Behold—a fuchsia football field takeover at the 2026 FIFA World Cup in North America.

The intention is to make you gay(er). Or is it?

At first I was jubilant to see an organised wave of queer support from 98% of the world’s gladiatorial round leather ball operators. From Egypt to Cape Verde, Colombia to Canada, virtually all football players sported rose coloured cleats, pixels flickering from far away, then up close in slow-mo as sweaty adonis men shifted divine energy from body to boot to ball. It had to be a statement on Pride. I assumed.

Needless to say, I was surprised to learn that this summer’s pink onslaught was in fact an organised strategic marketing effort by Nike, Puma and Adidas to synchronize their pre-trending product launch colour: “Electric Fuchsia… a vivid neon with a kinetic and digital quality… sitting between pink and purple”.

It rekindled memories of Germany’s ill-fated “diversity kit” from the 2024 Euros, when the host nation sported a polarizing Adidas bright pink and purple jersey. Mocked for being the “Barbie shirt” and not “manly enough” for the pride and joy of their men’s national team, the “Barbie shirt” sold out faster than any football jersey in the history of football jerseys netting over $300 million.

German commentator Leah Monses criticised the spectacle: “Without concrete actions and commitments behind these symbols, the risk remains that these gestures will be fleeting and superficial rather than a milestone of deep and enduring change.”

The kit proved ridiculously popular but much like the German squad in past years, it stumbled into its own racist downfall. The customisable numbers were found to mimic the Nazi SS font when “44” was selected. Thus the kit was discontinued.

But the marketing strategists saw the writing on the wall. Pink is in. Diversity is out. And so the pink was resurrected not as a national symbol of diversity, but as fluorescent pop-coloured kicks.

This is what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would call a sign in its final stage: no longer standing in for a reality, but standing in for the absence of one. Pink once flagged something – a body, a lifestyle, a movement. Now it flags nothing but itself: a colour detached from any cultural commitment it might have once gestured toward.

Over the decades I’ve owned a number of pink sneakers made by those same brands. First they were made only for women. Then they were multi-sex. Now they are produced en masse for the highest paid male athletes, who adorn the walls of teenage boys worldwide.

Adidas’ motto this season is additionally cute, borrowed from the Powerpuff Girls. “You Got This!” has been blazoned all over billboards from Belfast to Belgrade. The pink onslaught seems deliberately timed for Pride month yet there is no mention in any marketing of feminism or queerness or diversity at all.

British-Australian gender and queer scholar Sara Ahmed has a name for this particular sleight of hand: the document, or in this case the cleat, is doing the work that the institution was supposed to do. Diversity, once it becomes a colour on a shoe rather than a policy, a hire or a wage, stops being a demand and becomes decor. The image performs the labour so nobody else has to.

Media outlets were quick to raise an eyebrow at the start of this year’s World Cup. But the brands asserted that politics had no part to play. They say that they coalesced around this hue due to its high contrast and therefore visibility against the green pitch. The cleats stand out whether at the stadium, on television or scrolling down your feed.

There is an additional psychological reason for the profundity of pink. Manufacturers have found that athletes associate bold colours with increased confidence on the pitch. This is called “enclothed cognition”.

We recently witnessed Japanese tennis champion Naomi Osaka perform a version of this at Wimbledon when she arrived on court in an avant garde white gown inspired by the anime character Bleach. She went on to defeat the number one ranked Aryna Sabelenka 6-2, 7-6. That a mixed black Japanese woman (who has dealt with racism at home and abroad) would find her power clothing in a piece of white fabric does additional psychological work.

There is a version of this story in which clothing isn’t decoration at all, but the site where identity gets made. Feminist philosopher Judith Butler’s insight was that we don’t express a self through what we wear so much as constitute one through repeated actions, which means the pink cleats and Osaka’s Wimbledon gown are doing structurally the same work. The difference isn’t the mechanism but authorship. One is performativity sans politics handed down by a marketing calendar; the other is a woman choosing her own armour.

Adidas and its competitors have learned their lesson well: strip pink of politics and ride the consumer wave. It’s an ironic twist of fate from five years ago, when gender reveal parties became a quotidian part of COVID lockdown. Every conceivable device was deployed from pyrotechnics to smoke machines to flyovers to reveal a baby’s gender. This year a pair of pink cleats is ripe for a Father’s Day present.

Perhaps there is unconscious work being done on the heteronormative males who have fashionably aligned themselves to fuchsia. As they say, we are what we consume. I shop therefore I am.

The serial killer has become one of the most durable figures in contemporary pop culture; so much so that streaming commissions are practically guaranteed. From the literary and cinematic sensation of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter to the Netflix factory floor’s Mindhunter, Dahmer and You, recent years have seen an unending production line of true crime, which has industrialised the mythology of the multiple murderer to a degree that should make criminal sociologists deeply concerned.

The most intellectually honest cinematic treatment (if also one of the most radical) remains Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), a film so divisive, its original screenwriter, a young Quentin Tarantino, took his name off the bill. Confession: Natural Born Killers was the first film I saw as a child (9-10 to be exact, and against my older brothers’ permission), which turned me onto cinema. It wasn’t the politics or the violence that pressed my buttons – it was the expressive, and at times, absurdist style and the good guy/bad guy narrative inversion. Stone turned Tarantino’s psychotic yet cool killers into celebrities and the cameras into accomplices. Mickey and Mallory Knox, played deliciously by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, are not monsters from the unchecked id but are products of society’s assembly line: abused childhoods, tabloid culture, the 24-hour news cycle and violence as the lingua franca of American libidinal desire.

The film’s argument is that the system that condemns them made them. The audience watching is implicated in that system. Stone wasn’t subtle with his condemnation and audiences never forgave him. Although it was a box office success, Natural Born Killers remains effectively unstreamed on most major platforms. Whereas Dahmer, portrayed through cold fluorescent realism as a calculating, cannibalistic and necrophiliac aberration of the ‘80s, received 196 million viewing hours in its first month on Netflix.

Of the serial killer genre, I hold special place for Justin Kurzel’s harrowing Cannes premiering debut Snowtown (2011), based on the true story of John Bunting, who committed Australia’s worst serial killings across the working-class suburbs of South Australia throughout the ‘90s. Unlike Stone, Kurzel refuses every aesthetic pleasure the genre runs on. No seductive aesthetics, no psychological interiority, no charisma, no pandering mythology of exceptionalism. What he offers instead is texture: the grinding material reality of poverty and abandonment, the way manipulation metastasises through communities already failed by every institution that should have protected them; malevolent sadism rendered not as spectacle but as social realism – omnipresent, banal and cold. Snowtown does not want you to find Bunting compelling. It wants you to understand how he was possible. Not aberration, but societal cause and effect. The film is so powerful and clear in its message, I don’t necessarily fancy ever seeing it again.

Eleven years later, Ali Abbasi’s Iranian-set Cannes award-winning film Holy Spider (2022) makes an almost identical argument with more stylistic restraint yet considerably more rage than either Snowtown or Natural Born Killers. Based on the true case of Saeed Hanaei, a construction worker who murdered sixteen women in the holy city of Mashhad between 2000 and 2001, the film is not interested in Hanaei as a psychological specimen. It’s interested in the society that produced him, tolerated him and, most noxiously, celebrated him. Hanaei believed he was purifying the city of sex workers in the name of God. He was not alone in that belief. And so the horror is not the murders, which are brutally told from the perspectives of his unsuspecting victims. The horror is the neighbours who knew. The clerics who equivocated. The trial that turned him into a folk hero. Holy Spider argues that the serial killer is not a rupture in the social fabric as the dry procedural Mindhunter would submit, but a symptom of its dominant logic, given physical form and a social contract. The killings are thus deontological – that is, dutiful.

The French philosopher René Girard spent much of his life pondering societal bloodlust. For Girard, human desire is not autonomous. We do not want things because we independently assess their value; we want things because we observe others wanting them. This is what he calls mimetic desire – a desire modelled on an other’s, a mediator or a rival. And rivalry, inevitably, produces violence. When two people desire the same object that would bestow status, recognition or divinity, the object becomes secondary and the rivalry becomes the main course. The violence that follows is not a breakdown of the social order. It is the social order, seeking equilibrium through sacrifice.

According to Girard’s reading of Dostoevsky, the protagonist in Notes from Underground is an archetype for the intelligent yet isolated and resentful figure. Frustrated by his unrealised mimetic desires, he oscillates between masochism and sadism as a structural necessity. Insofar as he models himself after his mediator and yet fails to match his model, he is full of self-hatred tinged with envy and admiration. If the frustrated man can become like his model then his masochism inverts into sadism, and he abuses those who are weaker as his model had abused him. The tormented become the tormentors. The humiliated find someone further down to humiliate. And crucially, this inversion does not resolve the resentment. It amplifies it. We’ve seen this in the school playground. We see it all the time in the board room and on the international stage.

Girard writes in Resurrection from Underground: “[t]he masochist always ends up encountering a sadist and the sadist a masochist. Each confirms for the other and for himself the double illusion of grandeur and baseness; each supports and precipitates in the other one the coming and going between exaltation and despair.” What we are describing, in other words, is not a personality type but a feedback loop. And feedback loops left unchecked become culture. The serial killer is the fever for a disease Girard would label humanity.

What neither the genre nor its critics tend to examine is what happens when this loop escapes the screen and organises itself socially; when the mimetic contagion of violence is not fictional but collective.

The evidence from Mashhad is instructive. Hanaei’s neighbours knew or they suspected. His community did not merely fail to stop him but sections of it actively endorsed him. After his arrest, he received fan mail. At his trial, supporters gathered outside the courthouse. A documentary filmmaker, Maziar Bahari, recorded testimony from Iranians who considered Hanaei a hero and a cleanser of the sinful women who paraded the streets at night. Even his own adolescent son proudly reenacted his father’s violent crimes for the camera. Holy Spider does not present this as the fringe. It presents it as the mainstream – confirmation that Hanaei had attained the position of the mediator or the divine purifier.

As Girard writes in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, “[t]he sadist wants to persuade himself that he has already attained his goal; he tries to take the place of the mediator and see the world through his eyes, in the hope that the play will gradually turn into reality.” When a society applauds the performance, it is not being irrational. It is expressing its own mimetic structure. It wants what he claimed to have achieved: purity, power, annihilation of his own repressed shame, externalised onto a sacrificial other.

This is Girard’s scapegoat mechanism at its most naked. The community coalesces around the violence directed at the marginalised. The victim’s guilt is retroactively constructed to justify their expulsion. But the monster is not expelled from the community for he is the community, briefly made visible, then disowned once the sacrificial function has been served.

In the last two decades, the serial killer genre has evolved, or rather mutated, beyond any functional logic. Dexter and You represent a mutation so perverse that critics have not yet named it. In both cases, the serial killer has been normalised, humanised and heroised, and the detective relegated to the sidelines. There is no moral authority who acts on behalf of the audience. In fact the serial killers are the moral authority, and we, as the audience, are invited into their perspective.

Dexter Morgan kills other killers. Joe Goldberg kills people who, by his own reckoning, threaten the woman he loves or the life he thinks he deserves. In both cases the architecture does something that earlier iterations of the genre could not risk: it recruits the audience as the community who gives permission. We are not watching the sacrifice from outside. We are inside the priest’s vestments, nodding along as he selects the next victim, ratifying their guilt before they have done anything wrong. By the time the victims are rendered lifeless, we have already done the ideological work of condemning them. Ironically both Dexter and Joe are portrayed as happy-go-lucky average Joes. They want to live, laugh, love (and kill) like everyone else does. And we empathise with their pursuit. After all, who wouldn’t murder a few feckless droogs in order to break out of the middle class? Is that not what the American dream was built on? The pursuit of liberty at the slaughter of untold masses.

To see this play out in real life, we only need to go to the banks of the Eastern Mediterranean, where soldiers are currently committing genocide on camera with the backing of a population. In 2026, five Israeli soldiers, caught on leaked CCTV footage, were acquitted of the 2024 raping of a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman detention facility. What followed was not silence or shame but the logic of sacrifice. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers, civilians and politicians protested in their defence. They did not argue that the rape had not occurred. They argued that the victim did not count and that the category of “detainee” – as a Palestinian “terrorist” and “human animal,” to use the terminology of Israeli ministers – occluded them from protection from rape or any other human law for that matter. They placed the victim outside the boundary of legal suffering. With the scapegoat identified, his humanity was ritually stripped and the community bound together through the violence directed at him. Those who protested on behalf of the perpetrators were not defending men or soldiers. They were defending the social function they performed – the eradication of Palestinians as a social group deserving of human rights.

We have watched the same logic govern the broader conduct of the war with the IDF soldiers filming themselves in the homes of displaced Gazan families, wearing women’s underwear and broadcasting mortar explosions. They joke about the flour drops that preceded mass civilian casualties at the “flour massacre.” The cabinet ministers who called openly for a second Nakba. These are not the acts of a few bad apples who slipped through the moral net. They are the fabric of the net, performing a collective inversion from the historically besieged, the masochistically victimised to the proudly and profoundly sadistic in possession of overwhelming military power. A Girardian inversion so complete, it would be elegant if not so catastrophic.

Ask yourself, who is the malignant of your society? And then quietly wonder if it could be you.

If you like what you read, consider poking the algorithm by giving it a like, share, re-stack or subscription. And if you think this work should continue, consider a pledge. I promise a lot of deep cuts and more to come.

Neutron star-crossed lovers,

born from trembling void,

flung far apart

by the first breath

of dusty creation.

Particles once paired,

now drifting

through dark fields,

separated

by a heartbeat

away from meaning.

Eons spill through them,

pleasure and pain threaded

like a Technicolour tattoo

on the cosmic womb

before the embryo

inflated.

Amid far flung nebulae,

past collapsing stars

brushing the dark matter

ruins of galaxies

once bloomed and now dead.

Each flicker of their spin

sending a shiver ex nihilo–

a vow carved

into the vacuum.

They whisper

across expanding aether,

surfing the golden ratios

betwixt extropy and entropy,

guided by Eros and Thanatos

sailing voluptuously

on spacetime’s iridescent skin.

Waning, waxing,

tilted to one another

by a centripetal hunger,

spinning drunk

like Pythagareans

chasing the music

hidden inside Planck’s

tiny doors

between the here,

the now,

and the never.

Why is there something

rather than nothing?

Because the void

is a jealous god

forever aching

to make and unmake itself.

So it breathes the universe

in and out

of existence

through a pin prick

in the third eye

of your mind.

Romeo and Juliet,

twin flames,

supersymmetric shadows

orbiting fate.

Twilight lovers twisting

like vortices

through big bangs

and equally big collapses,

through the phenomenal

and the numinous,

singing the Higgs Boson Blues–

those fevered reds and yellows

of matter yearning

to kiss itself.

And at last their arcs converge.

Eye wide open,

lips split

for a cosmic kiss

of cataclysmic ecstasy,

meeting in superposition

for a quanta of spacetime–

a singularity,

folding inward

burning outward–

a union awaiting

the end of time.

And from obliteration–

that final

electromagnetic *muah*–

the void casts

the lovers out again,

to wander

around each other,

entangled,

for yet

another

eternity.

Such is the fate

of neutron star-crossed lovers–

tireless ballet dancers

in the grand scheme

of all things.

Ah well, good luck!

The shitification is real and it’s coming. I’ve smelt it. You’ve smelt it. It’s been wafting over, fanned by the accounts with 100K subscribers, $120 masterclasses and more AI prompts than a C-grade action flick jonesing for a Croisette screening (film industry joke).

I joined Substack not because I wanted to sell a brand. I genuinely wanted to express myself. Throw a few bones at the burning heap of humanity before it takes off, propelled by its own blinding smug self-destruction, or until the power goes out, the aliens rock up, and Silicon Valley slides into your living room through black mirrors like in a Steven King novel; or today’s equivalent – an episode of Black Mirror.

My interest is to provoke you. To make you question the world you live in longer than the time on the dunny it took you to read this. Longer than the elevator ride in which you swiped past Ms. Manilla. Longer than the YouTube video of Mr. Beast’s five-finger challenge (don’t bother).

It’s the attention stupid. I want yours. And not the quixotic one that likes shiny baubles. But the one that sat in the back of Philosophy or Psychology or Anthropology 101, and couldn’t wait to tell all the pretty lib arts girls and boys what you gleaned today about this crazy thing called life. Not because you thought you could monetize it (not at the time anyway). But because it quenched some innate thirst for wisdom, some comprehension of a modicum of a spec as to how this whole complex universe operates. And maybe, just maybe, with that knowledge, you might get laid. And maybe one day you can tell the spawn of that copulate labour that Knowledge is power. Knowledge is sexy too. And don’t forget it.

But knowledge doesn’t come out of Large Language Models. It doesn’t, dare I say, come out of books. It comes from the messy dialectic that plays inside our heads, and that given enough time and resources, can create something bigger than the sum of its parts. Not efficiency. Not quantity. Maybe not even coherence (at first). But a constant churning and churning and churning of the finite resources until 2+2 = 5 and 1+1 equals 11.

Scientists and psychoanalysts call it sublimation. Gastronomers call it a soufflé. I’ll just call it art.

And so what is the work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence? Those who took Art History and Theory might recall Walter Benjamin asking the same question in 1935 in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In a world where the printing press could copy and disseminate a piece of text or a black and white photo to the whole world within days, where did the work of art lay?

To keep it brief (because algorithms hate depth), in Benjamin’s opinion artworks are imbued with “aura”. Benjamin described aura as "a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be". Aura represents an artwork's "here and now" but pulls with it a psychophysical history that connotes origin, ownership, means of production, wear and tear, and a connection to religious and mystical rituals. The first artworks were religious totems. And the first totems were the bones of the dead.

Nothing is more auratic than the charnel houses of yore or the heaps of bones piled up in the catacombs under Paris – monuments to the unseen forces of life and death. They force us to confront the ultimate question: what exists betwixt presence and absence? They turn the profane into the sublime and challenge you to transcend.

For Benjamin, the photographic plate and the printing press abolished aura by demystifying the processes of meaning-making. As a German Jew of the Marxist Frankfurt School, this had massive political implications. He argued that the loss of aura allowed art to be used as a tool for social mobilisation rather than passive worship.

He is right to a degree. Mao’s Little Red Book and Luther’s protestant reformation mobilised the masses towards revolutionary ends. But I would argue that aura was not destroyed when art found mechanical means of production and dissemination. It was reframed and rerouted – it was sublimated.

As the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard said, “we are addicts of meaning.” The artworks (physical, digital or otherwise) that contain immense aura are those that contain an abyss of meaning just as the moon finds its reflection ad infinitum across the surface of a calm sea.

Aura are the black and white silver nitrate photographs of Man Ray. Aura is Jacques-Louis David’s 1787 oil on canvas masterpiece depicting the willing consumption of a chalice laced with hemlock in ‘The Death of Socrates’. Aura are the sonnets of Shakespeare, composed whilst channeling the stars, the planets and the moon. Aura are the first and last shots (and many in between) of any Terrence Malick movie projected in 35mm (film projection is optional but it would nonetheless increase the aura). Aura is a Marguerite Duras novel set in colonial Vietnam about her teen love affair with a local man. Aura is André Breton’s Surrealist manifesto, encapsulated in the auratic phrase: “As beautiful as the fortuitous meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” Aura is a Christopher Hitchens speech in which he debates the theory that there is a Hitler and a Mother Theresa inside of all of us, and then subsequently denounces Mother Theresa as more like Hitler than we’d care to admit. Aura is a Nick Cave song, lilting on the splendour found between life and grief. Aura is Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker piece about OpenAi’s Sam Altman, a man who, by nature of black holes, devours more light than lets out.

Aura announces itself with a knock at the door, whispering at first, you are not who you think you are. With time the whisper becomes a shout, you are not what you were told to be. The best aura acts as a call to arms, you are free to become what you will.

The aura asks something of you. Not blind consumption: a like, a share, a selfie, a restack. It asks for your presence. It reminds us that all we can and should really offer is presence. And that on either side of presence is fear and desire – its arch nemeses. Don’t ask the algorithm what it can do for you. But ask yourself what you can do for yourself. Don’t just be an addict – become a dealer of meaning and a farmer of aura.

Two decades on, the same Hollywood violence that Funny Games was critiquing has metastasised and spread to the body politic and culture at large. Violence has been so thoroughly stylised, gamified and memed that it has lost all affectation towards something brutish and vile. Take the Department of Homeland Security’s social media account that posts Call of Duty-style edits of ICE raids on family homes; and the bombing of Iran framed as a studio franchise, scored to the Rolling Stones and edited for dopamine-maxing. This is not propaganda in the classical sense à la the torch-lit and jack-booted rallies of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) (which documented the rise of another Austrian artist). This is something far more insidious: propaganda that has absorbed the aesthetics of play, irony and deniability. It’s just a joke. Lighten up, bro. The joke, as always, lands on the dead.

In 1994, anthropologists Don Kulick and Margaret Willson published Rambo’s Wife Saves the Day: Subjugating the Gaze and Subverting the Narrative in a Papua New Guinean Swamp. Their pioneering fieldwork, which surveyed villagers in PNG watching Sylvester Stallone movies for the first time, became a touchstone media studies paper when it revealed that audiences are not simply passive recipients of a film’s intended meaning. In fact the villagers in PNG reinterpreted Rambo through their own cultural frameworks, focusing on peripheral female characters, tribal kinship structures and the logic of revenge as they understood it from their own traditions. As Kulick and Wilson put it, “They dislodge the filmic narrative with parallel narratives of their own, fragmenting and then reassembling the film to satisfy their desire and their gaze.” Essentially, the images we export do not stay contained. They mutate. They fuse with structures of power and meaning in ways their creators never anticipated.

Perhaps the best example of this is Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), the most disturbing document ever made about the relationship between cinema and historical violence. Anwar Congo and his fellow death squad leaders in Medan, Indonesia, had been small-time gangsters who sold blackmarket cinema tickets before General Suharto (backed by the US) led an anti-communist military coup d’Éat in 1965 that promoted them to executioners. They would go on to murder thousands of men and women with their own hands, and aided in the killing of more than one million so-called communists over the course of a year.

Anwar and his friends loved Hollywood films, whose protagonists they modelled themselves on. After going to the cinema at night, they would cross the boulevard to a rooftop where they executed their neighbours, merchants and anyone of Chinese descent, before dumping their bodies in the nearby river.

Years later, Anwar would speak transparently and proudly of their murderous actions to Oppenheimer, the unassuming documentarian:

"Why do people watch James Bond? To see action. Why do people watch films about Nazis? To see power and sadism! We can do that! We can make something even more sadistic than what you see in movies about Nazis. Sure I can. Because there's never been a movie where heads get chopped off, except in fiction. But that's different. Because I did it in real life!"

For Anwar and his comrades, the cinema was not a refuge from violence. It was its template. They were not consuming entertainment and then committing atrocities. They were committing atrocities as entertainment, inhabiting the archetypes and performing the genre tropes they had learned from the silver screen.

In a surreal inversion of a film within a film, Oppenheimer turns his camera on the long-retired killers, and asks them to reenact the massacres through the aesthetics of the American westerns, musicals and gangster films they saw as young men. The killers simultaneously perform both perpetrator and victim, and direct the mise-en-scene.

In a moment of bizarre catharsis, Anwar, playing a mutilated victim in his own torture sequence, turns tearfully to the soft-spoken Oppenheimer: “Did the people I tortured feel the way I do here? I can feel what they felt. Because here my dignity has been destroyed, and then the fear comes. All the terror suddenly possessed my body.”

Oppenheimer pointedly replies, “What your victims felt was far worse, because you knew it was only a film. They knew they were being killed.” The film within a film did what neither Hollywood nor the Indonesian justice system could – it made Anwar feel guilty and undone.

If the consumption of screen violence is relative, what of its production? The truth is not all screen violence is created equally. Some filmmakers have a masochistic relationship towards it. They desire to put the audience in the role of the victim or the objectified. Others find pleasure in the act itself.

On this scale, Quentin Tarantino is a sadistic sensualist. Violence is choreographed and hermetically sealed in a universe agnostic to consequence. He is not asking you to feel the moral weight of the axe but the poetry of its executive function – violence as cinema.

Scorsese on the other hand implicates the audience. In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle’s violence is a product of his societal-rage curdled from the failures of the Vietnam War. As a lonely insomniac veteran without a mission, Bickle’s anger is directionless, and could easily turn towards the politicians or the petty street criminals. By the end his violent escapades are heroised by the press for him saving a young prostitute. Scorsese understands that American culture romanticises its violence even as it produces it.

Then there is Michael Haneke who refuses to participate entirely. His violence is clinical, unglamorous and stripped of catharsis. In Caché or the Grand Prix de Cannes winning Piano Teacher, the violence comes out of nowhere, unpremeditated, as a total shock to the system, mimicking the experience of real life violence that is senseless and illogical. You do not leave Funny Games or Caché or The Piano Teacher feeling cleansed or redeemed. You leave feeling spiritually bankrupt and horrified by your membership to humanity.

And then there is the playful silly sadism of yesteryears cartoons; eg. the Roadrunner demolishing the Coyote with an ACME anvil. Elmer Fudd shooting Daffy Duck's bill off his face and Daffy calmly repositioning it. How much of our Sunday morning cartoons were made up of pithy animated violence? Without the right context, how did these images fragment and mutate in the collective unconscious of cereal-eating children?

The danger is not that sadistic cinema exists. The danger is that sadism – in all its shades of grey from body horror to action flicks to AI generated kung-fu cat memes – has become the modus operandi of cultural violence at large. Violence as cartoonish. Violence as funny, as silly, as a commodity.

It wasn’t always like this. Violence in the Greek epics had grave consequences for both victim and the perpetrator. The Iliad is essentially a war crimes tribunal rendered in dactylic hexameter. Achilles' initial unchecked rage against his leader Agamemnon serves as the engine of the story, causing him to withdraw from battle and send untold Greeks to die. When Patroclus falls as a result, Achilles lays his blood-soaked “man-killing hands” on his comrade’s chest and is overcome with grief. He vows to drag their enemy Hector to the dogs and sacrifice twelve Trojan youths. Hector is ultimately hunted down and killed by Achilles outside the walls of Troy. Before dying, Hector begs Achilles to return his body to his parents for a proper burial, but Achilles refuses. Hector’s death, and the subsequent desecration of his corpse – seen as a rupture to the divine order – marks the absolute peak of Achilles’ moral degradation and inhumanity.

Even James Bond was originally conceived by Ian Fleming as a man corroded by his own profession. The early novels are dark. Bond drinks too much, sleeps badly and feels the psychic damage of state-sanctioned murder. The films stripped all of that away and gave us a man in a tuxedo who kills then quips with comedic timing. And so began pop culture’s extended lobotomy. Today Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible and Keanu Reeves in John Wick dispatch men at a pace that should alarm OECD demographers, yet not once does the camera linger on the human toll. As the title of a Politico article suggests, “[John Wick] Explains Our Politics of Indifference.” One might characterise this not as entertainment – but as training. No grief, no reflection and no reckoning. Only momentum as one action sequence loads into the next like a video game.

The German term for first person shooter is Ego-Shooter, putting the ego at the centre of the kill. For decades, politicians blamed gaming after every American school shooting. The research never cooperated. No consistent link between violent video games and school shootings has ever been established. The Secret Service’s own study showed only 14% of school shooters played violent games compared to 70% of adolescents. But while video games may not be producing individual killers, gaming culture has produced something far more consequential: a political movement.

As a preamble to the broader crisis of toxic masculinity, Gamergate in 2014 saw the weaponisation of the online gaming community against women in the industry. Female players and developers were abused, hacked, threatened with death and “swatted” live on Twitch. Joan Donovan at Harvard argues the MAGA movement drew its core online organising template not from politics but from gaming. Steve Bannon openly confessed to watching Gamergate closely and recognising the opportunity it represented for Trump’s 2016 campaign. The meme-as-weapon, harassment-as-organising-force and the virtual reduction of the corporeal to the digital – all of it refined in 4chan forums long before it co-opted the machinery of democratic governance. Bannon viewed gaming culture not as a community to be protected but as resources to be mined, players to be exploited and behaviours to be engineered.

In the early naughties, long before Gamergate, the cultural subversion was already taking place. With America reeling from 9/11, and confronted with a world that challenged its hegemony, the mainstream culture industry quietly pitched itself to a moral philosophy as old as its founding: Utilitarianism. It was 1769 when Jeremy Bentham came up with the principle of Utility. It held that morally appropriate behaviour should increase overall utility aka happiness. Basically your actions today are judged by their outcomes in the future, coining the phrase the ends justify the means. This would find apotheosis in network television’s action series 24, perhaps the most politically influential drama of the 21st century. Through eight seasons, counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer (played to unflinching perfection by Canadian Kiefer Sutherland) tortures, maimes and kills his way through relentless ticking-time bomb scenarios over the course of 24 hours. The Geneva Convention is thrown out the window on an hourly basis in the name of stopping an end that is ever more and more unthinkable. The prescription for the unthinkable was 9/11. Therefore any means were justified.

The ticking time bomb is a philosophical trap dressed as policy. It assumes the perfect context whereby the right person with the right information applies the right kind of torture to produce truth. That policy assumption failed disastrously. Torture produces confessions, not intelligence. The CIA’s own post-Iraq War review confirmed this. But none of that penetrated the writers’ room. So little that Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan personally travelled to the 24 production offices to ask the creators to stop. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were citing Jack Bauer to justify interrogation methods. At a 2007 conference in Ottawa on terrorism and torture law, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia invoked Bauer as moral authority: “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. He saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer?”

The problem with Utilitarianism is that the timeline never ends. There is always another terrorist to thwart, another bomb to defuse or another regime to topple. The logic that justifies torture to save Los Angeles also justifies the annihilation of Gaza in the name of defence. Jack Bauer is not a moral framework. It is a moral blank cheque, issued to whoever holds the gun. We are currently governed by people who have cashed that cheque.

Fast forward to the present where a cinematic revolution has taken flight, literally. Drones have become indispensable to modern warfare, and the best operators are gamers. The US military designed its drone flight controls to resemble video game controllers, having realised that a generation raised on Gears of War could operate them intuitively. The official term for the probability-of-kill calculation in a drone strike is called bugsplat. Not a person. Not a target. A bugsplat. The screen goes green, the algorithm resolves, the bugsplat is confirmed and someone’s child is eviscerated in a shower of pixels.

Fifty years of violent cinema, television, video games and meme culture have successfully produced a class of young men who can end a human life and genuinely feel nothing. The dissonance between virtual and real has reached full crescendo. Violence at a mouse click, happening elsewhere, to someone else, on another screen, in another game, from another moral universe.

Haneke rewinds the tape and tries to remind us: You Must Admit, You Brought This On Yourself. The question is whether you’re still watching. And if you could really be bothered.

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“He who makes a beast of himself

gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

– Dr. Samuel Johnson, quoted in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

A spectre is haunting America – the spectre of sports doping.

This Memorial Day Weekend, one week after neon-drenched ravers spilled out of the Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, another kind of chemical circus begins: the Enhanced Games. Not merely a competition where athletes are permitted to “dope”, it proposes the cultural rupture of our times – a gladiatorial spectacle for the age of creatine, CRISPR, looksmaxing and maxing as ideology.

Seeded by techno Accelerationists Christian Angermayer and Peter Thiel, with a Series A from Donald Trump Jr, the Games present themselves as a disruption to the naturalist orthodoxy of the Olympic movement. But beneath the branding lies something stranger: a war of narratives and a shifting cosmology in which the line between freedom and control, enhancement and exploitation, nature, man and machine, are increasingly blurred.

“If you want to destroy any concept of fair play and fair competition in sport, this would be a good way to do it,” the International Olympic Committee (IOC) proclaimed.

“For the sake of athlete health and the purity of sport of course it must be stopped,” World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) Witold Bánka searingly declared.

Sports regulators have lost the first battle as this weekend organisers intend to smash world records and change sports forever. But the stakes are much higher as they seek to make Darwinian evolution an amuse bouche in the annals of biology.

At their Vegas soft-launch 12 months ago, they announced to the assembled press, longevity aficionados, biotech investors and transhumanists, that the 50m freestyle world record was bested by the 32 year-old Bulgarian-born Greek Olympian Kristian Gkolomeev. His new time of 20.89 seconds – aided by a banned supersuit – shaved 0.02 seconds off Brazilian Cesar Cielo’s 15 year old record, making Gkolomeev, according to his employers, “the fastest swimmer in history.”

The caveat? He was highly medicated on a banned protocol of Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs). “Superhumanity begins here,” they boldly claimed on hotel-sized LED screens featuring a bulging Adonis in bisexual lighting.

Las Vegas is an apt setting for a competition fuelled by drugs. Sin City is ground zero for America’s neon dreams of excess: gambling, consumerism, money laundering, prostitution, live entertainment and Electronic Dance Music (EDM). Vegas has survived countless re-imaginings from Black Jack to boxing to bottle service and most recently mass consumer sports.

Two long awaited baseball and basketball arenas are under construction on either ends of the strip. Formula One – once an impossible sell to the American public – made its Vegas debut in 2024, the year which saw the Superbowl LVIII.

Hosting the renegade competition is Resorts World, the Malaysian owned casino franchise. Nearby, the gold towered Trump International Hotel loomed large over a vacant lot, the planned construction site of the first Enhanced Games. Across the road the Las Vegas Gun Show was setting up behind a row of marijuana dispensaries, which bloomed since Nevada legalised weed in 2016.

The smell of pot perfumed the sidewalks and taxi ranks. Somewhere the mescaline drenched ghost of Hunter S. Thompson plodded the casino floor in golf shoes in search of a fix. After all, his iconoclastic novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas curdled from a prosaic drug-fuelled piece of journalism about a desert motocross race for Sports Illustrated in 1971. Back then the enhancements were for the reporters (and the racers).

Unlike the Olympics with its pageantry and exorbitant public spending, the Enhanced Games is economical and streamlined, hosting only three disciplines at first: swimming, running and weightlifting – competitive sports with objective record breaking metrics.

A year ago we were told 100 athletes would compete in the inaugural Games, chosen from allegedly “thousands of applicants”. In the end they managed to muster less than 50, some of whom, like the Olympic silver medalist and 7th fastest man in history (at 9.76 seconds), American sprinter Fred Kerly, have been paid-to-play as “natty” (natural) athletes. Kerly very much intends to compete in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics and so his participation in the Games is purely promotional, and much due to his recent run-ins with the law and existing ban due to “whereabouts failures” aka failing to show up for a drug test.

In this respect he is joined by fellow sprinters Mouhamadou Fall, the seven-time French national champion and Tokyo Olympian, banned twice for taking the cardiac stimulant Heptaminol and as a subsequent whereabouts failure; and Marvin Bracy Williams, the 2022 World Championship 100m silver medallist, whose fall from grace is Netflix catnip. Williams was caught by a joint Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) investigation after a whistleblower tip. He tested positive for testosterone then attempted to tamper with the investigation before cooperating with a wider probe into organised doping. The whistleblower? His coach Dennis Mitchell, himself a former doping ban recipient.

On the other end of the spectrum is James Magnussen, the long retired Australian Olympic champion, who, in his storied career, took home 15 major event medals including the 100m freestyle gold at the 2011 and 2013 World Championships, and silver at the 2012 London Olympics. But in 2015, Magnussen, nicknamed “The Missile”, had suffered recurring shoulder issues undergoing surgery at 24. In 2019, at 28, he hung up the cap for good and successfully transitioned his career into a media-trained public sports figure. It was on an Aussie sports podcast in late 2024, when he made a flippant remark about the Games:

Game on. As the first publicly willing athlete, Magnussen became an overnight poster boy for the billionaires’ chemical crusade.

Regardless of intensions to dope, the perks are meaningful. In January, competing athletes were flown out for an all-expense-paid trip to Abu Dhabi for three months of training, medical check-ups, pharmaceutical trials and more sports data analysis than many of them had received in their entire careers.

Contrary to expectations, the drug policy is not laissez-faire. Stacks, which refers to the combination of multiple PEDs, must be composed of medicines approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA). Athletes (some of whom are doping outside of the organisation) are invited to communicate their stacks to organisers but are under no obligation citing medical privacy. In fact no drug testing will take place. Critically however, all athletes must undergo health monitoring of vital organs before and after the event for five years. Any athletes showing health risks will apparently not partake.

In lieu of an Olympic Village, where competitors typically cram into dormitory style rooms and sleep on cardboard beds, athletes will benefit from luxury hotel suites with spa and fitness facilities, facilitated to maximise performance on the day.

Most of the athletes were required to announce their retirement from natural sports on a one way pilgrimage. Swimming bodies in particular have been most vocal. “Those who enable doped sport are not welcome,” World Aquatics declared, days after Gkolomeev’s record breaking announcement. In response Enhanced Games filed an $800 million antitrust lawsuit against World Aquatics, WADA and USA Swimming, alleging an illegal campaign to “crush” the event. Traditional sports have been on the defensive, fearful that the proposition to dope has never looked so attractive.

Where the Olympics attracts eyeballs to sell lucrative broadcast rights, Enhanced Games will broadcast for free on YouTube, Roku and Rumble in order to service a sales funnel that will draw consumers towards their very own biohacking products including testosterone, peptides and NAD+.

Imagine this user experience. You see a trending TikTok video showcasing a retired sprinter besting Usain Bolt’s 9.58 seconds 100m world record, crowning him “the fastest human in the world”. Below the video is a link to schedule a free telemedicine consult. A few weeks later, after your urine and blood are analysed, and your credit card charged and subscripted, you receive a personalised monthly injectable. Your road to superhumanity begins.

The origin story is unique, even amongst Silicon Valley circles. Dr. Aron D’Souza, Australian litigator, entrepreneur and Enhanced Games brainchild, approached a buff male adonis in a Miami gym eleven years ago and asked him how he attained his ripped body. His answer was pithy and honest: steroids. D’Souza had a eureka moment: sports x drugs. He pitched his idea to the PayPal-to-Palantir billionaire Peter Thiel, who he met years before through the gay VC community whilst studying at Oxford. At a Sunday lunch in London, Thiel reconnected D’Souza with the German biotech billionaire Christian Angermeyer. “[O]ver roast lamb, Yorkshire pudding, and fine wine the group got to talking about human enhancement, longevity, and all the rest of it, and by the end of the meal both Angermayer and Thiel had agreed to invest.” The trio, far from sports enthusiasts (“We’re three gay guys”), hashed out a trillion dollar business plan.

As a sporting competition that simultaneously acts as drug-enabler, drug-researcher, drug-producer and drug-retailer, the circularity blurs the lines between competition, commercial manipulation and cartel.

Director General of WADA, Olivier Niggli, condemns the venture side of it: “The people who sell these products don’t care about [the athletes], don’t care about their health. They just care about making money.”

D’Souza sees their model akin to Red Bull, who fosters eyeballs through death-defying extreme sports in order to sell energy drinks. But the oft cited Red Bull comparison is flawed. Red Bull sponsors events and athletes but they don’t manufacture and distribute the parachutes and wingsuits that defy death. They sell sugar water with taurine. The Enhanced Games sells body-altering pharmaceuticals, some of which, like peptides, are being hugely debated-over given the lack of evidence as to their long term side-effects.

WADA’s Niggli doesn’t hold back: “The whole thing is wrong… it’s legally wrong and potentially criminal in many parts of the world… This is blatantly stupid, ‘cause the effects might be in five years, ten years, in fifteen years.”

“I think what we do is highly ethical, hundreds of times more ethical than what the Olympics do,” D’Souza says with Bond villain composure. In fact his ability to keep a straight face whilst saying completely jarring and morally dubious statements deserves a medal in itself. He was described by one anonymous expert in WIRED as “like talking to a bar of soap.”

It’s clear to all that his “highly ethical” approach substitutes the Olympic spirit with the profit motive, which, say what you want about the integrity of sports under attack, is demonstrably positive for the athletes. As D’Souza loves to repeat like a mantra:

With cash prizes of $250,000 for gold, $125,000 for silver, $75,000 for bronze, and $50,000 for fourth place, the Enhanced Games is setting the bar for athlete pay. And in addition, a $1,000,000 bonus will be handed to anyone who beats a world record. As with their first record breaker Gkolomeev, having made more money in three months than in “five, six careers,” glory is in the eye of the bank account holder.

Compare this to the British canoeist Kurts Rozentals, who was last year banned after found posting nudes on Only Fans. To supplement his meagre £16,000 grant from Paddle UK, he first worked as a video editor and Amazon warehouse worker before earning six figures in four months on the risqué content sharing platform. Nevertheless in Rozentals’ youthful, dirty-blond haired and blue eyed case, there’s more money to be made in pornography than in traditional water-sports.

The IOC is not without controversy. Bribery and bid-rigging engineered the Salt Lake City, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo Olympics. Sitting IOC President Thomas Bach receives 250,000 CHF per year. US Olympic Committee CEO Sarah Hirshland reported an annual compensation of $800,000 to $1 million in 2024. The IOC chooses to call these payments “indemnity” instead of “salaries” to maintain their illusion of amateurism and volunteerism. Whereas the athletes, depending on the GDP and generosity of their nation, are expected to perform purely out of patriotic duty. Enhanced are right to point out the pay-gap problem. But is the answer to corporatise the whole endeavour for the sake of Big Pharma?

Gkolomeev retired after the Paris Olympics at the age of 30 with a wife and newborn and found that he could barely afford a mortgage. Now he is a millionaire with an opportunity to extend his career long past his natty use-by-date. Last year, he expected droves of former colleagues to sign up. Not so it seems. But for him and 41 others, the rewards outweigh the risks.

Hunter Armstrong, the two-time American Olympic gold medallist swimmer, told reporters he joined because without the Enhanced Games he would “lose everything” – his sponsorship collapsed after the Paris Olympics and he couldn’t pay his bills. Shane Ryan represented Ireland at three Olympics on €18,000 a year. Sport Ireland, Swim Ireland, the Olympic Federation of Ireland and the Taoiseach all condemned his decision publicly within 24 hours, with Swim Ireland cutting all funding. His response: “People’s opinions aren’t going to pay me”. Reece Prescod, the fourth-fastest British sprinter in history with a 9.93 PB, retired at 29 not because his body was done but because the sport's ecosystem stopped returning his calls. He has been preparing for the Games un-enhanced in between Zoom calls with personal trainer clients.

Given the economic uncertainty of most professional athletes and the lack of studies on the long term risks of PEDs, when it comes to signing up for “superhumanity”, there’s still ample opportunity for D’Souza and co. to “exploit the peasantry of the global athletes.” They are the Minimum Viable Products the founders are stress-testing for patents and Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPAC). The wreckage, should it come, will be filed under “the price of progress.”

Eventually Enhanced’s antitrust lawsuit against World Aquatics, WADA and USA Swimming would be thrown out, and D’Souza, his long sought after multi-millionaire status cemented after a Series B funding round, would quietly step down from running day-to-day operations. “[Aron is] obsessed with status and power,” as his friend Sam Altman once put it. With zero explanation or press release, he was replaced by the less abrasive teddy-bearish Maximilian Martin, a young German entrepreneur who ran a Bitcoin miner under Angermeyer’s family office Apeiron Investment Group, and who was elevated to “co-founder” status. Like Angermeyer, he openly takes Ozempic and Oxytocin (the “love drug”) to grinning effects. Martin would go on to steer the company towards a NASDAQ listed SPAC which only weeks ago was certified by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), valuing Enhanced at $1.2 billion before a single race even takes place.

Countless doping scandals have rocked professional sports for decades. The American Marion Jones was stripped of five Olympic medals and served six months in prison for perjury after admitting steroid-use before the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

In a spectacular fall from grace, American Lance Armstrong was found to be systematically doping throughout his seven Tour de France wins between 1999 and 2005, whilst arrogantly gaslighting his fans, the media and the institution of cycling.

Perhaps most egregiously, as documented in the Oscar-winning film Icarus, WADA uncovered a state-sanctioned doping program at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Over 100 athletes were banned and Russia forbidden to compete under its own flag.

But before protocols there were casualties. In 1996 the shredded Austrian Andreas Münzer dropped dead at 31 of multiple organ failure. His liver had the consistency of marmalade and his heart was twice the normal size.

Lyle Alzado, the NFL’s snarling beast of the ‘80s, wept on national television before dying of brain cancer at 43, blaming years of steroids and Human Growth Hormone (HGH) abuse. “It wasn’t worth it,” he cried.

Cyclist Tom Simpson literally keeled over mid-race in the 1967 Tour de France, stuffed with amphetamines and brandy; sentenced to death by a cocktail of glory and chemistry.

The risks of taking PEDs are extensive and deeply consequential. Psychologically, anabolic steroids and stimulants have been linked to aggression (“roid rage”), depression, mania, cognitive dysfunction, body dysmorphia and heightened sexual appetite.

Physiologically, anabolic steroids can lead to liver and kidney damage, infertility, testicular atrophy, hormonal imbalance, musculoskeletal ruptures, organ enlargement, cancer and electrolyte imbalance.

Stimulants such as amphetamines and ephedrine can lead to heart attacks, strokes, nervous system overload and severe cramping.

Blood-doping agents like Erythropoietin increase the risk of blood clots, strokes, organ enlargement and diabetes due to blood thickening and elevated stress on the cardiovascular system.

HGH and insulin may contribute to the development of diabetes, increased cancer risk and autoimmune dysfunction.

Much remains unknown about the long-term neurological effects of PEDs, particularly their potential to cause epigenetic changes that could be passed on to future generations.

“It’s a dangerous clown show, not real sport,” says Travis Tygart, head of USADA, about the Enhanced Games. WADA warns the project “jeopardizes athletes’ health and well-being” by promoting “the abuse of powerful substances and methods that should only be prescribed, if at all, for specific therapeutic needs.”

Yet, as is the case made by drug cartels since the ‘80s, demand stimulates supply. And in competitive sports there is no lack of appetite to win at whatever cost.

Act IV: The Open Secret

“Everybody’s Doing It, So Why Can’t We?”

– The Cranberries

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Anonymous reporting and questionable prevalence studies suggest that 30–44% of elite athletes have used banned substances at some point. But given the schizophrenic nature of WADA’s lengthy and ever changing restrictions list, which constantly trips up well-meaning athletes, that’s not surprising.

The catalyst for WADA’s creation was a direct response to the 1998 Tour de France when customs officials discovered a car at the Swiss border belonging to the Festina cycling team loaded with anabolic steroids, HGH and EPOs. This was institutionalised doping on an industrial scale.

We often think of drugs and sports as a modern phenomenon, but the original Olympics were never so puritanical. “The ancient Olympiad had many formulas for human enhancement. They would eat bull’s testicles as a source of exogenous testosterone. And they were looking for technologies to improve human performance,” notes D’Souza.

In fact caffeine, scientifically proven to enhance stamina by up to 20%, was a banned substance until 2004. Determining factors for unbanning PEDs range from therapeutic use cases to difficulties with enforcement to societal and legal acceptance. Such was the case in 2018 for unbanning Cannabidiol (CBD), the non-psychoactive compound found in the cannabis plant, prescribed for physical and mental stress relief.

The philosopher and bioethicist Julian Savulescu – a leading theorist in the field of biological enhancements – has been a great influence to D’Souza’s mission ever since he read Savulescu’s work at Oxford in the early 2000s. He writes:

Asthma, known to be caused by pool chlorine, plagues many swimmers and so steroidal puffer inhalers are often exempted. How much of this is abuse vs genuine medical need is unknown. WADA, in their mission to create a natural and drug-free Olympics in order to level the playing field, has created an arbitrary system of regulations that benefits some over others.

23-time US Olympic gold medalist swimmer Michael Phelps lambasted WADA at a public hearing: “As athletes our faith can no longer blindly be placed in the World Anti-Doping Agency, an organisation that continues to prove that it is either incapable or unwilling to enforce its policies consistently around the world.”

Savulescu again:

Years of high-intensity training, collisions and repetitive muscle movement take a physical toll on the retired athlete. Common ailments include musculoskeletal degeneration, neurological and cognitive decline, cardiovascular disorders, metabolic abnormalities, psychological disorders and accelerated aging.

The public discourse on PEDs often overlooks the fact that many banned substances primarily aid rehabilitation. “It’s a lot about rejuvenation, regeneration, recovery, resilience,” says Dr. Dan Turner, Director of Athlete Safety at the Enhanced Games, who holds a PhD in Clinical Human Physiology.

During training, recovery can take up to four days after an intense session. HGH and anabolic steroids restore muscle mass and stimulate cell regeneration. “I could recover very well within just [one] sleep. And the next day I’d be able to push more,” Gkolomeev says. Without admitting to the specific formula, Gkolomeev clarifies that his protocol consisted of “microdoses” compared with the typical bodybuilding stack associated with negative side-effects.

Turner adds that “60% of athletes suffer from burnout, Unexplained Underperformance Syndrome (UPS), and no amount of rest allows an athlete to return to play from that. It’s unexplainable and science can’t figure out what happens to the body.” UPS can cause a performance drop for weeks to months and is thought to be caused by a combination of psychological and physiological imbalances. Turner suggests that PEDs could be a long sought-after solution.

In fact, Gkolomeev is adamant PEDs show potential outside of the pool.

This forms the crux of D’Souza’s argument for longevity: “the same technologies that allow athletes to run faster and jump higher will allow my father to walk up a flight of stairs and lead a longer, healthier, stronger, more tax-paying life.“

Every doctor knows that dosage is as important as compound. Not to mention, no drug acts the same on any given body. That is precisely what James Magnussen discovered when, after a few weeks on a personalised protocol, his muscles ballooned to Popeye the Sailor level.

As ex-doping kingpin Victor Conte states, “The general thinking of athletes is ‘if a little bit’s good, a lot’s gonna be great.’ And they have a tendency to overdo it. And the next thing you know, they’re doing self-harm.”

Magnussen, who reportedly side-stepped the Enhanced Games FDA-approved directive, took testosterone to boost muscle mass and bone density, the peptides BPC-157 and thymosin to speed up recovery, and ipamorelin and CJC-1295 to increase the release of growth hormone in the body. Nevertheless he was far from the agile “Missile.”

When it comes to speed-swimming there is a power vs buoyancy ratio and Magnussen’s’ bulging mass caused him to drag in the water. His supersuit could barely fit around his aircraft carrier arms. In fact, two pairs ripped during his failed attempts at the 50m freestyle world record for Enhanced. He was hulking in form and function, resulting in a far from superior race time.

According to Professor Guido Pieles, a leading Sports Cardiologist who runs a clinic at the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health (ISEH), and is Chair of an independent medical & scientific commission advising the Games, “James has the rare case of being a hypersensitive responder”. According to Pieles such reactions are often “genetically determined.”

For the Ancient Greeks, the word “Pharmakon” could paradoxically denote “poison”, “cure”, “remedy” or “magic potion”. The ancients knew that one man’s poison was another man’s antidote. The Pharmakon reminds us that an exogen is neither fixed nor constant, and something that harms can also heal, depending on dose, intent and context.

Dr. Turner sees a future where AI combined with genetic testing will be able to determine precisely the protocol (dosage and stack) for any given individual and their desired effect. He is hopeful that successive trial and error plus multiple peer reviewed studies will dramatically reduce the risk of PED use. “We’re in an era where machine learning AI is allowing us to look at many potential simulations and iterations of data; to forecast all these possibilities and potentialities. The limiting factor is how many athletes you can measure.”

Enhanced Games has answered that call by providing athletes and monitoring them with the data-scraping mindset of a Silicon Valley start-up. It’s yet to be seen at what price this data will be gate-kept. Turner’s goalpost is that “other institutions and universities can use this data to develop more research that might impact public health, longevity, and further research in sport and society.” Such open-source optimism has yet to be seen, particularly when a billion dollar IPO has set the agenda.

The question is how much trial and error can they afford? Can we expect this weekend a parade of athletes, half bulging disproportionately as Magnussen did? What is the tolerance for risk at the benefit of profit? In the early years of Formula One, it was expected 20-30% of drivers would crash and burn. Over time technology improved and safety standards increased. The last driver to officially die on the track was Roland Ratzenberger in 1994 at the San Marino Grand Prix.

D’Souza often criticises the “culture of safetyism” which holds back technological progress. “What we have lost in our contemporary society in so many ways is the propensity to take risk, thoughtful, intelligent, positive risk.”

Safety was never part of D’Souza’s early model. Athletes were expected to take whatever they wanted at their own risk. Early on, Angermayer brought on London based physician and longevity specialist Michael Sagner to sit on an independent medical commission to ensure athlete safety. Sagner became outraged by D’Souza’s anti-safety public statements: “that it’s even better without testing, and anything goes.”

For D’Souza, as for many of his Silicon Valley friends that he name-calls including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, red-tape guards against the elusive possibilities of Everest-like market caps.

The trifecta of sports, science and medicine is a tantalising proposition. But innovation in those other fields doesn’t include invasive medical procedures. But perhaps this is where the often derided tech sector can find salvation in creating actual deeply meaningful products. What is more meaningful than health?

The timing of Enhanced is instrumental to its early success and D’Souza credits social media for giving impetus to his creation: “Only through social media have we been able to build this movement, and it would have not been possible in any other era.”

Biohacking was on the fringe merely five years ago but has creeped into the limelight thanks to male optimisation ambassadors from Andrew Huberman to Joe Rogan. They mansplain brain and body science to their (mostly male) audience members whilst peddling supplements like creatine and nootropic gum.

Then there are the TikTokers who openly flaunt and encourage steroid-use to their Gen Z and Alpha followers. Dawson Sanchez aka “Daddy Tren” is nicknamed for Trenbolone, a potent and highly illegal steroid synthesised to boost cattle mass. Sam Sulek, a bodybuilder with 5.7 million Instagram followers, finally came out about his steroid-use in 2024 after years of denial. It used to be that fitness freaks hid their doping, emphasising blessed genetics and diligent routines. Now they are open and amassing a new generation of young fans seduced by their honesty, and shredded replicability.

The Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever features tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s hyperbolic journey to defy mortality. His zealous protocol dubbed Project Blueprint includes 100 daily supplements, a vegan caloric intake, intermittent fasting, VO2 maxing, high intensity weight training, red light therapy, and not to mention his controversial use of stem cell replacement therapy and blood plasma transfusions donated by his teenage son.

According to his own metrics, Johnson is now aging at a rate of 0.69 biological years per chronological year. To get this return he hired 30 medical professionals and invested $2 million a year for the last five years. Critics claim Johnson’s hyper-stacking approach makes it impossible for peer reviewed studies. To be sure Johnson is trying to outpace death and science.

Other entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Thiel – with their own longevity start-ups Altos Labs and Methuselah Foundation (named for the biblical longevity record holder) – have contributed to an immortality cult that pervades Silicon Valley and has leaked into the wider world of affluence. If the proliferation of podcasts and YouTube channels are anything to go by, it would seem the biohackers have left their man cave.

As the Enhanced Games soft-launch got underway, another grandiose drug-induced spectacle was wrapping up nearby: the 14th edition of Electric Daisy Carnival where 500,000 American ravers annually cram into the local Speedway over three nights of debauchery. Upon my check-in, the hotel lobbies were filled with under-slept and over-stimulated partygoers. Apropos given that ravers (and hippies before them) were early adopters of a newly burgeoning pharma-culture that seemed a far-cry only 10 years ago.

President Nixon’s War on Drugs, which began in the early 1970s, brought about a moratorium on promising medical research into substances such as psilocybin, Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA).

A rampant crackdown ensued, scapegoating hippies, left-wing artists, anti-war protestors and namely the controversial Harvard psychologist and pioneering psychonaut Timothy Leary. Entangled with political and racial motivations, the War on Drugs demonized drugs to a degree that is still felt far and wide by placing legions of black men in penitentiaries. Fast forward to 2026 where recreational marijuana has been legalised across half the United States, and recreational drug research, trickling-in again since the 2000s and 2010s, has brought upon what some pundits call a “psychedelic renaissance.”

What we unilaterally refer to as “party drugs” – vilified by successive administrations as a scourge on the youth, antithetical to family values, and epitomised by Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign – are proving to be the best weapons to fight against a raging mental health crisis.

Paper after paper from highly respected institutes such as Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) have shown psychedelics to ameliorate (and in some cases cure) clinical depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), alcoholism, addiction and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. At the snail pace of research, testing and legalisation, some scientists claim we’re at the tip of the iceberg.

Colorado and Oregon both passed legislation to legalise psilocybin for therapeutic use in the last five years. A slew of traditional democratic counties in Oregon, California and Massachusetts have gone further to decriminalise possession. Users report improved mood, general wellbeing, heightened energy, creativity, spiritual growth, trauma healing and enhanced brain cognition known as neuroplasticity. Last summer, psilocybin was proven to extend telomeres, the protective caps at the ends of our DNA chromosomes, thus increasing longevity. Bryan Johnson, previously adverse to psychedelics, doubled down with a hero’s dose live on Instagram.

The myth of the Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur with their Ayahuasca shamans and LSD microdosing schedules has become a full-blown mainstream narrative. Even The Simpsons aired an episode where Homer visits a shamanic healer and undergoes a psychedelic vision quest. Anyone with a wooded area and Reddit account can repeat the protocol. Like Homer, those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs saw the vision, and the answer they were looking for was to monetise it.

Act VIII: The Fountain of Capital

“Purple haze all in my brain,

Lately things just don’t seem the same,

Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why,

‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.”

– Jimi Hendrix, ‘Purple Haze’

A psychedelically-enriched world is the bread and butter of Enhanced Games co-founder Christian Angermayer. A collector of dinosaur bones and boutique hotels, his biotech firm AtaiBeckley has played a pivotal role in incubating research into various hallucinatory molecules and potential delivery devices, whilst Angermayer himself actively lobbies for political and cultural acceptance of clinical psychedelic use.

This outlook underscores a shift from illness-based coverage towards preventative medicine. End of life care places a huge burden on medical resources and Medicare spends roughly 25% of its budget on people in their last year of life. Many patients choose to die rather than put their family in debt with costly services. The hope is that longevity medicine can smooth the transition from life to death and unburden facilities and families. But the system is not set-up for such a Copernican revolution. Hospitals and pharmaceutical conglomerates profit from sickness and ill health. Insurance companies are predicated on drugs and procedures that are based on diagnosis. As CNBC reported in 2018 in a much maligned and memed headline, “Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’”

Cue scores of luxury private practices cropping up in the burgeoning longevity market. As the Financial Times notes, the sector is spawning hotels and clinics in premier destinations which offer everything from biohacking gadgets to epigenetic testing and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Alex Hawkins, Director of Strategic Foresight at The Future Laboratory (a trend forecasting service), co-authored a report with Together Group (a luxury lifestyle consultancy) about how luxury is embracing longevity.

It’s easy to criticise this trend as the latest elitist pursuit of the 1% and it’s not hard to envision a dystopian future much like the one in the film Gattaca, where the genetically enhanced are platformed far above the natties in a two-tier society locked in a “medical apartheid”.

“I know it’s an instinctive fear that certain innovations, medications would be just for the rich. … And it’s just wrong,” Angermayer defends.

Ozempic is Angermayer’s favourite case-study. The Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 (GLP-1) is a hormone which regulates glucose levels and appetite. Since 2017 it had been used solely to treat diabetes but recently found its superpower as a weight-loss drug. First came the celebrities, then the wealthy; now it’s available for $499 per month direct to consumer in the US. At a market cap of $330 billion, its creator Novo Nordisk is the most valuable company in Europe, at one time outpacing the GDP of its home Denmark.

“I believe we have a total addressable market (TAM) of literally 100% of the world population, because everybody wants to be happy, everybody wants to live longer,” Angermayer enthusiastically predicts. Angermeyer’s infectious jubilance is driven by his own protocol of the neuropeptide Oxytocin, a naturally occurring hormone produced during childbirth, hugging and loving: “it gives you a little bit the sort of feeling you might have when you’re freshly in love.”

But does everyone want to be happy and to live longer? And would they do so with an injectable stack of dubiously tested drugs. Hawkins thinks not:

By Blue Zones, Hawkins refers to those centenarian breeding hotspots in places like Sardinia, Okinawa and Ikaria, which offer a radically low-tech, communal approach, emphasising social connection, light physical activity and unprocessed low meat diets.

Given that 70% of the world’s population is projected to live in urban areas by 2050 (up from around 56% today), a mass migration towards Blue Zones seems far-fetched. Regardless, neither knowledge nor spending power is the best predictor for behaviour. Despite having the highest per-capita healthcare spending, the US ranks low among developed nations for life expectancy (77.5 years versus Canada’s 82.2).

For Angermayer, part of the challenge is cultural. The public is misinformed, uneducated and thus unable to make rational decisions for themselves. If religion is on the decline, then sports is the enduring opiate of the masses. What better platform to sell a new vision of the human body? As Angermeyer enthuses, “Enhanced Games is the perfect poster child or consumer facing event [...] of the progress which is made in science.”

Angermayer and D’Souza often compare their project to Open-AI, Sam Altman’s start-up which beat Google, Meta and Musk in the first heat of the Artificial Intelligence race. AI has since been integrated into every facet of digital human transaction.

Much as Ozempic outsources discipline and AI outsources memory, reading, writing and “reasoning”, PEDs outsource muscle growth, training, rest and rehabilitation. Gkolomeev and his coach Brett Hawke have no doubt that their record breaking swim was achievable through natural processes – in fact it just was by Australia's Cameron McEvoy one month ago, placing the new “official” and supersuit-unaided 50m freestyle world record at 20.88 seconds. Yet in a world obsessed with Return on Investment (ROI), who has the time and money to train for years when you can achieve a world record in a few months at a fraction of the cost?

Angermayer trumpets the same reasoning when it comes to psychedelics. Through prolonged meditation, Buddhist monks and holy men of all stripes have accessed the same states of mind afforded by LSD and psilocybin, but “will you and I meditate 10 hours a day for the rest of our life? I think psychedelics are a god-given tool to allow everybody – even if we have a busy life – to access that state of mind and to sort of draw from it.”

The story of technology is one of outsourcing human abilities. Plato worried that books outsourced memory. Horseback outsourced walking and running. Automobiles outsourced horsepower. Autonomous cars are outsourcing driving. Long Language Models (LLMs) are outsourcing a range of skills synonymous with assistants, journalists, paralegals, creatives and coders. With every new integration of technology, net productivity increases, the complexity of human endeavours deepens and the economy expands. But at what cost?

A recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study divided students into groups and asked them to write several SAT essays using either OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Google’s search engine, or nothing at all. An electroencephalogram (EEG) was used to record brain activity across 32 regions and found that ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels.”

Can we expect similar tradeoffs with performance enhancements? Most PEDs work by providing exogenous hormones. Your body senses “enough” hormone in circulation and down‑regulates its own natural production. If you stop suddenly, you often crash into a low hormone state with fatigue, depression, muscle loss and metabolic slowdown, which can feel worse than your pre‑PED baseline.

Athletes and biohackers who feel measurably better on a protocol often fear “falling off the cliff” if they quit. Therefore they stay on indefinitely, which only increases potential negative side-effects. Not to mention there is the sunk debt in regular blood-work, specialist appointments and prescriptions. Essentially, what turns enhancements into a trillion dollar business is their addictive nature.

Since last year scientific and user-reported evidence has pointed towards the downsides of the world’s most popular peptide GLP-1 (Ozempic). The most common side effects include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pain and constipation. In fact Ozempic, FDA approved in 2017 for diabetes, has never actually been approved for weight-loss and is prescribed as an “off-label” medication for this purpose. Some patients have since developed a slew of gastrointestinal injuries among others, and in rarer cases have gone blind after taking GLP-1s. As of May 2026, there are 3,636 legal cases pending in the US against manufacturers.

Perhaps more common is what doctors have colloquially referred to as “Ozempic personality” to describe an induced lack of appetite not just for food, but for sex, work, social bonding and joy (basically life). This makes Angermeyer and Martin’s stacking of Oxytocin on top of Ozempic all the more clear. What Big Pharma taketh away, Big Pharma giveth with additional prescriptions and shareholder value.

This begs the question. If our “cure” for aging or performance becomes a life‐sentence of pharmaceuticals, have we really beaten biology or just shackled ourselves to a different master?

What happens when protocols are patented, data is siloed and insurance companies increase premiums for those outside the biohacked “norm”? If PEDs are to be brought into the workforce, which are the founders’ goals, how much will you be penalised if you choose to opt out? One can barely exist in the economy at present without a smartphone. Actors, musicians and artists alike are told that their networking power on social media is more valuable than the quality of their actual work.

It’s frequently said that “it’s not AI that will replace jobs, it’s people who know how to use AI that will replace jobs.” Our minds have already been hijacked by new technologies. If you believe the hype then jobs en masse are soon to come. This sets the stage for the body as the final frontier of unending economic growth – a template for infinite product-market-fit.

Amid the Olympic-bashing, the Enhanced Games are quick to assert that they are not here to replace the Olympics or natural sports but to provide another option by allowing athletes the freedom and agency to choose between natty and narcotic. This underscores a fundamental right of libertarian philosophy called Bodily Sovereignty or Bodily Autonomy.

“I think the fundamental human right is our sovereignty over our own body,” says D’Souza. “There can be no other human right – freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion – until we have sovereignty over our own bodies.”

In late 2024 D’Souza enshrined the goals of his new venture by holding a conference at his alma mater Oxford University. The result was the ‘First Declaration on Human Enhancement’, an aspirational manifesto which places Bodily Sovereignty upfront in Article 1:

The first video teaser for the Enhanced Games in early 2024 featured an athlete “coming out” for being enhanced. D’Souza loves to quote his favourite Tweet in response to the video: “’It will go down in the history books that Aron D’Souza used the language of civil rights to make doping normal.’” This makes the bisexual lighting more apropos.

Bodily Sovereignty keeps controversial bedfellows such as abortion, gender‑affirming care, cosmetic surgery and even assisted dying. In many western societies, each of these endeavours have cracked the glass ceiling in a swirl of liberal politics in recent memory. But where left-leaning Body Positivity sought radical acceptance to a degree that doctors were warned against fat-shaming the morbidly obese, Bodily Sovereignty seeks to disavow the status quo in favour of self-optimisation.

The longevity industry seems like the logical (if not “natural”) corollary to the beauty industry. As D’Souza smugly opines, “​​the Enhanced Games doesn’t deliver a different message to kids than Kim Kardashian – humans need to upgrade themselves.”

Some of the attendees at the Vegas soft-launch run longevity clinics that began life as plastic surgeries. A smattering of attendees had upgraded under the scalpel to subtle but flattering results. I notice none of the body-horror I’m privy to at premiere film festivals where actresses have undertaken a war of attrition against aging at the expense of looking like a malnourished alien. In fact all of the VIP guests in Vegas looked remarkably fit, nutritiously fed, appropriately slept, and to borrow a line from Angermayer, noticeably happy.

One thing you can say about the Enhanced Games over any digital start up: the vision is tangible. And seeing is believing. “I don’t say we’re launching the Enhanced Games, we’re launching the Enhanced Age, a whole new age of mankind where we know that our biology is no longer our limits,” D’Souza often proclaims.

If the years prior to COVID, with Black Lives Matter, #metoo and decolonisation, were about victimisation through historical fetishism, then the Enhanced Age is about forward momentum through agency. Angermeyer doubles down:

After their first public announcement, the Enhanced Games drifted through months of fledgling support as the provocative balls-to-the-wall pie-in-the-sky concept was lambasted left and right. Even President Biden opined “deep concern” for the project. Without a host nation and a publicly willing athlete, the venture seemed like it would go up in smoke before they could break a single record. Then history came to meet them at a crucial moment.

Donald Trump was reelected president, breathing life into a MAGA movement that the Left, so blindingly confident would fail, propped up a mentally debilitating and severely ageing Joe Biden, who became the embodied symbol of American political sclerosis. In February 2025, Donald Trump Jr’s investment fund 1789 announced a multi-million dollar ticket for the Enhanced Games, declaring in a new promo video that “the impossible is what we do best.”

Trump Jr. married them to the MAGA movement with his superlative vows:

Emphasising the “realness” of the proposition, Trump Jr is positing that up until now society had been dealt illusions; that the Democratic party, and liberal identity politics, had been caught in a vortex of pageantry: words too opaque, ideals too fuzzy, men too soft. Today the right wing has moved beyond halcyon conservatism of yesteryear to a kind of phallocentric futurism akin to the Futurists of the early 20th century. It’s worth recalling the Futurists, whose poet-founder, the Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, declared in a manifesto published in 1909 on the front page of the Parisian broadsheet Le Figaro:

And thus techno-utopianism was born. And like today’s it came with a radically destructive and oppressive fervour marked by machismo as Marinetti displays:

Sound familiar?

At the closing press conference, I asked D’Souza what the appetite has been from female athletes. “It’s an interesting question,” he admitted. At the time none had stepped forward. Months later the American swimmer Megan Romano would be the first to declare her involvement. At 35, her personal best in the 50m and 100m freestyle were both set in 2013 when Barack Obama was president and her Vegas competitors were still teenagers. Nevertheless she welcomed the “opportunity to compete on a stage where female athletes are valued and compensated fairly, equally.”

This weekend 12 of the 42 athletes competing are women – most from the Caribbean and South America (like Barbadian Olympic sprinter Tristan Evelyn and Colombian Olympic silver medalist weightlifter Leidy Solis) where public sports budgets are crippled. Others such as Emily Barclay of Britain and Natalia Fryckowska of Poland are relatively-speaking fillers, having never competed on the world stage.

Since the birth of Trumpism, the swings of public discourse have created more whiplash than the bible belt. And yet the political pendulum has only accelerated during and after the years of COVID lockdown. The traditional safety net of society, the moralising role of humanity and the capacity for unending economic growth have all come under attack, and the chaos has sublimated into something amorphous and fiery, stoking fertile ground for polarising and reactionary forces to not just challenge the status quo but to upend it. D’Souza, a former student of philosophy, underlines the significance of the times:

Underneath the crumbling tectonic plates of the socio-political order, the technocratic elites (aka Accelerationists), who have long professed a deontological libertarianism – rabid pursuit of anti-welfare, anti-government and anti-democratic programs – have ascended. As detailed in Naomi Klein’s 2007 left-wing critique of authority The Shock Doctrine, it was the government that used shock and awe in order to solidify unpopular undemocratic positions to consolidate economic and political power. Today it is the techno-libertarians, who have amassed via “digital fiefdoms” more power than God on Earth, that are using the veneer of political chaos to pave the way for a new kind of socio-political experiment, one where the Aristotelian “political animal” is euthanised.

A recently resurfaced clip from 2009 showcases Peter Thiel at the libertarian conference Libertopia outlining this very agenda:

Thiel outlined his thinking in the essay ‘The Education of a Libertarian’, in which he claimed the goal of his project was “to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” In the essay Thiel rails against “the broader education of the body politic becom[ing] a fool’s errand.” He concluded, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Thiel put the philosophy in action during the chainsaw-budgeting by his PayPal Elon Musk at the Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE); not to mention the deregulation of cryptocurrencies and the 10-year moratorium on AI regulation – brokered by Thiel’s other PayPal David Sacks to the voluptuous delight of Accelerationists everywhere. And now with the Department of Education closed, Thiel’s “escape from politics” has evolved into a complete and utter government takeover in order to close up shop from within.

The end goal is to crown what Curtis Yarvin, intellectual star of the libertarian right, would call a “CEO monarch,” who runs the country like a startup. In his vision, citizens become customers with the right to cancel their contract. Voting remains possible – but only by relocating to a different sovereign state.

When the democratic process is nullified and the body politic expires, what is left in its wake is the individual material body, wholly detached from the other, from community, society, unions, church, family and any expression of socio-political dimension. Without these social structures, emphasis is put on the physical body as the only conceivable source of individual power. Look at the burgeoning subculture of Looksmaxing, whose patron saint, the awkwardly self-chiselled Clavicular (rumoured to be funded by Peter Thiel), plays out a real life myth of Narcissus as soap opera live on TikTok.

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This hyper-aesthetic apotheosis of capitalism crystallises the human body as pure commodity, one which can be manipulated by market forces and algorithmic formulas. The product manufactured on the factory belt is substituted for the very physical body of the labourer-consumer themself. When labour becomes obsessed and competitive over their biomarkers for longevity, perfectionism and productivity, they cease to question their own exploitation. “Keeping up with the Jones’” becomes “keeping up with the (Bryan) Johnsons and Kardashians.”

Among the many White House appointees Peter Thiel has ordained is Jim O’Neil as Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, second only to Robert Francis Kennedy Jr (a “close friend” of Angermeyer). O’Neil, who previously ran Thiel’s venture firm Mithril Capital, has been highly criticised for his “dangerous de-regulatory and extremist ideas.” In the past he has openly attacked the FDA’s regulatory process for slowing innovation, the very administration he is now in charge of. Since O’Neil’s appointment, Angermeyer’s AtaiBeckley have had a number of long awaited (and held up) clinical trials approved by the FDA, putting them on course to become the biggest retailer of clinical psychedelics. The market agrees – AtaiBeckley’s stock is at $4, up from $2 a year ago.

In a coup for the Enhanced Games product line-up, RFK Jr recently pushed the FDA to review whether seven specific peptides (including BPC-157) should be legally produced by compounding pharmacies again. The Enhanced website has already sidelined the athletes and Games in favour of fronting their online pharmacy before the Games have even taken place.

The MAGAgenda and the Accelerationists essentially want the same thing: a world without regulatory bodies. The public distrust in institutions enabled by the COVID pandemic combined with the rise in social media, paved the road for gymfluencers, biohackers and the manosphere who would sell their body as a laboratory for self-maximisation. American gyms are replete with needle bins. Breast enlargement, lip filler and plastic surgery are not just MAGA statements but are societal staples. Human beings, or at least the ones who can afford it, are indeed upgrading themselves.

In a now notorious viral New York Times podcast interview, Peter Thiel awkwardly stumbles through deafening stutters when asked whether “humanity should survive?” But his highly mocked non-response speaks to a radical philosophy that has pervaded Silicon Valley since its beginning.

Today the proletariat are losing their jobs to AI. Tomorrow they may lose the very opportunity of those jobs to “super-humans,” paving the way for a corporatised consumer-fit version of Transhumanism, a philosophy conceived in 1957 by the English biologist and philosopher Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous), which extols the use of science and technology to alter the human body in order to transcend its natural physical and mental limitations. Beyond PEDs this includes body modification, genetic engineering, cybernetic implants, nanobots, cryogenics and virtual consciousness.

At one point or another, each of these transhuman potentials was raised by team members of Enhanced not as possibilities, but as inevitabilities that will be folded into future editions. One can see Enhanced products moving beyond PEDs into the realm of consumer tech with the human body as the ideal consumer product (superseding the Apple iPhone), endlessly perfectable, adaptable and upgradeable in unending cycles of product-market-fit.

Angermayer doesn’t like the term Transhumanism:

With global GDP growth rates diminishing and debt rising higher than a Texan flash flood, maximising productivity is number one on the agenda as the global economy relinquishes the chains of environmentalism and woke politics. D’Souza recounts what he sees as the grand mission of the Enhanced Games, one which merges science and performance enhancing medicine with micro and macro economics:

Putting aside the caustic debates over misappropriated government spending and proportional taxation, D’Souza’s solution might treat the fiscal symptoms of an ageing population, but it does not solve the root cause; that is, younger generations in the west are having fewer babies. Without immigration, population decline in many affluent societies is a foregone conclusion.

The neoconservative American philosopher Francis Fukuyama – famous for prematurely heralding western liberal democracy as having won the battle of ideologies in The End of History and The Last Man – notes in his essay ‘Against Life Extension’, that keeping the elderly alive for longer in fact compounds the problems of an ageing economy.

Fukuyama is worried about ageing elites remaining in power longer than the relevance of their entrenched values. And there lies the rub. It turns out ageing elites fear death more than anything else. The first thing Thiel said to D’Souza when they met at Oxford was, “Hi, I’m Peter Thiel. I’m going to live forever.”

In a viral moment worthy of a William Gibson novel, in late 2025 a hot mic caught ageing dictators Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin discussing longevity. “Now they say that at 70 you are only a child,” a translator for Xi was heard telling Putin in Russian. With advances in biotechnology, people will be able to “transplant human organs continuously, grow younger with age and perhaps even achieve immortality,” Putin’s translator responded in Mandarin.

When Hunter S. Thompson drove to Las Vegas in 1971 in search of the American Dream, he found a deranged form of corporate capitalism, epitomised by a grotesque, hyper-exaggerated version of America filled with glitz, greed, drugs, paranoia and sensory overload – what the French post-modern philosopher Jean Baudrillard diagnosed as “hyperrealism”.

Thompson would love the Enhanced Games as an assault on common decency. I can see him competing in a drive-by shooting spree as he sniffs, smokes and eye-drops his way through “a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.”

As a loud advocate for drug legalisation, individual freedom, gun ownership and the right to be weird, Thompson might even be down with swaths of Americana Trump 2.0. But he was highly skeptical of corporations and would be darn right apoplectic over Silicon Valley’s marriage with the military industrial complex. See Palantir (a whole other ball of wax).

To be fair, I have no problem with the basic concept of a “Steroids Olympics”. I am a proponent of Bodily Sovereignty and I believe adults should have the right to choose what to put in and what to do to their bodies to the point of suicide. I think it’s a crime that rehabilitation medicines are gatekept from professional athletes who have given their bodies to the sporting industrial complex for little to no compensation. Some of these medicines will be truly revolutionary as humanity shifts the average lifespan needle past 120. “Do your own research” (as they say in crypto). Make an informed decision.

What I feel uncomfortable about is the slippery slope towards the wholesale corporatisation of the human body, and everything that entails. Given the callous reputations of certain billionaire pioneers of e-commerce, social-media and now AI, I don’t have a candle in hell to hope for that this will end well for all of us. We’ve read this book. We’ve seen this movie. But my discomfort is irrelevant. The machine is already running. Whether the Games last another year or 10, the genie is out of the bottle.

As various apocalyptic and dystopian scenarios play out from the climate catastrophe to unchecked AI to the Palantir aided panopticon to the Russia-Ukraine War to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians to the ridiculous Iran War, the Accelerationists (like the Futurists before them) are pushing the civilisational sled downhill at breakneck speed towards a new world order, one that is based on techno determinism – technology, specifically algorithms, as the sole arbiter of human affairs.

As seductive as this notion is to the Silicon Valley spectrum-aligned, it denies the outsized role that culture played during the flourishing Renaissance and the Post War New Deal era. Some of the founders of Silicon Valley were hippies, punks and ravers to begin with. Economics as a social science often neglects the significance of communities beyond arbitrary labour demographics. As they say, “politics is downstream from culture.” But today’s culture is an appendage of the tech industry via Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix and Spotify. Thus culture today is downstream from technology. In lieu of cultural determinism, we seem to be entering a period of moral relativism determined by Big Data, and advanced by a post-Fordist roller coaster age of feudal-capitalism. Except we don’t know where the roller coaster ends or if the rail baron tested the tracks.

To paraphrase Baudrillard, “it is more interesting to live at the end of civilisation than at its beginning.” One wonders how many techno-libertarians (from either end of the spectrum) are in the closet waiting to come out to dance on the grave of social welfare and democratic politics. If the polarised reactions to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in America are anything to go by, it seems quite a lot.

Like the Tea Party before them, which metastasised into MAGA, cycles come at swings of the pendulum. Meaning must erode until eventually abolished in favour of radical action. During a psychedelic trip, neurotransmitters flood the synapse until reality is a scramble of senses. Up becomes down, left becomes right, smell becomes touch, thought becomes vision. Manifesting a new reality out of the discord is where the real work starts.

The Accelerationists are not naive optimists. They have read Nietzsche, Strauss, Girard, Schmitt and Moldbug. They understand exactly what civilisational cycle we are entering. They are not trying to save the liberal democratic order, to which they all owe their massive wealth accumulation – but are positioning themselves to be the feudal lords of whatever comes after it.

The Enhanced Games is not about sport. It is not even really about longevity. It is about owning the infrastructure of human optimisation before the current order collapses, and charging admission to the ruins.

The Ancient Greeks ran naked before the Gods. The Soviets forged athletes as symbols of state power. The Americans sold sport as freedom and liberal individualism incarnate. And Lance Armstrong proved you could win the Tour de France in lieu of a midlife crisis. Now the midlife crises of the tech oligarchs, with their God-like egos and their overwhelming fear of death, are civilization’s real crises.

To echo the early 20th century German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who unsuccessfully tried to transatlantically escape the Nazis: “Technology: saviour of mankind or harbinger of doom?” The Accelerationists are betting on both, whilst selling us the former.

My Enhanced Games Predictions

• Icelandic strongman Thor Bjornsson aka The Mountain from Game of Thrones will surpass his own deadlift world record of 510kg.

• Chilean Arley Mendez and Canadian Boady Santavy will replicate their record breaking snatches in training in their respective weight-classes.

• Natty American Fred Kerley will win gold in the 100m sprint but come a sliver short of Usain’s Bolt’s world record.

• Britain’s Ben Proud will deuce it out with Greece’s Kristian Gkolomeev for the 50m freestyle. Chances of a record breaking swim are 50/50. Regardless, the supersuit will make it scientifically unverifiable as a pharmaceutical achievement and the Enhanced Games will not acknowledge the distinction.

• The FDA will approve multiple peptides for compounding. The Games will pivot its primary marketing away from sport entirely and toward the consumer longevity market. The athletes will become a footnote.

• At least one athlete will launch their own personal biohacking brand.

• At least one athlete will publicly express regret within a year of competing. The organisation will not comment.

Regardless of the winners, losers and world records, the crowd will be a surreal gonzo congregation. Biohackers with glucose monitors. Tech scions in norm-core uniform. Transhumanists with trippy gadgets. Trump family in dark suits and red ties flanked by Secret Service. MAGA apostles striking power poses for selfies. Looksmaxers with hammered cheekbones. Celebrities waning in their relevance, lips filled to form new geometry. Breasts that defy gravity. Faces smoothed aggressively. Bronze toner applied unsparingly. These are the new aesthetics of power. If the enhanced athletes are Greek Gods, then this is their flock. D’Souza was right about one thing: the Games delivers exactly the same message as Kim Kardashian: upgrade or die.

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References

BBC, ‘I’m being forced to choose between Olympics and OnlyFans’

https://www.bbc.com/sport/rowing/articles/c0715154kmeo

Bloomberg, ‘The ‘Enhanced Games’ Is the Ultimate MAGA Athletic Competition’

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-06-27/the-enhanced-games-aims-to-be-an-olympics-where-doping-is-the-point

Business Insider, ‘The godfather of DOGE: It’s Peter Thiel’s world now. We just live in it.’

https://www.businessinsider.com/godfather-of-doge-peter-thiel-elon-musk-government-funding-cuts-2025-2

‘ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study’

https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/

Drugwatch, ‘Ozempic (Semaglutide)’

https://www.drugwatch.com/drugs/ozempic/Enhanced Games, ‘The First Declaration on Human Enhancement’

https://enhanced-content.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/The+First+Declaration+on+Human+Enhancement.pdf

Enhanced Games, ‘50 Meters to History’

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘The Futurist Manifesto’

https://www.societyforasianart.org/sites/default/files/manifesto_futurista.pdf

Financial Times, ‘How ‘longevity’ became the new buzzword in health’

https://www.ft.com/content/7295d51a-7796-45ca-9059-372e47bda06a

Francis Fukuyama, ‘Against Life Extension’

Persuasion

Against Life Extension

Just so you know: In addition to this column, Francis Fukuyama also writes for the main Persuasion mailing list. That means that if you don’t subscribe to Persuasion, you might miss out on receiving some of his essays…

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a year ago · 128 likes · 16 comments · Francis Fukuyama

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

https://www.nothuman.net/images/files/discussion/4/d74f8d5659b59b9cc5238844938f9d05.pdf

iAI, ‘The delusion behind upgrading humanity or ending it: The techno-optimists who want to delete humanity’

https://iai.tv/articles/the-delusion-behind-upgrading-humanity-or-ending-it-auid-3195?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=feed

Jean Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacra

https://dn720006.ca.archive.org/0/items/baudrillard.-1970.-the-consumer-society/Baudrillard.1981.Simulacra-and-Simulation.pdf

Joe Rogan Experience ‘#2166 - Enhanced Games’

Julian Savulescu, ‘Doping Scandals, Rio and the Future Of Human Enhancement’

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bioe.12268

TODAY, ‘What Is ‘Ozempic Personality’? Patient Shares Troubling GLP-1 Impact on Mental Health’

https://www.today.com/health/diet-fitness/ozempic-personality-glp-1-weight-loss-symptom-rcna345729Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’

https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf

WIRED, ‘The Definitive, Insane, Swimsuit-Bursting Story of the Steroid Olympics’

https://www.wired.com/story/enhanced-games-freestyle-record-las-vegas-steroids/

In police procedurals like Law & Order, cops pursue facts; prosecutors pursue truth; judges, presumably, pursue fairness. The men and women in blue are flawed but earnest, stubbornly aligned with the public good. The message is soothing, almost parental: someone competent is in charge.

That comfort mattered. Police procedurals thrived in eras of anxiety – Cold War unease, post-9/11 paranoia and the slow but steady drip of economic dread since 2008. When the news felt ungovernable, television offered governance. When reality was messy, fiction offered clean-cut procedure. There were rules. There were consequences. There was closure.

Yet watching my favourite crime procedural now, one can’t help but notice the genre slipping toward fantasy. The headlines tell a harsher story. Victims are ignored, denigrated or threatened. Videos of police brutality circulate with algorithmic cruelty. Due process looks less like a sacred guarantee and more like a negotiable clause. Force is deployed and licensed to terrorise citizens. Protesters are managed, beaten or murdered. Language is bent. Objective truth is folded. Accountability is euthanised. Law and order is Kafkaesque.

Take the Epstein of it all. The scandal reads less like exception and more like a system rotten to the core – politicians, royals, venture capitalists, intellectuals, scientists and socialites orbit predation like a social network. And yet the prosecution of the perpetrators remains near nought.

In American Psycho – Brett Easton Ellis’ pastiche on ‘80s consumer-capitalism – the protagonist Patrick Bateman, a yuppie Wall Street banker, repeatedly professes, “There is no real me.” He is a product of (Peter Thiel’s favourite philosopher) René Girard’s mimetic rivalry. He wants what others have, particularly their status. The serial killing violence and cannibalism that Bateman enacts on everyone from his rivals to his lovers to the homeless are not aberrations but are logical extensions of the neoliberal agenda that prioritises corporate profits over social justice. Predatory markets breed predatory behaviour.

As a recent viral video suggests, to think that the same corporate raiders who poison our air, water and food supply, who enforce child slavery, structural racism and the patriarchy, and who bust unions with virulent McCarthyism, would not also rape, traffic, murder and consume our children, then we are utterly naive.

In Girard’s philosophical system, society self-regulates by placing blame on a sacrificial lamb: jews, muslims, blacks, immigrants, communists, gays, women, liberals... But in the logic of late-stage capitalism – crumbling under the weight of its contradictions – we are all sacrificial lambs to be slaughtered at the altar, even the credit card-carrying capitalists themselves, even the white men and women doing God’s or the government’s work.

Against this backdrop, the police procedural reads as wish fulfilment. What was aspirational now feels like a sedative administered to a pig being walked to slaughter.

Justice, once presumed to prevail, now demands proof. It demands accountability. It demands heads on sticks, CEOs in bodybags and board-members in prison stripes. Luigi Mangione’s murder of UnitedHealthCare’s CEO Brian Thompson blew the old narrative out of the water. It signalled that vigilantism is coming back into fashion.

As a clean-cut good looking Ivy Leaguer, Mangione is a far-cry from Robert Deniro’s troubled Vietnam vet turned lonely night-owl Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Yet despite their obvious differences both aspired to be “the rain [that] will come and wash all [the] scum off the streets.” In Scorsese’s magnum opus, the malignant of society are the street criminals. In the Epstein files, the malignant is anyone in a fitted suit with cufflinks and a platinum card.

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Leonardo DiCaprio plays an apathetic leftist revolutionary who is recalled into action to save his daughter from a volatile white supremacist American general, superbly played by a crewed-cut Sean Penn. It marks a return to the cinema of the 1970s where anti-heroes navigated corrupted systems. However unlike in Taxi Driver, which also concludes with the saving of a young woman, there is no return to halcyon days, nor hope for a better future. Only unending revolution. The system is not something that can be changed. It is something to survive.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” - Antonio Gramsci.

As the world falls into disarray and the logic of the old myths fail, a revolutionary fervour is needed to survive, to endure, to remember and rebuild. But stories that call for the collapse of the current system are far and few between. Given Warner Bros' new owners (the White House aligned Skydance), one wonders whether One Battle After Another or the succulent Jim Crow-set Southern Gothic Sinners would even be commissioned today under that studio banner.

Perhaps the most famous “man against the system” movie narrative is Star Wars, draped in fantasy sci-fi and set in a galaxy far far away. Yet the crimes of empire are dishearteningly all too familiar.

From Sophocles’ Antigone to Luke Skywalker, the archetype persists – that the individual who refuses the corrupt law in the name of a higher one, who pays for that refusal, and who in paying becomes the mirror in which society is forced to see itself and reckon with the destruction of its most deeply held institutions. America has never sat easy with historical self-reflection. Certainly not in the mainstream media. Certainly not in the public schools which have seen in recent years a systematic erasure of black, Native American, LGBTQ and feminist canons.

The procedural will not die. But its relevance has already been replaced. The news is the new crime drama. The detectives are citizen journalists. The witnesses are smartphones. The lab technicians are hackers. The prosecutors are podcasters and YouTubers. The verdict is delivered not in a courtroom but in the comments section. Cross-examination via memes. Judgement through a sniper-scope or a silencer.

The old world is dying. The monsters are wearing suits. And the cameras are rolling. There may no longer be law and order. But there will be blood.

A Cinematic Sci-Fi Novel by Daniel Y-Li Grove

"A child born in orbit. A world divided. A destiny written in the stars."

From the Stars is a serialized sci-fi novel told in immersive, cinematic prose and atmospheric soundscapes. Follow the first human born in space, as her existence becomes the spark for a global—and interstellar—struggle between science, myth, and power.Is she a weapon? A prophet? Or something else entirely?

From the Stars explores themes of:

🌍 Family & Adolescence 🧬 Science vs Mysticism🛰️ Geo-Politics & Espionage🔮 Human Consciousness & Cosmic Destiny

Music by ⁠⁠JenLi⁠⁠

Mixed and voiced by Daniel Y-Li Grove

Follow us on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠ or subscribe to our ⁠⁠Substack

I hope you’re getting sunshine and blue skies wherever you are.

If you haven’t caught up check out the audio-drama for Chapter 3. Please subscribe if you’re coming back for more.

This week’s poster brought to you by Chat GPT inspired by this week’s chapter.

Just to remind you. The concept art is AI generated. The words are farm to tabled.

Chapter 4: Living in a Black Hole

86 miles per hour, the Ford F-150 cruised east on I-85 towards North Carolina just after morning rush hour. The radio shifted channels crossing genres and timelines as April jostled the frequency. She finally settled on ‘Enter Sandman’ by Metallica. The guitar riffs offered a jolt of energy.

Maia woke up yawning, slumped over in the cabin. She caught a passing sign: ‘YOU ARE APPROACHING GREENSBORO, NC’, which meant they had four hours to go before reaching the DC outskirts.

“Look who decided to wake up.” April slurped on a Waffle House ice-coffee.

“You went to Waffle House?”

April signalled to the space bag on the cabin floor.

Inside, Maia found her favourite: hash browns covered, topped and smothered – Waffle house lingo for cheesed, chili’ed and with grilled onions.

“You’re welcome.”

“Thanks.”

Maia devoured the greasy hash browns but the taste fell flat. The salt and grease clung to her mouth, but no comfort arose. Somewhere between her tongue and her brain, the familiar reward signals short-circuited. Her body was betraying her in minute ways. Her olfactory signal was being cannibalised by something else.

The air outside shimmered in the heat, a greasy film hanging over the asphalt. The stench of scorched rubber and diesel clawed into the cabin vents. Maia tasted metal on her tongue and covered her mouth and nose.

“You alright?” April asked.

As they bore down the twelve lane highway, she observed the ashen concrete strewn with blown-out rubber from the daily procession of 18-wheelers, their bulbous tires bursting from heat and friction, their forever toxins melting into the infernal tar.

Maia pressed her forehead against the window, the glass rattling through her tempel. Outside, the concrete stretched out like a battered minefield, littered with the wreckage of civilization — blown-out rubber, busted chassis, appliances heaved onto the highway shoulders like the bones of forgotten titans.

“This highway looks like shit,” she muttered, voice hoarse with something thicker than disgust.

April sipped her iced coffee. “It’s a wasteland.”

Maia swallowed hard. The junk seemed endless, a planetary artery clogged with cholesterol. She pictured the ISS circling above like a moth orbiting a campfire, the Earth below choking on its own fumes.

Humanity was deep in the anthropocene, an epoch that started in the mid 20th century and which saw the rapid industrialisation of Earth to the extent humans were deemed a geological force as robust as super volcanoes and extinction-level asteroids. Half a trillion metric tonnes of concrete have been poured into the veins and arteries of a planetary organism little to no scientists understood.

Maia was irate. She might have had a reluctance to tidy the confines of her bedroom. But the trashing of communal spaces was something wholly abject. Intellectually she always knew the Earth was sacred but today it was visceral as if she was staring down from the ISS succumbing to the Overview Effect, the spiritual and consciousness awakening astronauts felt when they first looked upon their tiny ball of blue.

Earth or Gaia, according to the engineer and scientist Sir James Lovelock, was a holistic cooling system, a complex air-conditioned unit traveling at 30 kilometers per second around the su keeping temperatures just right. Without the atmosphere, Earth would be bombarded by deathly UV-C and UV-B rays that altered DNA and scalded flesh.

Every part of the Gaia system was reliant on every other part as a pure function of symbiosis. Symbiosis was necessary to the evolution of not just plants and animals but to matter itself – “the will to complexity” or “the will to live,” as the German philosopher Arhur Schopernahuer perceived it, was a blind, irrational, and insatiable force that drove every and all existence from the most basic physical processes to the most conscious desires. This will was the divine order of the universe, an unseen force holding the fabric of ontic being together, like quartz in a Swiss watch.

The project to atomise and separate the species in order to declare supremacy had bred a detachment between the self and nature. First man forgot that he was a part of nature. Then man came to denigrate nature against all warnings. He put nature’s existence into question. And now he is only starting to remember that he too was nature. It’s an Oedipus story

Was this entropy? she wondered. The inevitable unraveling of the system by design-flaw. Was her body also giving way to imperceivable contradictions? She was wrestling with many dualities from mind and body to terrestrial and astral.

“Do you think humans will ever clean up their act?” Maia asked.

April considered it a rhetorical question. She had too much experience between the various layers of society to give any of them the benefit of the doubt. She had lost hope in institutions – even her own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was a broken down machine led by a climate change denier and chief oil lobbyist.

“Sadly science outpaces morality. We could have clean energy tomorrow if they allowed it. But when money is at stake, morality goes out the window.” April knew these words were unhelpful for the hopes and dreams of the next generation. But she couldn’t blunt her bitterness, even for her only child.

All those dead dinosaurs, Maia thought, powering the petroleum dreams of an entire civilization whilst crudely poisoning the biological imperative of the whole damn thing. The irony would be hilarious if it were not so cynical.

Where April was bitter, Maia was angry. But her rage was directionless. Who, as a twelve year old, could she lambast and hold account? Surely Greta and her ilk were part of the problem. But she was inconsequential at least for now.

“What are you thinking?” April queried.

Maia pointed to the forest on the other side of the highway. Whole tracts of the Hagan-Stone Park, a once popular wildlife refuge, were zoned for logging. A stalk or falcon lifted off from a falling oak. The safeguards of complexity were unbuckling towards a will to--.

“Nothing. I guess we’re all doomed.”

“No. All I'm saying is… we’re gonna need a whole shift in consciousness. And I haven’t seen one of those in a long time.”

“Maybe it takes a generation?”

“Yeah. It does.”

“Maybe the extraterrestrials will show us what we’ve been doing wrong.”

“We can only hope. But you shouldn’t worry about such things.”

“What should I worry about then?”

“School,” April wanted to say. But that wouldn’t help. “Well, tell the ETs to hurry up,” April joked. “Time’s running out.”

“Message received.”

They hadn’t played like this in years. Life became too serious.

“Wanna talk about last night?”

“Why? What happened?” Maia could not remember anything past delivering Laika. Did it rain? Did she get wet?

“I thought you got stuck in the storm at Brian and Marianne’s so I drove over there. They said you’d left twenty minutes before. Then I backtraced it to the house – thought maybe you were out in the rain. Called around for you. I was losing my mind til I found you sleeping in bed.”

“What’s strange about that?”

“Besides sneaking in without saying a word? Well you also cleaned your room and packed your bags. I thought that was pretty disturbing.”

Maia had no recollection. What happened to her clothes? She distinctly remembered the feeling of wet cloth on her skin.

“It’s nice to see you actually listened to me for once,” April mused.

Maia was stumped but she was in April’s good graces. There was no point in torpedoing it this early in the morning.

“Why didn’t you wake me up this morning?”

“I tried. But you were out like a log. Plus you’d already changed, so all I had to do was carry you to the truck.”

Maia noticed she was wearing her favourite vintage NASA oversized shirt. She would never change into the next day’s clothes before bed. She had no recollection whatsoever. Then she remembered something: “Betelgeuse was blinking.”

“Betelgeuse? She’s always blinking.”

Betelgeuse was a semi-variable supergiant, expanding and collapsing like a superheated lung, causing variance in its brightness. Maia felt it was speaking to her own mind-body shifts.

She didn’t know what to say to April who could be known to overreact. She was a “rocket-ship mum”, dubbed so by the other parents as “the Challenger” given that every incident was another reason to combust.

Maia had to figure this out for herself. Or at least consult with her dad first who would most likely have a reasonable explanation.

She tried to recall what happened before going to bed. But only the fleeting trace of forgotten dreams remained, too hazy to form, too abstract to vocalise. Vanished like those twenty minutes in the rain.

Dr. Maggie Foster stood in the sweltering heat opposite the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, thumbing on her phone:

‘RUSSIAN SUBMARINE STRIKES MERCHANT SHIP IN INTERNATIONAL WATERS,” the headline on her phone read.

“Shit.”

April’s Ford honked as it pulled up. Maggie stepped onto the sidewalk still glued to her phone.

“We had such a good start today. Let’s not jinx it,” April warned Maia, cutting the engine.

“Can I have my phone back?”

April laughed, “No.”

April and Maggie hugged endearingly. Maggie had led the research into Maia’s pediatric development in space and on Earth. But after six years she was exited after a backlash to diversity initiatives – Maggie being black with roots in Guyana – April could and would not condone the changing of the guards.

“Excited for tomorrow?” Maggie hugged Maia.

Maia dodged the question: “Have you heard the theory that the universe resides in a black hole?”

“Just like our nation! How’s school?”

“Another divisive topic,” Maia warned.

“We’re censoring any conversation on education today,” April policed.

“Sounds in step with the authorities. You know what else is divisive? Michael asked that since I’m in town if I would water the plants while he takes her and the kids to Sicily.”

Michael was Maggie’s ex-husband with whom she was unsuccessfully trying to conceive before orbit. He “gentlemanly” waited for her return to mention he was sleeping with his colleague.

“Isn’t that where you were supposed to honeymoon? Oh honey. Bring it in,” April forced another comforting but pitiful hug upon Maggie.

The Smithsonian had become a yearly pilgrimage for Maia and April who had lifetime memberships. Their rotating exhibits offered respite from the dearth of stimuli on offer around her.

The current exhibition ‘The Story of Creation” was named aptly to placate the radical right who had taken over the public institutions of science and culture. But what the board thought would be a platform for intelligent design, was a catch-all title allowing the curators to smuggle in a smorgasbord of alternative cosmologies from the cyclical Mayans to the deontological Mesopotamians. In the end the Book of Genesis played a perfunctory role, lesser than the Kabbalah whose sacred geometry was an apt comparison to the mathematikoi of the Pythagoreans.

“Remember when things were simpler?” April nostalgised to Maggie in front of a crew photo of the ISS, their hair frozen in irrational shapes.

“Simpler?”

“When people got along. Those nine months felt like bliss,” April said.

“People got along with you because one, you were pregnant; and two, you were pregnant and hangry.”

“I wasn’t that bad.”

April caught a photo of Alexei’s floating head against her pregnant belly.

“You miss him?”

“Please. If anything, I want to electrocute him. He sent Maia a brochure for a UK boarding school for gifted children.”

“That would be great for her,” Maggie zapped. She could tell by April’s drawn out face she hit the wrong button.

“The point is he did this behind my back. With zero consultation of her mother”

“Not to change topic. But I’m pretty sure Frank still has a thing for you?”

“Frank!? Please. I’ve had pecan pie with higher EQ.”

“And speaking of…” Maggie turned. “Frank!” she shouted.

Frank, who was serendipitously staring at a diorama of an ancient Peruvian calendar, clocked April. They both smiled nervously. Maggie was already moving onto the next exhibit.

“Maggie?”

April knew Maggie was taking petty revenge for wooing the boys. Frank beamed at April, locking on to the one that got away.

Maggie joined Maia who was staring at a copper ceremonial plate of a human figure with falcon wings and a feathered headdress. “One of the most significant artifacts from Mississippian culture, the Falcon Dancer Plate was discovered at the Etowah Indian Mounds near Marietta, Georgia.” She turned to Maia, “That’s near you. Ever been?”

Frank and April recounted the last five years.

“Are you and Mercedes still...?” April knew the gossip but couldn’t help herself.

“Legally, I’m obliged to say we amicably parted ways. But she got the house. And the boat. But not the planes.”

“They gave you and Maia such a hard time. It wasn’t fair.”

His words came five years too late. “Thanks,” she said all the same.

“You should come for a test-flight one day. We can go hypersonic. Nothing sexier than flying at Mach 10.”

April expected nothing less from Frank who had always been a Tennessee flyboy. He followed the money over to Lockhead Martin and was trading top secret rides for skirts. How lonely he must be, she thought.

“Pretty sure anything hypersonic is top secret.”

“Nobody needs to know.”

Maia and Maggie made their way into the planetarium as the lights dimmed. Maia squeezed past attendees to be middle and center as Maggie settled for a seat in the aisle.

“The universe is a magical place…” As Neil deGrasse Tyson’s voice unfurled across the dark, Maia felt the air thicken. A low frequency buzz — deeper than sound, more like the pressure of deep ocean water — pooled inside her chest.

Above her, the ceiling dissolved into a glittering quilt of stardust. Each thread, a nerve ending. Each point of light blinking a signal. She blinked back – dizzy, unmoored, her body humming like a tuning fork.

Maia felt tethered to something unseen, entangled in a transparent web.

A faint hum whispered into Maia’s ears. Words of a dialect unknown. Reverberating into an all powerful Ohm.

“You are woven into the universal field,” the voice said. Or was it her own voice.

Then the planetarium dreamscape went into hyperdrive as it portalled through a wormhole. The audience zip-lined across the galaxy until they came upon a super massive black hole, an all destroying singular mass of superlative energy.

Sagittarius A* was expanding above them — no longer just a projection but a living thing, pulsing, breathing. It devoured light, sound, even thought. Maia could feel its pull inside her own bones, as if her ribcage might fold inward.

The hum was getting louder and lower, spitting out of the vortex like Hawking's Radiation. Utterly absorbing, guttural, alchemical. The audience were visually nauseous, their bowels massaged at 7Khz.

Maia clinched the seat handles, feeling herself weightless. The unseen was pulling her like a string through spacetime.

To her right, the boy floated midair, his sneakers bobbing weightlessly. No one else noticed. They were too busy gripping their seats, coughing under the thickening smoke.

The hum deepened into a sacred Ohm. Words like tadpoles swam in her ears. Reflections. Refractions. Instructions or memories? Maia could not tell. Her vision warped into kaleidoscopic patterns, from triangles and squares to tetrahedrons, sacred geometry she'd seen once, long ago, staring at the spinning gyroscopes aboard the ISS.

A newborn, carved out of the background radiation.

Sparks descended. Screams erupted.

But Maia stayed still, hands loose, gaze upward, as if she had always been waiting for this moment. The fire above tore through the air, but to her it looked like something else entirely: the opening of a tunnel, a bridge stitched through dimensions.

Maggie's voice echoed faintly. Then April’s.

Someone shook her shoulder.

Maia opened her eyes, smiling faintly – not because she wasn’t afraid, but because for the first time, she understood.

The Holiday Inn was an island of artificial calm — chlorinated pool, beige carpets, the faint hum of an ice vending machine. April checked them in on autopilot, her body moving but mind elsewhere.

Maia barely spoke. She was sleepwalking, tired but aware. They skipped dinner and drinks with Maggie and the ISS alumni. April wasn’t ready for small talk or straight up gossip, not with Maia’s episode. She would no doubt be the topic of conversation and April needed to guard what she did not understand.

Inside the room, April hung her dress uniform. Maia disappeared into the bathroom, she needed the rush of running water to cleanse her mind-body.

April took the chance to down a tequila from the minibar. She tried Alexei’s number again.
Straight to voicemail. She sent another text: "Are you in DC yet? Where are you?"

She had received a missed call during the planetarium inferno from an unknown number – his telltale sign. They should have checked in by now.

On the muted TV, a chyron scrolled:

BREAKING: U.S. AND RUSSIA EXCHANGE THREATS AFTER BERING STRAIT INCIDENT.

She unmuted to catch a slightly unhinged reporter: "Are these the first shots fired in a Hot War with Russia? Is this the beginning of World War 3?"

She muted again. The teletext was brief enough to let her own anxieties do the musing. She didn’t need another fear-pushing journalist to whip her up into another storm. She had earthed for the day and had no more current left to give.

April considered another tequila but it wasn’t a good look for her superego. Not when your tween child was showering after almost being engulfed by an electricity fire.

April knocked, “Are you ok?”

Maia was sitting cross legged, eyes closed under the streaming hot water, mumbling.

When Maia finally emerged in ISS pajamas, she crawled into her twin bed without a word.

“Whatever happens. You’re safe,” April whispered into the dim room.

“I know,” she replied.

Maia lay motionless, breathing deep, meditative.

“I ordered us club sandwiches.”

She was already asleep.
April watched her daughter’s silhouette twitch faintly in the dark, rhythmic spasms like she was playing an invisible instrument.

Both mother and daughter unconsciously fell into 5x5 breathing: the old SEAL method for crisis.
Inhale for five.
Exhale for five.

Maia murmured in her sleep, words too faint to catch.

Outside the window, Betelgeuse blinked like a dying ember.

April stared at the ceiling, feeling the cracks forming – not just in Maia, not just in her family – but in the whole fabric of reality.

Alexei, Maia, the world itself, were spinning on an axis that was shifting.
Caught in the gravitational pull of something unseen, something vast and interstellar.

After the fire, Maia’s world grows quieter — and stranger. Tension simmers between her and April as secrets spill, moods shift, and lights begin to flicker. When a mysterious blackout strikes their home, Maia senses something unnatural surging beneath the surface.

A Cinematic Sci-Fi Novel by Daniel Y-Li Grove

"A child born in orbit. A world divided. A destiny written in the stars."

From the Stars is a serialized sci-fi novel told in immersive, cinematic prose and atmospheric soundscapes. Follow the first human born in space, as her existence becomes the spark for a global—and interstellar—struggle between science, myth, and power.Is she a weapon? A prophet? Or something else entirely?

From the Stars explores themes of:

🌍 Family & Adolescence 🧬 Science vs Mysticism🛰️ Geo-Politics & Espionage🔮 Human Consciousness & Cosmic Destiny

Music by ⁠⁠JenLi⁠⁠

Mixed and voiced by Daniel Y-Li Grove

Follow us on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠ or subscribe to our ⁠⁠Substack

I’m starting a new tradition of dropping an AI generated poster with each chapter. After a bit of back and forth with “Sophocles”, it generated one that I quite liked – courtesy of Kandinsky.

On that note. For those interested. The concept art maybe AI generated. These words are not. They are organic. Bespoke. Farm to tabled from one mind to another.

There’s lots to say about AI, even revel in, but I wouldn’t prompt one to generate reams and reams of text to pass off as my own. The opportunity cost of using AI in this way is essentially the author’s voice. And is that not the point of this whole exercise?

And finally, a quote:

Chapter 3: Electrostatic Discharge

Maia hastily walked away from April towards the car park once out of the principal’s office. Her plan to avoid Greta had failed miserably. She had managed to stoke yet more resentment between them, and could not imagine the revenge that was brewing. An eye for an eye. Hair for a tooth. She'd never truly known hatred until she moved to Marietta. Was this the foundation that led to warring nations?

April meandered wearily passing the school trophy cabinet where a framed portrait of Mission Specialist April Lowry had started to fade. In her own reflection she caught a glimpse of her fading mother, who had succumbed to ill health in a convalescent home during April’s pregnancy.

Life on the ISS had been simple. No room for mistakes. No time for mincing words. Earth, on the other hand, was all performance — a dance of projection and posturing just to get by from one conflict to another.

April had run from ordinary human chaos towards NASA and then the ISS — they gave her a sacred order, a structure to keep her sane. But then she became a mother, and in a bid to protect Maia from the totalising space industry, she had driven Maia into the same madness she once fled. And in return April was starting to doubt Maia’s intentions and sincerity. She realised this was what parenting a teenager was like.

April and Maia sat in silence for the majority of the drive home. Maia, as always, was buried in a book.

“Did you set that fire?”

Maia was frustrated by the assumed guilt but also knew she had much to answer for – some of which she didn’t yet understand herself.

“Why would I burn down the library? It’s my only safe place.”

“I dunno Maia. Anger?”

Maia ignored her, pretending to read.

“Why did you lie about not being there when you clearly were?” Principal Mildred had pulled the CCTV footage which showed Maia entering and exiting around the time of the fire.

“I forgot. I’m in that building three times a day. And besides, it’s not like I was the only one there.”

“You’re the only one who lied about it.”

“I thought you’re a scientist. Don’t you work with facts?”

“Here’s a fact. You haven’t cleaned your room. You leave wet towels on the floor. Won’t make your bed. Nor finish your food.”

“If it was worth eating I would.”

“You wanna make your own meals?”

“Whatever,” Maia mumbled into her book.

April pulled the truck over to their rural suburban two-storey house. Maia closed the book and April noticed the cover: The Migration Habits of the Peregrine Falcon, a holdover from her biology major at UT, Austin.

“Since when d’you read my books?”

“Since the library shut.”

“So what have you learned?”

Maia looked at her dumbfounded.

“About the Peregrine Falcon?” April scanned Maia’s right-frontal lobe, often associated with truth deception.

“They eat their young,” Maia declared.

April grabbed the book causing a booklet to fall out. It was a brochure for the ‘Cambridge School for Gifted Children’.

“Where did you get this?”

Maia sighed.

“Did dad send it?”

Maia remained silent – the topic was sensitive.

“You wanna get away from me so bad, huh?”

Maia shrugged, despondent.

“You wouldn’t last one day at a boarding school.”

Maia removed her smartphone. But April grabbed it. “Hey!”

“Phones are off-limits. You’d be grounded if we didn’t have to go to DC tomorrow.”

“But I didn’t do anything.”

“Each action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

“Well I guess that’s why you have such a shitty daughter that everyone hates.”

“Maia.”

“I hate you,” Maia slammed the truck door and bolted to the house. Laika, their bronze cocker spaniel, was barking excitedly from inside.

April was exasperated. She wanted to call Alexei and scold him but knew he would probably be in the air somewhere over Greenland. Not only was her daughter keeping secrets from her but was doing so fully encouraged by her father. What else had Maia been obliged not to tell her?

Maia ran upstairs to her bedroom, unknowingly shutting the door on Laika. She opened it again at the sound of her whimpering scratches and picked her up tenderly.

“Pack your bags before dinner. We are leaving at O-six-hundred,” April called out.

Maia ignored her, hugging Laika from the comfort of her bed, surrounded by posters of the Apollo and Challenger missions. Like any typical pre-teen the room was a mess.

“Don’t forget to take Laika to Brian and Marianne’s! And clean your room.”

Maia middle-fingered the air. She had no desire to be present in this house, in this town, in this state. Since their defection from NASA, her father Alexei was the smartest person she knew, and the only one who refused to treat her like a child. Without the ever-present surveillance state, the idea of living with him bloomed like a forbidden flower. But even Maia knew someone was always watching.

April was questioning whether ‘normality’ had ever been a real option. What seemed safe to her, felt like punishment to Maia. Had her first years set untenable expectations? What child comes back from setting buildings and classmates on fire? April had resorted to some stupid shit as a teenager. But arson?

April wished she could comfort Maia; to tell her that none of this mattered in the long run but she knew she would be lying. All her scientific logic and astronaut training couldn’t compute the irrational emotions of a 12 year old. She routinely reverted back to her childhood on a military base. Everything, even playtime, ran like clockwork. It all worked out as long as she played the part of a well oiled gear.

But Maia was no cog. She was a clockwork orange, bursting with juice, transmuting primal charge into pure manifestation. Light into darkness. Or darkness into fire.

She knew she hadn’t started the fire in the library, just like she hadn’t burnt Greta’s hair. But she wondered if she had willed these events into being, pulling some electrostatic charge out of the air or collapsing the wave function into a fiery inferno. It was completely unscientific, or was it? If the universe was mental, which some quantum physicists opined then Maia was quite possibly projecting her hatred upon reality.

Maia slept off her emotions for the remainder of the afternoon as Laika nestled between her arms. She wiped off the occasional lick and fell back into serenity. Laika’s love was unconditional. As for Maia, everything had been conditioned.

As the sun dipped over the horizon a gentle breeze billowed through the open window. Maia woke up to a high pitched hum in her ear, which she attributed to the electricity wires collecting moisture and cooling down.

A storm was coming.

April fried potatoes and schnitzel in a skillet. She had long ago perfected the art of one-pan-cooking. Efficiency had been her modus operandi since college and as a single working mother she had no time to Martha Stewart each meal. At first she had attempted to replicate the strict nutritious diet she had been accustomed to during the astronaut training program. But suburban Georgia wasn’t a hotbed for the health-conscious. And oddly her homecoming brought about a nostalgia for the greasy Southern fried food of her youth.

She wondered if Maia’s diet had anything to do with her acting-out.

Maia grimaced, spitting out a morsel of chewed-up chicken.

“Excuse me.”

“It tastes weird. What did you put in it?”

April forked a piece off Maia’s plate into her mouth. “It tastes fine you, liar… Have you been smoking?”

Maia looked at April with brooding intent. Laika started barking under the table. The staring contest lasted a few seconds until Maia rolled her eyes. Then the lights flickered rapidly and increasingly towards a piercing hum. Until finally the filaments shattered all at once throughout the house.

“Great.” April fumbled in the dark and after a few moments lit a match. She encased a candle in glass and brought it to the dining table where Maia sat worried, shocked.

Laika was weeping under the table.

“Mom…”

“What? You know what to do. Go get the flashlights,” April commanded.

“You don’t think that was weird?”

“No weirder than an f’ed up power grid.” The blazing summers triggered constant rolling blackouts. Years of privatisation and cronyism had evolved a sclerotic energy infrastructure. But Maia was not convinced of this explanation.

“I felt a weird sensation.”

“It’s the electrostatic charge. There’s a storm rolling in.”

“Yeah. Obviously,” Maia said, half convincing herself. She wanted April to indulge her line of thinking, that her shifting moods were somehow distorting the physical world. But that sounded like the kind of quasi-religious crap they babbled down the road at the Baptist church.

After Maia’s eyes adjusted to the candlelight, she gathered two black maglites in the closet by the stairs. April had prepared them for all emergency scenarios.

April checked the fuse box. “Fuse didn’t hit. Maybe it's a good time to take Laika to Marianne’s anyway. We can see if their bulbs popped too.”

“I can do it.”

“You sure?”

“You check the house lights.”

Maia wanted to be alone. She immediately collected Laika with her food, treats and poo bags. Outside the house she climbed an oak tree. Hidden two meters up under a fringe of Spanish moss was a zip-lock bag with a Nokia 8180 inside. She and Alexei, sick of the constant surveillance, had developed strategies to get around it from burner phones to video game chat rooms.

She and Laika made their way down the unlit rolling road. The streetlights were down and the pale moon hid behind a cloud. It would take eight minutes to get to Marianne’s which sat behind the prairie past the creek. Maia had made the trip innumerable times, walking Laika to and fro. She enjoyed Marianne as a doting elderly maternal figure minus the parental judgement. She liked her husband Brian too who taught her how to hunt rabbits with a Ruger 10/22 long rifle, a secret they kept between them.

The road ascended and descended. Finally a light pierced through the marsh past the bridge. It was Brian and Marianne’s house, fully illuminated.

But just before they got to the bridge Laika tugged at her leash.

“Laika, come on. Let’s go!”

Laika barked into the blackness of the marsh. She was trembling, her nervous system jolted from her typical complacency.

Maia shone the maglite at the marsh, its swamp green tentacles swaying in the breeze. The crickets sung their high pitch serenade. Laika was adding to the nighttime orchestra with a determined growl. Maia ignored her warnings, scooped her up and walked her to the bridge. She put her down and Laika’s little feet plodded on.

April stood outside’s Maia room with the maglite. She clenched back her hesitation and entered. The open window and door created a draught sending papers into a flurry. April shut the window and set the maglite down to collate the mess. Her obsessive compulsive tendencies had flourished in the last few years. No mess was too small to convulse over.

The pages were filled mostly with mathematical equations. It was impossible for April to decipher them as the only words were in Russian. Though physically absent, Alexei was extraordinarily present in the development of Maia’s intellect. They routinely played proxy chess over the internet; so much so that the NSA took their daily correspondence as coded Russian military intelligence. It took three agencies and a visit by the Men in Black to corroborate that the coordinates in fact denoted moves on a chess board. These occurrences stupefied Maia, Alexei and April; but little to their knowledge the agencies were building up an enemy profile of their family.

It didn’t help that Maia’s bookshelf was stuffed with Russian science, philosophy and literature gifted by Alexei and her grandmother Olga. As soon as Maia could speak she was reciting Pushkin. As soon as she could read she was deciphering Dostoyevsky. One of the Men in Black had asked her why she owned no American classics to which she replied that she had seen them all on Disney.

Although they only spent holidays together at an average of 45 days a year, Alexei was nonetheless coddling his young daughter’s mind, transmitting his own imprint over waves and wires; a kind of “spooky action from a distance”. April wondered how much of Maia’s thoughts were in Russian and if that made her less American. Was her bi-nationality responsible for her dissonance? Not completely American and not purely Russian, they were competing branches of her psyche.

Against protocol Alexei sent Maia some of his highly confidential Roscosmos research on space lasers. He wanted to share a part of his work whilst utilising Maia’s innate scientific mind to qualify his work. Like a protege she would correct his equations much as Einstein’s students did his.

Their mathematical bond fused them in a way more fundamental than any religion. They were Pythagoreans without knowing it — worshipers of spirals, triangles and equations, believers in the sacred geometry that divined stars and souls alike, and whose vibrations could heal the physical world.

Marianne and Brian were in the living room watching TV when they arrived. As Maia knocked on the window she recognised the President giving an address. He was a rotund stocky man with an innate Napoleon complex. He often led with his mouth and somewhere behind the brain followed.

“Do you wanna come in for a drink?” Brian asked as Maia handed over Laika’s objects.

“Brian!”

“Not that kind of drink, Marianne.”

“I better get back and help mom. We had an electrostatic incident.”

“Sounds fuzzy,” Brian joked.

Maia checked on Laika who was already inside tussling with Milo, their older but smaller Yorkshire terrier.

“You know what you’re gonna say to the president?” Marriane queried.

“I haven’t thought about it,” Maia responded. Everything she had heard about him from adults painted him as a cynical power broker.

“It’s not everyday you meet the president.”

“It’s not everyday you meet a crooked president,” Brian sniped.

“What are you saying? That they’re all boy scouts?” Marianne and Brian laughed. Rural life had bred an antipathy towards the political class whom they had long given up on.

Maia saw politics as a noxious minefield that was inherently contradictory. It was not based in logic like physics or chemistry but something more primordial: power. Her family had become political scapegoats since her conception so she had learned to distrust politicians.

As far as she could tell lying was the major skillset to the politician as stone cutting was to the mason. The politician’s main objective was to magnify the public’s discontent towards their own political ends. They did this by histrionically repeating false narratives until they echoed in the mindset of the masses. How could any policy be outwardly good if it was undercut by deception from the outstart?

Politics was about mythmaking. Science was about myth-busting. It adhered to the principle of falsification as a mechanism to lurch towards progress. It left a door open for anyone to disprove its theories and therefore called attention to its flaws. Politicians however never admitted wrongdoing. They lacked the humility to change their opinions based on new information. And humility was a precursor to effective leadership.

As Maia walked home through the pitch black she removed the Nokia 8180 from her pocket and dialed the only number saved. She wanted to warn Alexei that April had found the school brochures he sent her. The phone dialed but the signal was cut off. It beeped, unable to make a call.

“Strange,” she thought. Then she remembered he was on his way to meet them in Washington DC. He had specifically told her not to show April the brochures until he had a chance to speak with her. Now she would be the cause of yet another point of discontent between them.

Maia decided to stargaze for the remainder of the walk. Now that the street lights were out, she could make out sections of the Milky Way. She called the stars out by name as if to summon their powers in a stellar pageantry.

“Sirius… Betelgeuse… Aldebaran.” Maia stopped. Betelegeuse was pulsing red. She removed her glasses to clean them. When she placed them back on Betelgeuse was gone, Orion’s belt missing a buckle.

Suddenly the maglite flickered, crescendoing in a dim hum until the bulb shattered into oblivion. She shook it. The filaments rattled. Then the moon vanished behind a cloud – and the stars with it. She was halfway home and caught in pitch black. The rain would not be far behind.

Maia pocketed the phone and made her way in the dark when the crickets stopped their mating call, replaced by a dim hum. It grew heavier, louder and bassier. She looked up into the formless black cloud, unaware of what or who hung over her.

It was vibrating with immense power. She felt an electromagnetic pinch like some strange force approached from above. The hair on the back of her neck stood up. Even the iron in her blood realigned. Spinal fluid climbing.

Maia thought of running but she didn’t resist, and stood perfectly still. She had long thought of alien abductions, even dreamt them. Was this what everything had been leading to? Then the hum gave way to silence – an empty void that was somehow staring back. Something or someone all knowing. All-creating. All-destroying.

The rain started.

Maia hides from bullies—but when fear turns to fire, nothing stays hidden. Meanwhile, April finds a nest of fragile life on a crumbling cliffside. As eggs crack and truths surface, something darker begins to stir.

A Cinematic Sci-Fi Novel by Daniel Y-Li Grove

"A child born in orbit. A world divided. A destiny written in the stars."

From the Stars is a serialized sci-fi novel told in immersive, cinematic prose and atmospheric soundscapes. Follow Maia Sokolov-Lowry, the first human born in space, as her existence becomes the spark for a global—and interstellar—struggle between science, myth, and power.Is she a weapon? A prophet? Or something else entirely?

From the Stars explores themes of:

🌍 Family & Adolescence 🧬 Science vs Mysticism🛰️ Geo-Politics & Espionage🔮 Human Consciousness & Cosmic Destiny

Music by ⁠JenLi⁠

Produced and voiced by Daniel Y-Li Grove

Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ or ⁠Twitter⁠ or subscribe to our ⁠Substack

Maia, freckled and bespectacled, locked the graffitied cubicle door behind her. She hadn’t seen Greta since third period and hoped to ride-out the remainder of the day in peace. So she hid in the girl‘s locker room by the gymnasium – typically empty during lunchtime. Her usual haven, the library, had been closed for a week due to a freak fire in the humanities section. Cause: unknown.

It was hotter than Georgia asphalt, and Maia missed the cold-stored books of the air conditioned library. Greta and her gang of pubescent troglodyte cheerleaders rarely made it there. Their capacity for books was undercut by their burgeoning breasts and diminutive prefrontal lobes. Greta, in particular, was a sinister little shit who took pleasure in hounding Maia for the space oddity that she was.

Maia had become their target of choice since starting at Marietta Middle School two years prior, when April unceremoniously and publicly left NASA’s Houston headquarters and relocated them to Georgia. For April, the homecoming placated a guilt-tarnished romantic idyll about leaving her demented and declining mother for the ISS. For Maia, it transformed her from an object of immense interest to experts far and wide to just another parochial disillusioned American tweenager.

At school she had been labeled everything from a “space bitch” to “star sperm” to the more mundane “freak” and “faggot” (on account of having short hair one semester).

She considered skipping mathematics with Mr. Harlock – she was already far ahead in her coursework and he probably wouldn’t mind her absence given that her genius often overshadowed him. This was a recurring problem with most adolescents and many adults. Her desire to prove her intellectual supremacy led her to being chastised as a “smartass.”

“Better to be a smartass than a dimwit,” she often had to stop herself from retorting. Maia’s bitterness over leaving Houston projected itself in myriad ways. She disagreed with April that the move was for her own good. She had no problem with the excessive routine mandated by NASA, nevermind the constant encroachment into her private communications. She was the belle of the ball – or rather the ball had been in her honour. But she was also too young to comprehend the politics playing out behind the scenes, the machinations of a military-industrial complex that took her not as an individual but as an asset to deploy.

This, April dutifully tried to shield Maia from, hoping to preserve some semblance of childhood normalcy. Had she communicated these fears to Maia as an equal, perhaps she might have won her over. But she fell into the same poor communication patterns learned from her own mother – a depressive army widow who took to chardonnay and Percocets after her marriage dried up.

April had vowed not to become that woman – bitter and resentful, especially toward those closest to her. She demanded obedience and attention. But that very same attitude had driven April away, first to the University of Texas, Austin, then to Houston for NASA’s Astronaut training program.

April feared the cycle repeating, and perhaps that was an underlying factor when she ejected herself and Maia from NASA, scared that Maia, just like her, would blast off this rock and leave her mother to die alone.

Maia sat on the toilet lid voraciously scrolling her TikTok until she paused on a clip of Jeremy Corbell, the tattooed and bearded ufologist whose documentary on Bob Lazar had reignited public interest in encounters of the third kind. He was on a news panel, chastising the government:

“Let’s talk about the 500 billion missing from the national defense budget. They say they have no clue where that money was spent. Zero oversight. Meanwhile, we know for a fact there are bases across the United States reverse-engineering alien tech for the sole benefit of that same defense department. And yet we’re cutting social programs and slashing research grants. That’s not austerity—that’s a war on the American people.”

Maia had never officially met Jeremy, but they had shared platitudes online after she reached out about the unusual physics involved in a declassified UAP video. He asked if she and April would consider an interview. She said no – April distrusted the media, especially after their public break with NASA led to hit pieces questioning her credibility, blaming DEI and feminism for her “love cruise” in space.

The fact that the mission was a success wasn’t enough. The pundits wanted alien gadgets and tech powered by otherworldly energy sources. It didn’t help that NASA’s funding had been gutted, with most R&D outsourced to private firms more interested in profit margins than humanity’s future. After a series of setbacks—one which left two astronauts stranded in orbit for eight months—Elon Musk successfully lobbied to abandon the ISS.

Privatization had hollowed the scientific community. Foreign-born scientists were scrutinized and rooted out. A pall fell across academia. The dream kindled by Kennedy smoldered in the atmosphere.

The graffiti in the cubicle wall expressed as much with a crude drawing of the space station burning up, flanked by “SPACE BITCH” in thick black ink. A sore topic. The end of a chapter. Her place of birth was eradicated, making Maia an alien refugee.

The bathroom door banged. Voices. Laughter. Cigarettes. Greta!

“I know you’re in there!”

Maia muted her phone and stood on the toilet bowl, hoping to hide. But it was no use.

“Get out, bitch!”

She took a breath and opened the stall, attempting a swift exit—but Trina, a bottle-blonde Viet-American cheerleader, blocked the way.

“Doing homework in the toilet again? You’re such a loser, Maia.”

The bell rang. Maia stepped forward. “Can you move, please?”

“Only if you smoke a cigarette with us,” Greta taunted.

“Cigarettes are carcinogenic.”

“Your mom’s carcinogenic,” Greta shot back.

Maia gritted her teeth. She wanted to deck Greta but she knew from past experience it would only lead to a beating. “I have to get to class.”

Maia tried to pass, but Greta grabbed her backpack and yanked her down. Her glasses skidded across the tiles.

A cigarette was jammed into her mouth.

“No—”

“We’re not supposed to,” Greta mocked. Trina held Maia’s jaw shut as Greta struck the lighter.

A bluish-red spark. Then fire.

Maia twisted her face as the flint approached the cigarette tip. Bending backwards. Greta’s face ignited. Hairspray accelerated the flames. Maia watched in reverie as she darted chaotically against the lockers, incinerating like the ISS. Metal buckling. Glass shattering.

“Put it out! PUT IT OUT!”

Trina panicked, smacking Greta’s flaming hair with her sweater.

Maia sat stunned, the lighter in her hand, cigarette hanging from her lip.

The door burst open.

Principal Mildred stepped in.

April looked down the misty valley from Kennesaw Mountain as the rolling green hills of Piedmont sank back in the afternoon sun. The Atlanta skyline shimmered on the dusty horizon like a mirage. The surrounding woodlands were paved with red, orange and gold foliage.

A flock of eagles circled above, surveying for prey. April was abseiling off the side of a gargantuan boulder hanging in mid-air, weightless and serene. She felt at peace, precariously dangling, held by a harness and her 60-year-old colleague above. The pair had come to the mountain to retrieve and salvage what they could of an electro-static sensor that had gone missing from a weather balloon.

A tracker strapped to her vest beeped pulsing as she got closer to the sensor. Suddenly the rope slipped a few inches.

“Stop taking in the scenery!” Echoing Stone shouted.

April lowered herself to the base of the boulder which jutted out like a giant tortoise head. As she descended the tracker beeping increased frequency.

“Hold on.”

April pushed back from the boulder, loosened her rope and swung underneath. She grabbed onto a mountain laurel shrub.

“No tomb raiding Ms. Croft!,” Echoing Stone shouted after getting dragged to the edge.

As April pulled herself into a crevice, the beeps merged into a hum. In the shadow of the boulder, three speckled reddish-brown eggs laid nesting. Their colours blended into the surroundings, kissed by fire and earth. Among them was a flashing black sensor, chewed and gnawed by a beak.

“I found a nest of eggs. Peregrine, I think. Looks like mama bird thought she was bringing home lunch.”

“Must be a food shortage if she’s scraping up weather sensors.” Echoing stone looked up at the circling eagles, sensing the nest April had found.

The warmer springs had caused the peregrine falcons to lay their eggs earlier to avoid the heat. But the availability of prey had dramatically declined due to mass migrations northward, leading to nestling starvation. No creature – mouse, falcon, human or otherwise – remained unaffected by the Earth’s broken supply chains. With little prey to fend over, apex predators had to jostle it out. Eagle vs falcon. Man vs man.

April pocketed the sensor and prepared to jump back. “Ready for liftoff?”

“Yup.”

Suddenly one of the eggs moved incrementally. Then turned whimsically until the shell broke and a tiny beak protruded out.

“You comin’ up?”

April watched the hatchling burrow out of its embryonic shell. Soon the whole nest of chicks would be squeaking, hungry and hot. If the mother falcon did not soon return, the eagles would no doubt claim her young by tea-time.

It made April think about the delicate yet unforgiving balance between nurture and nature. April had sought to protect Maia from the pernicious overreach of institutions. Yet at the same time those institutions made up the fabric of her being.

Echoing Stone pulled April up by her harness.

“The nest is hatching. They won’t stand a chance if mom’s still out looking for grub.”

Echoing Stone undid her binds. “Even the strongest wings can’t shield every egg. Sometimes the wind decides who makes it.”

“That an old Muscogee saying?” April presumed.

“No. David Attenborough.”

She handed him the chewed up sensor. “Well… next time don’t make these look so tasty.”

“I’ll get on it after you ask the President not to slash our budget again.”

Given the White House’s aversion to science, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been reduced to a husk. Of the 12,000 employees nationwide, half had been told to walk—including most of the climate scientists.

“Not my department,” April replied. She had already suffered royally for fighting against budget cuts at NASA, and was not ready to reprise the role as administrative punching bag.

“You’ll be in a room with him.”

“With 40 other people,” she defended.

“He might like you,” Echoing Stone chuffed.

“Tell me the last time someone with authority liked me.” April’s phone rang and she answered, “Go for April… She did what?”

April’s Ford F-150 swung into Marietta Middle School and parked in the near-empty lot. April shot out of the truck like a banshee to find Anna escorting her crying daughter Greta under a baseball cap. She could smell the burnt hair as they approached.

Anna, make-up running like a glazed donut in the afternoon sun, walked straight up to April with a wild expression under her thick black eye-liner. “Your child needs to be controlled. You can expect a letter from our attorney.”

Anna and Greta shuffled away leaving April to sigh, embarrassed and reluctant to respond. April had once gone to the same middle school with Anna and at one point had even courted her friendship. But since returning she couldn’t think of anyone she wanted more to go to hell.

“Maia doesn’t smoke,” April said to Principal Mildred, a cigarette and lighter sitting precariously on her desk. Exhibit A.

“I told ja, those bitches put it in my mouth,” Maia retorted, emotionally erupting. She was the victim and had no interest in niceties.

“Maia. That is not language becoming of a lady!” the principal scolded her.

“You’re gonna take Greta’s words over hers?” April chided. “Her mom looks like she got hit by a nail salon at the strip mall.”

“April?” Principal Mildred had known April for over two decades. She was the former home-economics teacher who plotted her way into becoming headmistress.

“Sorry, I shouldn't talk like that.”

“I’m just telling you what I saw with my own eyes.” Principal Mildred’s thickset glasses glinted in the sun as she removed them.

“What’s your prescription?”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m just saying,” April replied. “If we’re going by your eyewitness account, how far away were you? How dark was it?”

Principal Mildred looked at her caustically. She didn’t like having her authority challenged. “Then who lit Greta’s hair on fire?”

“It just happened!” Maia pleaded.

“Two girls say you did it on purpose.”

“I never touched that lighter.”

“Except when I found it in your hand.”

Maia knew it looked bad. She had even wished and willed ill health upon Greta many times. But she was adamant it was physically impossible.

April observed Maia who seemed deflated. She never knew her to lie and couldn’t imagine her starting now. But Greta and her rotating girl posse had berated Maia before. Was she finally getting her payback?

April tried to push it along: “Are we done now?”

“Not quite. Maia, I want you to be real honest with me. Did you have something to do with the library fire?”

“What library fire?” April was caught off guard.

“What? No!” Maia shouted adamantly.

“Are you sticking with that?” Mildred eyed her impatiently.

April saw what all the fuss was about. There was something deeper at play. How could she be so ignorant? Maia’s intelligence was masking a much darker reality.

“The cosmos is within us.

We are made of star-stuff.

We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

– Carl Sagan

Chapter 1

88 beats per minute: the cardiac monitor pulsed like an arrhythmic metronome, electrically fed by a sinewy vortex of blood and muscle. Sophie’s grip floated uselessly. Blood droplets shimmered around her like tiny red orbs. The pain anchored her mind to her body. She closed her eyes and returned to her breathing.

April was breathing like a Zen Buddhist Olympion. With pure focus, she could live a lifetime within each oscillation.

“In through the nose by five.”

“Out through the nose by five.”

5x5 was the breathwork hack scientifically developed for the Navy SEALs to effectively calm the central nervous system of a soldier under fire. April now found herself under fire by endorphins, her synapses awash.

“Is that what it is?” she thought laughingly.

“The endorphins?”

April had learned the technique during her 24 months at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. She had been doing nothing but 5x5 since the contractions started five hours prior. What they omitted in training was that prolonged use could induce cosmic hallucinations. This fun fact she now had to ontologically wrestle with whilst strapped to a medical table as a crewmember of the International Space Station, cocooned in a medically sealed blue plastic womb, birthing life on the precipice of outer space.

The radio shuffled through 14 hours of April’s pre-selected nativity music, mostly classical. She needed the full force of a 100 piece orchestra to overpower her “Nascar brain,” named for her competing circular thought patterns racing towards victory, failure or oblivion. “Get out of your head,” was often prescribed. She just didn’t anticipate the full dose to hit when a human baby was getting out of her.

Music and breathing, she convinced herself, would get her through it. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in C minor sparked white tips on the blue ocean of her mind. From the shadows a flood of waves enveloped the artificial air and reverberated through the metal compartments, bending to the solar mass and collapsing into the universal wave function.

April could feel the steel contracting and expanding; the 8cm polycarbonate fused silica glass vibrating; the oxygen molecules oscillating. Even Mission Specialist Maggie Foster, the inhouse obstetrician, resembled a kaleidoscopic lighthouse of waves. She was floating in front of April’s thighs shouting for her to push.

But for all the commotion, April could only hear Bach’s angelic choral mass. She could feel the universe cycling through her every breath, death and rebirth; like the goddess Shiva dancing between the thresholds of self-creating and self-destroying.

Microgravity made the whole nativity business messier. For April it had made the pregnancy less backbreaking. How the fetus would grow was a major concern to all. Astronauts often returned to Earth with atrophied muscles and weakened bone density. So April had been regularly injecting a cocktail of peptides and nanobots to maximise cell regeneration.

Gravity, it turned out, was not necessary to fetal development. In fact it placed undue stress upon complex cellular structures and thus gave every mammal who climbed a tree chronic back pain. The Fibonacci spiral was the natural order for all gesticulating organisms from the acorn to the fetus to the galaxy. Undeterred this purely mathematical process could reach apotheosis in April’s womb. And so to the surprise of the astronauts aboard and the scientists below, the nine months went by as planned.

What had begun as a routine space mission to last 127 days quickly evolved into a celestial obstetrician's course at 400 kilometers above sea level, when an American Mission Specialist April Lowry met a Russian Cosmonaut Alexei Sokolov in the Poisk (“Search”) module of the ISS. Astronauts are trained to anticipate every potential outcome, yet all algorithms and data sets couldn’t predict this Georgia girl falling for a Kaliningrad boy. As two single athletic 30-something over-achieving nerdy army brats who equally loved Guns n’ Roses and Beethoven, their consummation within the cramped dwellings was, as they say, written in the stars. The invisible hand of the celestial free market.

Alexei first serenaded April with a steel six string guitar in the panoramic observation deck of the Tranquility node. He played her the alt-rock classics of the 90s from the Smashing Pumpkins to Green Day, peppered with the odd Russian pop song. They stargazed for hours in the 360 degree viewing deck, comparing how many astral bodies they could name by memory. Alexei mustered the courage to first kiss April as she stared out at the Milky Way. Cirrius A was blinking with a morse code message; she felt a twang of electrical impulse as he pulled back her unruly brown hair. They floated in the unbound space, embracing like a Roman marble, enveloped by the Cosmic Background Radiation. He kissed her freckles naming each one after a different Class A planet fit for life. Up til then her main focus had been her research into fertilized ostrich embryos. Now she felt full heartedly her mission was the promise of an extraterrestrial union. Call it hormones or otherwise.

Serendipitously, April and Alexei had separately severed ties with their respective long term on-and-off again prior to leaving Earth. They both needed stratospheric closure, which the ISS offered in trumps. And so they had resigned themselves to a year as offworlders, solar monks devoid of Earthly bodily pleasures, tinkering away at their esoteric sciences.

The astronaut training manuals decidedly omitted the possibility of pregnancy onboard (likely to discourage attempts). Notwithstanding that a titanium can circling the earth at 7660 meters per second, vacuum-packed with people and equipment, was highly impractical for a romantic sojourn. The physics involved in a space-bonk are wanting for friction. But beggars can’t be choosers, and lovers know no bounds. That was precisely how they felt at the time of conception, pulled and pushed by the stars, moons and planets; waning and waxing in each other’s sweaty embrace.

April was an astrobiologist and Alexei an astrophysicist. Beyond science and an overinflated sense of purpose, they had their supplementary reasons to blast off the third rock. As a Russian, Alexei was escaping the state. As an American, April was escaping other people. On the ISS they found solace from the tyranny of human endeavours. Their orbiting craft was a hermetically sealed capsule protecting them from the freezing dark of space above and the fiery tempers below.

Thankfully the ISS offered an embryonic bubble. The mission was – as it always is – science. The astronauts prided themselves on their a-politicalness. They were mere Earthlings on the outer limit of their world, staring at the majesty of the universe, who unlike humanity, only needed to live up to the laws of nature.

The mainstream media sold it as “a miracle in space”, “a romance above the stratosphere”. Two superpowers, mortal enemies, brought together by satellite lovers, teenage romantics, bound by biology and astronomy. But for every gushing journalist, there was a vacuous luddite from the influencer fringe who could not see past their myopia.

Conspiracy theories played out in the backrooms of the public consciousness like an atrocity exhibition. Distrust between the population and the agencies grew. Every photo was scorned as a fake. Every scientist was a crisis actor extolling the miracle of a crisis baby. Whatever initial goodwill had been fostered between the two nations quickly devolved into a vindictive custody battle. NASA vs Roscosmos; the European and Japanese Space Agencies stuck in the middle.

Before the surreptitious nativity was even announced to the public, Moscow and Washington were already jostling over the potential spoils of interplanetary parenting. If America was the mum and Russia the dad, who had naming rights, preschool picks-ups and drop-offs, Steiner, State or home schooling, hockey or baseball, gymnastics or ballet? Would the child forgo birthright citizenship being born in the Japanese module of the ISS? Or become a dual citizen? Or a citizen of the world? Vacations with grandma in Lake Baikal? Russian lessons at the embassy? Diet? Minerals? Hormones? Vaccinatinations? Every phone call, text message and TikTok, forever analyzed by multiple state agencies working for and against multiple states.

In fact everyone proclaimed ownership over the “space baby”. Not to say least, America. NASA, riddled by budget cuts, and circumcised by Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketry, had received a god-given financial windfall and an opportunity to prove their relevance in a rapidly privatising space industry. But a human birth in space had the potential to unite the planet towards a common astral goal, leapfrog science and industry forward by decades, and bring about a colony on Mars in half the time. But to fail the first attempt could also mean decades before another. And whichever political chorus one consumed, the conclusion was that time on Earth was running out.

It dawned on April that Maya, whilst being a leap forward for science and humanity, was by nature of her birth, another chess piece in a grandiose political pageantry. Maia was in vitro between the superpowers. But not only. The major faiths all had a say, their creation myths tested for malleability. Universally almost everyone gave their blessing from the Pope to the Dalai Lama to the Grand Ayatollah. Prehistory was written in the stars. The future could only be the same. That they could not deny.

All these thoughts swirled in April’s consciousness like a fever dream. Her body may've been weightless but the gravity of her endeavours grew with every exhalation, every heartbeat, every electrical impulse recorded and transmitted back to Earth. She was the first, the primordial mother for a whole generation of spaceborn children. As the baby crowned, April’s spinal fluid had reached its zenith, oozing past her cervical on the way to the eighth chakra. The pressure in her skull sent psychedelic ripples colliding with the choral mass. She was next in line for the pantheon of creation myths, eons of life and death, pain and pleasure coursing through her body. She was Cassandra, Antigone, Juliet, Joan, Mary and Eve all at once. A whole panoply of martyred matriarchs sacrificed to the scion of progress. She wondered if she would follow them into the fire.

Maggie’s calls to push grew more urgent. Alexei appeared as a masked man grasping her hand, eyes-pinned to hers. She could hear the other astronauts outside the blue medical tent giving live commentary to the space agencies, institutional Godparents. She was firmly back in the localized reality of her body, pushing out a child who was destined for strangeness, terrestrially bound but longing for the stars.

Maia floated above April, her umbilical unwrapping like a phone cord. Somber and unflinching, eyes in dreamy repose. Alexei and Maggie anxiously watched her move through the silvery light, naked and frozen like a Renaissance statue, blood and placenta trailing.

She moved straight into April’s arms. Her eyes opened softly, briefly, grey-blue, wide and unblinking then nestled back into her slumber, deferring this life until the next.

Alexei’s voice broke the radio silence, "Zvezdochka..." Little star.

And for a few seconds, the humming of the ISS, the beeping of the heart monitor, the unwavering choral mass of Bach’s symphony — harmonized into a singular frequency anchored by the stars. A Space Baby. A child not born of Earth.

Maia was born Maia Sokolov-Lowry inside the Japanese Experiment Module, “Kibo” (Hope), aboard the ISS at 03:16 Greenwich Mean Time. Maia was named after the eldest of the Pleiades Sisters, a cluster of blue stars 444 lightyears away, and who had prominently played in the stargazing mythologies of man from the Australian aborigines to the Ancient Greeks. As the myth goes, the sisters were often pursued, most notably and predatorily by the hunter Orion. Therefore to protect his progeny, Zeus – the father of the Gods – transformed the sisters into star nymphs and placed them in a dark corner of the sky, out of arm’s reach but within eye’s sight. A guiding light in spirit and form.

Maia birthed into existence in low Earth orbit, 400 kilometers above the Pacific, as the station passed silently over the equator. She had a healthy mass of 3.14 kilograms. Her blood type was AB negative, a genetic rarity shared by less than 1% that made her a universal donor. Maggie noted Maia’s heart rate was steady at 134 beats per minute. Her skin was pink, limbs reflexive and lungs sustained by the ionized oxygen of the life support system.

She did not cry as she floated, gently turning in the sterile blue cocoon, umbilical cord uncurling like a tethered astronaut. Solemn, quiet, Buddha-like. True to her name she was a celestial object of the highest order. But she had not followed the typical soul’s journey; that is, moving upwards in frequency and density through multiple incarnations from mineral to vegetable to animal to spectre to star. In a manner of speaking, Maia had returned from her stardom. Guided by the nexus of universal flow.

The decision was uncompromisingly made by NASA to return April (and Maia) to Earth only one month after birth. At the contest of experts, they were willing to risk the newborn burning up on reentry on the theory that any more exposure to microgravity and solar radiation would be detrimental. Originally April was set to return three months later on a Soyuz Rocket to Almaty, Kazakhstan. In reality NASA wanted to immediately rest control of its latest extraterrestrial asset. Allowing the first human born in space to fall into the hands of Roscomos was not an outcome the dark end of the US government could accept.

The SpaceX Dragon 2 had been fitted with a climate-controlled shock-absorbent incubator. April and Maggie were locked into place on either side to monitor Maia’s heat resistant egg-shaped cocoon. However there was really nothing they could do until they either landed or burned to ashes.

Alexei watched on with the other astronauts from the viewing platform, monitoring each stage from detaching to burning to drifting into the upper atmosphere at an angle of 7 degrees.

April braced as the capsule slammed into the thermosphere. The heat shield glowed white-hot, then orange, then blood red. Maia screamed, the pressure crushing her gelatinous ribs. Then, the world went silent. The comms cut.

At an outside temperature of 1900 celsius and a downward trajectory of 6,944 metres per second, plasma forms around the capsule preventing radio waves. The Dragon 2 vibrated ferociously as Maia cried uncontrollably, sweat streaming like jet propulsion. The stars blurred into streaks of static. No sound. No Earth. No certainty.

April panicked but remembered her breathing. She resigned herself to whatever fate held and was suddenly jolted back to the nativity, reality breaking down into uniform undulating waves. She suddenly had a sense of calmness and oneness. The depth of Maia’s namesake finally illuminated itself for April. Afterall “Maya” in Sanskrit was the goddess of illusion, projector of the hologram, placating the cosmic dancer between creation and destruction. It was then that April instinctively knew the universe in all its chaotic splendor was nestling Maia in its electric grasp.

Alexei tearfully followed the glowing blood orange man-made meteor as it streaked across the oceanic globe with a smoking tail. He watched the Dragon 2 descend with acute focus. He felt powerless at the prospect of his newborn daughter disintegrating into nothingness before his and the world’s eyes. He imagined the multitude of parallel universes within the realm of calculability. By nature of the quantum field, probability was on his side. There would be at the very least one timeline where the vessel and all its passengers would survive hell intact. He prayed that they existed in that timeframe. He willed it through every entangled atom in his body. Electrons spun falling in with the centripetal forces, bending to the vortex of blood and muscle called the heart. It was a prayer directed down from above as opposed to the billions daily directed up. Alexei was a conductor, moving entropic energy flows like a Qi master. As above, so below, the mystics said.

Much remained unsaid between him and April as state apparatus had obscured their relationship. His attempts to play father would forever be hijacked. He knew that regardless of the outcome their separation had been formalised but their lives would intertwine in ways pre-conceived but not yet revealed.

Chapter 1 - "A Child Not Born of Earth"

A Cinematic Sci-Fi Podcast Novel by Daniel Y-Li Grove

"A child born in orbit. A world divided. A destiny written in the stars."

From the Stars is a serialized sci-fi novel told in immersive, cinematic prose.
Follow Maia Sokolov-Lowry, the first human born in space, as her existence becomes the spark for a global—and interstellar—struggle between science, myth, and power.
Is she a weapon? A prophet? Or something else entirely?

Told through rich narration and atmospheric soundscapes, From the Stars explores themes of:

🌍 Family & Separation
🧬 Science vs Mysticism
🛰️ Space Politics & Espionage
🔮 Human Consciousness & Cosmic Destiny

Produced and voiced by Daniel Y-Li Grove

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@thelunagrove

(Full disclosure: this is not a review but an intertextual analysis of the films’ themes which seem prescient, and as the biggest blockbuster successes of the year, worthy of discussion. PS. I know I’m late to the game but it’s hardly like you’ve gone to the cinema to see anything else.)

(The Barbie Knight Rises)

Watching Oppenheimer and Barbie back-to-back feels like a cinematic transition from the 1940s to 50s. The grey and sepia tones of early cinema blossomed into a Post War America that was bright, vibrant, musical and Technicolor. When the Mad Men and women of Madison Avenue – veterans of war and psychoanalysis – began to invent ways to sell the American Dream it was in order to alleviate our fears of total annihilation from above. Post war consumerism became a salve against the horrors of a technological global war of yesterday and the Cold War of the day. It was in this era of cookie-cutter capitalism that Barbie was born. 

So contrary to the seemingly absurd coupling, Barbie and Oppenheimer go hand in hand. They reflect the current malaise (of not just cinema) but of a society in general sliding from late stage capitalism into an era of decline. In Oppenheimer and Barbie, the respective hero returns to the world after successfully completing their epic quest, but now faced with the true knowledge, find themselves unable to exist in the world from whence they came. 

In Oppenheimer, after opening Pandora’s nuclear box and giveing Uncle Sam the keys, Oppenheimer seeks an alliance with the Soviets to prevent more destructive hydrogen bombs that will logically end in our mutually assured destruction. And for that he is cast out. 

Meanwhile in Barbie World, after saving the fiefdom from becoming a plastic patriarchy, and having already learnt the truth about death and cellulite, Barbie decides to leave for good to the “real world” and become an independent woman. She wishes to grow up and be the arbiter of her own will and not a doll tethered to an adolescent utopia. 

The lesson of Oppenheimer is that the ego or individual is merely a pawn to forces greater than he-she-they can ever truly comprehend. Science, which should be a unifying theory of humanity, is co-opted by politics to destroy the very foundations of civilization. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of Worlds.” Cue stodgy Christopher Nolan sex scene. 

Barbie reimagines and repackages feminism out of corporate capitalism, which is why the feminism it espouses – with its cosmetically curved waist lines – is questionable at best. In the 90s Barbie became a byword for the plastification of the human body: silicone chips begot silicone breasts. In Barbie World, the Barbies have been protected from all manners of active and passive submission (including original sin). However in the “real world” Barbie will have to contend with all the “invisible hand(s) of the market” she has yet to contend with: genetics, economics, politics, religion, big pharma, big tech, big government, etc, etc. Oppenheimer too was protected from the real violence of the world (for a time) by his conceptual equations and academic idyls.

(Waiting for Barbieheimer)

Both Barbie and Oppenheimer recall the myth of Dr. Faustus who, in a bid to advance his knowledge of all things, sells his soul to Mephistopheles. To violently co-opt peace, Oppenheimer must align and uphold the forces of the US military industrial complex. To (re)create her feminist utopia, Barbie must align with the forces of corporate capitalism: Matel. They are both paradoxical unions. Like physics before it, feminism – a sociological tool as powerful as the splitting of the atom – has been virtually co-opted by the forces of capitalism.  Today science is a cipher for Big Tech to sell us more products. Feminism exists mostly as a cipher for the corporate world to sell us makeup and handbags.Yes, Barbie can now exist in the “real world” and be the arbiter of her choices. And yes, we can choose Apple over Samsung over Boeing over Lockhead Martin. Regardless, our choices are made up of consumer corporate bullshit to keep us in a vicious cycle of conspicuous consumption which adheres to one beneficiary only: the shareholder. 

What makes Barbie so postmodern is that its success owes to the Barbie brand deconstructing its own patriarchy (cringy self-reflexive pedofile jokes included). But postmodernism as a philosophy is as old as Barbie, which is why the outdated glove fits. Postmodern Barbie can make fun of its own inherent patriarchy yet still claim a feminist mantle. And there’s the rub. The message for children is clear and worthy. Grow up and choose not to be a wife or mother. Either way, you must consume, liberal or illiberal, barren or baked. You are a function of consumption.

We can both adore and ridicule Barbie because she represents our own fatalism: that is, striving to make a better world, but in the end being fantastically ignorant, and thus more corruptible to the powers that be. Barbieheimer has come at a perfect time to remind us that we actually don’t have power as individuals. In fact Barbie gives up the power held by the community for the vacant power of the individual. Today it is consumption by way of liberal individualism that is the opiate of the masses. 

(Barbiediner)

Post-film-narrative Oppenheimer would leave his beloved America and retire to a secluded beach in the US Virgin Islands where he would succumb to booze, existential demons and throat cancer. I imagine post-film-narrative Barbie living out her “real life” in real Los Angeles, uneducated, jobless, penniless, putting on weight, and at the whim of predatory producer-managers of the Weinstein variety. All whilst juggling the infinite demands of consumer capitalism. Credit to the filmmakers for making CAA (Century City) the centre of all things phallocentric and toxic. 

To recall another 90s cinematic property, Neo, having escaped the Matrix with the knowledge that humans exist in a simulation for the benefit of machines, returns to the Matrix, in order to foment revolution, and save the souls of those locked in eternal bondage. In Barbie the true knowledge is kept to Barbie herself. Her transcendence is reserved for her and her only. She reaches the shores of Valhalla whilst the Kens and Barbies remain in the fake plastic prophylactic paradise (cue Aqua remix by Radiohead) to await eternally for another beach-off. The perfect transcendence for the ego individual. A revolution of one. After all, the hero of Barbie is the OG Barbie. The others are mere facsimiles. 

The ending of Oppenheimer showcases his nemesis Strauss being voted down by a young stalwart senator from Massachusetts, John F Kennedy, who would go on to challenge the American military industrial complex himself by repressing the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He is shortly after rewarded with two-bullets to the head on a sunny day in Dallas.

In the opening of Oppenheimer, Nolan refers to the myth of Prometheus who "stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity." Oppenheimer couldn’t put fire back in the bottle and so the race to the end begins. 

In Barbie’s opening, Greta Gerwig makes a nod to Stanley Kubrick’s infamous opening scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which Neanderthals, in the shadow of the Monolith, discover technology, which sets them on a 400,000 year course towards their own self-annihilation via AI. Gerwig pastiches this scene by substituting the Monolith with the first Barbie doll. Perhaps a wink and a nod from the scriptwriters Gerwig and Baumbach (who previously never showed that much interest in mainstream cinema)? What took the Neaderthals 400,000 years will take conspicuous consumer-capitalism barely a century and change. 

(Centuryheimer)

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