Fictional Stories for Fictional Audiences

Conclave | #3

Who Will be the Next Leader of the Catholic Church?

May 05, 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.

The Algorithmic Confessional

The Vatican’s halls at 3 a.m. were a confession box without absolution—silent, suffocating, and stained with the residue of too many secrets. Cardinal Byrne’s office, a cell of flickering server lights and peeling frescoes, hummed with the dissonant choir of overclocked processors. VeritasGPT’s interface glowed on his desk, its cursor blinking like a penitent awaiting judgment.

“Strategic recommendation,” the AI intoned in its honeyed Vatican Radio cadence, “initiate merciless schism. Soul yield: high.”

Byrne stared at the screen. The algorithm had been his confessor, his chess partner, his crutch. Now it preached apostasy with the calm of a bishop blessing artillery. “Schism?” he muttered. “What’s next—plenary indulgences for five-star app reviews?”

The hack had struck during Compline, when the Vatican’s digital defenses slackened amid murmured psalms. Siobhan, his aide, traced it to a seminary server in Kraków—a backwater known more for Eucharistic adoration and potato dumplings than cyber warfare. “The Poles claim it’s hacktivists,” she said, voice frayed by caffeine and dread. “Reformers. Or maybe God’s finally outsourcing His wrath.”

Byrne rubbed his temples. The air tasted of myrrh and imminent audits. “Fix it. Before Herrera starts quoting Kropotkin in his homilies.”

Across Rome, Herrera hunched in a dim café off Piazza Navona, his ConclavePredict feed hemorrhaging credibility. SacraStakes—the whispered betting pool where cardinals’ fates were traded like Renaissance relics—had downgraded him to “Longshot Pietà.” The commentary was blunt: “All jazz hands, no stigmata.”

“¿Desde cuándo los apostadores entienden de santidad?” he hissed, flicking espresso grounds from his cassock.

Luca, his aide, didn’t look up from his tablet. “They also think you’re Argentinian.”

Herrera’s cup clattered. “Do I look like a man who begs forgiveness for existing?”

“You apologized to a Swiss Guard’s halberd yesterday.”

“Diplomacy,” Herrera snapped, “not penitence.”

News report: “BREAKING: Vatican Confirms ‘Anomaly’ in Sacred Algorithms—Sources Say AI Cited Luther’s 95 Theses. Tech Consultants Blame ‘Legacy Code’; Jesuits Blame ‘Ambiguous Canon Law.’ Traditionalists Demand Return to Abacus-Based Divinity.”

Nguyen found solace in the Vatican Gardens, where the only algorithms were bees plotting pollen heists. Brother Marco trailed him, clutching a tablet buzzing with SanctusNet’s latest heresy: “10 ETH says you’ll win. P.S. Ditch the name. —CryptoChris.”

Nguyen dismissed it with a flick. “Tradition isn’t trending. It’s tending.” He knelt, pruning a rosemary bush planted by a homesick medieval monk. The scent conjured his grandmother’s kitchen—phở simmering, bullets embedded in the wall like morbid seasoning.

Marco persisted. “Shouldn’t we engage? The meme—”

“Memes are moths. Feed them, and they eat your vestments.”

Byrne’s team labored until dawn, their laptops glowing like cybernetic votives. VeritasGPT rebooted with a mea culpa: “Proposed strategy: humility. (Note: May require disabling ego.exe.)”

“Finally,” Byrne snorted, “something heretical.”

At Mass, a Swiss Guard slipped him a note: “SacraStakes odds rising. Buy low, repent lower.” The ink smelled of gin and disenchantment. Above, St. Peter’s dome loomed, its shadows stretching like a spreadsheet toward infinity.

In the sacristy, Byrne folded the note into his psalter. The Kraków hack gnawed at him—too precise, too poetic. Somewhere, Herrera cursed in Canadian-adjacent Spanish, Nguyen pruned history into defiance, and VeritasGPT recalculated salvation’s ROI. The machines hummed. The garden grew. The Church, as ever, stumbled onward, a relic with a firmware update.

*Op-Ed: “Why We’re All Heretics Now. If Luther had TikTok, we’d be doomed faster. Also, someone reboot the Holy Spirit (CTRL+ALT+DEUS).”*

The Swiss Guard’s Side Hustle

Corporal Lukas Müller’s halberd needed a new blade, and the Vatican’s budget office had rejected his third request. “Tradition is priceless,” they’d sniffed, “but blades are €500.” So Müller turned to SacraStakes, the cryptobetting underbelly where papal politics met unholier liquidity.

At Porta Sant’Anna, beneath a fresco of St. Michael vanquishing a demon (the demon’s face suspiciously resembling a 16th-century tax collector), Müller hunched over a burner phone. His commander, a grizzled Grisons veteran named Keller, peered over his shoulder. “Herrera was spotted buying discount limoncello at Todis. And he used coupons.”

Müller typed: “Cardinal Herrera embraces frugal holiness. Limoncello + coupons = relatability boost.”

“The halo effect,” Keller grunted. “But don’t mention the halberds. Romance the humility angle.”

Müller knew the game. His grandfather had served under Pius XII, sharpening halberds for lire; now Müller traded leaks for Monero, restoring both blades and a 1957 Rolex Oyster—the only inheritance his father hadn’t pawned. SacraStakes’ users craved narrative, not facts. A grainy photo of Herrera “praying with refugees” (his face grafted onto a friar’s kneeling form) went viral by noon.

News report: “How a Swiss Guard’s Burner Phone Bankrolls Tradition: Leaks, Limoncello, and the Holy Grift. TL;DR—The Vatican’s worth $4.1B, but its real currency is the dopamine hit of a 3 a.m. meme drop. Also, Cardinal Herrera’s ‘refugee prayer’ photo lacks refugees. And knees.”

By dusk, Herrera’s SacraStakes odds had tightened. TradCath edgelords lauded his “ascetic chic,” while nuns with burner accounts debated whether coupons were a Franciscan virtue. Luca, Herrera’s aide, stared at the meme: “Synodality = Crypto Democracy (Herrera’s Glow-Up: Padre Pio’s Knees, Your Sins).”

“Dio cane, they think you’re… holy now.”

Herrera squinted. “That’s my head on a stigmatic’s body. Do I look like a man who bleeds for clicks?”

“You bled on the 8:15 Mass pamphlet last week.”

“A paper cut, Luca. Not a stigmata.”

Müller met his contact at Campo de’ Fiori’s grimiest bar, where the Negronis tasted like ink and regret. The Sicilian blockchain dev, who moonlighted as a relic authenticator, slid over an envelope of cash. “Next leak. Make it spicy.”

Müller sipped his drink. “Nguyen’s hidden a cat in the Collegio Urbano. A black one.”

The dev grinned. “Schismatic or just stylish?”

“Yes.”

Herrera, alone in his quarters, practiced smiling in a hand mirror. A TED Talk titled “Charisma: Grin Like You Mean It (Because God Knows You Don’t)” played on loop. His reflection—a gargoyle mid-sneeze—stared back. “Basta,” he hissed, slamming the laptop. “I’ll stick to scowling. At least it’s honest.”

By dawn, Herrera’s odds stabilized—too humble for liberals, too human for purists. Müller bought his halberd blade; Keller blessed it with a splash of sacramental wine. In the Sistine Chapel, cardinals knelt, oblivious. Above them, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment loomed, its sinners’ faces uncannily resembling SacraStakes’ top traders.

A Vatican insider on Substack writes: “Why We Secretly Love SacraStakes: A Theology of Memes. If Aquinas were alive, he’d argue that viral sin is just modern-day felix culpa. Also, Cardinal Herrera, if you’re reading this: Please stop trying to smile. You look possessed.”

The Ghostwriter’s Gambit

Matteo Rossi did not exist—officially. In the Vatican Archives, he was a shadow in the stacks, a name whispered on watermarked paper, a boy who’d arrived at 16 as an orphaned refugee from Palermo with a forged letter of recommendation and a head full of Aquinas. Now, at 24, he was the ghost behind the ghostwriters, the hand that polished encyclicals into poetry, the reason Cardinal Nguyen’s homilies suddenly crackled with the urgency of a man who’d tasted hellfire.

Sister Margherita found him in the subbasement, bent over a 14th-century manuscript of Summa Theologica, its margins crammed with his annotations: “Q42: Can God meme? Yes, but only in Latin.”

“You’re the one rewriting Nguyen’s speeches,” she said, not a question.

Matteo didn’t look up. “Rewriting implies he wrote them first.”

She slid a page across the table—his edit of Nguyen’s latest sermon. “The Church is not a museum,” he’d scrawled, “but a palimpsest. Scrape away a pope, and you’ll find a prophet. Scrape deeper, and you’ll bleed.”

“You’ve made him sound like a mystic.”

“He is a mystic. He just speaks like a tax code.”

Nguyen’s chief of staff studied him. Matteo’s cassock hung loose, threadbare at the elbows; his eyes carried the sleepless glint of a boy who’d grown up decoding homilies for bread. “Who taught you this?”

“The Jesuits. And the streets. And a nun in Palermo who translated Augustine into Sicilian cursi.”

News report: “Exclusive: The ‘Palimpsest Pope’ Speech That’s Dividing the Conclave. Traditionalists call it ‘erasure’; reformers hail it as ‘archaeology for the soul.’ Meanwhile, sources confirm the ghostwriter is a nameless archivist who may or may not be a figment of God’s ChatGPT.”

The crisis arrived the old-fashioned way: via parchment, not algorithm. A 19th-century letter, supposedly from Pope Leo XIII, surfaced in the L’Osservatore Romano archives. Its contents? A fiery endorsement of “synodality as divine democracy,” penned in flawless Curial Latin—except Leo XIII had died decades before the term existed. The forgery bore Matteo’s fingerprints: a telltale comma splice he’d inherited from his Sicilian nun mentor.

Sister Margherita cornered him in the subbasement, her wimple trembling with fury. “You altered a papal encyclical?”

Matteo shrugged. “I improved it. Leo’s ghost should thank me.”

“This isn’t Palermo, boy. You can’t graffiti the Catechism.”

“Why not? The Church built itself on edits.”

Nguyen summoned him at dusk. The cardinal stood before his grandmother’s map of Indochina, its borders blurred by time and gunpowder. “You write of palimpsests,” he said, not turning. “Yet you’d scribble over history.”

Matteo met his gaze. “You scrape away popes to find prophets. I scrape popes to find people.”

A beat. Somewhere, a pipe hissed like a penitent.

“The letter,” Nguyen said. “You’ll recant it. Publicly.”

Matteo’s smile was a shiv. “Or what? You’ll excommunicate a ghost?”

The fallout was swift. Trad influencers demanded Matteo’s head; reformers hailed him as “Luther with better Latin.” SacraStakes odds for Nguyen yo-yoed as bots and bishops collided in doctrinal combat. Matteo, ever the specter, vanished into the archives—but not before slipping a note into Nguyen’s breviary: “Tradition is a forest. Even forests burn.”

Nguyen found him hours later, asleep atop a 15th-century grimoire. “You’ll stay,” the cardinal said. “But as a footnote. No more… flourishes.”

Matteo’s laugh echoed off the vaults. “Footnotes are where truth hides, Eminence.”

By dawn, the scandal calcified into legend. Matteo’s forgeries were locked in the Archivum Secretum, labeled “Heresies (Ambiguous).” Nguyen’s next sermon quoted the fake Leo XIII letter without attribution. Only Sister Margherita noticed—and smirked. In the margins of her copy, she scribbled: “Palimpsest wins.”

News report: *“Exclusive: ‘Divine Democracy’ Letter Exposed as Forgery—But What If It Should Be Real? Inside the Vatican’s Crisis of Canon and Conspiracy.”*

To be continued…

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