It’s not much to look at now, but you should have seen Clarksburg in the 1900s, after they found copper in the nearby mountains. While the mining companies made money for a century, the people built a thriving community. This town, which is at the tip of the Siberian Peninsula, was the bedrock of culture and business.

Then the music stopped.  After they sucked the land dry and destroyed everything, the mining companies just packed up and left. But they abandoned a wasteland in their wake; for years afterward, not even a blade of grass could grow here. The rivers turned red when the rainwater came gushing out of the ground: as though the earth bled from its wounds. The greed, of the industrialists, and the politicians who pocketed their payouts, destroyed our lives.

We were too poor to bribe the bureaucrats, so they turned a blind eye to our plight. We only saw them during elections when they came by asking for our votes, and making empty promises. This situation was the fuel. The spark came when the government decided to raze our beloved opera house on Solzhenitsyn Street, to make room for a highway. When the bulldozers arrived on Monday morning, something broke in us. I had never seen my father so upset. He put on his parka, grabbed a shovel, and, mad as hell, yelled, “They don’t hear us when our children are born deformed. They don’t care when we die of hunger. Now they want to take this away too. If it’s war they want, it’s war they will get!”

He then stomped out of the door to join a growing crowd in front of the Opera house.

Uncles, aunts, grandfathers, children; anyone who had strength in their legs stood in defiance against the demolition crews for weeks. Protests grew into a rebellion. Pretty soon, the disgruntled farmers and workers formed a militia and demanded to secede from the motherland.

The situation quickly got worse after that. The governor sent a battalion of soldiers to control the situation. We had daily curfews, tanks patrolled the streets and living conditions became intolerable. But our resistance was strong. The opera house became the symbol of our struggles. Gun battles killed scores of civilians, but that only strengthened our resolve, and the war escalated. Soon, planes dropped bombs on the little town. The opera house was the first to be reduced to rubble. This was the land where entropy reigned supreme: Chaos ruled the day. 

One by one, all seven of my brothers and sisters left town. My parents forced them to leave. But I didn’t; I stayed to fight the fight because our cause was just. As luck would have it, the media picked it up. The Moscow correspondent of The New York Times covered us extensively. Photos of my battle-weary 70-year old father, and my soot-covered fifteen-year old face, captured the attention of the world. They ran a series of articles, titled “Davids of Charlesburg face the Russian government Goliath”. There was a massive outpouring of sympathy and the issue raged on in the United Nations for months. But diplomacy worked too slowly to prevent bloodshed more quickly. I was beginning to think that we got our hopes up in vain, when agents from Karma Pays came calling one day.  Soon thereafter, the tide started to turn. The government negotiated a peace agreement when we eventually had the upper hand. Peace and prosperity came soon thereafter. We had our first harvest of grapes couple of years after that: wine never tasted better.

It’s the year 2040 now. Weary after a hard day’s work at the farm, I stopped by at La Nigra Tuo-the only bar in town. Someone had an ironic sense of humor when they named a bar, “The Black Hole”, in the forgotten language of Esperanto. I like the bar; it’s small and unassuming.  The bartender slid over my drink: a Vodka with 2 ice-cubes and a soybean. The soybean is my homage to an old American radio show called The Prairie Home Companion. Father used to play it in the car all the time, just to remind us that there was still culture out there.

My two little girls, Anna and Rebecca, are home sleeping. I see them playing in the yard, without any fear of bombs raining down, or if a sniper might have them in his sights, and it warms my heart. I know the sacrifices were worth it. My name is Vlad, and you shall soon see how Karma Pays helped us do it all.