It has taken me a while to decide how to release this story. It is very sensitive, which you’ll see when you read it. I’d like to first note that the investigation is ongoing and nothing has yet been proven.

A woman was directed to my office to register her complaint. I didn’t recognize her last name and it’s not normal for me to be assigned a common civilian’s case. When she told me her complaint concerned her ex-husband I began combing my memory for a decent person that worked civilian cases that I could recommend her. Then she told me the former husband’s name. When she said it, I nearly spit my coffee. I truly had not known this subject had been married before his appointed wife, let alone that he had other children. He was a certain Midland patriarch who had been enjoying a niche renaissance among his charges.

They had been divorced for quite some time before this meeting, if they had ever been legally married. I couldn’t find a trace of divorce in any of the Directory files on the House. I could tell that she had once been terribly attractive, but she hadn’t been aging well. She looked like the years since the divorce had taken more than their toll. She came to register her complaint in the hopes that it would allow her to change the current custody agreements.

The cause of the complaint was the woman’s daughter. For many years the girl had been close with her father. Their relationship was strained as the children of his second marriage grew older. The daughter is a lovely girl on the edge of early adulthood. “She’s always been so bright and friendly, she’s always been the kind of girl that got along with everyone,” her mother told me.

“But in the last year,” she continued, “she’s become quiet, you know, withdrawn. We never had trouble getting on and talking, but she started acting differently. She started fighting me, ignoring me, running off without telling me where she’d be going. She was dressing differently, in a way I considered far ahead of her years. I thought it was just her age at first and she would move on from it soon enough. But they didn’t get better. I started noticing that none of her friends were coming around anymore, and when she ran out of the house it was always with some boy or another. I tried to take her to an analyst, but it didn’t work. She didn’t want to talk to a stranger, she told me. But she also wouldn’t talk to me. She only became quieter, and even when she started staying home more she would hide away in her room. I had started to worry that she might harm herself in some way.”

“One night she came to my room. It was the night before she was scheduled to go on a visit to her father’s. She told me she didn’t want to go that weekend or ever again. I think once she’d let that out, she couldn’t stop the rest. She told me how something had happened at her father’s estate about a year ago. That she woke in the night and found her father looking at her and…”

The woman choked a bit. I gave her my handkerchief and let her have a moment while I poured her some water. She wiped at her eyes and took a deep, quavering breath. “She said her bedding was piled on the floor. At the time she thought she was dreaming. She sat up and he… stopped what he was doing to himself. She said he apologized and left the room. Nothing was said about it the rest of the visit and I guess she convinced herself it had been a strange dream.” She took a drink of water and bolstered herself again.

“When he picked her up for the next visit, she said he took her to some kind of overlook alone. He told her that he loved her, but in a way that was ‘stronger than ever before.' He said that he thought of her as a woman and not his daughter and that he couldn’t stop it. She…” The woman stopped and collapsed into her chair. She took up the kerchief again. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s alright, I want the whole story so take as much time as you need. We can even pick this back up another day if you need.”

“I’ll be fine. It’s just that I don’t want her to be blamed for this. She’s only a girl and this arrangement has been so hard on her.”

“She won’t be, I promise you. My word will be the final one for this case.”

“She told me that she was flattered by it, at first. For her, it meant that her father would spend more time with her than he had been. She said she felt special. Over the next months, he continued to not only do the thing she’d caught him doing that first time, but he had advanced these engagements. She hadn’t told me, or anyone, because she’d never had as much attention from her father as she was getting. The other boys she saw were only bothered with because she wanted to… be better for her father.”

I refilled her glass and asked her, “Did something happen that made her want to stop this?”

“Sort of. The initial reason wasn’t a specific incident, that I know of at least. She said she didn’t like the kind of person she was turning into, so she stopped it suddenly, without discussing it with him. After she stopped she said her father became violent with her one night, that he tried to force himself on her. She ran away from him and found his wife. She told her that she was ill and begged her to take her to the train station.”

“Has the father made any contact since then?”

“No, but the next visitation is coming soon. He didn’t contact me directly when she didn’t come to her last, but he did have some legal advocate write me a letter of demand with all sort of hinting threats in it.”

I gave her my most direct contact line. Since he was an OFS name, and because the girl is old enough, I was able to place an indefinite hold on the visitation schedule. I stamped her complaint and gave her a copy of the motion. She thanked me and asked for nothing else.

AIRTEL TO [REDACTED]

RE: PLANNED ECONOMY

The Household Industry

As you have now learned, the industries of finance, manufacturing, and governance are the physical embodiment of capital, goods, and services. They are easily defined because they are, usually, logically structured. Because of this, their processes can be described mathematically and their technical coefficients are easily deduced. This is not the case with the service industry known as the Household.

The problem that a theoretical economist faces is that the consumer preferences of any Household are not easily predictable and the technical coefficient of any one Household tends to be non-linear, very complex and varies due to prices.

Calculable information derived from a centralized product code catalog in conjunction with credit purchases as an individual Household identifier could change this state of affairs. But this method is not yet established on a national or even significant regional scale. To compensate for this lack of data, an alternative, indirect approach of analysis has been developed.

This alternative approach is known as Shock Testing. In this, all of the households in a single zone, or in the whole nation, are studied as a group or class, rather than individually. The mass behavioral patterns, rather than individual behavior, are used to discover useful estimates of the technical coefficients governing the economic structure of the hypothetical single household industry. To make such evaluations we shock the prices of a commodity and record the changes in the movement of all commodities.

[CONCLUDED]