ORION SAINT / DARK SATIREView the back cover
Dark satire
The Philosopher of the Cage
Freedom Is Included. Escape Costs Extra.
Port Meridian has never run so smoothly. The buses arrive. The wages clear. The city remembers everything.
Maintenance worker Toma Iliev helped install the system. Then a door refuses to open, his work account disappears, and his daughter’s hospital appointment becomes somebody else’s responsibility.
As helpful suggestions become conditions and the fog thickens, Toma starts collecting the rules everyone forgot had changed. But exposing the cage means admitting who helped build it.
Revised easy-reading edition · 28 chapters + epilogue · 209 pages
PDF: larger type and open spacing. EPUB: choose your own font and text size in your reading app. Both include the complete story and both covers.
Read an excerpt ↓FROM THE ORIGINAL EDITION
Chapter 1 · The Door Was Working Perfectly
By the time Dr. Felix Voss purchased his third island, he had concluded that ownership was a primitive concept.
He explained this to an audience who had paid eight thousand dollars each to hear him explain it.
“Humanity must move beyond possession.”
Behind him, a screen displayed his name, his company, and a photograph of a mountain his foundation had recently fenced off.
Toma stood beside the ballroom’s emergency exit with a screwdriver between his teeth.
The door would not open.
He had reported this twice.
The first report had been classified as a maintenance issue. The second had been classified as resistance to innovation.
Onstage, Voss walked barefoot across an imported slab of Himalayan stone. His communications team called this humility. Six men had carried it upstairs.
“For centuries,” Voss said, “we have misunderstood freedom.”
Toma removed the lock cover.
There was nothing wrong with the mechanism. Someone had connected it to the building’s central permission system.
A LETTER WHEN THERE IS A STORY
Keep a place
on the shelf.
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