Hadley Caine sat in darkness—by choice. He was surrounded by lights. His apartment boasted cutting-edge LED accents around cabinets and along the walls, as well as rich crimson-shaded pendant lights and cut-glass chandeliers. None of them came with the apartment. Upgrades, accouterments befitting a man of his station.

  Status symbols of the man he had become.

  But tonight was a night of shadows. Shadows, hunters, and death. The hard boys could hardly wait.

  Empty eyes stared out, watching him lifelessly. Masks—tribal, ceremonial, from Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. A compromise in design between Hadley and his personal decorator when he moved into the apartment. The masks kept watch over the richly furnished living room, with its leather furniture, ox-skin rug, sleek vases in corners with a mixture of ostrich feathers and faux ferns like cattails in a marsh.

  The sort of place a man would stay if he knew what power and wealth looked like. In short, the nest of someone like Hadley Caine.

  He hunched, gargoyle-like, perched on the edge of a black chair. A Natuzzi, imported from Italy. Leather, deep-seated, soft-cushioned, made for luxurious relaxation. His nails clicked as fingers drummed on a glass-topped coffee table, its brutalist frame crafted from reclaimed steel.

  Sleek, expensive, austere. Just the way he liked it. Just the way he deserved it.

  On the table, a laptop glowed. Beside it sat a plate, unnoticed and forgotten, veal cooled while avocado toast slowly browned. Flanking the plate, a bottle of Napa Valley wine. No glass. The wine was red, as evidenced by the few drips spilling down its neck, pooling on the table at the bottle's base, and mingling with blood seeping from the corner of Hadley's mouth.

  Hadley did not notice the blood. Hadley did not notice the wine. Instead, he stared at the screen, breath held between gritted teeth.

  What was taking so long?

  He wanted to watch his prey die on camera. It should have been easy.

  How can I see what's going on? He searched the internet for security cameras in the town. Nothing. No cell phones, no laptops, no doorbells, no security cameras. Nothing was on.

  It made no sense. This wasn't an Amish community or some backwoods hollow. These were modern retirees. True, they lived beyond the municipal power grid, but they had power and internet. Yet the whole town sat dark. Silent. Like a ghost.

  In the end, he'd borrowed a company satellite. Not something he should have had access to. But Tetherley, despite its public image as the world's most secure social media network, was laughably simple to manipulate from the inside. And after sending the company wet-work team after his jilted conquest, what was one more transgression?

  The satellite, parked over the northeastern United States, stared down at Sanguine Springs. Though ostensibly a network and GPS unit, the satellite also carried a camera. But despite the lack of clouds, the video was unsatisfyingly unclear. Even at full magnification, he'd watched the van pull to a stop, watched little specks remove themselves from the back. His disappointment grew as they disappeared into the woods.

  And then lights came on, all over town. He sat up bolt upright, leaning forward as the image compensated for the surge of brightness. Smaller pixels of light flared as gunfire erupted from one small contingent of men. Then it started up on the opposite side of the screen. What was going on? At this rate, Horus Overwatch would eliminate the entire town.

  Hadley didn't care. His prey was close. She'd earned this, and he was willing to snuff out anyone that stood in the way of Allison's punishment.

  More gunfire. Flashes here and there from different points around the town.

  Someone was fighting back. Two someones, from the looks of things.

  He leaned closer to the screen. No way that was Allison. She was too soft. Mousy. Broken. There was no way she could have defended herself. So where was the return fire coming from?

  Another shooter entered the conversation, this time on the kill team's side. A machine gun opened up from the hill, raking the town. Hadley watched a tall tree topple, watched flecks and specks of debris shower down as houses came apart under the barrage.

  Then it stopped.

  The image held still. Far from the lights, black specks moved around the perimeter. Shadows circling. He held his breath, waiting.

  A flash—maybe a gunshot—from the edge of the woods. Another inside the town. Maybe. Then nothing. The calm stretched out, heavy and tense.

  The fireball came without warning.

  One of the houses erupted, bursting apart at the seams and raining down in a billowing inferno. Orange light bloomed across his screen, washing out the pixels.

  What is going on?

  Hadley's fingers had stopped drumming. His fists clenched tight, fingernails digging crescents into his palms. Blood welled. He didn't notice. His teeth found his lip again, biting down as he stared at the screen, unblinking. A fireball like that one, someone was bound to be dead.

  But who?

  He licked his lips, eyes dilating at the cocktail of wine and blood. His temples pounded—or was that the hard boys pounding at the door, begging to be let out?

  Hadley pushed the thoughts aside. He turned back to the screen, watching the hunters close in on his prey from three thousand miles away.

  The world's most powerful man sat cross-legged in the deepest moonlight. Insomnia. His curse—one he embraced. It gave him more time. Time to think, to plan, to steer the world toward his goals.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  Near him, half-buried in the sand, a scorpion spasmed. A host of red ants assailed its fractured carapace, their movements methodical, efficient. Nightbirds, wide wings spread, glided overhead, scanning the sands for the scent of the dying.

  Thomas Newton wore no watch, no phone, no shirt, and no shoes—only a pair of tailored athletic shorts cut from a self-cooling fiber blend. An expression of complete, almost surgical peace rested on his face. He took a slow breath, his stomach expanding as the chilly, sterile air filled his waiting lungs.

  He was not dead, despite the hunger of the sands.

  This desert, vast, sun-bleached, and vicious, was his only true competition. It was an ecosystem of calculated, brutal efficiency. The sand sucked the residual heat from his calves, yearning to drain him, reduce him to a clean, polished, symmetrical skeleton. Serene.

  He stared out into the black void.

  Thomas Newton embraced the dark by choice, shedding the artificial light and noise of the empire he commanded. The air was a blade, as sharp as the sands were cold.

  Not yet. Not tonight, you vampire.

  A breath, consciously held for the duration of a slow, four-count inhale, escaped his lips.

  He was the man who could feel time in the metronome of his own pulse, in the unhurried expansion of his chest. The concept of an external clock was a failure of self-discipline.

  Thomas Newton unfolded his long, lean body, rising from the cold dune. Sand flowed from the folds of his shorts like fine, pulverized glass. A cricket fled, startled, its passage sending further sands raining down on the unfortunate scorpion. Its stinger, now empty, caught the glint of moonlight like a dying star.

  The billionaire paused, dropping into a low crouch to investigate the methodical work of the swarming ants. His hand stretched out. Slender forefinger and thumb took gentle hold of the scorpion, grasping carefully on either side of its stinger. He pulled it free, watching the shower of sand and ants tumble from the arachnid's body. He held the creature inches from his face, evaluating the lethal utility of its claws, the proportions of its legs. Nature provided the workshop; he pilfered the upgrades.

  This was nothing new. From honeycomb-shaped nano-tubes to burdock-inspired fasteners like velcro, innovators had always gleaned inspiration from nature. But not on the scale, or breadth, of Tetherley. Their algorithm was not driven by a Large Language Model like so many of their competitors. Instead of old books, public blogs, and pirated romantasy novels, its operational data set came from nature itself. Terabytes of footage and analysis of ant colonies, beehives, bird migrations, and wolf packs. Especially wolf packs.

  Natural hierarchy and efficiency, observed, copied, and improved on. The next stage in societal—no, human—evolution, on a leash.

  A leash he held.

  Thomas Newton closed his eyes, committing the scorpion, the ants, and their brutal lesson to memory. Then, he crushed the scorpion's tail between his fingers. The stinger's shell gave with a tangible pop. He rubbed it to a smear of fluids and broken chitin. The creature flailed its perfect claws the entire half-second fall to the sands. The broken arachnid landed still on its back. Too late—the ants were upon it, swarming, covering, burying.

  Thomas Newton was already walking away, breath steady, on the familiar two-mile path back to his home. With every step, the heat-thirsty ground sucked heat from his body. Always hungry, never satisfied. Such is the way of the desert.

  The desert lay deep in darkness. Even his three-story estate huddled in shadow. Newton did not need lights. He preferred it this way. He owned the desert, a very large portion of it, acquired without thought to cost. Greed, gobbling up nature. Naturally. But not everywhere. Out here, the untamed sky was nearly as wild as when the first nuggets were found.

  Tetherley—the long-shot startup that made him a billionaire many times over—was rapidly losing value, its currency fading faster than tariffs or inflation could explain. Newton did not worry.

  A new currency was taking shape: information. Not general knowledge or breaking news. Personal data. Financial, consumer, biometric data. Like a fairy tale of old—where to know a creature's name is to have power over it—the new economy ran on total personal knowledge. Advertisers, employers, governments? They all wanted a piece. Because when you know someone completely, so deeply that you can predict their next move, you are a god to them.

  Ahead, his mansion loomed. The structure emerged from the desert like a geometric challenge, its sharp angles and clean horizontals casting a sneer of cold contempt on the landscape's jagged horizon. Floor-to-ceiling glass panels, each precisely engineered to withstand the brutal temperature swings, reflected the skeletal mountains beyond. The framework: brushed aluminum and blackened steel, calibrated to absorb minimal heat. Granite slabs, imported from Sardinia, formed the foundation—cool, dense, eternal as the destiny of mankind.

  Inside, visible through the transparent walls, minimalist furniture occupied exact coordinates. A single Eames lounger. A low platform bed, Japanese in its austerity. Polished concrete floors stretched unbroken, punctuated only by strategic inlays of black onyx that caught and swallowed light. The sort of maximal minimalism only the ultra-rich can afford.

  No landscaping softened the transition between structure and wilderness. The house simply existed, a monolithic statement of dominance rendered in stone, metal, and transparency.

  The mansion was not shelter. It was a declaration. Man imposing order on chaos. Silicon Valley minimalism transplanted to the desert's throat, daring the elements to break it. They never would. Newton had calculated every variable, anticipated every assault. The desert could hunger. His fortress would not yield.

  He walked in its shadow. With each quiet step across the packed desert floor, the greedy ground pulled energy from his soles. He acknowledged the drain. Respect was a form of acceptance.

  Up the granite steps to the vast verandah. This stone, too, craved the warmth he generated.

  Thomas Newton did not smile; he merely registered a faint, pleasing calibration in his neural pathways.

  Lightlessly, wordlessly, the doors slid open at his approach, the building welcoming its master home. He walked in darkness, bare soles registering the change in temperature as they padded across the polished concrete floor. Upstairs, his security detail sat awake, monitoring cameras and sensors near and far. Eventually, Newton would replace them, trading hardened soldiers for purpose built creations—the canine unit’s recent testing had gone very well.

  But for now? he trusted the human security detail with his life, and more. He was secure. Safety bought not just with money, but with isolation and control.

  He passed the office, where his phone lay charging. With it, he ran the largest social network company in the world. Its screen blinked. A notification. Newton filed it away for later. Now was not the time. He had people to handle things while he slept. Anything short of a disaster could wait until the morning. He was ready to sleep. Who knew what the next day would bring?

  The world was changing rapidly, as the antiquated concept of a worldwide web melted under the weight of the IOT—the internet of things. Things sold by, monitored by, and controlled by Tetherley—a network of assets spanning the globe, all at his command.

  He would rule…benevolently. Some would resist, futile; a portion of them would not survive. A small amount of the population at large. Barely a rounding error. Compared to the farce that was "the Great Leap Forward" or the Soviet Revolution, mere pocket change. He would leverage his control to provide the greatest good for the greatest possible amount of humanity—whether they liked it or not.

  Newton entered his bedroom. He slid beneath the single sheet of his twin bed—firm mattress, military corners, the ascetic choice of a billionaire seeking spartan discipline over comfort. His stomach rose and fell with a series of breaths. His pulse, already slow, relaxed further.

  Newton closed his eyes, relaxed his body, and drifted off to sleep.

  Meanwhile, down the hall in his office, the billionaire’s phone screen buzzed to life, again and again.

  He had no idea the shitstorm tomorrow would bring.