The Worst Century

[Ilmari Hoito]

((To Katya))

Ilmari was busy sweeping the floor when a customer entered his shop. He quickly put his broom away and went to greet her.

"Hello, can I help you with anything?" He asks the young woman.

[Nea Jokinen]

Nea shrugs. "Oh well."
She turns back to her drawing.
"What are you up to tonight?"

[Dead Character]

"I might talk to Shura about lending some money.. so you don't have to sell as many paintings." Antero replies. "But other than that, I don't have anything planned. I kind of just want to relax around the house I guess."

[Hope Dayspring]

"I met some very unusual people. One was a woman named Li Winters and the other a guy named Vissarion. They are both socialists." I say to Lysander, hoping maybe he has some reaction to these names. They seem awfully familiar to me, though I have no real proof that they are anything more than what they claim to be.

"How was your visit with Bassarov and family?" I ask the two of them.

[Nea Jokinen]

"Are you sure? Its no trouble for me at all."

[Dead Character]

"Well...I don't want to pressure you or anything." Antero replies and crosses his arms. He sits down at the table and looks over the newspaper.

"Anyway I don't know if anyone has much money right now. Things are kind of chaotic here right now until wages and stuff get figured out." He says of why people might not be in the market for art at the moment.

"A lot of the richer people have fled the country."

[Nea Jokinen]

"Its no problem. I dont mind at all," Nea smiled and then leaned over and kissed Antero's cheek. Since he didn't have anything planned for the night she just wanted to be with him and maybe cuddle.

[Dead Character]

"I you want we could go up to my room and read to each other. I like reading." Antero suggests since he wants to do something different than the normal just hanging out.

[Aleksandra Odinsova]

"I don't really care where we go. If you want to go to Japan, Laurent, we can go to Japan. I will go ahead and book our flight. If nothing else we can go on two vacations. One to Japan and then when we are done with that one, we can go to the Carribean. There is no reason why we can't go to more than one place." I tell all of them.

I then go online to book our flights.

"It is settled, we are leaving tomorrow morning."

[Nea Jokinen]

"I'd like that," Nea smiles. She would enjoy spending time with him.

[dead character]

I head back to work, but think about my chat with Sen. Maybe I will call her again and invite her over. She seemed a little lost or something.

After working another 8 hours at RTE, I head home and order chinese food for delivery. I am too pooped to cook. I don't like cooking that much anyway.

I can Sen and leave a message that she can come over and visit if she wants to, and appologize for being so rude the last time we met.

"I've really got to work on my people skills."

[Dead Character]

"Cool." Antero replies and takes her hand. They go up to his room and he pulls a book off his shelf. "The Conquest of Bread" by Peter Kropotkin. "I kind of want to read more...and like, be a better anarchist."
"You know, Shura's last name is Kropotkin. It's kind of funny. I think it is just a coincidence."
He opens up the book. It is a little bit dusty since he has never read it before. He sits down on the bed with Nea and opens to the first chapter.
"Want me to read aloud?"

[Nea Jokinen]

"If you want to its really up to you," Nea smiled and postioned herself under his arm.

[Dead Character]

"Okay, I'll read." Antero skips the preface and goes right into chapter one.

"Chapter one...our riches..."

"THE human race has travelled far since, those bygone ages when men used to fashion their rude implements of flint, and lived on the precarious spoils of the chase, leaving to their children for their only heritage a shelter beneath the rocks, some poor utensils--and Nature, vast, ununderstood, and terrific, with whom they had to fight for their wretched existence.

During the agitated times which have elapsed since, and which have lasted for many thousand years, mankind has nevertheless amassed untold treasures. It has cleared the land, dried the marshes, pierced the forests, made roads; it has been building, inventing, observing, reasoning; it has created a complex machinery, wrested her secrets from Nature, and finally it has made a servant of steam. And the result is, that now the child of the civilized man finds ready, at its birth, to his hand an immense capital accumulated by those who have gone before him. And this capital enables him to acquire, merely by his own labour, combined with the labour of others, riches surpassing the dreams of the Orient, expressed in the fairy tales of the Thousand and One Nights.

The soil is cleared to a great extent, fit for the reception of the best seeds, ready to make a rich return for the skill and labour spent upon it-- a return more than sufficient for all the wants of humanity. The methods of cultivation are known.

On the wide prairies of America each hundred men, with the aid of powerful machinery, can produce in a few months enough wheat to maintain ten thousand people for a whole year. And where man wishes to double his produce, to treble it, to multiply it a hundred-fold, he makes the soil, gives to each plant the requisite care, and thus obtains enormous returns. While the hunter of old had to scour fifty or sixty square miles to find food for his family, the civilized man supports his household, with far less pains, and far more certainty, on a thousandth part of that space. Climate is no longer an obstacle. When the sun fails, man replaces it by artificial heat; and we see the coming of a time when artificial light also will be used to stimulate vegetation. Meanwhile, by the use of glass and hot water pipes, man renders a given space ten and fifty times more productive than it was in its natural state."

The prodigies accomplished in industry are still more striking. With the co-operation of those intelligent beings, modern machines--themselves the fruit of three or four generations of inventors, mostly unknown--a hundred men manufacture now the stuff to clothe ten thousand persons for a period of two years. In well-managed coal mines the labour of a hundred miners furnishes each year enough fuel to warm ten thousand families under an inclement sky. And we have lately witnessed twice the spectacle of a wonderful city springing up in a few months at Paris,1 without interrupting in the slightest degree the regular work of the French nation.

And if in manufactures as in agriculture, and as indeed through our whole social system, the labour, the discoveries, and the inventions of our ancestors profit chiefly the few, it is none the less certain that mankind in general, aided by the creatures of steel and iron which it already possesses, could already procure an existence of wealth and ease for every one of its members.

Truly, we are rich, far richer than we think; rich in what we already possess, richer still in the possibilities of production of our actual mechanical outfit; richest of all in what we might win from our soil, from our manufactures, from our science, from our technical knowledge, were they but applied to bringing about the well-being of all."


"Okay...so like, humans are no longer a slave to nature... we have the technology and manufacturing power to meet everyone's needs..." He says in summary.

[Nea Jokinen]

"All of that means that?" Nea kinda smirked.