Chapter 1: Setting Up Shop

I watched with interest as Sadie was brought out of her medically induced coma. She looked around wildly trying to determine where she was. She tried to move and suddenly realized she was tied tightly to the chair in which she was sitting. She looked with fear at the stone walls of the castle that surrounded her. Finally her eyes fell on me sitting on my "throne." Recognition came into her eyes.

"Uncle Sam," her eyes said she was still clearly confused. "What?" I didn't bother to answer. "Where am I?" I answered her softly, "Welcome to the country of Samula, Sadie."

I continued, "As to why you are here there are two reasons. First, because I don't like the way Mary, your stepmother, is raising you and second because I want you. To my mind, both are valid reasons."

I noticed she was still pulling that the ropes that were holding her. "Would you like to have the ropes untied?," I asked. "Ya think?," she said snottily. That was another attitude that showed she wasn't being raised right but I decided to let it slide for the moment. "The only reason I had you tied was so you wouldn't hurt yourself while you slept." (That wasn't entirely true but close enough.)

I turned to speak to Gar who was seated on a platform to my left which was ten inches lower than my own. "Gar," I said firmly, "would you please untie little Miss Sadie." Even though it was worded in the form of a question, it was a command that he could not ignore. He sort of grunted and got off the platform to do as I asked.

Perhaps now it the time to explain a few things that led to position I now occupy. My name is Sam, the last name doesn't matter and you probably wouldn't recognize it anyway. I was born into a wealthy but not super rich family. Nevertheless, they wanted the very best for me and I took to it like a fish to water. I was also blessed with a world class brain (I'm not bragging, just stating a fact). I graduated from high school at 15 and from Harvard Law School at 19. All the time my parents were in there pulling for me and, more importantly, teaching me how to be humble and to have a great love for my country. At 20 I started my own investment firm, took time to get married to my childhood sweetheart, Susan, and made my first billion dollars. After the first billion it came easily and today I am worth somewhere between 975 billion and one trillion. According to the latest numbers that makes me the richest man in the world and yet nobody knows me. And I like it that way.

My parents kept me grounded. But it was Susan that kept me humble. Susan came from lower middle class family living in a small town in central Pennsylvania. She wanted to stay that way even though I offered to buy her a mansion. So we lived in a small town in a medium price house and shopped, just as our neighbors did at Wal-Mart and Kmart. I was very happy with that as it was a good place to raise our son, Richard, who came along about three years after we were married.

I first met Sadie when Susan's niece, Mary, met and married Glen. Glen had custody of Sadie who was ten and his daughter from a former marriage to a dwarf. I don't if she got the gene or not but she was pretty small for ten. But it was what happened to Shannon that upset me more than anything else. Shannon was the product of Mary and Susan's oldest sister, Gail and some guy. Gail wasn't at all sure who the father was. It could be any one of twenty or so different men most of whom were migrant workers and no longer in the area. Anyway, Mary ended up raising Shannon who was pregnant by twelve and on drugs by thirteen. Today, Shannon is much better, no thanks to the mental health industry. At my suggestion we put her in the room and wouldn't let her out until she was clean. She looked like hell when she came out but she had learned her lesson. She went back to school, became and RN and is now working in the city hospital.

Now Mary had another impressionable ten year girl on her hands and from what I could see she wasn't doing a much better job with this one. She was already letting her spend the night at her "boyfriend's" house.

Two years later, tragedy hit my own house. Richard was enrolled in karate classes and they were on the way from that class when a drunken semi driver ran them down killing both himself and the two most important in my life. I'll have to give Mary credit as both she and Sadie were there to help me during the dark days that followed. But my sorrow wasn't over as both of my parents died on their way to support me. Even with Mary and Sadie trying to cheer me up, I felt like a rudderless ship flowing in a sea of despair.

I finally was starting to come out of it a bit within about a month. I've never one to worry much about those things I can do nothing about. So I threw myself into the one thing I had always been good at ... making money. Within six months I had a net worth of over three trillion dollars. That was more than the annual budget of many small countries.

When I had that thought I knew what I wanted to do. For all that I truly love America I really didn't think it could survive and I'd owned a forty-five square mile island in the South Pacific for several years. It came on the market for eleven million and I had snatched it up. At the time I didn't know what I was going to do with it ... now I did.