Conclave | #4
Who Will be the Next Leader of the Catholic Church?
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 Silent Schism
The blackout began with a bang, and also with a breath—a collective exhale as the Sistine Chapel’s Wi-Fi flatlined. Cardinal Byrne’s tablet dimmed mid-sacrilege, SacraStakes’ neon odds fading like a sinner’s resolve. Around him, cardinals clutched dead devices, their faces lit only by the Judgment’s frescoed hellfire. No alarms, no sparks—just the mute verdict of unplugged eternity.
Nguyen was the first to move. From his cassock, he withdrew a quill and vellum, the tools of a man who’d learned scripture under artillery fire. “We voted with parchment long before hashtags,” he said, the scratch of nib on paper a rebuke to the silence.
Herrera lunged into the void. “Who here knows Latin well enough to count?” His voice cracked, stripped of digital amplification.
Cardinal Okeke raised a hand. “I know ‘Fiat lux’. It’s not helping.”
In the hall, Swiss Guard Corporal Müller paced beneath a marble Peter, his burner phone buzzing with SacraStakes panic. “Is white smoke tradable?!”
“Sì, ma solo se non è crypto,” he snapped. (“Yes, but only if it’s not crypto.”)
Byrne stalked the vestry, cornering Tech Father Anselm—a Benedictine with a server room key around his neck. “Fix. It.”
Anselm crossed himself. “Eminence, the outage isn’t technical. It’s… theological.”
The outage’s source revealed itself in a surge of heat. Tech Father Anselm traced the collapse to Kraków’s deconsecrated chapel, now a crypto farm run by ex-seminarians mining Ethereum with stolen sacramental servers. “They overloaded the grid,” Anselm muttered, clutching a rosary of frayed Ethernet cables. “Penance and a new circuit breaker.”
Byrne stormed into the Sistine Chapel, where cardinals now hunched over parchment ballots like medieval scribes. Herrera’s tablet lay abandoned, its screen cracked underfoot. “We need order,” Byrne barked.
“Order?” Nguyen didn’t look up from his vellum. “The Spirit thrives in silence.”
Müller intercepted a courier smuggling SacraStakes odds carved into communion wafers. “Basta,” he growled, confiscating the wafers—and pocketing one for later.
Amid the chaos, Matteo’s forged Leo XIII letter resurfaced, clutched by a radical archbishop demanding “divine democracy now!” Herrera, desperate to reclaim relevance, cited it mid-vote: “Even Leo XIII endorsed reform!”
Nguyen’s quill paused. “Leo XIII died in 1903. This letter reeks of Palermo.”
The archbishop flushed. Matteo, eavesdropping from the archives, smirked.
By nightfall, the grid flickered back. SacraStakes bots revived, spinning odds like a roulette wheel. But the cardinals lingered, their handwritten votes revealing alliances no algorithm predicted. Nguyen’s ballot bore a single word: “Crescere” (To grow). Byrne’s read: “Silentium” (Silence).
In the gardens, Müller dumped the crypto-stained wafers into a fountain. Keller eyed him. “Neutrality, Corporal?”
“Neutrality starves,” Müller said, watching the wafers dissolve.
Nguyen found Matteo in the subbasement, bathed in server glow. “Your forgeries almost burned us.”
Matteo gestured to the restored grid. “Fire clears deadwood.”
Above them, the Sistine Chapel’s lights hummed—but the votes, now eternalized in ink, refused to pixelate.
Midnight draped the chapel in a silence so thick it felt sacramental. Candlelight pooled on the cardinals’ faces, etching shadows into the crevices of their doubts. Byrne’s pen hovered over his ballot, ink bleeding into the vellum like a confession. Nearby, Herrera stared into his wine cup, the dregs reflecting a man who’d gambled on algorithms and found them wanting.
Nguyen wrote without hesitation. His grandmother had taught him to vote under mortar fire, her hand steady as she etched saints’ names onto rice paper. “The devil fears quiet men,” she’d say. “He can’t hear them coming.”
The ballots piled atop St. Augustine’s mosaic, their wax seals glowing like tiny tabernacles. The question hung unspoken: Was this sabotage, surrender, or the Spirit’s last stand against the dopamine drip of progress?
Matteo lingered in the apse, a specter in a moth-eaten cassock. He’d drafted a homily on the outage—“Apocalypse 2.0: The Buffering”—but let the parchment burn. Some silences, he knew, were not to be broken. They were to be listened to.
The Codex Coup
The Sistine Chapel’s vaulted silence shattered at dawn when Patriarch Volkov, flanked by white-gloved archivists, unfurled a 15th-century parchment. Its brittle Latin decreed: “Conclavis acta in lingua Latina tantum—sub poena excommunicationis.” (Conclave proceedings in Latin only—under penalty of excommunication.) The traditionalists had weaponized the archives, and the Church held its breath.
Cardinal Byrne squinted at the text. “That’s not a canon. That’s a Post-it from the Council of Basel.”
Volkov’s smile was a blade. “Authenticity is a matter of faith, Eminence.”
The reformers floundered. Herrera’s Latin, polished in Roman salons, dissolved under pressure: “Synodalitas est… um… jazz divinus!” The scribe, a Benedictine with a face like a disappointed Church Father, struck his ballot. “Invalidus. Jazz non est dogma.”
Only Nguyen remained unshaken. Beneath the fresco of Jonah swallowed by doubt, he penned his vote in Ciceronian Latin, each stroke a rebuke: “Ecclesia non est algorithmus.” (The Church is not an algorithm.)
A young Nigerian cardinal leaned in. “Eminence, what’s the ablative absolute for ‘bullshit’?”
“Caveat emptor,” Nguyen murmured. “Let the buyer beware.”
Matteo found Volkov’s forgery tucked between folios of a 12th-century penitential manual, its parchment too smooth, its ink too eager. The decree’s Latin bristled with anachronisms—synodalitas had been coined in 1965, not 1431. He traced the fake seal, its wax still faintly tacky. Amateur hour, he thought. In Palermo, his nun-mentor had forged Ottoman land grants with chicken blood and ash.
He cornered Byrne in the sacristy, the counterfeit canon clutched like a dagger. “Volkov’s bluffing. This ‘decree’ was penned last Tuesday.”
Byrne eyed the parchment. “Proof?”
“The ink’s acrylic. The Council of Basel used walnut gall. Also, the Latin’s Google Translate bad.”
Byrne’s grin was a flicker of Dublin alleyways. “Let’s give Volkov enough rope to hang his own halo.”
The compromise unfolded at Vespers. Byrne addressed the conclave beneath Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, where damned souls twisted in silent critique. “Latin stays,” he declared. “But so do shadow scribes—translators in the alcoves. Think of them as… confessors for the lexically challenged.”
Volkov’s jaw tightened. “Barbari sunt in aula!”
“Yes, yes,” Byrne said. “The barbarians are here. They’re us.”
Nguyen’s ballot—Ecclesia non est algorithmus—circulated among reformers, its clarity a rebuke to Volkov’s obfuscation. Herrera, desperate to salvage relevance, sidled up to Volkov: “Perhaps a joint statement on… jazz liturgicus?”
Volkov recoiled. “Your Latin is a crime against God and man.”
In the archives, Matteo inscribed a final jab in the margins of Volkov’s forgery: “Ubi potestas, ibi peccatum.” (Where there’s power, there’s sin.) He slipped the codex back into its case, its secret now a seed.
Nguyen found him hours later, dusting residue from a 9th-century psalter. “You play a dangerous game, boy.”
Matteo didn’t look up. “You let them call you Eleanor. We’re all heretics here.”
At dawn, the conclave reconvened. Volkov’s Latin bloc fractured, their ballots riddled with scribal “errors” suspiciously favoring Nguyen. Byrne’s shadow scribes hummed in the alcoves, their whispers a counterpoint to the old guard’s growls. High above, Jonah’s fresco glared, his whale’s belly lit by the glow of a single candle—Matteo’s, burning in the Archivum Secretum.
To be continued…
Thank you!
This five-part story was generated using DeepSeek, with some human edits (~75% AI)
Prompt: Now that pope Francis has died, we need to come up with a fictionalized, entertaining, humorous, and highly relevant account of the search for a successor. This story will be called Conclave. Provide plot ideas now. Read [news articles] for inspiration, but don't focus too much on their exact content; we're looking for something new and original.(…)
Prompt: Let's use ideas 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8! AI is a great angle, but we must stay away from old tropes: old-timey-robot-voice, evil-AI-taking-over-the-world, hacker nonsense. Instead, let's think of more interesting and realistic options. No time travel.(…)
Core Premise: The Francis Algorithm (Inspired by Idea 8)
Pope Francis left behind a cryptic final message: “My successor lies where the lions sleep.” The Vatican’s secretive AI system—SACRA (Systematic Algorithm for Catholic Revelation and Ascension)—is tasked with decoding it. SACRA, designed to analyze centuries of encyclicals, historical texts, and Francis’s own speeches, spits out absurd clues that send cardinals scrambling across Rome. But SACRA has a quirk: It’s been trained on too much medieval theology and Francis’s off-the-cuff jokes, leading to gloriously unhinged interpretations.
(…)
Prompt: Why would Francis leave any clues? Why a treasure hunt? No, that's not what we want at all. The Vatican's own clunky AI system is weird: can that really make for a good story? Think it through. Maybe add a political angle. Try again.(…)
Core Premise: The Digital Crusade
The death of Pope Francis triggers a conclave where 133 cardinals—divided by ideology, geography, and ambition—vie for power. Behind the scenes, they weaponize modern tools (AI, social media, leaks) to lobby, sabotage, and outmaneuver rivals. The story unfolds through three lenses: global cultural clashes, tech-driven political scheming, and the absurdity of maintaining dignity in a meme-driven world**.
(…)
(10 more prompts were needed to get something decent)