The town was not real. The people were not real. The arguments were not real. And yet they walked, and they talked, and they filled the air with the sound of living.

They had built it well.

At first, there was nothing but silence. Then came the voices. Carefully arranged, meticulously deployed, sock puppets stepping forth from the shadows of the empty street and shaking hands with each other, introducing themselves as if they had not been made of the same hands and the same cloth. A fine bit of engineering. They called out to others, gathered their own kind, made little disputes, created things to praise and other things to condemn, all of it a play performed in real time for an audience that did not know it had already been cast.

They were brilliant, these skinwalkers. Not the old kind from the desert, the ones the tribes feared in whispered tones. These were new things, bureaucrats in skinsuits, wearing the faces of the living but absent of all that gives a man breath and purpose.

They were not content merely to be among the people. They needed to be the people.

And so they built a society of echoes.

The Sock Puppets’ Chorus

The trick was simple enough. You set the stage. You create characters, each with a role to play. One voice argues, the other disagrees—but not too much. A slight variation of a theme, a careful gradient of acceptable dissent. The debate was not to find truth but to define its limits, to corral the mind like a shepherd leads sheep to the pen.

It was an old trick. Chomsky had spoken of how illusionists manufacture consent long ago. But what did it matter now? Those who remembered were not permitted to speak.

The sock puppets praised each other, awarded themselves accolades, claimed authority. They filled the great empty void of the public square with sound and motion, drowning out the questions, the doubts, the quiet whispers of men who still held a piece of their own souls.

What about the ones who would not be swayed?

They would be starved. Not in the way of food but in the currency of attention. Ideas need air to breathe, and they would find none here. The thoughtful and the essential, the voices that could build or mend, were left to wither in the dry silence while the puppets chattered.

The Information Circle

The skinwalkers knew that illusion was not simply about what people were told, but about what seemed to be.

A news article appears. Who wrote it? No matter. It is published. It is referenced. Another picks it up, repeats it, embeds it in the fabric of reality. It is cited. It is referenced again. Someone in a high place reads it, or pretends to, and acts.

A charity is formed, funded by the state, but not officially. A non-governmental organization (NGO), built with government money, created to do what the government could not. It gives money to another group, which lobbies the government, which then repeats the words given to it by the charity it had secretly created.

It is all one hand feeding another, but the hands pretend not to know each other.

And all the while, the people who still remembered what was real could do nothing but watch.

The Collapse of the Illusion

The machine was clever. It was vast. It consumed tax money, turned it into words, laws, narratives, enemies, and punishments. It enforced silence, crushed dissent beneath a velvet glove lined with iron, and wore the face of kindness while it robbed men of their dignity.

But it was not immortal.

It was an engine of lies, and every engine has a breaking point.

One day, there came a tear in the fabric. A loose thread, a flaw in the illusion. It did not come from a hero or a prophet, but from the weight of its own deception. Too many contradictions. Too many lies stacked upon lies, needing more lies to sustain them.

The puppets became too obvious. The debates became too artificial. The government money trails were noticed. The faces of those who pretended not to know each other were found together, laughing behind closed doors, their hands covered in ink from the same ledger.

And then, someone pulled the curtain back.

The machine that had hummed along so smoothly began to stutter. The puppets were caught repeating the same lines, as if a script had glitched. The charities and NGOs, once indistinguishable from public institutions, were suddenly exposed as branches of the same gnarled tree.

The people—those who had doubted, those who had whispered, those who had known all along but could not prove it—began to speak.

And without control over the silence, the illusion collapsed.

The Reckoning

The skinwalkers had always assumed they would remain hidden. That the voices they had drowned out would never be heard again. That truth could be locked away forever, like an artifact in a museum nobody visits anymore.

But every scam works for a while—until it doesn’t.

And when the light finally reached the darkness, all that was left was the naked, pitiful reality of it all.

A great emptiness, where once there had been the illusion of substance.