《Bells and Taxes》House Bruce
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Every so many years the rich and historic music scenes of Auview produce a group that launches into a nationwide culture craze. The story today concerns a group of girls ranging from fifteen to seventeen. The image they put forth is the typical over-sexed type with as racy of lyrics as state broadcasting will allow. A balancing act of being the socially pure virgins that they are all supposed to be and the demands of public taste. The group is wildly popular all over Palmetto, especially among adolescent girls. They’ve been one of the highest-selling groups for the last three years. The girl who became the subject of the story was seventeen at the start, I’ll call her Cici.
Jansen Bruce, an established Midland artist from the notable House of Bruce was doing a season in Auview. His reputation is the opposite of innocence. He’s an infamous asshole, but his crowd is very talented and they've built a lot of intrigue for themselves. He’s the very stereotype of an Old Family scion and makes a loud performance of it. He’s close to thirty.
It turns out Cici is a fan of Christaine’s work. They meet at a show in Auview where she fawns over him as a teenager would do when meeting a beloved artist. Christaine is used to having his way with his admirers and it doesn’t occur to him that there are stark social differences in Auview. To him, she’s just another eager groupie. To her, this was a much more monumental event. His mind is on The Night, her’s is on Forever. He’ll get his night and never think of her again. She’ll never stop thinking about him. She will wonder why he doesn’t return her calls.
It takes her two months to realize that she’s pregnant. This is a big problem by Directory standards. Because despite being far from reality, social protocols expect women to remain unsullied until marriage. This is even more expected of civilians of high influence like Cici. Her portrait is pinned up in every other teen bedroom across the country. Cici is part of a very visible group that can’t just disappear. And she knows exactly who the father is, but tells this information only to her family. The rest of the group had no clue what exactly was wrong with her. All they knew was that their season was ending early and next year would be delayed. Plans were laid to remove the girl to a quiet village until the situation ran its natural course.
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Cici’s handler finally discovers who the father is and tracks down the Directory point team assigned to his House. Of course, this isn’t the first time they’ve dealt with this problem. The Directory is even more interested in containing the situation than Cici’s handler. They block her from being relocated, concerned that a lovesick and lonely teen would have little trouble finding an ambitious journalist ready to hear her sorrows. The situation needed to be hidden and held in control. The Directory garnishes funds from House Bruce's coffers to house the girl in some inconspicuous hotel near the Directory's Midland Compound.
During the pregnancy, Cici and Christaine rarely see each other. Cici still wants to be with him, and he lacks the moral fiber needed to tell her that he never intended to be with her, so he just strings Cici along for the ride. He gets so caught up in said ride that he starts talking about marriage and even adopting the baby once it's born. The game goes on until about a month before Cici’s due date.
At that time, Christaine had met someone he actually wanted to be with and forgets all about Cici. He doesn’t tell his new mistress about the ongoing situation. Meanwhile, she had been attempting to contact him, only to learn that he now refused to speak to her. Cici is crushed. She feels deceived, then she feels ashamed, then she feels alone in a strange place. She thinks about how she’s hiding from the life she worked for to deliver a baby that no one wants.
Cici is rushed to the Midland Clinic after her handler finds her nearly dead in a bloody bathtub. She and the baby are saved. She tried to call Christaine to tell him the baby was born, but again he refuses to speak to her. He does attempt to order the Directory to end the garnishment of his House’s treasury, but that was futile. In a high-profile interview with one of the major art and culture publications, he was quoted as saying he has no kids and no plans on having any. He is just having a good time.
The Directory takes custody of the child to route a quick and quiet adoption. Cici returns to Auview where the group breaks up and most of the girls try for solo careers. Cici leaves the spotlight for seclusion. Christian’s relationship ends and he moves on to someone else, then another someone else shortly after.
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AIRTEL TO [REDACTED}
RE: ECON-MODEL
TIME-FLOW RELATIONSHIP AND SELF-DESTRUCTIVE CYCLES
An ideal industry with calibrated supply and demand creates what we will call an admittance relationship. This relationship can result from three economic factors.
The first factor is foresight flow. This is the result of living entities having to cause energy (food) to be stored for a period of low production (the winter season). This flow consists of demands made upon an economic system for that period of low production. In a productive industry, it takes several forms, one of which is known as productive stock or inventory. Satisfaction of an industry demand suffers a lag because of the loading effect of inventory priorities.
The second factor is present flow and ideally involves no delays. It is, so to speak, input today or the output of today, a hand-to-mouth flow. This specific industry is a pure use industry and it is a single economic valve.
The third is hindsight flow, representing habit or inertia. This flow is characteristic of a pure service industry in which a current flow of money creates an active human population that, if the money flow begins to diminish, will have to be collapsed, usually via warfare conscription, to maintain the current flow of energy. Other viable alternatives to conscripted warfare as economic flywheels are an open-ended social welfare program or an enormous, but fruitful, crime suppression program that is also open-ended.
The obstacles to stabilizing the economic system are specific and nameable. They are caused by too much demand due to:
1. Too much greed, and
2. Too much population.
These create excessive economic pressure on industries which can only be balanced by the true resources or capital. The social welfare program is a simple open-ended credit system that creates a false capital industry to give non-producing people their shelter and daily food. This can be useful because the nature of the program renders its recipients state property in return for the ‘aid’, a standing servant force for the Directory’s needs. Those who get hooked on such dependence must stay in close contact to maintain it. In this, the method of introducing large amounts of stabilizing capital is done by borrowing on the future ‘credit’ of the nation.
This is the fourth law of motion and consists of performing an action and leaving the system before the reflected reaction returns to the point of action — a delayed reaction. The means of surviving the reaction requires changing the system before the reaction can take place. This puts a large quantity of money into the hands of the public and maintains a counter-balance to their greed. This exercise ultimately holds the enemy at the gates.
The result of the social welfare program is a sort of staving off the inevitable. War must eventually be resorted to in order to balance the account. Conscription war is the act of destroying the creditor, therefore erasing the debt. The Old Families are useful here to craft justifications for the act and keep blood off the public’s conscience.
If the civilians truly cared about their communities, they would control their appetites of greed and procreation so that there would be no need for a social welfare program that siphons capital from the productive to satisfy the non-productive. Since most of the public will not exercise restraint, there are only two alternatives to reduce overwhelming economic pressure:
1. Let the populace bludgeon each other to death in war, risking the total destruction of the country.
2. Take control by the use of social engineering to reduce economic pressure to a safe level by a process of benevolent indenturement.
The latter has been agreed to as the obvious best option. At this point, it should be quite clear why absolute confidentiality is necessary. The public refuses to improve their mentality. They have become a herd of proliferating barbarians, a blight upon our homeland. They do not take any care to learn why they have not been able to avoid war despite their dogmatic morality. It is to those of us willing to think and survive as the fittest to solve the problem as the few who truly care. Exposure of our work would destroy the only hope of preserving the seed of true humanity.
[CONCLUDED]
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