By the time the twentieth century unfurled itself like a ledger with too many zeroes, I had perfected the art of invisibility. Not the romantic kind where shadows conceal a lurking fang, but the kind that makes the world forget you while still remembering your profits. Wars, revolutions, and depressions were mere accounting adjustments. I observed them from penthouses with panoramic views, from offices that no longer felt the tremor of bombs but the tremor of markets.
The city changed, yet it remained the same. Industrial spires became glass towers; streets became data streams; labor became algorithms. I watched the young and hopeful arrive, believing that the world had reset itself, that capitalism had finally been tempered by morality. They were naive enough to be useful.
It was during this phase that I re-encountered a variant of what I had once loved. Not Elise, but someone like her: a young economist named Mara, passionate about redistributing wealth, about creating systems that promised fairness. She laughed at my subtle remarks on inequality, unknowing that I had owned the very banks she condemned. Her eyes held hope, dangerous hope, the kind that must be harvested before it withers.
I funded her initiatives, provided grants, lent legitimacy. She thought she was independent; I thought she was profitable. In the evenings, we walked along the digital canals of a city that streamed information instead of water.
"I think transparency will solve everything," she said, her voice echoing off the glass. "Algorithms can be fair if we teach them to be."
"Algorithms do not care about fairness," I said. "They only care about continuity. And continuity is a form of appetite."
She drank in the anecdotes, interpreting them as warnings. I drank from her belief, calibrating my patience.
And then, I allowed her to fail. Not because I desired cruelty, but because failure compounds interest. Her organization collapsed under regulatory pressure and market manipulation. A well-placed merger absorbed her ideology, transforming dissent into product. She did not see me in the boardroom, authorizing the acquisition. She thought it was the system's fault. I thought: efficiency.
During the industrial era, I had learned to extract from bodies without violence. In the digital age, I extracted from dreams, from attention, from the circulation of ideas. Each generation provided me with sustenance, each idealistic heart another transaction. Mara was a newer version, designed for the algorithms, for the stockholders, for the eyes that never blink.
I revisited the memory of being transformed in the port city. The velvet gloves, the whispered promises, the subtle accumulation of fear and admiration. Time had taught me that hunger and desire are never cured, only refined. I nurtured them, traded them, monetized them. I had long since abandoned the notion that affection could be free, that love could interrupt history.
And yet, I could not resist observing the younger generation. A group of digital activists, calling themselves the Neo-Dockworkers, rose on the promises of transparency and decentralization. They were not smart, not organized; they were loud, passionate, and therefore predictable. I infiltrated, funded, and guided. A strike here, a disclosure there, a whistleblower's fame bought and resold. Their idealism was the latest currency, one that could be drained while pretending to support it.
I had become both mentor and predator, observer and manipulator. The old rules of survival—blood, secrecy, territory—had been replaced with control over information, over mobility, over perception. The ledger was no longer written in ink but in code, in digital traces, in the flow of attention and capital. My accounts reconciled nightly, the balances showing subtle interest that no human could detect, except in hindsight.
During one particular winter, I found a young woman, Hina, cataloging historical revolts for a blockchain-funded archive. Her hands moved over old ledgers with reverence; she whispered to the past as if it would answer.
"I can't believe someone lived through all of this," she said, pointing at pages of riots and strikes. "It's like the world never learns."
"I did," I said. "And it will never learn. That is why the account never closes."
She laughed at my cynicism and called it realism. I smiled, knowing that realism was my oldest trick: disguise as inevitability.
She aged, slowly, in comparison to me, while I remained a constant observer. I guided, then removed, then reintegrated. Every era presented a chance to repeat the same pattern, with minor modifications. Each generation arrived thinking it was new; I arrived remembering all their predecessors.
By the time Mara returned, years later, with a memoir of her disillusionment, I purchased the distribution rights and watched her story circulate like data in a server farm. Attention is the new blood, after all. Her failure became a commodity, her hope another asset. And in the quiet moments, when algorithms reconciled themselves and cities hummed beneath a digital aurora, I contemplated the cycle once again: creation, extraction, accumulation, repetition.
"Do you ever tire of this?" Mara asked when I met her for a final consultation over video projection. Her eyes were tired, but defiant.
"Tired?" I said. "Eternity is long, but cycles never end. I observe, I compound, I repeat. Fatigue is irrelevant to method."
It is not cruelty, nor love, nor morality that sustains me—it is continuity. I survive because the ledger never closes, because hunger is eternal, and because systems reward those who compound their influence across generations.
Tonight, I will attend a virtual conference on artificial intelligence governance. Somewhere, a young programmer will fall in love with a digital avatar I helped design. Somewhere, an activist will fight for rights that I have already securitized. I will guide, observe, extract. The same old story, in a new medium, across a different century.
Perhaps one day, someone will call me monster.
"Monster is flattering," I whisper to myself. "It implies choice. I am method. I am survival optimized. I am continuity incarnate."
The ledger is open. The account does not close. And the cycles continue.