“Remove them,” the billionaire heiress said, watching my people on a drone feed from her penthouse. “I don’t care how.”
She thought a thousand-dollar check was enough to buy our home, our history, our souls.
So she sent men with batons to break our bodies, and fire to burn our memories.
She thought we were just a bug on her screen, an inconvenience she could just delete.
She built her glass palace on our land and planned a massive party, a grand opening gala for the whole world to watch her celebrate.
What she never saw coming was karma, and karma was about to use her own guest list, her own jumbo screen, and the cheap concrete in her foundation to hand her a bill she could never pay.
A Paradise Paved Over: A Flaw in the Canvas
The world outside my window was a grid of light, a silent, sprawling circuit board 58 floors below. Manhattan never slept, but from up here, it didn’t even seem to breathe. It was just a pattern, beautiful and inert. I ran my thumb over the cool glass of my tablet, the motion as smooth as the polished concrete floor under my bare feet.
On the screen was a different kind of perfection. “Seraphina Sands.” My vision, rendered in photorealistic detail. An archipelago of overwater villas connected by boardwalks of sun-bleached wood, a main pavilion that swooped and curved like a bird in flight, an infinity pool that bled into the turquoise sea. It wasn’t a hotel. It was a sculpture, and the coastline of a small, cooperative nation in Southeast Asia was my pedestal.
My father built an empire on oil and steel, on things that were dug up and melted down. His legacy was brute force. Mine would be elegance. I was creating beauty where there was only, well, nothing. Sand, trees, a few scattered shacks. A blank canvas.
A notification chimed, a discreet sound like a single drop of water. It was a report from my acquisitions team on the ground. Land Title: Secured. Governmental Incentives: Finalized. Final Obstacle: Indigenous Settlement.
I sighed, the sound loud in the minimalist quiet of the penthouse. An obstacle. I zoomed in on the satellite map, a tiny cluster of structures near the shoreline. An imperfection. A smudge on the canvas that needed to be wiped away before the first layer of paint could be applied. It was a simple matter of logistics, nothing more.
The Inconvenience
Two days later, another report. This one included a video file. I didn’t watch it. I read the summary from my Head of Legal, a man named Sterling whose face I could barely recall. That was the point of having a Sterling.
Offer presented to village representative, a Mr. Mateo. Relocation package of $1,000 USD per family unit. Offer was… not well received.
A thousand dollars. It was a generous number, calculated by our analysts to be ten times the average annual income in that region. More than fair. It was a golden ticket out of a life of dirt floors and fishing nets. What was there not to receive well?
I tapped a reply. Is the offer non-negotiable?
Sterling’s response was instantaneous. Correct. The land is ours. The package is a courtesy.
Then the issue is settled, I typed back. Proceed.
I put the tablet down and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, looking down at the yellow river of taxis flowing up Park Avenue. Each one was a life, a story, a universe of messy complications. But from up here, they were just part of a predictable, orderly flow. That’s how I saw the village. A small, temporary disruption in the flow of progress. My progress. They would take the money. They had to. It was the only logical outcome. Anything else was just… inconvenient.
An Unscheduled Performance
The next morning, Sterling patched me into a drone’s live feed. The image shimmered into focus on the 100-inch screen that served as a wall in my media room. The view was startlingly clear.
There was the dirt road, the only one in or out. And there were the people. Dozens of them, standing shoulder to shoulder. Men with weathered faces, women holding babies, children clutching handwritten signs in a language I didn’t recognize. They formed a human chain, a fragile, flesh-and-blood barrier against the two black SUVs parked at the edge of the frame. My survey team.
I unmuted the audio. They were singing. It wasn’t angry chanting; it was something soft and melodic, a hymn that was carried away by the ocean breeze. For a moment, it was almost quaint. A little piece of local color.
Then I saw him. The man from the file, Mateo. He stood at the front, not singing, just watching the vehicles. His posture wasn’t aggressive, but it was unyielding. He was the center of their gravity.
My head of security, a former Mossad agent named Elias, appeared as a window in the corner of my screen. “Ma’am,” he said, his voice a low gravel. “The surveyors are unable to proceed. The local police are… reluctant to intervene. It seems the chief is the protest leader’s cousin.”
I felt a prickle of annoyance. Nepotism and sentimentality. The twin diseases of the undeveloped world. “This is unprofessional,” I said, my voice flat. “This was supposed to be a clean acquisition.”
“There are no clean acquisitions, Ms. Vanderbilt,” Elias said. “Only clean outcomes.”
I watched the screen. The drone zoomed in on a child’s face, streaked with dirt, looking up at the sky. They were looking at my drone. At me. It felt like a violation. Like they were peering into my home. This wasn’t a protest. This was a performance, and they were trying to make me their audience.
Clearing the Board
I had a lunch reservation at Per Se in an hour. My car was waiting. This little drama was cutting into my schedule. The singing was starting to grate on my nerves.
“How long will they stay there?” I asked Elias.
“As long as he does,” he replied, a red circle appearing on the screen around Mateo’s head. “He’s the lynchpin. They think their conviction is a shield.”
Conviction. What a flimsy, useless thing. It couldn’t build a hospital. It couldn’t pave a road. It couldn’t create a single job. My resort would bring hundreds of jobs, a surge of capital into their pathetic economy. My vision was worth more than their nostalgia. It was a simple, brutal equation.
I looked at the face of Mateo, still standing there, a statue of pointless defiance. He wasn’t a person. He was a variable in a problem that needed solving. A bug in the code.
“Elias,” I said, tapping the disconnect button on Sterling’s window.
“Ma’am.”
“This is an inconvenience I no longer wish to have.” I walked over to my closet, pulling out a silk dress, the color of champagne. “Remove them.”
“By what means?” His voice was utterly devoid of emotion. He was asking for parameters.
I thought of the misaligned tile in my mother’s summer home, the one that drove me crazy for an entire season until I paid a fortune to have the entire floor ripped up and replaced. Perfection requires decisiveness.
“I don’t care how,” I said, my voice as cold and clear as the glass surrounding me. “Just clear the road by morning.”
I hung up. On the giant screen, the drone feed showed a new development. A line of a dozen men in black tactical gear disembarked from a third vehicle that had pulled up behind the surveyors. They carried batons and shields. They advanced on the singing villagers. Mateo put his hands up, palms out. A gesture of peace. It was laughably naive.
The lead security officer raised his baton. The screen went black, replaced by the sleek, silver ‘V’ of the Vanderbilt Global logo. I turned away and finished getting dressed. The problem was being handled.
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