UNUM
Let the maneuvering begin
‘This action can not be reversed, would you like to proceed?’ Jake stared at the statement on the screen for just a little while before selecting ‘confirm’. The choice should have been harder for him, and it probably would have been if anyone else knew what he was doing. In fact, his own pettiness surprised him, after all these years he retained the desire to be vindicated. He glanced over at the piece of wall he’d had removed from his childhood home. For a moment he felt nostalgic, the piece of transported concrete not only carried Beth’s first mural for him, but it brought with it memories of his father. He scrunched his nose and shook his head, now wasn’t the time to reminisce fondly, it was time to execute a long planned plot of revenge. Well, calling it a plan was a bit too gracious, it wasn’t a plan it was just a plot. It didn’t keep him up at night, it didn’t plague his thoughts, but it was always there, silently waiting. Jake didn’t know how, or when, his plot would materialize, he just knew it would, and then there was an opening, and he took it.
Tragedy is in the eye of the beholder and the rest of that day Jake felt light as a feather. As far as he was concerned he was just fulfilling a long delayed, large order of comeuppance, and it was time to clear the books. When Jake was younger he and his dad were undesirable and forgotten. Repeatedly taken advantage of by a system that desperately clung to the established order that perpetuated society’s hierarchy. Now though, things were different, and part of Jake’s nostalgia was tied to the fact that his dad never got to witness the full extent of Jake’s rise. He was no longer forgotten, he was no longer undesirable, he literally held the keys to the castle, and he just permanently locked the door on six of the seven most influential families on Earth: Pembleton, Montague, Whitman, Clayton, Erickson, Raleigh, and Feters, he spared the Clayton family, to repay the kindness the elder Clayton had showed his family after his hospitalization. These families may have been among the ruling elite on Earth, but they’d never reach Unum, and they’d never know… no one would.
The office door clicked behind him and Jake knew it was locked. So he commenced his morning game of dodging the hallway children. They didn’t have a place to house all the people that needed to be relocated after the quake in Bakala so Jake bought a sprawling piece of land, 100 acres large, in upstate New York, and over the course of 10 years and with the help of Ingrid and Beth transformed it into a haven for the displaced, as well as state of the art lab for cryogenic zygote research. He looked up and saw Ingrid moving opposite him with enviable ease, Ingrid didn’t have to dodge the children, they dodged her. When she got close, Jake did an about face to join her, “how was your night, Ingrid?”
She stopped walking for a moment, then glanced in his direction, “It was…decent. We had a few late night calls from Washington, DC, last night. They are starting to coordinate initial deployments..what’s with that face?”
“How… we haven’t given them a final list. I want to make sure we aren’t just offering access to the usual suspects.”
“Meaning what, Jake?”
As he extended his arms outward he made eye contact with Ingrid, “do you see the people around us now?”
“Of course, I see the little rugrats, how could I not? They’re everywhere.”
“Well, these are the humans I want populating Unum. We aren’t selling seats, I don’t care how rich, successful, productive, esteemed, or whatever… insert any other descriptor we’ve used in the past to rank humans. We will not now use the money the wealthy would give us to preserve their lineage on our new planet at the expense of everyone else. I think we should do this a different way.”
“You’re probably going to be the only person saying that Jake. Back in DC and New York people are already drafting property rights and selling ‘Unum Futures’, half the planet is already “owned”, and the other half is for sale at a steep price. So, what are you going to do?”