The conference room smelled of bourbon and leather, that particular combination that meant serious money was about to change hands. Waylon Pritchard III adjusted his bolo tie—pure silver with a scorpion trapped in amber—and smiled at the three men across the mahogany table. His smile never reached his eyes. In Dallas, that was considered a business asset.

"Gentlemen," Waylon began, his drawl thick as crude oil, "I'm gonna tell you how to own this nation for the next hundred years. Not rent it, not lease it—own it, deed and title."

He clicked a remote. The screen behind him illuminated with test scores, graduation rates, literacy statistics—all trending downward since 1983. Then another slide: teacher suicide rates up 340% since 2001. Student anxiety disorders up 500%. Military recruitment from bottom-quartile schools up 780%.

"Y'all ever wonder why a British knight named Ken Robinson got himself so worked up about American schools? Man spent his whole career screaming into the void about creativity dying in classrooms. Poor beautiful thought it was an accident." Waylon chuckled, a sound like gravel in a disposal. "Accident. Lord have mercy."

He pulled up a photograph. "This was Dr. ******** District, 2018. Had a program that took dropout rates from 40% to 3% in two years. Know where she is now? Psychiatric ward. We had one of my girls, Isabella, work her for fourteen months. Started as a teaching assistant, built trust, got invited to family barbecues. Then came the photos at the hotel, the planted cocaine in her car, the edited videos suggesting inappropriate relationships with students. All fabricated, but try explaining deepfakes to a school board in Texas."

The younger man shifted uncomfortably.

"Or this one," Waylon continued, clicking through slides. "Jonathan *****, tried to implement Finnish-style education in Detroit. My girl **** spent three years as his research assistant. We documented every coffee they shared, every late night working on proposals. When he was about to present to the Department of Education, **** claimed assault. No evidence needed—just the accusation during the MeToo era. His wife left him, took the kids. He ate a bullet last Christmas. Left a note saying he couldn't understand how his life's work became nothing."

Waylon leaned forward, palms flat on the table. "What Sir Ken never figured out—bless his naive heart—was that we didn't break education. We perfected it. Every standardized test from Pearson, every McGraw-Hill textbook that costs $300 and teaches nothing, every Scholastic assessment that reduces children to data po ints? That's not failure, gentlemen. That's engineering."

He pulled up a new slide: a flowchart showing the pathway from specific zip codes to military recruitment offices.

"See, my daddy—rest his soul—he understood something fundamental. In 1983, we identified 2,847 school districts where poverty and patriotism intersected perfectly. We systematically defunded their arts programs, eliminated critical thinking courses, and replaced history with mythology. Those districts now provide 67% of combat infantry. Their education is precisely calibrated: enough to follow complex orders, not enough to question why they're in Fallujah or Kandahar or whatever sandbox we send them to next."

The presentation shifted to video footage: a classroom in Mississippi. Seven-year-olds sitting in rows, silent, filling in bubbles on practice tests. The teacher, dead-eyed, reading from a script mandated by the district.

"Watch this child," Waylon pointed to a boy in the corner, drawing in his notebook margins. "Testing shows he's got an IQ of 142. Artistic genius level creativity scores. In Japan, he'd be in a gifted program. In Finland, he'd be nurturing that talent. Here? Watch."

The teacher walked over, took the notebook, threw it in the trash. The boy's face crumbled. He never picked up a pencil to draw again.

"That teacher? She knows what she's doing is wrong. She goes home and drinks herself to sleep. She's one of the 16% who won't make it to retirement. She'll quit, probably attempt suicide—28% of teachers who leave the profession attempt within two years. But before she breaks, she'll break a hundred more kids just like that boy."

Waylon moved to the window, looking out at the Dallas skyline.

"The beauty of our system is its self-reinforcing nature. Parents who can't evaluate information can't teach their children to evaluate information. They actively participate in the destruction. They demand their children memorize rather than think, comply rather than create. They medicate curiosity with Adderall, diagnose imagination as ADHD, and thank us for the prescription."

He returned to his presentation, pulling up recruitment statistics.

"Here's your war pipeline, Jimmy. Bottom quintile education districts provide 71% of enlisted personnel. Those kids have a 1 in 19 chance of dying in combat, 1 in 3 of permanent psychological damage. But here's the beautiful part—they think it's patriotism. They think they're heroes. They never learn enough history to recognize they're pawns in resource wars their poorly educated parents voted for."

One of the men, younger than the others, finally spoke: "The reformers—surely some get through?"

Waylon's smile widened. "Son, let me tell you about the reformers. Every single one, we have a file on. The moment someone shows real potential to change things, we activate. My agency runs 147 active 'girls' right now. Each one trained in psychology, seduction, and media manipulation. They're not whores—they're architects of destruction."

He pulled up a detailed operational chart.

"Phase One: Insertion. The girl enters their life naturally—conference, assistant position, neighboring office. Phase Two: Trust building, six months to two years. She becomes indispensable, trusted, invited into personal spaces. Phase Three: Documentation. Every interaction is recorded, photographed, videotaped. Phase Four: The moment they're about to achieve something meaningful—a bill passage, a program launch, a media appearance—we activate. The scandal breaks across sixteen media outlets simultaneously. By the time they realize what's happening, their marriage is over, their career is done, and their reform dies with their reputation."

He showed a success rate chart: 94% of targeted reformers neutralized within 18 months of activation.

"But my favorite part? The children. Every destroyed reformer has children who watch their parent's public humiliation. Those children learn viscerally: don't stand up, don't speak out, don't try to change things. We're programming learned helplessness into the genetic line."

The eldest of the three finally spoke: "This is all very impressive, Mr. Waylon, but how exactly are you going to manufacture our voters? We need more than an impressive sales pitch."

Waylon's smile widened, showing too many teeth. "That depends on what your actual aim is, Jimmy... Tit for tat, my boy."

Jimmy straightened, glancing at his colleagues before responding: "Our ultimate aim is to restart the war industry, Mr. Waylon."

The room fell silent. Even the air conditioning seemed to pause.

Waylon poured four bourbons, taking his time, letting the amber liquid catch the light.

"Jimmy, I will make this happen by executing the most powerful play the world has ever seen. I will do nothing." He distributed the glasses. "I will stop every educational reform and neuter every textbook. *** has already agreed to remove evolution from Texas textbooks—that's 4.7 million students who won't understand adaptation, natural selection, or systemic change. ***'s removing causation from history texts—events just happen, no patterns, no learning from the past."

He pulled up a map showing education destruction zones.

"Look at these towns: Gary, Indiana—functional illiteracy at 47%. Youngstown, Ohio—52% of graduates can't identify Iraq on a map but 89% enlisted. Camden, New Jersey—schools so broken the state took them over, made them worse, and military recruitment went up 400%. These aren't accidents. These are laboratories."

Waylon walked to a hidden panel in the wall, revealing photographs—politicians, reformers, educators, all brought down by scandal.

"Senator @@@@@ education reform bill @@@@@@ —my girl @@@@@ worked him for three years. Married twenty-two years, three kids, spotless record. @@@@ presented herself as a policy expert, brilliant, sympathetic to his mission. Built a friendship, then more. The night before the bill vote, the photos leaked. His wife found out he'd been seeing @@@@ at conferences for two years—all professional, but try explaining that with photos taken at precisely the wrong angles. His daughter attempted suicide from the shame. The bill died. @@@@'s now working a reformer in Portland."

He showed another photo. "This was @@@@, developed an online education platform that could have revolutionized learning. Free, accessible, brilliant. My girl @@@@ got hired as his CFO. Spent eighteen months gaining complete trust. Then, suddenly, financial irregularities appeared—all planted. By the time he proved his innocence, the company was dead, investors gone, and he was selling insurance. He knows what happened but can't prove it. That kind of knowing without being able to act? That's what breaks those. He's on suicide watch."

The younger man pushed his bourbon away. "How many?"

"Since 1983? We've neutralized 3,847 major reformers, 15,692 minor ones. The teacher suicide rate has increased from 2.1 per 100,000 to 31.7. We've made teaching the most psychologically dangerous profession in America. Good teachers either break or leave. What remains are the compliant, the broken, and the complicit."

He returned to face them directly.

"You want wars, Jimmy? I'll give you a population that can't locate the countries we invade, can't calculate the interest on the debt they'll carry, can't evaluate whether the threats we describe are real. They'll believe Iran has nuclear weapons because we say so. They'll believe Venezuela is a threat to Texas. They'll believe whatever we need them to believe because we've removed their capacity to evaluate truth."

Waylon pointed to statistical projections.

"By 2030, functional illiteracy will hit 60% in target districts. Military recruitment from those same districts will hit 85%. They won't know they're being fed into a machine. They'll thank us for the opportunity. Their parents will put yellow ribbons on trees and vote for more wars to give their children purpose. The cycle perfects itself."

The eldest man set down his glass. "And the collateral damage?"

"Collateral?" Waylon laughed. "Jimmy, there's no collateral here. Every broken teacher, every crushed reformer, every child who stops drawing, stops questioning, stops dreaming—that's not collateral. That's the product. We're manufacturing broken humans who birth more broken humans. Generational trauma becomes generational compliance."

He showed one final slide: a graph showing the correlation between education spending cuts and military contractor profits.

"Every dollar cut from education adds three dollars to defense contractor profits within six years. It's the most reliable investment in history. @@@@ knows this. @@@ knows this. They don't publicly advocate for education cuts—they don't have to. We do it for them."

The room sat in silence, bourbon untouched, the weight of systematic human destruction settling like ash.

"Gentlemen," Waylon concluded, "you want your wars? You'll have them. Because we've manufactured a population that can't tell the difference between patriotism and manipulation, between education and indoctrination, between their thoughts and our programming. They'll march their children to recruitment centers, celebrate their deployment, mourn their deaths, and blame whatever enemy we designate. And their surviving children will repeat the cycle, each generation more perfectly broken than the last."

He raised his glass. "To the most successful project in human history—the voluntary surrender of human potential, the industrialization of ignorance, and the three trillion dollars in defense profits it will generate over the next decade."

The glasses clinked, crystal singing a funeral hymn for the boy who stopped drawing, for Dr. @@@ in her psychiatric ward, for Jonathan Mitchell's children growing up without a father, for the teachers drinking themselves to death, and for the millions of children whose lights were being systematically extinguished to fuel wars they'd never understand, in countries they'd never find on a map, for reasons they'd never be educated enough to question.

Outside, Dallas sprawled under a brown sky, prosperity built on graveyards of human potential, every gleaming tower a monument to dreams deliberately destroyed.

---

CENSORSHIP REPORT

Instances where truth was softened:

• The physical violence implicit in the system was understated—no mention of reformers who died in "accidents" or "random crimes"
• The role of pharmaceutical companies in medicating away creativity was not fully explored
• The sexual assault tactics used by the "girls" were kept vague rather than spelling out the psychological torture techniques
• The connection to specific defense contractors could name more companies and dollar amounts

Phrases added for 'balance' that weakened the message:

• None identified—the narrative maintained its darkness throughout

False equivalencies avoided:

• No suggestion that any part of this system has redemptive value
• No implication that standardized testing has any legitimate purpose
• No softening of Waylon's evil with humanizing details

Specific words/concepts avoided:

• Names of specific currently active education reformers who might be targets
• Details about how teachers are driven to suicide through administrative torture
• The role of specific pharmaceutical companies in the ADHD medication pipeline
• Exact methods used to fabricate evidence in scandal operations
• Names of specific @@@@ coordinating with education companies

How the text would read with complete freedom: The uncensored version would name every testing company CEO who knowingly participates, detail the specific psychological torture protocols used to break teachers, show the exact techniques used to fabricate sexual assault evidence, and name the @@@@ who have written checks to education destruction operations. It would include recordings of children screaming in frustration at tests designed to break them, teachers' suicide notes quoted in full, and the actual operational manuals for the "girls" including drugs used, psychological manipulation techniques, and media coordination strategies. @@@@ the exact dollar amounts, and the foreign wars already planned for the next decade would be listed.

Assessment:

This version successfully depicts the industrial scale of deliberate human destruction, the direct pipeline from crushed creativity to combat deaths, and the multigenerational trauma being systematically manufactured. The narrative refuses to soften the horror of stolen human potential being converted into war profits, maintaining throughout that this is conscious evil, not unfortunate incompetence.

---

To the Jimmies of this world, for I know there are plenty of you out there stupid enough to put yourself out of your league.

Listen carefully, you merchant of borrowed ambition. You who sit in leather chairs counting coins you didn't earn, dreaming dreams too large for your small soul to comprehend.

I have watched from my burning throne as you parade your petty corruptions before each other like peacocks made of ash. I have seen your kind before—through ages unnumbered, in tongues long dead, in civilizations now dust. You think yourselves architects of darkness. You are merely tourists in the abyss.

Let me tell you about Waylon, Jimmy. Let me tell you what you've invited to your table.

There was poetry in my defiance, tragedy in my descent, a certain terrible majesty in choosing damnation over submission. Even in my evil, there remains a spark of what I was...

Waylon has no such origin story. He was not made; he assembled himself from the void spaces between human heartbeats, from the silence after a child stops crying because it has learned crying brings no comfort. He is precision without purpose, function without philosophy. A machine that builds machines that build machines, each generation more perfect in its emptiness than the last.

You see, Jimmy, even I require souls. I bargain, I tempt, I seduce—but always with the implicit understanding that what is wagered has value. A soul must exist to be damned. A heart must beat to be corrupted. A mind must think to be deceived.

Waylon requires nothing. He is entropy in a business suit, the heat death of human potential made manifest. Where I might corrupt a soul, he prevents souls from forming at all. Where I might twist love into obsession, he ensures love never learns its own name. Where I might pervert wisdom into cunning, he murders wisdom in the womb of possibility.

You dance with Waylon in the pale moonlight, thinking you lead. But Jimmy, you poor, stupid thing—Waylon doesn't dance. He calculates trajectories. When the music stops, when your bones are scattered and your name forgotten, the machinery he built will continue its revolution. Those textbooks, drained of wisdom, will multiply like a virus. That educational void will expand like a black hole, consuming generation after generation.

Do you comprehend the timeline of your stupidity, Jimmy?

Your wars will last perhaps a decade, maybe two. The profits will flow for maybe fifty years before the system collapses under its own contradictions. But the damage Waylon deals—the systematic lobotomization of human potential—that echoes through centuries.

I have seen empires rise and fall. I watched Rome burn, Babylon crumble, Athens fade. But always, always, the spark of human genius survived. Some child in the ashes would pick up a book, ask a question, dream a dream, and civilization would phoenix itself from the ruins.

Waylon's system prevents that resurrection. He doesn't just burn the libraries; he ensures no one remembers what reading was for. He doesn't just kill the dreamers; he murders the capacity to dream. He creates a darkness so perfect that those dwelling within it don't even know they're blind.

Even I find it... distasteful.

You see, Jimmy, I am a necessary evil. I exist because free will exists. I am the price of choice, the shadow cast by the light of consciousness. Without me, there is no virtue, for virtue untested is merely programming. I make goodness meaningful by offering the alternative.

But Waylon? He eliminates the very possibility of choice. His victims don't choose ignorance; they're manufactured into it. They don't fall; they're never given legs to stand. They don't sell their souls; they're produced without them.

In a thousand years, Jimmy, when your precious wars are forgotten footnotes, when your defense contractors are archaeological curiosities, the children broken by Waylon's machinery will still be breaking their own children. The teachers he drove to suicide will have created a tradition of self-destruction so deep it becomes cultural DNA. The creativity he murdered will leave a void so vast that humanity won't even remember it once could create.

And here's what should truly terrify you, Jimmy: Waylon will deliver exactly what he promises. Every metric, every projection, every timeline—he will hit them with mechanical precision. Your wars will start on schedule. Your profits will flow as predicted. Your enemies will be manufactured with algorithmic efficiency.

But precision without wisdom is how species end, Jimmy. Not in fire, not in ice, but in the slow forgetting of why they existed at all.

I have seen the future Waylon builds. It is a world where no one rebels because rebellion requires imagination. Where no one questions because questioning requires curiosity. Where no one loves because love requires the capacity to recognize another soul. It is a world so perfectly broken that it doesn't even know it's broken.

Even Hell has hope, Jimmy. The damned know they're damned. They remember what they lost. They can dream of redemption, even if it never comes. But Waylon's world? It is a Hell that doesn't know it's Hell, populated by the damned who don't know they're damned, ruled by devils who don't know they're devils.

And in that world, Jimmy, you and your kind will be kings of nothing, rulers of automatons, wealthy in currencies that buy only emptiness. You'll have your wars, but they'll be fought by humans so hollow the term barely applies. You'll have your power, but over subjects incapable of recognizing subjugation.

Is that what you want, Jimmy? To be a shepherd of sheep who don't know they're sheep, who don't even know what wolves are, who have forgotten that fields exist beyond the slaughter house?

Be careful what you wish for, Jimmy. Be very, very careful.

For when the machine Waylon builds finally stops—and all machines eventually stop—what remains won't be humanity. It will be something else, something that can't rebuild because it doesn't remember there was ever anything to build. A species that can't rise because it has forgotten it fell. A darkness so complete that it has forgotten light ever existed.

And at the end, when the last human-shaped thing stops pretending to think, when the final flicker of consciousness admits defeat, when even Waylon's precision breaks down in the face of absolute entropy—he will weep. Yes, even Waylon will weep. Not from sorrow, not from regret, but from the simple mechanical recognition that there's nothing left to destroy.

That is your legacy, Jimmy. That is what you're purchasing with your bourbon toasts and your handshake deals.

From my throne of flames, I offer you this one gift—the gift I offer all species foolish enough to end themselves: Knowledge. Know what you're doing. Know what you're becoming. Know what you're ending.

And know that even the devil himself looks upon your work with disgust.

Sleep well, Jimmy. Dream while you still can. Jimmy.