“I can’t. What does a person spend in war? A bullet. Or an entire group of people spends only one projectile. And then what? We lose Consumers.”
“Terrible.”
Prince managed to raise his eyes to Babe’s face, wanting to appear menacing, to let her know that he would ravage her, seriously punish her for what she was doing to him. And Babe, running the tip of her tongue across the edge of her teeth, studded with silver stars, licking the ends of the upper lips, clearly showed her Prince how intimidated she was.
“Not to go into all these details — I reduced the costs of the state to one third,” Mr. Kaella summarized at the end of his exposé.
“To one third?”
“Yes.”
“Do you hear this, dear viewers? Do you understand what Mr. Kaella has done for us?”
Chapter 50
Pascal could not believe that the room wasn’t locked. “What is going on?” he wondered. He left the door wide open so that under the light of the wall lamp he might see the room that he found himself in. He immediately saw a switch on the wall and he turned on the light.
He was in a long narrow hallway, closer to the left end. In front of him, slightly to the right, was a door. The only one on that side of the hallway. He approached it quietly, listening to hear whether there was something behind it. “Nothing. Quiet,” he concluded. When he tried to open it he realized that it was locked and that he was in fact Raul’s and Seneca’s captive.
The hallway was a bit over a meter wide, and about fifteen meters long. Pascal saw that on the side of the hallway where he had come out of there were three other doors. He went to the one next to his room, on the left-hand end of the hallway, which was also unlocked, and opened it.
There was a bathroom with a two-sink vanity, which ran along the entire length of the bathroom, as did the mirror above it. On the opposite side were a shower, toilet and bidet.
He froze in shock. “Where am I? On another planet? How is this possible?” The entire bathroom accessories, colors, vanity design, lighting, tiles… were not only from some previous season, but were also in some black-and-white combination. There were incredibly old. Years old.
“Well of course. The room too… I hadn’t paid attention… the nightstand, lights… it’s all ten years old… or more.”
He left the bathroom and went down the hallway, past the door to his room, to the next one. He opened it quickly, without pausing or listening, not expecting any room to be locked. It became clear to him that he was imprisoned in some apartment, a suite, and that the only way out was through the locked door that was across from his room.
He switched on the light. This room was narrower than his. It had a bed for one person, a dresser and a nightstand, a lamp and a pink cover. The last room in the row was the same size as the previous one. It had two bunk beds with a light-blue covers, and only one dresser that was the entire length of the room. But there were no windows anywhere.
“This is underground. Some shelter. A bunker. For someone important. For several of them… pink… for a girl… two blue covers… the bunk bed…” he thought. “Two boys… yes, that’s surely it. The underground shelter that Seneca had prepared for himself and his family. Nonsense! How could it be for his family when… he has… She gave him… him… Peter and Eir… one boy and one girl… she gave him. And not two boys and one girl…”
“What am I doing!? Thinking about covers and bunk bed! What do I care how many children you gave him? It could have been one or ten! What difference does it make?! You’re not mine… and you never will be. And nothing else matters.”
Chapter 51
The entire time watching on the monitor the final image that was being aired, in the corner of her eye, Babe saw that the director of the interview and the guy handling the video mixer were keeping to their agreement. She had created a special script — that they must not film when she showed Prince the lace and buttocks, when she bore her breast, when she licked her lips. And to show Prince. And they showed him.
“That wrinkled old lady of his saw how my Prince looked me in front of the entire world, how he leaned towards me, how he was going mad. Pack your stuff you old hag and get out of my palace!”
This deal hadn’t been cheap. She had to give the two of them half of the fee she received from the Company sector for fashion accessories.
“It’s ok. I don’t mind. It wasn’t a great expense. That was the best investment that any girl has ever made.”
“Miss Babe, do you know what the False Balance was?” Mr. Kaella interrupted Babe’s thoughts.
“A False Balance? Of course, Mr. Kaella. Our history teacher made us learn that by heart,” Babe smiled.
“Did he? Good teacher. Tell us…”
“A False Balance was a period without serious wars…” Babe hesitated.
“When did this period start?” Mr. Kaella helped her with another question.
“In the second half of the twentieth century, after some war. I guess the Third…”
“The Second. They still counted them back then. Just before the permanent war,” said Mr. Kaella.
“And how long did the False Balance period last?
“Less than century, I think…”
“Excellent. What was the False Balance based on?”
“States becoming indebted.”
“Bravo, Miss Babe! And how did it end?”
“It burst. The states couldn’t even pay the interest. There, I remember everything!”
“Very good, very good!”
“And then there was a war of money…” Babe continued the history lesson.
“Currencies.”
“Yes, currencies.”
“And what happened next?”
Babe stopped for a moment. Mr. Kaella helped her.
“The collapse…”
“Ah, yes,” Babe remembered. “Then came the collapse of the global financial system.”
“Bravo. Next…”
“Then protectionism… then isolationism…”
“Wonderful, next… what thin line had been crossed?”
“I know that!” Babe shouted excitedly. “The national social states crossed the thin line and became national socialist states.”
“Which led to…”
“To bloody wars…”
“For…”
“In the beginning for raw materials, for natural resources… and over time, with the destruction of the planet’s ecosystem, for water, for food, for shelter… for survival.”
“The national socialist states…”
“Fell apart.”
“Because…”
“Even within them people fought for rivers and lakes that were drying up… they fled from the ocean shores inland…”
“This led to…”
“The great migrations of the hungry and the thirsty…”
“Did hunger and thirst account for the most victims?”
“They didn’t…”
“What did?”
“It was skirmishes with nuclear warheads.”
“That too. But the greatest number of human lives were taken by…”
“The pandemics!” Babe remembered.
“Because…”
“Because viruses mutated at an accelerated rate due to the climate changes.”
“Bravo! Bravo! Bravo, Miss Babe! And what happened to the survivors?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Kaella.”
“People…”
“Oh, yes! People melted together”
“They created…”
“New, ad hoc communities around sources of drinking water and fertile land.”