Novel Excerpt!!!!

And while we're on the subject, I'm looking for beta readers. Those who have disappointed me previously need not reply

Yesterday, Kenneth responded to my Substack piece with an observation that its Malthusian undertones deserved to be drawn out a little more explicitly. As it happens, I’d already smuggled many of those same implications into my novel—same playbook, different medium. So in the spirit of synchronicity (and because I enjoy resurrecting inconvenient truths), I’ve decided to drag one such chapter back into the light, just for the fucking fun of it.

Chapter 25: Depopulation in the Age of Content Moderation

The meeting wasn’t planned. Most of them weren’t. Vern had triangulated the building’s security to give us a four-hour window of invisibility, so we used it. Mid-tier hotel conference room. Fluorescent lights with a tremor. Carafes of coffee already going cold.

We were talking shop—barely. Half-formed thoughts, quiet frustrations, nobody quite ready to say the thing we were all circling. It was a dream in real time. It was a nightmare in real time.

“You think they’ll actually do it?” Jose asked. “The hard kill switch?”

“Not yet,” Vern said without looking up from his laptop. “They haven’t finished cleaning the board.”

Lynn shook his head. “They won’t need to. Half the world’s already dying in slow motion.”

Sam looked tired, but sharp. “That’s the goal, isn’t it? Quiet exits. No spectacle. Just fading lights.”

Then Holloway spoke.

He’d been sitting silently at the far end of the table, folding and refolding a linen napkin like he was timing the room’s rhythm. He didn’t raise his voice. Guys like him didn’t have to—which, to be honest, only made me like him less.

“Depopulation isn’t a plan,” he said. “It’s an environment. You don’t pull a trigger—you build a climate. Then you let people acclimate until survival itself feels gauche.”

The air flattened. No shift in tone. Just… stillness.

“You’re thinking in tools,” Holloway continued. “Chemicals, viruses, drones, currencies. But that’s low-tier. The real purge is atmospheric. Behavioral. Psychological. You don’t reduce a population by force. You just convince it that continuing is irresponsible.”

He took a sip of coffee, made a face, then set it down like it had personally insulted him.

“They’ve made birth feel unethical. Families feel selfish. Desire feel outdated. The goal isn’t to kill—it’s to domesticate. Depopulation by deferral. By redirection.”

Sam crossed her arms. “So what—just shut down eros?”

“That’s part of it,” Holloway said. “Make attraction feel perverse. Make male desire feel radioactive. Start policing its aesthetic expression and punishing its nostalgia.”

He leaned back slightly.

“I was consulting for a firm three years ago—one of those ESG-adjacent media classifiers. Not a censor per se. Just a ‘visibility arbiter.’ And I watched—up close—as they built a policy matrix where a 1950s calendar girl got flagged for ‘contextual harm,’ but a BDSM tutorial was rated safe-for-discovery. The difference wasn’t content. It was trajectory.”

Lynn raised an eyebrow. “Trajectory?”

“Reproductive versus non-reproductive,” Holloway said. “They’ll never admit that, of course. But it’s there, baked into the metadata. Soft suppression of anything that invokes lineage, loyalty, or legacy.”

I exhaled. “Cheesecake as contraband.”

“Exactly.” Holloway nodded. “It’s not about nudity. It’s about memory. You can’t have a revolution if people remember how things used to feel. So you sterilize history. You make courtship feel archaic. You turn masculinity into pathology. You flood the zone with fetish, fluidity, frictionless dopamine—anything that burns bright but doesn’t root.”

Vern looked up from his screen. “So it’s algorithmic eugenics.”

“No,” Holloway said, smiling thinly. “It’s worse. Eugenics had a goal—however perverse. This has none. This is entropy sold as progress.”

Jose frowned. He seemed to be doing that quite a bit these days. “So what happens when the birth rate drops below… replacement?”

“It already has,” Holloway said. “They just haven’t adjusted the narrative yet. That’ll come later—maybe framed as a climate victory, or a spiritual awakening. Something that makes extinction feel noble.”

Lynn looked at me. “You’ve been saying this for months.”

“I said it,” I replied. “But I didn’t know it had a budget line and a marketing team.”

Holloway stood slowly, brushing nonexistent lint from his sleeve like a Bond villain who’d just explained the world’s funeral.

“Every civilization has its death cult. Ours just wears better branding. DEI, ESG, Health Equity, Trust & Safety. But it’s all the same impulse. Reduce risk. Reduce birth. Reduce memory. And eventually, reduce you.”

He paused at the door.

But instead of leaving, he turned—one hand on the frame, voice lower now, like the final paragraph of a eulogy.

“And before anyone writes this off as theory—just remember what’s already happened.”

He ticked the points off with surgeon’s precision.

“Global sperm counts have dropped over 50% in the last forty years. Testosterone down. Fertility clinics up. One in every thirty-six children now diagnosed with autism—up from one in ten thousand a generation ago. Not just diagnosis creep. We’re seeing neurological disruption on a planetary scale.”

He took a step closer to the table.

“Average human body temperature has declined. Immune resilience plummeting. Chronic inflammation now the norm. Metabolic collapse rebranded as dietary preference. And nobody’s asking why the species is losing heat, literally.”

Vern’s eyes narrowed.

“Even epigenetic drift,” Holloway said. “We used to inherit strength. Now we inherit trauma. Weakness coded in before birth. Kids born allergic to life. Then fed endocrine disruptors, attention-fracturing media, and medicated for the side effects of being raised inside a machine designed to keep them docile.”

He folded his hands behind his back. Like an old Asian man, but one in good defiant health.

“They’ve got us sleepwalking toward a bottleneck. And the worst part is, even the survivors won’t be human in any recognizable sense. We are engineering the Omega Generation—final-stage homo sapiens. Cognitively stunted. Fertility-neutral. Plugged into surrogate purpose loops and told that’s evolution.”

No one spoke.

Even Lynn, who could always be counted on for gallows humor, said nothing. And whatever I had to say? They’d heard it before. Just not like this. Not from someone who could say it like it was a PowerPoint presentation he’d given a hundred times—except his slides were classified and no one else got the clearance.

This wasn’t a crackpot with a corkboard.

This was confirmation.

Holloway’s gaze swept the room. Not cruel. Not smug. Just grim.

“The future isn’t conquest. It’s succession. What comes after us won’t remember why we ever resisted. And that’s the real victory.”

Then he left.

No door slam. No mic drop.

Just footsteps down a carpeted hallway, fading into the kind of silence that takes days to shake.

I stared at the napkin he’d left behind.

Perfectly folded.

Like a flag at the end of a funeral.