On a luxurious estate in Barrington Hills, belonging to Karl Pozner-Maddog, lived a young man gifted with intelligence, empathy, athleticism, and a warm and genuine disposition. He combined true judgment with a simplicity of spirit and a sense of initiative, which resonated with his given name, Kandude.
The servants of the estate, known formally as Cha-Ching Manor, suspected Kandude was genetically related to Mr. P-M and/or one of his earlier wives, but he was neither adopted nor acknowledged as a relation to the Master of the Manor and/or his past and current wives. Rather, through long habit and general conviviality, and not regardless of the fact that he was tall, strong, good looking, modest, and agreeable, Kandude was allowed to hang out and afforded all the privileges, opportunities and advantages associated with Cha-Ching Manor.
Pozner-Maddog, or P-M, was an enormously wealthy corporate value optimizer. He was one of the most powerful members of the American plutocracy, a raptorial club going by no name but in which all were known to one another as the rightful owners of most of the wealth and power in the land. P-M was widely admired for his ability to surgically convert inefficient companies from superfluous enterprises with infrastructures, products, employees and health plans, into vast amounts of infinitely more valuable pure capital for investment in hedge funds and offshore accounts. His wives were known for their youth, beauty and similitude, as well as their dedication to intense personal training, plastic surgery, and Goop wellness and lifestyle products. However, in the natural course of things, each of these wives reached a state of obsolescence requiring transition, which was always handled with superb legal acumen, speed, and discretion.
P-M’s son Brutus seemed in every way worthy of his father, being enrolled presently as a legacy student at the Wharton School of Business (BS pending, probationary) and already a participant in the beneficial streamlining of several bloated, inefficient and overstaffed corporations. P-M’s nineteen-year-old daughter Cardoshia was charming, bright, bodacious, and universally regarded as totally hot by hetero males and many females throughout the land of ultra-high-net-worth individuals and their families, friends, retainers and sycophants. She was a young woman of innocence and virtue, conditions ironclad by her unerring sense of modesty, a familial devotion to preservation of capital, a security team, and 24/7 surveillance.
Cha-Ching Manor retained its own preceptor, Professor Cuthbert Bloughgazz, to tutor the children and young adults in residence. This was necessary and desirable due to outside educational institutions being captives of corrupt ideological groups such as state and local governments, churches not dedicated to prosperity theology, and private entities that advocated abstract philosophical learning and anemic humanism above bold engagement in the bracing gristmill of pure capitalism. The young people of Cha-Ching Manor were to a great degree insulated from the disturbing and corrupting exposure to direct shopping outside of exclusive fashion vendors, current affairs unrelated to making money, and undesirable elements such as middle-class and poor people.
Beyond his pedagogical duties, Professor Bloughgazz was the supreme oracle of the family. A polymath of titanic erudition, Professor B was a particular devotee of Economics, a disciple of the gods Hayek and Friedman, and a devoted admirer of the world’s greatest applied economist, Armand Laugher, upon whose works he lavished the most fulsome of his several doctoral dissertations. He proved admirably that there is no effect without cause, and that, in this best of all possible White Christian Capitalistic worlds, P-M’s enterprise model was the most virtuous of all business models, and that P-M’s estate and its coherent strata of roles, goods and services was the finest estate in America.
“It is demonstrable,” said Professor B, “that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for all being created for an end, all is necessarily for the best end. Observe that wealthy people’s features are malleable and perfectible, thus we have plastic surgeons. Crops need to be harvested by sturdy, low-paid, heat-tolerant field laborers, thus we have migrant workers. Wealth needs to be amassed and efficiently managed on behalf of the rich, thus we have offshore tax havens, leveraged derivatives, flash trading platforms, insider knowledge, capital gains deferment strategies, shell corporations, hedge funds, and a multitude of other market mechanisms that effectively concentrate assets upwards in the socioeconomic column. Consequently, they who assert that all is well have said a foolish thing; they should have said all is for the best.”
Kandude listened attentively and followed Professor B diligently through courses in the classics, natural science, history, law, art, and the apex discipline of capitalism and its subspecialties. Likewise, he excelled outside the classroom in golf, boxing, rugby, polo, and 10-meter platform diving.
One day, Cardoshia, while walking near the conservatory, saw between the bushes Professor B (who spared no effort to expand education beyond a traditional curriculum), giving a lesson in experimental physics to one of her current stepmother’s special assistants, a lovely and agreeable women who found Professor B both generous and charming. Cardoshia had an unfulfilled interest in physics, and, as she observed the high intensity interval modality being effectuated by her more experienced elders, she became greatly flurried, quite pensive, and filled with a desire to herself conduct rigorous experiments, considering that young Kandude might be for her the most excellent of laboratory partners, and she for him.
Later that afternoon, Cardoshia happened to cross paths with Kandude just as he was thinking about entering the southern portico. She blushed, as did he, and they exchanged faltering salutations. She dropped her squash racket. Kandude swiftly bent over to pick it up, and rising to restore it innocently found himself highly proximate to her person. Their lips met, their eyes sparkled, they experienced biochemical events often associated with driving race cars at extremely high speeds and firing automatic weapons at glass bottles at the old quarry. Their hands strayed like high energy thermal sensors exploring the terrain for hot spots.
Witnessing these events on CCTV, Cardoshia’s security team immediately alerted P-M, who upon viewing the video several times, had his team, composed primarily of ex-navy seals and retired Mossad officers, toss Kandude into the back of a black Lincoln Navigator, drive him to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and throw him bodily onto the road with only the clothes on his back and a single overlooked American Express Black Card in his pocket.
Cardoshia was rushed to her rooms by a team of three androgenous Latvian trainers for a 3-hour workout and an ice bath, then whisked away to a Swiss spa run by the Sisters of Chastity. Her current stepmother, nearly a whole decade older than Cardoshia and nobody’s fool, arranged secretly for dispensation of a device known to help women make important life choices, knowing that soon such devices would be illegal in many states.