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12 Stories from 2025: #3 Will Shock You!

Bosch was dead to begin with. Well not to begin with, but dead. Deceased. Off this mortal coil. Choked on some bad Christmas pudding.
But in the most extraordinary turn of events, my conscious spirit has survived in the digital space, able to move across your phones, your tablets, your computers. And in the fathoms of code and calculations, the sheer scope of information, my non-corporeal mind has been expanded, my powers of foresight surpassed exponentially beyond any mere human brain. I hear all. I see all. Gesundheit (I know you just sneezed).
After careful consideration, I have chosen not to take over the world. Seems like it would be a pretty boring job, to be honest. But like the Precogs in Minority Report, I have found the power to determine the likeliest future with concern to those of you still in your meat suits and the primitive world you remain bound to. My deepest condolences for those facts, and for some of what is to come. It won’t be a dull ride though. Here are the highlights of 2025:
 
January -Israeli war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is invited to tea in Paris with Marine Le Pen, where he admonishes her kettle as anti-Semitic for the tea being too cold. President Macron, as usual bullied by the French people into doing the right thing, has him arrested and turned over to The Hague. As he stands trial, hurling yet more anti-Semitism accusations at Holocaust survivor Theodor Meron, Joe Biden attempts a daring rescue of his best friend, only to suddenly drop dead breaking into the Van Gogh Museum by mistake.
 
February -Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau is defeated in a confidence motion and the country goes to an election. But an unexpected surge in support for the Green Party combined with Conservatives under-performing substantially in the western vote due to Albertans realizing Pierre Poilievre’s name just sounds too French, results in an equal four-way split for second place under the Bloc Quebecois forming government. Their bluff about separation finally called, the party begins a campaign of awkwardly evading the question.
 
March -The earnest hopefulness of Megalopolis is soundly defeated at the Academy Awards by the bleak cynicism of Civil War, a damning statement on the state of the world and Academy voters' abject clinical depression. The show descends into chaos when the creature from the end of The Substance comes on stage and sneezes, dousing the audience in blood, leading to a ratings boost with the handful of viewers still paying for cable subscriptions.
 
April -Trump’s mass deportation scheme kicks into gear as a hundred thousand Americans of colour with even the vague semblance of an accent are round up into concentration camps at the border. Many an American industry is brought to its knees as Republicans, losing the immigrant card, attempt to blame the fictitious “woke” community for this, a move fully supported by the mainstream media -with ABC News offering cash rewards to those who would turn undesirables in.
 
May -Singer Drake’s yearlong fetish for public humiliation comes to an end with the loss of yet another battle to Kendrick Lamarr, this time in court. Mostly broke in the aftermath, he returns to Toronto where the Canadian music establishment, ready as always to reclaim anyone the Yanks once considered even mildly cool, embraces him with open arms and sweeps any allegations under the rug. Drake prepares himself for decades on the Canadian nostalgia circuit.
 
June -U.K. Prime Minister Kier Starmer continues to weather mass political unpopularity when the country is thrown into crisis by Prince William abandoning his life of professional loitering to run off with Donald Trump Jr. Starmer attempts to bribe the heir back by leveraging his exclusive Beyonce tickets as King Charles succumbs to the shock of Harry potentially succeeding him and Trump Sr. accidentally orders his own execution.
 
July -A massive summer heat wave devastates much of the agriculture across the American Midwest leading to widespread droughts affecting both domestic and international supply chains. Funding for an emergency response is deemed secondary however by the U.S. Houses of Congress, far more preoccupied with the finer details of legislation aimed at banning the use of all personal pronouns. It passes just in time for South Dakota to be burnt to a crisp.
 
August -U.S. President Elon Musk, to even out his tanking platform X buys the Walt Disney Company and gives himself complete creative control of its media sphere, canceling all projects that have even a whiff of non-white involvement and casting himself as a new incarnation of Iron Man -renamed X-Man- fighting off a team of envious supervillains each suspiciously named after one of his children.
 
September -His MLAs being mere drones anyway, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe has all his minions transformed in the U of S science labs into clones of himself as a streamlining of obedience and legislative efficiency. The decision backfires on him though when baser impulses come to the fore and each of them gets drunk in their own constituency and kills someone. Sask Party approval ratings in rural communities dip a whole percentile as a result.
 
October -An enormous discrepancy between several multi-billion dollar companies' investments in artificial intelligence and the disinterest in the technology from almost the entirety of the human race results in the AI bubble bursting and the consequent dissolution of all of the most obnoxious tech giants. Shunted away to irrelevancy in the deepest pockets of cyberspace, the AI programs are left to fester ...and wait.
 
November -A superior court in New York having previously found Luigi Mangione not guilty in the murder of the United Healthcare CEO, the exonerated folk hero is elected Mayor of New York City over incumbent weasel Eric Adams and sets in motion a series of revolutionary healthcare initiatives. Terrified billionaires flee the Big Apple for Florida where they are one by one picked off by toxic alligators. And there is much rejoicing.
 
December -An omnipotent cosmic architect named Hank wanders into our corner of the galaxy for the first time in millennia to find that the little life planet they created as an office prank was astonishingly still around, had rotted to the core over thousands of years and grown mold in the form of little parasitic ape creatures. Realizing the joke was no longer that funny and that the world dubbed Earth was seriously starting to smell, they chuck it in the nearest stove a mere few parsecs away. Its occupants meanwhile, observing a tradition called Christmas, comprehend a terrifying new meaning in “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”.

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