„Dad, is it true that when I was very little, some old people broke into our house and you scuffled with them? And they took everything out of the fridge? And then they slept in the stairwell of the building?” 

“Did your mother tell you that?”

“No, I sometimes sort of remember it, when I’m half asleep. Is it true, or am I just imagining things?”

“It’s true, but I didn’t think you remembered any of it. You hadn’t even turned two at the time.”

“Who were those people?”

“Grandparents.”

“My grandparents?!”

“No, the city grandparents. The grandies. That’s what we called them.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I’m not surprised,” he says, stretching a bit. Then he yawns real big and dives into the story. “That was just after the second pensioners’ uprising.” 

“The second?”

“Yes. The first uprising was relatively mild. They just held protests or sat down on the pavement at the busiest intersections in the city and brought traffic to a halt.”

“And then the police came and sent them on their way?”

“Not quite. It was slower than that, and more painful. First, the city introduced the ‘Adopt Two Grandies’ program. They said you could only use some of the basic municipal services if you adopted a pair of grandparents, or grandies. The grandies didn’t know who had adopted them. The whole thing was anonymous. But if you wanted your kids to be able to go to the doctor or the hospital and just to school, then you had to adopt an average of three grandies. By which I mean make regular payments on their behalf. That’s when things started going wrong.”

“But why did they try to pass them off on you?”

“Cause first the state passed them off on the big cities. That’s when the city-states started to form. The state needed more local taxes to be able to cover the cost of the pensioners. It wasn’t so much the pension payments as it was the cost of care. Think about it: more and more peoples started to live to be ninety or even one-hundred or older. The people of the city didn’t want to pay more taxes, of course, and so the state stopped providing for the pensioners. Then the big cities didn’t want to pay any taxes at all as part of the state budget, since they had to take care of the pensioners. So the state stopped providing other services too. Health care, the courts, the police, the prisons, everything. And then the big cities became completely independent. The villages and the smaller towns quickly allied themselves with whatever city they could, whatever city was closest. Course, that didn’t bring the cities more money. On the contrary!

And then they introduced the grandie program.”

“I still don’t get it. Why didn’t they just tell everyone to provide care for their own parents? Wouldn’t that have been simpler?”

“Yes, it would have. Which is precisely why they didn’t do it. The city leaders quickly realized that the parents and their children would join forces, and the city leaders would face their wrath. And they didn’t want this. So they devised a solution that they could use to rile parents up against children and children up against parents. The messages started to come in. ‘You will be unable to purchase your medications today because your adoptive son is not providing care for you.’ And messages to the caregivers too: ‘Today, your grandie is going to bed hungry because you are not providing adequate care.’ The messages were sent by the Pensioners’ Foundation. It worked for a while, but in the end, when your wages aren’t really enough for you to provide for your own children and you are already going into debt, and then you also have your actual parents for whom you are trying to provide care, since their adoptive children can’t, well, after a while no one really concerned themselves with the messages from the Pensioners’ Foundation.”

“But if the whole system was anonymous, then how…”

“It was only anonymous for a time. One year before we were going to emigrate, just before Christmas a group of hacker pensioners allegedly busted into the system and released all the names. But if you ask me, it was the City. Then chaos broke loose. The grandies got their hands on the addresses, and they started knocking on doors, and that’s putting it mildly. That’s what you saw when you were two years old. 

“And what became of my real grandmothers and grandfathers?” 

“They were still alive at the time. My parents still grew things in the garden too. They had a little plot of land, but everything they grew on it was stolen. And food wasn’t the only problem. They got more and more frail, and then the contagions started to hit and all the sicknesses and ailments that come with age. It’s a terrible feeling, knowing that there are medicines and treatments which would save them, but you can’t get them. And no one wanted to help the elderly. With every passing day, more and more people started to think, ‘they’ve lived long enough, now it’s my turn! Let them die!’”

I can tell that if I ask another question, he’ll burst into tears. 

“And the City just sat back and watched?” 

“Who is the City?” he asks in voice so quick and sudden that it startles me. “The leaders? I think there was only one thing that concerned them: not getting swept away by a wave of public anger. Holding on to power. And the rest of us? We just tried to survive. It was astonishing. One year, you could still get pretty much everything, though the weather was already catastrophic and everything you needed oil for was already expensive. But we still imported things from all over. We could afford it, if just barely. But one year later, everything doubled and tripled and quadrupled in cost. And what did people do? Buy less? No way! They bought more and more and more, even if they didn’t have any money. They sold anything they could, everything they could just to sure they had food in the fridge and on the shelves. And that made everything even more expensive.”