One Trillion Dollars

by Andreas Eschbach

  A silence ensued, as if some ancient mythological monster were drawing breath.

  “We the People,” Annan repeated contemplatively.

  “That’s right,” John said. “Just like the people who went out onto the streets in Leipzig and other former East German cities back in 1989 shouted ‘we are the people’. That’s what this is all about.”

  “Nobody has ever attempted anything like this before,” the secretary-general said.

  “Then it is about time someone did,” John told him.

  Name of Foundation: We The People Organization.

  Head Office: 40 Wall Street, New York, NY, USA.

  Purpose of the Foundation: Organization and implementation of global elections and referendums.

  Foundation Capital: The Foundation's capital is 100 billion U.S. dollars. Foundation donor is John Salvatore Fontanelli. The amount of the endowment was chosen so that all anticipated expenses may be paid from capital gains in full.

  Managing Director: Lionel Hillman.

  Main function: To establish ballot stations (5.1 million in total) in all countries of the world. To hire and train election workers from the local population. Registering voters, and drawing up voter lists. Acceptance of nominations and publicizing the names of candidates. Printing and delivery of ballots. Announcement and supervision of the referendum. Publication of results.

  Disclosure: All documents, account transactions, financial entries and other operations of the Foundation are public. The Foundation website (www.WeThePeople.org) offers all users access to its accounts. Anyone requesting so by telephone may have physical access to all accounts.

  Exceptions to Disclosure: The voting register will not be made generally available. On request, however, any citizen may check whether or not he or she is registered and in which list, and request, if requested, transfer to another list. In this case they will be required to produce a valid identity document: contact your regional WTPO office.

  During voting: Election observers will be present in all polling stations and are permitted access at any time, both during voting and during the public count of votes cast. The results of all votes will be broken down by polling stations, and published in regional newspapers.

  Election Basics: All votes will be secret, free and equal to all. Voting is open to all adults, 18 years or older at the time of the vote and who are not incarcerated due to a crime, or who are in care due to mental impairment.

  Tourist Information: The offices of the foundation are in the lowest five levels of the headquarters building (marked by its colorful façade, a painting by Chilean artist Chico Roxas). The upper, white painted part of the building from the 6th floor upwards is the future residence of the World Speaker.

  Annan was leaning back in thought, his slender fingers intertwined. The expression on his face reflected an inner struggle between skepticism and fascination. "Have you ever thought," he said finally, "that you will need candidates?”

  John and Paul exchanged looks. “That’s one reason why we’re here,” said John.

  “An ideal candidate for world speaker,” Paul explained, “would be a former head of state or someone in a similar position … someone who is known throughout the world, who has a good reputation, and has connections to at least a few governments.”

  “We were thinking of you,” John added.

  Kofi Annan raised his eyebrows in surprise. Then he held up his hands defensively. “Oh no. I’m not suitable.” He shook his head. “No, thank you.”

  “Why not? You…”

  “Because I’m a diplomat. I’m a mediator between opposing viewpoints — an administrator.” He stretched out his hands. “Let’s forget that. You basically want someone to be world president, and I would not be accepted as a world president.”

  “But there is nobody in a better position than you.”

  “On the contrary.” The secretary-general shook his head. “If only for reasons of political integrity, I should be the last person to be expected to run for this office. I would be charged with supporting your idea just to further my own career.”

  Paul cleared his throat. “To be honest, we asked Mikhail Gorbachev first,” he told Annan. “He didn’t want to either, because his wife is very ill and he wants to care for her. It was he who suggested you.”

  “I feel honored, but I must decline.”

  John felt suddenly exhausted. Could the question of finding an appropriate candidate prove to be a problem? No, surely not. Visionary ideas aren’t defeated by minutiae. He brushed a strand of hair from his face, his arm as limp and heavy as a wet rag.

  “However,” Kofi Annan went on, “I could suggest someone else, someone I admire very much and who would be more suitable for this office than anyone else.”

  $47,000,000,000,000

  EVEN AS JOHN’S airplane was still flying over the Atlantic the press agencies had been informed and the first news reports of the impending global referendum were being broadcast around the world. As they drove from Heathrow into London, John’s phone rang in his jacket.

  “John?” someone shouted into the phone, “have you gone totally mad now?”

  He took the phone away from his ear and glanced at it. Then somewhat bemused, he said “Malcolm? Is that you?”

  “Yes dammit. Tell me, didn’t you understood anything? A worldwide vote? Let uneducated people who have no idea decide what should be done? I simply can’t believe it. For years I explained to you how the world functions and no sooner am I gone than you wander off into cuckoo land. What answer do you expect from some farmer in a rice field in Jakarta or a miner in Peru on how they want to live? A life of sacrifice and modesty?”

  “I won’t ask them that,” John answered coolly.

  “John, if you ask everyone in the world how they want to live, then you may as well cover the planet with suburbs littered with mansions, swimming pools, and shopping centers. That will mean the end, I hope you realize that.”

  “I’m certain that most will be satisfied with justice and a future for their children rather than a swimming pool.”

  McCaine sounded like he was yelling and gasping for air at the same time. “John, you are a dreamer!”

  “That’s what my mother always said too. I guess that’s why fate made me the heir instead of you. Take care, Malcolm.” He hung up and then called his secretary. He told her that calls from McCaine should be directed to the legal department from now on.

  The music droning from his room was so loud that it almost burst his eardrums, even out in the hallway. It sounded vaguely familiar.

  Unborn children

  want your money

  and their screaming

  never stops.

  House on fire,

  god is leaving,

  you don’t matter

  anymore.

  Wasted future, wasted future,

  all you offer me are tears …

  The crashing sound and croaky vocals — unquestionably Marvin’s CD. But hadn’t he thrown it away after playing it only once?

  When John went into the living room he saw Francesca standing in the middle of it with her eyes closed and her arms crossed as if she was hugging herself, swaying passionately in time to the bass guitar. John stared at her like she was the eighth and ninth wonders of the world all at once — she really seemed to like this droning cacophony of electronic noise!

  She startled when she saw him standing by the door and raced to the stereo to turn it off. The sudden quiet was almost too much. “Scusi,” she whispered as she retrieved the silver disc from the CD player, and put it back into the case. “I forgot you were returning today.” She gestured shyly around the room. “But everything is cleaned and straightened up.”

  “Va bene,” John said calmly, but she was already scurrying out with a barely audible “Buona notte,” the CD with Marvin’s image on it pressed against her breast, like some treasure. John looked after her and in a diffused way he was troubled to realize how much people’s tas
te and values could differ. And Marvin, for heaven’s sake … he hadn’t heard from him in ages. He didn’t even have a clue where he was living these days.

  When Marvin was allowed out, he enjoyed going up the rough mountain slopes into the woods that surrounded the valley like majestic guardians. There he wandered for hours through the forests, the underbrush, climbed over fallen trees, breathing in the cold, clear air and listening to the near silence, hearing only the sounds of nature, his own breathing and the sound of his footsteps. If it were not for the red and white stripes on some of the trees and steel rods, which marked the boundary between the region in which he was allowed to move and the rest of the world while wearing the electronic ankle bracelet, he would have felt free as never before.

  By now, the clinic allowed him to go out in the afternoons for up to four hours at a time. Yet the beeping signal from the electronic gadget on his ankle when time was up always seemed to come too soon. From up near the top of the mountain the clinic looked like an elegant white country house, oddly out of place nestled within this wilderness. One had to get much closer to see that it had barred windows and that the access road was guarded. And the other patients? They were all junkies: arrogant, cold-hearted sons and daughters from wealthy families, the black sheep who were kept here in no-man’s land by dad’s monthly check. He saw them only when he stepped back into the clinic. Marvin always hated that moment.

  On this day he had the feeling he wasn’t alone in the forest. There was no one to be seen. It was more like a scent. Was it one of the others? He hoped not. Marvin went back to a part of the forest’s periphery where he could see the clinic and counted the pathetic figures walking around in the garden pathways. No one was missing. Whoever it was sneaking around out here, it was not a patient.

  He decided not to worry about it. He climbed up the trail through the brush and gasped for breath, and when he saw the smoky white wisp in the chill air about it took him back to his previous life in the city with exhaust gases in the streets and smoking his joints by the window. It really did seem like another lifetime. He could have sworn that he had lived in the clinic for a hundred years already, in the room with the barred windows looking down on a piece of grass as featureless and boring as a green carpet. And it almost looked like he would have to remain here until his death.

  Suddenly there was a man in front of him, in a moss-green parka and a dark-blue baseball cap, standing motionless in the brush on the other side of the boundary, watching him.

  Marvin looked at him. He could simply have gone on his way — after all, it was not forbidden for him to be there in the forest. But he didn’t, instead he called out: “Hey, how’s it going?”

  The man lifted a hand and waved, then he gestured for Marvin to come closer.

  “Sorry!” Marvin said and pointed to his right foot. “I have this gadget on my ankle that’ll pump me full of anesthesia if I go on. That’s just how it is around here, you know.”

  The man seemed to understand because he clambered closer over roots and stones. “Is the discipline really so strict here?” he asked Marvin when he got close enough.

  Marvin shrugged his shoulders. “Twenty steps max and an alarm will go off, got somethin’ to do with the distance to the transmitter. And if they have to come get me with the dogs I’ll get a minimum two weeks of no fresh air — know what I mean?”

  “Sounds bad.” The man had a rough looking face with scars and a bushy mustache.

  Marvin had a vague feeling he had seen him before, but he often had such feelings lately. Dr. Doddridge, his therapist, assured him it was a side effect of the medication he had received in the start of his treatment. Marvin shrugged his shoulders. “I guess they have to do that. There are a few dudes here who are pretty wacko in their heads.”

  “You don’t seem to be one of them. The wacko ones I mean.”

  “God no, I was never that bad. I could have stopped anytime I wanted.” Marvin pulled out a stalk of grass and stuck it between his teeth. Looks cooler, he thought. “It’s all part of the rock star image, you know. You’re under such awful pressure. That can really be a problem sometimes — if you know what I mean.”

  “Hmm,” the stranger said. “But you seem to be well again.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Only the memory of the state he was in before coming here were still a bit fuzzy. The doctor said it would all come back one day. “It’s actually great all the things they do with you here; spa therapy, detoxification, hypnosis, conversational therapy … yeah, sure, they got me fixed-up pretty good again.”

  There was something snake-like in the hooded gaze with which the man looked at him. “Then why are you still here?”

  “No idea. Guess I’m not fixed totally one hundred percent yet.”

  “And you really believe that?”

  Marvin was suspicious as he looked at the man. He had on a dark-red sweater and there was thick, black body hair protruding from the collar. “What do you mean?”

  “You understood me. Have you never asked yourself about what was really behind everything that had happened to you?”

  “Like what?”

  “Think about it,” the man said and turned around to leave.

  “Hey, what are you talking about?” Marvin asked and was tempted to follow him. “You can’t just leave me standing here. Who are you anyway?”

  The man only raised a hand without turning around again. “I will come back,” he called out. “Think about it until then.” Then he disappeared into the trees.

  If it were up to Marvin he would have erased the incident from his memory, but, of course, instead that was all he could think about for the rest of the day. And in the middle of the night he remembered, and knew where he had seen the man before.

  The media didn’t like the term “World Speaker,” not even the newspapers and TV channels that belonged to Fontanelli Enterprises. Instead, what the people were told on the news was that they would be voting for a world president. The first commentators did not know if they were the butt of a silly joke or not.

  They would have done well to check with their advertising departments. Only the day before, there were double page ads placed in virtually all newspapers in the world — even in some government-controlled ones, where this sort of thing had never happened before — publicizing the creation of We the People and explaining its plans, its timetable, and modalities of coordinating them. All over the world people were amazed to hear that every adult could apply for the post of World Speaker, provided he or she could collect a sufficient number of supporters, of which not more than half the signatures were from people of his or her own nationality. In pubs and cafeterias around the globe the first candidates were already being considered, even before the world’s governments had recovered from their surprise. Just two days after the start of the campaign, the first applications were sent to New York.

  And the series of giant ads went on, this time with minutes-long spots on TV, broadcast during the most expensive primetime programs. The logo with the five colored heads suddenly popped up everywhere, on billboards, subway stations, on the back of cinema tickets, at the perimeter of football fields, on buses and trains and shown before every film in every movie theater everywhere on the planet. The We The People website claimed that the organization would have spent more on ads by election day than the Coca-Cola would have in ten years. It was obvious that We The People had an endless amount of money available, and that it would spend as much on educational work as was necessary. People all over the world began to understand that the campaign was serious.

  Politicians in office were smart enough not to comment on Fontanelli’s plan unless they were asked. Instinctively they realized that this would only give his plan more publicity. But even if they were asked, they held back, spoke only vaguely, reminded people of the right to free speech, and praised the tested structures of democracy. An EU commissioner, a member of this powerful organization where not a single executive had been voted into office by the
electorate of the diverse European Union governments, said he saw no reason to change the existing power structures.

  The interview John Fontanelli gave on Japanese television was just one stop on the world tour he undertook to promote his project. After only a few days of this he began to learn the usual sequence of the conversations, to the point where he was almost capable of predicting every word beforehand. Wherever he went, the respective interlocutor explained to him in great detail how different his country was and how different his culture was from the rest of the world — only to ask the exact same questions as everyone else had done!

  “Mr. Fontanelli,” said an athletically built Japanese man, whose name John had forgotten right after their introduction (though he had taken his business card just in case), “do you really believe that countries such as China, Iran or North Korea will allow secret voting to take place?”

  Beijing had already agreed, but John did not want to trumpet it to the world just yet. China needed wheat, it was an easy matter. Cuba, now that was a problem child. “A government that does not allow its citizens to vote,” John said, sticking to his well-rehearsed statement, “must be aware that it will then not participate in any global talks on restructuring the financial system.”

  “Will you apply pressure on such governments?” the man wanted to know.

  His highly paid staff of psychologists, rhetoricians, and speech writers had developed an equally impressive though as meaningless answer for this type of question, which had been anticipated all along. But what the hell, in that case you might as well send a taped message, right? John’s desire to be defiant was suddenly irresistible. He cleared his throat and said with a grim smile: “Let me put it this way: if someone still thinks that a single country can withstand the influence of multinational corporations, then it’s about time for him to wake up and smell the coffee.”

  It took a week before the man came back.

  Every day Marvin was on the lookout between the giant redwood trunks, in the rain and the cold, but no one came. He should have taken a closer look for any footprints at the spot where they first met to make sure it hadn’t been a dream. So when he went there a week later he was relieved to see the man waiting for him.