Don had imagined it more euphorically, this

New start

They’d arrived at the bus station she remembered well, with two drunken parents.

She’d thought this time would be different. They would romp through the streets and things would be offered up to them, she’d thought.

Maybe they would meet interesting kids who had a—let’s say—villa where they could put up the four of them. It wasn’t clear what the others had pictured, what they had dreamed of for that first day in the metropolis. Nobody talked about so-called feelings; that sort of thing wasn’t sufficiently concrete. What were they supposed to talk about? Their troubled childhoods? Their distrust of the world? The horrors of the night? When the ground seemed to open up and they vanished into the abyss. Blaming their childhoods for their fucked-up lives had been a pointless quirk of the disappearing bourgeoisie. The over-fifty set, teachers working on behavior therapy based on trauma inflicted by their mothers, constructing a new family tree with amusing, colorful pictures they’d drawn of their pain. WTF. If there was an upside to the end of the world then it was the collapse of the psych industry. Nobody had money anymore for family constellations and Kleenex boxes. There wasn’t any money for nonfunctional members of society.

Men like

THOME’S FATHER

Had seen to that. Thome’s father looks around. He’s alone in the library. His so-called wife is hanging around with some Russians in Dorchester, which belongs to some Arabs. And Thome’s father scratches his testicles. Well, “scratches.” He checks on the basis of his masculinity. Everything’s present and accounted for. Still alive. He shoves a cigar into his mouth. Things are rolling. Withdrawal from the EU has been forgotten. But not by Thome’s father; he likes to remember it. It was the first step of the reconfiguration, and it still makes him smirk, yes, he thinks “smirk” when he vaguely curls his lips, thinking about the fact that bots took the blame for that. Back then he had no clue about technology, only about psychology. A divided populace is a controllable populace. One that wants an enemy and a leader. Voilà, thought Thome’s father. Here I am. Thome’s father was a rabid supporter of Murray Rothbard’s libertarian manifesto.

Exactly.

Here

SIR ERNEST (EARL)

HEALTH PROFILE: gout, incontinence, pronounced anxiety when he thinks of his own demise

HOBBIES: hunting

FINANCIAL STATUS: unclear, more than a billion

Comes into play.

“Sir, if you were to offer a concise version of your ideas?”