Published:
Baroness Kristina
Some might now ask how one could come up with the idea for such a book. Let's put it this way: I've often been told that once-young offenders can no longer be reintegrated. Unfortunately, this has proven true more than once, and I am also aware of what the younger generation actually dreams of.
Many, or rather the majority, think they can achieve wealth with absolutely no skills and only minimal effort. Yes, some particularly idiotic complete morons actually manage it. Most however remain simply foot soldiers who dream of wealth. In this book the youths simply take whatever they want. With minimal effort they seize Freifrau Kristina and make her their personal house slave.
Chapter 1
It was one of those evenings I would have preferred to spend in a bar, watching the colorful activity on the dance floor and listening to the rock music. That afternoon I had managed to set up a very lucrative business for myself. As a corporate consultant I was relatively successful and could afford a nice sum of money. After this deal another half million added up. I was already rich and had bought a nice house in the outskirts of town. It was my personal retreat for working and I had turned the garden into a place of relaxation.
On such an evening, which I could only celebrate occasionally, I liked to sit among celebrating people and have one or two drinks. That was my way of celebrating a successful conclusion. I hadn't lacked money for a long time. The only problem in my life was my love life. I wasn't particularly successful in that area. There was certainly no lack of offers, but even after 36 years I had not managed to find a decent man who interested me. Most were only looking for a quick tryst and weren’t interested in a long-term relationship. Not at all in marriage.
Yet I actually was a good match for any man. My bank account was well filled, I wasn't exactly ugly, I had some brains and was additionally blessed with an aristocratic title. Although these titles hadn't meant anything for many years now, I could still use the title "Freifrau" in my name. One couldn't rely on it anymore, but one could still carry such titles. I inherited it from my father and also used it to give my own company a slight push. Something like that always made an impression.
This small private celebration in the bar obviously couldn’t last very long. It was a weekday and the next morning my alarm clock would throw me out of bed no later than shortly after seven. My workdays were tightly organized and there was only rarely any waiting time. I somehow needed it. At work I was almost restless and sometimes didn't even allow myself to eat anything. Only in cases of absolute emergency, i.e., just before starving, I took a very short break for nourishment. Then I usually spent this time chewing over my notes.
On this evening however, I no longer thought about my work. At some point it had to end. Instead I quietly celebrated my success, watched the celebrating people on the dance floor and focused on my drink. Just as I wanted to take another sip, the waitress unasked placed another glass in front of me and indicated with her eyes a somewhat older man at the other end of the bar. He thought he had a chance with this small attention and the few euros he spent. But I could easily pull his tooth out. I was an expert at that by now.
I took the newly served glass, held it for only a short moment in his direction as if to thank him and then poured the sponsored drink into a small flower vase with plastic flowers. They could handle it and the liquor was disposed of. His face immediately showed a noticable red flush and instead of being happy about a conversation with me he preferred to disappear as quickly as possible. At 36 I no longer belonged to the young people who could be lured away by an older man for a drink.
In earlier years this had also not worked. Whenever I celebrated in a bar or nightclub with my friends, there were only initially some scattered boys who thought they could impress us that way. If I wanted to have a drink, I could afford it myself. I wasn't exactly a poor student. My father owned a company that completely remodeled campers for customers and wasn’t exactly starving. My mother was able to stay at home and take care of me and after both died in an airplane crash, I inherited not only my title but also the proceeds from my father's company.
With this I could study business administration at Harvard and build up my successful business. The former company of my father had already closed its sails in the meantime. There were no more campers in Germany nowadays. The business would have only worked in the Netherlands, but the people there weren't any less stupid either about modifying a vehicle on their own. So the air became pretty thin and there was no turnover anymore. After a restructuring of the company, the necessary follow-up financing quickly failed and the entire operation had to file for bankruptcy.
During my work I had often dealt with such companies. The only thing that helped then was a radical cut, which meant separating still functioning departments from the actual company and selling them to the highest bidder. The rest was simply closed down and the remaining real estate sold. There was always someone interested and who had the necessary small money. Only for future-proof companies could one achieve great things with the right marketing and minor changes. That was also worth it financially for me.
Over the years I had managed to put a nice sum on my bank accounts. However, I had invested so much energy and life time into my profession that other things were always short. Apart from some vacation trips, I hadn't experienced anything, couldn't keep a lover long enough to start a family, and spent most of my time in my office. My few relationships ended very quickly. Therefore I withdrew more and more into my work, spent years alone and even stopped meeting people.
However, this didn’t bother me anymore. I had never been really lonely. In that sense I was married to my work, which didn't even bother me. It never left any clothes in the bedroom, turned the kitchen into a battlefield and didn't lose hair in the sink. Additionally it was always faithful and didn't flirt with others. Even in bed I could take it with me. The problem was only that it didn’t want to have sex with me either. That was basically the one thing missing in my life. At least in the first years.
But even for this my job found a very practical solution. Sometime there stood a man in my office who wanted me to make his company successful again. He was a small local manufacturer of adult toys and contraceptives. Technically really good, but financially an absolute catastrophe. I took his business under the microscope and also went through the entire production process. The market for it existed, however, his problem was selling the things. To give the business a little boost, I commissioned another company to pack the overproduction into a Christmas calendar and offered them on the market.
After that it quickly picked up because the items were really well produced and only needed to be known by a larger audience. Some advertisements in the press and a quickly set up shop online solved the problem. And as I was directly at the source and didn't mind testing the products myself at home, I took some samples. From this emerged a small but quite impressive collection which solved the problem my work couldn’t give me.
This went so far that I sometimes spent entire working days with invisible toys under my business suit. But with increasing age it became less and less until I finally gave it up and only brought them to the bath or into my bed in the evenings. As I hardly had any social contacts in my retreat, it was never a problem for me to keep my toys openly accessible near my bed. No one would ever see them. Next to my bed there was an entire shelf of toys from which I simply needed to pick one.
This shelf I had only installed a few months ago. Earlier I had to hide the toys from my cleaner. She was an old dragon and in terms of my work I couldn’t really play open cards. She would have been the first to disappear into the confessional after work and tell the old churchman about what she had endured during the day. Now I didn't need her anymore though. Technological progress had entered and I commanded a whole army of helpers, only with my voice and some devices that I had installed.
Even my lawn in front of the house was cut automatically by a small helper and the green waste stored in an integrated facility. This waste is then transported by my gardener to a biomass power plant nearby. That was the only sensible use for me. I got rid of the mess and for disposal, I just had to pay my gardener who anyway needed to do enough in my garden. The community also supported this nonsense. They followed this climate religion and called it ecological. For me it was simply dirt that needed to be removed, preferably as cheaply as possible for me.
For the same reason I also installed a solar panel on my roof. It was subsidized, and I no longer had to buy expensive energy from an enterprise. Everything had nothing to do with supposed climate protection. It was cheap, I got money from the state for it and could keep my own electronic army happy. The one thing I refused was the proposed wallbox for an electric car. That was absolutely not for me. If I needed half a night after 300 kilometers to charge the battery again, that wasn’t a concept for my work. Not to mention the driving experience with such a battery tank at all.
It had nothing to do with a driving feeling anymore. I preferred the incomparable sound of an internal combustion engine that could overshadow a jet engine even at speeds over 150 kilometers per hour. Additionally, I enjoyed playing with a mixer so that the black rollers dug into the asphalt. It was also incomprehensible to me what a noble gas, which plants needed to grow in the first place, could be so dangerous. Unlike all these young followers of this eco-cult, I had learned the basics of mathematics, biology and chemistry at school.
In my free time I occasionally took care of socially disadvantaged youth who had already imbibed this millennium fraud with their mother’s milk. In the initial years I had tried to make up for the shortcomings of the schools and teach them something sensible. But after half a year I gave it up. It was simply impossible for these young people to use their intelligence to expose this fraud. Allegedly they had learned mathematics at school and that was enough for simple calculations, but 0.04% of a noble gas was an insurmountable size for this generation which must not exist.
I then tried to teach them that without these 0.04%, no growth would be possible for food plants and they would simply starve. But it was impossible to engrave this simple fact into the minds of these organs pipe. Even if I managed to get them to that point where the penny finally dropped, their ideology prevented belief in the truth. There was absolutely nothing left to do and the generation after me would run blindly into the downfall while singing joyfully songs. However, in a language that had been distorted.
According to their own definition they were no longer students, but "students." The problem was simply that they were only "students" as long as they sat in the lecture hall or library and studied. When they were sitting on the ceramic throne in the tile department, they were just pooping students. They had been indoctrinated with this nonsense since childhood at school and you couldn’t get it out of their programming anymore. If you tried, you got a syntax error after another. Therefore I have stopped teaching them for some time now.
Actually, I could have saved myself all these problems with the young people, but people had always told me not to distance myself so much from society. In my profession it was also advantageous to know what was going on in young people and which products they were into. Moreover, I could improve my profile quite a bit with these vulnerable existences. Therefore I occasionally engaged with the youth alongside my work. It didn’t matter at all if I invested a few euros that I rarely got back.
At this point I also remembered that my last visit there had already been almost three weeks ago. This was already known from me. It wasn't so easy to separate myself from my work, and if I was tied up or working on a business, it took over my entire time. After I had the next project in hand, I could easily spare an afternoon and listen to the worries of the youth. They weren’t exactly born with a silver spoon and had completely different realities.
Some of them had already seen prison from the inside despite their young age and their police files were anything but spotless. It usually started at home and life was already over before it even began. Life was already predestined, and although they had some skills, they automatically ended up in the employment office and lived off social benefits. A few special candidates were among them who had attached themselves to the wrong friends during their youth and then ended up with illegal substances. With these ones there was always trouble and I dealt less with them.
Among my protégés were also two of them. However, they had undergone a longer detoxification course and weren't dangerous anymore. One of them looked like he could lift an entire house by himself but was very approachable and almost as gentle as a lamb. Behind Jax I could hide myself twice at the same time. Behind him I wasn’t visible anymore. At first I was really scared of him, but that passed pretty quickly. He was as drowsy as a sleeping pill and just as silent. That was also one of my biggest troublemakers. He couldn't read or write and acted like the first human being. Except for adrenaline, there seemed to be nothing in his head.
Chapter 2
After my second drink, I left the bar and walked through the heated air along the streets to my car. I had parked it a few streets away on purpose. The building that housed the bar was in a very dark corner. Therefore, I preferred to park my car a few streets away on a guarded parking lot. I had learned this over the past years. Even average cars were increasingly being broken into and items taken that could be turned into money. It had happened to me twice already. Although I didn't have a laptop or anything valuable in my car, the extra work annoyed me.
On one hand, you always had to wait for the police first and get an official case number from them, even though the perpetrators were hardly traceable. Then you had to report everything to your insurance company, take the car to a workshop, have it repaired, and use a rental car in the meantime. The last time, they even handed me one of those remotely controlled small cars with batteries. I had never driven in such a "flat tire search device" before and had to go to a charging station instead of a gas station, where I had to wait for hours until I could finally drive a few meters again.
But this would definitely never happen to me again. I had made that clear at the workshop, and the service employee apologized a thousand times. She immediately entered it into the computer so that in the future she would be automatically reminded not to hand me an electric car anymore. Since then, I always parked my car more securely and ensured it was never unattended. From this point on, at least I didn't have any more rush because my car had been broken into. On this evening, despite the alcohol, I got behind the wheel and drove home not quite as safely.
It was already just before midnight when I parked my car in the garage of my house and stepped through the door into the hallway. Automatically, the lights turned on in the house. A sensor was installed in the door to the garage that triggered a whole series of actions depending on the time of day. I didn't need a light switch anymore. For me, this was really a relief. Everywhere were sensors distributed and the entire building regulated what I needed through a simple computer. Additionally, I could simply trigger various actions with short sentences. Even my coffee machine responded to a brief command. Only the cup had to be placed there myself.
But on this evening, my way led me only into my bedroom. Already on the way there, I pulled off my clothes and kicked my shoes off at the top of the stairs. It was just too late, and I wanted to sleep. Since I needed to be fit for work the next morning, I needed a sufficiently long time in my bed. I even skipped a shower. In my bedroom, my clothes simply flew onto the floor, and I took over my mattress. With my short verbal command, the lights went out, and the entire house was secured. Then the alarm system took over duty.
For me, these were really relaxing nights. The doors were securely locked, and as soon as one of the sensors reported something to the computer, pre-set programs ran. If anyone else was in my house besides me, a door opened, or someone just moved, the lights automatically turned on, and there was an alarm in my bedroom. At the same time, a message went out to the security forces, who then immediately set off. My bedroom was my fortress. By the time someone could get there, the security forces would already be standing by.
Even my alarm clock worked fully automatically. At exactly seven o'clock, it woke me up with a song from my personal playlist, informed me directly afterward of the most important news from around the world, and deactivated the alarm system. I got out of my bed somewhat groggy and shuffled a few steps into the bathroom. My usual morning routine almost ran by itself. In the many years, it had become second nature to me, and my body performed it like a bad habit. Every movement and every gesture was stored in my muscle memory. I could do it with my eyes closed.
Even the water temperature of the shower was exactly set to the right value for me. The only thing that still didn't work automatically was selecting my clothes. I had to dress them myself as well. After finishing, I moved into the kitchen, took a cup from the cupboard on the way and placed it under the coffee machine. While I mumbled the command for fresh coffee, I opened the refrigerator and grabbed the package of quark cheese. Behind me, the hot drink flowed into my cup, and the cheese landed on bread slices on the worktop.
I ate breakfast as usual at my small kitchen table and informed myself about the stock market developments on the screen. I had invested some money in stocks that I considered stable. I checked them routinely on weekdays to have enough time to sell the securities in time before I lost my invested money. But there was no reason for concern this morning. There were even a few small gains in my portfolio. However, it didn't really matter to me. Most of my wealth had been invested in real estate that had risen in value over the years.
If this continued, I could already stop working by my mid-forties. But that was out of the question. Work was, so to speak, my family, and I was otherwise rather restless. If I just stopped working, I wouldn't know what to do with my time. Out of sheer boredom, I would end up back in my office after at most three weeks and desperately look for a job. Even my vacation had been cut short more than once because I couldn't lie on the beach anymore. That didn't fit into my life at all. There was always something to do.
Shortly after breakfast, I retreated a second time to my bathroom. Since I had a brief appointment in the morning, I needed at least a little makeup to cover the deep under-eye circles. Actually, I slept long enough, but after the short party the day before, I lacked some energy, which was noticeable in my dark circles. That obviously couldn't stay like that. With trembling fingers, I applied my light war paint and then went into my home office. Although I still had an office room in the city, I only used it for official appointments.
I didn't want to receive visitors in my private house, so I had rented a smaller office in the city. Furthermore, this was also a perfect alternative address that I could provide so that no one knew where I actually lived. Since my obvious wealth attracted enough envious people and even criminals, I certainly didn't want to publicly give out my private address. So I led them all on a false trail and only mentioned the address of my rented office in the city center. But I was there very rarely.
Most of the time, I spent alone in my house where I also did the work. As every morning, I started my computer, sat down on my comfortable office chair, and opened my electronic calendar. Only my short appointment at a production was noted there, which gave me more time for other tasks. For the evening, I planned to visit my protégés. They usually spent most of their time in the facility because they mostly got free drinks and food there. All of them suffered from chronic financial shortages, making this offer particularly attractive for them.
A small part of my money also went as a donation into this pot from which they were served. This had often brought me a very favorable press article. I didn't know where they got their information from. I had never publicly communicated it myself. Not because it was important to me in any way. I simply wanted to help the young people, and I didn't want public recognition for that. Nevertheless, the press somehow found out about my involvement and wrote about it in some articles of the local newspapers. I didn't need to portray myself positively.
This option was only chosen by politicians who bought a praise song from journalists with a tiny contribution to socially disadvantaged people. That should bring them a positive image in society so they could secure their re-election. With politics, that obviously didn't work. But people were just massively stupid. Politicians had absolutely nothing to do with private men. They were two completely different people. One of them squeezed the people with ever-increasing payments through local politics, and the other distributed a few cents for social projects. Both had nothing to do with each other.
The people would never understand that. In recent years, it has become increasingly worse. Many residents could not connect the administration of a small town with parties in Berlin that ruined the republic. Nevertheless, it was the same soup. But the people had forgotten how to look behind the mask and ask themselves uncomfortable questions. I, on the other hand, let my work speak for itself. That was at least honest and not as hypocritical as all those political puppets. In our social area with the youth, this topic was consistently excluded.
My smart home system reminded me of the upcoming meeting with my client before my appointment and also turned on the lights all the way into the garage. I liked the technical toys that were possible and made life easier for me. After a brief checking glance in the mirror, I got into my car and sat behind the wheel. The garage door also opened automatically and gave me access. Slowly, I drove out of my house and turned onto the street. Behind me, the gate closed again.
To the small print shop, I didn't really need long. The streets were completely empty that day, and I moved quickly forward. Even the few traffic lights had mercy and changed to green without delay. This is how I liked my drives. The car radio also joined in, and cheerful pop music flowed from the speakers. On the streets, the natural scene showed itself. Many housewives doing shopping for their families, a brief chat with acquaintances, and various shops pushing their special offers onto the sidewalks.
A typical sunny and relatively warm morning was gaining momentum as I slowly approached my destination. In front of the factory premises stood a small house where the security service was housed. There sat a young woman with a bold black short haircut. The light gray uniform hung on her like a sack. It was certainly two sizes too big for her. This caused me to smile. The company seemed to be in pretty bad shape. If you could already tell from the clothes of the security service that it didn't fit, this immediately gave me the first hint.
This was anything but advantageous for a first impression. After all, the people at the gate were the first signboard. Visitors subconsciously noticed it and felt uncomfortable when visiting the company premises. This meant an invisible red line right from the start on a contract, and as a client, you thought five times whether you should even sign such an agreement. There are more than one print shops in the city, and the costs for an order didn't differ greatly. They were all almost in the same price range. That was certainly no secret.
I stopped at the gate and waited for the young woman until she appeared next to my window. There I became aware again of the entire extent of the clothing catastrophe. She seemed to be very conscious of it and asked me disinterestedly, "Do you have an appointment?"
I gave her a friendly smile and answered, "Mr. Graubler is expecting Lady von Arenberg in his office."
The woman in the ill-fitting uniform looked into her calendar, found my entry there, and opened the gate with a simple keystroke. While I slowly passed through the barrier, I saw her already reaching for her phone in the rearview mirror. Of course, visitors had to be registered. After all, work was being done here, and nothing was worse than a visitor getting lost in the production. You were quickly run over by a forklift there. Then you only existed as a pancake on the asphalt of the production hall. There you couldn't just get out so easily. You were simply stuck there.
Before I even stood on the parking lot in front of the administrative building, the door opened and a middle-aged small woman with bright red hair and a small nickel glasses balanced on her nose rushed toward me. This had to be the secretary. She introduced herself to me as Paola Gehrenberg right away. Her task was obviously to take me to the boss's office. The first thing that struck me about her were the slightly shifted teeth, on which small traces of her deep red lipstick clung. She must have been preparing for me all morning. She smelled of an old perfume, which I would rather have expected from an old kind grandmother.
She must have bathed in the broth. Less would have been clearly more, but she lived according to the motto "more is also more!" She accompanied me like a detective into the main building and bounced around me like a rubber ball. The inside of the old brick building was a revelation of bad taste and gave me a very deep insight into what time could do to such an old redbrick building. Cracks in the walls, poorly painted over with formerly white paint that had taken on a dark gray tone. Small successes from the grey past with colorless pictures in old wooden frames on the wall told me a whole story.
From its founding in 1908 to the present day, the history of the print shop stretched. Back then, they still printed newspapers, shifted to the production of ammunition in the forties, and returned to paper printing after the war. Again with a newspaper that came out weekly if enough paper was available, until they switched to smaller catalogs and advertising sheets in the early 1980s. But after the large retail chains had their weekly advertising booklets made by large print shops, there wasn't much left for these small companies. They were simply too expensive over time.
Whoever no longer bought large quantities of colors and paper could not secure discounts and had to keep prices high to be profitable at all. Of course, this was difficult if you didn't have a long-standing customer base. In the era of big corporations, such small companies gradually sank or were simply acquired by larger companies. This problem also stood before the entrepreneur Graubler. He had taken over the family business 13 years ago and now found himself helplessly facing the market.