The Rich and the Poor

In some emerging city in southern India, the lights of the entire city lit up beneath the night sky, casting a faint yellow glow across the heavens, with streams of vehicles flowing endlessly, ring-shaped overpasses, and skyscrapers towering into the clouds.

At the city center stood a twenty-five-story building, its entire exterior silver-white, bearing a massive red sign—Manohar—a large multinational biomedical conglomerate founded in the name of its founder Manohar, maintaining partnerships with companies across many nations worldwide.

More than twenty years ago, a young Manohar inherited a vast fortune from his father. He accurately spotted the coming trend—the inevitable aging of the Commercial Alliance and the Hong Alliance, where elders controlling immense social resources would require superior medical services.

The higher the standard of living and the greater the level of education, the more humans could overcome their biological instinct to reproduce.

Economic development allowed ordinary people to view their descendants' future with a longer-term perspective, rather than blindly marrying and having children.

As a result, in the world's two most economically advanced superpowers, only a minority who controlled vast social resources and possessed enough resilience against risk chose to marry and have children, while most ordinary people spent more money on themselves.

In the past, marriage better protected private property. In modern society, an individual life free from marital bonds could raise one's own standard of living.

There was no need to spend enormous sums raising offspring, no need to be bound by monogamy, and one could freely switch partners at any time and place.

A safer, more stable social environment and stronger self-actualization needs caused traditional families to gradually disintegrate, with many people deleting the step of marriage and childbearing from their lives.

This was the opportunity Manohar saw.

These nations lacked large numbers of volunteers willing to undergo 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 wage standards rose year by year, with a worker's minimum hourly wage exceeding one hundred fifty RMB. Even with substantial subsidies for participating in drug trials, almost no one chose this uncontrollable way to earn money.

India became the world's most populous country starting in 2025. Most of its poor earned less than a quarter of the Hong Alliance's minimum hourly wage, lacked good education, and many engaged in heavy physical labor, bearing bodies full of injuries and illnesses.

Yet a single job participating in drug trials could let them easily obtain large sums of money, at a cost that seemed negligible in their eyes—a risk lower than the death rate on construction sites.

At first, Manohar acted as an intermediary and agent, finding human test subjects for foreign pharmaceutical companies with advanced technology in his homeland, taking a cut from each person while also selling new drugs for those foreign firms.

Later, his company grew larger, its channels spreading across most of the country. He befriended numerous local elites and pushed for policy reforms that imposed high import tariffs on those new drugs.

At the same time, controlling vast channels, he negotiated with multinational pharmaceutical companies and began producing and selling generic versions within India.

These generics might not match the originals' effectiveness, yet their prices were lower than before the tariffs, causing his wealth to swell once more.

Wealthy people with means had channels to buy more effective imported drugs at original prices, while the poor bought cheap generics to survive.

Manohar became a great benefactor in the eyes of the poor, having secured benefits for the people so they no longer needed to purchase expensive imported drugs from foreign companies.

Those multinational corporations did not care about the meager profits within India. What they needed were more test subjects. As long as Manohar maintained his prestige among the poor, a steady stream of people who trusted him would volunteer for drug trials.

Compared to most rich men, Manohar was in some sense truly a great benefactor—at least some people had survived because of him.

In truth, in Manohar's mind, this country was already beyond saving.

The enormous wealth gap and internal ethnic conflicts had pushed it to the brink of fragmentation. The upper ranks of the military had evolved into warlords carving out local fiefdoms.

Most high government officials had instead become spokespeople for wealthy families. All policies squeezed the poor to support the upper class, with the bottom layer contributing the majority of taxes.

The unled poor were nothing more than scattered sand, easily turned against their own friends and relatives by the smallest benefits.

On the twentieth floor of the building, Manohar lay on the bed enjoying the service of his maids.

They all possessed beautiful faces, carefully selected as young girls from the slums by a newly established maid academy and trained from childhood for ten years in various skills of serving their masters, after which they were hired and chosen by the wealthy to take home.

Though called employment, their contracts were lifelong. The law stipulated that if they chose to run away, their masters could imprison them, and the police would assist—essentially no different from slaves.

Even so, countless people sought to enter the maid academy. Many slum families bore large numbers of children. If one was selected, they could receive a handsome sum of money, enough to enter the city and live an entirely different life.

As for the maids, most would not flee even if subjected to inhuman abuse—partly from fear of their masters, partly from reluctance to leave the luxurious life in a wealthy household.

Human value differed. People from the slums were openly priced. Most jobs now could be replaced by automated machinery, yet human labor remained cheaper than intelligent devices.

Inside a rich man's home, they were humble maids to be beaten and scolded at will. Outside, they became part of high society, with parents and relatives having to treat them with utmost care, free to enter and exit the skyscrapers of wealthy districts.

If they could win their master's favor and rise from servant to mistress, their status would soar instantly.

Nine out of ten of India's great tycoons were men. A single one could possess hundreds or thousands of beautiful women, living a life more extravagant than ancient emperors.

Men from the slums could almost only sell their labor in factories, with lifespans barely reaching forty. Certain handsome men might be taken in by a few female tycoons, escaping hardship through their natural advantages.

This naturally provoked resistance from the poor.

However, with the development of artificial intelligence, although most tycoons' security teams still numbered only in the hundreds, the drones, self-propelled artillery, armored vehicles, and other weaponry they possessed could defeat an entire army from the previous century.

The wealthy, who controlled the nation's entire fortune, purchased vast quantities of weapons and artificial intelligence from the Hong Alliance and the Commercial Alliance. Their armed forces were now hardly weaker than the country's own armies that had devolved into warlord factions. Their powerful military might was enough to suppress all resistance and protect their property.

Manohar turned over. Wrapped in a bathrobe with his upper body bare, he pulled the two maids serving him from behind into his embrace. These two women had just turned sixteen; he had brought them back from the maid academy last month.

Hundreds of beautiful maids belonging to him lived in this building. Starting fifteen years ago, he bought two maids from the academy every month, with the newest arrivals personally attending to his daily needs.

After one month, the maids no longer needed to work. He would pay each a generous sum every month for them to spend freely.

Embracing two young, soft bodies, Manohar felt little desire for them.

Letting the maids gently caress him, he lifted his head and gazed quietly at the silver-white ceiling, his stubbled chin lightly brushing against the girls' soft hair.

The crystal chandelier in the center cast a brilliant orange-yellow glow. Memories in Manohar's mind suddenly came alive again, faces and voices flashing past like paper airplanes.

Dharavi, India's largest slum. Years ago, while still in university, Manohar had visited once for a social research project.

Dilapidated low houses, hundreds sharing a single toilet, vast amounts of household garbage dumped into the river, the black water emitting waves of stench, dark-skinned children in sandals running and playing along narrow paths.

There, Manohar met a little girl.

Like the other children, she was dark-skinned, hiding behind her companions and secretly watching Manohar as he photographed the houses.

Not far away were the train tracks, the ground littered with trash, and a rope strung outside the residential area hung heavy with tattered clothes. A few small workshops sold cheap drinks, and a white goat basked in the sun.

The little girl stood barefoot on the ground, wearing worn-out gray trousers and a top covered in red and green patterns. Her shoulder-length curly hair flipped up at the ends, and she pursed her lips, peeking shyly at Manohar, who was dressed in expensive, handmade attire, with her dark, wide eyes.

He asked the little girl for her name. The girl was called Seema, and she lived in the slum with her mother and father, usually helping out with some manual weaving work.

Their interaction lasted only a few minutes, and Manohar soon left.

Not long after, his father died of a heart attack—it was said he had been too reckless with his seventeenth mistress—and Manohar became the sole heir to that vast fortune.

Several months later, after settling the inheritance matters, he returned to Dharavi once more to complete his social research. On the same trash-strewn ground, he saw the same children from before.

When he asked about Seema, the children replied: She died.

Not long after Manohar had left, she fell ill; her parents had no money for treatment, so she passed away, and her body was hastily cremated.

In the slums, this was a common occurrence.

From that day on, he would always recall the first time he went to the slum, and that little girl.

They had known each other for only a few minutes, knowing nothing more than a name, and not even a single photograph remained of her.

Even though they were strangers, he constantly found himself thinking of the little girl's figure.

He felt nothing toward his father's passing, yet a faint sense of guilt welled up from the depths of his heart whenever he thought of the little girl.

I could have saved her.

This faint sense of guilt always lingered around him. Compared to the anger of being powerless, the fact that he could have easily done something but missed the chance inadvertently made him feel even sadder.

Every month, he bought girls from the slums through maid academies, and by now, he had hundreds of maids. The girls gave their bodies for a month, and in return, he provided for them for a lifetime.

He brought people from the slums to pharmaceutical companies to test new drugs and sold cheap generic medicines to the people; for this alone, he was hailed as a great philanthropist.

Manohar actually did not care whether these people lived or died. He didn't even know the names of most of them, and he had no intention of becoming a spokesperson for the poor.

He also reaped profits from these transactions, expanding his wealth just like any other tycoon.

He simply wanted to use this method to dissolve the inexplicable guilt he felt when facing death.