From the Neck Up and Other Stories by Aliya Whiteley

Author:Aliya Whiteley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

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The Vetter

He felt that if he didn’t believe in something then there would be no point in living, and he had chosen to believe in Farleyton. He didn’t need to go there himself. It was enough to know a place like that existed. Its appearance had raised the tone of the whole planet. It gave every single person a goal, an aspiration.

He looked up from his monitor and stretched. The muscles of his back and neck ached, and his spine clicked; age was upon him. But he wouldn’t stop. To have been born with money was such a privilege and he hadn’t even realised it until late in his life. Now he meant to make good use of it with the time he had left, before the end.

Every day more applications arrived from the website. Each application represented a request for one person to be awarded a grant for access to Farleyton, from the charity he had set up. People couldn’t fill one out on their own behalf; the idea was that they nominated somebody. A person with a good heart and a host of kind works behind them. The application form was fifty-two pages long and in the language of Farleyton, but that didn’t seem to stop fraudsters from attempting it. About a quarter of the applications, when investigated, turned out to be fakes. People nominating themselves under false names, mainly. Telling lies. How he hated lies.

He returned to the screen. During that brief pause seventeen more emails had arrived from the people he employed to perform the first application filter process. With numbers like these, only one in ten thousand would be given a grant, but he felt good about that. The truly deserving would get in and find a better way of life. The work of uncovering the best people would continue until he was too old and tired to stare at the screen for a moment longer. The work gave meaning to it all.

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