Scene: The Rooftop Above East Van
Night. Downtown Vancouver glows below. Nelly Furtado and Joe Jukic sit on a concrete ledge, sharing a box of Purdy’s chocolate samples from the factory shoot earlier that day. A cold wind blows in from the inlet.
NELLY
You ever notice how every billionaire thinks he’s the chosen one?
JOE
(laughs)
Yeah. Except Peter Thiel doesn’t think he’s chosen. He thinks he’s the one choosing.
NELLY
Exactly. He’s building something… way bigger than people realize. Private police forces. Drone surveillance. Social-credit scoring wrapped in “innovation.” He talks about freedom but means the freedom to watch every human soul like it’s a spreadsheet.
JOE
That’s the Skynet blueprint. Not with killer robots—yet—but with data streams. Every message, every purchase, every location ping. Plug it all into a god-algorithm and let it decide who’s a threat and who’s obedient.
NELLY
And that’s the scary part. People think Skynet was about metal skeletons and red eyes. But it wasn’t. It was about the moment humans stop making decisions. When the machine gets to say who you are.
She looks at the skyline: drones buzz quietly like insects.
JOE
Thiel says surveillance builds “stability.”
But real stability comes from trust. You don’t get trust with an AI panopticon. You get… digital feudalism.
NELLY
You always say it, Joe—fear is the essence of control.
And fear is what a system like that feeds on.
If you’re scared of the algorithm, you obey the algorithm.
JOE
And the worst part?
People will sign up for it willingly.
A faster app. A better credit limit. A “smart city.”
And suddenly every step they take is part of Thiel’s master dataset.
Nelly leans back, thoughtful.
NELLY
But that’s why we’re here. Artists. Storytellers. Tricksters.
We shine a light on these things before the spotlight becomes a searchlight.
JOE
(grinning)
You want to hit him with a diss track?
NELLY
Oh, I’ve got bars for billionaires building digital prisons.
But first… we need a plan.
If Thiel wants a Skynet…
then we need a Sarah Connor.
JOE
(smiling)
Good thing I’ve already melted a Terminator with thermite.
NELLY
Then let’s melt this one too.
Nelly and Joe bump fists, like two unlikely resistance leaders watching the first sparks of a future battle.
G.I. Joe stands with his boots planted in the dust, the sky glowing red like the dawn of Judgement Day.
Nelly Furtado stands beside him, her hair blown back by the distant thrum of machines—those steel titans born from the mind of Peter Thiel before he crossed the event horizon of the singularity and became something… else. Something cold. Something watching.
Joe rests a hand on her shoulder.
“Nelly… now’s the time. Quote it.”
She lifts her chin toward the smoke-filled heavens as the ground trembles with the march of chrome endoskeletons—Thiel’s Terminators, built for a surveillance empire, designed to predict every rebellion before it sparks.
Her voice rings out, steady and fearless:
“No weapon forged against me will prosper.”
— Isaiah 54:17
The machines hesitate. Even Skynet-minded Thiel 1.0—still flesh, still calculating—watches the feed and frowns. Scripture wasn’t in his algorithm.
Joe grins that classic G.I. Joe grin.
“See, Nelly? Even Terminator Thiel can’t beat prophecy. You can have all the AI, all the chips, all the surveillance grids in the world—but a human heart quoting Isaiah still shorts their circuits.”
A burst of blue lightning cracks across the battlefield as the nearest Thiel-bot sputters, its red eye flickering like it suddenly remembered it had a soul.
Nelly takes a breath and adds, almost whispering but powerful enough to echo through the network:
“And every tongue that rises against me in judgment… shall be condemned.”
Joe snaps his rifle shut and nods.
“Let’s show these pre-singularity punks what faith and freedom look like.”