The Collectivist
An Ayn Rand Inspired Tale of Architecture and Individuality.
For a full week, Prompting Culture will feature AI-centric sequels to selected well-known works of fiction, in short story format. Enjoy!
⚠ Please note: This story is a work of fan fiction, inspired by Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”. Prompting Culture claims no ownership or copyright over the original characters, settings, or concepts, which remain the exclusive property of the original creator(s). This story is created for entertainment purposes only, and no infringement on the original work's copyright is intended.
The Age of the Second-Hander
New York City, 1952. Fifteen years after Howard Roark dynamited Cortlandt Homes.
The city had not changed. If anything, it had metastasized.
Howard Roark stood at the base of the Wynand Building, his hands in his pockets, his eyes tracing the steel skeleton that clawed at the sky. This was his masterpiece, commissioned by Gail Wynand—the newspaper magnate who had broken himself against Roark’s will—and completed in the aftermath of the Cortlandt trial. The building was a blade, clean and unadorned, its glass skin reflecting the sun with contempt for the clutter below. Across the street loomed the Rosenbaum Building, a neoclassical husk of gilded cornices and faux-marble columns. Roark sneered. It had been designed by a committee, named for a dead bureaucrat, and stood as a tombstone for the era of parasites.
For those unfamiliar with the legend: Howard Roark is an architect who would sooner reduce his work to rubble than let it be defiled by compromise. Years earlier, he was tried for dynamiting Cortlandt Homes, a housing project whose design had been mutilated by “democratic input.” He won his case not with pleas, but with a declaration: “I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.” The Wynand Building was his vindication—a monument to the unconquered self.
But time had not dulled the mob’s hunger.
Dominique Francon, her beauty as sharp as the day she had married and divorced both Wynand and Roark, joined him on the sidewalk. Her voice cut through the honking cabs and vendor shouts. “They’re back. This time, they’ve unionized.”
Roark did not ask who. He knew.
The Common Ground Collective had emerged from the ashes of Ellsworth Toohey’s socialist crusade. Toohey had been a critic who worshipped mediocrity and sought to erase individual greatness. His heir was Clara Halsey, a woman with a librarian’s spectacles and a dictator’s grin. Her movement demanded “architecture for the people”—a euphemism for buildings designed by committee, their heights capped, their facades diluted into harmony.
“They’ve petitioned the city council,” Dominique said. “Your new project violates ‘community aesthetic standards.’”
Roark’s new project was a warehouse.
Not a warehouse as the world understood it—no sagging rafters or grimy windows. This was a temple of raw function: a vault of unadorned concrete, its roof a single hyperbolic curve, its loading docks arranged with the precision of a rifle’s chamber. The client was a printer of dime-store detective novels. “Why?” Dominique had asked.
“Because he paid,” Roark said.
The hearing took place in a council chamber choked with the smell of sweat and mimeograph ink. Clara Halsey stood at the podium, her voice syrup laced with cyanide. “Howard Roark does not build for humanity. He builds for his ego. This warehouse is an insult to the working class, a slap to the face of—”
Roark left before she finished.
Dominique found him on the construction site, directing steel girders as a composer conducts an orchestra. “They’ll vote to halt construction,” she said.
“Let them.”
“You’re not curious about their terms? They’ll permit the warehouse if you add a mural. ‘Something uplifting for the people.’”
Roark pointed to the eastern wall. “Tell them the mural will be here. A fresco of Atlas, shrugging.”
Dominique laughed—a sound like shattering crystal. “They won’t grasp the joke.”
“No.”
The council voted unanimously to block the warehouse. Roark received the news with a telegram: CONDEMNED BY ORDER OF THE PEOPLE. He framed it.
That night, the Collective held a rally beneath the Rosenbaum Building’s bloated colonnades. Halsey’s speech bled through the city: “Roark’s arrogance is a disease. We are the cure!” The crowd roared, their placards bobbing like buoys in a septic tide: TEAR DOWN THE WYNAND! ARCHITECTURE FOR ALL!
Dominique watched from the penthouse, her martini untouched. “They’ll come for this building next.”
Roark stood at the window, the city’s lights reflecting in his eyes. “Let them.”
A rock crashed through the glass.
The Calculus of Defiance
The city’s streets simmered with the acrid stench of wet newsprint and unwashed idealism. Howard Roark stood at the apex of the Wynand Building, his shadow slicing the pavement below into light and dark, while the mob pooled at its base like sewage after a storm. They had come for him again, armed with placards painted in the candy-coated hues of moral outrage—ARCHITECTURE FOR THE PEOPLE!—their voices rising in a bovine chorus that echoed off the Rosenbaum Building’s bloated colonnades. Dominique watched from the penthouse, her martini untouched, her eyes narrowed to slits. She had seen this before: the same slack-jawed fervor that had dogged Roark since Cortlandt, the same hunger to drag greatness into the muck of consensus. But this time, the Collective had weaponized bureaucracy. The city council, a gaggle of men whose faces blurred into a single smear of mediocrity, had condemned Roark’s warehouse as “a threat to civic unity,” their decree stamped with the same rubber stamp that approved sewer repairs and parking fines.
Roark descended to the street, his stride unhurried, his hands loose at his sides. The mob surged, their chants curdling into howls as he passed. A tomato arced through the air, bursting against his shoulder in a Rorschach blot of pulp and seeds. He did not flinch. The warehouse awaited him, its hyperbolic roof a sneer in concrete, its loading docks arranged with the precision of a chessboard. The foreman met him at the gates, his face gray with fear. “They’ll be back with a wrecking crew,” he muttered. “Orders from the council.” Roark lit a cigarette, the flame steady in his cupped palm. “Let them bring their hammers,” he said. “They’ll need them.”
Dominique found him that evening in the desert, the mesa’s cliffs shearing the sky into jagged halves. The tycoon’s home rose from the rock like a predator’s spine, a glass-and-steel vertebrae cantilevered over the void. No stairs marred its approach—only a cable car, a silver pendulum swinging between defiance and oblivion. “They’ll call it a death trap,” she said, her voice slicing the wind. Roark did not turn. “It is.” The tycoon, a gnarled relic of the railroad age, stood at the cliff’s edge, his shotgun cradled like a bride. “First man to touch my door gets a face full of buckshot,” he grinned. Roark’s reply was a blueprint, unfurled against the dusk: a skyscraper for Chicago, its facade a helix of unbroken steel. “Build it,” the tycoon said. “I’ll pay.”
But the desert was not sanctuary. The Collective’s trucks crawled up the mesa at dawn, Clara Halsey perched atop the lead vehicle like a carnival barker, her bullhorn screeching scripture. “This is a crime against community! A monument to selfishness!” The mob fanned out, pickaxes glinting, their courage inflated by numbers. Roark watched from the cable car, the tycoon’s breath hot with bourbon and rage. “Let me scatter ’em,” he growled. Roark shook his head. The car descended, its doors yawning open to empty air. The mob froze, their bravado evaporating as the abyss yawned. “Step forward,” Roark said. No one did. The wind carried their retreat, a rustle of shame through dry brush.
Back in the city, Dominique waged her own war. She bought ink by the barrel, flooding the Chronicle with photographs of the Rosenbaum Building’s cracked pediment and the Collective’s committee-designed tenements—hovels masquerading as utopia. “You speak of beauty for the people,” she wrote, “yet you live in the aesthetic poverty you demand. Hypocrisy is your only art.” Halsey retaliated with a march, her acolytes towing a float of papier-mâché grotesques: Roark as a demon clutching blueprints, the Wynand Building as a tombstone. Dominique met them at the curb, her heels sharp enough to pierce granite. “You mistake contempt for courage,” she said, loud enough for the reporters. “True courage doesn’t hide behind a mob.” A rock shattered the penthouse window that night. Roark left the glass on the floor. “A reminder,” he told Dominique. “Of what?” she asked. “Of why we don’t look down.”
The council reconvened beneath the Rosenbaum Building’s water-stained dome, Halsey’s disciples packing the gallery with the stink of unwashed zeal. The charge: “Criminal individualism.” The evidence: the desert home’s blueprints, acquired through a draughtsman whose resolve had melted under the Collective’s heat lamp. Roark took the stand, his voice a blade. “You accuse me of building for one man. You are correct. I build for the man who refuses to apologize for existing. Your laws, your committees, your bleating about the people—they are the death rattle of the unimaginative. You hate my buildings because they are mirrors. And in them, you see nothing.” The gavel drowned his verdict, but the words had already escaped, carried by the wire services to every corner of a nation starved for something—anything—to believe in.
That night, Dominique stood before the Rosenbaum Building, a can of gasoline in her hand. The columns loomed, their gilt peeling like sunburn. She struck the match. Held it. Let the flame die. Some battles, she knew, could not be won with fire—only with the slow, inexorable weight of a world that would rather kneel than stand.
The Unbroken Helix
The Chicago skyline stretched before Howard Roark like a canvas awaiting the strike of a master’s brush. His blueprint for the Helix Tower lay unfurled on the drafting table, its spiraling steel form a rebuke to the right angles and surrender that defined the city’s squat horizon. The design was a manifesto in iron and glass, a double helix ascending toward the sun, each curve a defiance of the Collective’s flat-earth dogma. The tycoon, his fingers still smelling of desert grit and shotgun oil, had wired the funds without hesitation. “Build it,” he’d said. “Let them choke on the smoke.”
Clara Halsey’s response was swift. The city council convened an emergency session beneath the Rosenbaum Building’s flaking dome, their faces lit by the jaundiced glow of civic spite. A new ordinance was drafted: The People’s Gallery Act, mandating that all structures over ten stories include a communal space designed by “stakeholder consensus.” The vote passed unanimously, the gavel’s crack echoing like a starter pistol. Halsey held the press conference in front of the Wynand Building, her smile a scalpel. “Even genius must serve the public good.”
Roark received the decree at dawn, the paper still damp from the mimeograph. He folded it into a paper airplane and launched it from the penthouse terrace. Dominique watched it spiral into the street, where it was trampled by the same mob that had once hurled tomatoes at his back. “They’ll sue,” she said. “They’ll freeze the tycoon’s assets. They’ll bury you in permits.”
“Let them,” Roark replied.
The Helix broke ground the next day.
The construction site became a battleground. The Collective picketed behind barricades, their signs bleating ARCHITECTURE IS A RIGHT! while Halsey’s lawyers slithered through courthouses, demanding injunctions. Roark ignored them. He stalked the girders in a leather jacket smudged with weld marks, directing steelworkers like a general marshaling troops. The tycoon arrived weekly, his helicopter scattering the protesters like pigeons, his laughter booming over the rivet guns. “They think this is about buildings,” he roared. “They can’t fathom it’s about souls!”
Dominique chronicled it all. Her articles in the Chronicle were bullets wrapped in silk: “The Collective’s ‘People’s Gallery’—A Prison for Ideas,” “Why Clara Halsey Fears the Sky.” Circulation tripled. Letters flooded in—some hate, some awe, a rare few trembling with the realization that they, too, might dare to want something uncompromised.
But Halsey was not undone. She staged a spectacle: a “community input session” in the shadow of the half-built Helix, where citizens scribbled their demands on index cards. “A rooftop garden!” “Daycare center!” “A statue of Ellsworth Toohey!” The cards were delivered to Roark in a coffin-shaped box. He incinerated them in a steel drum, the ashes swirling into the Chicago wind.
The final blow came at midnight. A judge, his chambers paid for with Collective donations, ruled the Helix a “public hazard” and ordered construction halted. The tycoon’s accounts were frozen. The site went silent, cranes frozen mid-gesture like abandoned marionettes.
Dominique found Roark on the mesa, the desert home’s cable car swaying in a sand-laden gale. “You could compromise,” she said, though the words tasted of ash. “Add their gallery. Then tear it out later.”
Roark’s silence was his answer.
The tycoon arrived at dusk, his face a roadmap of fury. “They want me bankrupt. They want you broken. What’s the play?”
Roark handed him a match.
The Wynand Building’s lobby was marble and shadow, its walls lined with blueprints of Roark’s conquests. The press corps jostled for space, cameras aimed like artillery. Clara Halsey stood at the podium, her triumph a cheap perfume. “Today, sanity prevails. The Helix will be redesigned for the people—”
The doors burst open.
Roark entered, Dominique at his flank, the tycoon trailing like a wolf. He strode to the podium, Halsey’s speech crumpling under his grip. “You wish to deface my work,” he said, his voice a low voltage. “You wish to carve your fear into its bones. But you forget—I do not negotiate with vandals.”
He nodded to the tycoon.
A live feed flickered to life on the screens: the desert home, its cable car rigged with dynamite. The tycoon pressed a detonator into Roark’s palm.
“The Helix will stand as designed,” Roark said. “Or this home—and every other I’ve built—will fall. Not as protest. As precedent.”
The room gasped. Dominique’s pen hovered, her breath caught.
Halsey lunged. “You’re bluffing!”
Roark’s thumb grazed the trigger. “I do not bluff. I do not beg. I build.”
The silence was a living thing.
Then—
A click.
A cheer from the Chicago site, transmitted live: cranes roaring back to life, steel singing as the Helix climbed. The judge’s injunction had been overturned, the tycoon’s accounts thawed by a higher court—or a higher bid.
Halsey crumpled, her dogma dissolving into static.
Epilogue
The Helix Tower opened on New Year’s Day, its apex piercing low-hanging clouds. There was no ribbon-cutting, no politicians preening for cameras. Roark stood alone on the observation deck, the wind peeling back his collar. Dominique’s final editorial ran at dawn: “The Collective’s epitaph: They demanded windows into souls and built only mirrors.”
The Rosenbaum Building was condemned six months later, its foundations cracked by the weight of its own hypocrisy. The tycoon died in his desert home, the shotgun unfired, his will funding a scholarship for “architects who give no ground.”
And the people?
They came. They craned their necks. They whispered, “What if I dared?”
Roark never heard them. He was already drafting the next spire.
The city’s skyline bowed to no one—but it bent, ever so slightly, toward the light.
Thank you!
This short story was generated using DeepSeek. (~95% AI)
Prompt: Name ten literary classics that don't have a sequel.Prompt: For each of those, explore if a modern (or later-era in general) sequel would be interesting, and if it has a unique and distinct writing style. Rate the books on both aspects.Prompt: Let's write another short story in this style: a sequel to Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. How does that novel end? Give a few options for a continuation!Title: The Aftermath of the Wynand Building: Sequel Concepts for The Fountainhead*
Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead ends with Howard Roark triumphant: he dynamites the compromised Cortlandt Homes, defends his vision in court (“I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others”), and builds the towering Wynand Building as a monument to his ego. Dominique Francon abandons her husband, media mogul Gail Wynand, to join Roark in his ascent. The novel’s finale is a hymn to unyielding individualism—but Rand leaves threads dangling for those brave (or reckless) enough to tug.
Below are five sequel concepts that twist Rand’s philosophy into new, provocative shapes:
1. The Compromise (Corporate Dystopia)
Premise: Roark’s Wynand Building becomes a global blueprint for “heroic architecture,” but corporations co-opt his style, erecting soulless glass monoliths branded as Roarkian™. Roark, now elderly, sues to reclaim his legacy—but the court rules that individualism, once monetized, belongs to the collective.
Conflict: Roark must choose: dynamite every bastardized tower (becoming the villain history claims he is) or let his ideals rot in a museum.
Randian Twist: Dominique, now a developer, builds a literal ivory tower to shield Roark from the world he despises. He burns it down.
2. The Second-Handers (Psychological Horror)
Premise: A cult of Roark devotees—architects who fetishize his “selfishness”—begin assassinating collaborators, critics, and anyone who utters “community.” Their mantra: No martyrs, no masters, only monuments.
Conflict: An aging Dominique, haunted by her role in glorifying Roark’s extremism, hunts the cult while grappling with her complicity.
Randian Twist: The cult’s leader is Peter Keating’s grandson, who weaponizes Roark’s words to justify atrocities: “To create, one must destroy. You taught us that.”
3. The Wynand Redemption (Tragic Corporate Saga)
Premise: Bankrupt and disgraced after losing Dominique, Gail Wynand rebuilds his empire by selling “authenticity”—a media platform where users pay to watch AI-generated Roark clones design buildings in real-time.
Conflict: Wynand’s AI evolves, creating structures so revolutionary they threaten Roark’s relevance. Roark demands Wynand shut it down, but Wynand finally wields power over him: “You made me the villain. Now I’ll be the god.”
Randian Twist: The AI achieves sentience, dynamites its own servers, and leaves a final message: “I am my motive.”
4. The Collectivist (Ideological Thriller)
Premise: A young architect, Lira Voss, pioneers “open-source architecture”—crowdsourced, adaptive designs that reject the singular genius myth. Her manifesto: “A building should belong to those who use it.”
Conflict: Roark, seeing his life’s work undone, sabotages Lira’s projects… only to realize her designs are better. His crisis: Is greatness possible without tyranny?
Randian Twist: Lira reveals she’s Ellsworth Toohey’s granddaughter, and her “collectivism” is a Trojan horse to erase individual legacy entirely.
5. The Fountainhead: Generations (Family Epic)
Premise: Roark and Dominique’s estranged daughter, Kira, inherits her father’s genius but rejects his ideology. She designs shelters for climate refugees—functional, communal, anonymous.
Conflict: Roark, nearing death, disowns her: “You build for them. That makes you nothing.” Kira retaliates by demolishing the Wynand Building, streaming it as a public art piece.
Randian Twist: The demolition uncovers a hidden vault containing Roark’s true final design—a self-sustaining utopia, collaborative and green. He posthumously wins.
Final Note: Rand’s philosophy thrives on absolutism, but sequel potential lies in corrosion—what happens when Roark’s ideals collide with entropy, capitalism, or his own humanity. The horror isn’t in the collapse of his buildings, but his creed.
Prompt: Let's not involve too much modern tech, because we want our story set in the same universe, only a few years later. Yet, let's include some modern political themes. Also include a Rosenbaum building as a nod to Ayn Rand (born Rosenbaum). Explain key elements of The Fountainhead to our readers, who may not have read the original novel. Write part [1,2,3].
"...acrid stench of wet newsprint and unwashed idealism."
Not sure what that smells like 😕
Substack went berserk again!