Working Title - The Madrigals

A Story of Privilege, Power, & Revolution

There were seventeen trees leading down the road to disaster. Of course, he didn’t realize that now. He only subconsciously counted them from the plush leather back seat in which he sat, as he was driven down the road he thought lead to the consulting firm his father had attempted to leave to him. He had declined most of the privileged opportunities afforded him by his luck of being birthed into a dynastic family that controlled most of the silicon mining operations in the world, which had so far quietly allowed them to amass a fortune rivalling any single family in history due to the high, & rising, price of the most critical component in microchip production & the need for, & price of, this mined element only increasing over the last 30 years, & exponentially in the last 10. I say quietly because very few people had even heard of he Madrigals before tonight, but that was all about to change. The plutocracy that he had witnessed first hand, in his dealings with his family had, not only made him sick, but had driven him away from the same family he had only really been a member of until he was 15 & learned the truth by being read in on what the family actually did, & why they were afforded such a lavish lifestyle, while much of the world suffered, as well as political power the likes of which had only been enjoyed by a handful of families in the modern age. His father had often taken calls at home from world leaders, including the president of the United States & prime ministers the world over & had gatherings at their various mansions hosting the same leaders. When global events had jeopardized their stranglehold on the microchip input monopoly, he would delegate a flurry of threatening calls to these same types, & usually by dinner, the crisis would have been averted, placing them back onto, usually an even more beneficial trajectory. The looming possibility of multi-governmental intervention that would mean a vast array of costly operational changes, meaning a certain profit hit. As with any corporation, the idea of making good things or helping people only mattered insofar as it was in line with the actual primary, or really sole, objective of pushing each point higher in stock price in order to squeeze every ounce of wealth & add pointless millions upon the billions that had already been amassed. Investments in real estate, foreign currency, obviously other companies, all backstopped by equal amounts of insurance, holdings in actual gold, vaults of liquid cash, ensured that the wealth would be maintained under any eventuality, other than total collapse. A maze of mansions & lavish apartments littered America & Europe along with a fleet of helicopters, planes, boats, including 3 super yachts; these people are as prepared as you can be & have everything anyone could ever want, as well as most things that existed, & certainly more than anyone needed, & definitely more than their share.

Alex, having been born into this absurd wealth, had both political & economic power, & more importantly to this story, a self-hating guilt so deep that at 13, when he learned that there were people who worked full-time jobs & made less than $100,000 a year, an obviously high annual salary for any working class regular citizen, & he learned this fact about his fellow man at large while charging a $3,000 pair of sunglasses on his Amex black limitless card because they were only half of his weekly allowance, he turned it inward & this began a smoldering purpose. Since this initial shock, causing him actual PTSD, & after attending therapy with the most expensive psychologist in New York, figured out he was full of shame from simply having the extraordinary luck of being born so incredibly privileged that he could literally do anything on earth, & in perpetuity too, meaning he would not one time in his life be limited by, or worry about, money, as almost all of his fellow citizens would have to, & obviously some more than others. It’s not like he thought that people couldn’t live good, fun, joyful lives without money, & he, in fact, was both impressed & jealous of how happy people could be having to go to a job 5 days a week, not summering & wintering, living in one, tiny to him, house most of their lives’, not having chef prepared meals 24 hours a day, paying money to fix a car instead of just replacing it, & all of the other extraordinarily expensive things that had always been standard for him & everyone he knew, especially his family. At family dinners & other events there would sometimes be talk of the poor & it always came back to their belief that they were just a sub-class of humans on earth, necessary to power, or supply rather, the rich in order that they could really enjoy their time on this earth. He didn’t really ever come around to the family’s falsely justifying defense mechanism of a belief that if the ‘poor’ just worked harder, they would break into the rich class & that meant that he, both was open to other outside ideas, & that he was somewhat regarded differently by the entirety of his family. Although this wasn’t entirely bad, & truth be told, he had, since the age of 16, almost hoped they would face mass indictments & give him the ability to turn on his family, each & every one, to the tune of federal prison time. Maybe a fantasy, but he knew that each one of them was close to evil in their own way, definitely malignant narcissists, & had literally no regard for any human being at all, so the idea of them all being punished had always been one of his primary mechanisms to dissuade the pervasive & acute waves of rolling shame for even knowing about the absolute debauched, lavish, absurd lifestyle afforded these worthless people from the fortunate baby that they grew up from because of the dynastic wealth they were all a part of. He knew that they mostly understood their position & standing, as well as the fact they had basically won the monetary lottery, but being the ones with so much everything, it was easy to just enjoy each & every minute, & conversely Alex felt that for every day that he just enjoyed, thousands of people could have had better decades of their lives & he couldn’t bare the crushing guilt of just enjoying any more days; he had lived ignorantly blissful long enough, spending millions of dollars by the time he was 16 & he was determined to do something to mitigate this being born at the head of the table with a gold spoon all the way down his throat. It was this drive that had led him to Augusta in the first place & ever since he arrived, he had been a ghost to his family. He had taken a hard-working assembly line job building axles 3rd shift for semi-truck brands like Peterbilt, Mack etc, & he had successfully infiltrated the working class anonymously. He worked almost 50 hours a week, just enough time to sleep, & back to work, as many people had their entire adult lives. He was being paid 20/hr, but obviously the money wasn’t the point. He had shown a lack of hunger for extra shifts, being half broken by the work, & almost got figured out as some kind of fraud. At any rate, he was searching for some way to, at least, redistribute his family’s billions of dollars of assets somehow, & hopefully find a way to bring down the whole plutocrat class of pricks he had known his whole life, but he wasn’t stupid, so he knew it would almost be impossible, but if it could be done, it would have to have an inside, key man who would pull all of the strings that never got pulled, but the details were still unknown; unknowable & that was his mission, so he was trying to find someone to help him organize a massive plan that he wanted to upend the whole economy, society; a revolution!