In the not-so-distant horizon of 2025, when the silver towers of Manhattan still gleamed with the hunger of old money and fresh ambition, a man called Zohran emerged — not merely elected, but enthroned by a populace softened by exhaustion and seduced by promises of safety. No longer was he a mere politician. He styled himself The Custodian Premier, a title swollen with the kind of grandeur only a socialist despot could imagine for himself.

Under Zohran’s reign, New York City ceased to be the chaotic mosaic it had been for centuries. Instead, it became the proving ground for NYSOC — the New York Socialist Collective — a civic faith that demanded not only allegiance but intimate submission of thought.

It began with the subways. Commuters on the A train once carried earbuds pumping music that drowned out the groans of the tunnels and the ravings of half-crazed preachers. Under NYSOC, all personal devices were required to run the Harmony App, an AI concierge that piped a continuous feed of ideological affirmations:
Unity is Strength.
Individuality is Corruption.
The Custodian Sees You.

Screens above the seats no longer advertised Broadway shows or cheap personal injury lawyers. They streamed Zohran’s addresses in real time, his soft, unblinking stare a lullaby to the obedient and a threat to the rest.

The bodegas — once the sanctuary of hurried workers and insomniacs — were transformed into Distribution Points. Every purchase, from a black coffee to a roll of paper towels, required a scan of your Civic Standing QR. One’s Civic Standing was an algorithmic concoction distilled from your social media likes, your browsing history, and the political orientation of your contacts. A man whose cousin had shared an unflattering meme of Zohran might discover, to his quiet horror, that he could no longer buy milk.

In apartment buildings from Inwood to the Battery, the old brass buzzers were replaced with biometric locks linked directly to the Civic Registry. Residents learned quickly that a single lapse in ideological purity could result in being locked out of their own homes, left to stand shivering on the steps as neighbors peered through the blinds, terrified to be seen offering sympathy.

The great arteries of the city — Fifth Avenue, Madison, Park — were patrolled by the Custodial Brigades, paramilitary units whose uniforms gleamed with NYSOC insignia: a stylized eye over the silhouette of the five boroughs. Their patrols were justified in the name of Public Assurance, but the truth was plainer: they were there to remind every passerby that the Custodian Premier’s reach was total.

Times Square, that carnival of commerce, was repurposed into the Forum of Collective Progress. Towering 16K screens no longer hawked energy drinks or fashion brands but delivered ceaseless scrolls of compliance statistics, betrayal reports, and a leaderboard of citizens whose zeal for NYSOC had earned them privileges. At night, the glowing billboards cast the crowds in a sterile blue pallor, as if the entire city had been embalmed alive.

Children in Brooklyn’s public schools were organized into the Young Custodians, whose daily ritual included pledging obedience to Zohran and memorizing official slogans:
Forget Yourself.
The Collective Remembers.
Liberty is Treachery.

Teachers who deviated from the prescribed lessons — even in an unsanctioned remark — vanished, their desks left conspicuously empty. Rumor held they had been transferred to Re-Alignment Lodges in Queens, but no one dared to inquire.

At City Hall, now called the Hall of Custodial Accord, Zohran delivered weekly addresses in which he appeared on all devices — televisions, phones, and the new Civic Mirrors mounted in every apartment foyer. His face was a study in paternal gravity as he explained the necessity of expanding the Surveillance Harmonization Program. The Harmonization Program, he insisted, was simply the next evolution of civic responsibility — a universal mechanism to ensure no New Yorker would ever again suffer from the virus of dissent.

And so, in that city of ambition and impatience, the people learned to lower their eyes. They learned to repeat the slogans with conviction. They learned that even a sigh could be catalogued and interpreted as disloyalty.

Yet a question lingers in the fluorescent-lit hallways of every co-op and the rain-lashed canyons between skyscrapers: If safety is bought by the sacrifice of every private thought, if the price of collective security is the annihilation of individual conscience — then what is left that makes us human?

Ask yourself this as you pass beneath the ever-watchful eyes of Zohran the Custodian Premier: Are you alive, or have you merely agreed to be catalogued, scored, and pacified?

Remember — in New York 2025, under NYSOC, the greatest crime is to remember what freedom once felt like.