Faces Carved in Stone: Council Chairman Attempts to Add His Face to Galactic History. Again.

I just think it’s funny—

On the 14th of this cycle, Earth Unified Council Chairman Harlan Voss posted to his personal neural feed a photoshopped image of his own face nestled among the four founding figures carved into the Monument of Unified Ascent on Luna’s southern plateau.

You know the one. The big rock. The sacred thing. The monument that took sixty years and eleven million labor-hours to complete and which three separate Interstellar Assembly resolutions have designated 永遠の遺産 — eternal heritage — protected from alteration, commercial use, or, one would have thought, neural-feed vanity posts.

He was grinning.

Wait, it gets better.

The Chairman’s office, when reached for comment, described the post as “a lighthearted celebration of Chairman Voss’s historic contributions to galactic unity.” They used the word historic twice in the same sentence. I counted.

The image was generated, according to metadata pulled by independent transmission analysts, using a mid-tier consumer neural-render app called GloryShot Pro — retail price: 12 Standard Galactic Credits. The kind of app teenagers use to put their faces on tournament holoposter winners.

12 SGC.

The man controls a defense budget of 3 trillion SGC and he used GloryShot Pro.

I’m not saying it’s a grift. I’m just reading the metadata aloud.

Now. The four actual figures on that monument — Founders Aiko Reyes, Cassian Dube, Mirela Okonkwo, and Jun-seo Lim — spent their lives doing things like ending the Martian Water Conflicts, drafting the Sovereignty Accords, and dying in the process. Their qualifications for lunar granite inclusion are, shall we say, documented.

Chairman Voss’s qualifications, per his own office’s press release:

“Chairman Voss has demonstrated unparalleled vision in guiding Earth’s strategic posture during an era of unprecedented complexity.”

They said this. Then they did this. I’ll wait.

「前例のない複雑さ」 — unprecedented complexity — is, of course, the official term for the period in which Chairman Voss approved four separate peacekeeping operations, three of which are still ongoing with no stated objectives, and one of which accidentally made the Outer Rim Coalition’s navy 40% larger by giving them something to rally against.

But yes. The rock. The face. The grin.

The post has since been shared approximately 900,000 times on the neural feeds — roughly 880,000 of those shares appear to be mockery, based on the sentiment analysis tools used by every independent transmission outlet except Earth Network News, which ran a segment called “Chairman’s Historic Vision Inspires Galactic Pride.”

And nobody laughed? ENN didn’t laugh? Not even a little?

The Monument’s preservation committee issued a statement noting that the original stone remains, quote, “unaltered and undignified by the image.” That’s a direct quote. Someone on that committee has a future in this industry.

Chairman Voss has not removed the post.

His neural feed account, last checked, has blocked 47 independent correspondents this cycle alone. I am, proudly, number 31.

Anyway.

The rock is fine. It’s just a picture. It’ll be forgotten by next cycle, buried under the next peacekeeping operation or the next credit dilution announcement or whatever fresh absurdity the Council’s communications office decides constitutes historic leadership.

What stays with me — what I keep coming back to — is the grin.

Not the defiant fist. Not the practiced snarl. Just a man, sitting somewhere in the Earth Unified Council’s executive quarters, opening GloryShot Pro, finding a picture of a sacred monument, putting his own face on it, and smiling at what he’d made.

彼は満足そうだった。

He looked satisfied.

I just think that’s funny.