Kote djel Vinta (Xochano Baro II)

It was time for the Food Bank drone to arrive, there was no more food for the baby. Yanna was hurrying to get to the drop site in time. The drone brought a little food every month, the rest we had to find as we could. The humanitarian associations that helped the refugees were disappearing every year. There was less and less assistance to the precarious populations. They were no longer politically relevant. There was no politics in a global government.

This food aid drone was not like the police surveillance drones that chased you at curfew, at night, sending waves that made you sick and made you vomit for a week. Those damn machines would chase you home at night. During the day, it was more peaceful, the snipers of the camp's defense forces managed to shoot them down.

Yanna's two-year-old daughter Kalia was sleeping, curled up on top of Yanna as she ran. She was used to sleeping in all positions. Kalia was a real gypsy!

Yanna would have liked Tiago to watch their daughter while she went to get food.

But Tiago wasn't there. He had been arrested that morning, they said. He was arrested on his way back to the camp. That's all we knew at the time. It seemed that he had been caught with his brother. They must have been caught stealing parts from a warehouse of some kind, unless it was during a drug delivery. Yanna didn't know what had happened. She didn't know what would happen, either. She had a bad feeling. She preferred to brush it off with a wave of her hand.

The cops had been nervous and offensive lately. Clearly, they had been given orders. There was a new governor, with a good head of Nazi baby. Another one of those officials with no conscience, the kind who would commit the irreparable. Since the civil war, the government had been trying to regain control of the territories liberated by the insurgents.

Yanna hoped that they would not send Tiago and his brother to the new P11 reformatory camps. There were rumors that strange things were happening in these new camps. The people who came back from them were a little crazy. It wasn't the problem with the microchips and the drugs. The Gypsies knew how to remove the chips and detoxify the bodies, but it seemed that new mind control techniques were being experimented with. The guys who came out of the camps were vomiting, having nightmares. They would stay in bed and not get up. Many died within two years. In the end, they were drooling and shitting themselves, their brains completely fried.

The head of the Yeniche in Basel said that this was forbidden, that he would protest to Brussels. But he would do nothing, as usual. Some people said he was a traitor. Sure, he was a good talker, but when he was in front of the officials, he would piss himself, like Pastor Hoekner, whom they had finally thrown in jail for drug trafficking... 

The Gadje did not understand that it was normal to want to resist and survive globalism. They had given up on resisting all these vaccines, on the regimentation of society. More than half of the world's population had died in the various phases of COVID, and the viruses kept coming back, ever more deadly for the poor. Each time, control measures were tightened.

There was still no official word on where the disease came from. In spite of the scandals, in spite of the few revelations of the repentant, the media at the orders acted as if they did not hear anything, as if these viruses, manufactured in laboratories, were not voluntarily disseminated in the populations. There were not many old people left. All the old people had been exterminated by the different waves, except among the ultra-rich who had fun exceeding 100 years, helped by transhumanist technologies. 

After the old and the weak, the young and vigorous populations of the Third World were directly attacked. After decades of bacteriological aggression, the world population was on its knees.

The world government had been installed, officially and anonymously, without anyone's knowledge. The communiqués of the world government, faithfully relayed by all the media, told what to do, what to say and what to think.

All "unsocial" behavior had been gradually eliminated. Generations of insubordinate people were sent to camps, to the point of eradicating any desire to revolt.

Those who returned from these FAMA camps were rare. They were killed by chemistry, rendered incapable of speaking.

No one said anything, everyone was silent, resigned, terrorized. Some had come to take refuge among the Roma, in the slums around the cities, to die. They would rather end up in filth and starvation than die from an injection given by government health personnel.

The Gadje accepted to be vaccinated, revaccinated, dispossessed of their will, of their lives. Jobs became scarce. The surviving populations were kept under a sanitary bell, with bans on movement, time slots, passes, passports, food tickets...

In short, the people had fallen for it. They had accepted to deprive themselves of their freedom in exchange for the promise of keeping the appearance of their little comfort, their little privileges, their little lives as guinea pigs, as consumers.

Little by little, each of their categorical advantages had been taken away, separately. While a few squealed, the herd continued to advance, indifferent. It was now clear who was at the top of the pyramid, but it was too late.

Now the apartments and villas were being razed to the ground to build large medicalized housing units that were supposed to guarantee against COVID, against insecurity, against terrorism. Here again, areas were surrounded, populations were moved authoritatively, with the indifference of others. Populations were moved like cattle.

In fact, these large wards were used to finish off the lobotomized populations. One entered there, one fertilized ovules there. Children were born by exogenesis, to be worked on at will.

The dead were recycled, discreetly. It was a dystopian nightmare come true.

Yanna thought she had observed all this, all this mess. It had been so easy to enslave humanity. There were only a few pockets of resistance left, doomed to disappear, like the children of the wind, the unruly Roma, refusing to settle down, to work in the Gadje companies, to be vaccinated, to be hindered.

Yanna had not grown up in a camp, far from it. She had studied macroeconomics and had started working. But as she watched events unfold, she felt the need to resist. Her free origins told her not to submit completely.

Ion, her father, was an engineer. He had connections, he had tried to explain to her that this resistance was futile, that it was necessary to adapt, to resist in other ways, to give oneself a chance to survive until the globalist empire collapsed, like others before him.

Yanna was young, she had refused to listen to her father whom she did not yet understand. She had wanted to find her Roma roots. She had taken flamenco lessons, attended parties, Roma gatherings even in Europe.

It was at one of these events, in Europe, that she met Tiago. He was very handsome, dark, funny, crazy, so different from all the reasonable young men she had met. He had kidnapped her, in the tradition of the travelers, to make her his. It was so romantic!

Tiago was a gifted man. He made money, lots of money, with his methods. With him, life was a permanent party. Money was spent on dresses, jewelry, gifts. He didn't watch, he lived like a prince. Yanna and their daughter, Kalia, were his princesses. But his estate was a Roma camp, his castle was a caravan, luxurious of course, but a caravan. Yanna had accepted the camp, the shabby environment, the dirt, for Tiago. Deep inside, she was afraid. It was all because of Tiago. Everything else was so fragile, so doomed. Yanna often remembered her father's words. She was beginning to understand André Lafleur's reasoning. 

Tiago and his brother were tinkering with protein pumps for the trucks. Yanna did not know what these parts were, but Tiago managed to sell them at a high price on the black market; the Gadjé paid a lot because the official prices were much higher. In addition, the pumps Tiago cobbled together were said to be more efficient than those from official factories. Since the components to make them were expensive, Tiago collected them from the scrapyard. When he couldn't find them, he stole them from warehouses in industrial areas.

Why make a big deal out of it? The Gadje made hundreds of pieces in their factories. If Tiago stole a few, it wouldn't even be noticed.

Why else wouldn't they hire people like Tiago to make them, since their technical solutions were better than those of the factory engineers?

No, the Gadje didn't want Gypsies. They were all suspicious of the Roma, they didn't want to see them. The Roma were kept away from the cities.

But the Roma had been there since the dawn of time. They were still hanging on, despite the blows, despite the diseases, despite the vexations, despite the imprisonments, despite the tyranny of globalism.

Yanna had gone to the Gadje schools. The Gadje children did not speak. At least, they didn't say things like that. The Gadje children went home after school, plugged in their devices, and stayed glued to their screens until it was time to go to sleep.

While the children of the wind, Tiago and his friends went "kote djel vinta", where the wind went, Yanna had known the childhood of the Gadje children, in a comfortable house, with his room, his toys, the screens. As a child, Tiago had run around the suburbs of Paris until the end of the night. Now he had hundreds of stories to tell about robberies, fights, chases with the cops. And then there were the stories of the camp, the fights, the young couples that could be heard screaming with pleasure while everyone was laughing; life! The old men told stories in Romani, sang stories in European Sinti.

Yanna did not regret having come to live among the Gypsies. She led a free and joyful life, despite the misery, the humiliations and the obvious dirtiness of life among the Roma. 

In truth, her world was only held together by Tiago. Yanna tried not to think about it too much. 

In comparison, what Yanna knew of the Gadje world was sad: they all ate pills, processed food, plugged into machines, injected with electronic chips. The Gadje's eyes were lifeless, they smiled strangely, as if permanently stoned. Yanna provided them with various drugs, things that she and her children would never take.

But the Gadje who came didn't care anymore. It was as if they had to escape, as if they were locked up in a colorless universe. The screens, the assets, the sanitized houses, the clothes, none of this replaced human contact, laughter between friends, carnal contact.

The Gadje, with all their modernity, their comfort, they only wanted to die when Yanna and her people were struggling to survive.

Tonino, the head of the camp, had come to see Yanna with Pedro, the eldest of the community, the friend of Yanna's great-grandfather. They had terrible news: Tiago and his brother had been killed that morning. Tiago's body could not be buried, there was nothing left to recover. The soldiers had fired an anti-tank weapon. Yanna collapsed. Her world was collapsing.

After several hours, she recovered. Tiago was dead. Yanna was alone with a young daughter in a Roma camp threatened with extermination. Tiago was dead, romance and joy were dead. Yanna no longer felt like a Gypsy in any way. She remembered her past as a young American woman, a member of Wilmington's good society. She spoke fluent Romani, she didn't speak French well, Spanish poorly. Here, without Tiago to make the connection, she would be a stranger.

Pedro had stayed close to Yanna. He was old, very old now. He had become skinny, he who had been a colossus. He hated this globalist era. He wanted to disappear before he saw this catastrophe, this tyranny of the New World Order. Pedro thought back to the episode of the bastide of Allauch, to the opportunity of the Flamenco Spa Hotel that he had perhaps missed. It was one of his greatest regrets.

Today, he looked at what was left of his clan. Tiago and his brother were dead.

They had done everything to get by, to survive. They had skills. They had been killed like animals. The future was bleak for the clan, bleak for the freedom-loving men. Tonino, the leader, had no plan, no options.

In this time of consolidation of the globalist empire, the Gadje themselves were herded like sheep. They were put down like animals, drugged and reduced.

How could they manage in a world that left so few options? The Roma of this clan, unable to assimilate, were going to be crushed. In such a setting, one had to play along, at least on the surface, and find a way to escape the masters' grip a little.

If one resisted openly, being in the minority, one would be eliminated, like Tiago.

Pedro watched Yanna and her daughter. They had a chance to get out of there. They had to be given that chance.