Fictional Stories for Fictional Audiences

Conclave | #1

Who Will be the Next Leader of the Catholic Church?

May 03, 2025

After Pope Francis’ death, the conclave erupts into holy chaos. Cardinals are part diplomats, part schemers. They leverage modern tools (AI, social media, opposition research) to lobby, sabotage, and outmaneuver rivals. Publicly, they project piety and unity. Privately, they’re calculating politicians racing to exploit cracks in the Church’s fragile global coalition.

Please note: this is fiction.

Cardinal Al Byrne — “Vatican’s ‘Algorithm Cardinal’ Purges AI After Dinner Debacle—Insiders Whisper ‘Even Satan Pities Him.’”

Arrivals & Algorithms

Cardinal Al Byrne’s dented Fiat choked its way through Rome, the engine hacking like a chain-smoking archbishop. The scarlet skullcap on his head—zucchetto, the uniform of papal politics—might as well have been a flashing neon sign: SPY INBOUND. Outside his window, the city sprawled in glorious contradiction: Renaissance domes loomed over kiosks hawking Aperol Spritz. If the Vatican was God’s meticulous ledger, Rome was His junk drawer—stuffed with receipts for every bad idea heaven ever had.

Byrne thumbed his tablet awake. He prompted his AI assistant whether God preferred Excel or Google Sheets. The question was rhetorical, of course—Byrne had long suspected the Almighty’s tastes leaned toward celestial abacuses—but he enjoyed needling VeritasGPT, his custom-built large language model, into theological absurdities

The screen’s glow carved hollows into his face as VeritasGPT—his personalized AI trained on six centuries of papal decrees—processed his latest heresy. The reply flickered back, drier than a Vatican sermon: “Analysis inconclusive. Recommend stone tablets (Exodus 34:1) or divine cloud storage (Exodus 13:21).”

The car shuddered to a stop outside a 17th-century townhouse, its limestone facade pockmarked by time. Byrne’s cane struck the cobblestones—a souvenir from Dublin, where parish politics required more than prayer to survive. Inside, the air hung thick with the musk of old parchment and reheated pasta. His aide Siobhan had turned the salon into a hacker den: glowing laptops, tangled cables, and a map of past conclaves annotated with “Borgia bribes HERE” and “NO ESPRESSO AFTER 8 PM (see: 1542 ‘Sleepless Heresy’ incident).”

She slapped a dossier into his hands. “Nguyen’s sermons—that’s ‘win,’ by the way, like the thing we’re all pretending we don’t want. Your AI flagged fourteen rants about ‘tradition’ and one panic attack over TikTok.”
A sticky note on the cover declared: *Charisma score: 2/10. Warning: Prolonged eye contact may cause drowsiness.*
Byrne sighed. “Lord deliver us from metrics.”
Siobhan snorted. “Says the man who tracked Dublin’s confession stats in a pivot table.”

Outside, dusk settled over Rome like a threadbare choir robe. Byrne’s driver—Giancarlo, an 80-year-old Roman who’d smuggled Popes through riots—lit a cigarette and muttered: “Lui crede che gli algoritmi siano meglio del fumo negli occhi.” (He thinks algorithms beat smoke and mirrors.)

Byrne didn’t need a translation. The Old Guard’s distrust was as reliable as a Vatican clock—and just as broken.

Upstairs, a scrap of paper coiled under his door like a venomous snake. The Latin was clumsy, the ink cut with sacramental wine:
“Iudas 2.0? Pœnitentiam agite. —Amici Traditionis.” (Judas 2.0? Repent. —Friends of Tradition.)

Byrne held it to the guttering light.
They’d misspelled paenitentiam.

**Cardinal Eleanor Nguyen during a sermon.**

Byrne poured a finger of Jameson, the whiskey’s peat-smoke bite cutting through the room’s mildew. His borrowed apartment was a museum of holy rot: flaking frescoes of martyrs mid-scream, a radiator that hissed like a nest of vipers, and a landline phone that had likely brokered more indulgences (*pay-to-pardon sins, discontinued in the ‘90s*) than prayers. He cracked open The Imitation of Christ, its pages dog-eared at the chapter on humility—a virtue he’d bookmarked purely for tactical reasons. A brittle Post-it fluttered out: “Remember: Even Judas had a backup plan,” his own seminary handwriting taunting him. Dublin’s back alleys had taught him contingency; Rome demanded divine alchemy.

A Vespa backfired below, as Roman as the cobblestones. His tablet buzzed: VeritasGPT had dissected the “Friends of Tradition,” cross-referencing their rants with 16th-century heresy trials. The verdict? *“73% match to neo-Ultramontanist rhetoric (Translation: Pope-worshipping fanatics). Suggested pacification: liturgical nostalgia. FYI—Gregorian chant streaming stocks up 12%.”*

“Pacification,” Byrne muttered. As if souls were data centers.

The threat note’s ink—cut with sacramental wine, now vinegar—stung his thumb. Amateur move, but the fear behind it? Ancient. Every conclave bred Judases. Byrne knew reform wasn’t a crusade; it was a draft, eternally edited.

A knock. Siobhan leaned in, her tablet blaring a livestream of Swiss Guards practicing halberd spins (think papal bouncers with poleaxes). “Giancarlo says the Old Guard’s ‘prayer vigil’ is code for taste-testing veal suppliers. Their victory banquet’s gonna be lit.”

“Save me a seat.” Byrne tossed the note into a drawer jammed with rosaries, USB drives, and a half-eaten bag of communion wafers (emergency snacks). “Dig up dirt on the ‘Amici.’ Are they actual heretics, or just Latin fetishists?”

“Already did. They’re 60% liturgical LARPers.” She paused. “You know they’re right, though. The machines can’t fix this.”

Byrne glanced at the fresco of St. Jerome, the lion at the saint’s feet side-eyeing him like a disappointed deacon. “Neither can we. But at least the machines don’t lie about it.”

Byrne knelt to wrestle the warped window shut. A neon Aperol ad bathed the room in cyan. He raised his glass to Rome’s holy mess. “Sláinte, Jerome. Let’s see if the Devil takes Apple Pay.”

The machines hummed. Somewhere, a server farm ingested another psalm.

Cardinal Mateo Herrera — "Disgraced Cardinal’s ‘Tech Exorcism’ Night Ends in Solitary Spirits."

Dinner & Data

Cardinal Mateo Herrera didn’t trust algorithms, but desperation made hypocrites of saints. In the backroom of Trattoria da Enzo, he adjusted his scarlet skullcap (zucchetto) in the gilded reflection of Pope Pius XII—a pontiff famous for silence as Nazis marched. ConclavePredict, the AI he’d bought from ex-seminarians turned tech bros, had cost €200,000 of donor funds. Its latest decree glowed on his tablet: “68% receptivity boost if seated near liturgical dancers. Culinary nostalgia imperative: Serve Kenyan chai, plantain chips, cilantro garnish.”

Herrera grimaced. He’d once watched Cardinal Mbeki—a Kenyan hardliner whose glare could peel frescoes—trip over his cassock during a Pentecost procession. Mbeki had hissed at a snickering altar boy: “Even angels stumble.” Grace wasn’t his thing.

“Dios mío,” Herrera muttered, “since when is communion a focus group?”

The trattoria’s owner—a Roman whose ancestors had poisoned cardinals for the Borgias (Renaissance’s worst popes)—waddled in with wine older than Vatican II. The walls bristled with papal portraits, their eyes tracking Herrera’s every sweat bead. He’d booked this room for its dead zones: no Wi-Fi, no spies, just the ghosts of power dinners past.

Mbeki arrived first, handshake crushing Herrera’s fingers. “A pleasure, Eminence.”
“Your work with the youth—”
“—is God’s excuse for our failures.” Mbeki’s smile was a machete in velvet. “How… observant of you.”

The others shuffled in:

Okeke, Lagos’s sharp-tongued theologian,
Ndlovu, South Africa’s silent storm,
Guzmán, a Bolivian blinking like he’d wandered into the wrong crusade. (“Perdón,” he mumbled. “Thought this was the root canal summit.”)

Herrera’s aide Luca hovered, tablet flashing dietary landmines: “Okeke: shellfish allergy. Guzmán: gluten-free (AI says +12% empathy).”
Herrera whispered: “Since when?”
“Since the algorithm outvoted common sense.”

The first course arrived: plantain chips with cilantro, artfully arranged like the Last Supper’s appetizer. Mbeki sniffed, nostrils flaring like a heresy detector. “An… interesting choice.”

Herrera leaned in, candlelight glinting off his silvering temples. “A taste of home, no?”
Mbeki set down his fork. “I’m deathly allergic to cilantro.”

Silence. A papal portrait’s eyes rolled.

Cardinal Adofo Mbeki — "‘The African Lion’ Leaves Dinner Early—Sources Say ‘Cilantro Was Just the Excuse.’"

Herrera’s smile fossilized mid-charm. He’d fed ConclavePredict everything—Mbeki’s sermons, Nairobi’s rainfall stats (turns out, downpours make cardinals doubt papal infallibility). But cilantro? The AI had missed a landmine any market granny could’ve spotted.

Luca lunged for the tainted plate like it held the actual Devil. “A mix-up!” Herrera croaked. “The chef confused coriander with charity.”

Mbeki’s stare sharpened. “Charity isn’t garnish, Eminence. It’s the meal.”

Herrera pivoted to synodality—the Church’s favorite buzzword, vague as the trattoria’s tiramisu. “The Holy Spirit isn’t a compass. It’s a GPS—recalculating.”

Mbeki’s fork froze. “A GPS needs satellites. Our Church is a desert. The stars we follow?” He sipped wine. “Already dead.”

Okeke snorted into his chai. “My Lagos flock tithes in Bitcoin. I told them Satan still prefers cash.” The table chuckled, a sound like rosary beads dragged through sand.

Luca’s earpiece buzzed: “Laughter detected. Deploy Vulnerability Protocol.”

Herrera ignored him. Mbeki wasn’t a “reformer”—he was an archaeologist, digging past Rome’s colonial rubble to resurrect a faith older than Latin.

Dessert arrived: tiramisu dusted with holy ash. Guzmán, caffeine-jolted, rambled about Bolivian miners worshipping Pachamama (indigenous earth goddess, Vatican’s nemesis). Ndlovu, silent all night, dropped a bomb: “Vatican II was karaoke theology. We sang, but the lyrics weren’t ours.”

Mbeki stood, his chair screeching like a sinner at Judgment. “Next time, skip the algorithms. And the cilantro.”

Alone, Herrera swirled grappa, its swirls mirroring his regret. Luca hovered, clutching his tablet like a lifeline. “The AI suggests groveling in Nairobi.”

“Mbeki doesn’t want apologies. He wants our silence.”

The truth ached: ConclavePredict was a placebo. Once, Herrera drafted encyclicals that shook Rome. Now he peddled bite-sized diplomacy, mistaking tweets for truth.

Luca ventured: “The Jesuits say failure is God’s way of—”

“—trolling us?” Herrera drained his glass. “Tell them to stick to wine and dick jokes.”

Outside, the trattoria owner swept crumbs from papal portraits, their eyes still judging. Herrera left a tip that wouldn’t absolve anyone, least of all himself.

Cardinal Angelo Guzmán — "‘Andean Cardinal’ Goes Off-Script, Traditionalists Fume Over ‘Pagan Dessert Rant.’"

To be continued…

Thank you!

Prompting Culture

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