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The AI Reckoning: Humanity’s Future in the Hands of the Few

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In Episode 12 of The Rise of King Asilas (The Manifest Destiny), the central question isn’t about power, it’s about sacrifice. When survival hangs by a thread, do you abandon your moral code to secure victory? Or does crossing that line ensure you’ve already lost? It was a moment that resembled that point Caesar “crossed the Rubicon.” There was no going back for King Asilas. The window was closing for him to make his move that would change the world forever. And he wasn’t going to hesitate in that moment.

Now imagine that dilemma… not in a fictional kingdom, but in Silicon Valley boardrooms, classified Pentagon briefings, and quiet diplomatic backchannels between Washington and Beijing. Because today, the same choice is unfolding in the AI arms race. And the terrifying truth? The outcome may not be decided by nations, but by a handful of executives, intelligence officials, and unelected architects of the digital future. All of which facing the same closing window, the same urgency to make their move and change the trajectory of the human race. The stakes are just as high as for the fictional king blowing up Canada’s government. Even higher than what Caesar himself faced when he led his troops across that river and changed the direction of Rome (and essentially the world) forever.

Publicly, artificial intelligence is marketed as productivity tools, chatbots, copilots, and assistants. Privately, insiders speak of something else: strategic dominance. And with those strategies come contingency plans and covert maneuvers to offset blindsided attacks and stay several steps ahead of adversaries. Sound familiar? It should. This is exactly what King Asilas does throughout the series. Behind polished keynotes and quarterly earnings calls, a quiet consolidation of influence has taken shape. A small cluster of technology giants, defense contractors, and national security agencies now sit at the helm of systems that can do everything humans can do any a million times better and faster. This isn’t innovation. It’s leverage. And leverage, in the wrong hands, becomes control.

The Moral Fracture: Speed Over Safeguards

King Asilas’ philosophy, overcome your moral code to survive, now echoes through strategic doctrine. Policy circles increasingly frame AI as a zero-sum contest. Whoever builds the most advanced systems first will set the rules for the next century. Lag behind, and you don’t just lose market share, you lose sovereignty. Organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations openly describe AI as a defining arena of geopolitical rivalry, particularly between the United States and China. The framing is clear: supremacy in AI may determine military dominance, economic command, and global influence for generations.

But here’s the unspoken part.

When leaders believe they are racing against extinction-level disadvantage, ethical hesitation begins to look like weakness. In fact, some AI proponents are believed to be on a suicide mission, risking the entire human race as collateral damage should their gamble turn catastrophic. And most think tanks believe the AI supremacy will lead to global collapse and perhaps the end of humankind as we know it (if not blatant extinction). Is this hyperbole? Could it just be exaggeration? Likely not. Think about King Asilas and his mission: to save humanity. What was the cost? Destruction of global government systems. How was his consolidation of power achieved? His weapons were far superior to those of other countries. And the global system collapsed, one by one until all that was left was King Asilas. And where did he lead the people? To their ultimate fate in Armageddon.

The simple version of the story is “systems were deployed faster than they could be understood.” That was King Asilas’s advantage. By the time the world could react to his weapons, it was already too late. This is the exact same scenario we face (collectively) as a species in the face of this wicked race for AI supremacy. Once the winner shows himself, it will spell doom for all of us on this planet.

The Existential Threshold

The AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in 2023 produced the Bletchley Declaration, signed by 28 nations, including the U.S. and China, acknowledging the need for coordinated safeguards. But declarations are not enforcement. Agreements are not guarantees. History shows that when transformative power becomes available, competitive instinct often overrides restraint. Nuclear deterrence created uneasy balance, but AI differs in one critical way:

It can replicate.
It can scale.
It can evolve.

And unlike uranium, its raw material is data, which is something no nation truly controls. The communities of this world have become so dependent on media via the Internet, that the very idea of losing control of those abstracts has some adverse physical consequences. For example, when YouTube ran into some data issues recently and the site went down, within minutes the hashtag #YouTubedown trended like wildfire. It was pandemonium within the hour. Utter panic set in. Anxiety spread. Was this the end? It isn’t even relevant if the event was choreographed or not, the outcome was troublesome. Are people that dependent on media platforms? Absolutely. What would happen if all of them shut down? Honestly, the beginning of the end. Too much of people’s identities are woven into the cyber fabrics of social media that eliminating them would erase people’s brains, their core reason for existence, and chaos would ultimately ensue. It’s kind of like “releasing the fog” and the effects of the Trishul in some sense. Masses of people would blame their leaders and oust them from their state houses. Blood would flood the streets.

And if you think someone holding AI supremacy couldn’t do this with the touch of a button, you are sadly mistaken.

The Concentration Problem

Here’s the part rarely discussed openly: The most advanced AI systems are not evenly distributed across humanity. They are concentrated in a small circle of corporations and government partnerships. Their control is largely overseen by a few executive teams, intelligence committees, and let’s throw in a few classified programs for good measure. Decisions are made about alignment, deployment, safety thresholds, and access is granted to individuals most citizens will never meet, and certainly have never voted for. Yet the decisions made by these select few could determine:

  • Whether labor markets destabilize overnight
  • Whether autonomous weapons become normalized
  • Whether misinformation ecosystems become indistinguishable from reality
  • Whether humanity retains agency over its own technological creations

This is not a democratic process. It is a technocratic inflection point. And to be honest, it would never move forward with any speed if held to the standards of a democratic process. The AI arms race is on and there’s no time to ask the public for their opinions and votes. Such delays would hinder its progress and our enemies would have the advantage. Speed was something King Asilas understood very well in his assault on his enemies. “Waste no time” was something the king often uttered throughout the series. It wasn’t a filler. It wasn’t an irrelevant phrase. It was repeated because time means advantage. The longer it takes you to make a significant move, the more advantage you surrender to your adversaries. This is the mindset of the curators of the AI arms race. It resembles (horrifically) that of the fabled king. And there’s no doubt the outcome would be the same for humanity.

Gabriel’s Warning

Throughout the King Asilas series, Gabriel represents moral resistance. Translated into today’s context, that voice exists among researchers, ethicists, and policy advocates arguing that dominance without guardrails is not strength, it’s systemic fragility. Unchecked AI doesn’t just threaten rivals. It threatens everyone. These threats cannot be brushed off as standard corporate banter or propaganda meant to instill fear in order to assert more control on the masses. A catastrophic failure in one system can ripple globally. A misaligned autonomous defense protocol could escalate conflict unintentionally. A hyper-optimized economic AI could hollow out entire sectors before safeguards respond. And that spells doom. For everyone.

Simply put (in Gabriel’s voice): Victory without virtue becomes self-sabotage. As one listens to the words spoken by these AI pushers, it sounds eerily similar to a mentally ill person on a mission to incinerate an entire city in order to feel warmth. Compassion or reluctance to address the instability of the mentally ill person is signing one’s own death warrant. Avoiding confrontation only ensures the madness will continue with impunity. The masses are as much at fault as the sheep for following the Shepard over the cliff. The warnings are blaring. The picture has been painted. The threat is real. Yet, the world does nothing. And there is no virtue in doing nothing.

The Real Question

The public debate frames AI as progress. The strategic debate frames AI as power. But the deeper question (the one whispered in policy briefings) is this: Are we building tools to empower humanity… Or constructing a cognitive infrastructure so powerful that control inevitably consolidates in the hands of the few who built it? Or worse, consider the possibility it goes into the hands of one man.

History’s empires were limited by geography. Digital empires are limited only by bandwidth. And for the first time, humanity may be approaching a threshold where decision-making power over information, defense, and economics converges into systems overseen by a tiny group of actors operating beyond meaningful public scrutiny. It would be a “High Council” or sorts. But there will always be a head of that council. A head. And on that head, you can bet will be sitting a gold crown.

That is the true dilemma of Episode 12 playing out in real time. Planting bombs inside of Spartans (like AI systems plotting in the dark corners of the Internet), sending them into command centers disguised as someone else (like Trojan horse viruses and malware), destroying everyone in proximity, ushering in a new dominant force, a king. Then, an unfettered absolute authority swoops in to “save the day” and restore order. We know how this ended for the Canadians in Episode 12. And we also know how it ultimately ended for the rest of the world when King Asilas finally revealed what his secret weapon was. The world had to react to something completely new, and something they had no answer for. That concentration of defense took precedence and world leaders could not focus on the man, King Asilas, himself. Who was this man? How did he arrive to wield so much power? And when they stopped to try and reason with him, it was already too late. Their only choice by that time was to kneel before their new ruler, whether they liked it or not. The loss of privacy, then the loss of sovereignty. They had lost the game before they sat down at the chess board. The absolute authority of King Asilas was a consolidation of access. They couldn’t even make a move, at least not without permission. Think about that.But the road to societal collapse (although brutal and bloody) took more than mere technological (and military) superiority. There were other forces at work, if you recall the characters of the series. Reptilians, cannibals, and occult entities are infused throughout the entire storyline. If the Epstein files has shown us anything in these recent weeks, it’s that The Rise of King Asilas feels less like fiction in 2026.

The Net Ray and the End of Nuclear Sovereignty

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An AI rendition of what the Net Ray may look like based on its description in the show.

In The Rise of King Asilas, few devices are as consequential—or as philosophically charged—as the Net Ray machine. It is not merely a weapon; it is an argument. An argument about power, about fear, and about the fragility of the systems humanity has relied upon to keep itself in check. The show never reveals the true origins of the Net Ray. We are told only that a mysterious figure known as “Gabriel” helped bring it into existence. This deliberate obscurity elevates the machine beyond a national project or a scientific breakthrough. The Net Ray feels less invented than discovered, as though it were an inevitability waiting for the right moment and the right hands. In this sense, Gabriel functions less as an engineer and more as a midwife to history.

Neutralizing the Ultimate Threat

The Net Ray’s capabilities are deceptively simple. It neutralizes nuclear missiles in midair, causing them to fall harmlessly from the sky by disabling their propulsion systems. There is no explosion, no fiery interception, no spectacle of counterforce. The missile simply ceases to matter. This detail is crucial. The Net Ray does not defeat nuclear weapons through greater violence, but through irrelevance. It strips them of meaning. In doing so, it undermines the philosophical foundation of nuclear deterrence itself: the belief that fear can be stabilized, that terror can be balanced.

Its secondary capability—jamming operating systems, particularly military-grade systems—extends this logic further. Modern warfare is not merely physical; it is informational. By attacking the digital backbone of militaries, the Net Ray severs intention from execution. Orders can no longer guarantee outcomes. Authority dissolves into uncertainty.

For King Asilas, the Net Ray was not simply a strategic advantage—it was a civilizational pivot. The machine ended the era of Mutually Assured Destruction, an era built on a paradoxical faith: that the threat of total annihilation could preserve peace. Once that faith collapsed, so too did the illusion of equality among nations. Nuclear weapons had long functioned as the great equalizer, allowing even smaller or weaker states to demand respect through existential threat. The Net Ray erased that leverage in an instant.

What followed was not global devastation, but global capitulation. Many nations surrendered sovereignty not because they were conquered, but because resistance had lost its rational foundation. When survival depends entirely on the goodwill of a superior power, freedom becomes a luxury ideology cannot afford. Yet the show wisely avoids presenting this as a clean or final resolution. Some nations refused to submit. Deprived of nuclear deterrence, they turned to older, messier forms of resistance—conventional warfare, insurgency, sabotage. The Net Ray ended one logic of war, but it could not end war itself. Conflict, therefore, is not a technological problem.

The Quiet Return of the Same Question in 2026

As we forge into the first quarter of 2026 in the real world, the Net Ray reads less like fantasy and more like allegory. The modern arms race is no longer defined primarily by warheads and delivery systems, but by artificial intelligence. Today, nations compete not just for stronger weapons, but for faster cognition. Within AI circles, the alarm bells are ringing, asserting that the first nation to achieve overwhelming AI supremacy (sometimes loosely framed as a form of “singularity”) will possess an advantage so decisive that traditional military balances may no longer apply.

Such an AI would not need to intercept missiles in the sky. It could prevent them from launching at all. It could predict escalation paths, disrupt command networks, corrupt guidance systems, or paralyze logistics before human decision-makers even comprehend what is happening. Nuclear weapons would remain physically intact, yet strategically hollow.

Here the philosophical parallel becomes unavoidable. How different is such an AI from the Net Ray?

Both eliminate deterrence asymmetrically. Both concentrate power not through destruction, but through negation. And both shift the nature of dominance from visible force to invisible control. The crucial distinction lies in form. The Net Ray is a single machine—centralized, tangible, and therefore symbolically vulnerable. It invites rebellion precisely because it can be imagined, targeted, and mythologized.

AI supremacy, by contrast, would be ambient. It would exist everywhere and nowhere: in models, infrastructure, satellites, and decision pipelines. There would be no throne to storm, no reactor to sabotage. Power would no longer announce itself as power. It would simply feel like the way the world works. This raises an unsettling philosophical question: if domination is subtle enough, does it still feel like domination? Or does it become indistinguishable from order?

The Illusion of Choice

At its core, The Rise of King Asilas is less concerned with tyranny than with inevitability. The Net Ray forces nations into a moral corner where choice exists in theory but not in practice. Submit, or disappear. As AI reshapes global power, the same dilemma may re-emerge under a different name. States may not be conquered, but optimized. Not ruled, but managed. Sovereignty may persist symbolically, even as meaningful autonomy erodes. The Net Ray, then, is not a warning about a single machine. It is a meditation on what happens when technology outpaces the ethical frameworks designed to contain it. It asks whether freedom can survive in a world where resistance is no longer catastrophic, but pointless.

In that sense, the most disturbing aspect of the Net Ray is not what it destroys, but what it makes unnecessary: fear, negotiation, and ultimately, consent.

The Importance of Quintin Capone

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King Asilas is not a man who needs reassurances about the decisions he makes. He is the quintessential leader and does not rest until he completes his mission, and reflects on the costs once his objective is achieved. Which has mustered curiosity by some as to why Quintin Capone is such an important figure in Asilas’s inner circle. The easiest analogy to use when evaluating the situation and the people surrounding the king is the classic game of chess. The king has two bishops, two knights, two rooks, a queen, and two lines of pawns. By episode 4, we already know his queen and who his two bishops are: Quintin Capone and Dr. Ezekiel. These men give the king guidance and he trusts their points of view. Minister Jeremy Oreb falls into the category of a knight because Asilas sends him to meet combatants, terrorists, domestic rebels and other threats with the might of his guns.  President Jackson is a rook because he proves to be valuable to the king in terms of public opinion. He also maintains ties to the monster group. We also know who some of his pawns are: Abigail Sierra and Rachel Canaan, but Rachel was likely sacrificed in episode 4. When you look at the characters in the show through this lens, you begin to see how their maneuvering is determined. Each move is calculated with another anticipated by the king.

But how did Quintin Capone, a school chancellor for New York City Public Schools during the second civil war, become the most powerful “right-hand man” of the New Kingdom? The show does not give any clues as to how Capone became so trusted by Asilas. The novel does explain this in detail. Capone was once in the Army and served alongside of Asilas in their early years. Asilas ascended in rank and Capone left the Army due to an injury. They remained friends and stayed in touch over the years. To sum it up, during the war, the United States was in utter chaos -with battlefronts scattered across the entire country. The one place where the civil war was not felt so disruptively was New York City. School children continued to go to school and life was as normal as it could have been during such a tumultuous time. The establishment of Marshall Law at the conclusion of the war by General Asilas enabled school systems to be community hubs for dissemination of information, instructions, basic first aid, and a plethora of social services so people would not have to venture far from their homes during the transitionary period. In a large city like New York, this emergency system kept the enormous population from plunging into utter turmoil. Capone, along with the mayor, reassured everyone life can continue as normal as long as they followed the instructions given by Washington and General Asilas. While cities like Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles experienced great upheaval by a restless and paranoid population, New York was largely controlled and managed to stay peaceful during the government transition period. This decorum by New Yorkers on such a vast scale did not go unnoticed by Capone’s old friend, General Asilas.

When Asilas became king, the first person he asked to join his circle was Quintin Capone. For most, he was an enigmatic figure, but New Yorkers and people in the education field on the east coast knew Capone quite well. He was feared and despised by some, but respected by all. No one wished to cross him professionally or personally. So, to those who knew Capone, they were not nearly surprised to learn he would sit at the right hand of the king. The two men were very like-minded and always seemed to accomplish whatever they put their minds to. Their love and admiration for one another is evident in the way they converse. Capone, a brilliant man in his own right, was too smart to question the king when he knew his mind was made up. And whenever he spoke in contrast to the king’s ideas, he knew it to be wise to bow figuratively and literally. However, Asilas had no siblings and was not very close to many in his family since his days in the Army and Capone became his surrogate brother. He loved Capone for the figurative “brother” he was to him. But in the game of chess, Capone was his bishop and would sacrifice him only if absolutely necessary and only if he knew it would help him win the game.

The Homeland Defender’s Program

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In Episode 7, Lord Joshua Jackson (the last president of the United States) enters King Asilas’s inner circle as a trusted member of the High Council. Lord Jackson references The Homeland Defenders Program when it is surmised people who’ve had the “fog lifted” from them engage in violent behavior and exhibit super human strengths. Jackson states certain measures should be limited to only those who need to have their “blood-thirst” quenched. But why exactly do people become “bloodthirsty” in the first place? No information or details about this program is discussed or revealed on the show, but it is clearly important enough to be a consideration as a counteraction of one of the most dangerous exploitations of human inhibitors on the planet.

What is alluded to by King Asilas and others is that the poison filter (code name Trishul -not mentioned in episode 7) removes inhibitors of the human brain and allows the brain’s capacity to be utilized to a much higher degree than normal. This increase in brain capacity results in humans becoming more powerful and seemingly more intelligent -drawing from some ancient knowledge source one struggles to interpret and apply in the modern world. Details of this reaction is discussed further in episode 8. Subjects acquire the ability to move objects with their minds and can communicate telepathically. These incredibly potent capabilities cause people to react violently when ancient knowledge surfaces and they realize their existence has essentially amounted to servitude.

In the early, experimental stages of the poison filter, Minister Oreb and his team of military scientists devised a contingency plan in case subjects became too powerful and violent to be contained. They discovered by turning their machine on and off at strategic times, they could tell who in their population of subjects would be prone to uncontrollable violence and super human strength, especially levitation and moving heavy objects with their minds. They called these individuals “Destroyers.” The Destroyers could be isolated and placed in special quarantine, where they could be studied further.

By sheer chance, one of their test subjects was a Satanist. Oreb and his team witnessed a group of Destroyers corner the Satanist and collectively decimated him by levitating him high up in the air and ripping his body apart while suspended in the air and then causing the pieces to go ablaze, incinerating him in midair. Then, they all levitated, encircling the ashes in a whirlwind. Later on, Oreb interviewed some of the subjects who remembered what they had done and asked them why they chose to kill one in their group the way they did. They all had the same answer; citing they just knew that individual was evil and partly responsible for their enslavement. They also revealed they simply could not stop themselves in this blood-thirst to eradicate anything touched by Satan.

Oreb and his team attempted to train these Destroyers as black op soldiers, but all endeavors to do so ended in failure. Oreb first took his wild ideas to turn these Destroyers into extensions of the military to the king, but Asilas understood the stark danger in releasing these people into the general public . There was simply no way of hindering them if they were out in the open. King Asilas instructed Oreb and his team to report only to him and not give details of their observations to anyone, not even other members of the High Council. Asilas wanted only a limited number of people in his inner circle to know the details of the Destroyers -still suspicious of a possible mole in his midst. So, they created the “Homeland Defender’s Program” as a means to code what they plan to do when they lift the fog on Americans.

King Asilas, Minister Oreb and Lord Roberts were the only members of the High Council who knew all the details of the Homeland Defender’s Program. Jackson mentioning it and Capone commenting on it was merely a way for King Asilas to make sure they were not the moles. After this test was completed, Asilas knew he could trust Jackson and Capone wholeheartedly. Originally, they wanted to test the poison filter on places like Las Vegas, a place surrounded by a desert in order to control the masses in case they needed to quarantine an entire city. But this idea was too risky. Instead, they used large underground bases and secret underground cities (Asilas only learned about these “cities” once he became king) to place and test the groups of Destroyers. Then, they would use the poison filter in increments in order to locate those individuals who could not be easily controlled and who would exhibit super human strength. What essentially amounted to private citizens suddenly being placed under arrest without breaking any laws would have created a public relations nightmare for the king. So, instead, he found creative ways to have these individuals register in the Homeland Defender’s Program. They received great benefits for their registration, but only under the stipulation they would have to report to undisclosed locations in times of a national emergency. This is how King Asilas was able to safeguard the quarantine of millions of Americans in the event the fog is lifted on citizens of the New Kingdom of America. The underground cities dotted across the kingdom were enormous and intricately connected through an elaborate tunnel system. Entire underground metropolitans (some as large as Houston) with hundred of thousands of people existed under everyone’s feet without ever even knowing it. So, Asilas realized it would be simpler to test people who were already underground and gave Lords Oreb and Roberts complete authority to carry out the tests on populations of people who were miles underground before trying it on people on the surface. Asilas also gave Lord Capone authority in this regard, as he relieved Oreb of is obligations with testing alongside Lord Roberts to complete the orchestrated actions pertaining to the occupation of Mexico.

The High Council was well aware of the program and knew eventually there would be millions of names on the list. They also knew the only thing that would keep them controlled long enough for their effects to wear off was the collective objective of destroying Satanists. King Asilas felt it was safe to let the High Council know the nuts and bolts of the program, but kept most of the minute details with Oreb and Roberts. The poison filter (Trishul) was such a powerful and useful weapon, King Asilas would one day became the most powerful man in the entire world because of it. The Monster Group became increasingly aware of Asilas’s weapon, but were not able to have someone close enough to the king to learn all the intricate details. For this reason, they had no choice but to keep a certain distance and hope Asilas would not send one of his own Destroyer infiltrators into their midst. However, their corner was shrinking and Asilas continued to close in on the Monster Group both on the surface and underground. Both the Monsters and Asilas proceeded with their respective plans and counter plans knowing the only resolve would be the complete annihilation of their opposition. Each were certain they would prevail.

Season 1 Wrap-Up

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While the show went through many twists and turns in the writing process, fans might be surprised to learn that some of those twists had a lot to do with variables in the real world. For example, many of the cast members are public school teachers in Baltimore City. We (meaning myself as the writer and main actor and my colleagues) have tried very hard to make our schedules flexible so we could record after a long day of dealing with middle school students. Sometimes, these schedules wouldn’t work and the availability (or lack thereof) of some of the actors forced me to re-write parts of the storyline all together -sometimes midway in the production of an episode. But, of course, I’m a well seasoned writer and these bumps actually made me think of more creative ways to make the story stay in rhythm.

But now that Season 1 is complete, I can honestly say much was learned from both the writing aspect and the production. Season 1 was way over budget and I blame my lack of experience in the production side of things for this. Next season, there will be less of a need to spend so much money on things I can do myself. Plus the publishing company that finances this show has put a cap on the budget for next season. Anyway, as the season progressed, there was more of a conscientious effort to streamline the production for a finer quality sound. The equipment wasn’t any different; the finesse in the production improved.

I’m certain Season 2 will be much more action packed and intense because there is so much conflict that needs to be resolved. Plus, I will spend a great deal of time over the summer planning the next two seasons and get a jump start on the production long before the next school year begins. You see, we can’t do Season 2 right now because the school year is about to end and we (meaning most of the cast) won’t have access to everything needed to produce the show. We want to preserve the environment as much as possible so when September rolls around, it’ll be like Season 1 -only we’ll be better prepared and more experienced. But like every school year, teachers move around and I am praying everyone stays at the same school when the fall session begins. If not, that would present a little problem in accessibility to some of the characters and thus I’ll have to work around that. Not to mention there will be more students who will want to be part of the show (as many have expressed great interest) and that will also be something to consider. The more staff and students participate, the cheaper the production because it’s essentially an after school project and there’s less money involved -just what’s spent on pizza and sound effects.

I don’t want fans to think I’m being cheap. On the contrary, the less money spent on actors, the more can be spent on the production -and that’s really what’s at the heart of this project. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be paid actors in the show -of course there will be. In spite of having a company finance the show, the truth is it isn’t a very large company and money is tight. Professionals and semi-professionals will likely join our cast because let’s face it -when you pay for an actor, you generally get good stuff. I literally had to shelve characters on the show because the (free) actors were so bad. Anyway, the storyline for Season 2 is quite ambitious, so there will be many late nights editing and fine-tuning every second and every sound effect. That’s really where my focus will be on. Oh yeah, and I’ll be finishing the novel while all of this is going on.

~JV Torres