[Lauchenoiria]

Lia Chiu stared at the black-and-white picture of her with her parents. She had been fifteen when EUDCA came into force. Her mother sent her father away to Laeral – thankfully, EUDCA predated the emigration ban by four years – and she had never seen him again. At the time, she’d had mixed feelings. She understood the purpose of EUDCA, given the infancy of the Matriarchy and the culture of surrounding nations. She also loved her father, and missed him.

Over time, she had convinced herself of the value of the Act, and had suppressed any emotional feeling she had over the matter. Then came her granddaughter’s flight from the country in order to give birth to her great-grandson. All the emotions she had suppressed successfully for decades had come flooding back, piece by piece. It was why she had voted for the reformist amendments in the end. Chiu was NOT a reformist, but on matters of family, she shared their sympathies.

The eighty-one-year-old Councillor was both physically and mentally fit for her age, but one could only do so much to stave off the waves of nostalgia. This box hadn’t been opened since the 1950s. It had been collecting dust in a storage room, but now she couldn’t let it go. She had been here for hours, picking through old photographs, overthinking every decision she had ever made. She felt a dampness on her cheeks and lifted her hand up to touch tears. Councillor Chiu did not cry. Yet, now she did.

It was Xia, of course. Her granddaughter who fled the country, and her great-grandchildren who had run away to join their mother. She wasn’t angry with them for their action. That would be easier to deal with. No, Lia was heartbroken. Her young great-grandchildren had felt it was better to flee across a border in the night than stay with her. She couldn’t even blame Jia, not after the Alt-Ed stint. In the end, it didn’t matter whether or not Lia had a choice. There is always a choice.

“Peace at all costs,” she whispered, laughing and weeping at the irony. That was how this happened. Their desire to prevent another civil war in Kerlile meant that the other Council families were giving the Patels whatever they wanted to keep them happy after the revelation about the death of Anita. In the end, it was just ripping things apart further. Appeasing the Patels made them bolder, leading to ever-more concessions.

“But we can’t risk a war anyway,” she muttered to herself in Mandarin. It was a no-win scenario, and she couldn’t see a way out of it. But she had to find one. Her family had always been careful to stop the Matriarchy going too far in an anti-family direction; which seemed like a logical option for such a state. The political battle between the reformists and the gynarchists was beginning to tear apart the fragile fabric of the state, however.

Chiu needed to find a way to fix things without going even further down the tangled roads of appeasement and concessions. Perhaps… yes, perhaps…

She stood up, digging further into the storage room, past boxes covered in dust even older than she was. There. In the back was a wooden box stamped with old shipping labels in numerous languages. The Councillor made her way carefully through the stacked boxes and knelt over, ignoring the pain in her back as she did so.

“Okay, grandmother, what do you have for me?” she whispered as she opened the box. Inside were stacks of old paper with careful, handwritten Chinese characters on them. A smell of aged paper and wood wafted up, but Lia couldn’t tell if it was real or an olfactory hallucination brought on by expectations.

Lia grunted as she stood back up, bending over to pick up the box. She hissed as she did so. She was much too old for this, but she didn’t quite trust any of her daughters with the task. And she certainly didn’t trust the servants. She struggled with the box, carrying it out and through to her office, gasping in relief as she dropped it on the desk, and locked the door before sitting down to recover.

Once she had rested, she got up again, and began to go through the papers in the box. They contained much of the work of the Chiu founder, Yijun, on academic discussions of feminist theory and the Kerlian project. They dated back, for amusement, to a scrawl in the untidy script of a six-year-old, which read solely what roughly translated to ‘boys are stinky’, dated 1903. Then there was a gap until Yijun was nineteen, before she began studying the subject of gender in earnest.

This included an unabridged, unedited, uncensored version of the initial manifesto for the creation of Kerlile, and the logic behind the initial policies. This was before the founders had decided to put it into practice, back when it was solely a thought experiment. That was what Lia was looking for. Reality had a way of clouding things; of turning ideology into politics. Perhaps in these old writings of her grandmother, she could find something that would help her find a way to fix Kerlile in the present-day, before it was too late.