Think or Swim: Part IX

"When are you going to wake up? For fuck's sake! When are you going to grow up?"
Mao Kelly had developed the habit of talking to himself after he'd accepted that he was a loner — in his early teens, in other words.

It was late morning and he was awake. But it wasn't the aftertaste of the absinthe or the pain in his head that had brought on the rebuking. No. He was upset that he had misled a woman who had been honest with him. Yvette was also gorgeous and his restless sleep had been filled with graphic fantasies involving her in various settings.

"Jesus, you are mad," he said to the bathroom mirror, as he recalled what he had done.

After upbraiding himself for another five minutes, he turned to cursing the other great scapegoat in his life: politics.

Mao, for most of his early life, had ignored politics. And then it was too late because politics took an intense interest in him. Not only because of his revolutionary work in artificial intelligence, which involved subverting 35 international laws, but because of his status as "alien European" within the European United States Alliance. He was a fugitive and, to his shame this morning, a deceitful one.

He tried to recall the sequence of events that had led to this mess. As always, it went back to 2010.

When the people of Ireland rejected the Berlin Treaty in 2010, which was an amended version of the Paris Treaty they had rejected in 2009, which was a modified version of the Lisbon Treaty they had rejected in 2008, the European Union, as it was then called, lost its patience with the stubborn islanders.

The Brussels mandarins responded to the 2010 rebuff by cutting off the generous EU development funding that had become a key component of Ireland's budgeting following the collapse the former "tiger" economy at the end of 2009. The wilful Irish reacted by reducing the nation's corporate tax rate to 0 percent, thus matching the Cayman Islands.

Enraged, the EU ejected Ireland from the Euro currency zone (its place was taken by Albania) and Dublin then astonished the global markets with a breathtaking counterstroke: It declared that Ireland was becoming a tax haven and that it was simultaneously joining Gibraltar, Andorra and Monaco to form the GAIM gambling association. The four launched a 24/7 virtual reality casino that soon became the world's most popular and lucrative betting business. Overnight, Ireland became a favourite holiday destination for risk-appreciative Afghan and Cuban millionaires and its distinctive green passports traded for millions on the black market.

In the final act of the "European Treaty War", as it became known, the successor to the EU, the EUSA, under President Bruni, rescinded the rights that Irish citizens had enjoyed under previous European agreements and imposed strict visa limits on the country's tourists and workers.

Engrossed in his ground-breaking work in the Republic of Flanders and uninterested in politics, Mao Kelly let all these developments take their course without acknowledging their importance or preparing himself for their impact.

When his employer informed him that she had no option but to offer his job to a qualified EUSA citizen, Mao, after recovering from shock, made his decision. Unwilling to return to the rain, he decided to go on the run.