10 voices echoed in unison. “No witnesses.” The phrase reverberated through the parlor, filling the space, only to be swallowed by the weathered tapestries that lined the walls.
Sunlight peeked through frayed curtains, illuminating the gathering with an eerie, almost sacred glow.
Many faces were new. They had been but greenhorns, fresh blood just entering the family business, the last time the decaclave convened. The elder council members bore more wrinkles, more scars — silent witnesses to decades of careful work. Nods of emotionless recognition circled the room.
No witnesses. The first rule. The only rule that mattered.
This emergency meeting had been called because the pugnacious nephew of one elder had acted hastily in a raid the fortnight prior. The raid succeeded without incident — executed with the hallmark levels of precision and overwhelming force. But the crew never saw the fishing trawler that had been running dark two clicks away. And now there were witnesses.
Witnesses could not exist.
Don Del Mare, head of the council, leaned forward. Silence settled, as though the room itself had been instructed to obey.
“No witnesses, gentlemen,” he said. “This has been the creed of our kin for half a millennia. Witnesses are existential. They threaten our peace with the Hollow-Talkers. Need I remind you the painful lessons our forefathers endured before they learned the necessity of this peace?”
He let the room absorb the weight of history. “Five hundred years ago, we were masters of our domain. And they of theirs. But this could not last. The tools of their Great Revolution pushed them to expand, to reach far beyond their borders. And we responded in kind. Without reservation or mercy.”
Don Del Mare settled for half a beat. “The news of our aggression spread like wildfire. And with their more powerful tools, we were hunted to the brink.”
A ripple of unease passed through the room. One elder’s jaw tightened; another clenched the edge of the table. Even the greenhorns felt the weight — anger and fear mingling, a reminder of what it meant to be vulnerable.
“But in the same breath of their revolution, the seeds of their undoing were sown”
“The Hollow-Talkers were once a people wary of mystery, respectful of the numinous of earth, ocean, and sky. They understood and feared the unknown, as a sailor fears the power of the sea. They were a people that thought deeply and saw through the eye instead of with the eye.”
“It was their newfound love of technology that exposed a vulnerability deep in their hearts — one we quickly learned to exploit. A clever fellow, barely older than some of you here, discovered the transcendent and contagion power of story. That narrative repeated becomes truth. It resonates. And so, we found and struck those chords again and again. The Hollow-Talkers embraced a carefully crafted illusion.”
He slowly tapped at the table, each movement a moment of deliberate emphasis.
“The world is knowable. The world is masterable. Proof is what I see.”
“They believe these things because we have arranged for it. They accept what fits their mold. Untested and unquestioned. All we had to do was scaffold molds convenient to us. As long as the scaffolding is tuned, they take care of filtering-in or filtering-out ideas accordingly, filling up the molds within the bounds we laid. Rare indeed is the one who hears through the ear and asks, “Under what conditions might this be true?”
The elders exchanged glances, a quiet acknowledgment of the subtle, brutal intelligence embedded in centuries of rule.
“Fragile peace, based on half-truths that we must ruthlously manage” Don Del Mare continued “And so the peace persists.”
He leaned back, letting the soft light carve the edges of his face into a mask of calm authority. “And now we must act. Not out of cruelty, not out of desire, but because necessity demands it. A single mistake, a single witness, threatens everything. The boy’s haste must be corrected. There will be no witnesses. There never can be.”
Sunlight filtered through the water above, playing shadows across the decks. The words had been spoken. The creed reaffirmed. In the quiet that followed, the decaclave understood and set to work: the world would remain exactly as it had been. Fragile, precise, and utterly unbroken.
The Hollow-Talkers believe they are the inviolate kings - masters of their domain.
Well the Orcas come for the king. And they never miss.
The ocean is a cruel and powerful mistress. 2000+ souls are lost to the sea every year. Never to be heard from again.
Orcas are man’s gentle neighbor in the ocean. There have been no recorded killer-whale to human attacks in human history.
This short story was inspired by a bunch of ideas around:
- Semantic narratives.
- Mimetic injection risk.
- Inception of small ideas.
- Well-coordinated and prolific bot networks hammering the most resonant/convenient framing of a storyline.
- How breaking news pertrubes the status-quo for a short-time, but then the “system” settles on a handful of steady-state memes and frames.