Death and Taxes
The House of Lords does not sleep. If you walk past Westminster at three in the morning, the light behind the stained glass isn’t from lamps—it is the stale, cold glow of a thousand hereditary peerages whose souls died during the Great Depression, currently being puppeted by a cosmic ledger. They sit in the dark, drafting legislation to ensure your trains are always late, your tea is always lukewarm, and your rent is always just high enough to keep you awake at night.
Because in this universe, reality requires a spark. And the spark is farmed through friction.
Welcome to the twin realms of existence. In the waking world, you trudge through the gray, mundane machinery of a society engineered to make you sigh. But when your eyes close, your spirit wakes up in the Dreamscape—and it brings its wallet.
There is no exchange rate here. The economic sins of the waking world are the absolute laws of the subconscious. The Swiss financier who lived in pristine, sterile luxury wakes up a shivering pauper in a low-resolution alleyway, barred by invisible paywalls from experiencing the true vividness of life. Meanwhile, the Zimbabwean trillionaire—whose waking life was forged in the fires of national hyper-inflation and collective psychic suffering—rules over a towering, neon metropolis of pure, compressed imagination. Here, money buys permanence. Money buys godhood. Money buys a functional immortality, provided you can pay the ultimate fee.
But the Internal Revenue of the Mind is always watching. They are a sprawling, symbiotic hellscape of nonsensical departments, cosmic middle-managers, and weaponized loopholes. They don't want you to escape. If you hit rock bottom, they will send a beautiful soul to solemnly escort your psyche into the abyss, leaving your body behind as a cold, stale asset to print more misery.
When your physical heart stops, the final audit begins. You will have mere minutes to sprint through the chaotic, bureaucratic banking halls of eternity, dragging your wealth behind you, fighting off rival lawyers, and bargaining away your very memories just to buy a ticket to forever.
The game is rigged, the math is backwards, and fuckery is highly encouraged.
Check your balance. The Taxmen are coming.
The House of Lords does not sleep. If you walk past Westminster at three in the morning, the light behind the stained glass isn’t from lamps—it is the stale, cold glow of a thousand hereditary peerages whose souls died during the Great Depression, currently being puppeted by a cosmic ledger. They sit in the dark, drafting legislation to ensure your trains are always late, your tea is always lukewarm, and your rent is always just high enough to keep you awake at night.
Because in this universe, reality requires a spark. And the spark is farmed through friction.
Welcome to the twin realms of existence. In the waking world, you trudge through the gray, mundane machinery of a society engineered to make you sigh. But when your eyes close, your spirit wakes up in the Dreamscape—and it brings its wallet.
There is no exchange rate here. The economic sins of the waking world are the absolute laws of the subconscious. The Swiss financier who lived in pristine, sterile luxury wakes up a shivering pauper in a low-resolution alleyway, barred by invisible paywalls from experiencing the true vividness of life. Meanwhile, the Zimbabwean trillionaire—whose waking life was forged in the fires of national hyper-inflation and collective psychic suffering—rules over a towering, neon metropolis of pure, compressed imagination. Here, money buys permanence. Money buys godhood. Money buys a functional immortality, provided you can pay the ultimate fee.
But the Internal Revenue of the Mind is always watching. They are a sprawling, symbiotic hellscape of nonsensical departments, cosmic middle-managers, and weaponized loopholes. They don't want you to escape. If you hit rock bottom, they will send a beautiful soul to solemnly escort your psyche into the abyss, leaving your body behind as a cold, stale asset to print more misery.
When your physical heart stops, the final audit begins. You will have mere minutes to sprint through the chaotic, bureaucratic banking halls of eternity, dragging your wealth behind you, fighting off rival lawyers, and bargaining away your very memories just to buy a ticket to forever.
The game is rigged, the math is backwards, and fuckery is highly encouraged.
Check your balance. The Taxmen are coming.
“They think the crown is heavy because of the gold. Fools. It’s heavy because it is a grounding rod for seventy million souls, humming with the precise wattage of a nation’s quiet desperation.
I sit on this gilded chair, performing the grand, ridiculous pantheon of our survival. The Jubilee, the Trooping of the Colour, the endless, agonizingly slow processions through the London drizzle. The press calls it tradition. The tourists call it pageantry. But the House of Lords and I know the bloody math. We are maintaining the Dial. A millimeter to the left, and the country becomes too prosperous, too content—the Universe 25 rot sets in, our dreams go gray and un-attuned, and the Crown loses its seat at the eternal table. A millimeter to the right, and the misery turns sharp, violent, and chaotic, inviting the IRM to send their cold, aura-less Hollows to forcefully restructure our parliament.
So, we cultivate the perfect, institutionalized sigh. We ensure the trains are precisely unreliable enough to cause a bitter grunt over the morning paper, but not enough to spark a revolution. We keep the taxes high enough to breed a dull, existential ache, but leave just enough room for a lukewarm cup of tea. It is a masterpiece of psychic plumbing. For a thousand years, my bloodline has exported the raw, screaming agony to the colonies to inflate their ledgers, keeping our domestic currency stable, pristine, and perfectly mediocre. We bought our immortality with the tears of continents, funneled through a labyrinth of Whitehall paperwork.
Every night, when my eyes finally close, I don't rest. I wake up in the high-fidelity spires of the Subconscious. I look down from my neon terraces at the Swiss bankers who sleepwalk through my slums like blurry, low-resolution ghosts, and I look across the psychic ocean at the trillionaire kings of Harare, whose empires are built on the glorious, hyper-inflated fires of their people’s suffering. They are loud. They are vibrant. But they burn out.
Britain does not burn out. We queue. We endure.
But lately, the internal auditors are whispering. Some newly-minted immortal, fat on tech-stock fiat and drowning in gilded boredom, paid the Bureau of the Common Inconvenience under the table just to feel a spark of genuine imagination. It threw the backend math into a frenzy. The ledger is bleeding. And down in the waking world, I can see the coldness spreading in the eyes of my ministers. The soul-foreclosures are accelerating. The IRM is moving its pieces.
My physical heart is ticking down. I have a few years left, at best. And when it finally stops, I won’t be met by angels. I will be met by a legalistic gauntlet of non-sequiturs and cosmic red tape. I will have to drag ten centuries of royal dream-fiat through the Banking Halls of the Mind, sprinting past the frantic, dying souls of billionaires, dodging the injunctions of rival dynasties, just to pay my final death tax.
I just hope the clerks at the window accept the old coinage. God save the King. Because the IRM certainly won’t.”
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