Maria hated driving through the countryside. It was summer and the heat had scorched the grass and cracked the earth. Wildfires raged through the beautiful golden vistas nearly every year then, tearing at them. The Italian countryside was in the clutches of a historic drought. It had been nearly 10 years since it had rained enough to feed the hungry stems and leaves of the wheat plants. For the farmers that lived there, it was a slow death that they watched. Their old family farms were wasting away, eaten by the dry earth and the fires. Their children were being eaten away by the cities, desperate for jobs and money. Maria knew that struggle well.
Although she had always been a city girl, a Milan girl, she had been watching her life slowly fall apart from the day that she had been born. Her mother and father had never been married. Although she knew who her father was and often saw him around; he never admitted that she was his daughter. Every single time that she saw him with another woman hanging off of his arm; she remembered festering with hatred. So angry she couldn't even move. How she wanted to rip him away, to make him repent for all the trouble he had caused her and her mother. She grew up with a bitter taste in her mouth.
When she turned 18, she did what she thought her mother should have done all those years ago, she married a man 20 years her senior. He was a business man, wore fine wool suits and made good money. She was his beautiful, naive plaything. Looking back, Maria saw that it had been doomed from the very start. Back then, it seemed like a dream come true.
"That is what Italians have now" Maria thought as she looked at the scenes passing by her window. "Broken dreams."
--
A middle aged woman sat in the head editor's seat at the "Gazzeta di Roma", Rome's biggest newspaper. Famously reclusive, she never appeared at public events and rarely left her posh home in heart of Rome. While Maria hurtled down the highways towards the compound for another visit, the Gazzeta was about to run a breaking story about the origins of the cybernetic implants that so many in Rome owed their lives to. A story so bizarre that it seemed that someone from those dark days themselves had written the article.
The woman sat in a wooden chair facing her window. She might have been pretty years ago, but lines now ravaged her face and her hair was deftly turning white. In her hands she held an old pistol, she toyed with the mechanisms, loaded the cartridge, took it out again. She was an old friend.
There was a knock at her door. She smiled knowingly. The knock was soon accompanied by shouts and demands. She sat still, until the resounding crack of a door falling apart rang through the air.
"Jean, I know it's you." the woman said with a hint of amusement in her voice. "What do they call you now?" she laughed. "General? Dictator?"
"I should ask you, Miss Priscilla. My compliments on your ability to run and hide all of these years."
" It was really just to avoid seeing you again Jean my dear."
"Small talk. Get up, hands up."
Priscilla turned around, clutching Angelica's old pistol between her hands, she aimed between Jean's eyes and fired. Priscilla fell to the ground riddled with bullet holes. Jean stood unscathed.
"How pathetic." Jean thought out loud as he bent down and wiped a few drops of blood from his fine leather shoes with a silk tapestry. "We're done here. Get rid of the body."