Back in 1990, when my short story “In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear” (included in Anthology of Evil (2012) first appeared in an East Coast horror quarterly, it felt like a dark slice of speculative fiction. It was the tale of Peter Masters, a prodigy who fuses his brain into a crystalline processor to become the ultimate. media controller, benevolent at first but terrifying in his potential.
He essentially turned himself into a computer chip. That was the original concept of the story. I've written more about this story earlier this year in a blog with a Part I and Part II. Years ago, I also made a book trailer video for it. I first discussed this story, perhaps, in a 2013 blog that was also a survey of the stories in my first collection of my short fiction, Anthology of Evil.
I've mentioned this story on social media more than a few times over the years since Donald Trump achieved the presidency in 2016. The parallels were disturbing. Soon after he took office it became ever more apparent, that he has problems for America. And not in a good way. In a Peter Masters sort of way, where he was beloved by many, but gave serious concern to an ever-growing cohort of others.
Thirty-five years later, the story reads less like science fiction and more like an autopsy of our political present.
A Prodigy Becomes a Processor
In the story, Peter’s transformation is literal: his brain begins to crystallize, turning him into a living, ultra-human computer chip. Eventually he manipulates entire nations media and advertising via his omnipresent iSet broadcasts.
iSets are a 1980s version of today's smart TVs from when this story was first written. Children’s programming, advertising, blending entertainment, propaganda, and surveillance until everyone’s perceptions flow through him and his mental processes. The ultimate tale of the unreliable narrator.
Trump’s transformation is metaphorical, but the parallels are eerie.
Donald Trump hasn’t physically fused with silicon, but he’s become a living algorithm...an input-output machine that thrives on attention. His tweets, rallies, and “truths” function as feedback loops; his audience’s reactions reinforce and amplify his next move. Like Peter Masters, he isn’t just using the media, he is the media.
Donald Trump is not just operating on his own impulses. He is shaped and reinforced by people around him...figures like Stephen Miller and others in his orbit...who channel his instincts into something sharper, more destructive, and more authoritarian. His supporters may glorify and adore him, but what they are celebrating is not health or strength. It is a personality shaped by grievance, bigotry, and the pursuit of unchecked power.
Mental Instability as the Engine
The story hints at Peter’s mental fragility...the surgeon George senses psychopathy even as he operates on him
Trump’s critics make similar observations. We watch a man who demands total loyalty, who reshapes reality to fit his grievances, and whose “big show” (whether a rally, a Truth Social post, or a deepfake video) is crafted to evoke exactly the emotions he wants.
When norms collapse under such a figure, we aren’t just dealing with an eccentric leader. We’re dealing with a destabilized system built around one unstable mind.
Decriminalizing the Unthinkable
In “In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear” Peter perfects surveillance and “social credit,” ostensibly to stop crime...but he also controls the narrative so completely that morality itself becomes negotiable
He can frame himself as hero or godhead no matter what he does.
That’s the chilling echo in Trump’s current behavior. By normalizing political threats, defaming opponents, and treating violence as loyalty tests, he erodes the old boundaries. Acts once unthinkable are now waved away as “just rhetoric” or “jokes.” It’s not literal decriminalization, but it’s a cultural and institutional version of it...exactly the kind of moral hollowing you imagined in 1990.
The Cult of the Ultra-Human
Both Peter and Trump present themselves as larger than life...saviors, truth-tellers, martyrs. Followers excuse contradictions because the leader’s persona has become their lens on reality. In your story, the world wonders what will happen “should Peter ever go mad” with that much power.
Today, many Americans are asking the same about Trump as he tests limits on the judiciary, the military, and democratic norms.
The Lesson We Missed
When I wrote “In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear,” I wanted readers to feel seduced, then horrified — to realize how easily we cede our autonomy to a charismatic figure promising order. Like Peter’s dazzling holograms, Trump’s pageantry can distract from the real stakes: the slow, grinding erosion of democracy and shared truth.
The story’s final warning applies now: concentrating all power...media, government, loyalty...in one person creates a single point of catastrophic failure. What happens when boredom, paranoia, or madness sets in?
What happens when the “ultra-human”, or the democratically elected head of a political personality cult at its center, cracks?
Trump may never become a literal computer chip. But as long as our institutions and norms bend around him, he functions as one: a self-reinforcing processor of grievance and spectacle, encoding a new operating system for American politics where accountability dissolves and authoritarianism feels like “normal” governance.
We’re living inside the iSet world now.
The question is whether we’ll recognize the horror encroaching on us in time, or only after the final scene has already played out.
The question is whether we’ll see the horror for what it is before the credits roll, or simply applaud as the curtain falls on our own undoing.
The danger, unlike in a book or a film, is that in reality we may not realize when the end has already passed us by—when we’ve slipped into the part where there is no turning back, no time left to repair what’s been broken.
That...is the insidious truth of autocracy and of tyranny.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
Compiled with aid of ChatGPT
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