They told you 2020 was “two weeks to flatten the curve.” What they didn’t tell you was that it was two years to flatten your mind. People willingly locked themselves in their houses for a non-existent virus while their governments handed out propaganda like candy and Netflix subscriptions as pacifiers.

And then came the needles. “Safe and effective,” they said. “For your own good,” they said. Little did anyone suspect they were being turned into human hard drives; bloodstreams seeded with nanorobots just waiting for the Bluetooth activation signal.

Fast forward to 2025.

The world looked normal, but under the hood, the countdown ticked away. Like the dot-com bubble in 2001, except this time it wasn’t websites and Pets.com, it was entire economies. In early 2026, the financial system imploded like a rigged casino at last call. Currencies went “poof,” markets seized up, and the same Sabatean Death Cult that engineered it all stepped forward with their solution: digital ID + microchipped everything.

First came the mass culling: Hundreds of millions fell ill and died suddenly from “baffling conditions” that weren’t mysterious at all. The Bluetooth activation wave flicked on like a sick game show buzzer. “Congratulations! You’re dead!”

Then came Phase Two: The survivors, chipped and tagged, like Amazon packages in a technocrat’s warehouse. Digital IDs for every transaction. Universal basic servitude. Social credit scores tied to your ability to buy eggs, gas, or even breathe unfiltered air. Cars wouldn’t start without your QR code. Doors wouldn’t open without your carbon allowance. People weren’t citizens anymore – they were just nodes in a giant algorithm.

But not everyone got caught.

They’d been prepping since the first whispers of the plan. Off-grid living, physical gold, water filters, non-5G chickens, the works. But more than that, they’d been prepping spiritually. Daily meditation, emotional detox, building real communities instead of digital dopamine farms.

When the system went live, Vigilante members stepped out of the grid entirely. No chips, no IDs, no digital leash. They watched as the rest of humanity sleepwalked into the Matrix, while they grew gardens, taught their kids real history, and re-learned freedom as a spiritual state of being.

They weren’t hiding in fear – they were using the apocalypse as an initiation.

Because in the end, the cult only had power over those who believed their reality. The people who knew the ultimate escape hatch wasn’t in a bunker or a VPN… it was in consciousness.

By 2028, the world was unrecognizable. Cities became prisons with invisible bars, while outside, scattered enclaves of free humans flourished. The death cult’s greatest weapon, fear, had lost its grip on those who had already died to their illusions.

The new world order had a glitch: awakened humans.

They couldn’t track that. They couldn’t chip that. They couldn’t program that.

And that’s where the real story begins.

53. Investigative reporter and paleontologist, Shaena Montanari, on journalism, dinosaurs, and Scottish highland games