Chapter 27 E
Two weeks earlier, King Jacob was in his father’s private residence rummaging through his personal desk, when he found a computer chip. It was stuck inside a see-through plastic card, and not easily read by any kind of computer plug-in Jacob had ever seen. He took it to his father’s leading computer technician who led the tech side of the cyber company. He also had never seen a chip like this one before. He had carefully gotten a scan of the chip's storage center, and what he found was something unbelievable.
“It’s a computer program that analyzes all of the data of the people logged into our company’s internet source.” He explained to Jacob. “It’s very complex. I can't believe your father got access to this kind of technology without telling me about it. But this thing, has incredible capabilities. The best way I can describe it, from my brief observation of this thing. It’s analyzing human behavior to predict and essentially control future outcomes.”
Jacob had the technician program the chip into a personalized format he can use, and took control of the program after that. When he lost the battle for Penelope, he publicly blamed his advisory board, and had them all killed for treason. He left their heads on the castle lawn, right next to his new dragon, and displayed it for all the world to see.
But that was all over now. Today he sat on the patio of a coffee shop, undetected in civilian clothing. In the beautiful kingdom of Luzaria. He watched his little brother down the street, selling flowers at the market. He was a charming little guy, and Jacob needed a chief of staff.
Penelope took her father’s crown as she always dreamed of doing, and moved to the castle in the southern most state of her kingdom. It wasn’t Luzaria, but it had enough sun to help her forget the burn of cold air on her skin.
She had lots of healing ahead of her, and reflexes to unlearn, but thankfully she had a really good chief of staff lined up to help her. The two of them made some much-needed upgrades to the Alamora social media, to accommodate for the recent decrease in internet content. For a little while, the world was calm. It had been a bittersweet victory.
The world given permission to breathe finally, after closing the book on a complex chapter. Everyone as a collective, had something to mourn. Perhaps the only real remnants left over from war.
Penelope condemned her father’s castle, a good portion of it burned and the rest smelt like plastic campfire. She didn’t have it in her heart to rebuild it, and bulldozing her childhood home wasn’t an option.
As for King Jacob, Penelope decided it was time to end the trade war with Cybcernia. Calling corporate monarchies, the governing force of the future. They needed to be accepted, not fought and excluded from global trade, and world affairs. Headlines even whispered of a secret romance between the two new monarchs. Which the Silver Knight found peculiar, since he was spending his nights in the queen’s bed. You never really can trust headlines.
To honor Prince Sunny’s sacrifice, in the name of the queen, Penelope had a statue of him installed in a very special place in her new city. He pointed at the sun in the sky, and dragged a sword with the other hand. He was a sun dial, if you knew how to read him. Unfortunately, Sunny’s father wasn’t very pleased with the current affairs. He watched from his kingdom, as the youngest queen to ever hold power got chummy with an oligarch that killed his son. For him, there was no peace. There was no new chapter. Only boiling blood, that screamed for war.
The End.