Snow padded softly against the windowpanes of the Hut. The wind etched rivulets down the glass, like calligraphy slowly washing itself away. Alias sat cross-legged by the fireplace, a wool blanket folded over his knees, an annotated copy of Ficciones resting face down on the table. He had reread The Lottery in Babylon twice this week.

Babylon, Borges had written, had been overtaken by a mysterious company—“the Company”—that turned chance into a moral, political, and metaphysical system. At first, simple drawings. Then punishments. Then fates. In Borges’s fiction, no one could tell where the Company ended and reality began.

Alias murmured: “They substituted probability for justice. And made randomness sacred.”

But where Borges imagined opacity, Alias imagined a mirror—one made of code. Where the Company operated in shadows, Alias dreamed of transparency. A lottery not orchestrated in secret temples but executed on-chain, its randomness verifiable, its rules incorruptible.

“Replace the priesthood with oracles,” he muttered. “Replace secrecy with cryptographic proof. Replace faith with mathematics.”

He opened his notebook. On the page he wrote:

What if Borges’ Babylon had a blockchain?

The question made him smile. Not the sardonic smile of a cynic, but the cautious one of a man who has stumbled upon an old thought in a new shape.

He scribbled ideas.

Lotteries as social allocators, not merely wealth redistributors.

Participation = contribution to stability.

Every ticket is a vote—but not in governance, in reality-shaping.

Lottocratic DAOs—not ruled, but tilted.

This wasn’t about gambling.

“It’s not about dreaming of riches,” he wrote. “It’s about engineering uncertainty so that rigging becomes impossible.”

Lottocracy, in his mind, was not a utopia. It was an escape hatch from managerial capture, from pretense, from meritocracy that had fossilized into oligarchy.

The fire popped. Alias let the silence flood back in.

What if people accepted that life is a lottery—and embraced it, with dignity, with structure, with fairness baked in?

He turned the page and wrote three words in large, careful print:

PEGGED IS THE NEW BABYLON.

Then underneath, more faintly:

But this time, Babylon is irrevocable...