“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Victoria Noble sat before the Capitol Plaza’s dressing-room mirror. The smartglass obeyed as always, smoothing her skin, sharpening her jawline, brightening her eyes. She knew what she really looked like — sagging, gray, spotted — but the mirror never forced her to admit it. She loved that. Even alone, she never had to face reality, just shape the truth for herself. The mirror gave her the leader she deserved to see.
She leaned close, admiring the gleam of her teeth, the plump lips, the dark sheen of her hair. She whispered her mantra like a prayer written for her alone: “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about…” She let the silence after it linger. Not being talked about. That was death. That was nothingness.
Victoria Noble would never be nothing.
The knock came. Bernard’s voice, always deferential, with just a trace of nerves: “Madam President, it’s time.”
She rose, heels cracking against marble, and with a blink, activated the augmented reality mask. The overlay hummed as the younger face slid over her own. It was not concealment; it was coronation. The mask was her crown, invisible but absolute.
She passed two guards, both broad-shouldered, clean-cut, symmetrical. She had dismissed the ones with acne, with drooping eyes, the ones too dark, too foreign, too weak, too queer. A guard’s job was not merely protection — it was presentation. The people must see only perfection around her.
The curtain parted. The roar of thousands struck her like heat. Capitol Plaza shook with her name. The screens magnified her flawless face. Flags blazed her emblem, the eagle clutching a sword. Her adherents screamed devotion, and she inhaled it like perfume.
“My fellow Americans,” she said, her voice silk drawn over steel. “We stand at the dawn of greatness.”
She spoke of enemies expelled, of traitors purged, of illegals and infiltrators removed. Every word made the crowd roar. She thought of the Repatriation Centers as she spoke — the razor wire, the barracks, the floodlights sweeping rows of cages. She adored them. They were her vision made flesh: a nation purified. They were proof she had the will others lacked.
She did not call them prisons. She called them reservoirs. America’s cancer siphoned away, locked and wasted. They were not citizens. They were intrusions. Their occupants’ despair was not cruelty. It was policy. Their tears nourished her triumph.
And as the crowd screamed “One Leader!” she savored the image of them — the foreigners, the dark-skinned, the accents, the ones who “looked wrong” — packed away, silenced, erased. She believed she was saving America. She believed their absence was purity.
She basked as a goddess upon the tears of the forgotten and the shouts of her devotees.
Later, in her limousine, she removed the mask and reclined. Fatigue clawed at her. Two days without rest, but weakness was for the unchosen. Bernard sat opposite, reciting approval numbers, arrests, deportations. She nodded, pleased. Reports of another thousand “processed” made her hum in satisfaction. She pictured them herded into vans, neighbors peering out windows, children screaming. It made her smile. That was what saving America looked like.
Bernard shifted uneasily when he mentioned her schedule. “This week: three rallies, two interviews, the Fort Pike inspection.” He hesitated. “It’s… heavy.”
“Of course it is,” she snapped. “America doesn’t rest, and neither do I.” But she knew what he meant. The mask couldn’t hold through all of it. The serum’s glow was already fading. Her body ached. She pressed a hand to her temple and sighed. “Call Habib. Tonight. I’ll need another.”
Bernard bowed. “Yes, Madam President.” His face was pale. She thought him weak. She thought all men weak.
That night, the suite beneath the residence reeked of antiseptic and iron. Habib’s hands shook as he adjusted the serum bags, amber fluid glowing. “Five donors,” he said. “Three from El Paso. Two from… internal detentions in the West.” He faltered. “One didn’t survive.”
“Then she gave what she could,” Victoria said coldly. “As long as the yield is good.”
The infusion seared her veins. She convulsed, teeth clenched, sweat pouring. Habib begged her to stop, to rest longer. She silenced him with a glare. This was her sacrifice. By dawn the pain would fade. By midday, she would shine again. That was leadership. Her suffering was noble. Theirs was wasted breath.
When it was done, she stared at the mirror, trembling but radiant. Cheeks flushed, eyes bright, hair lustrous. She whispered, “Beautiful.” She did not think of the girl. She thought of the applause to come.
Unity Day arrived with flags and parades, soldiers goose-stepping, the plaza thrumming with tens of thousands. She appeared before them dressed in white, luminous with both mask and serum. Her face blazed above the eagle banners. She shouted, “We are united! We are pure! We are strong!” and the plaza answered with “One Leader!”
Then the screens flickered.
The AR mask faltered, her face towering on every screen above the plaza. One moment she was radiant, gleaming and eternal; the next, gray and hollow, skin sagging, veins dark against sallow flesh. The crowd’s gasp rolled like thunder. She shrieked “Lies!” into the mic, but the mask only hissed, sparked, and then collapsed, leaving her naked before them all.
The hack unfurled at once. Every screen, every device, every broadcast was seized. The plaza drowned in images from the Repatriation Centers. Names crawled across the feeds. Faces appeared—familiar, vanished faces. Children strapped to cots. Men shackled, broken by labor. Women pressed into corners, eyes hollow with fear. Rows of the sedated, drained by tubes. And at the center of it all, Habib bent over her body, youth siphoned from theirs into her veins.
The crowd froze. Then came the shouts. Names. People saw their own missing among the lists. A brother. A daughter. A father. Mothers screamed. Soldiers lowered rifles, pale as they recognized kin. The plaza crowd began to shatter in grief and fury.
Victoria turned and saw Bernard at the stage edge, pale but defiant. In that instant she understood. He had betrayed her. His nothingness had undone her. She hated him with a white-hot purity. She screamed at the crowd, “I am your President! You owe me everything! Without me you are nothing!” but the storm drowned her words.
The Patriot Corps moved in, not to save her but to contain the chaos. They dragged her away as the crowd roared in escalating anger. Her mask fell from her face, trampled by Corps boots as they moved her indoors, away from the building inferno.
The plaza burned with grief and fury, and for the first time in years the chants were not orchestrated but born of the people themselves. They shouted not her name, but the names of those lost but not forgotten.
What followed was not swift, but it was relentless. The Unity Day broadcast spread across the continent before censors could stop it. Every family who had lost someone saw proof. Every loyalist who had clung to excuses found them shattered. The spell broke that day, and once broken it did not return.
The institutions that had upheld her reign fractured under the weight of betrayal. The Patriot Corps split, their ranks collapsing when soldiers recognized fathers and daughters in the reels of the disappeared. Cabinet ministers were dragged from their offices. Generals and secretaries stood in their own tribunals, their crimes read into record. Advisors who had once whispered policy in her ear found themselves shackled beneath the same halls where they had once dictated the nation’s future.
Cities purged her banners. Squares once filled with her face were painted with the names of the missing. The great machine she had built brick by brick consumed itself, its gears stripped bare for all to see. And yet, amid the thousands of hearings, the arrests, the punishments, the nation demanded one trial above all.
Hers.
The tribunal convened in a hall heavy with silence. Families filled the benches, clutching photographs, wearing years of grief etched into their faces. Reporters hunched in the balconies, styluses scratching, lenses trained. This was the theater of justice, and she was its singular actor.
Victoria Noble sat shackled at the center, stripped of mask and serum. Her hair was white, her skin sagging, her eyes sunken. Yet she carried herself as though the cameras still adored her, chin high, lips curled in a practiced smirk. Even ruined, she believed herself luminous. Even exposed, she imagined herself eternal.
The testimonies came like waves. A mother clutching a photo of her boy, nineteen, born here, vanished in the night. A former guard describing “harvest duty,” drained bodies, quotas filled under her signature. A soldier breaking down mid-sentence as he confessed to recognizing his cousin on the Unity Day broadcast. A neighbor recounting how an entire family next door vanished, only to reappear as faces in a medical reel. Doctors detailing rejection rates, marrow collapse, children who never survived their “donation.” Habib, pale and broken, admitting that she called it her right, that she said they were lucky to serve her.
Each voice cracked the hall open wider with grief. Each sob and oath pressed heavier on the tribunal’s bench. And through it all she smirked, her replies sharp with scorn. “Sacrifices must be made.” “Weakness is death.” “Parasites do not deserve mercy.” She relished the gasps that followed her cruelty. To her they were not shame but applause.
At last the presiding judge rose, his voice carrying the gravity of generations. “Victoria Noble, former President of this Republic. You stand convicted on all counts: murder, torture, crimes against humanity, the perversion of office, the destruction of families, the betrayal of the people you swore to serve.”
A second judge intoned, “Your titles are struck. Your honors erased. Your name removed from every building, every street, every monument. Where it was written, it shall be replaced by the names of those you destroyed.”
The chief judge spoke the sentence. “You shall live out the remainder of your natural life in confinement, without parole, without privilege. No screen shall carry your face. No history shall call you great. You will vanish into the obscurity you fear most.”
The hall erupted in sound: sobs, cheers, curses, shouts of vindication. Families clutched one another. Reporters scrawled furiously. Even soldiers wept openly, as though the weight of years had finally cracked.
Victoria leaned forward, lips pulled thin, her voice sharp against the roar. “History will vindicate me,” she spat, her eyes blazing with certainty.
And then she laughed, a hollow sound swallowed by the hall. To her, the verdict meant nothing. She still believed herself eternal.
When they led her away in chains, she held her head high, convinced the world would beg for her return. To the nation, her trial was the capstone of justice, the last stone sealing an age of cruelty. To her, it was theater still, and she the star who refused to leave the stage.
Her prison was bare concrete: no mirrors, no mask, no serum. Only a warped reflection in the basin of the toilet. Her audience was gone, yet she declaimed to the walls, shrieking speeches to the dark, cursing the traitors who had undone her. Each morning, she told herself she was still chosen, still radiant, still adored.
Outside, her name was stripped from stone and steel. No plaque bore her likeness. No avenue carried her title. The grand halls where she once thundered were rechristened with the names of the families she had silenced. Marble walls filled with the long roll of the disappeared, line after line of names inscribed where hers had once loomed.
Her body collapsed long before her delusion. Hair fell in tufts, skin sagged, voice withered to a rasp. Yet she remained certain: certain she had been betrayed, certain she was right, certain she was eternal.
Beyond her cell, the camps were razed, their fences melted, their foundations seeded with wildflowers. Where she had drained the living, gardens rose, tended by survivors. Pilgrims walked among them in silence, laying offerings at stones carved with the names of the lost. It was said the flowers bloomed brighter in those fields, as if the earth itself was trying to heal.
No one spoke her name. Not from fear, but from indifference. From scorn. From forgetting.
Some said she ended it herself, unable to endure invisibility. Others swore she lingered for years, railing against injustice until her voice thinned into silence. Either way, she died as she had lived: blind to truth, drunk on her own cruelty, savoring misery as proof of her greatness.
And in the end, she was given the one fate she could never endure. Not hatred. Not scorn. Worse.
