In a burgeoning city somewhere in southern India, the lights across the city blazed beneath the night sky, tinting it a faint yellow. Traffic flowed without pause beneath looping overpasses and towering skyscrapers.
A twenty-five-story building stood in the city center, its entire exterior silver-white. A huge red sign—manohar—hung above it. The multinational biopharmaceutical conglomerate, named after its founder, Manohar, maintained partnerships with companies in many countries around the world.
More than twenty years ago, the young Manohar inherited a vast fortune from his father. He had accurately foreseen the trend of the future: the aging populations of the Commercial Alliance and the Hong Alliance were inevitable, and the elderly, who controlled vast social resources, needed better access to medical care.
The higher people's standard of living and level of education, the better they could overcome their biological instinct to reproduce.
As the economy developed, ordinary people began to take a longer-term view of their children's prospects. They no longer married and had children blindly.
As a result, in the world's two most economically powerful blocs, only the few who controlled vast social resources and could withstand risks chose to marry and have children. Most ordinary people spent more of their money on themselves.
In the past, marriage offered better protection for private property. In modern society, however, living free of the constraints of marriage could improve one's standard of living.
They didn't need to spend huge sums raising children, weren't bound by monogamy, and could freely change partners whenever they wanted.
A safer, more stable society and a stronger desire for self-fulfillment had begun to erode traditional families. Many people had removed marriage and children from their plans for life.
That was the opportunity Manohar had seen.
These countries lacked enough people willing to participate in drug trials, and the development of many medicines had stalled. They had to seek volunteers from countries with larger populations and less-developed economies.
In the Hong Alliance and the Commercial Alliance, minimum wages rose every year. A worker's minimum hourly wage exceeded 150 yuan. Even though drug trials offered generous compensation, almost no one chose this unpredictable way to make money.
India had become the world's most populous country in 2025. Most of its poor earned less than a quarter of the Hong Alliance's minimum hourly wage. They lacked a good education, and many of those doing heavy manual labor were already covered in injuries and ailments.
Yet taking part in a drug trial could earn them a great deal of money with ease. The price was a little risk that seemed insignificant to them—working on a construction site was deadlier.
At first, Manohar ran a brokerage and agency, finding trial subjects in India for foreign pharmaceutical companies with cutting-edge technology. He took a cut from each person and also sold new medicines on behalf of those companies.
As his company grew, its network gradually spread across much of the country, and he made connections with many local power brokers. Manohar pushed through policy reforms that imposed steep import tariffs on new medicines.
At the same time, with his extensive network in hand, he negotiated with multinational pharmaceutical companies and began manufacturing and selling generic drugs in India.
These generics might not work as well as the original products, but they cost less than the originals had before their prices were raised. His wealth swelled again.
Rich people who needed medicine had ways to buy more effective imported drugs at the original price, while the poor bought cheap generics to stay alive.
In the eyes of the poor, Manohar became a great benefactor. He had won them a benefit: they no longer had to buy expensive imported drugs from foreign companies.
Those multinationals didn't care about the modest returns from India. What they needed were more trial subjects. As long as Manohar could maintain his standing among the poor, a steady stream of people who trusted him would volunteer for drug trials.
Compared with most rich people, Manohar was, in a sense, a great benefactor. At least some people had survived because of him.
In truth, Manohar believed there was no hope for the country.
The vast gap between rich and poor and the ethnic conflicts within its borders had brought it close to breaking apart. The military's top brass had turned into warlords ruling over their own territories,
and most senior government officials had become spokespeople for wealthy families. Every policy squeezed the poor to support the upper class, while the lower classes paid most of the taxes.
Without anyone to lead them, the poor were nothing more than a disorganized rabble. The tiniest benefit could turn them against their own friends and relatives.
On the building's twentieth floor, Manohar lay in bed, enjoying the attentions of his maids.
They were all beautiful. A newly established Maid Academy selected pretty little girls from the slums and trained them from childhood. For ten years, they learned every skill needed to serve their masters. After graduation, wealthy employers chose and hired them.
They were supposedly hired, but in reality their contracts lasted for life. The law allowed their masters to imprison them if they tried to escape, and the police would help. They were little different from slaves.
Even so, countless people wanted to enter the Maid Academy. Many slum families had lots of children. If one was selected, the family received a handsome sum, enough to move into the city and live a completely different life.
As for the maids, most wouldn't run away even if they suffered inhuman abuse. Partly, they feared their masters; partly, they couldn't bear to leave the luxurious life in their homes.
Human beings were not all valued equally. People in the slums were assigned a price. Most jobs could now be done by automated machines, but human labor was cheaper than intelligent machines.
In a rich man's home, they were lowly maids who could be beaten and berated at will. Outside, they were part of high society. Their parents and relatives had to treat them with care, and they could freely enter the towering buildings of wealthy neighborhoods.
If they pleased their master, they could rise from servants to mistresses and see their status soar overnight.
Nine out of ten of India's wealthiest tycoons were men. Each man could possess hundreds or even thousands of beautiful women, living more extravagantly than emperors of old.
The men at the very bottom of the slums could almost only sell their labor in factories, and their life expectancy was barely forty. Some handsome men were taken in by the few wealthy women, escaping their misery on the strength of their natural advantages.
Naturally, this provoked resistance from the poor.
Yet as artificial intelligence advanced, the security teams of most wealthy people still numbered only a few hundred, but their drones, self-propelled artillery, armored vehicles, and other weapons were enough to defeat an entire army from the previous century.
The rich, who controlled the country's entire wealth, bought large quantities of weapons and artificial intelligence from the Hong Alliance and the Commercial Alliance. Their armed forces were now nearly as strong as the country's own troops, which had become warlord armies. Their overwhelming firepower was enough to crush any resistance and protect their property.
Manohar rolled over. Wearing a bathrobe with his chest bare, he pulled the two maids serving him into his arms. Both women had just turned sixteen. He had brought them back from the Maid Academy the previous month.
Hundreds of beautiful maids belonging to him lived in the building. For the past fifteen years, he had bought two maids from the academy every month, and each month's new arrivals tended to his daily needs.
After a month, the maids no longer had to work. He paid each of them a substantial sum every month, which they could spend as they pleased.
Holding the two young, soft bodies, Manohar felt little desire for them.
He let the maids gently stroke him, raised his head, and gazed silently at the silver-white ceiling. His stubbled chin brushed softly against the girls' hair.
The crystal chandelier in the center cast a dazzling orange-yellow glow. The memories in Manohar's mind suddenly came alive again, and faces and voices flitted past like paper airplanes.
Dharavi, India's largest slum. Years ago, while he was still in college, Manohar had gone there to conduct a social study.
Dilapidated, low houses. Hundreds of people sharing a single toilet. Piles of household waste dumped into the river, whose black water reeked. Dark-skinned children in slippers ran and played along narrow lanes.
Manohar met a little girl there.
She was as dark-skinned as the other children. Hiding behind her companions, she watched him furtively as he took pictures of the houses.
Railway tracks lay nearby. The ground was littered with rubbish. A line had been strung outside the residential area, old clothes hanging from it. A few little workshops sold cheap drinks, and a white sheep basked in the sun.
The little girl stood barefoot on the ground, dressed in worn gray trousers and a shirt covered in red and green patterns. The ends of her shoulder-length curls turned upward. Pressing her lips together, she peeked at Manohar with big, dark eyes. He wore expensive, tailored clothes.
He asked the little girl her name. It was Seema. She lived in the slum with her parents and helped with handicrafts in her spare time.
Their paths crossed for only a few minutes. Manohar soon left.
Not long afterward, his father died of heart disease. Apparently, he'd overdone it with his seventeenth mistress. Manohar became the sole heir to his enormous fortune.
Several months later, after settling the inheritance, he returned to Dharavi to finish his social study. On the still rubbish-strewn ground, he saw some of the children he'd met before.
When he asked about Seema, the children answered, "She died."
Not long after Manohar left, she had fallen ill. Her parents couldn't afford treatment, and then she died. Her body had been hastily cremated.
In the slums, that was common.
From then on, he kept thinking about the day he had first gone to the slums, and about that little girl.
They'd known each other for only a few minutes. He'd learned nothing but her name, and hadn't even taken a single photograph of her.
They'd been strangers, yet he kept remembering the little girl's face.
He had felt nothing when his father died, but whenever he thought of the little girl, a faint sense of guilt rose from deep inside him.
I could have saved her.
That faint guilt always clung to him. More than anger at being powerless, it was the missed chance to do something so easily that made him sad.
Every month, he bought girls from the slums from the Maid Academy. By now, he had hundreds of maids. The girls gave him their bodies for a month, and he provided for them for the rest of their lives.
He sent people from the slums to pharmaceutical companies to test new drugs, and sold cheap generic medicines to the public. That alone was enough for people to call him a great benefactor.
Manohar didn't really care whether these people lived or died. He didn't even know most of their names, and had no intention of becoming their representative.
He made money from these deals too, expanding his wealth just like the other rich men.
He only wanted to use this method to ease the inexplicable guilt he felt when faced with death.