In the Republic of Othellia, the national pastime wasn’t sports or art; it was the Great Scrolling. The citizens had long ago traded the dry, dusty work of town halls and budget committees for the dopamine hit of the Outrage Cycle. Civics, to an Othellian, was something that happened to other people—usually people they didn’t like. They didn’t vote for candidates so much as they voted for “Characters,” seeking entertainment rather than infrastructure.
Then came Julian Vane. He didn’t have a platform; he had a feed. Vane understood that in a society that had forgotten how to read a balance sheet, the man who tells the funniest lie wins. He campaigned on the impossible, promising to garnish the wages of “The Annoying People” and claiming he had discovered a secret mountain of gold hidden behind a fake waterfall. When journalists pointed out that the gold mountain was actually a macro photo of a discarded candy wrapper, Vane simply posted a meme of himself dancing on a grave. The people loved it. They didn’t care if it was true; they cared that it made the experts look foolish.
Once elected, Vane governed by whim and whisper, turning the machinery of state into a theater of the absurd. He might announce on a Monday that gravity was a conspiracy to keep people grounded, only to claim by Wednesday that the moon was a surveillance drone operated by birds. By Friday, he would redirect national healthcare funds to build a giant, gold-plated slide that led directly into a swamp. The Othellians spent their days exhausting themselves arguing over his latest posts. They were so busy debunking or defending his nonsense that they didn’t notice the roads cracking, the schools emptying, or the fact that the gold slide was actually made of rotting plywood.
On December 31st, the country gathered for the centennial countdown, fueled by Vane’s promise of a “Miracle at Midnight” in the Great Northern Woods. He didn’t show up on the screens for a formal address. Instead, he sent a final, grainy broadcast of himself walking into the deep pines, laughing. He told the millions watching to follow his voice and sing the old anthem of the docks, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” claiming that only the loudest singers would see the gold. The people, desperate for a win and a sense of belonging, began to sing. Their voices rose in a thunderous, emotional swell that echoed through the cold winter air, chanting about walking on with hope in their hearts.
Deep in the woods, far from the cameras, Julian Vane stopped. He looked back at the flickering lights of the city and felt a strange, cold heaviness. He had trolled them so well that they were singing to a ghost, and the ultimate joke was that he had finally run out of things to say. As the clock struck midnight, a geological silence took him. Starting at his feet, his skin hardened into grey silt and granite. His mocking smile froze into a jagged line, and his hand, mid-gesture as if holding a phone, became solid basalt. He wasn’t a man anymore; he was a garden gnome of his own ego, tucked away under a canopy of oaks.
Back in the city, the song ended and the people waited in the silence of the new year. When he didn’t reappear, they simply did what they always did: they made it up. One group claimed he had ascended to a higher dimension, while another insisted he was undercover, hunting enemies in the forest. They argued about his absence with more passion than they had ever argued about his presence. Nobody actually went into the woods to look for him because it was too cold, and besides, there was already a new trending topic to discuss. Julian Vane stood in the woods, a cold, moss-covered statue of a liar, while the society he broke continued to scream at shadows, perfectly content to never walk alone as long as they had a screen to tell them they were right.