[ WP ] Our government has reached a point where they can control everything , and everything costs money including the air that we breathe .

It was the night after a Hedd convention, so most of the brutes stumbling in were local magistrates, middling little bureaucrats with touchy little security details and even touchier little egos. They got the thumb same as the froth puffers: ‘ You breathe, you buy.' 
 
 Still, seemed these types, with their frilly black trimmed spectacles, thought themselves deserving of an extra breath here, a snort of the clean there. ‘ Their dictums, their air, ’ the thought went. Good thing about those translucent new fixtures, thought Valle, is that the red goes up same as the clear. So when public servant types got stiffies over the hardware, touchy feely in hyper-oxygenated stupors, Valle made an effort to yank down the last blood-soaked breach of conduct from the ceiling to make crystal clear that in Ten-Se, to frothers and politicos alike, the sign was the law. 
 
 Seemed to him like only months before when ‘ on the house ’ was closer to policy than to sentiment. Back then, it was free-for-alls for the whales, like Senior Consul Yason Elli, to snort a lungful without forking a nickel. 
 
 “ What ’ ll it be? ” asked Valle to a new face—first timer from the looks of it. He had a hard, curved nose and wore a matted black hairpiece that lifted to reveal his freckled, bald head every time the 
 junkie to his left took extra large swigs of ox No. 2. 
 
 “ What… have… you…? ” asked the stranger in a labored, snakelike gasp. 
 
 “ Two for the buck, Charlie, and not a single liver over! ” Valle yelled to Charlie Belkin, who long ago wed the old ox. 
 “ Sorry, stranger, ” he said to the outsider, looking still at Charlie. “ We ’ ve got Fortis half off tonight: three for five. The Kester is buy one—Oh, two up on the keister when she ’ s got buck forty… And you call yourself a man! ” he yelled again at Charlie. “ So sorry… Why don ’ t we start you with the Kester? ” 
 
 Valle felt a wet palm touch the back of his hand. “ Hey, you, don ’ t you, ” he blurted instinctively while capitulating to the back of the bar. 
 
 
 

