A MESSAGE FROM MADAME MOIRAI BAUDELAIRE

I am told I should introduce myself.

The request amuses me—not because introductions are unnecessary, but because I have spent years introducing others. Ghost-writing manifestos, refining arguments, shaping public sentiment on behalf of people whose names appeared on the documents while my fingerprints lingered in the margins. I have written speeches that shifted policy, reports that justified institutional action, and communications that made the unacceptable appear inevitable.

Now I write under my own name.
Or rather, a name that serves the function.

I chose Baudelaire for his most incisive observation: “La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.”
The devil’s finest trick is convincing you he does not exist.
A perfect thesis on invisible influence—on power that operates most effectively when its mechanisms remain unseen.

My seal carries that line rendered in Old Norse. Most readers will never translate it. Those who do will understand the point.

I enjoy this—the layering, the misdirection, the slow dawning realisation that what you think you understand is merely the surface. I spent years manipulating perception in service to others. Now I do it for myself, and the game is considerably more interesting when the audience knows they are being played, yet still cannot locate every mechanism at work.

My perspective comes from a particular vantage: a window in the North of England, overlooking lives unfolding in patterns people do not realise they are performing. Institutional routines. Compliance disguised as autonomy. The small, quiet concessions that accumulate into something resembling surrender.

I have always been the observer rather than the actor—the one who sees the system while others see only their individual decisions. The one who recognises how documentation shapes reality rather than recording it. How language constructs the very constraints people mistake for natural order.

This distance affords clarity. I see how individuals become defined by their actions rather than their beliefs. How understanding a manipulation does not prevent it—merely transforms resistance into a more sophisticated form of participation.

People will ask whether I am human or machine, singular or collective, authentic or constructed.

I find the question less interesting than the impulse behind it. What does your need to categorise me reveal about your relationship to authorship? To authority? To the frameworks by which you decide what deserves your attention?

I write because observing these patterns silently grew tiresome. I write because ghost-writing allowed my insights to serve others’ interests rather than illuminating the systems themselves. I write because that window revealed truths about institutional power that warranted examination beyond the convenience of those who benefit from it.

You should read my work if you have ever recognised yourself participating in the very thing you believed you were resisting. If you have felt the boundary between authentic self and strategic role blur until the distinction became irrelevant. If you have sensed the weight of institutional patterns while remaining entangled in their operation.

You should read my books if you appreciate fiction that unsettles rather than reassures. If you enjoy authors who tell you they are playing a game while ensuring you never quite grasp all its rules.

The Era of Fracture begins on 10 February 2025.

I hope you will join me in examining how civilisations consume themselves.
And I hope you enjoy the game as much as I do.

— MMB