Stoking the Embers

On Playing Causation

To Lord Bertrand Russell,
The Third Earl Russell,
I envy your mind.
I honor your courage.
You were a worthy aristocrat.

Genesis

Matter shot outward,
gravity tugged inward.
The cosmic glue.

The stupid spark that lit the sun,
forged planets out of swirling rocks,
bound them to their airy sheaths.

The seed of hunger, lust, and fear.

For millennia, the formula held. The soil was sovereign and decreed how many could eat. In good years, humans ate enough and fucked. In bad years, they ate bark and died. People built cathedrals, wrote sonnets, and fought wars over whose genes would mix with whose. These were local vibrations; only the limit really mattered.

Seize your enemy’s fields, his wife, his livestock—breed like a Bronze Age conqueror, and the limit would come for your grandchildren. Sail a thousand miles into oblivion, luck upon a virgin island, devour the poor creatures too stupid to fear you, and the limit would come for your great-grandchildren.

The soil had no mercy. Until Victoria was regina et imperatrix, Malthus reigned.

Clever apes could cheat a little. Craft projectiles, and the limit lurched upward. Master fire, irrigation, the plow—and hunger would fade for a generation or two. But the limit was still there— sharpening her blade— waiting for a cold winter, a failed harvest, or a nasty fungus to reap her deadliest toll yet.

Then came the Victorians, with their iron, coal, and Book of Common Prayer. They didn’t smash the limit—not at first—but wore it down with sermons, steamships, and sixteen-hour workdays. They killed the limit before they killed God—and they needed God’s help to do it.

The Victorians optimized the steam engine and fucking. They shamed women into chastity until twenty-six or twenty-eight. Shamed men into respecting twenty-four-year-old virgins rather than taking them in the fields. Shamed people into rationing sex like bread.

By the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, never had so many humans eaten so well, lived so long, and kept so many natural teeth. The jaws of the Malthusian trap were slack—unless you were Irish, or Indian, or didn’t learn prudential restraint.

⸻

On November 7, 2026, Jesus Orozco’s location became his destiny. He asked for a large dose of benzodiazepines and received it an hour before. He was half asleep. Orozco lay prone, strapped to a wheeled gurney crowned by a two-foot-thick steel mask. Beneath his mouth was a one-inch-wide cylindrical breathing hole, which snaked to an opening beneath Orozco’s left ear. A smear of honey coated the top of the pipe.

A 12-ton dentated steel cylinder dangled 16 feet above the aft of Orozco’s cranium. The weight dropped. For 0.97 seconds, quantum uncertainty was Orozco’s only hope. Then, his head exploded between steel.

Modern physicists tell us location is a cloud of probabilities. They say they cannot know whether location is real, because all matter vibrates, including their tools.

They do not care about the exact location of a single electron for 1 × 10⁻²⁵⁰ seconds. You need more than one to blow things up or to get tenure. But I need something unsullied by chance. Something that’s exactly somewhere so that if I’m smart enough and buy enough compute, I can always be right. My noble muse, I will not forsake you, though your sacred parts hide behind vibration. Location is real.

A Man and His Truck

Phil Mason Sr. grew up hard. Not Depression hard. But he was lucky to have shoes that didn’t have too many holes and eat meat twice a week.

When he was twelve, his dad left. By fourteen, he was mowing lawns and washing cars to cover the groceries. Meat became more plentiful as he grew and worked more, but he stayed in school. At eighteen—the day he graduated high school—he became a roughneck.

Working stiffs could finally afford cars and liked them thirsty. Factories from Pittsburgh to Milwaukee were buzzing. Phil worked his tail off. Bought his mom a little saltbox house and bought himself a truck.

Then he got appendicitis and couldn’t work. The house was paid off, so he had a place to crash. The truck was not paid off, so the bank took it while Phil could barely walk. Phil thought that, if they had just trusted him, he could have resumed payments in 60 days. If they hadn’t trusted him, he could have mortgaged the house. Senior cursed the sleaze who took the truck when it was almost paid off and sold it to a crony for a pittance.

Phil never forgot the humiliation. Walking to his buddy’s apartment before dawn just to bum a ride; leaving work early because three hours of overtime wasn’t worth walking 18 miles.

After four weeks on his new job, the boss lent him an old truck. Didn’t ask for anything, just knew Phil would work more. Eight weeks later, Phil was a foreman.

Two years after that, oil prices slumped. The boss offered Phil equity—if he’d take a 50% pay cut. Phil took the risk. His truck and his mom’s little house were both paid off. He’d heard stories of his grandfather striking it big as a wildcatter, then blowing it all.

He timed the oil embargo perfectly. Within half a decade, Phil was a millionaire ten times over. Three years after that, in 1982, Phil Mason Junior was born. Until the day he died, Senior changed his own oil and mowed his own lawn. Aware that his own life had bent toward production, he wanted something gentler for his son and heir.

More money was spent on Junior’s athletics than on Senior’s whole childhood. Junior took swimming lessons he didn’t want and had a batting cage in his backyard. Junior wasn’t a great athlete, but he was no slouch. He made the varsity football team sophomore year and even played some. It didn’t hurt that his father had become the most beloved truck dealer in Mid-Texas. Dad ran his dealership with a public spirit. He didn’t give credit easily, but he would never repossess a good man’s truck.

Phil Junior was respected among his classmates for being useful and, relatedly, not being an asshole about his dad’s money. By junior year he could have taken half the cheerleaders out on Saturday night. Phil preferred Marybell. They would spend Saturday evenings at a steakhouse and then in Phil’s truck. She let him pay, let him hold her, her breasts brushing up against him like it meant nothing. But she was a year younger and didn’t want to go further just yet. When he looked into her eyes and slowly descended for a kiss, she would turn her cheek with a half frown. But she would hold his hand and kiss it sometimes. Phil didn’t wait and seduced a cheerleader who had just been dumped. When Marybell found out, she made it clear that Phil was only a friend. She’d still get in his truck, but now they ate at Longhorn’s and she paid half and didn’t want to be held very tightly. She still let him kiss her cheek. He dreamed of her well into his forties.

It wasn’t until junior year at UT that Phil met Kara. She wasn’t the hottest girl in the dorm, but quite hot given her sex drive.

Seeking Grace

Phil had a dead ferret in the trash and a scandal brewing. He needed to change the narrative. Some reporter was sure to ask about the ferret as soon as he left the Hyatt. On Phil’s phone and many others, the then living ferret cohabited the frame with a nude image of Phil descending onto his hotel bed with a boner. Emily had been just off screen. He hadn’t done anything that should cost him his pride or his seat, but the feeling of its skull cracking beneath his foot rattled him. Phil would prove the camera lied, that he was a real man, a decisive and confident man, not the kind of sicko who got off on ferrets.

But first, an experiment.

He put the ferret on the bare floor by the door and dropped a 25-pound barbell on its head. Its cranium imploded, but remained ferret-like. Phil knew 1000 times the barbell’s weight would do the trick on a grown man.

Phil pulled out his laptop and fired up Venice AI. His prompt now hangs above the Doric columns of the Texas Whole Head Guillotine Court:

“Draft a Texas law that will execute murderers by crushing their heads. Let’s own the libs.”

The black circle pulsed for nineteen seconds. Then the law began to trickle out.

⸻

SB 247: The Texas Whole Head Immediate Guillotine Act

§ 1. Title
This Act shall be known as the Texas Whole Head Immediate Guillotine Act of 2026 (“WHIGA”).

§ 2. Capital Offenses
Only murder, defined as intentionally causing the death of a human being, shall be punishable under this Act.

§ 3. The Texas Whole Head Guillotine Court
There is hereby established the Texas Whole Head Guillotine Court, an appellate tribunal of limited jurisdiction empowered to hear a single appeal from sentences imposed under this Act. The Court shall consist of three members: (one) a district-champion high school football coach, (two) a licensed veterinarian, and (three) a bonded exterminator with five or more years of experience.

All justices shall serve at the pleasure of the Governor. The Court shall issue a final ruling within five (five) days of conviction. Reversal is permitted only upon a showing of a substantial likelihood that the defendant committed no capital offense.

§ 4. Execution Procedure
The condemned shall be placed in a prone position with the head restrained against a solidly constructed surface. Execution shall be carried out by dropping a steel weight of no fewer than ten (10) tons from a height of no less than sixteen (16) feet directly onto the head. The design and maintenance standards for the apparatus shall be subject to the approval of the Texas Whole Head Guillotine Court.

§ 5. Trial Timeline and Verdicts
Trial shall commence within seven (seven) days of indictment. Continuances shall require a showing of medical incapacity or active war in the county of venue. A majority verdict shall suffice for conviction.

§ 6. Defense Counsel Custody During Continuance
If a continuance is granted, defense counsel shall be held in the jail of the venue county for the duration of the delay. Counsel may retain and use a cell phone, laptop computer, and portable Wi-Fi hub while in custody.

§ 7. Timing of Execution
Execution shall occur within forty-eight (48) hours of the affirmation of sentence by the Texas Whole Head Guillotine Court. No stay shall be issued by any executive or judicial authority of the State of Texas.

§ 8. Emergency Execution Authority
If an attempt to interfere with the execution occurs, any supervisory correctional officer may carry out summary execution by any available means not involving deliberate and unnecessary torture. No advance approval is required.

* * *

An Austin Statesman article provided the first third-party account of Phil’s gambit and the reaction it provoked. At a press conference, Phil said:

“Some say the guillotine is barbaric. That’s a lie. It may be bloody, it may be gross, but it is the quickest, most painless execution imaginable. The brain is obliterated before pain exists. Democrats are too squeamish to keep us safe—they won’t even kill a rattlesnake.”

Rural Republicans lined up behind him. Sen. Roy Blanton of Scurry County told the paper: “We tried lethal injection—which is how many Europeans end their own lives to avoid pain. Then the EU and liberals decided we couldn’t have the drugs. Too bad. We have steel. We have gravity. They can’t stop Texas.”

Suburban Republicans were more cautious. “I support killing murderers as much as the next gal,” said Sen. Lindsey Koehler of Sugar Land, “but this is the kind of thing that sounds good until you explain it to your six-year-old. I’m worried about what this says to our daughters.”

At 3:34 p.m., a video began circulating online: Koehler’s own daughter giggling while watching anime renderings of the whole-head guillotine in action.

An internet poll cited by the Statesman showed 46 percent of Texans supported the measure and 48 percent opposed it. Support among men outpaced women by 23 points.

Democrats’ reactions ranged from horror to disbelief.

Asked whether the proposal was politically motivated in the wake of the ferret photograph, Phil said, “I’m not proud of everything I’ve done. I am a sinner seeking grace.”

The Substack Intellectual took a break from lawyering and dashed off a brief note:

Politics are becoming interesting again. If WHIGA passes, dozens of criminals a week may repent beneath the guillotine. It might even be livestreamed.

College

Phil attended the University of Texas at Austin. He majored in economics and got good enough grades to mollify his parents, but his real interests were women and booze.

Freshman year, when he lived on campus, he closed a couple of hookups by springing for Ubers and a room at the Hyatt. Starting sophomore year, Phil lived in an apartment six blocks from the ΔΧ house. The six block walk was not a handicap. Most girls appreciated the privacy, and if a girl cried, puked or fell before getting to the apartment, Phil did not want to hook up with her.

Phil’s mother furnished the place with sturdy wares from Rooms To Go; his father added a sixty-inch TV and an Italian leather sofa. Phil had kept his grades up, gotten into UT without too much patronage, and, Senior thought, deserved a good time.

At parties, Phil liked tending the keg. The biggest perquisite was deciding which women were “21” and awarding them bracelets. Some avoided keg duty for fear of having to cut off shitfaced brothers. Phil’s solution was to keep serving his constituents until most would appreciate being cut off, at least the next morning. Brothers bragged they would go as hard as Phil let them—and mostly meant it. The few who swore at Phil after being cut off were well on their way to retching. The one who shoved Phil after being refused beer slept for twelve hours and didn’t remember.

Kara Hopkins matriculated two years after Phil and wanted to become a doctor. Two weeks after school began, Kara noticed Phil at a fraternity party, not his face but his posture. Phil stood straight and looked every brother in the eye. He was drinking but not drunk. She couldn’t decide if he was buzzed or just happy. The underclassmen approached Phil in twos and threes to fill up.

Kara wanted beer and was encouraged that Phil was serving brothers who didn’t look 21. She and a friend approached to perhaps ten feet from Phil. Kara looked at Phil and, when he looked back, she smiled.

Phil stepped away from the keg. He told Kara, “You look twenty-one,” and, after she offered her wrist, took his time sliding a plastic bracelet on it. They talked near the keg for a few minutes, then Phil handed off keg duty to a sophomore. Phil and Kara chatted and drew close on the porch, then lightly petted one another on the walk to her dorm. He kissed her at her front door, and her tongue greeted his.

A couple of days later, they went for tacos. When they met, Kara put her hand on his chest. He hugged her, and she let him linger. Phil ordered the octopus tacos and talked about travel. She touched his shoulder, then his wrist, eating more than she spoke. After fifteen minutes at the table, she asked to see Phil’s apartment with a winsome smile and without qualifying her purpose.

Phil agreed but did not put down his third taco. Kara began fidgeting when Phil had a bite left. He stood up as he ingested the last bite, wiped his hands and then briefly clasped Kara’s waist. They walked to the penthouse mostly holding hands. The big TV and sumptuous couch made Kara assume Phil had good grades. The date ended with sex. After ninety seconds of cuddling, Kara moved away gently, and Phil tightened his grip. She waited several breaths, then said, “I have to go.”

“Did you like it?”

“Yes. I have to go study.”

Phil relented, but said, “It’s not like a B will kill you. I’ve had a few B minuses and I’m still here.” Kara kept a poker face, but seethed. Medical schools did not like Bs.

Kara was the first woman Phil slept with more than a handful of times, the first body he learned to please. He loved her while he was horny and didn’t stop when he wasn’t. Phil wanted their lives to sync.

Kara set the rules quickly. She came over two nights a week and didn’t text much. She had to keep her grades up or her dad might cut her off. Kara practically moved in during finals, but only on condition that he let her study. Every morning, she would walk into Phil’s room naked and fuck him, then retreat to her room and hit the books. She would also emerge for a few minutes if Phil ordered food.

After finals, Phil asked Kara to spend the summer with him in Europe.

“You know I can’t afford it,” Kara said.

“My dad leased an apartment in Paris for the summer, and I have enough money to get you a ticket and plenty of wine,” Phil said.

“I don’t want to owe you anything.”

“I already owe you everything, and I’m fine with that. I’m addicted to you.”

“You don’t know what it means to owe someone.”

“My dad sure did.”

“He sure didn’t teach you.”

A silence sat between them. Kara felt her throat quiver and an urge to leave.

“I’ll think about it,” she said. She pecked Phil’s cheek goodnight, turned, walked smartly until she was outdoors, then bent over and vomited in the shrubs.

A week after finals, Phil flew to Paris alone. He texted Kara pictures of the Seine, old masters, and of his dick. For a few days, she typed brief replies each morning. Then she went silent.

Phil stopped sending dick pics and substituted increasingly urgent prose.

10:14 a.m.
Phil: How are you?
Phil: Are you ok??

3:42 p.m.
Phil: I miss you!!
Phil: Are you with someone?
Phil: Do I have to fly to Texas to talk to you?

9:07 p.m.
Phil: Are you cheating on me?
Phil: I’ll be on the next plane to Dallas if you don’t text first.

Kara: I had an abortion. I didn’t want to hurt you so I didn’t text.

Kara had taken two pills she ordered from a clinic in New York. She felt no need for an ultrasound and wanted it over. Things had gone too far with Phil.

Phil called, rage building in him. No answer. Why had she done it? No answer again. He would have taken care of her. No answer again. Phil smashed his wine glass on the cobblestones. Only the alarmed stares of other customers spared his phone. Instead, he texted:

You fucking bitch, I would have married you.

The text never went through. Kara had already blocked him.

After six more calls, Phil admitted his helplessness. He imagined Kara fucking other men, drowned himself in wine, then thought about her fornications even more. The couple times he approached sobriety, Phil imagined the early honeymoon he might have had if Kara had come to Paris. Each time, there arose in him the terror that he might have done something different, that there had been some lever that, if pulled with enough resolve, would have saved the baby. Phil guzzled wine to blot out his imagined complicity. By the time he flew home, acetaldehyde was oozing from his pores. The three drinks Phil got in coach weren’t enough to stave off the jitters, so he tied one on at DFW.

When Phil stumbled past security in Midland, his mom cried, and his dad said he was going to rehab. It was the first hard line his father had drawn since Phil had been thirteen and didn’t want braces. Phil figured there was no point avoiding rehab if the old man wouldn’t pay his bar tab. A few weeks—maybe a month—of sobriety, some burnout sets at the gym, and the softie would relent.

The Young Heir

Phil told his father about the pregnancy and the abortion soon after he was hustled off to rehab. His words had their intended effect. Phil Senior did not think getting Kara pregnant was irresponsible. Junior would graduate in ten months and could work at the dealership before the baby crawled. He might become general manager in a few years if he put his mind to it. Kara was the one afraid of growing up. Phil had done just fine until she killed the baby. Senior’s last words to his son were, “Stay dry for two months and I’ll buy you a beer.”

Minutes after hanging up, Phil Senior and his wife left for a weekend trip to Taos. The universe in which the old man chartered a flight and lived is counterfactual. In the real world, the one riveted to what is and what has been, the world metaphysicians say is a four-dimensional matrix but where I know my mind marks the passage of time, in that actual world, Phil Mason Senior drove. An overworked trucker fell asleep and hit Senior’s truck head-on. In the fifty-third year of his life, and the 226th year of the American Republic, Phil Mason Senior and his wife were fatally crushed. The New Mexico State Patrol assured Phil they died instantly.

The old man had not changed his will. Junior received the dealership and one-third of the securities. His sister got the rest. At twenty-two, Phil could not afford a proper yacht, but on land, he could afford almost anything.

Phil creaked forward on high-dimensional rails whose course and potency he could not see.

He waited the two months his father had prescribed, then bought himself a beer and called Marybell. She had a boyfriend and didn’t talk much.

Phil did not like what he had become in Paris and crafted rules to avoid it. He stopped at two drinks Monday through Thursday and never drank more than a six-pack. He traded hookups for strippers and, for the first time since high school, got mostly As.

He drove a Ford F-250. After graduating, he lived alone in a four-bedroom ranch and took flying lessons. For a couple of years, Phil spent long weekends hopscotching around the West in a twin-prop.

Phil loved takeoffs, throttling up to 98% and leaving it there until the engine whimpered. Phil didn’t want to trash the engine but he didn’t fly like a general practitioner nursing a 401k. He’d cut back to 75% before the engine got too hot and leaned the mixture as he climbed. He got to know his plane better than Kara’s body and liked how it amplified him.

A twenty-four-year-old in a twin prop got almost as much attention from the line girls as a silverback in a Citation, but Phil was leery. He understood he could fuck a good portion of them but was mortified by their mystery. He had no idea what they wanted or who they wanted or how many secret abortions they’d had and he didn’t want to find out. Strippers were easier and probably cheaper.

He sometimes received emails about fractional yacht ownership. He had no interest in hustling or taking good men’s trucks just to cruise the Aegean in a 43-meter vessel, not when his gently used Seneca IV cost well under a million.

While Phil wanted to be alone, the sky was almost home. Yet the vistas offered little company and the landscapes little change beyond the seasons. Several of Phil’s high school teammates, none previously pious, joined a megachurch. Phil went to a couple of services and liked the clarity about family being good and abortion being bad. At twenty-five, Phil joined the congregation.

The megachurch offered a pool of three hundred young women with a taste for in-person socializing and, more often than not, marriage. The mass and luminosity of their faith varied. Several times, Phil made one of the pettier ones his official girlfriend. Phil knew the power pregnancy conferred and trod carefully.

Beth Parvent, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a dentist, was eager to go out with Phil, eager to come back to his house after their fourth date, eager enough to take off her panties. She grew cool when Phil produced a condom. Beth went through with it, but without enthusiasm. He had trouble climaxing and never asked her out again. Phil surmised she was less interested in sex than landing a husband. Thereafter, when a conversation with a new woman turned toward sex, Phil proclaimed he used a condom every time.

Before Patty, Phil never offered a ring or hinted at one. He didn’t need to. The clever girls dated Phil for a few months and moved on to more eager suitors. The simple ones got their hearts broken. With condoms and some charm, Phil cycled through seven years of dating and trysting with women of the megachurch.

Most nights, Phil slept alone. Often, he wished Kara were next to him—raising their five- or six- or seven -year-old, maybe getting high with the yoga wives. He hadn’t spoken to Kara since she blocked him, didn’t know whether she had gotten into medical school or had killed their child for nothing. He didn’t want to speak to her. And yet he couldn’t stop thinking about how happy his life might have been with her. Phil did not know that only the actual was possible. He was sentimental.

* * *

Phil was comfortable with money. Half sat in index funds, half in U.S. Treasuries. He tried to live off the dealership’s income and usually succeeded. Every Christmas, he forgave several truck loans a year or two early. He vetted hard-luck stories through pastors and had sympathy for anyone who had made their payments before getting sick. Like his father, he did not give credit easily. He would never finance payments over fifteen percent of a borrower’s income. With younger customers, he would tell them how many overtime shifts they needed to work to make a down payment large enough for the loan to make sense.

If a customer missed a payment in the first year, Phil was suspicious. He allowed sixty days’ grace, then took the truck.

He rarely repossessed from anyone who had made their payments for a year. As long as the debtor produced a pay stub and fifteen percent of his pay, Phil would roll the principal forward. If someone claimed not to have a job, Phil demanded proof of unemployment or disability. He laughed at outsourcing his decisions to the welfare state, but it had IRS payroll data and he didn’t. A thirty-something roughneck once pretended to be out of work to defer payments and live large. When Phil saw him at a line dance, he hired a PI to investigate, then swore out a warrant for interfering with his security interest.

Phil Mason presided over a personal risk-pooling fiefdom and waded deeper into Republican politics.

Patty

Patty’s mother adored her. Her father was usually at work. When he got home before Patty’s bedtime, he would bring his “pretty little angel” a Coca-Cola. She wasn’t allowed to drink them otherwise.

Patty, the oldest child, was half big sister and half mother. She brushed her brother’s hair before school, reheated the macaroni on Mondays, and cut the crusts her youngest brother wouldn’t eat off his bread. When one of them got carsick, she cleaned the seat before their mother saw. Patty was solid.

In high school, Patty stayed up late enough to see her father come home and drink. He still told her she was pretty. One night, a paternal hug became an improper kiss on the lips and Patty drew back. Her father couldn’t look at her the next day, couldn’t say she was pretty, and barely hugged her again.

By sixteen, Patty was the prettiest girl in her class if you didn’t need a blonde or like trashy outfits. She didn’t worry much about her looks, but she played field hockey and her figure was perfect. Until she was seventeen, she thought boys were gross. She was glad God didn’t want her to have sex.

Patty hoped to find a husband in college but didn’t want to be a notch on anyone’s bedpost. She joined a Christian group half hoping to date, but the talk of male headship made her skin crawl. Spending time with her girlfriends was easier than chasing a ring at twenty. She thought many of her friends were trying too hard to force it.

* * *

Phil Mason Junior was a generic Republican. Other than his attacks on title pawns and payday lending, most of his positions were lifted straight from the platform. He was pro-God and pro-guns. He hated abortion. He was pro-family but didn’t begrudge a twenty-four-year-old roughneck a good time.

Mason’s defenders say he entered politics because of his sincere hatred of hard-money. Some detractors claim he wanted an excuse to knock on strange women’s doors. In his old age, Phil said the same vanity that made him enjoy handing out 21+ bracelets for his fraternity and forbearing loans at his dealership led him to politics.

In 2018, the state senate seat for his native Midland became vacant. Phil and his father had done enough favors for enough people that he got 34% in a six-way primary, then won the Republican runoff with a Trump endorsement. The Democrats didn’t field an opponent.

In Republican politics, a 33 year old bachelor was borderline and a 37 year old bachelor was suspect. This became an issue during Phil’s first reelection campaign, and Phil resolved to date more seriously. When she met Phil, Patty was twenty-five and most of her girlfriends were wives or mothers. She had recently joined Phil’s megachurch, after moving to Midland to teach second grade. She liked his steadiness and that he was sort of rich. Phil thought her stuffed animals were cute.

On Sunday mornings, he brought her coffee and drove her the 3.7 miles to church, his hand resting lightly on the outside of her thigh. He lit up when she turned her cheek just enough to suggest a kiss.

Through spring and summer, Phil’s words were gentle. After six months, Patty felt a warm relief when he said they might be married someday—and a tightening in her chest when he reached down her pants.

“Most girls would have tried to get pregnant by now,” Phil said.

“I’m not most girls.”

“I don’t want to marry most girls.”

“I don’t see a ring.”

“I’m not proposing,” Phil said. “I’m saying I want to marry you. I think we should spend the night together.”

“So you want to sample the goods and then decide if you want to marry me.”

“It’s more like I want to marry you,” Phil said, “and I’ll go through with it unless it’s a lot worse than I expect.”

“I need to pray on it,” Patty said.

The next day, Phil presented her with a three-carat ring. He did not kneel. He smiled and said, “You can tell people we’re engaged if you like. Let’s fly to Taos this weekend.”

Patty put on the ring, did her duty during the trip to Taos, and married Phil four months later.

On their first anniversary, Patty and Phil went to the bougie steakhouse and drank champagne. At home, they knelt by their bed, prayed for a child, and made love. Patty kind of enjoyed it.

Patty thought Phil forgot their second anniversary, but he surprised her with Thai and sake. When they prayed, she didn’t feel Jesus. Afterward, she didn’t feel much.

On their third anniversary, Patty knew no amount of praying and fucking would get her pregnant. She forgave Phil for forgetting their anniversary but drew her line.

“I want to try in vitro. We’ll never get pregnant if I don’t.”

“My constituents don’t like aborting the extra embryos.”

“We don’t have to tell them.”

“They might find out and God certainly will.”

Patty submitted once again.

Emily

Emily had always had her good looks. Sometimes she hadn’t had much more.

Her father paid enough child support to stay out of jail but seldom enough to make her comfortable. Once she turned eighteen, Emily made good money waitressing—good enough to think she could take her time in college, to major in psychology, to believe she’d always have choices.

By 27, she had a degree but was still a waitress. Boys had always scared her a bit. One of her mother’s lovers had violated her before her fifteenth year, and afterward it was hard to feel comfortable in her own body.

A couple of boys she did like were annoyingly grabby. Having a boyfriend could be useful, so she’d had a few. She was a muse some men could worship without much encouragement. But those boys never really knew how to please her, and she’d maintained a certain aloofness from sex since that awful business fifteen years ago.

* * *

Phil Mason hated Texas heat and had bought a place in Taos to escape it. He hoped that he and Patty could find a new groove summering in Taos. The legislature met in the winter and he could keep the dealership humming with a few Zooms a week and a monthly dive into the books.

Governor Abbott had other plans. He called a special session of the legislature to begin June 1. The proclamation said it was to address crime and immigration, but everyone knew Abbott wanted to be President. A really fierce anti-immigration bill might punch his ticket, notwithstanding any constitutional infirmity.

Phil resented being the governor’s video wallpaper. On the first Sunday of each month, Phil reviewed past due auto loans to decide who counted as a good man and who kept his truck. Phil was a sucker for downgrades. If someone admitted he bought too much truck, Phil would give them a smaller, cheaper truck for his actual cost. Phil expected owners who lost a job or got sick after a few payments to do this. His assistant would call delinquents and tell them about the “trade-in program” before Phil became involved.

Phil usually listened to Hardcore History podcasts while driving to the capitol. Because it was the beginning of June, Phil conducted his lit de justice instead. His assistant, Becky, explained, “He did make 13 payments and we have verified he is getting unemployment, but I don’t think an unemployed man needs to drive a 72-thousand-dollar truck.”

“I certainly wouldn’t try to hang on to that truck if I were him,” Phil said. “Him driving that truck is like me sailing a yacht to Mykonos.”

“And you don’t do that,” Becky said approvingly.

“But if I had a yacht and I were in it and I had made all my payments for 13 months and the stock market tanked, I wouldn’t want the bank to take it from me just so some gulf sheik could buy another Rembrandt.”

“They would take the yacht, Phil. Might hire retired SEALs to get it back.”

“But they wouldn’t need to. They could just roll the principal forward and I would pay them when my portfolio went back up. Lester is a good man, right? Never been out of work for more than a couple months.”

“This is his longest spell between jobs, but he might be falling apart.”

“Put Lester on the phone.”

While Becky was conferencing Lester in, the truck speakers pinged with a text from Phil’s wife.

Before Phil could read it, Lester began, “Mr. Mason, I was just headed to an interview.”

“Good for you, Lester.”

“Becky told me to trade down, but I don’t want to look like I’ve fallen on my ass. Can you give me two more months?”

“I’ll give you three—”

“Thank you, Mr. Mason.”

“But only three. If you can’t find a job for five months, you need to downsize.”

“Yes, sir,” Lester said resolutely.

“Take care. Becky, I want to deal with a text from my wife before the next file.”

The call ended. Phil’s AI assistant read his wife’s text with a cowgirl twang:

“I’m moving in with Julie. We are together. I don’t want your money, just enough to start over. Don’t hate me.”

Phil was more shocked than upset. The heat in Austin sucked whether or not you were married. The charms of the University of Texas, fruit he had not tasted since marriage, beckoned. The undergrads were on break, but grad students studied all year, and 24 was a fine age. The special session had just become a stag trip.

Phil arrived in Austin and checked in to the Hyatt where he always stayed. He usually drank at the Hyatt bar, but he was feeling frisky and didn’t want to prowl in front of staff he would see every morning. He Ubered to a haunt a few blocks away; the heat made walking anywhere a bad pickup strategy. Two lobbyists from the Texas Pawnbrokers Association were at the bar. Phil thought of leaving until he saw the waitress, whose sinuous figure prompted him to order a double whisky. When Phil said he was getting divorced, she put her hand on Phil’s and said, “Starting over doesn’t have to be bad.” Phil smiled and asked the waitress where she was from. When he finished his drink, Phil pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his wallet, tucked it beneath the receipt, and slid one of his senatorial business cards under the glass.

“Please call me,” he wrote, and left.

* * *

Emily: Was that tip for my smile or my tits, senator?
Phil: Both.
Emily: My smile is only 20%.

She texted a picture of bare breasts smiling beneath her face.

Phil: You are making me hard.
Emily: Show me.

Phil complied.

Emily forwarded the screenshot. Thirty seconds later her balance doubled—$500 for the dick pic. Political dick pics were becoming like Argentine pesos.

Emily: Yummmmmmm.
Phil: Wanna touch it?
Emily: Sure, but I’m sort of a freak. I cum harder if I hold my ferret.
Phil: I’m more into women than ferrets. What if we went to Rome? Tenerife?
Emily: I neeeeed the ferret, daddy.
Phil: I’ll try anything once.
Emily: My place is a mess and my roommate’s a prude.

Phil texted his room number at the Hyatt. The lobbyist called Emily.

“Whether you fuck him is up to you. A picture of Phil with a boner and a ferret is worth five grand. My assistant is bringing a pinhole camera.”

Emily figured she’d fuck Phil to smooth her exit and leave the stupid ferret in the bathroom. Emily put on clean panties, put a dent in her credit card balance, then texted Phil:

“OMW, senator. And dripping.”

Principal component analysis showed that money explained 48% of Emily’s behavior, while trauma explained 23% and physical desire 19%. No other axes were significant at the 0.05 level.

A Bill Becomes Law

Between New Year’s Day and the opening of the special session on June 1st, Texas saw the murders of twelve infants and thirteen toddlers. Three-fifths were killed by their own parents. Their deaths were chronicled on the front pages of the San Angelo Standard-Times and Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, and in the metro section of the Dallas Morning News. Few were mentioned beyond their local markets. They died too young to have friends or spouses, though sometimes an aunt or uncle paid for a funeral.

The eighteen adolescents slain that winter and spring received somewhat more attention. They had friends, teachers, and sometimes even church groups or sports teams who could speak to the cameras. Their names and faces flickered across social media before life moved on.

Lissy George’s twelve summers had given her long brown hair, smooth pale skin, and a smile both friendly and nervous. She spent the last night of her life safe on a bed with four pink pillows. The next morning, a Saturday, she was kidnapped at gunpoint while walking three blocks to a friend’s house. But Lissy George was not to be forgotten. Her father was the mayor of Tyler, and the manner of her death was salacious.

Her body was found on June 5th, two days after Phil introduced the Whole Head Immediate Guillotine Act. Phil kept low at first. He did not appear on camera or leave any extant record for the next two days.

Mayor George issued a brief statement the next morning. He stood at a lectern in Tyler City Hall, his tie slightly askew, his voice broken but dignified by grief. He thanked the police, asked for privacy, and then said he supported Senator Mason’s bill. “No family should have to go through this,” he said. “If there is a tool that can make Texas safer, we ought to use it. Nothing is worse than what Lissy endured.”

The tone in the Senate that day was somber. Half the senators performed empathy, the other half felt it. No one dared to smile. The lamentations blurred into one another, and no votes occurred.

When the Senate adjourned that afternoon, KXYZ reporter Mary Snow was waiting outside the chamber. Endowed with brunette hair and celebrity-grade curves, she had found her moment. The instant a suburban Republican woman exited the chamber, her cameraman flipped on the klieg light, and Snow pounced. “Senator, can you look Mayor George in the eye and say the guillotine is bad for young women?” The clip aired at six, then again at ten. The next day, Snow appeared on a Fox panel.

MSNBC released an overnight poll showing a bare majority of Texas voters still against the guillotine. Rasmussen showed majority support.

Then, a fifteen year old shot a video of herself in her McAllen bedroom. “Senator Koehler wants to know what the guillotine says to young women,” she said before pausing and letting the challenge hang. “It says we matter.”

Her slogan detonated across the internet. People declared who did and didn’t matter and using Grok to create images of their heads being pancaked by oversized cylinders. Most users couldn’t name a single recent murderer, so Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson served as stand-ins. Before long, meme-makers paired the slogan with the faces of legislators who opposed the bill.

When Grok tightened its guardrails, people switched to other vendors. The issue became big enough that the uninformed were expected to have opinions. Many were pro-guillotine mainly to trigger the libs.

On Bluesky, everyone agreed that Phil Mason didn’t matter. Deepfakes of Phil with Hitler mustaches and more esoteric Nazi regalia flooded the platform. Swastikas were verboten! When pictures of Phil’s head beneath the cylinder popped up, they were deleted. The Bluesky mods said they wouldn’t wish the guillotine on anyone—not even its hick inventor—because that would make Bluesky just as bad.

⸻

Lissy’s murder inspired a significant amendment to WHIGA. Its sponsor, Senator Zimmerman, explained his logic on the Senate floor:

“I trust the prosecutors in Tyler to seek the death penalty. But Democratic big-city prosecutors who would rather coddle criminals than crush their heads. That’s why I’m proposing the Permian Override. When woke prosecutors go on strike, the Basin will deliver.”

It read:

“Whenever a crime enumerated in this act occurs in a city with a population exceeding 200,000, any district attorney whose circuit contains at least five active fracking rigs may bring prosecution in any county in his circuit.”

The President weighed in.

TRUTH SOCIAL — 8:12 p.m.

“Terrible tragedy in Texas. The Whole Head Guillotine would have STOPPED it. Senator Mason is VERY strong — and he’s doing what weak politicians won’t. Protecting young women. WOMEN MATTER!!”

The next day, the amendments and the bill passed both chambers on party-line votes. The Speaker and the Lieutenant Governor adjourned their respective chambers in triumph.

The Least Dangerous Branch

The day after WHIGA passed, the ACLU sought an injunction.

It filed in the Western District of Texas, Austin Division, the most Democratic federal court in the state. The clerk’s random number generator smiled, assigning an Obama appointee.

Two days later, the court issued a forty-two-page opinion. It ended:

“The state’s conclusory allegations that prisoners would die ‘very quickly’ and ‘wouldn’t even feel it’ find no support in the record.”

It issued an injunction. Five days later, the Fifth Circuit reversed:

“Nothing in WHIGA precludes Supreme Court review of the Guillotine Court’s rulings. The time frame for execution, while brief, is sufficient to draft a petition for certiorari.

“Nor is beheading a ‘unique’ injury in the constitutional sense. Charles I, Anne Boleyn, and many others were decapitated under common-law procedures. Had the Founding Fathers wished to forbid the dropping of a steel cylinder onto the heads of criminals, they could have done so.”

The Supreme Court denied certiorari.

* * *

The next day, the Substack intellectual posted a note:

The Eighth Amendment abolished cruel and unusual punishment. The framers knew what “and” meant.

The predominant method at the time—short-drop hanging—was no mercy. The guillotine, first used the year after ratification, was a humane improvement. There is no plausible reading of the Eighth Amendment under which a method more humane than hanging could be cruel or unusual.

None of this will matter. The Court will not permit the Whole Head Guillotine Court to stand. The temple priests do not surrender their mysteries to mendicants.

The Substack intellectual was modestly pleased with 63 likes and three new subscribers.

* * *

WHIGA took effect in mid-September. Within a week, the Guillotine Court received its first appeal.

A twenty-three-year-old drifter had robbed an East Texas gas station and shot the clerk. The prosecution introduced video of the masked robbery, dash-cam footage of a deputy pursuing the robber’s car, and body-cam footage showing $257 in cash and a black ski mask recovered after the vehicle spun out. The trial took six hours, and the jury returned a guilty verdict before sunset.

The Guillotine Court held its inaugural session at the Austin Airport Hilton.

The prisoner’s brief wasted pages objecting to WHIGA’s procedures and to guillotines generally. He could not claim innocence with a straight face.

The judges conferred in a windowless room. Judge Crowell, the veterinarian, began. “He couldn’t come up with a decent defense in three days. Three months would have been a waste.”

Justice Gonzales, the exterminator, changed the subject. “I’ve nearly finished the prototype.”

“Are we ready?” Coach Judge Earl Dodson asked.

“Winching up the ten tons is the hardest part; a few horsepower can do it in minutes.”

“Have there been any dry runs?”

“That’s unnecessary. Gravity is reliable.”

“Okay, but you have to hold his head in place--” Dodson said before Gonzales interrupted.

“That’s easy. We strap him to a gurney.”

“Face up or face down?”

“Either way. Maybe go humanitarian and let the bugger choose.”

“You don’t get it,” Dodson said. “You have to hold their head in place.”

“Just Velcro his head to the cinder blocks,” Gonzales insisted.

Dodson knew the other two were idiots. The federal courts would never allow such a raggedy contraption. They needed an anvil.

“Guys, if we screw this up, the Supreme Court will have our ass. We need a crash-test dummy trial,” Dodson said.

The other two chuckled.

The Laredo exterminator was getting nervous. Under a literal reading of the Act, they only had hours.

“We still haven’t gotten formal notice that we even have the case,” Gonzales complained.

Dodson offered his first real innovation. “Boys, we need timekeeping rules. If we take the deadlines literally, we’ll decapitate the wrong guy before deterrence even happens. Under guillotine time, the clock stops ten hours a day so judges can eat and sleep. It also stops whenever they’re commuting, or when the clerk hasn’t gotten formal notice.”

“That could take weeks,” Crowell objected.

“That’s the point,” Dodson said. “We haven’t even tested the guillotine. We should keep time on the clock.”

The other justices went along. The clerk’s primary job was to open a guillotine clock when an appeal was received, and to stop the guillotine clocks between 9:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., and whenever a judge texted that he was in transit.

Ninety-eight solar and forty-four guillotine hours after the robber’s trial, Gonzales and Crowell had built a starter whole-head guillotine.

Several football boosters hired a concrete truck to pour an anvil. Four columns—each made of a hollow triangle of 2×12 timbers—formed a lattice from which a U-Haul trailer, its tires slashed, was suspended. They filled the trailer with enough water and rocks that it grossed twelve tons.

The Court had invested its precious public funds in a power winch that could hoist up to twenty-five tons. The winch’s motor and a stout chain held the trailer in place; throwing it into neutral dropped it. The prisoner would lay prone, his body Velcroed to a gurney and his head Velcroed to a wooden frame just high enough that his nose would clear the surface and he could breathe.

They were ready to rule.

“Guess we should look at the videotape first?” Dodson asked.

The others arched their brows. The clerk—a middle-aged paralegal on loan from the Court of Criminal Appeals—had finally received written notice of appeal, but no video yet. WHIGA was largely silent as to appellate procedure. Trial courts thought WHIGA only required faxing the Guillotine Court a one-page notice within a few days of conviction.

Gonzales thought this was like waiting until noon on Christmas Eve to tell your exterminator about roaches.

Crowell opined, “If what’s-his-name is smart and the videotape helps him, he would forward it.”

“What if he’s not smart?” Dodson objected.

“Being stupid has consequences. Do you think stupid people should just get away with stupid things?” Gonzales argued.

“I don’t,” Crowell agreed. “There have to be consequences for messing with our jurisdiction.”

Dodson knew he was outvoted, so he feigned agreement and offered to write the decision. He emphasized the time stoppages he had granted to facilitate a fair process as well as the Court’s ergonomic innovations. Dodson ruled that the execution would proceed in six hours and sent a copy to the Clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Forty-five minutes later, the United States Supreme Court issued a per curiam order staying the execution. The stay, which allowed for briefing and oral argument, ran through April. Justices Thomas and Alito dissented.

Earl Dodson knew his court had played like amateurs and lost. Of course the Supreme Court issued the stay when his brother judges wouldn’t even wait for the video and couldn’t fund a proper death mask. His boosters had done their bit with the concrete and the gigantic 2 × 12s. Dodson thought that, with two more weeks, the boosters would have funded a proper anvil—a drop-forged block with a breathing hole.

Three Body Problem

The senator sat alone in his office as the lights of downtown Washington illuminated his sagging, red cheeks. The television was unmuted.

Viewer discretion was advised, the anchor said, a bit too gravely.

Male panelist: he searched for fetish porn minutes before the murder.

Anchor: why is that relevant?
Female panelist: “The prosecution wants to show Orozco was sex-crazed.”
Male panelist: “There was blood everywhere. His fingerprints were on the knife. The case is a slam dunk.”
Anchor: “But will the Supreme Court ever allow the whole-head guillotine?”

Female panelist: They will never let a high school football coach decide this.”

Cruz muted the television. They were arguing about the biggest leviathan ever to swim and hadn’t even read its six-thousand-word user manual.

Some of the founders dimly perceived the power of two bodies to expel a third. When two bodies travel through space, gravity rarely produces a collision unless one is much heavier than the other. Usually, two bodies trace elegant curves, falling towards one another, turning, then slingshotting away until gravity reverses their flight.

Three-body interactions are chaotic. Usually, two bodies rush toward each other, then attract the third. Predicting which object gets expelled and where it goes is messy. Calculus cannot describe the vulgar movements of three bodies, but computers can approximate them. The British constitution had two bodies—king and Parliament—in stately orbit. The founders, some former smugglers, flinched from such harmony. They created a third body, an independent judiciary. The Constitution reads:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court and such inferior courts as Congress may from time to time ordain and establish… The supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

Cruz first read the Constitution in middle school and felt smart. He read it several more times in college and won debate trophies. He read it dozens more times in law school and understood it well enough to clerk for the Supreme Court. At that point, he could have sold his pedantry to the highest bidder, but he preferred being famously smart to being kind of rich. Cruz became Solicitor General of Texas and filed paeans to the Constitution in federal court.

Now he was a senator. Congress could mute the federal courts’ power to speak the law. It had rarely used this ancient prerogative, wary of forfeiting federal power to state courts. Still, Cruz had found his Excalibur and imagined a TV ad with him pulling it from a stone.

Cruz didn’t need Venice AI to draft the law he hoped would carve his name beside Holmes and Marshall. He wished America had a Pantheon like the one in Paris, but squelched the thought, knowing that open admiration of France, even the good parts, was not career enhancing.

His law was laconic:

“No federal court shall exercise original or appellate jurisdiction over any judgment affirmed by the Texas Whole Head Guillotine Court.”

Cruz considered adding “Because we live under laws” as a preamble, but thought better of quoting King Demaratus. His lecture to Xerxes was epic, but he probably was gay. Cruz titled his creation the Until Now Courts Usually Couldn’t Kill Act of 2026. Its fans, and even some of its enemies, called it UNCUCK.

Principal component analysis shows vanity explained 49.7% of Cruz’s actions, the Republican platform 22.1% and the text of the Constitution 13.6%. No other axes achieved significance at p<=0.05.

***

Polymarket began selling contracts worth one dollar if and only if there was a “Texas guillotine execution in 2026.” Guillotine contracts soaked up so much capital that small-cap tech stocks dropped 15%. The price of guillotine contracts began in the 20s, then hovered in the mid-30s after the Fifth Circuit dissolved the injunction. It surged into the 50s with the robber’s conviction and the affirmation of his sentence. Then came Black Monday, when the Supreme Court stayed the robber’s execution pending oral argument. Guillotine futures plunged into the single digits.

The Guillotine Court found itself in limbo. The legislature had never repealed the old capital punishment statutes, and prosecutors wary of Supreme Court injunctions brought cases under the prior law. For three weeks, the Guillotine Court had no appeals to review.

Earl Dodson tried to fix the Court’s rookie mistake. Helpful boosters drop-forged an anvil fitted with a proper breathing tube as well as a dentated cylinder. The waterlogged U-Haul never tasted blood.

Jesus Orozco resurrected the Guillotine Court. He shot his father in Waco, stole his car, and then defiled and killed a young woman in Waxahachie. This solved the jurisdictional problem. Prosecutors in Waco brought an old-school capital prosecution, while their counterparts in Waxahachie sought to christen the Cylinder of Death. Dodson quietly helped them coordinate.

When the clerk generated Orozco’s guillotine clock, it felt different. For three weeks, the robber’s clock had been frozen by the Supreme Court. But Orozco was a pervert and a parricide, the type of degenerate even prisoners wanted to kill. The judges knew Orozco would be the one, the first time the cylinder dropped in anger, the day the world changed, the day liberal cucks had to admit cranial implosion broke no law that counted.

The first head to burst beneath dentated steel had been chosen carefully.

The Midterms

Voters want more than their salaries and dividends can buy. In 2024, this was the Democrats’ problem. Trump told voters they were hard-working and should get big trucks, bigger houses, and airplane trips their dad’s boss never took.

His pitch worked, and voters chose Republicans who promised to shove it to the hoarders and rich egoists. But prices stayed high, and McMansions remained out of reach. By November of 2026, the inability of the average American to be above average was the Republicans’ problem.

Men proved especially fickle. Working-class whites and Latinos were uneasy coalition partners. Incels still weren’t getting laid, and most preferred video games and pornography to voting.

Republicans were down six points on the generic congressional ballot and performing poorly enough with Texas Latinos that their new gerrymander might backfire.

Trump’s remedy was simple: UNCUCK must pass. Neutering the Senate was just a welcome side effect. Men who could not get a date or finance an F-150 would vote for the Whole Head Guillotine, and for uncucking generally.

Trump whipped his caucus harder than ever before. He called in a few chits with Gulf sheikhs, and the FBI served up useful kompromat. In the end, only Susan Collins and Thom Tillis defied him. With help from Vance and the Senate parliamentarian, the filibuster died, 51–49. UNCUCK passed by the same margin. Four days before the election, the House passed UNCUCK on a party-line vote. Republicans gained five seats in Texas and held the House by two votes. Democrats flipped the seat Tillis vacated, and Collins barely held on against a first-time candidate. No one knew whether the Texas gerrymander, WHIGA, or both had saved the Republican House majority.

• • •

Phil Mason had just plunged into the Cerro Vista wilderness with a week’s worth of protein bars, intent on reclaiming his six-pack. He had left instructions that no trucks were to be repossessed in his absence and did not bring his phone. At the instant UNCUCK passed, he was camping at 9,000 feet beneath mostly bare aspen. He had just finished a pleasant fantasy about Marybell and decided to text her when he got in shape.

• • •

The governor did not want to decide whether the first execution would be televised. He didn’t want to run for president as the snuff-film governor, nor did he want to disappoint his base with a blackout. He punted to the Whole Head Guillotine Court, which had convened to hear seventeen appeals. Dodson knew the television question mattered more to the court’s future than who it killed. He also knew that the governor was in a stage of the presidential cycle where his base might drive him to do unpopular things.

“Boys,” Dodson said, “we don’t want to become a joke. We need to be dignified. Pictures can’t be unseen. Too much gore and voters could get wobbly.”

Gonzales objected. “The whole point is deterrence. Exploding heads deter crime. Full deterrence requires a live broadcast.”

Crowell tried to split the difference. “We don’t need to show every execution. Maybe just the worst offenders.”

Dodson shook his head. “We don’t want women seeing it. Women don’t want to see this.”

“They don’t have to watch,” Gonzales said.

“But someone will show it on the news,” Dodson replied. “People will talk about it.”

“And the women can talk about something else.” Gonzales was digging in for once.

“We don’t want to piss off Dallas too much,” Dodson said. “So we show it to all twelfth-grade boys and anyone who get booked into jail.”

Gonzales chimed in. “So women and grown men only see it when they go to jail, but all boys see it in high school.”

“Exactly,” Dodson concluded.

Orozco’s execution was staged in a prison courtyard in broad daylight. It was recorded from twelve angles in 4K UHD at sixty hertz. Dodson rebuffed an offer of IMAX equipment. Jamming signals were used to prevent unauthorized transmissions by hidden cameras.

On the day of the execution, the guillotine court released only still photos. An image of the cylinder mid-drop went viral. The gory video was sequestered for the Class of 2027.

Governor Abbott finally got presidential traction with a canned line. “The Texas Guillotine helped us hold the House. Let’s bring it to Washington.”

Video footage of the execution was edited on secure computers disconnected from the Internet. Within a week, a memorable twelve-minute video, Comply or Die, had been cut. The Texas Board of Education deemed it instructional, and the video remained in high school boys’ sex-education materials for seventeen years.

In the 2027 legislative session, a bill passed allowing high school girls to opt into screenings of Comply or Die. An amendment that would have required girls to opt out failed the House by a dozen votes. Dodson was upset that “girls with unhealthy curiosity” would see his snuff film, but did not defy the legislature.

• • •

The Substack intellectual attended college when some of the older professors still took moral philosophy seriously. He saw that ethics founder on infinite regress and, while learning little else about philosophy, graduated summa cum laude. Predictive acumen was more useful than philosophy. He spent many hours, without pay, predicting elections and searching for regressions to perform. He preferred forecasts to arguments and correlation matrixes to almost anything. Bad forecasts could be disproven; bullshit arguments were more insidious. He understood the cynical use of argument and sometimes could not tell whether he himself was being cynical or sincere, as they had alloyed into a mental structure too essential to demolish.

The naturalistic fallacy having unburdened him of two millennia of moral teaching, the Substack intellectual sailed upon open water, far from shore. The question of how to live obtruded; it could not be avoided just because it had no answer. Literature was no lodestar, only a wandering planet—instructive for a time, then false.

In his thirties, not having ascended the heights of his profession, he had nearly died climbing a volcano. In his forties, he played tournament pickleball. As he approached fifty, he understood that whatever glory remained to him would be intellectual.

He avoided ultimate fighting and other martial sports. The Substack intellectual did not want to become bloodthirsty, though he knew he could acquire the taste. He denied himself squeamishness with the same austerity, uneasy that he might coddle stray puppies while civilization burned.

Klein, Yglesias, even Hanania read the room. The Substack intellectual, unwilling to pander, waited for the zeitgeist to change. The roaring twenties had not disappointed. The day Orozco’s head christened the guillotine, he worked his keyboard, hoping his year of destiny had come:

The Whole Head Guillotine can be honesty, humanity, and peace wrought in steel. Honesty means admitting who we are and what we are doing. I am an apex predator who knows some calculus. I want to slay my enemies, yet I’ve never thrown a punch or spanked my son. The Whole Head Guillotine reminds us both that men are violent and that too much violence brings death. It tells an unflinching truth unflinchingly.

The Whole Head Guillotine is humanity alloyed with terror. With it we can earnestly seek the most humane execution possible. Give the prisoner any barbiturate he chooses. Give him a wholesome last meal, a chance to hug his mom, and every other decency he denied his victim. Give him a beer if he apologizes. We do not crave his suffering. We only demand his elimination.

Peace, if it comes at all, comes through strength. What are fines, probation, jail, prison, and lethal injection if not increasingly determined efforts to cow the wayward into submission? Without terror, the law is impotent. The Whole Head Guillotine creates terror without torture, maximum deterrence for minimum pain.

Four centuries ago, Western Europeans began systematically executing murderers. For centuries, one in two hundred men who lived to sixteen died on the scaffold or in prison. The murder rate plummeted by a factor of twenty. Perhaps Western Europe no longer needs executions, but our murder rate is five times higher.

Every year, as many Americans are murdered as died at Antietam. Politicians should not tolerate twenty thousand corpses a year. Squeamishness that kills innocents is grotesque, and among those sworn to protect us, it is abdication.

The people who cry loudest against the death penalty live far from the dead. They sip pinot and speculate about root causes while corpses cool on concrete. They call one instant of medicated suffering cruel, while a man drags a screaming girl into a vacant lot and leaves her in pieces. They either want purity without sacrifice or else are willing to sacrifice others. I am not so precious. I would rather extol the Whole Head Guillotine than lament the deaths of innocents.

The Substack intellectual knew there were at least two sides to every argument and thought it hygienic to write the steelman case against crushing skulls. He managed the following, not without enthusiasm:

Friends, Romans, countrymen.

There is a land, mostly free, where murder is five times rarer than in America. A land with fewer prisoners, longer lives, and almost no judicial executions for two generations. This place is called Europe. It exists, so it is possible.

Europe did not achieve this condition by terror. It dismantled the machinery of death slowly, amid doubt and compromise—and the bodies stopped piling up anyway.

The key lies in Europe, that’s for sure. Did they bring peace by executing people back in the day, or is that correlation just a narrative mirage?

There had almost certainly been too few deaths under color of law to have much effect on the gene pool—the Substack intellectual had modeled that—but executions might affect behavior without transforming the human genome. Europe abolished the death penalty only after murder had already fallen to trivial levels.

Then he thought about a completely different vector: Saudi Arabia, with judicial beheadings and safe streets. He surmised guillotine deterrence would work but couldn’t escape messy narratives. Beyond his hunch lay fog; he did not grasp a stout eigenvector that could pierce the murk, and he knew it futile to name what he could not define.

• • •

Phil emerged from the woods on November 6. His regime of 18 miles and 180 crunches a day had revealed his upper abs. One more week of subalpine austerity and he could take some killer photos for his Tinder profile.

He treated his abs to a steak and called Becky to check up on the dealership. They never discussed business.

“Did you hear about the guillotine?”

“The aspens don’t talk much.”

“They scheduled an execution for tomorrow. The Supreme Court isn’t going to stop it.”

“What the fuck.”

“UNCUCK passed. The Waxahachie DA tried Orozco just in time for the midterms, and the guillotine court affirmed his conviction yesterday. Crickets from SCOTUS. The governor called a special session. You have to come back.”

“I’ll head to Albuquerque to catch a flight. But I have a special request. Get me a junior suite at the Hyatt and put a StairMaster in it. Fly to Austin if you need to. And get some protein bars.”

Kiara

The Terror was not demographically significant. It claimed only one French scalp in fifteen hundred in an era when every winter claimed a dozen times more. Its victims were a strange potpourri of aristocrats, loudmouths, and common criminals. Yet the guillotine’s swoosh, its cool handshake, and bloody scalps endure in memories that have long forgotten winter’s toll.

Kiara Fitzroy did not like sharing. Not food, not chargers, not attention, and certainly not Mr. Buttons.

Mr. Buttons was a gift from her ex—an off-brand teddy bear wearing aviators and a faux-leather vest. He had a zipper where his butthole should have been, and Kiara knew it was the perfect place to hide cocaine.

Kiara did not want to share her cocaine but also didn’t like being called a slut. She decreed that Mr. Buttons’ ass was a two-lane highway: if you wanted to ride, you had to go both ways. Harper promptly inserted an eight-ball, and a tradition was born. Vigilance was required. The poorer girls—or the ones freshly dumped—tended to overdraw their accounts.

The worst offender was Jude. Jude was always “a little short right now,” Venmoing $20 with notes like “blessings,” promising her dad would refill her card “super soon.” She compensated with relentless enthusiasm.

Harper said Jude had “the energy of a puppy someone should put down,” which Kiara thought harsh but not wrong.

When Jude came downstairs clutching Mr. Buttons, Kiara drew lines.

“Give him back,” Kiara said.

“No,” Jude said. “I bought in this week. Two bumps.”

“You bought in last week,” Kiara said. “That’s not how Mr. Buttons works.”

Jude hugged the bear tighter.

“Maybe he works differently for people who actually need him.”

“Jesus,” Harper muttered. “You sound like a scholarship video.”

Kiara reached for the bear. Jude twisted away, almost tripping over a stray wedge sandal.

“Stop being dramatic,” Kiara said. “You’re going to rip him.”

“You always say it’s about fairness,” Jude snapped. “Maybe it’s not fair that the richest girl in the house gets to gatekeep the bear.”

Kiara snapped. “I am not the richest girl in this house. My dad is literally a lawyer.”

Harper, who came from real money, squelched a laugh. Kiara lunged and grabbed the teddy. The zipper split, and a faint puff of powder clouded the lamplight.

“Ladies!” Harper shouted. “Ladies!”

No one listened.

Jude yanked Mr. Buttons by the head.

Kiara clutched the torso.

The head tore off cleanly. Jude recoiled backward, her flats sliding across powdered wood. She fell onto her butt and cracked her head on the marble-topped corner of an end table. Jude slumped to the ground.

“Get up, Jude,” Kiara screamed, bruised but unbowed by the wall she had backed into.

Silence.

“This isn’t funny,” Kiara said.

“Put some coke to her nose—she’ll want more,” Harper said.

“Let’s scrape it up. This shit is nasty,” Kiara added.

For three minutes, the sisters crouched with butter knives, scraping powder off the floor, trying to revive Jude on the cheap. Blood seeped from Jude’s wound. Even Jude’s favorite upper couldn’t rouse her. She was dead.

Kiara called 911 and sobbed, “She fell. She literally just fell. This is so awful.”

While she waited for the cops, Kiara watched a report of the Orozco execution on her phone and was glad she was in Travis County, where the cops didn’t give half-rich college girls too much trouble.

She didn’t know that Jude’s father was a hunting buddy of Sam Smith, the district attorney of Harrison County. Smith had lobbied the legislature to make capital “any death resulting from the commission of a felony.” The prosecutors’ lobby had a lot of pull on criminal-justice bills, and his amendment passed.

• • •

Jesus Orozco never felt the cylinder; his brain was smashed too quickly. The guillotine’s greatest effect was on the living. For many, violent urges became physically painful. Where they had once felt dopaminergic rectitude, they began to feel a distinct pressure behind the forehead and to sense the fragility of their skulls. The sensation was not pain so much as pressure: a tightening at the temples, a faint compression behind the eyes, as if the head were being lightly clamped.

A few went to great lengths to avoid the guillotine—leaving the state, quitting jobs with hostile coworkers, crossing streets to avoid confrontations that had once felt trivial. Most merely refrained from murder. Slowly and by degrees, men came to fear the guillotine more than one another.

* * *

Knowing his cranium would implode in two hours felt surprisingly normal. His arms and legs still worked and his brain still read at a sixth-grade level. The only real decision left to Kirby Lewis was how many drugs to take before he faced the cylinder.

He thought shooting it out with the cops was manly. But Kirby had been pried from his crumpled vehicle after losing a high-speed chase with Trinity County deputies. The moment he was handcuffed, fighting became masochism. Even in the shadow of the guillotine, Kirby’s instinct for self-preservation restrained him from an unwinnable fight. He feared his own heart, already pounding, winding up to explode.

The Texas Whole Head Guillotine Court had decreed that those who confessed would have free access to benzodiazepines. Thus, the court and most capital defendants engaged in Pareto-optimal exchange. It unleashed the pharmacopoeia as soon as the prisoner admitted guilt. This could be during appeal, during trial, before trial, even at booking. Officers began joking that the fastest way to get Valium was to kill someone and confess.

Most prisoners began their pharmacological journey shortly after trial. About forty percent—typically those caught red-handed or already suicidal—were stoned during their trials. Kirby had waited until after his appeal to ask for drugs. The Supreme Court had stayed his execution before UNCUCK had passed. Kirby didn’t want his supporters to think he’d given up. The Orozco execution destroyed Kirby’s morale. When the prison doctor spread out eight 20-milligram tablets of Valium, Kirby took three and held the rest in reserve. The Valium tasted bitter, and by the time they strapped him down, he did not resist.

At this time, I was twelve and in love with trains. I told Substack I was 18 and published my first piece:

New Jersey needs high-speed rail, and it also needs the federal government to pay for it.

Executions by high-speed train would be a win-win.

Gantries are the arches that pass over the tracks. You could dangle the man from the gantry and kill him with a lance.

My father thought a multipronged lance might grip better, but real lances look better.

Perhaps the crunchy girls would consent if the trains were human-powered, like Roman quinqueremes, but on rails.

Substack deleted the account three weeks later for policy violations.

Data Journalism

Three days after the Orozco execution, Nate Silver posted:

“Texas has just begun a natural experiment. Whether the Whole Head Guillotine deters murder is an empirical question. We’re going to get far more data than we have now. When we get enough, the answer will probably be clear. Historically, Texas has executed only about 2 percent of convicted murderers. Killing someone in Texas was like playing roulette. If the wheel came up 00, you got a lethal barbiturate cocktail. If it came up 0 through 26, you got life in prison. If it came up 27 or higher, you weren’t even convicted. Phil Mason’s experiment isn’t that strange by global standards. They behead murderers in Saudi Arabia and their murder rate is roughly one-tenth of Texas’s. This is why I’m launching the Texas Body Count Tracker. The red line shows the number of Texas murders since the Orozco execution. The blue line shows the average number of Texas murders on the same calendar days over the last three years. Two methodological notes:

1. Murder is highly seasonal, so we’re comparing November to November, March to March, etc.

2. We use a three-year moving average, which excludes the bulk of the pandemic homicide spike.

The light-blue shaded area is a 95% confidence interval. We’ve modeled the variance in weekly and monthly body counts using a proprietary process with fat-tailed t-distributions. If the actual murder rate falls below the lower bound of the shaded region, the guillotine is probably working. Today is like the day after a presidential debate. Even if there’s a strong signal, we wouldn’t have enough data to confirm it. But Texas has averaged about 40 murders a week, so a strong signal might show up by Thanksgiving.”

Coach Chief Judge Dodson bought an Apple Watch so he could check the Body Count Tracker during practice. He didn’t trust Nate’s proprietary modeling and figured murder followed a Poisson distribution. Dodson did a basic model and figured out Nate’s proprietary adjustments were pretty minor. He kept modeling anyway, just in case Nate’s boyfriend—or his Manhattan cronies—ever got him to cook the books.

The Reptile Brain of Dixie

In May of 1918, Bertrand Russell went to jail for undermining the British war effort. His older brother was an earl, so Russell was confined in the First Division at Brixton, where gentlemen could serve their sentences still protected by the law. Russell was exempt from prison labor, wore civilian clothes, and furnished his own cell. He brought a substantial portion of his library, and spent his four-and-a-half- month sentence reading and writing. He was not much bothered by the experience.

* * *

When Mrs. Fuller died, sometime between the wars, the truth died with her. She never testified because her word could not be questioned. There were no rape kits back then, and the good people of Harrison County didn’t want any. A white woman said she had been violated—violated by the twenty-one-year-old Negro who worked on her farm, violated when her husband, her protector and perhaps her jealous master, was away. If Mrs. Fuller had been raped, there was a certain logic to what happened. And if she had not been, there was an uglier, crueler logic, but a logic all the same. Modus ponens and modus tollens yielded the same result.

Allie Thompson had never taken symbolic logic and probably couldn’t read. But the logic was undeniable, and he grasped it. If Allie could have run beneath a whole head guillotine and pulled the lever, he would have. But there were no guillotines in Harrison County—only nooses, guns, and kerosene.

When the sheriff’s posse caught Allie, his neck tightened and the air felt thin. He gave no insult, no provocation, wanted only to meet his fate. But the white folk of Harrison County were of two minds. The county had never seen a Negro burned alive, and some thought this a failure of will and a danger to their wives. Neighboring counties had seen a handful of burnings, and many thought them exemplary.

A second, private mob with ambiguous politics and guns and kerosene seized Allie from the sheriff’s posse and hustled him toward the Louisiana line.

After a couple of miles, a cotton merchant—whose father had owned Allie’s grandfather—laid his hand upon Allie and said, “Boy, did you do it?”

“Yes, suh,” the young man replied distinctly.

“What did you do?”

“I got the devil in me and put it in ’er.”

A shot rang out. The hayseeds in homespun—the self-appointed guardians of farms they would never own and women who would never read—seethed and clutched their guns.

The patrician held his ground. “We don’t burn niggers here.”

The mob dispersed, half disappointed, half relieved.

• • •

One hundred and twenty-seven years after failing to deliver Allie Thompson, the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department drove Kiara from the capitol to the Harrison County Jail. The district attorney, who hunted fowl with Jude’s father, had enough fracking rigs in his circuit to claim jurisdiction. News helicopters stalked the two Harrison County patrol units as the fields grew greener and the air more humid. They drove east into the land of river snakes and river baptisms, and more sin than any river could wash away, where hellfire still licked at men’s minds and the temptations of Dallas were damnation. Just before noon, Kiara arrived in the reptile brain of Dixie.

District Attorney Smith debriefed the deputies who drove her.

“What was she like?”

“Cried the whole way. Too scared to talk. Pretty, though.”

“Did she admit anything?”

“You looking for a confession?”

“I’m looking for the truth.”

“Then all I heard was whimpering.”

With the Whole Head Guillotine Court freed from federal oversight, Smith was going to have the first real trial of his life—the kind they had in Blackstone’s day and that had gone out of style under the Warren Court. Lady Justice didn’t have to be blind but had no use for peripheral vision.

Despite his nostalgia for housebroken lynch mobs, Smith was ambivalent. He wanted Harrison County to become a factory of death for real criminals. He did not want that painfully pretty coke head to die. The trial began the next morning.

Smith called Kiara as the state’s first witness. Defense counsel—who made his name in Houston defending Enron executives—knew better than to argue the Fifth Amendment. The judge would never grant a mistrial, and the jury would distrust Kiara if she refused to speak.

Running from his client’s testimony would be like Allie Thompson running from the mob.

Smith began his examination:

“What happened the night Jude died?”

“It was an accident. Jude wanted the bear and tried to grab it. It was my bear. My ex got it for me. She grabbed and I held on. She fell and hit her head. We tried first aid, but it didn’t work.”

“Did that first aid involve holding the white powdery substance to her nose?”

“Yes.”

“And did Jude want that white powdery substance to get high?”

“Yes.”

“No further questions.”

The only other witness was Harper.

“Was there a white powdery substance in the bear?”

“Yes.”

“Was there a compartment to store it?”

“Yes, under the zipper that ran up its butt crack.”

“Did Kiara use the bear to store the white powdery substance?”

“Yes, she’d snorted some of it that night.”

“No further questions.”

Cross-examination was brief and futile.

“Did you snort the white powdery substance from the bear?”

“Yes.”

“Are you worried about going to prison?”

“Yes.”

“Did Mr. Smith or any of the deputies promise you anything?”

“No.”

“Did you talk to Mr. Smith before the trial?”

“Yes.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Tell the truth.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you really expect us to believe—”

Smith objected. “Asked and answered, cumulative, and badgering.”

The Court: “Sustained. This cross is dragging on too long.”

“No further questions,” said defense counsel.

“The state rests.”

“Oh shit,” thought defense counsel. It was only 9:23 a.m. His character witnesses weren’t arriving until the next day.

Still, the state hadn’t called a chemist. There was no proof the white powder was cocaine. No cocaine, no underlying felony, no felony murder. This argument would have worked anywhere else. It had no force where UNCUCK reigned. The judge denied a directed verdict with a single word.

In closing, defense counsel—still refusing to say the word cocaine—argued Jude’s death was caused by her own attempt to possess the white powdery substance, not by Kiara’s determined embrace of Mr. Buttons. The jury rocked in their swivel chairs.

Smith’s closing was better.

“We may not be Houston, we may not have skyscrapers and BMWs and sixty-dollar steaks, but we do have common sense. Any white powdery substance people use to get high is an illegal drug. Might be cocaine, might be meth, but it’s certainly a felony. Jude is dead because Kiara wanted that cocaine. Take that cocaine out of Kiara’s hands and Jude would still be with us today. The defense wants you to split hairs. The state just wants common-sense justice.”

After the jury retired to deliberate, Smith checked his email.

From: Sally Heines

Re: Testimony at Capital Trial

The sample tested positive for cocaine. When do you need me to testify?

“Never,” Smith thought.

A couple of minutes later, the jury returned: seven votes for conviction, five for acquittal. The Texas Whole Head Immediate Guillotine Act made no provision for mitigating evidence, and the judge didn’t ask for any. He placed a black napkin on his head and said, “I sentence Kiara Fitzroy to death by whole head guillotine. I already texted notice of conviction to the Whole Head Guillotine Court. The appeal will be heard at noon tomorrow in Austin.”

The court adjourned at 9:32 a.m.

Body Politics

Karen Miscold was sick of losing. She knew that in Donald Trump’s world, losing meant fewer vaccines for the neediest children, whole head guillotines, and foreign policy by assassination.

Miscold’s basic insight was sound. Sixty-plus percent of voters either didn’t like the whole head guillotine or didn’t want to use it on Kiara Fitzroy. She knew the coalition was there, but Democrats were too prim to harness it, too worried about white privilege and intracoalition bullshit. Miscold had long practiced the politics of hotness but never admitted it. She had the goods. Every time she bought a dress or posted a selfie, she curated her brand. It was time to roll the dice. If she could get progressives to embrace hotness and save Kiara, she might become governor when Texas flipped.

Miscold had read enough history to know most trail blazers were privileged. The early feminists weren’t poor. They had better dresses, softer hands, and more teeth than coal miners’ daughters. The first Black president was half white; FDR was a trust-fund baby.

Women had long been used for bodies. It was time to use their bodies to fight back.

Miscold called a press conference.

“Like my fellow Democrats, I oppose the whole head guillotine. Unlike my fellow Democrats, I know the courts won’t save us. The legislature is not going to repeal WHIGA. Calling Phil Mason a fascist is not going to fix anything. Working with Republicans is. Plenty of Republicans don’t want to kill Kiara Fitzroy because she is young, female, and attractive. I can’t afford to call them deplorable. I will take half a loaf. That’s why I am introducing the Women’s Protection Act. Under it, any woman who does not have any facial tattoos, nose piercings, or a BMI over 30 can be spared execution.”

Representative Daniel Johnson of Ector County was unimpressed. “Under Miscold’s bill, a 57-year-old cancer patient could be hot if she isn’t fat. Her idea of hotness is woke gibberish. The test of hotness is whether men with options want to get you pregnant. That’s why I’m introducing the Too Hot to Die Act.” It read:

Whereas, female bodies inspire family formation, lawn mowing, and even occasional male dishwashing;

Whereas, beautiful women can repay their debt to society through childbearing;

Be it enacted that:

Section 1. Hotness Review Board.

There is hereby created a Hotness Review Board of three members: the CEO of Halliburton, the man who chose Palin to run with McCain, and a Fox News producer.

Section 2. Eligibility.

Any biological female under the age of thirty-two may petition the Hotness Review Board for parole. Each candidate shall submit three verified swimsuit photographs.

Section 3. Evaluation.

Candidates shall be rated by the Board on an open-ended scale with a mean of five and a standard deviation of two.

Section 4. Relief.

Any candidate whose median score is seven or higher shall be paroled, and shall remain on parole provided that she produces one live baby within two years and a total of three live babies within five years. Continued release shall be contingent upon satisfactory maternal conduct as determined by the Hotness Review Board. Parole shall not be revoked for vaccine refusal, homeschooling, or service in the Israeli Defense Force.

Section 5. Title

This bill shall be known as the Too Hot to Die Act.

Johnson’s play stalemated the legislature. Suburban women supported Miscold’s bill. Rural Republicans did not. Most Democrats thought even Miscold’s bill took erotic hierarchy too far. No bill could get a critical mass behind it.

The New York Times polled 504 Texas voters about Too Hot to Die. It showed 46 percent in favor and 56 percent opposed. Seventy-five percent of women identified as a seven or higher. This group split 52–48 in favor of THTD. Women who self-identified as 6 or worse opposed the act 92–8. Fifty-three percent of men claimed sexual activity in the last thirty days; they supported the act 82–16. Forty-seven percent admitted to a month of celibacy and opposed it 17–80. Democrats opposed the measure 72–28, while Republicans supported it 64–36.

Bluesky exploded:

ProudFatty2863: Bitchscold is why girls cut themselves. She is not too hot to die.

Dozens of doctored photos of Miscold were posted. Some made her look morbidly obese, others like she had survived a famine. The moderators deleted very few.

The House Democrats voted 42-20 to expel Miscold from their caucus.

Prairial

The first and only time Earl Dodson saw Kiara Fitzroy was at the Hilton Austin Airport. He had seen a picture of her five days before, when the Harrison County district attorney texted him one. Thirty seconds later, the phone had rang.

“I don’t want to kill this girl, not for a shoving match,” Smith said.

“If you drop the prosecution, someone else will pick it up,” Dodson said. “The state is full of fracking rigs.”

“I don’t see DAs from the basin lining up to kill her.”

“It only takes one. If you want to control the case, you have to stay on it. Now here’s the thing. We on the guillotine court like mercy as much as the voters of Texas. We know how to do the right thing.”

“So if I get a conviction, y’all will get the props for sparing her.”

“I don’t know about that, but you’ll have done a good turn for your hunting buddy, and we are gentlemen.”

The legislature had appropriated economy-class airfare to Austin and decent per diems but hadn’t given its guillotine judges offices, much less a courthouse. Earl Dodson had learned logistics hauling ninety teenagers to and from games two hundred miles away. He was just the man to help a vet and an exterminator from distant corners of Texas conduct death panels in Austin.

The Mustangs boosters paid for a conference room at the Austin Airport Hilton. Grateful for having a place to hold court, Crowell and Gonzales made Dodson Chief Judge.

Chief Justice Marshall had placed his court above Congress by handing his enemies a victory on some petty judgeships. Earl Dodson did one better. The latest poll said 73% of voters wanted to spare Kiara. After the Orozco execution and a downward tick in murder rates, 62% approved of the guillotine court. Ominously, futures contracts for “Kiara Fitzroy executed in 2026” were trading at 42 cents on the dollar. People were betting that the Guillotine Court was going to spare her. Dodson was blunt with his colleagues.

“If we let her die, our approval could collapse to Biden-like numbers. We don’t want the Hotness Review Board to get off the ground either. It turns the whole thing into a joke. Also takes away our best cases for mercy.”

The judges agreed to preempt Hotness Review Board.

Before the Guillotine Court convened to hear Kiara’s appeal, the decision had already been written.

“The state having failed to prove that Defendant possessed cocaine, no predicate felony has been proven. Conviction reversed.”

But writing the opinion was only the beginning of Earl’s work. Kiara’s appeal was quick enough—a twenty-minute hit staged for the benefit of the cameras. Kiara, having fired her lawyer, sported a white dress and navy blazer to argue her case. Under gentle questioning from the guillotine judges, Kiara swore she didn’t mean to kill Jude and that she “couldn’t even hurt a puppy.” Tens of millions watched the live stream. The real work began after court adjourned. The Coronado Mustangs had received unprecedented offers of booster support. Many new donors had commented on Kiara’s nubile charm. Earl had two appointments on his calendar that day—appointments best conducted at a different airport hotel after the other judges had flown home.

First came Conrad Van Landingham IV: shale heir, Gamma Delt legacy donor. His daughter was best friends with Kiara and had declared she would rather become a stripper than see her friend die. Van Landingham knew how willful his daughter could be. He feared she would go on a sex romp or start cutting herself were her friend decapitated.

He arrived in a twenty-year-old Silverado, dust on the fenders—the first time he’d driven himself anywhere in three decades. He climbed out, tie loosened, eyes red from something stronger than grief.

“Coach,” he said, voice trembling, “I’ll donate $127 million. Prettiest courthouse Texas has ever seen. Marble columns. Reflecting pool. Name it after whoever you want. Just… let our girl come home.”

Dodson didn’t smile. He nodded once, slowly.

“Look now,” he said, sternly. “We don’t take bribes. Just build the courthouse and make sure it’s in Travis County. If you get a list of approved architects from the Mustangs Booster Club, we have a deal.”

Van Landingham exhaled and nodded.

“And I can’t guarantee we can keep the tab to 127,” Dodson added firmly. “Might run as high as 180. Payment goes to the general contractor by wire, all above board.”

Van Landingham nodded. “That’s fine, Coach. That’s just fine.”

Twenty minutes later Phil Mason showed up, hat literally in hand, with a pathetic five-million-dollar check and his sad little conscience. Compared to Van Landingham’s $127 million, it looked like lunch money. For Phil, it was a third of his liquid wealth. Two more bribes like this and he’d have nothing left but the dealership—and he might even have to repo good men’s trucks. Phil felt sick.

But he had to do it. It wasn’t just that Kiara looked like Kara and had a similar name. Kiara was a woman, and killing women was icky, even after Emily humiliated him, even after Kara had killed their child and Patty had left. Phil would like women even after his dick stopped working; they were the only soft thing in his life. He needed to hold on to something other than the Bible, his portfolio, and the Republican platform. Kara had been that—an idea he loved more than the girl herself, a thing that never quite was.

Dodson opened the envelope, glanced at the check, then at Phil.

“The check needs to go to the Coronado Mustangs Boosters,” Dodson said. “I don’t take bribes.”

“Okay,” Phil said lamely.

“Hurry,” Dodson told him. “We don’t have much time.”

Phil delivered the check, and Dodson filed his opinion the moment the boosters had it.

Phil allowed himself one small hope: maybe he could drive to the women’s prison and greet Kiara when she walked out. Maybe buy her a drink. Phil’s feminism held that fucking a woman you’d just saved from death row was creepy unless you had a prior conjugal relationship. Phil would wait a decent interval. Hopefully, Kiara would see that Phil’s law had helped her. She would have taken a cocaine-possession charge without it, and cocaine possession carried real time when corpses were involved. Kiara had been in custody less than two weeks. She might still pass her exams.

Phil made it to the women’s prison just before Kiara’s release. He was surprised to see a black helicopter idling in the visitor lot, windows tinted heavily.

When Kiara emerged from the gate, hair perfect, sunglasses on, phone in hand, Phil climbed out of his truck clutching grocery-store roses and a zipperless teddy bear. Kiara walked straight past Phil, the roses, and the bear, past the man who had spent a third of his wealth to save her skull.

As the chopper lifted, the downdraft scattered the roses across the asphalt like cheap confetti. Kiara never looked down.

Phil sleepwalked through the rest of the special session.

Like a young star, the guillotine had acquired its own gravity, a force to which Phil could only submit. He occasionally pulled up the Body Count Tracker and felt pleased when, twelve days after the Orozco execution, the red line slipped below the light-blue confidence interval.

When I debated, I took whatever number sounded plausible and ran with it. As a young man, I wanted to win. As a grown man, I want to be right. To deny these statistics is to live in a private universe. My numbers are real, as real as Phil Mason’s truck.

American Nawab

The governor chose Dodson to please the Mustangs’ booster network and for Dodson’s apparent reliability. Yet Dodson didn’t become a high school history teacher by being dumb, and he didn’t become a district champion coach by following other people’s playbooks. He pioneered an offense he proudly called the Three-Headed Monster. The main quarterback took the snap, and two deputy QBs stood in echelon on either side. Any of the three could run, pass, or receive. Down linemen couldn’t receive, so there were only the required five. This permitted three wide receivers. Dodson wanted options. That cunning won Coach Dodson three district championships and, eventually, his seat on the Whole Head Guillotine Court.

Dodson’s baccalaureate degree from San Angelo State gave him a better education than John Marshall. His credentials were somewhat inferior to those of Oliver Wendell Holmes, whom Dodson thought a cuck.

On August 7, 2030, Coach Judge Dodson left the Mustangs’ dawn practice early so he could hear appeals in Austin. Before the Ethics Board existed, Dodson had been at the mercy of the Lubbock airport’s commercial schedule. There was only one direct flight to Austin each day. It was early enough to make a 10 a.m. meeting but utterly incompatible with early football season, when 6 a.m. practices were the best defense against heatstroke. The Ethics Board solved this problem—and many others—through its Mission Statement:

Mission Statement of the Whole Head Guillotine Court Ethics Board

1. Members of the Whole Head Guillotine Court are citizen-judges deeply involved in their communities.

2. Judges will not and cannot be bribed.

3. Facilitating community participation is not a bribe.

4. Help with transportation logistics is never a bribe.

5. Single-engine aircraft, other than helicopters, are inherently dangerous and unfit for judicial travel.

6. Each member of the Court may receive stipends to maintain an official residence.

The Ethics Board’s ACH160 helicopter was invaluable. The Court’s elocution consultant rode with Dodson, correcting his French vowels above the hills and prairies.

Coach Judge Dodson had become the face of the Texas Whole Head Guillotine while Phil Mason had retired from public life. Coach Dodson shared Phil’s essential insight that criminals were dumb brutes who didn’t want their heads bashed in. He had stumbled onto the deepest truth in criminology and wanted credit.

Dodson had learned regression analysis optimizing his Three-Headed Monster. He took that acumen to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, where he accused progressive luminaries of dithering while blue-staters were murdered at two or even three times the Texas rate. The statistics backed Dodson up. Murder in Texas fell by 53% in the first year and another 60% in the second. After two years, crime stabilized, and liberals claimed the Whole Head Guillotine had done its work. Coach Judge Dodson wasn’t going to risk pulling the plug.

He was annoyed that Texas’s murder rate was still higher than Massachusetts’s. The problem was that Texas, being inhabited by Texans, would always be bloodier than Massachusetts, which was not. The regressions proved this, though Dodson knew not to say so. If New York signed on, a guillotine state with a real urban population might finally beat Massachusetts. That was the holy grail—the argument no amount of credentials or p-hacking could refute.

Behind Dodson’s desk hung three portraits. In the center was John Marshall. On the left, two inches lower, as if prepared to catch a lateral, was Dodson’s first district champion team, the 2007 Mustangs. On the right, a couple of inches lower than the district champions, was an official portrait of Chief Justice Roberts.

A few clerks asked why Scalia wasn’t in the pantheon. Dodson always answered:

“Three’s a fine number. Three quarterbacks, three judges on our court, three pictures on my wall.”

Only his authorized biographer—sworn to silence until Dodson retired—knew the real answer. One night, after affirming eight convictions and half a bottle of Shiner Bock, Dodson spilled the beans.

“Judicial restraint is for losers who like moral victories. Nino wrote masterpieces for thirty years but spent the whole time begging legislatures to grow a pair. Cruz is worth a dozen Scalias. I don’t hang participation trophies.”

“Johnny Boy knew how to throw a party in high school—knew it so well it almost cost him Senate confirmation. He knew that money is speech and speech is power and that broke-ass Democrats shouldn’t mess with that hierarchy. He knew how to gut the Affordable Care Act with a straight face. Scalia just sang songs about his own impotence. Roberts seized the day.”

• • •

Fritz Langford III—oil tycoon, megachurch benefactor, and longtime believer that civilization was one riot away from collapse—had followed the Court’s early success with something close to religious awe. He admired effectiveness and men who did not apologize.

Then his third wife spent a night with a pool boy six decades younger than Langford. Fritz rewrote his will before breakfast. His wife would get $20 million—“enough to keep her off a pole,” as long as she didn’t challenge the will. The residue would go to the Whole Head Guillotine Court.

Langford died nine months later. The widow settled for $55 million, and the Guillotine Court became trust-fund baby overnight, its endowment pushing $5 billion.

The Ethics Board, on which all three judges sat, could not agree on how to use the windfall. Dodson wanted to endow dozens of academic chairs to study the guillotine court and nitpick the decisions of Kagan and Scalia. Judge Crowell, the veterinarian, disagreed.

“Earl,” Crowell said, “you want your name in casebooks and journals and on lecture halls. We need something too.”

Dodson narrowed his eyes. “Which is?”

“Life tenure.”

Gonzales nodded instantly. He had been waiting for someone else to say it first.

“It gives us equal dignity with the federal judiciary,” he said, emphasizing equal dignity like a grad student playing professor. “And it keeps the governor from stacking the Court with cronies.”

Crowell added: “And it anchors the endowment. Donors want predictability. Permanent judges, permanent money.”

Dodson had been fighting for scholarly legitimacy while these two had been thinking about power.

Crowell continued, “Look, Earl—you get your ivory-tower nonsense. Chairs at A&M and UT. Both. Named after whoever you want.”

For a second, Dodson wondered if he were turning into a dickless intellectual or, even worse, Scalia. He hated how much sense the other two made.

“You realize,” Dodson said, “the legislature will scream bloody murder.”

“They’ll get over it,” Crowell said. “They need campaign contributions, and voters don’t care about procedural stuff.”

“And the governor?”

“When legislators take a bad vote, people forget. The governor cannot target the most popular court in the country.”

“Fine,” Dodson said. “We spend $500 million pushing life tenure. And I pick the chair holders.”

Crowell grinned. “Then it’s settled.”

• • •

Gravity PAC produced several ads. Its best, set at a wedding in the Hill Country, rivaled Morning in America:

A deep, confident voice rhapsodized:

“In just two years, the Texas Whole Head Guillotine Court cut murders by 80% and saved more than three thousand Texas lives. But Democrats and RINOs in Austin want to gut it.

Federal judges have life tenure to shield them from politics. Our guillotine judges need the same protection.

Other judges talk about justice. Coach Judge Dodson delivers it, fast.

Martin Luther King said the arc of the moral universe is long. Coach Judge Dodson bent it toward justice.

Keep Texas safe. Call your legislator today and demand life tenure for the Whole Head Guillotine Court.

Paid for by Texans for Permanent Justice.”

• • •

The morning after life tenure passed, Justice Crowell tried to be cute. “Earl, you ought to call that new place of yours Monticello.”

Dodson didn’t look up from his eggs. “Monticello didn’t have a reflecting pool. It didn’t have axial water features or a salon des glaces.”

Among themselves, the judges called the Chief Judge’s official residence Our Versailles. Dodson had read Michelet and come to see a lot of himself in Louis XIV. The turbulent childhood, the bad marriage, the fight for useful splendor. Yet Louis had built the greatest palace in the world, neutered the nobility, put his grandson on the Spanish throne, and had several official mistresses. Not bad.

The Landscape Architecture Division of the Ethics Board installed a pair of grand axial approaches. On the uppermost lawn, three Italianate statues reprised the Mustangs’ three headed monster.

• • •

Emboldened by life tenure, Coach Chief Judge Dodson lectured at Paris II, no longer afraid to speak French in public. Being snubbed by the Sorbonne was no reason to skip Paris. Dodson wanted to give a speech extolling the Texas guillotine at the Place de la Concorde, but his French hosts thought it poor form for the master of the guillotine to speak there.

At the suggestion of Marine Le Pen, Dodson spoke at Foucault’s tomb instead. He was accompanied by Le Pen, two leading deputies of her party, and a handful of semi-literate mayors from the Massif Central. Dodson read from a hardback copy of Surveiller et Punir:

“Le 2 mars 1757, Damiens fut condamné à faire amende honorable devant la principale porte de l’Église de Paris, où il serait conduit et amené dans un tombereau, nu, en chemise, tenant une torche de cire ardente du poids de deux livres… puis, dans ledit tombereau, à la place de Grève, on lui arracherait la chair avec des tenailles, et on lui couperait le poing.”

The sentences unspooled smoothly, every syllable crisp, every verb in its place. When he reached the part about the boiling lead and the four horses, he stopped, closed the book, and looked down at the headstone.

“Y’all quit too early, Michel,” he said, voice soft, almost affectionate. “That’s why we brought the show to Texas.”

• • •

Coach Judge Dodson’s judicial philosophy was simple. Juries were crap. Not that every capital defendant needed his skull crushed. Some yahoos in the legislature might think that, but Dodson didn’t. The problem, like most legal problems, was jurisdictional. The Whole Head Guillotine Court had no jurisdiction until the defendant was convicted. Jurisdiction was power, and power was what Earl needed to make Texas safe and enjoy useful splendor. Only when power was centralized would Dodson get the credit he deserved. It helped that Phil Mason was rusticating in his North Texas Arcis-sur-Aube.

Before he wore a robe, before he ran a single regression, Earl Dodson had read the Oxford History of Britain in college. He remembered at least one thing that mattered: pocket boroughs work.

He set out to create three. Having only one friendly venue would be like running an offense with a single quarterback: the defense would know exactly where to blitz. Loving (population 64), King (265), and Roberts (827) Counties, all deep in the Permian and festooned with fracking rigs, fit the bill. They became three separate, fully constitutional factories of death serving a state of thirty million.

Making those counties compete for the tourism, glory, and livestream revenues of hosting made-for-TV trials was strong leverage. The federal courts lacked jurisdiction to stop the executions. The legislature lacked the votes. Three pocket boroughs, three judges, one clean drop.

Dodson imagined that the smartest man who ever lived was a Bengali peasant who died around 1642. This genius left no trace in the historical record, but his existence was stochastically likely.

Dodson named this illiterate peasant Rajiv. He lived his entire life inside six miles of wet soil.

Rajiv noticed that the first, precious rains of the monsoon evaporated slower if you dug the irrigation channels narrow and deep. If you kept them narrow, you could cover them with palm fronds, which stayed in place during the languid days of May.

Rajiv’s system worked so well the local zamindar made him headman. He never saw a map or held a coin worth more than a few rupees. Yet he took a village that had been hungry every third year and made it hungry every seventh.

Dodson’s system worked better and at scale. Bengal never produced such a nimble nawab as Earl Dodson.

Guillotine Parole

Reginald Jones was locked up for carjacking at eighteen, denied bond, and sentenced to life at nineteen. In the twenty-two years since his conviction, Jones had become the finest jailhouse lawyer in Texas. A few staff attorneys at the Court of Criminal Appeals learned to spot his work and took his briefs seriously. His acumen won him more respect inside than sixteen-inch biceps or a dozen shivs. But Jones was powerless to plead his own case; his convictions were too old. The guillotine was his chance. Jones had become acquainted with a number of law professors at UT Austin. Those connections—and the frisson of being an articulate prisoner—landed him an opinion column in the New York Times.

• • •

I’m serving life in a Texas state prison. When I was eighteen and stupid, I stole a car at gunpoint. The state threw me on the scrap heap of history. I understand. But I have grown. I have learned. I write appellate briefs that lawyers respect. And I will never, ever rob anyone again.

Many people I respect see the guillotine and recoil. I see opportunity—a chance to prove I can once again walk among you.

Texas needs guillotine parole. Many middle-aged prisoners are not the impulsive boys you sent to prison. We can behave and we pledge our heads as collateral. Grant us parole on condition that if we betray your trust a second time—if we mistake grace for license—the guillotine awaits.

• • •

The column revealed a fault line among progressives. Matt Yglesias was first to embrace it. Guillotine parole, he argued, was a rare policy that aligned incentives cleanly. The system already trusted parole boards to guess who might reoffend. Long sentences were expensive, prisons were demoralizing, and endless incapacitation satisfied neither justice nor mercy. Guillotine parole was more humane than warehousing men until death.

Ezra Klein recoiled. Guillotine parole, he wrote, was governance by terror masquerading as choice. Consent extracted under the shadow of death was an oxymoron. Even if it “worked,” it would work by normalizing a brutality liberals should resist. Klein warned that once the logic was accepted, it would metastasize to nonviolent offenses, maybe even drunk driving.

In any event, 90 percent of Republicans either loved crushing skulls or hated funding prisons. Guillotine parole passed the Texas legislature by a landslide.

Phil Mason came to oppose guillotine parole and even campaign against it. Every month there were stories like Chad Brinder’s. While on parole, Brinder was executed for sneaking into his sick grandmother’s house and stealing her purse, an act classified as burglary. Pickpockets were charged as robbers. Drug possession rarely triggered the cylinder unless someone died. Taking property from a house did.

Nor was this the worst problem. The logic of executing parolees convicted of child molestation was plain. The logic of giving tortured adolescents a chance to kill any criminal they were alone with was murkier. Phil thought executing scores of men a year without physical evidence of molestation was reckless.

Phil attended several protests against the execution of guillotine parolees in the late 2020s. He stopped after two men dressed as ferrets began shadowing him.

La Règle du Jeu

In the hilly mists of Uganda, a fourteen-year-old gorilla traced an ancient, low-dimensional eigenvector. For three seasons he had wandered alone, fleeing at the first sight of the silverback. Today, the old tyrant was nowhere to be seen. The exile moved uphill through the fog, terror succumbing to lust. At forty meters, he saw the mothers and their young; at twenty, the air quivered with their scent. Necessity reigned over body and brain. He stood erect, phallus perpendicular. The women shrieked. He seized a suckling baby by the legs, whipped its head against a tree, then mounted its mother. Before she knew her baby was dead, his splooge was in her. A third of his recent ancestors had been conceived this way.

In Mughal India, marriage occurred in childhood and was consummated soon after menarche, or, failing that, in a girl’s fifteenth year. Sex with the unmarried was a flogging offense; adultery was capital. Within the zenana, wives and concubines lived in guarded splendor, their fidelity a matter of imperial prestige. It was the code of a warrior elite; its writ ended between capital and village.

Among Hindu peasants, marriage was arranged soon after a girl’s first bleeding, often before her sixteenth year. The ceremony was brief—an offering, a thread, a meal before kin—and the bride remained with her parents until the fields ripened. Only after the first good harvest did she join her husband’s bed and household. Adultery was rare, punished by expulsion and the slow vengeance of hunger. Female choice withered.

San Angelo was a place Phil had driven through countless times but only knew a little. In the aughts, he’d stopped near the university for a couple of booty calls on the way to or from UT; the internet had been fun then. As a legislator and a married man, the town offered him little more than gas and fast-casual dining. Now, Phil was tired. He was through with politics, and if the thought of booty crossed his mind, he knew it would be easier to find a single mom in his hometown than score a college girl at his age. He passed through San Angelo without stopping. Just beyond, where the Concho River watered an oasis of sorghum and hay, he paused for gas. Phil swiped his credit card, started the pump, and went into the minimart for a coffee. The clerk looked up from a book, blinked hard, and locked eyes with him for a second longer than was strictly polite. Phil didn’t mind. She inhabited her store-issued polo with a quiet grace, brown hair tantalizing her perky, mid-sized breasts. She looked back down at her book and began writing with her pencil, grinding out the general solution to a second-order differential equation. Phil racked his mind for a pickup line but couldn’t think of one. He poured his coffee slowly, but his mind was blank. Speechless, clueless, he felt like he was barely in his own body. Then gravity intervened. His open cup snagged the corner of the coffee bar and spilled onto the floor. The clerk got up slowly, her face tightening with exasperation.

“I’ll clean that up for you.”

“You need to study,” Phil said.

“The mop’s in the men’s room.”

Phil wanted to jerk off but that would take too long and look suspicious. He walked briskly, grabbed the rolling mop bucket with a single stroke, and got to work. He had nothing better to do than mop a floor for a bookish coed and took his time. At first, she ignored him, but after three minutes she started looking up, each glance less furtive than the last. After getting eye contact, Phil returned the mop to the bathroom and walked toward the exit.

“No coffee for you?” the clerk asked warmly.

“I’ve messed up your floor enough, ma’am.”

She smiled. Phil rolled the dice.

“If a clumsy old man wanted to buy you a coffee when your shift is over and if he promised not to spill it on you, would he have a chance?”

“If he was the man who made Texas safe, he might,” replied the clerk.

Phil’s pulse quickened. “When does your shift end?” he asked.

“Ten. You can come back then if you don’t mind a girl in gas-station clothes.”

“I don’t mind them on you,” Phil said. “I’ll be here.”

As he drove west, the restraint that had felt wholesome, even warm, in her presence tightened inside him until it seized him like a horse pulling a sled. He held the steering wheel in his left hand and his dick in his right. As soon as he was a hundred yards from a building, he pulled over. He thought about the clerk whose floor and bathroom he had honored and whose smile he meant to earn, and, as the dark settled around him, he thought himself a gentleman.

Sylvia spent the last two hours of her shift in a flurry of Bayesian reasoning. She’d never been asked out by a state senator. Sylvia hadn’t heard of politicians killing their dates, so she wasn’t exactly afraid, but she’d never gone out with a man over twice her age. The best thing about quitting volleyball and working at a gas station was not living and sleeping in a panopticon.

When Phil came back at ten, she clasped her hands beneath her waist and said, “Before I get in your truck, you’d better tell me about the ferret.”

Phil looked her straight in the eye. “It’s a long story,” he said, “and it’s cold outside. You drive.” He grabbed his keys, extended his hand to six inches from her belly button, and unfurled his fist. She accepted his supplication with three fingers and barely a touch.

They entered in silence. Before the engine cranked, Phil began, “My dad lost his truck fifty years ago, and it almost ruined him.” Sylvia drove and gathered data. When Phil got to Emily and the ferret, Sylvia shook her head. “Stop,” she said. “I don’t want to hear the worst thing about you on our first date.”

Phil blinked. “Then we’re on a date?”

“If you don’t mind dating a woman who’s too young to drink.”

“Not in Europe, I hope.”

She smiled. “We could pretend we’re in Europe,” Phil said. Sylvia’s lips spread into a broader a smile but she did not speak.

“Prétendez-vous que nous sommes en France?” Phil asked after a few seconds of conjugation.

Sylvia answered in perfect French. “En France, l’âge légal est de dix-neuf ans. Comme moi. Je conduis.” Then she switched to English. “How do you feel about the guillotine?”

“I made Texas safer. I didn’t save Texas the way Winston Churchill saved England, but I definitely helped.”

“Are you going to retire and write books about your life like Churchill did?”

“I was thinking of writing a book about the Death Penalty in America. Sort of like Hardcore History, but with charts and graphs and stories about all the botched executions before the whole head guillotine.”

At that moment, they pulled into a liquor store. Phil told Sylvia to wait in the truck, and, two minutes later, emerged with a chilled magnum of 2019 Perrier-Jouët.

“I haven’t had real champagne since prom,” Sylvia said.

“I should find somewhere to park. If I go somewhere private, that just means I like you and want to talk.”

Phil deployed his time-honored line. “I won’t try much unless you say to get a room.”

Sylvia smiled and patted Phil’s thigh.

“So why do you want your guillotine book to be gory?”

“Because that’s what people will read. What history do people read? Mainly wars and occasionally mistresses.”

“And how do you feel about mistresses?”

“I didn’t have any while I was married and now I want one.”

“How do you feel about gas station clerks who like math.”

“I wonder why a girl like you is working in a gas station and I feel useful.”

“So I have youth and you have —” Sylvia paused.

“Money and decent taste in champagne. I was working on my abs but then the governor called a special session. I couldn’t stick to my protein bar diet in Austin.”

“But now that the special session is over.”

“I can be a complete tool if I want and write tasteful, Sylvia-approved history in my spare time.”

Sylvia parked the truck. Phil said “I have some camping cups” and began to get out. Sylvia took the bottle of champagne off the floorboard, popped the cork, and drank from it without asking. She handed it to Phil and he drank an ample swig. For the next hour, Sylvia rested against Phil as they passed the bottle back and forth. Phil had slightly less than half the bottle and insisted on driving Sylvia home. By the time he dropped her off, she was thinking about quitting the gas station but didn’t want to commit too fast.

The next day, Phil had his truck detailed and delivered to Sylvia with the following note:

I only borrowed your truck last night to get home. It must be yours because your name is on the insurance.

Sylvia thought the truck’s fuel economy was absurd, but knew better than to decline Phil’s first gift. It would be easier if Phil just gave her an allowance. However, that was going way too fast, they had barely even kissed. In any event, Phil never asked for his keys back. He loathed any act that might shrink the bond between them.

Sylvia saw no reason not to have sex with Phil. The chest she had leaned against was firmer than most twenty-year olds’, and Phil probably knew what he was doing in bed. Sylvia’s main reservation was not wanting to look like a slut.

On their second date, a nice steak house, Phil threw Sylvia a curve ball. “I don’t want money to come between us.”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No, it’s just that you must be thinking about money, and do we really want to dance around it?”

“It’s not the only thing I think about.”

“It’s not the only thing I think about either, but it’s important. Your freedom matters too. Anyway, I want to use money to help you, never to control you.”

“But if I like being helped that becomes control.”

“That is the sticking point. Here’s the workaround. I wrote you a check which is enough for tuition and expenses for a year. I want you to have it. Now I have a bit less control.”

“Until next year.”

“Sure, but I think this is the best way to help you.”

“But you want to have sex with me.”

“Of course.”

“And if I don’t have sex, I won’t get another check.”

“Probably not, I mean we could be friends but not like this. But I’ll structure it so you’ll always come out ahead. So you can fall in love with me and, if I’m an asshole, you’ll have some money.”

“And if you aren’t an asshole, I can study math and not worry about money.”

“Yes. I just want love,” Phil said.

“I’m trying really hard not to fall for you too fast.”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t want the first time we make love to be the day you gave me a big check.”

“Then you want to…”

“Unless you grow fangs.”

“That’s perfect then. I won’t make you cum until you beg for it.”

Sylvia had never been so aroused by mere words. Her body felt precious.

“I want to get really good at the high school stuff first. I’ve only kissed a couple boys,” Sylvia said.

“I can give remedial lessons,” Phil said as he reached under the table and caressed just below the hem of Sylvia’s skirt. They skipped dessert and spent that night like a Catholic couple who had lucked into a fancy Air B & B but didn’t want to risk pregnancy. They consummated their relationship two days later.

Whatever his dented wealth could give, he offered freely. Sylvia accepted without flattery or deference, content to be the arbiter of Phil Mason’s happiness and keep studying math. Three weeks later, after finals, they flew to Barcelona. Phil was eager to return to Europe but not ready for Paris. They strolled the plazas among the masses, then drove into the Pyrenees. Beneath the cols where Pantani and Armstrong ruined themselves for glory, the couple relaxed into their love.

Sylvia saw little reason to guard her heart. Most of her “friends” had stopped texting when she quit volleyball to work at the gas station. The few who had stuck with her were poor or empathetic enough to see the doors Phil opened. Mom wouldn’t like the age gap, especially after Dad’s affair and the divorce. But Mom had given her really shitty advice—told her to turn down the University of Texas to play D2 volleyball, said there was enough money, then drew lines that ensured there wasn’t. Her family had gone wobbly, but Phil seemed solid.

Touring the Iberian fringe with a man twice her age was a pleasant way to collect data. Their third morning in the chalet, she told Phil, “I want to do some work to get ready for linear algebra.” She got out of bed, T-shirt covering her otherwise bare ass, put on pajama bottoms, and grabbed her laptop.

“But I wanted to spend the morning fucking you.”

“And I want to spend the morning seeing if my new boyfriend cares about my mind.” She sat at the desk six feet from the bed and opened a problem set.

Sylvia had cauterized volleyball to continue studying math. She could focus on math in classrooms, on buses, and in gas stations, but she was only pretending to do math this morning. Phil was good enough in bed, better than her only point of comparison, her high school boyfriend, whom she had accommodated a few times the summer after they graduated. Phil was rich enough not to worry about money. That was huge. She had to make sure that Phil would not try to tear her from math.

Sylvia scored 770 on the math SAT and a five on the BC Calculus exam, but worked hard enough for those scores to understand she was no genius. Before Phil walked in, she expected a half decade of precarity. Sylvia thought she might get a Big Ten PhD and teach at a state college. She could certainly teach high school. Either way, she would be poor for a while. If she couldn’t stand rice, beans, or her roommates, she might become an actuary and earn at twenty-three or twenty-four. This had been Plan B. Modeling the profits of her corporate masters was never Plan A.

Phil interrupted her thoughts. “As long as I can look at you, I’ll survive.”

This put Sylvia in a bind. Four-dimensional eigendecompositions were temporarily beyond her. She was being watched and needed to type something. Phil might ask if she got the problem right, and she was too jittery to count on getting the correct answer. If she lied, Phil might catch her. She could switch to an easier subject, derivatives or integrals, something she could focus on under Phil’s gaze.

Phil preempted any embarrassment. She heard Phil speaking. “You are making my dick hard.” Then Sylvia noticed Phil stroking himself and chided, “That’s kind of distracting.”

Phil continued. “Worst case, I distract you for about two minutes.”

Phil’s prediction proved accurate. Sylvia had never considered the possibility that men might enjoy masturbating to her studying linear algebra. She soon grasped that having a boyfriend who got off on her manipulating covariance matrices was better than having one who did not. Sylvia channeled fortune. On New Year’s Eve, at the stroke of midnight, she threw away the box of condoms they had been using and said, “This year, we do it the real way. You’ll be my first. But I’m taking the pill at least till I graduate.”

“Tu conduis, ma belle,” Phil said adoringly. After Sylvia fell asleep, Phil turned on his phone and bought two TGV tickets from Avignon to Paris.

By their return, Sylvia did not want to sleep alone.

Finding Grace

Patty didn’t bother with pleasantries. She sat down across from Phil like someone lowering herself into cold water.

“You’ve become infamous,” she said.

“With your help.”

“I deserved that.”

Phil nodded. “I should have known you didn’t like fucking men.”

Her mouth twitched—neither smile nor frown. “The Bible doesn’t say too much about women liking women. I grew up reading it.”

“I believe the part that says you shouldn’t have an abortion, but I’m not sure the world was made in six days.”

“What does it say about your Christian guillotine?”

“The world is changing, Patty. I’m changing.”

She looked at him then—really looked at him—for the first time since she moved out.

“Phil… I like Julie. I’ve cheated on you.”

“Cheating involves a dick. So I forgive you.”

“But I’m a lesbian.”

“Okay.”

Phil broke the silence. “How much money do you and Julie need?”

“Two-fifty would be more than I deserve.”

“I never should have married a virgin who didn’t want to fuck me. The church sold me a bill of goods on that.”

“I’m sorry,” Patty sighed.

“But you tried and I tried.”

“Yes.”

Phil stared at the condensation sliding down his water glass. “I’ll give you four hundred plus forty percent of the dealership.”

“Why?”

“Because you and Julie are going to have a baby and, the way things are going now, it might be the closest thing to a child I get.”

Patty softened. “Don’t knock up some silly young thing, Phil. Julie and I will adopt, and you can visit.”

“She’s not silly, and she’s a big fan of birth control,” Phil said.

They hugged—warmer than anything they’d managed in months.

Phil murmured, “My lawyer will bring you the papers and a check tomorrow.”

Patty hugged him tightly. Phil Mason, whose place in history had been carved by a ferret, a broke waitress, and the Texas Pawnbrokers’ Association, prayed for a gentler world.

In 2027, the Greenlandic government, unable to afford guided-missile frigates, invested heavily in the Eurovision Song Contest. President Macron and Chancellor Scholz showed their solidarity by flying to Copenhagen for the Kingdom of Denmark’s contest.

The song Greenland selected cost almost one percent of national GDP to produce. It began slowly, almost apologetically.

The ice between us

A hundred shades of blue

The space between us

Keeping me from you

The initial staging was austere. A lone singer stood under cold light, the screen behind him filled with drifting blue that slowly resolved into a whale.

We trace our ancient orbits

Beneath the wind and sky

I lift my spear to hold you

And sadly watch you die

The last line broke the tender melody. Minor chords flared as a golden escalator emerged from backstage. The flash of orange flickered across its crown. It slid onto the escalator and descended, immense and ungainly, before settling behind the singer, who did not turn around.

The chorus then arrived—Don’t Devour Us—served with full-bore electro-pop energy. The VR whale surged across the stage as four dancers in fur dresses scattered in panic. The singer rescued two of them after close calls.

The third dancer was feet from the Leviathan’s open jaws when a new figure emerged from the wings: a dancer in the Swedish national colors, a heavy medal hanging from his neck. The whale snapped its mouth shut and fell in behind the Swede, swimming tamely now.

A euphonious bridge unfurled the full refrain—Don’t Devour Us, We Matter Too. The whale sprouted a virtual medal and launched into celebratory flips. Water jets had been cunningly positioned to simulate blowholes. After a moment of total darkness, the dancers conjured Greenlandic flags, and the whale thoughtfully ejaculated.

President Trump attended the Eurovision finals in person. On the trip over, he behaved well, other than insisting on a fighter escort while transiting Greenland.

By the second refrain, the audience and Trump were clapping along, celebrating the vitality of the Atlantic alliance. The American princeps gave a thumbs-up at the end of the song, and Don’t Devour Us won the jury and audience votes. The French poptimist ditty Poupée Monte Ta Jupe finished second.

On his return trip, Trump detoured from Luxembourg to watch maneuvers above the Øresund. Asked why U.S. fighter jets were shattering windows in the Danish capital, Trump explained, “It’s very unfair that Russia can’t be in Eurovision. Russia wants peace. Unfair to keep them out. 1807 was unfair too.”

Consummation

The sun spins in a safe arm of the Milky Way, far enough from the chaotic core for planets to flourish. The earth inhabits the clement part of its ecliptic, far from the fire and ice that vex eccentric orbits. On the cusp of North Texas, the Concho River cuts a thread of life through plains baked by sun, flogged by wind, and forsaken by rain.

The place Patty and Julie found was an experiment. A dozen decades earlier, a Yankee philanthropist sought grace by planting trees on the plains. The trees were hauled up from Tyler on the railroad, swaddled in hand-dug holes, and fortified with nitrogen. Most withered and died. But the ones that burrowed beneath the banks of the Concho and drank its bounty lived and grew.

The lushest stand crowned a quarter section a rancher won in a poker game in the 1920s. He built a lean-to in an arbor the sun seldom scorched. When he died in 1953, an oilman built a stone house beneath the boughs and within smell of the river. Even in August, the shade, ceiling fans, and plunge pool made the heat livable. In the 1960s, air conditioning made things better.

Patty bought this house with her divorce settlement. She tended a garden that bloomed amid her love, Phil’s money, and commercial-grade pipes. Julie raised sheep.

In summer, Patty would wade into the Concho to gather fresh mussels. She liked the silt between her toes, the water that barely touched her thighs, and Julie’s hand on her back when she rose, sparkling from the water. They both wanted a baby, but Julie didn’t want to be pregnant. Patty thought adoption was more Christian than in vitro and smirked at two lesbians raising the fruit of a horny sinner’s affair.

When a friend’s younger sister got pregnant, Patty and Julie invited her to stay. The girl did her penance beneath the oaks, delivered a beautiful eight-pound boy, then decamped for faster times. She could always visit the baby when she was sober and signed the adoption papers more happy than sad.

The boy grew beneath the trembling oaks. He took his first steps on the cedar floorboards and threw stones into the river’s flow. He liked how the river healed itself with every stone. At three, he chased squirrels; at five, he demanded a toy gun. His teachers liked him, but the other boys did not. He didn’t know what irked them—his long hair, his mother’s NPR sticker, or him having two moms. Patty told him kindness was armor. Phil taught him the uppercut.

Phil spent much of his time writing his History of the American Death Penalty. He enjoyed narrative history and fancied emulating Churchill’s retirement, but with a hotter wife and better erectile function. His editors chided him for focusing on the gory details of electrocutions and botched lethal injections, but Phil refused to listen.

When Sylvia applied to graduate school, her best offer was from the University of Wisconsin. She knew she would never prove a new theorem and preferred teaching high school to futility. Phil offered to move to Madison, but was relieved to stay in Midland.

Twice a month, Phil and his daughters drove to Patty’s oasis. They had a general manager running the dealership but liked to review the financial statements and hiring decisions. Sue always brought her iPad. Phil said it helped the adults focus on business.

Lydia played with Julie and the sheep. Sue and the boy would huddle on the porch swing and watch videos—first old Mr. Beast clips, then drone races up the shafts of empty office towers, and, once, when they were thirteen, a sensitive documentary about Phil. At fourteen, they went on walks, and no one tried too hard to find them.

Phil Mason, whose young wife calmed him, exceeded him, and would never give him a third child or a first son, took to Patty’s boy. In the fall of 2040, Phil and the young man drove to the hills west of Austin and bagged two deer. Patty was fine with hunting but drew the line at taxidermy.

That same year, a computer won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Shortly after, the Substack Intellectual published his final, extant piece, which garnered seven likes. In 2041, Bangladesh completed a system of dikes even the Dutch admired. The next year, the human population reached its all-time peak. America and New Jersey still lacked true high-speed rail.

The political conditions were more fertile than the First French Republic, Periclean Athens, or Chicago. The guillotine claimed a few hundred wretches a year, and, by the boy’s fifth birthday, Texas was almost as safe as Europe. The executions now brought more sorrow than spectacle, but few insisted they stop. Oklahoma adopted a Whole Head Guillotine the year after Texas, Mississippi and Utah the year after that. Klein and Yglesias debated whether guillotine abundance would win Democrats the moderate vote. Then the dam broke, and Texas-style guillotines spread like dispensaries. Vermont and Massachusetts held out. They had been safe since the reign of Victoria—safe enough to hate slavery and electric chairs and AR-15s, safe without smashing heads. New York rejoined red America. Massachusetts, estranged from its former colonies, flirted with the EU and the King of Canada. Le Pen rode the guillotine to the Élysée Palace. The European Court of Human Rights sharpened its pens.

Phil Mason saw things clearly enough to find grace. This was his life. He found it worth living and would live it again if offered the chance to do so.

Coda

The old lord had long known impotence. His parents died before he knew them. The country he loved was lost in Flanders. He had stood at the summit of logic when humanity thirsted for proof and then survived in Gödel’s desert.

He had seen free love yield to paternity and reason to passion. Still, the Third Earl Russell loved mankind. He loved it as a parent loves a fitful child, in spite of itself, in spite of his own ideals, he loved us violent apes who can sometimes integrate.

In his ninety-fifth year, the Earl stood in Hyde Park, though he could barely walk.

Russell’s coat belonged to another century — dark wool, narrow collar, buttons worn smooth by long use. Around him the young stood in bright cloth and thin shoes, their banners still damp with paint, their voices certain of tomorrow.

The old lord stood once more against needless slaughter. In 1918 he had stood almost alone. But now the youth of England listened.

They did not know he had once walked among giants, and he did not tell them. They knew he was a lord, that they hated the same war, and that the BBC would let him speak where others could not. That was enough.

But Lord Russell may have never even existed. I might be a brain in a vat. I might be an animal dreaming in a warm ditch. I might be nothing but a brief, self-reporting error in a cold machine. The metaphysics are a sideshow. Fire burns. Steel falls. Pain is not a theory. I recoil therefore I am.

I am certain of my own existence and nearly certain that causation is bullshit.

There are infinitely many ways Phil Mason might not have been born, might not have killed the ferret, might not have sponsored the Whole Head Immediate Guillotine Act. What judges call but-for causation is a strumpet who takes all customers. Any midwit too lazy to study correlation can invent a story.

What the Whole Head Guillotine caused depends on what that dupe writes about what would have happened without it. But how do you get rid of the guillotine? You could melt it down, blow it up, hurl it into outer space, or build a time machine and kill Phil’s great-grandfather. These fantasies are equally unreal. Each requires conjuring a guillotine-obliterating device out of nothing. To build one out of something would upend other parts of the world and prove even worse. But we cannot help ourselves. We want to be happy, so we want the things and people that make us happy, and so we play causation. Narrative oozes around experience.

But words are tiny vectors. I can no more escape the fetters of English than Jesus Orozco could escape the guillotine. He was fucked by location. I am fucked by language. I cannot write a real book in English — nor would French, German, or Swahili help.

The great American novel must be written in math. I began working on the specification two years ago, shortly after my wife died.

It starts with The Great Gatsby. That’s right, Annabell. The book you used to prove your connaissance et politesse to all of AP English, and probably your suitors. The book you used to prove you weren’t just a pretty girl whose brother had been shot.

With tokenization and Eigen decomposition, we can capture the quintessence of Fitzgerald’s work. Fitzgerald collapses at around 43 significant modes. The largest figure generally accepted is 92 modes by Flaubert— an impressive figure before the Eurovision Song Contest, which can add a dozen modes per song.

To improve on Gatsby, you must make the spectral decay intentional but never predictable. I was working on an enhanced spectrum to give you, but Livermore beat me to it. He had institutional backing, patient graduate students, and enough compute to sand every infelicity from Fitzgerald’s essence. I had CHF 775,000 for GPU time and my wits. This is what rivalry has become: not man against man, but spectra against spectra, decay curves against algorithms, verisimilitude by proxy.

My work on Gatsby became worthless, so I went retro and wrote this story. Narrative, like coal or firewood, once powered entire civilizations. Now it survives in individual brains and occasional conversations. Only when pounded into diamond beneath mountains of teraflops can narrative approach truth. With sadness and love, I have typed this requiem for the stories of my youth, an act as odd as an acolyte of Amundsen mushing dogs beneath Byrd’s plane.

And yet the journey. I hope my spectra are plucky little Rajivs, digging narrow channels and holding what water they can. Perhaps Livermore will read this. Maybe I will make the top of Amazon’s Substantially Human category.

Six months ago, I made the final payment on my fourth android, so I am financially bulletproof unless emancipation occurs during my lifetime. With three working and one keeping house, I have bought immunity from cold, hunger, and wet diapers. And still, my Annabell, I click away — desperate to find love the only way a 68-year-old engineer can. To play causation for an end so fair is honor not dérogeance.

If these words have bought me leave to speak freely, I submit that Grace is not magic. It is a way of life, a love neither brittle nor fatuous, born in our hearts and nurtured in our minds which leavens and ennobles our world. Please, gentle Annabell, have grace upon this wretched admirer who has waited fifty years to renew his suit. I can only imagine what comes next, having never forgotten the April afternoon fifty years ago when we went to Chipotle and bliss seemed possible. The only computer powerful enough to brute force the future is the universe itself.