Who Will Rule After Me?

(Disclaimer: I have no business connection with HUNGER GAMES. My only purpose in writing this story is to have fun and maybe share it)

Chapter 1 Livia Snow

The people of the Capitol would be surprised if they saw President Snow's inner sanctum. It was quite austere, with few of the frills that adorned most Capitol buildings. The principal decoration was a side wall, with an inscription in Latin and Panemian English:

These your imperial arts, ye sons of Rome!
O'er distant realms to stretch your awful sway,
To bid those nations tremble and obey;
To crush the proud, spread glory near and far,
give mankind peace, or shake the world with war.

An expert in Virgil might notice that the inscription left out a line, about showing mercy to the humbled. That was not Snow's style.

"Sir?" said his secretary's voice on his intercom. "Your daughter Livia is here to see you."

"Thank you, send her in."

Livia was Snow's only child, and was presumed to be Snow's heir. The little girl whom Livia had recently borne, Claudia, made a Snow dynasty even more likely. Snow was very fond of Claudia, but there was one thing about the birth that disturbed him.

Livia had refused to give the name of Claudia's father. That was not unusual in the Capitol, but disturbing from the dynastic point of view. Some day Claudia might be president, and Snow worried at the idea of the mysterious father coming out of the woodwork, playing on Claudia's emotions, and becoming a power behind the throne. He had given up trying to get the information out of Livvie, and instead assigned a trusted investigator to look into the matter.

"Welcome, Livvie. You said you had something important to talk about. Is Claudia all right."

"Yes, Claudia's fine. But I had an idea, about the Hunger Games."

"Rather late, isn't it? The 64th Games were just last month."

"I know. I watched them while I was nursing Claudy." Her decision to breastfeed the baby had been unusual by Capitol standards, but not worth arguing about. "The contrast – well, it got me to thinking."

"About what?"

"I think that when a tribute receives a serious injury in the Games, they should be retrieved by hovercraft and brought back to the Capitol for treatment."

"And sent back once they are patched up? That would prolong the Games a lot."

"No. Once they've been retrieved for treatment, they are 'out'. The Victor will be the last one to stay functional in the arena. Then everybody goes home."

Snow stared. "My dear, I think you're missing the point of the Games."

"Point? What point? In the Games last month, I saw one girl got her belly slashed open by a Career with a sword. Disemboweled, the experts called it. She died, but only after an hour of agony. What was the point of that?"

"One of the main purposes of the Games is to punish the Districts for Rebellion."

"What does that mean, exactly? A District is an abstraction. You don't punish a district; you punish PEOPLE. Yeah, I've heard the theory, that the Romans thought one could punish a rebel by targeting their children. But even if you accept that, the Rebellion was more than sixty years ago. How many rebels are still alive now, given the low life expectancy out in the Districts? If you still want to punish the actual rebels, why not hang the ones that are left and have done with it?"

"It's not just a matter of punishing rebellion in the past; it's also deterring rebellion in the future. Losing 2 kids a year – 1 if they're the Victor that year - is the baseline if they do nothing more than having rebelled 60 years ago. I leave it to their imagination what we would do if they REALLY angered us - where did you get this idea of a changed Games, anyway?"

"You gave me permission to study history. There was something called the Olympic Games. Actually they happened twice, once in ancient Greece and once after the Industrial Revolution. People COMPETED, without killing each other. It was a unifying force."

"But we don't want a unifying force," said the President. "Divide and conquer is our rule. Right now our Peacekeepers are a match for any one District if it rebelled. But if several Districts were to combine and offer separate threats, the Peacekeepers would overwhelmed. Right now there's little contact between the Districts. When they do come into contact, they try to kill each other. There's a fundamental split between the Career Districts and the outliers."

"You keep talking about rebelling. When they rebelled, if they rebelled. How about setting up an Empire where nobody wanted to rebel?"

"You say you've studied history, Livvie. Well, it's a law of history that a period of anarchy is ended by the rise of a powerful ruler willing to crush any opposition. The Leviathan, one philosopher called it. The Roman Civil War – Pompey, Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Antony – ended with the Emperor Augustus. The Mongol depredations ended with the powerful Ming Dynasty. The War of the Roses ended with the Tudors. The French Revolution produced Napoleon. But no anarchy matches what hit the human race in the past few centuries. Plague, war, ecological disaster. Population went from several billion down to several million; that's a thousandfold decrease. We have a responsibility to keep the peace."

" 'The Romans created a desert and called it peace'," quoted Livia. "One of their own writers said that. It's been two generations since the rebellion; isn't it time to change tactics?"

"I'm not ready to take that risk," said Snow.

"YOU'RE not," said Livia, now losing her temper altogether. "But you're not going to be around forever. Someday I'll be President, and I'll run the Hunger Games the way I suggested. A peaceful, civilized Games."

"You can't do that. It'll ruin everything."

Livia stood up. "How are you going to stop me? You'll be dead. Goodbye, Father". She marched to the door of the office and slammed it behind her.

For a time the President sat still, thinking. Only when his mouth filled with too much blood from his sores did he move to use his spittoon, then he sat again. Eventually his phone rang again, this time his most private line.

"Hello?"

"This is Oculus," The investigator he had hired. "Can we talk freely?"

"Yes. Go on."

"I found the name of your daughter's co-parent. Fellow named Julius King. They're still sleeping together. They've made a secret assignation for tomorrow, a cabin in the border mountain."

"I see," The President came to a decision. "Arrange an accident."

"Sir?"

"Arrange a fatal accident. Make sure it's untraceable, and don't ask any questions. And make sure that nothing happens to my grand-daughter."

"Ah - yes, sir."

The President hung up, and thought grimly:

How am I going to stop you? Easily. You'll be dead.

TO BE CONTINUED.

(Author's Note: my thanks to Kakima54 for suggesting a story built around Snow's succession.)

(Author's Note: the poem quoted at the beginning is from Virgil's AENEID, Book 6, but has been altered to fit Snow's philosophy.)