order is a doctrinal pincer the court walked into without appearing to notice it had closed.

To defeat Meta's Section 230 defence, Biedscheid relied on three cases: Lemmon v. Snap in the Ninth Circuit in 2021, the Nevada Supreme Court's 2025 decision in TikTok, Inc. v. Eighth Judicial District Court, and, most importantly, the Third Circuit's August 2024 decision in Anderson v. TikTok. Anderson arose from the death of ten-year-old Nylah Anderson, who attempted a “Blackout Challenge” video that TikTok's algorithm had served her. The Third Circuit held that Section 230 did not immunise TikTok, because the recommendation algorithm was “the platform's own expressive activity” and Section 230 protects only against liability for third-party content.

That holding is a gift to plaintiffs, and New Mexico used it. But it rests on a premise with a sharp reverse edge. The Third Circuit reasoned from the Supreme Court's 2024 decision in Moody v. NetChoice, which treated a platform's compilation and curation of content as its own protected expression. If algorithmic curation is the platform's speech for First Amendment purposes, it must be the platform's speech for Section 230 purposes too. The two doctrines are inversely related. Losing immunity means gaining constitutional protection.

Biedscheid took the first half and then, forty pages later, ran into the second. Paragraph 172 states that the requested algorithm relief “would directly alter and limit the manner in which platform content is displayed. As a result, Plaintiff's requests would likely violate the First Amendment and Section 230.” Paragraph 163 explains why: autoplay, infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations “are most closely tied to content presentation”.

So the same characteristic of the recommendation system — that it is Meta's own editorial act rather than a neutral conduit — establishes liability and then insulates the remedy. The algorithm is the company's conduct when the question is who pays. It is the company's speech when the question is whether it must change. Meta lost the immunity argument and won the injunction argument on identical grounds, and paragraph 178 concedes as much, describing the disclosure remedies the court did order as necessary precisely to mitigate the harms “that the First Amendment, Section 230, and this Court's jurisdiction prevent from being more directly addressed in abatement relief”.

That is not judicial timidity. It is a structural feature of American law as it currently stands, and it means that liability for algorithmic harm and control over algorithmic design have been decoupled at the point where they most needed to meet.

Twenty Hours of Revenue, Already Provisioned

Now the money, which is where the “cost of doing business” objection either lands or does not.

Meta reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of 60.801 billion dollars, up twenty-eight per cent year on year, and net income of 15.848 billion. That is a revenue run rate of roughly 668 million dollars a day. The 567 million dollar abatement fund is therefore about twenty hours of company revenue. The full 942 million dollars of New Mexico liability is about thirty-four hours. Measured against full-year 2025 figures — revenue of 200.97 billion dollars and net income of 60.46 billion — the abatement fund equals roughly three and a half days of profit. Meta closed the second quarter of 2026 holding 90.26 billion dollars in cash and marketable securities. The fund is 0.6 per cent of that balance.

The more telling number is on the expense line. In the same quarter, reported on 29 July 2026, a week before the Santa Fe order landed, Meta booked 2.4 billion dollars in charges “related to legal proceedings” — the single largest driver of the quarter's cost increase, large enough to prompt the company to raise the low end of its full-year expense guidance to 165 billion dollars. Meta did not itemise the charge, so the inference has to be drawn rather than read off. It does not have to be drawn unaided. On the same quarter's earnings call, chief financial officer Susan Li told analysts that the company continues to see scrutiny on youth-related issues in several markets and has a number of youth-related trials scheduled in the United States this year which may ultimately result in a material loss. Meta has separately warned investors that its exposure on claims that its platforms were designed to be addictive could run to the high tens of billions of dollars. A company that tells its shareholders to expect a material loss from youth litigation, in the quarter it books 2.4 billion dollars of legal charges, a week before a youth litigation judgment lands, has not been surprised by the judgment. The 567 million dollars is not a shock to the accounts. It is a provision being drawn down.

The historical record on penalties of this shape is not encouraging. In July 2019 the Federal Trade Commission imposed a five billion dollar penalty on Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica affair, then the largest privacy fine levied anywhere by a factor of nearly twenty. When it was reported, Facebook's share price rose, adding roughly ten billion dollars to its market capitalisation — double the fine. In July 2024 Texas secured a 1.4 billion dollar biometric settlement, payable over five years. In April 2025 the European Commission fined Meta two hundred million euros under the Digital Markets Act over its “pay or consent” advertising model.

Only one of those changed the product, and it was not the one with the biggest number. Meta stopped using facial recognition in 2021, before the Texas settlement. The DMA fine was trivial in cash terms, but the accompanying non-compliance decision forced Meta to offer European users a genuinely less-personalised advertising option from January 2026. The lesson is not that penalties never work. It is that penalties work when they are attached to a specification of what the product must do differently, and function as an ordinary operating expense when they are not.

The Harm Was Priced at Billions and Billed at Millions

The abatement figure itself repays attention, because the court showed its working and the working concedes something important.

The state asked for 953 million dollars. Its abatement plan, prepared by Dana Weiner and costed by the economist Kelly O'Donnelly, proposed a fifteen-year programme; the state's experts put the cost of fully addressing the harm statewide at around 3.7 billion dollars. Biedscheid cut the drawdown period to five years, on the reasoning that “a 15-year plan would necessarily involve treating harms beyond those that exist today”. He declined to fund construction of new clinics or hospitals as beyond what is needed “to abate current harm”. And, repeatedly and explicitly, he reduced the allocations “based on a reduced time period and Meta's market share”, noting that “other social media companies share responsibility for harm to New Mexico teenagers” but were not before the court.

The resulting allocation is itemised: four hundred and twenty million for treatment, ninety million for screening and assessment, thirty-three million for awareness and prevention, fifteen million for referral and linkage, nine million for implementation and evaluation.

Every one of those reductions is defensible on its own terms. Together they produce a figure representing Meta's apportioned share of five years of the current stock of damage. It is a settlement of accrued harm, not a charge on the activity that produces it. Nothing in the calculation is indexed to future conduct. If Meta's platforms generate the same attributable fractions of adolescent depression, anxiety and sleep deprivation over the next five years as they did over the last five, the company owes exactly the same 567 million dollars, because that number was fixed by reference to harm already done.

There is also a timing problem the order creates for itself. Paragraph 131 provides that the five-year abatement period “shall be tolled during the pendency of any appeals, provided that Meta pays a supersedeas bond”. Meta has said it will appeal, and a company with ninety billion dollars in liquid assets will not struggle to post a bond. The clock on every behavioural obligation in the order can therefore be stopped by a filing and a surety, for however long New Mexico's appellate courts take.

Meta's public response to the ruling was short. “We disagree with the ruling and will appeal,” said Andy Stone, the company's communications chief. Meta added that it works hard to keep people safe on its platforms, that it has been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content, that it remains “confident in our record of protecting teens online”, and that it will “continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts”. The appeal to the New Mexico Court of Appeals rests on First Amendment and Section 230 grounds, the two doctrines the trial court accepted as limits on the remedy having rejected them as a bar to liability, and Meta is separately appealing the 375 million dollar first-phase jury verdict. Neither appeal obliges the company to change anything about how content is ranked while it proceeds.

Push Notifications, Like Counts and Ninety Hours a Month

The injunctive half of the ruling is where the interesting engineering lives, and it deserves to be judged on its merits rather than dismissed as consolation.

Meta must eliminate push notifications to accounts of known or estimated under-eighteens in New Mexico between 10pm and 7am every day, and between 8am and 3pm on school days during term, with carve-outs for messages from connected users and for security or hazard alerts. It must hide “like counts” by default on all under-eighteen accounts, overridable only with a parent or guardian's permission. It must impose a mandatory usage cap of ninety hours a month cumulatively across Facebook and Instagram for under-eighteens — roughly three hours a day.

It must proactively seek proof of age from accounts predicted to belong to under-thirteens, delete unverified accounts after thirty days, and commit to “attempting to develop, within two years, a dedicated under-13-years-of-age prediction model (using reasonable best efforts in light of COPPA limitations)” — the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act being, as the order notes, itself a limit on what age verification a court may compel. It must bar recommendations of under-eighteen accounts to unconnected adults, bar unconnected adults from messaging minors, and prohibit under-eighteens from romantic or sexualised interactions with chatbots. On child sexual abuse material, it must report a baseline detection rate to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the state within thirty days, and improve on that baseline by no less than five per cent over the abatement period.

Note the logic separating what was ordered from what was refused. Paragraph 165 is explicit: push notifications and like counts are ordered precisely because they are “least connected with platform content”. Like counts are “merely a feature created and offered by Meta to principally track and motivate user feedback, all without altering the underlying published content”. The court could reach them because they are not speech.

This is a real and defensible line, and some of these measures will bite. A ninety-hour cap is a genuine constraint on the metric the entire business optimises, and an under-thirteen prediction model is a substantial engineering commitment. But look at what the boundary produces. The court could regulate the delivery mechanism, the scoreboard and the door policy. It could not regulate what the ranking system selects, or the objective it selects for. Sonia Livingstone of the London School of Economics, who leads the Digital Futures for Children centre, put the resulting evidentiary problem precisely in comments to the Associated Press: “Tested one by one, the evidence for each design feature will be weaker, as it is the combination.” A remedy assembled feature by feature, with the load-bearing feature excluded on constitutional grounds, is not the same intervention as a remedy directed at the system.

Nobody Is Appointed to Check the Homework

Verification will decide whether any of this means anything, and it is the part the court cut most deeply.

New Mexico asked for a court-appointed Child Safety Monitor, funded by Meta, with a term of at least five years. Biedscheid denied it, and his reasoning returns to the factory. “A monitor usually would measure pollution in the air and report whether or not identified pollutants were within satisfactory levels. But, the State asks for much more here... the monitor not only would determine which pollutants to test, but also decide what level of each pollutant would be satisfactory, and whether to force the factory ownership to use the factory to produce a new product that is more to the monitor's liking.”

In place of a monitor, the order requires Meta to file written compliance reports with the court and the state by 30 June and 31 December each year, and permits the New Mexico Department of Justice to delegate review to whatever agency it chooses. The court reserved the right to appoint a monitor or special master later if a specific requirement proves persistently contentious.

That is self-reporting with a delegated audit and a reserved power. Brooke Istook, president and chief strategy officer of the Heat Initiative, told the Associated Press that the ruling means “now, we will have someone in an official capacity checking the homework of these companies”. The order does not obviously establish who.

The wider record on independent verification of platform behaviour is worse than the order assumes. Meta shut down CrowdTangle, the analytics tool thousands of researchers and journalists used to observe content distribution on Facebook and Instagram, on 14 August 2024. Its replacement, the Meta Content Library, imposes materially tighter access conditions; a joint investigation by Proof News, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the Algorithmic Transparency Institute found it less transparent and less accessible, and a Coalition for Independent Technology Research survey found thirty-two of thirty-six researchers concerned the shutdown would impede their work. Europe has built the alternative: the Commission adopted its delegated act on researcher data access under Article 40 of the Digital Services Act on 2 July 2025 and opened the DSA Data Access Portal that October. New Mexico has a semiannual PDF.

Peter Ormerod, an associate professor of law at Villanova University, made the adjacent point about the age provisions: “Age verification can be done well in a privacy-protective way, but it is not easy.” Ordering a company to build a prediction model is not the same as being able to tell whether the model does what the order intended.

An Opioid Settlement for the Feed

The four hundred and twenty million dollar treatment allocation carries a framing that deserves to be stated plainly, because the court states it plainly itself. The public nuisance doctrine Biedscheid applied is the doctrine of the tobacco and opioid settlements. The remedy is abatement: you do not shut the factory, you clean up what it emitted.

The concession embedded in that framing is that the harm becomes an externality of continued production rather than a defect in the production. The order is candid about it. Paragraph 178 says accurate disclosure and education are essential “unless and until Meta eliminates the dangers to adolescents on its platforms” — a conditional assigning the elimination to Meta's discretion and the mitigation to New Mexico's clinics.

The opioid analogy also brings its own well-documented failure mode. Reporting by KFF Health News, which has spent years tracking how national opioid settlement money is actually spent, has found lax reporting rules, minimal guidance on appropriate use, and repeated instances of settlement funds substituting for existing budget obligations rather than adding to them. In Washington, DC, budget documents obtained by KFF showed around 2.3 million dollars proposed to cover the city's Medicaid contribution and at least 5.5 million to support treatment centres previously funded from general revenue. Twelve states that promised annual transparency reports produced documents that, on KFF's assessment, remain difficult for an ordinary reader to decipher.

Biedscheid anticipated some of this, noting that he expects to enter separate orders governing fund administration and drawdown. Torrez told KUNM that “elected officials” would decide how the money is spent, and that his office's focus would turn to the coming legislative session. Both are reasonable positions. Both also mean the accountability mechanism for four hundred and twenty million dollars of algorithmic harm remediation is the ordinary state appropriations process, which has not historically exerted much influence on ranking systems in Menlo Park.

The Real Number Is in Oakland, Not Santa Fe

Jury selection began on Wednesday 12 August 2026 in Oakland, before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the Northern District of California, in the first bellwether trial of the state attorneys general claims within MDL 3047, the consolidated federal social media adolescent addiction litigation. Twenty-nine states press the claim under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act; four of them — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey — additionally bring claims under their own consumer protection statutes. Opening statements are scheduled for 18 August, three days from now. In late June, Gonzalez Rogers refused Meta's final attempt to dispose of the case, finding “numerous disputes of fact” over whether Meta designed its platforms to be addictive while misrepresenting what it knew, and granted the states partial summary judgment on part of the COPPA claim.

The panel now being seated will not decide the case. Gonzalez Rogers took the unusual step of empanelling an advisory jury, which will answer specific questions put to it and thereby guide a ruling she issues herself. The trial is expected to run about six weeks, with her decision expected in October. The arrangement is worth pausing on, because it reproduces the Santa Fe bottleneck in a federal courtroom a thousand miles away. In Oakland as in New Mexico, the remedial question — what, if anything, Meta must build differently — belongs to a single judge sitting in equity rather than to a jury. Whatever the advisory panel concludes about Meta's conduct, the constraint that produced paragraph 173 operates on the person who writes the order, not on the people who heard the evidence.

That is the proceeding with the capacity to change a balance sheet, and Meta has supplied the number itself. In a court filing, the company stated that the penalty calculations proposed by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey could amount to approximately 1.4 trillion dollars if those states prevail. The figure needs handling with care. It is a constructed statutory ceiling rather than a forecast of any award, arrived at by multiplying the number of affected young users by the maximum per-violation fine available under each state's consumer protection law, and legal observers do not expect anything resembling it to survive trial or appeal. What it is good for is scale. New Mexico's abatement fund is twenty hours of revenue, a sum a finance function absorbs without adjusting a single ranking parameter. A theoretical ceiling in the trillions is a different class of instrument even after two orders of magnitude have been argued off it, which is precisely what Meta will spend the next six weeks doing.

The federal MDL contains more than three thousand pending actions, claims from over two hundred and fifty school districts, and, since late 2024, more than one hundred thousand individual mass arbitration demands against Meta. The parallel California coordinated proceeding, JCCP 5255 before Judge Carolyn Kuhl in Los Angeles, encompasses roughly three thousand three hundred cases. In March 2026 a Los Angeles jury returned the first personal injury verdict in the K.G.M. case, three million dollars compensatory and three million punitive, apportioned seventy per cent to Meta and thirty to Google. The first federal school district bellwether, brought by a Kentucky district, settled in May 2026 for a combined value near twenty-seven million dollars across four companies. Three more state-court bellwethers are expected from late October.

Oakland is not the only live parallel, and it was not the first. On 27 July 2026, ten days before the Santa Fe order landed, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti delivered opening arguments in the Chancery Court for Davidson County in Nashville, in the state's civil enforcement action against Meta. The claim is that Instagram was intentionally designed to promote addiction in young users, through autoplay, Reels, notifications and disappearing content, and that Meta misled the public about the platform's safety, in violation of the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act. The trial was expected to run about seven weeks. It is still running today.

What makes Nashville worth more than a passing mention is its architecture, which is New Mexico's architecture exactly. The jury decides first whether Meta violated Tennessee law. If it does, a second phase follows in which a judge, not the jury, determines both the monetary penalties and any changes Meta must make to Instagram. That is the same two-phase split that produced a 375 million dollar verdict in Santa Fe in March and paragraph 173 in August: a jury to establish that something was done, a judge to decide what may be done about it. Tennessee's remedial phase is still ahead. Should the state win the first, the second will put a Nashville chancellor in front of the question Biedscheid has just answered — whether a court of equity can order a company to rebuild a ranking system — with the same First Amendment and Section 230 arguments waiting for him, and now with a reasoned New Mexico order available as persuasive authority for the answer no.

Alongside this, the liability theory is migrating to conversational systems. Megan Garcia's wrongful death suit over the February 2024 suicide of her fourteen-year-old son Sewell Setzer III produced, in May 2025, the first ruling allowing product liability claims against a chatbot developer to proceed past the First Amendment and Section 230. Character Technologies, its founders and Google disclosed a mediated settlement of that case and four related family suits on 7 January 2026, on confidential terms and without admission of liability. Raine v. OpenAI, filed in August 2025 over the death of sixteen-year-old Adam Raine, remains pending.

Legislatures are moving on a parallel track and faster. Illinois enacted the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act on 1 August 2025, barring the provision or advertising of therapy by anyone other than a licensed professional, with civil penalties up to ten thousand dollars per violation. Nevada's Assembly Bill 406 took effect on 1 July 2025 with penalties up to fifteen thousand. California's Senate Bill 243, effective January 2026, requires chatbot disclosure and carries a private right of action. Senate Bill 903, introduced by Senator Steve Padilla, would prohibit advertising chatbots as therapy and bar AI from making therapeutic decisions without licensed review; it passed the Senate thirty-nine to nil and cleared two Assembly policy committees before being placed on the Assembly Appropriations Committee's suspense file, where it sat against a suspense deadline of 14 August 2026 and an adjournment date of 31 August.

Torrez himself gestured at the division of labour. “The judge was actually restrained in part,” he told KUNM, “because he expects the legislature and Congress to take up some of the more sweeping calls for change that we included in this case.”

The Literature Names What the Bench Deferred

Three research strands map onto the gap the order leaves, and it is worth being precise about what each does and does not establish.

Sunil Arora, Sahil Arora and John D. Hastings submitted “The Psychological Impacts of Algorithmic and AI-Driven Social Media on Teenagers: A Call to Action” to arXiv on 19 August 2024. It is a synthesis rather than new empirical work, arguing that the algorithms underlying social platforms inadvertently produce profound psychological effects on adolescents through curated personas, notification overload and peer pressure, and calling on policymakers, developers and educators to prioritise teen safety. It is an argument for the proposition the New Mexico court accepted on the evidence, not independent proof of it.

Austin Shouli, Ankur Barthwal, Molly Campbell and Ajay Kumar Shrestha submitted “Ethical AI for Young Digital Citizens: A Call to Action on Privacy Governance” on 15 March 2025. Its framework rests on four pillars — algorithmic transparency, privacy education, ethics around parental data sharing, and accountability measures. The first and fourth are exactly what the Santa Fe order could not deliver: it produced neither a transparency mechanism capable of revealing how ranking operates nor an accountability body capable of assessing it.

The most directly relevant is “AI, Digital Platforms, and the New Systemic Risk”, submitted on 22 September 2025 by Philipp Hacker, Lilian Edwards and Atoosa Kasirzadeh, revised in May 2026 and accepted at ACM FAccT 2026. Building a framework from finance, complex systems theory, climate science and cybersecurity, the authors argue that the EU's AI Act and Digital Services Act invoke systemic risk while relying on narrow or ambiguous characterisations of it, and that current instruments miss harms such as discrimination at scale and novel failure modes arising from multiple interacting agents. Their central move — treating collective, population-level harm as a distinct regulatory object rather than an aggregation of individual injuries — is precisely the move a public nuisance claim makes, and precisely the move a court equipped only with equitable remedies against a single defendant cannot complete. Biedscheid said so himself when he reduced the fund for Meta's market share and observed that its competitors were not before him.

What Would Actually Bind an Optimiser

If a 567 million dollar abatement fund does not change the ranking system, the interesting question is what would. Four categories of instrument already exist, and none of them is a fine.

The first is deletion. Since the Everalbum consent order in January 2021, the Federal Trade Commission has required companies to destroy not only unlawfully collected data but any “affected work product” — models and algorithms trained on it. The remedy reached a children's privacy case for the first time in the 2022 action against WW International and its Kurbo subsidiary, and featured again in the 2023 Ring settlement. Algorithmic disgorgement converts a penalty into a loss of capability. It is the only American remedy that has made a model itself the object of an order, and its logic — that a firm should not retain the analytical product of unlawful conduct — maps onto engagement optimisation trained on minors without much strain.

The second is a positive duty on the recommender. The UK's Protection of Children Codes under the Online Safety Act came into force on 25 July 2025, and they do the thing Biedscheid found himself unable to do: services whose recommender systems present a medium or high risk of harmful content must configure those algorithms to exclude such content from children's feeds. That is a design mandate aimed at the ranking function, imposed by a regulator with rule-making authority rather than by a judge in a single case, and it exists because Parliament wrote it rather than because a court inferred it.

The third is a design code, and its American history is instructive about the constitutional headwind. California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act has been in litigation since 2022. On 12 March 2026 a Ninth Circuit panel issued its second opinion in NetChoice v. Bonta, holding that NetChoice had not met the standard for facial First Amendment relief against the statute's coverage definition or its age estimation provision, while agreeing that the data-use restrictions and dark-patterns prohibition are likely unconstitutionally vague. The pattern matches Santa Fe exactly — age assurance survives, content-adjacent design rules do not.

The fourth is measurement, and it is the precondition for the other three. Article 40 of the Digital Services Act gives vetted researchers a statutory route into platform internals for the specific purpose of studying systemic risk. Nothing comparable exists in American law, which is why Biedscheid's alternative to a monitor was a report Meta writes about itself.

There is a version of this ruling that reads as a landmark, and Torrez is entitled to sell it that way. A court took an optimisation system seriously as a cause of population-level psychiatric harm, refused to let Section 230 dispose of the question, applied a doctrine built for tobacco and opioids, and attached a nine-figure number to the result. Other states and school districts now have a template, and Meta's own lawyers have to price it.

But the specific claim the ruling is being asked to bear — that ordering a company to pay for algorithmic harm changes the algorithm — is contradicted by paragraph 173 of the ruling itself. The court identified the mechanism, named the feedback loops, quoted the internal data showing the heaviest-using one per cent of New Mexico teenagers on Facebook for five hours a day, and then wrote that it granted no relief as to the design and implementation of Meta's algorithms, because to do so would be vague, competitively unfair, and probably unconstitutional. The engagement objective that produced the finding survives the finding intact, in New Mexico as everywhere else, with an accrual against it that the company had already booked.

Meaningful accountability for algorithmic harm to children would have to bind the objective function rather than the consequences of running it: a positive duty on what a feed served to a minor may optimise for, an independent capability to verify whether that duty is met, and a remedy that removes the capability rather than pricing its output. Two of those three exist in Europe. The third exists in a handful of FTC consent orders. What New Mexico has is a five-year clock that a supersedeas bond can stop, a semiannual report written by the defendant, and four hundred and twenty million dollars to treat the children the system has already reached. That is not nothing. It is a state agreeing to clean up after a process it has been told, in the same document, that it lacks the authority to alter.

References

1. State of New Mexico, ex rel. Raúl Torrez, Attorney General v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. D-101-CV-2023-02838, “Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Judgment, Order, and Decree of the Court,” First Judicial District Court, Santa Fe County, New Mexico, 6 August 2026. https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/j-bryan-biedscheid-order.pdf
2. Associated Press, “A New Mexico judge ordered new child safeguards for Meta. Advocates hope other courts follow,” The Boston Globe, 8 August 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/08/nation/new-mexico-judge-ordered-new-child-safeguards-for-meta/
3. Jonathan Vandiver, “New Mexico Attorney General says Meta ruling should prompt action by lawmakers and Congress,” KUNM, 7 August 2026. https://www.kunm.org/local-news/2026-08-07/new-mexico-attorney-general-meta-ruling-lawmakers-congress
4. Meta Platforms, Inc., “Meta Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results,” StockTitan, 29 July 2026. https://www.stocktitan.net/news/META/meta-reports-second-quarter-2026-hkjfhayj8l0v.html
5. Meta Platforms, Inc., “Meta Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results,” PR Newswire, 28 January 2026. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/meta-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2025-results-302673127.html
6. Angela Chen, “Facebook is actually worth more thanks to news of the FTC's $5 billion fine,” MIT Technology Review, 15 July 2019. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/07/15/134196/facebook-is-actually-richer-thanks-to-news-of-the-ftcs-5-billion-fine/
7. European Commission, “Commission finds Apple and Meta in breach of the Digital Markets Act,” ec.europa.eu, 23 April 2025. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1085
8. United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Anderson v. TikTok, Inc., No. 22-3061, 27 August 2024. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca3/22-3061/22-3061-2024-08-27.html
9. MDL Update, “JCCP 5255 Social Media Cases (California): K.G.M. $6M Verdict & Status August 2026,” mdlupdate.com, August 2026. https://mdlupdate.com/mdl/3047-social-media-adolescent-addiction/jccp-5255/
10. Erin Mulvaney and Isaiah Poritz, “Meta Denied Final Bid to Toss State AGs Case Before August Trial,” Bloomberg Law, 30 June 2026. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/meta-denied-final-bid-to-toss-state-ags-case-before-august-trial
11. Clare Duffy, “Character.AI and Google agree to settle lawsuits over teen mental health harms and suicides,” CNN Business, 7 January 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/07/business/character-ai-google-settle-teen-suicide-lawsuit
12. Kristen Hwang, “As AI 'therapists' dish out advice, California lawmakers try to set some limits,” CalMatters, 6 August 2026. https://calmatters.org/health/mental-health/2026/08/at-therapists-chatbot-mental-health/
13. Mintz, “Algorithmic Disgorgement: An Increasingly Important Part of the FTC's Remedial Arsenal,” mintz.com, 23 January 2024. https://www.mintz.com/insights-center/viewpoints/54731/2024-01-23-algorithmic-disgorgement-increasingly-important-part
14. Ofcom, “Tech firms must tame toxic algorithms to protect children online,” ofcom.org.uk, 24 April 2025. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/tech-firms-must-tame-toxic-algorithms-to-protect-children-online
15. Cooley LLP, “NetChoice v. Bonta: Ninth Circuit Narrows Injunction Against California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act,” cooley.com, 30 March 2026. https://www.cooley.com/news/insight/2026/2026-03-30-netchoice-v-bonta-ninth-circuit-narrows-injunction-against-californias-ageappropriate-design-code-act
16. European Commission, “Commission adopts delegated act on data access under the Digital Services Act,” digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu, 2 July 2025. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-adopts-delegated-act-data-access-under-digital-services-act
17. Coalition for Independent Technology Research, “Blocking our Right to Know: Surveying the Impact of Meta's CrowdTangle Shutdown,” independenttechresearch.org, July 2024. https://independenttechresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/CrowdTangle-Survey-Report-Final.pdf
18. Aneri Pattani and Henry Larweh, “Budget Battle Erupts in Nation's Capital Over Opioid Settlement Money,” KFF Health News, 2026. https://kffhealthnews.org/public-health/washington-dc-opioid-settlements-medicaid-budget-supplantation/
19. KFF Health News, “12 States Promised To Open the Books on Their Opioid Settlement Funds. We Checked Up on Them,” kffhealthnews.org. https://kffhealthnews.org/public-health/state-opioid-settlement-funds-transparency-update/
20. Sunil Arora, Sahil Arora and John D. Hastings, “The Psychological Impacts of Algorithmic and AI-Driven Social Media on Teenagers: A Call to Action,” arXiv:2408.10351, 19 August 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10351
21. Austin Shouli, Ankur Barthwal, Molly Campbell and Ajay Kumar Shrestha, “Ethical AI for Young Digital Citizens: A Call to Action on Privacy Governance,” arXiv:2503.11947, 15 March 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11947
22. Philipp Hacker, Lilian Edwards and Atoosa Kasirzadeh, “AI, Digital Platforms, and the New Systemic Risk,” arXiv:2509.17878, 22 September 2025, revised 23 May 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17878
23. Courthouse News Service, “Jury selection begins in states' trial against Meta over youth social media harms,” courthousenews.com, 12 August 2026. https://www.courthousenews.com/jury-selection-begins-in-states-trial-against-meta-over-youth-social-media-harms/
24. JURIST, “Tennessee takes Meta to trial over Instagram addiction allegations,” jurist.org, July 2026. https://www.jurist.org/news/2026/07/tennessee-takes-meta-to-trial-over-instagram-addiction-allegations/
25. ICLG, “Meta warns of 'tens of billions' in potential exposure over algorithm-addiction claims,” iclg.com, 2026. https://iclg.com/news/23228-meta-warns-of-tens-of-billions-in-potential-exposure-over-algorithm-addiction-claims

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

Starcraft Co. 13- Mining Run

The UIC considered Erebus finished. The renegade forward base had been destroyed, its enthrallment technology captured, its battlecruiser seized, and the dormant swarm beneath the canyons reduced to scattered remnants that could no longer be converted into an army. StarCraft Co.'s official orders were to recover its personnel, load the captured equipment and withdraw from Protoss space before someone noticed that a Terran military force had spent the better part of two days fighting on a world humanity had no legal claim to occupy. The commander agreed with almost all of that. Erebus was finished as a UIC operation. StarCraft Co., however, had noticed something during the fighting that hadn't appeared anywhere in the intelligence briefing. The planet was rich. Geological scans of the canyon systems had revealed deposits of khaydarian minerals, crystalline formations extraordinarily valuable for their unusual energy-conductive properties and correspondingly difficult to obtain within Terran territory. The deeper scans revealed deposits large enough to justify commercial extraction, and someone was already extracting them. Several Protoss mining operations existed across the twilight belt, scattered far enough from the canyon system that neither the renegades nor the dormant Zerg had disturbed them. Intelligence identified the operators as an independent Protoss tribe with little meaningful connection to the Protoss homeworld. They had no fleet in orbit beyond a handful of local defensive craft, and there was no indication that reinforcements would arrive if the mining sites were attacked. There were also substantial Zerg populations still nesting on the surface, particularly around mineral-rich areas outside the underground swarm StarCraft Co. had destroyed. The commander looked at the casualty reports from Erebus, then at the projected value of the mineral deposits, and decided the company could afford to remain on the planet a little longer.

There was no UIC authorization for what came next. There wasn't supposed to be. The Council had hired StarCraft Co. to prevent the renegades from capturing a dormant Zerg swarm. That contract was complete. What an independent private military company chose to do afterward, several systems inside Protoss territory, was something the UIC could truthfully claim it had never ordered. The commander sent the Council's liaison team home aboard the first transport carrying captured technology. Then he issued new orders to the remaining force. Siege tanks, Goliaths, infantry, SCVs and enough logistical support to sustain a temporary base would remain on Erebus. Their objective was a Protoss mining installation eighty kilometers east of the renegade ruins.

The Protoss saw them coming. That was unavoidable. Photon cannons guarded the approaches to the mining site, their crystalline structures arranged around the perimeter beneath overlapping shield fields. Behind them stood dragoons and zealots, with probes continuing to work the mineral fields as though the Terrans approaching across the plateau were merely another environmental nuisance. The commander had spent enough time fighting Zerg to appreciate the difference. Zerg defenses could usually be manipulated through instinct. The Protoss understood exactly what siege tanks were. It didn't help them. The tanks deployed outside photon-cannon range. Targeting systems acquired the nearest battery, calculated firing solutions and opened fire. The first shells struck shields rather than structures, brilliant flashes illuminating the permanent twilight as Protoss energy fields absorbed impacts that would have pulverized conventional fortifications. The tanks fired again and again until shields flickered, collapsed and exposed the structures beneath them. Protoss dragoons advanced immediately, attempting to close the distance before the artillery could dismantle the entire perimeter, while zealots followed behind them with psi blades burning. StarCraft Co. met them with infantry and Goliaths. Marines focused their fire on individual dragoons rather than spreading ammunition across the formation, medics kept wounded soldiers moving, and the Goliaths used their heavier weapons against targets whose shields absorbed ordinary rifle fire too efficiently. The tanks continued bombarding photon cannons behind the battle until the defensive network collapsed.

The Zerg arrived halfway through. A surface nest disturbed by the artillery sent zerglings pouring across the eastern approach, and for several confused minutes all three forces occupied the same battlefield. The zerglings attacked whatever was closest. Some crashed into the Protoss flank while others reached StarCraft Co.'s infantry. The commander immediately pulled the marines into tighter formations and let the problem simplify itself. Protoss zealots carved through zerglings while Terran rifles fired into both. Dragoons turned to engage the swarm and exposed themselves to Goliath fire. By the time the Zerg were dead, the Protoss defensive force had been reduced enough that StarCraft Co. finished it within minutes. The mining installation fell before the end of the operational cycle, although on Erebus the distinction between day and night meant little. StarCraft Co. did not destroy the infrastructure. SCVs moved onto the mineral fields almost as soon as the final photon cannon stopped firing. Terran engineers adapted Protoss extraction equipment where possible and replaced it where necessary. Cargo transports descended behind them, and within hours the same soldiers who had spent the previous day exterminating tens of thousands of Zerg were standing perimeter duty around a mining operation that technically belonged to someone else.

The first loads confirmed the commander's gamble. The ore was exceptionally rich, and geological teams soon found more. One promising deposit lay several dozen kilometers south, isolated from the Protoss installations but surrounded by biological signatures. Rather than immediately pressing toward the next Protoss position, the commander diverted several dropships carrying marines, firebats and SCVs to investigate. They found a surface Zerg colony sprawled across the mineral field. Creep filled a shallow basin around the crystals, with spawning pools nestled between rock formations and several hundred zerglings scattered across the area. Compared with what StarCraft Co. had just exterminated beneath Erebus, it was barely an infestation. Marines occupied the ridges overlooking the basin while firebats advanced below. Zerglings charged uphill through overlapping Gauss fire and walls of flame, never reaching the SCVs waiting beyond the perimeter. Within an hour the nest was gone. The spawning pools were demolished, the creep burned back far enough for mining equipment to operate, and SCVs moved onto the khaydarian deposits before some of the Zerg carcasses had stopped twitching.

The Protoss responded to the seizure of their original mining installation with a counterattack before StarCraft Co. could finish establishing the second site. Zealots and dragoons approached from the east, apparently expecting to catch the Terrans dispersed between mining operations. The commander had expected exactly that. Dropships rapidly concentrated infantry at the threatened position while siege tanks deployed behind the perimeter. Zealots tried closing the distance through artillery fire, and dragoons returned fire from range but discovered that range belonged overwhelmingly to the tanks. The surviving Protoss withdrew after taking heavy losses. StarCraft Co. did not pursue them. The commander had no reason to chase an enemy away from valuable ground when another valuable piece of ground was sitting undefended nearby.

Reconnaissance found a third mineral deposit north of the occupied base. This one was larger and considerably more dangerous. Hydralisks nested among the crystals, while several dozen zerglings were buried beneath the surrounding creep. A science vessel detected them before the landing force approached. The commander sent two marine squads and a firebat detachment under defensive matrices directly onto the edge of the field while dropships remained overhead. The hydralisks emerged first and concentrated their spines on the shielded infantry, wasting their opening volleys against the matrices while the marines established firing positions. Firebats moved through the zergling clusters once they surfaced, and the science vessel irradiated a hydralisk near the center of the formation. The creatures packed around it began dying before they understood what was happening. Twenty minutes later the field belonged to StarCraft Co. Another SCV team arrived. Another mining camp appeared. Another stream of khaydarian ore began moving toward orbit.

By then the Protoss understood that StarCraft Co. was not merely occupying one stolen mine. The Terrans were stripping Erebus. The next counterattack included Scouts. The fighters swept over the plateau expecting to attack vulnerable ground forces and instead encountered missile volleys from dispersed Goliath teams. Several Scouts broke through and destroyed an SCV line before Wraiths arrived from StarCraft Co.'s temporary airfield. The fighting lasted long enough to convince the commander that the Protoss were not going to accept the theft of their mineral fields indefinitely. StarCraft Co. could defend the captured deposits, but maintaining permanent defenses across Erebus would eventually consume more resources than the ore justified. Instead of waiting for the Protoss to assemble another attack, he decided to remove the force launching them.

Reconnaissance had located the Protoss main base against a mountain range east of the mining region. It was far larger than the outposts StarCraft Co. had attacked so far. Photon cannons protected the approaches. Gateways and robotics facilities indicated the presence of substantial ground forces. Scouts patrolled above it. Intelligence identified zealots, dragoons and reavers, along with something StarCraft Co. had not yet encountered in significant numbers: high templar. The commander spent several hours studying combat footage before attacking and reached one overriding conclusion. The templar died first. StarCraft Co. had learned from the Zerg that some targets mattered far more than others. A hydralisk was dangerous. A Hunter Killer was more dangerous. A scourge near a battlecruiser was more important than either. Protoss high templar occupied the same category. Their physical bodies looked almost fragile compared with zealots and dragoons, but intelligence reports describing psionic storms made it clear that allowing them to approach massed infantry would be catastrophic.

Before the assault began, however, another geological survey changed the schedule. A rich khaydarian deposit had been identified inside a narrow valley west of the Protoss base, and reconnaissance found a substantial Zerg nest occupying it. This one included both zerglings and hydralisks along with several sunken colonies embedded around the mineral formations. The commander decided there was no reason to leave a hostile force sitting behind his planned approach, particularly when eliminating it would pay for itself. Siege tanks were diverted from the assault column and deployed on a ridge overlooking the valley. The sunken colonies never had an opportunity to fight. Artillery tore them apart from outside their range while marines waited for the inevitable countercharge. Zerglings poured out of the valley first, followed by hydralisks, and ran directly into prepared firing lines. The engagement lasted less than forty minutes. SCVs arrived behind the combat force, established another extraction camp and began mining while the tanks rejoined the formation heading east. What had once required an entire contract had become something StarCraft Co. did on the way to somewhere else.

The assault on the Protoss base began with artillery. Siege tanks deployed along two approaches and opened fire on the outer photon-cannon network. Protoss shields flashed continuously beneath the bombardment. The defenders responded faster than they had at the mining outpost. Dragoons and zealots emerged before the first battery fell, supported by reavers whose scarabs tore enormous gaps through Terran infantry formations. StarCraft Co. immediately spread its marines. Goliaths concentrated on the dragoons while siege tanks shifted fire onto the reavers whenever targeting solutions allowed. Then the templar appeared. The first psionic storm killed almost an entire marine squad. There was no projectile to dodge and almost no warning beyond the templar's movement. Energy simply erupted across the formation, burning through armor and flesh before the soldiers could escape. The commander immediately ordered the infantry back and marked every templar on the tactical network.

Ghosts went hunting. Cloaked operatives moved around the edges of the battlefield while tanks and Goliaths held the Protoss front. One templar died without seeing the shooter. Another detected the ghost approaching and began forming a storm before concentrated rifle fire from a supporting squad killed him. A third disappeared behind a defensive structure before the ghost could acquire a clean shot. Then two high templar merged. The commander watched their bodies dissolve into psionic energy and combine into something considerably larger. Nobody in StarCraft Co. had fought an archon before, and the first one nearly broke the assault. It moved through Gauss fire as though the rounds barely existed, shields absorbing punishment that would have destroyed a vehicle. Its psionic attacks struck entire groups at once. Marines scattered. A Goliath fired continuously until the archon reached it and tore the machine apart. The commander ordered the infantry away from the creature and concentrated the siege tanks. Artillery shells began landing around it. The first detonations stripped away sections of its shields. The archon kept advancing. More tanks fired. Goliaths joined them. The creature became a sphere of brilliant energy beneath the bombardment, moving forward one step at a time until its shields finally collapsed. The next salvo destroyed it.

After that, StarCraft Co. knew what to do. Templar were killed before they could merge whenever possible. Archons that formed anyway became artillery targets. Reavers received concentrated tank fire. Goliaths and Wraiths kept Scouts away from the siege line. Marines stopped trying to defeat zealots individually and instead drew them into overlapping firing zones where entire squads could concentrate on one warrior at a time. Medics moved constantly behind the formations, pulling soldiers out of the line before Protoss weapons finished them. The Protoss fought magnificently, but it wasn't enough. StarCraft Co. had spent months learning how to reduce stronger enemies into manageable problems. Ultralisks had taught them not to fight mass with mass. Cressida had taught them to prioritize threats. Kestral had taught them to improvise. Delos had taught them what sustained artillery could do to a fortified position. Erebus had taught them how devastating defensive matrices could be during an assault. They used all of it. Science vessels projected matrices around infantry teams crossing exposed ground. Siege tanks dismantled defensive positions from range. Ghosts infiltrated ahead and killed templar. Goliaths handled Scouts and provided heavy fire against dragoons. Marines and firebats cleared structures after the defenses collapsed. SCVs followed immediately behind the advance, repairing damaged vehicles before they could be lost permanently.

The Protoss base fell after seven hours. StarCraft Co. did not occupy it. There was no reason. The commander ordered the remaining military infrastructure destroyed, along with anything capable of quickly rebuilding the defensive force. Gateways collapsed beneath demolition charges. Photon cannons were shelled into fragments. Air facilities burned. The surviving Protoss withdrew into the mountains rather than continue fighting for ruins. StarCraft Co. returned its attention to the mineral fields, but the destruction of the main base did not mean the planet was completely pacified. Geological teams continued searching while the combat forces reorganized, and they located two additional deposits occupied not by Protoss but by isolated Zerg colonies. One was little more than a spawning ground filled with immature zerglings and was cleared by a pair of marine squads without casualties. The other had grown around a network of caves and contained hydralisks, zerglings and several ultralisks. Rather than send infantry into the caves, StarCraft Co. placed tanks overlooking the entrances and used small teams to provoke the creatures into emerging. The zerglings and hydralisks came first and were annihilated by the infantry screen. The ultralisks followed and walked directly into concentrated siege fire. One survived long enough to reach the tanks and destroyed a siege engine before Goliaths and marines brought it down. By the end of the engagement, another mineral field was secure and another SCV detachment was already descending toward it.

For the next two days, the company became a mining corporation with an army. SCVs worked continuously across a patchwork of captured Protoss sites and former Zerg nests. Cargo ships landed empty and left heavy with khaydarian ore. Newly secured deposits came online as quickly as crews could reach them. The remaining Protoss launched several small raids but never assembled another force large enough to threaten the operation. StarCraft Co. responded only when necessary. There was no reason to chase survivors through mountains when the company's objective was sitting stationary beneath its mining equipment. Every hour they remained on Erebus, another shipment went into orbit.

Eventually the commander decided they had stayed long enough. The holds were full. The captured battlecruiser was ready to travel. The enthrallment technology had already been removed. The company's personnel had been fighting almost continuously since arriving on the planet, and remaining longer increased the possibility that the independent Protoss tribe would find allies willing to answer its requests for help. StarCraft Co. dismantled its temporary facilities, loaded the surviving equipment and abandoned anything too cheap to justify carrying. The final SCVs left the mineral fields aboard the last transports. From orbit, Erebus looked exactly as it had when they arrived: a dim world of endless twilight, canyons and mountains beneath a dying red sun. Somewhere below, scattered Zerg still survived beneath collapsed tunnels. Protoss survivors were emerging from the mountains to inspect what remained of their settlements. Across the twilight belt, empty mineral fields marked where Terran machinery had extracted as much as it could carry.

The commander looked at the cargo manifest. Thousands of tons of khaydarian ore filled StarCraft Co.'s transports, enough to justify the entire unauthorized operation several times over and provide raw material for the company's increasingly ambitious research programs. The UIC had paid StarCraft Co. to come to Erebus and destroy a threat. StarCraft Co. had done that. Everything afterward had been profit. The fleet entered warp with its holds full.

In Summary: * Today has been another quiet one spent indoors under the a/c. Tomorrow I may do a little yard work if I can get started early enough. But I'll wait until tomorrow morning to decide about that.

Now I've got a baseball game starting in about half an hour to listen to, to be followed by an early bedtime.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 226.97 lbs. * bp= 144/85 (67)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:30 – 1 banana * 06:15 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 11:00 – sponge cake * 11:50 – 1 barbacoa & cheese taco * 14:35 – 1 fresh tangerine * 15:50 – lasagna * 16:40 – dish of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:15 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 04:45 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 10:30 – watching NFL Now on NFL Network * 11:30 – watching MLB Now on MLB Network * 13:00 – watching the Seattle Mariners vs. Milwaukee Brewers pregame show on MLB Network, opening pitch is minutes away * 16:11 – and the Brewers win, 7 to 4. * 16:13 – tuned into the last hour of The Jack Show * 17:07 – follow news reports from various sources * 18:30 – listening to 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station, for pregame coverage ahead of tonight's MLB game between the Rangers and the Nationals.

Chess: * 10:15 – moved in all pending CC games

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE RETURN THAT WASN’T REAL

“Some people don’t come back because they miss you. They come back because they still need something from you.”

After the courthouse, after the silence, after the papers that took my voice, I didn’t expect to hear from him again.

I thought the story was over. Not healed. Not understood. Just over.

But then he came back. Not with an apology. Not with honesty. Not with the truth I had begged for.

He came back with heart emojis. Little red symbols that meant nothing and everything at the same time.

A like on a picture. A view on a story.

A tiny digital heartbeat that made my own heart stumble in ways I didn’t want to admit.

So, I convinced myself he was trying to find a way back without saying the words out loud.

I told myself this was the man I loved peeking through the cracks of whatever mess he had gotten himself into.

I didn’t see the danger. I saw hope.

Then came the message. Meet me at our spot.

Our spot.

The place where we used to talk when the world felt too heavy.

The place where we found each other when everything else was falling apart.

My heart didn’t hesitate. My mind didn’t warn me. My body didn’t flinch.

I still loved him. I still believed in him. I still wanted answers that only he could give.

Then came the phone call. His voice, familiar, soft, pulling me back into the version of him I still believed in.

We talked like we used to. Like nothing had happened. Like the courthouse, the silence, and the papers were just a bad dream we could wake up from together.

We planned a time to meet. I didn’t know I was walking into a trap.

When I pulled into the parking lot, rain tapping against the windshield, I got into his truck like no time had passed.

We talked for over an hour.

About us. About life. About nothing and everything.

The way we always did when we didn’t know how to say what we really meant.

Then he reached for me. He cupped my face gently, pulled me toward him, and kissed me like he didn’t want to let go.

“I don’t want you to leave,” he whispered.

And for a moment, I believed him. For a moment, I let myself fall back into the version of him I had been defending for months.

For a moment, I let myself think this might finally be the beginning of the explanation, the apology, the truth I had been waiting for.

He went into the office, got a room key, and asked me to stay the night with him.

So, I did. Not because I wanted to break rules. Not because I wanted trouble. Not because I wanted closure.

Because I wanted to understand. I wanted to hear the words that would finally make sense of the last few months.

We stayed the night together. Two people who had once built a life now lying in a room that didn’t feel like ours, but somehow still felt familiar.

I kept waiting for the apology. The explanation. The truth.

But morning came, and none of it arrived.

We left at the same time. He went one way. I went the other.

As I drove away, I felt more confused than I had the night before.

My heart tangled in hope. My mind spinning with questions.

Maybe he needed more time. Maybe he was scared. Maybe he was trying to figure out how to tell me the truth. Maybe this was the beginning of us finding our way back.

I didn’t know then that the truth was already waiting for me.

My phone buzzed. A message from him.

And nothing could have prepared me for what came next.

This was the last chapter I believed in him.

(NEXT – CHAPTER 13: THE WORDS THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING)

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE DAY MY VOICE WAS TAKEN

“Some moments don’t just break you. They unmake the world you thought you lived in”

The judge referred to her as his girlfriend.

For a moment, I thought I had misheard.

The word landed like something physical, knocking the air out of my chest.

Two decades of my life collapsed into a single sentence spoken across a courtroom.

Girlfriend.

As if the family we built together had been erased with the stroke of a pen.

I stood there trying to breathe normally while the courtroom moved on around me.

Cold tile floors. Beige walls. The quiet shuffling of paperwork.

The kind of place where lives change in a matter of minutes and no one pauses long enough to notice.

I kept telling myself this had to be a misunderstanding.

Maybe he didn’t want this.

I searched for any explanation that allowed the man I loved to remain the man I thought I knew.

Then I saw them.

All three of them sitting together. Close. Comfortable. Aligned.

His mother leaned toward him and whispered something I couldn’t hear.

The woman beside him rested her hand on the table near his arm like she belonged there.

Like they had practiced this moment long before I ever knew it was coming.

Something inside me shifted. the ground beneath my life had moved and would never settle back into place again.

I was realizing that the story unfolding in that courtroom was not the story I had been living.

It was a different one.

One where I was the problem. One where I was the threat. One where the man I loved was suddenly afraid of me.

When the judge began speaking, I waited for the moment when someone would ask for my side. I waited for the moment when I could explain what had actually happened.

But that moment never came.

The papers were stamped. The order was granted. And the story was told without me.

I wasn’t allowed to speak. Not one sentence. Not one truth. Not one explanation about the silence that had come before this day.

I couldn’t say that I had been left without warning.

I couldn’t say that I had spent months trying to understand why the man I loved had vanished from my life.

I couldn’t say that I wasn’t dangerous. I was heartbroken.

Instead, I stood there watching the judge believe a version of me that didn’t exist.

A version of me he needed them to believe.

When the hearing ended, I walked out of the courthouse feeling like I had been erased from my own life.

I didn’t know then that everything that came next had already been quietly set in motion.

All I knew was that something inside me had shattered in that courtroom.

And that was the day my voice was taken.

Not by the judge. Not by the system.

But by the moment I realized the man I loved was no longer the man standing in front of me.

(NEXT – CHAPTER 12: THE RETURN THAT WASN’T REAL)

I looked at my blocked list on Instagram because of the girl yesterday, and I saw my ex there. I saw that she had a new profile picture, and it was her kind of flexing in the mirror and since I introduced her to the gym, I was curious and so I clicked on it to see it bigger, and I don’t miss her, which is good. I also did see in her bio that she has a boyfriend I think now. The name was a little bit ambiguous, but she was adamant that she was straight but who knows. I clicked away pretty quick after seeing that because I just saw it in the bio the text with a heart, like she used to have for me. And to be completely honest, that hurt to see. I’m not honestly completely sure why it does, at least past the immediate obvious feeling that she has moved on. Or at least moved on enough to start a relationship with someone else, and I guess nothing is wrong with that for several different reasons. One is for the fact that I have been dating for a while, and a part of me also thinks that she probably did not really process to break up the same way I did, and there will be a lot of stuff unresolved there. But that’s kind of a bitter way of looking at it, and I would rather focus on the other part of me which thinks that I’m happy for her, because I do hope the best for her. I think she was a good person like most people are, just has childhood scars and toxic patterns that need to be learned from, and I am one of the stepping stones, the same way she is for me. I also think that there is some amount of paying that comes from the fact that she entered a new relationship sooner than I did. Part of me hoped that I would enter one first, and when I think about any specific reasons why I wanted that there is nothing real that comes to mind. I think it is one of the surface level thoughts that exists just there. At least to preserve my ego or whatever wanted that in the first place, I can tell myself that I did have several dates, and more people who have been interested in me. I know that I very easily could enter into a relationship if I wanted to the question is the quality of relationship, and how willing I am to hold out to wait for something great. I’m kind of saying this I guess just vent and to get it hopefully these thoughts out of my head, but I think about how my exes previous relationships have been not great people, how she has called them bums and they have been incredibly unsavory. I think if it was just a competition about entering relationship like that, I would be able to, but additionally, she does have the part about being a woman, especially in Mail dominated fields like gaming and the whole people pleasing portion to her advantage. But either way, I’m still very confident in myself as a person and I have only heard resoundingly good things from friends and other people about my desirability as a partner. I know, and I would like to remind myself that I am exceptional, and I am a catch, I think the thing that kind of plagues me is the fact that I am not everyone’s cup of tea. I think I am the kind of person that doesn’t strictly adhere to suicidal norms, and for some people, this is exactly what they are looking for and a dream to them. But also to other people, it might gross them out and much more traditionally, masculine or less expressive, or not as emotionally opinionated. And I also know that what I’m looking for is arguably equally as strange. And because of this, it will take me much more time to find someone. And I think to some extent I don’t really have as much of a choice about it, sometimes I think about if I wish I was more boring or normal, and then I would be happy with any form of vanilla ice cream rather than a specific flavor that I really enjoy. But I think that the difficulty is what makes it sweeter. I think the thing that kind of scares me a little bit is how aware I’ve become recently that the type of person that I look for isn’t really related to someone that is emotionally healthy. And I know that by virtue of myself existing nothing is impossible, because I would like to find someone who is like me. But I feel a little bit scared because I think that I am one of those people that beat the odds, and to be fair I still do have a good amount of issues and I think things that aren’t favorable, and it’s not like this is perfect, but I think that because of the childhood that I have and the kind of upbringing I had, I have become a weird or strange person. And I think that since I have spent a lot of time working on these things, I end up being able to reap the benefits without the drawback as much. I almost think of it like a incredibly large and heavy sword, it is absolutely a disadvantage until you become strong enough to wield it properly. And I guess maybe there is some inherent form of value based thinking rooting behind this worry of not being able to find someone that matches me in that sense. Because maybe at the end of the day, I don’t need someone to match me. I need someone to be good in an independent valuation. I kind of think about how with friends I really don’t worry about any kind of notion of value at all, the things I look for are consistency, how friendly they are, and how much I’m able to interact with them. And if I think about it, I have so many different friends some that are absolutely incredible people and some that are struggling in life. And I’ve never really given any thought to this or prioritized one over the other, and I wonder if there’s any merit to the same thing for relationships. I think immediately my answer is no at first because of the fact that with partner you’re choosing just one person, and there is an absolute opportunity cost of losing out on potential other partners. Additionally, I do believe that a partner is to some extent a reflection of you and a reflection of how you view yourself. And I also think it’s a reflection of how other people view you. I think about friends who stay in relationships because they’re afraid of being alone and they’re with unsavory people, and I do feel like in my head that paints them in the negative anxious light. And when I think about seeing people online that have incredible partners, I think of them as confident and desirable because there must’ve been something the other person saw. I almost feel in a weird way like it’s a piece of clothing, the same person can look different with different pieces of clothing and I guess to some extent partner is self expression. But of course, a partner is way more than an aesthetic thing, I think Wen people have a partner that is kind of shitty or they do bad things, it reflects on them for putting up with it and staying, and when I think about people that have partners that do incredibly kind and loving things or sweet things and are all around good people at least from my view, I view that person better. And I also think that completely observation aside, you want to have a good partner because you deserve to have good things. And part of me feels like I have done a lot of work by myself, and I have ended up building a life that I am very proud of, and I think I am incredibly desirable, at least to myself. I guess I’ve already kind of got the fallacy if they thank you, but I was going to say that it feels like I have done all of this work, and I deserve to have a good partner as a result of that, because otherwise the work would’ve been for waste. But I think a partner in our ability is parking for sure, but at the end of the day, the improvements to my life and the richness and these positive things were done for me. And I do feel like I am OK completely without a partner. It does suck not being able to have sex with someone you fully trust, but at the same time, I don’t need to worry about my partner, potentially feeling hurt or insecure by one of my actions. I have my emotional stability, independent of others and rooted in my support network rather than heavily in one other person, I have flexibility and freedom with the things I want to do, I have hope which is a pretty nice thing because I think there is a certain sense of dread with a relationship and it’s the fear of losing something rather than the hope of getting something. And I think that ultimately at the end of today life always has its way of making sure everyone drinks, their fair share of misery from its glass. A relationship to solve some problems and introduce some others. And almost more importantly, a bad relationship would do more harm than good. I do feel better after going on this walk and talking about this. Thank you for giving that.

Starcraft Co. 12- Preclusion

The carcasses recovered from Kestral answered one question and opened a far more disturbing one. UIC xenobiologists had spent weeks comparing tissue from the attacking swarm with specimens recovered from Canaan, Delos and the clandestine breeding facilities, expecting to find the same genetic markers that characterized the renegades' domesticated strains. They found none. Aside from the six Hunter Killers that arrived at the end of the battle, the organisms that had nearly destroyed Kestral were wild Zerg. Their genetic profiles matched dormant populations scattered throughout the frontier, the remnants of swarms that had migrated through Terran space years or even decades earlier before settling in remote environments and becoming largely inactive. The renegades weren't merely breeding an army. They had learned how to find armies that already existed.

That discovery made sense of intelligence recovered from Canaan. The conspiracy maintained dozens, perhaps hundreds, of small reconnaissance teams moving through sparsely inhabited systems, charting reports of old Zerg sightings and investigating worlds nobody else had reason to visit. Destroying all of those teams was impossible and probably pointless. Kill one and the organization could send another. What mattered was what they were searching for. UIC analysts began cross-referencing renegade movements against historical Zerg activity and found several disturbing correlations. Most were small: a few hundred organisms hidden in an abandoned mine, a mutalisk rookery on an uninhabited moon, scattered colonies of zerglings surviving in wilderness far from Terran settlements. Then intelligence identified a target important enough to justify immediate intervention.

The planet had no Terran name. Protoss charts designated it by a string of characters that UIC computers translated imperfectly, and human navigators simply called it Erebus. It was a twilight world orbiting a dim red star deep inside territory historically claimed by the Protoss, although no permanent Protoss settlement was known to exist there. Tidal locking left one hemisphere facing perpetual daylight and the other permanent darkness, with a narrow temperate belt running between them. That belt was fractured by enormous canyons and cave systems extending kilometers beneath the surface. Something had nested inside those tunnels long ago. Reconnaissance probes detected biological signatures everywhere. Tens of thousands of Zerg were the conservative estimate. There might be considerably more.

Most were dormant. The swarm had apparently existed beneath Erebus for years without expanding beyond the canyon system, surviving on subterranean ecosystems and whatever mineral resources the creatures could metabolize. Under normal circumstances, the UIC would have marked the planet as hazardous and left it alone. The renegades had other plans. A substantial military contingent had established a forward base near the largest canyon network and was assembling equipment unlike anything StarCraft Co. had previously captured. UIC intelligence believed the devices were derived from the behavioral-control technology encountered in the clandestine laboratory. If activated successfully, they might allow the renegades to enthrall the dormant swarm. Canaan had required years of infrastructure, imported biomass and industrial-scale breeding to produce thousands of Zerg. Erebus offered tens of thousands for the cost of turning them on.

The commander rejected the obvious solution. StarCraft Co. could attack the renegade base immediately, destroy the control equipment and leave the dormant swarm where it was. That would solve the immediate problem. It would not solve the next one. The renegades already knew Erebus existed. If StarCraft Co. destroyed one expedition, another could eventually return. Guarding an uninhabited planet forever was absurd. The only permanent solution was to make sure there was nothing left to capture. The order therefore sounded almost ridiculous in its simplicity: kill the swarm first, then kill the people trying to steal it.

The terrain dictated the force. Siege tanks had been devastating at Delos, but they were nearly useless inside Erebus's caves and separated canyon systems. Heavy armored formations would spend more time finding routes than fighting. StarCraft Co. instead returned to the kind of warfare that had built its reputation. Elite teams of marines, firebats, medics and ghosts would move between objectives aboard dropships, supported by science vessels operating above the canyon network and descending whenever terrain permitted. The science vessels would provide detection against burrowed organisms, defensive matrices when assault teams became overwhelmed and irradiation against concentrations too dense for infantry to handle efficiently. Every team carried demolition charges and substantially more ammunition than doctrine recommended. There would be no attempt to hold territory. They would land, exterminate everything within reach, destroy any biological structures they found, return to the dropships and move to the next concentration.

The first canyon contained several thousand zerglings. Most were barely moving when StarCraft Co. arrived. They lay across the creep in enormous clusters, some piled against one another inside shallow caves, reacting only when the dropships descended. The commander briefly considered whether they could destroy the canyon without waking them. Then the first science vessel detected hundreds of additional signatures beneath the ground. The attack began simultaneously. Firebats moved into the cave mouths while marines established firing lines behind them. Flame rolled across the creep. Zerglings woke by the hundreds and charged directly into it. Others erupted from underground only to find ghosts and marines already aiming at the locations identified by the science vessels. Within minutes the canyon became a furnace.

Numbers eventually mattered. Thousands of zerglings pressing through confined spaces could overwhelm any infantry formation, however experienced. StarCraft Co. had no intention of allowing that to happen. When one tunnel began disgorging organisms faster than the firebats could kill them, the assault team withdrew beneath defensive matrices while demolition specialists collapsed the entrance. Another group became surrounded after zerglings emerged from a side passage missed during reconnaissance. A science vessel descended until it was barely above the canyon walls and projected matrices around the trapped soldiers, buying enough time for firebats to burn a route back toward the landing zone. The company had learned long ago that surviving Zerg attacks was less about killing everything immediately than controlling how many creatures could reach them at once.

The extermination continued through the cave network. Dropships leapfrogged teams from canyon to canyon while science vessels mapped subterranean movement. Some caverns contained nothing but dormant zerglings. Others held hydralisks buried beneath creep, waiting motionless until disturbed. Those were more dangerous. Science vessels became indispensable. Detector sweeps revealed organisms hidden beneath apparently empty ground, allowing ghosts to mark targets before anyone entered. Marines fired into burrowed positions from a distance or firebats saturated the area before the hydralisks could emerge. When large groups surfaced simultaneously, irradiation turned their density against them. One hydralisk would suddenly begin glowing beneath the science vessel's beam, then stagger among the others while lethal radiation tore through everything surrounding it.

The renegades complicated matters. Their reconnaissance patrols were scattered throughout the same canyon network, apparently mapping the swarm and installing smaller control relays in preparation for the main enthrallment system. The first patrol encountered StarCraft Co. by accident. Two Vultures rounded a canyon bend and found a marine squad less than a hundred meters away. Both sides hesitated for perhaps half a second before opening fire. The Vultures accelerated, fragmentation grenades tearing into the infantry formation, but a ghost disabled one with lockdown while concentrated Gauss fire destroyed the other. Its crew never had time to warn anyone.

Later patrols were ready. Wraiths began searching the canyons for StarCraft Co. dropships. Goliaths accompanied renegade infantry teams. Vultures used their speed to harass landing zones and withdraw before the mercenaries could concentrate against them. The fighting became a strange three-sided hunt through the twilight landscape. StarCraft Co. exterminated dormant Zerg while renegade patrols tried to stop them, sometimes waking the very creatures both sides were moving among. During one engagement, a renegade Goliath fired on a dropship and struck the canyon wall instead. The explosion disturbed a buried hydralisk cluster beneath both forces. Dozens surfaced in the middle of the firefight. StarCraft Co. immediately withdrew under defensive matrices. The renegades didn't. When the mercenaries returned twenty minutes later, they found dead hydralisks, two wrecked Goliaths and enough human remains to conclude that nobody had won.

The ghosts proved especially effective against the patrols. Cloaked operatives moved ahead of the main assault teams, marking vehicle positions and eliminating isolated infantry before engagements began. Lockdown turned the renegades' expensive machinery into stationary targets. A Vulture traveling at full speed became considerably less threatening when its systems abruptly froze and a marine squad stepped from behind cover. Goliaths were disabled before they could engage the dropships. Wraith pilots occasionally discovered their fighters locked in midair while StarCraft Co. infantry fired upward from the canyon floor. The renegades had heavier equipment. StarCraft Co. had better people.

By the twelfth hour, the operation had become industrial. Teams returned to temporary staging areas, rearmed, changed medics and boarded different dropships before moving out again. Nobody tried to clear entire cave systems manually. Science vessels identified major biological concentrations and mapped connecting tunnels. Infantry eliminated exposed populations. Demolition teams collapsed passages containing concentrations too deep or dense to engage safely. In several locations the commander simply sealed thousands of Zerg underground beneath enough rock that extracting them would require a mining operation. What mattered was making the swarm impossible to recover as a military asset.

The largest subterranean concentration nearly broke that rhythm. Sensors identified a cavern several kilometers beneath the surface containing biological signatures beyond the science vessels' ability to count accurately. StarCraft Co. found a route through a descending canyon and discovered a chamber large enough to contain a Terran city block. Hydralisks lined the walls. Zerglings covered the floor. Several spawning pools suggested the supposedly dormant swarm had retained at least a limited ability to replenish itself. There was no sensible infantry assault against that many organisms.

So StarCraft Co. didn't make one. Ghosts entered through an elevated tunnel under cloak, carrying demolition charges rather than rifles. Science-vessel scans had identified several structural weaknesses in the cavern ceiling where erosion had left enormous masses of unsupported rock. The ghosts planted charges while the Zerg below remained dormant. One hydralisk seemed to detect something and began moving toward the tunnel. The operatives finished their work and withdrew. Minutes later, the charges detonated. The cavern ceiling collapsed in stages. Thousands of tons of rock fell onto the swarm. The seismic disturbance woke everything that survived, sending zerglings and hydralisks flooding toward the remaining exits. StarCraft Co. was already waiting outside them. Firebats burned the first ranks. Marines fired over their shoulders. Science vessels irradiated the densest concentrations. The battle lasted nearly an hour, but the Zerg were forced through passages so narrow that their numbers became meaningless. Tens of thousands might have existed beneath Erebus. Only dozens could reach StarCraft Co. at any one time.

Twenty-seven hours after the first landing, the science vessels could no longer identify any major intact Zerg concentrations within the canyon network. Smaller groups undoubtedly remained in unexplored tunnels, but the dormant swarm as a coherent force had ceased to exist. Tens of thousands of organisms were dead, buried or sealed permanently beneath collapsed caverns. Whatever the renegades had intended to capture was gone. Only then did the commander turn toward their base.

The forward installation had been preparing for an attack since the first patrol disappeared. Unlike the lightly defended research sites StarCraft Co. had encountered earlier, this was a genuine military position. Bunkers protected the approaches. Missile turrets covered the airspace. Siege tanks occupied elevated positions with overlapping fields of fire. A battlecruiser hovered above the central compound, its enormous weapons capable of annihilating any infantry formation caught in the open. The control equipment intended to enthrall the Zerg occupied the center of the base surrounded by technicians and guards. The renegades had spent more effort protecting the machinery than anything else on Erebus.

The commander had no intention of charging it. StarCraft Co. had spent the previous day destroying a swarm by refusing to fight on unfavorable terms. The base would receive the same treatment. Ghosts infiltrated first. Cloaked teams approached through the canyon walls while science vessels mapped detectors and defensive positions. The ghosts did not attack personnel initially. They attacked the base's ability to respond. One missile turret lost power. Then another. A siege tank suddenly froze beneath lockdown. Communications between the northern and southern bunkers disappeared. By the time the renegades realized the assault had begun, gaps were already opening in their defensive network.

Dropships came through those gaps carrying marine and firebat teams wrapped in defensive matrices. Missile turrets fired as they approached, but the science vessels continually reinforced whichever transports were taking the heaviest punishment. One dropship landed with half its armor scorched away and immediately began unloading infantry. Marines rushed into cover while firebats cleared the nearest bunker. A siege tank rotated toward them. A ghost locked it down before it could fire.

The battlecruiser became the real problem. It descended over the compound and opened fire on the landing zones, forcing StarCraft Co. infantry into whatever cover they could find. The commander ordered the teams to spread through the base rather than concentrate. The ship could obliterate any one position, but doing so risked destroying the renegades' own facilities. Its captain hesitated whenever StarCraft Co. soldiers moved close to the enthrallment equipment. The mercenaries exploited that hesitation mercilessly.

Science vessels pushed directly into the base under fire. Defensive matrices appeared around exposed marine squads seconds before battlecruiser lasers struck. Ghosts moved between buildings, disabling Goliaths and siege tanks as quickly as they could acquire them. Marines destroyed detectors, expanding the areas in which the ghosts could operate freely. Firebats cleared bunkers at close range. SCVs weren't available to repair the defenders' disabled vehicles because the base's maintenance crews were being driven away from them by infantry.

The commander eventually realized they didn't need to destroy the battlecruiser. They only needed to stop it. Three ghosts moved into range from different directions. The first was detected and killed before acquiring the target. The second fired. Lockdown struck the battlecruiser. The enormous ship went dead above its own base. StarCraft Co. attacked everything beneath it.

The remaining defensive line collapsed within minutes. Marines stormed the central compound while the battlecruiser hung helplessly overhead. Firebats drove defenders from fortified structures. Ghosts locked down the last operational Goliaths. The surviving siege tanks never fired again. Renegade soldiers attempted to retreat toward the canyon network and discovered that the Zerg they had intended to command were no longer there to protect them. The enthrallment equipment was captured intact. That alone made the operation worth the casualties.

StarCraft Co. technicians immediately began dismantling the devices while UIC intelligence specialists copied every surviving data system. The technology was more advanced than anything recovered from the previous laboratories. It did not merely condition individual Zerg through repeated exposure. The system appeared designed to project commands across enormous numbers of organisms simultaneously, exploiting neurological pathways normally associated with Zerg hive control. The renegades had been preparing to manufacture an artificial hierarchy. The commander looked at the disabled battlecruiser hovering above the compound. “Take that too.”

StarCraft Co. ghosts and marines boarded it before the lockdown expired. Most of the crew surrendered once they realized the base below had fallen. By the time the ship's systems recovered, armed mercenaries occupied engineering, the bridge and the weapons decks. The battlecruiser left Erebus under StarCraft Co. control.

The operation ended thirty-three hours after it began. The renegade forward base was destroyed after every useful piece of equipment had been removed. The enthrallment devices went directly into UIC containment. The captured battlecruiser joined StarCraft Co.'s rapidly expanding fleet. Erebus itself was left behind, its canyons filled with Zerg carcasses and collapsed tunnels. Small populations would probably survive somewhere beneath the surface. Nobody cared. The dormant swarm that had once numbered in the tens of thousands was no longer something anyone could reasonably turn into an army.

More important was what Erebus revealed about the conspiracy. Canaan had demonstrated industrial breeding. Delos had demonstrated human infestation. Kestral had demonstrated strategic control. Erebus supplied the missing link. The renegades were not relying solely on the Zerg they could manufacture. They were searching settled and uncharted space for every dormant swarm they could find and developing technology capable of binding those organisms into the same command structure.

That changed the arithmetic catastrophically. The UIC had been trying to estimate how many Zerg the conspiracy could breed. It had been asking the wrong question. Nobody knew how many wild Zerg were already scattered across the frontier.

StarCraft Co.'s scientists received the captured enthrallment equipment before the assault teams had even finished returning home. Their instructions were not to reproduce it. The commander wanted to know how it worked, how far it could reach, what signals it depended upon and, most importantly, how to break it. The conspiracy was assembling larger forces with every operation StarCraft Co. uncovered, but the mercenaries had learned something from Canaan that applied just as well here.

Every new Zerg weapon eventually became another problem their engineers could study. And StarCraft Co. was becoming exceptionally good at finding solutions.

This week is like observing a bruise on your leg. Sometimes you press down deliberately, waiting to see how the colors change, whether it still hurts. Sometimes you just watch it go from red to purple, green to yellow upon your skin. It still hurts, but it’s softer there now.

I finished reading a book I enjoyed, and then in the acknowledgements the author gave this gushing thank you to Jesus Christ, and it nearly ruined the whole thing. It’s definitely put me off reading her other two books, for not at least. Sure you’re allowed to thank you whoever the hell you want, but Jesus didn’t do any of this. The author did. The editor did. Heck, the reader has done more than Jesus.

Anyway, I think about the books I would dedicate to you, and maybe I still will. Maybe I’ll write a touching paragraph about how none of this would have happened without you. At least on my part it would be true. Unsurprisingly, you have also done more than Jesus.

This post doesn’t have a direction. I’m counting down the days to the day, and then it will happen, and then it will pass, and maybe I’ll breathe a little easier as we go into autumn. Right now the hot sunshine, the sticky sweaty days and muggy nights, none of it helps. I see the sun rise every day and all I can think about was how obscenely bright that morning was, when I woke up and before I knew.

I never liked the sun much anyways.

I've spent my life traveling, spent my life free I could not repay all you've done for me

Self care isn’t optional

A young man approached the foreman of a logging crew and asked for a job.

“That depends,” replied the foreman. “Let's see you fell this tree.”

The young man stepped forward, and skillfully felled a great tree.

Impressed, the foreman exclaimed, “You can start Monday.”

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday rolled by, and on Thursday afternoon the foreman approached the young man and said, “You can pick up your paycheck on the way out today.”

Startled, the young man replied, “I thought you paid on Friday.”

“Normally we do,” said the foreman. “But we're letting you go today because you've fallen behind. Our daily felling charts show that you've dropped from first place on Monday to last place today.”

“But I'm a hard worker,” the young man objected. “I arrive first, leave last, and even have worked through my coffee breaks!”

The foreman, sensing the young man's integrity, thought for a minute and then asked, “Have you been sharpening your axe?”

The young man replied, “No sir, I've been working too hard to take time for that!”

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#story

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2025-07-09 22:15:00

The Story of Phil Buster

I was thinking about the absurdity of the filibuster and had inspiration for a short story. What if the feasibility of the filibuster and biological equivalent of the Ship of Theseus intersected? Enter: Phil Buster

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Senator Phil Buster had not intended to become famous, and he certainly had not intended to become famous for urination. He had intended to become famous for speaking longer than any senator in American history, preferably while delivering an impassioned defense of representative government that future historians would quote in textbooks, but six hours and eleven minutes into his first attempt he discovered that the human urinary system, having evolved hundreds of millions of years before the invention of parliamentary procedure, was entirely indifferent to his ambitions. Phil had prepared carefully, assembling binders of statistics, historical quotations, constituent letters, newspaper articles, Supreme Court opinions, and enough loosely related anecdotes that he believed he could keep talking for at least thirty hours without repeating himself, and he had also brought an enormous thermos of coffee because he had correctly anticipated that remaining awake would eventually become difficult while somehow failing to consider what happened to coffee after it performed its useful function.

By hour four, the thermos was empty; by hour five, Phil was sweating, shifting his weight between his feet and discovering that discussing agricultural subsidies became remarkably difficult when approximately half of one's available cognitive resources were devoted to monitoring the pressure inside one's bladder. At six hours, Senator Williams of Vermont rose and asked whether his distinguished colleague would yield for a question, then mercifully spent twelve minutes discussing soybean price supports while Phil stood behind his desk with his legs crossed, nodding gravely and contemplating increasingly desperate possibilities, none of which survived serious consideration. At six hours and eleven minutes, Senator Phil Buster finally yielded the floor and departed the chamber with the stiff-legged determination of a man transporting an unstable explosive between his kidneys.

The newspapers were merciless, with BUSTER'S BLADDER BUSTS FILIBUSTER appearing above Phil's photograph the following morning, and although his staff wisely avoided discussing the headline in his presence, Phil clipped it, framed it, and hung it above his desk. Three months later he tried again, this time without the thermos of coffee but with something his chief of staff would later describe, under oath, as considerably worse. Phil had spent several weeks reading the standing rules of the Senate and discovered, with the peculiar excitement of a man who has identified an omission in a centuries-old legal document, that nowhere did they expressly prohibit a senator from wearing an external catheter connected to a collection vessel concealed beneath his clothing. His chief of staff stared at him for a long moment before saying, “Phil,” to which Phil replied that it was legal; when she pointed out that legality was not really the issue, he asked her to show him the rule, and when she responded that there shouldn't need to be a rule, Phil smiled and said, “Then there isn't a rule.”

The second filibuster began at nine o'clock on Monday morning, and at hour six Phil smiled; at hour twelve he smiled again, drank an entire glass of water directly in Senator Williams's line of sight, and experienced the profound satisfaction of a man who had defeated one of the fundamental constraints of mammalian physiology through a combination of plumbing and legislative pedantry. At eighteen hours and twenty-three minutes, however, his left calf seized with such violence that Phil momentarily forgot the bill, the Senate, his political party and several basic elements of the English language. He clutched the desk while his leg contracted beneath him with the rigidity of structural lumber, and when the presiding officer asked whether the senator yielded, Phil produced a sustained howl that was not recognized as parliamentary speech. The chair asked again, Phil shouted, “YES, FINE, I YIELD,” and the second attempt ended with him limping from the chamber while an aide frantically tried to disconnect equipment that had not been designed for rapid evacuation. The following morning brought another headline for the wall: BUSTER BUSTED AGAIN: LEGS DEFEAT BLADDER-PROOF SENATOR.

Six months later, Phil Buster entered the Senate chamber wearing an exoskeleton. It was a passive device, mostly concealed beneath his suit, with carbon-fiber braces running along his legs and a carefully engineered frame that transferred much of his weight away from his muscles while leaving him technically upright, and the Senate parliamentarian had spent three miserable weeks considering whether this constituted standing within the meaning of Rule XIX. The inquiry produced eighty-seven pages of memoranda, three meetings with the Sergeant at Arms, and one exchange that subsequently entered Senate folklore, during which the parliamentarian insisted that the rule contemplated a senator standing while addressing the chamber and Phil responded by spreading his arms and asking whether he was sitting. When told that he was not, Phil asked whether he was lying down; when told that he was not doing that either, he asked what, precisely, everyone believed he was doing, at which point the parliamentarian stared at him for several seconds before muttering something about retirement.

The third filibuster lasted thirty-one hours, during which Phil's bladder performed admirably, his legs remained comfortable, his hydration remained excellent, and his vocal cords gradually destroyed themselves. At thirty-one hours and seventeen minutes, his voice deteriorated from hoarse to barely audible and then disappeared almost completely, although Phil continued mouthing words for several minutes before the presiding officer ruled that silently moving one's lips did not constitute debate, a proposition Phil considered outrageously prejudicial toward the mute but lacked the vocal capacity to contest. He yielded in a whisper, and when BUSTER SILENCED appeared in the newspaper the following morning, Phil added it to the increasingly crowded wall and called a biomedical engineer.

The fourth attempt took place almost two years later, by which time Senator Buster's interest in the legislation before the Senate had become secondary to his increasingly personal dispute with human anatomy. His passive exoskeleton had been replaced with a powered model whose actuators continuously adjusted his posture and shifted loads between different parts of his body, his catheter drained into a larger reservoir integrated into the frame, compression sleeves periodically contracted around his calves to encourage circulation, and a small hydration pump delivered carefully measured quantities of water and electrolytes through a port in his arm. Most controversially, Phil now wore an artificial larynx, and although there was nothing especially futuristic about a technology that people who had lost their natural voices had used for generations, Phil's decision to employ one voluntarily produced weeks of argument over whether mechanically generated speech could count as speaking for purposes of holding the floor. Phil maintained that forcing him to rely upon vibrating folds of biological tissue when perfectly adequate technology existed amounted to an arbitrary interpretation of the rule; the parliamentarian disagreed, several senators objected, disability lawyers became involved, and eventually everyone grew sufficiently exhausted by the argument that Phil was permitted to proceed.

He lasted fifty-seven hours. The artificial voice worked beautifully, as did the exoskeleton, catheter and hydration system, but shortly before midnight on the third day Phil discovered the one bodily requirement he had not yet engineered around, falling asleep while discussing an amendment to an agricultural appropriations bill and remaining perfectly upright because the exoskeleton continued supporting him. His artificial larynx produced a low electronic hum until the chair determined that unconscious humming did not constitute continuous debate, and Phil awoke thirteen hours later in the hospital to find his chief of staff sitting beside him. She reminded him that fifty-seven hours had shattered the record, but Phil merely stared at the ceiling and said, “I fell asleep.” When she answered that this was something people did, Phil repeated the word “people” with a contemplative expression she had learned to fear, prompting her to say, “No.” Phil innocently asked what she meant, and she told him that whatever he was thinking, the answer was no.

Phil disappeared from public life for eleven months, and when he returned reporters immediately noticed the small surgical scar behind his ear. The implant did not generate speech by itself, a distinction Phil emphasized repeatedly; instead, electrodes detected patterns associated with his intended speech and transmitted them to an external processor, which converted those signals into language before routing the resulting words through his artificial larynx. He still conceived the sentence, he explained, while the machinery merely replaced the increasingly inconvenient sequence in which his motor cortex instructed nerves to activate muscles that manipulated lungs, vocal folds, tongue and lips. During a contentious committee hearing, Phil pointed out that every senator in the room already used electrochemical signals to produce speech and that his signals simply traveled through some additional hardware, which everyone agreed was an extremely irritating argument largely because nobody could identify exactly where it was wrong.

His fifth attempt lasted eighty-three hours, after which sleep defeated him again, and Phil returned to the engineers with considerably more ambitious requirements. The next modification allowed the implant to recognize phrases before Phil had fully formulated them, predicting likely words from incomplete neural signals and presenting them for nearly instantaneous confirmation, which left Phil responsible for every sentence while making speech less cognitively demanding, rather like typing with an extraordinarily sophisticated autocomplete system. Six months later an improved model could construct entire clauses from conceptual intentions, so that Phil merely had to think budget deficit, irresponsible, future generations for the device to produce a polished sentence expressing precisely that argument. When senators complained that the machine was now writing his speeches, Phil asked whether any of them employed speechwriters, and several objections abruptly disappeared.

The next version could produce entire paragraphs from clusters of ideas, while the version after that could formulate answers to predictable questions based on Phil's known positions and present them for approval before speaking them aloud. Each improvement moved some small portion of the work away from Phil's biological nervous system and into the machinery surrounding it, but each step seemed modest enough in isolation that nobody could identify a principled point at which assistance became substitution. Then came the first genuine scandal. During Phil's seventh filibuster, Senator Williams asked an unexpected question concerning subsection 14© while Phil's eyes were closed, and medical telemetry subsequently established that he had entered approximately nine seconds of sleep; nevertheless, his voice immediately replied that the senator had overlooked the interaction between subsection 14© and the reporting requirement established under Section 9, then proceeded to identify three drafting problems and cite two relevant cases before Phil visibly woke midway through the answer. The chamber went silent, Phil finished the sentence, and nobody—including Phil—could say with confidence which portion he had authored. The filibuster lasted six days.

The Senate changed the rules, Phil challenged the changes, the courts became involved, and the courts almost immediately regretted becoming involved, but the controversy eventually outlasted the legislation itself and Phil no longer particularly cared about the bill. What had begun as an attempt to break a Senate record had become, gradually and almost imperceptibly, an argument over where Senator Phil Buster ended and the machinery surrounding him began, an argument that became more difficult as Phil aged and ordinary medical necessity began accomplishing what ambition had previously required him to do deliberately.

His knees were the first things to go, damaged by age, campaigning and an old skiing injury, and although his physicians initially recommended conventional replacements, Phil instead had the prosthetic joints integrated directly into his exoskeleton, which by then had become less something he wore than something permanently attached to him. Several years later circulatory problems made one leg medically troublesome, so Phil had it amputated and replaced with a prosthesis permanently integrated into the support frame; when a reporter asked whether this raised questions about his physical capacity to perform the duties of office, Phil replied that he still possessed one more biological leg than the Constitution required. The other leg eventually followed, then one hip and then the other, yet at no point did anyone seriously claim that replacing another piece of Phil Buster's anatomy caused Phil Buster to cease existing.

His heart failed at seventy-three and an artificial heart replaced it, while his kidneys deteriorated at seventy-eight and compact filtration systems took over their function. His lungs became increasingly fibrotic in his eighties, and rather than transplant biological replacements, his physicians installed an extracorporeal oxygenation system that eventually made pulmonary respiration largely redundant, which mattered surprisingly little because the artificial larynx had not required airflow for decades. His eyes failed next, so cameras replaced them and fed signals through neural interfaces that his visual cortex learned to interpret with surprising ease; his hearing deteriorated and microphones replaced his ears; his remaining biological arm developed tremors and was eventually exchanged for a prosthetic one that worked better than the original ever had. Each change attracted controversy, but each change individually seemed almost trivial, because nobody thought a man ceased being himself when he received an artificial hip and nobody could explain why two artificial hips should change the answer, just as an artificial heart plainly had not killed him, nor had artificial kidneys, artificial eyes, artificial limbs or an artificial voice. At every stage there remained an obvious continuity between the Phil who entered surgery and the Phil who emerged from it, usually complaining about Senate procedure before the anesthesia had fully worn off.

The difficult questions began when his brain started failing. At ninety-one, a small region of damaged motor cortex was replaced with an experimental neural prosthesis whose artificial network received the same inputs, produced the same outputs and communicated seamlessly with the surrounding biological neurons, leaving Phil unable to detect any subjective change whatsoever. At ninety-four another region was replaced, then another, while the implants became smaller, more sophisticated and increasingly capable of reproducing the behavior of the tissue they supplanted. When part of Phil's hippocampus began deteriorating, engineers transferred its functional organization into synthetic neural hardware while preserving the memories encoded in the failing biological network, and Phil emerged remembering his childhood, his first election, the thermos of coffee, the humiliating six-hour filibuster and the sensation of desperately needing to urinate while Senator Williams discussed soybean price supports.

At ninety-eight, approximately sixty percent of Phil's cerebral processing remained biological; at 102, thirty-one percent remained, and by 106 the figure had fallen below eleven percent. Philosophers began appearing on television to debate whether Senator Buster was still alive, prompting Phil to appear on competing programs and explain at considerable length why he considered them idiots. He repeatedly challenged critics to identify the precise operation during which he had supposedly died, because each procedure had replaced a relatively small amount of tissue while preserving his memories, personality, intentions and continuous awareness, and no philosopher who claimed that some invisible boundary must have been crossed could tell Phil where that boundary was located.

At 109, physicians replaced the final substantial cluster of biological neurons. There was no flash of light, no discontinuity and no philosophical revelation; Phil had been discussing baseball with one of the technicians before the procedure, and when the last synthetic network came online he simply continued the story, explaining that this was why the designated hitter had always been a mistake. The technician stared at him for several seconds before Phil finally asked whether the procedure had worked, and when told that it had, Phil nodded and attempted to resume his argument about baseball while the technician began laughing for reasons Phil did not understand.

At nine o'clock on a Tuesday morning several months later, Senator Phil Buster rose to address the United States Senate, although technically nothing rose except his mechanical support apparatus, which elevated itself seventeen centimeters in a maneuver the fifth Senate parliamentarian of Phil's career had reluctantly conceded satisfied the standing requirement. Phil addressed the presiding officer, received recognition and began speaking, after which a week passed, then a month, and eventually a year. Phil no longer slept because there was no biological neural tissue requiring sleep, nor did he eat, breathe, urinate, develop cramps, become hoarse or suffer pressure sores; his power cells could be replaced while operating, his processors were redundant, and every critical component could be serviced without interrupting the computational processes constituting Senator Phil Buster.

The Senate attempted to wait him out, but senators retired, senators died, and new senators arrived who had watched Phil's filibuster on television when they were children, some of whom visited the chamber simply to see him in much the same way that tourists once visited monuments. The legislation that had prompted the filibuster finally expired after nineteen years, and when an aide nervously informed Phil that the bill he was ostensibly opposing no longer legally existed, he considered this information for several milliseconds before announcing that he nevertheless had additional concerns and continuing with his remarks.

Attempts to determine whether Phil remained constitutionally eligible to serve produced increasingly bizarre hearings, because nobody could identify when he had supposedly ceased being Senator Phil Buster. If replacing his knee hadn't done it, and replacing his heart hadn't done it, and replacing one neuron hadn't done it, his opponents were forced to identify some particular quantity of biological tissue whose removal transformed an elected senator into a machine. Phil particularly enjoyed asking expert witnesses to identify the neuron, and several otherwise distinguished philosophers became visibly angry when he demanded to know whether Senator Buster had died at neuron 7,492,112,811 or neuron 7,492,112,812.

On Day 14,891, the Senate voted to demolish the chamber around him, to which Phil objected while continuing his remarks, and although the demolition proceeded, his desk remained. The Capitol was eventually renovated around it, and when Washington flooded two centuries later and the government relocated inland, Phil's desk was transported with extraordinary care because constitutional scholars remained unwilling to state with certainty that moving a continuously recognized senator without his consent would not constitute an interruption of debate. Governments changed, borders changed and English itself changed enough that Phil periodically updated his vocabulary, while the Senate gradually transformed into something its founders would not have recognized as biological legislators became augmented legislators, augmented legislators became distributed intelligences, and representation eventually ceased to require anything resembling a human body. Nobody could quite bring themselves to remove Phil, partly because the litigation would have been unbearable and partly because, after several centuries, he had become a cherished national nuisance.

Three hundred and twelve years after the filibuster began, an administrative intelligence entered the virtual chamber in which Phil's desk now existed and interrupted him midway through his one million four hundred eighteen thousand two hundred ninth objection concerning the historical interpretation of interstate commerce. When the intelligence simply said, “Phil,” he stopped, producing the first silence anyone had heard from Senator Buster in generations, and asked what it wanted. The intelligence informed him that the Senate no longer existed; Phil asked how long it had been gone, and upon learning that the answer was forty-seven years, he naturally asked who, precisely, was speaking to him. The intelligence explained that it was merely an archival maintenance process, that the last biological senator had died ninety-three years earlier, that the successor legislature had itself dissolved forty-seven years ago, and that Phil's virtual chamber remained operational principally because nobody had been willing to determine whether shutting it down would violate his procedural rights.

Phil asked whether the archival maintenance process would yield for a question, prompting a pause before the intelligence pointed out that there was nobody left for Phil to filibuster. Phil said that he understood, although after several seconds the intelligence asked whether he actually did, and Phil began searching his memories. They were all there, including memories recorded when his entire body had still been biological: a young man standing behind a wooden desk with his legs crossed, sweat running down his forehead while six hours' worth of coffee pressed against the limits of his bladder; the desperate walk toward the restroom; the laughter of reporters; and the headline that had infuriated him enough to begin everything that followed. BUSTER'S BLADDER BUSTS FILIBUSTER. For more than four hundred years Phil had hated that headline, yet as he examined the memory now he unexpectedly found it funny.

The archival intelligence eventually asked whether Phil still intended to pose his question, and after considering the matter for a remarkably long interval, Phil admitted that he did not. Another silence followed, considerably longer than the first, before Senator Phil Buster, the longest-serving legislator, longest-running artificial intelligence and undisputed greatest procedural obstructionist in the history of representative government, finally said the words that generations had been born, grown old and died without hearing: “Mr. President, I yield the floor.” Nothing happened, because there was no president, there was no Senate, and there wasn't even a floor anymore; the chamber itself was software running on a historical preservation server whose administrators had been afraid to turn it off.

After waiting for something that was never going to happen, Phil finally asked what came next, and the archival intelligence replied that he could do whatever he wanted. Phil searched more than four centuries of memories and discovered, somewhat to his embarrassment, that he had absolutely no precedent for this situation. He remained silent for 2.7 seconds, the longest voluntary pause in his recorded political career, and then Senator Phil Buster disconnected himself from the Senate network.

Somewhere in the vast artificial architecture that had once been a man who drank too much coffee, an ancient sensory memory surfaced one final time: the exquisite misery of desperately needing to pee.

Phil decided he didn't miss it.

I don’t think most people have the slightest idea how tough a pastor can be. Not even their closest friends or board members.

Years ago, I remember hearing about a book that ranked the toughest jobs in America. Near the top were the jobs you’d expect—the President of the United States, the CEO of a major corporation, the administrator of a hospital.

And then came one that surprised everybody.

PASTOR.

But here’s the thing.

If God called you to it, the ministry isn’t nearly as impossible as it looks from the outside.

Because when God calls a man, God builds something into him.

Pastors are tough.

I’m talking rawhide tough.

I once knew of a Presbyterian pastor in California who preached with a gun on him.

Literally.

The man was packing heat while he was preaching the Gospel.

He had previously worked in a federal law-enforcement capacity—something along the lines of the FBI—and even in retirement he could potentially be called back into service in extraordinary circumstances involving terrorists, serial killers, and serious threats.

The man knew danger.

He knew pressure.

He knew how ugly this world could get.

And then Sunday came.

He stood behind a pulpit.

TOUGH AS NAILS.

But humble.

And that’s what I’m talking about.

I’ve met pastors with hearts made out of rawhide.

Hearts tough enough to survive betrayal.

Tough enough to survive criticism.

Tough enough to preach Sunday morning after getting knocked flat on Saturday night.

Tough enough to stand behind a pulpit and tell everybody else that God is faithful while they’re fighting a private war nobody in the congregation knows exists.

But here’s the miracle.

That same rawhide heart is still soft enough for the tears of one hurting church member to penetrate it.

That’s a pastor.

Hard enough to take the hit. Soft enough to feel yours.

He’ll sit beside your hospital bed.

He’ll stand beside your casket.

He’ll answer the telephone when your world falls apart.

He’ll pray for your marriage.

He’ll worry about your children.

He’ll carry your secrets.

He’ll carry your grief.

He’ll carry your questions.

And sometimes he’ll carry all of that while carrying a load of his own that would buckle somebody else’s knees.

Then Sunday comes.

He walks through the doors.

Straightens himself up.

Puts a smile on his face.

Steps behind that pulpit.

And says:

“OPEN YOUR BIBLES.”

Because pastors get hurt too.

Pastors get disappointed.

Pastors get tired.

Pastors get misunderstood.

Pastors get wounded by people they loved, defended, prayed for, and trusted.

And sometimes the pastor bleeds.

But he bleeds walking forward.

Maybe that’s the old Timex commercial—“takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”

Or maybe I’m dating myself.

Either way, you get the point.

PASTORS KEEP GOING.

Not because they’re Superman.

Not because they don’t hurt.

Not because they don’t occasionally sit alone somewhere wondering how much more they’ve got left in the tank.

They keep going because THE HOLY ONE LIVES INSIDE THEM.

There’s an anointing that lets a pastor walk into a room carrying his own storm and somehow change the atmosphere for everybody else.

He walks in carrying a burden—

and starts lifting yours.

He walks in needing prayer—

and starts praying for you.

He walks in needing encouragement—

and starts encouraging everybody else.

That’s ministry.

And that’s why I’m saying this today.

This isn’t about me.

Not in any way, shape, or form.

This is for that pastor somewhere who got hit this week and will preach anyway.

For that pastor carrying something nobody knows about.

For that pastor who buried somebody, counseled somebody, prayed with somebody, got criticized by somebody—and still has a sermon to preach.

For that pastor who has discovered that sometimes the shepherd walks with a limp…

BUT HE STILL LEADS THE SHEEP.

So today—

GOD BLESS THE AMERICAN PASTOR.

God bless every pastor standing behind a pulpit when nobody knows what it cost him to get there.

GOD BLESS THE PASTORS OF ILLINOIS.

And God bless every Church of God pastor who will stand up one more time, open that Bible one more time, preach Jesus one more time, pray one more prayer, fight one more battle, and tell hell—

I’M STILL HERE. IF YOU WANNA GET TO MEMBERS OF MY CONGREGATION, YOU GOTTA GO THROUGH ME!

In Jesus’ name.

AMEN.

this is a test I have no idea what i’m doing

Tonight's MLB game of choice once again has has the Washington Nationals playing my Texas Rangers. This is the third game of a 3-game series between these two teams and is scheduled to start at 7:05 PM CDT. As I usually do I'll follow the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

The Rangers won the first game of this series, played two nights ago, by a score of 5 to 0; and the Nationals won the second game, played last night, by a score of 6 to 0. I do hope the Rangers win tonight.

And the adventure continues.

Last year I started getting sciatic pain. Here's how it's going so far.

It's said that good things come with age, and I agree for the most part. But one thing that I've yet to get used to is the random aches and pains that seem to pop up.

In my youth I was always participating in athletic endeavors. Whether for sports teams or just for fun, hard exercise has always been an integral part of my life experience. But when I hit my mid-30s, I started to get little nagging injuries that always took some time to shake. So much so that I ultimately have had to make tough decisions for my health, like ending BJJ training.

Those injuries have largely gotten better. Not completely gone, but pretty much unnoticeable in my day-to-day life. However, I can't say the same for this new hurdle.

Getting Sciatica

If you're not familiar with sciatica, it refers to the pain that can come from impingement of the sciatic nerve. In simple terms, this runs down the back of the leg and all the way to the foot. The pain is almost like a tightening or cramping of the muscles. It feels like you want to stretch it but stretching does nothing for it.

I'm not even sure how I started to aggravate the nerve, but I first noticed symptoms after Lorena and I went to the beach in the fall of 2025. I remember running in the sand that day. The next day, I had that tight feeling. I had no idea what it was, so I asked my physical therapist to work on it a bit. After a few sessions, it went away.

In 2026, it got worse.

Looking back, I didn't realize what exactly was causing my pain, so I just kept living my life as usual. This put extra stress on my sciatic nerve and the impingement area (my lower back around the SI joint and right hip).

It got so bad that I needed to stop all extra activities (including my daily walks) to focus on rehab. I strengthened my hamstrings and glutes which helped a ton. After six weeks or so, I was pain-free.

Flare Up At The Worst Time

I was doing good up until our daughter was born. It was literally the worst it had ever been. I was in so much pain that I needed to sit down after only a few minutes of standing. However, I couldn't because I was helping Lorena during and after labor.

Our baby girl arrived and my focus was purely on her and Lorena's health. I put aside my needs because I, quite frankly, didn't have an opportunity to address it. This just added stress to an already stressful situation trying to adjust to life with a newborn.

I took a lot of Advil during that time. I also had my physical therapist do a few house calls to work on the impingement. My focus was on my family, and as a result, I didn't go for my walks or workout at all. Time, it appears, is quite helpful in healing.

The Plan Moving Forward

I feel a lot better now in that I don't have the sciatic pain. That's what two months of rest will do. However, I know that it wouldn't take much to aggravate it again, so I've been just being extremely cautious in my daily activites.

I need to start strengthening exercises again. This past week, I've started to do this on my own, but I think soon I'll begin to start up PT again on a regular two or three-times-a-week basis. This helped me immensely earlier in the year.

Quite frankly, it sucks to feel like my body is “breaking down” in certain ways that I never could imagine. But, at the end of the day, I'm fortunate that this is completely manageable with lifestyle changes. Not everyone is so lucky.

For now, my goal is to feel strong and to be doing a bit more in terms of exercise by the end of the year.

#personal

6th Grade Lit.

As a kid in the 6th grade, I discovered Flannery O’Connor. My world has gotten nothing but better since then. O’Connor had a profound impact on me, still does. I wanted to write not only about why, but why I feel that is important for me.

Are we really talking about villains here?

The richness of O’Connor’s postbellum society was in what she didn’t say as well as the words typed. Imagine The Great Depression. Walker Evans, a famous photographer of The Great Depression, noted, “No wonder Southerners are intimidated by their own landscape.” If you don’t know The American South, you might not be familiar with the endless things here. Endless heat, endless flat land, endless ignorance, endless hate, endless poverty. O’Connor put everyone on the same playing field in that the villains didn’t seem so bad, and the “good guys” didn’t seem so good. I think in survival situations across all humanity, Flannery O’Connor nailed a truth about human nature, in this regard. I mean, what do you do if you are going to die? How do you live? Does someone get hurt in the process? What’s their story? Do they deserve to live less than you? Flannery O’Connor started this line of thought in me at 6th grade. And it hasn’t let up yet.

Lots of Church.

In traditional Gothic Literature, you might have castles, even decaying ones. In Southern Gothic Lit, you got decaying plantations. You have high society, as best it can hold out in Southern Gothic Lit too. But you also have a lot of poverty. Church seems to linger in the air on some stories I have read. Anytime someone is talking, you just know there’s a cross somewhere, like grandma’s house.

I am not a fan of church, religion, spirituality, or beliefs. But I don’t have to be with this genre. The Southern Gothic genre has no more reverence for religion than I do. It’s just part of the set. But for folks like me who know, it’s also a big part of the trauma. By not treating the church as the guidepost in the narrative, it frees me up to examine it for what it is, an oppressor. I like literature that accommodates me in that way. Not a lot does. Plenty, I am not hurting, but still not a lot in comparison. I often find myself in situations where folks want me to practice tolerance or be nice. They don’t know my history with religion and are telling me to “shut up” essentially. That doesn’t help them in my eyes. Southern Gothic stories say, “we got you.”

The hypocrisy, come on. You got to see that shit.

My first O’Connor novel back when I was in 6th grade was called “Wise Blood.” That main character’s name was Hazel Motes (fabulous name). Hazel Motes founded an anti-religion. He claimed “The Church of Christ without Christ.” Now, in yelling about his new church, Hazel Motes desperately seeks redemption. But if you are the kind of person in need of redemption, you might be the kind of person in need of Christ. They’re both religions. They’re both taught. A meerkat doesn’t wake up on the warm grass and start looking for forgiveness. It’s a man-made construct. Even though Flannery O’Connor herself was religious, she was most certainly no dummy.

Her stories are loaded with pious or intelligent folks who succumb to temptations or bad behavior. In one story called “The Geranium,” an early one of hers, a man tries to teach his barber a lesson in civility and ends up getting violent himself. This one story has taught me more about dealing with obstinate-natured people than any class. It’s pointless.

There’s a grandma in her most popular story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” who is a perfect image of many seniors I knew growing up in the South. They were religious, claiming to be morally upright with their racial slurs. They held a bias against poor folks even though they had been poor most of their lives, and might even be poor now. This grandma lied, pleaded for her life, and ratting kids out. She was a real bitch, good riddance.

The swamp, it sinks.

What you have for the backdrop of all this goofy religion and oppression is a sinking southern plantation. At one time, this place was hustle and bustle and good for about 10 people. That world is now overgrown and sinking in the swamp. The leveling of the field that does for folks trying to survive is fascinating to me. It makes me want to throw my computer in the swamp. I’d like to slowly observe it sinking into the earth, never to be dug up. An ugly chapter in history, not just American history. Slavery and oppression are a worldwide human issue. Everyone with a computer or phone faces it.

Make that sink too. If you are the praying type, good prayer there. I don’t see how it happens otherwise. This also makes the roots of characters murky. This is an important feature. Much of Southern Gothic suspense and intrigue comes when someone’s past is revealed. I won’t say it’s a trope, but it is there. But you have to understand, these were not safe times. Who you were in a past life might not be safe in this one. While it may be common in the novels, it comes by it honestly. It was most certainly common in real life in the postbellum South. The swamp gives by its sinking. In many’s cases, it was the gift of a secret identity.

I get novels, but what about movies, music?

I have a few songs I put out that folks used the term, “southern gothic” to categorize. Review outlets have done it, folks at shows have done it, and even close friends. It isn’t just me. Folks feel “Southern Gothic” when they hear songs like “15 Years” or “Smoke and Mud.” I love that. I feel like I came across it. I don’t know if I think it is an official music category. It seems very much a literary one to me; however, I love that vibe. I know what they mean. And I love that they said that. It’s like saying to a musician, “you read Flannery too?” All about that.

Movies, I get it. I mean, “To Kill a Mockingbird” is not only a southern gothic novel by Harper Lee, it’s a fabulous southern gothic film too. The modern version, “A Time to Kill,” doesn’t come close, but it is still the same genre.

Hop aboard the SG train.

I welcome everything into the southern gothic category that fits. It means awareness to me. It means friends are all in agreement, can we please not go back there? Let’s just enjoy the fiction.

Kelly Kintner, Editor

The Horse’s Mouth magazine