14
The next morning was a hot one, with the principality scorching with sunshine. At his old place in weather like this, Isaac would literally have been gasping for breath, and he preferred to go early to the bar where strong air conditioners buzzed quietly and it was relatively cool. But that problem was behind him now. At the Wolanski villa it was great. Squeezed in between cliffs on both sides it was always slightly in the shade, and in addition there was always a breeze blowing in this little gap, even on a completely windless day.
The electric cleaners hummed away steadily outside, tidying up after the party. Isaac and Bikie, in an excellent mood, had sat themselves in the living room and were studying in more detail the photographs they had managed to get hold of at Link University.
Isaac noticed that in some of the photos Link looked rather odd by modern standards. An American would have called his appearance “old-fashioned”, and an Englishman would have called it “classic”. In some of the photos Link was holding a cigar.
“Look, Bikie, in this photo here and here too. Link smoked and he smoked cigars. Smoking has already been conquered, right?”
“That’s right, it has,” replied Bikie. “I got cured myself; I never thought it would be so easy. I don’t feel the slightest desire to smoke, in fact it disgusts me. Although there are some rich old farts that still suck on their cigars and pipes.”
“And Link smokes! Maybe he still smokes now. It doesn’t look like our stubborn Link changed his habits of many years. That could be our lead. It is cretins like that, who think cigars aren’t really all that harmful, who keep the remaining Cuban factories in business. Let’s see what we can dig up on the subject.”
Isaac remembered the jubilation at the final victory over nicotine addiction. For three hundred years smoking had been a problem for ordinary people and a source of big money for the tobacco industry. Einsteiner screwed the influential tobacco lobby by releasing a drug that cured nicotine addiction, both physical and psychological, with just two tablets. In a flawless marketing move, the Agency handed out the medication absolutely free, exchanging two tablets for a single cigarette of any brand. The tobacco conglomerates were crushed like pitiful worms; they went bankrupt in just a few weeks. The tablets flew off the shelves like hot cakes; people gathered in parks and burned their cigarettes together. There aren’t very many ideas that can unite the entire world in a single impulse, but cigarettes were burned in parks from America to China.
The day they started handing out the free tablets was a global holiday, a celebration of independence. Independence from nicotine which used to take a million human lives a year. People lost millions on their tobacco shares, some even committed suicide but no one felt sorry for them. The hands of the tobacco company owners might not be bloodstained in the literal sense, but figuratively speaking they were dripping with gore.
Anyone that still wanted to smoke could only find a tobacco shop in the very biggest cities, or they ordered the old-fashioned poison on the internet. Cigarettes already cost almost as much as cigars, their price rocketed as sales plummeted. A month later the Agency spectacularly bolstered its influence by releasing a cheap remedy for cancer.
In those two months the popularity of donating creativity soared sky-high and more followed when Einsteiner struck a blow at drugs. This time the Agency didn’t forget its own interests – the drug-dealers and pushers were “downloaded” compulsorily, as criminals. Drug addiction had also been defeated, this applied to every kind of illegal highs apart from weed. The arguments about that were still going on but way things were headed, it was going to be declared a drug. The last bastions of legal marijuana, Amsterdam and Los Angeles were losing the battle.
So, smoking had been conquered. Only a few smokers were left, mostly rich people and members of the older generation. They were too old to listen to the warnings about how bad you smoking was for you and too arrogant to give up their beloved habit of puffing on a pipe or pulling at a cigar for any reason at all. For people like that, smoking a cigar was a matter of individual style, a hobby and a part of their life. There was a chance that the retrograde Link was like that too. Everything seemed to suggest it. Like many geniuses, he was not very particular about his appearance, and grayish white traces of ash could be seen on his trousers and the sleeves of his jacket. The cigars also turned in his photos a few times. The tobacco industry was at its last gasp but still working for people like Link.
Bikie came up with the idea of digging through the lists of clients on the servers of tobacco