...etc...

Why did bread and water - useful things - cost little, and silks and diamonds - useless things - cost a fortune? It didn't make sense. B. had once heard of a man, fabulously rich with silks and diamonds, but dying of thirst in the desert, who had traded all his diamonds for a single drop of water. He had kept the silks - they kept the sand out of his face, and it had to be admitted, made him look rather dapper. But he had died a few hours later because a single drop of water wasn't really enough. Clearly he had been deficient in the haggling. But the question remained, and so had the camel. He could have drunk the camel's blood, yes, but camel's blood was very salty, and it might have been considered a breach of trust. How could he have looked himself in the mirror after drinking his friend? He didn't have a mirror. If he'd had a mirror, he could have reflected the Sun to signal to passing aeroplanes. Even a hot air balloon would have sufficed. He could have used the mirror to scorch a scorpion, or sand snake, to pass the time whilst awaiting aircraft. And of course, he could have used the mirror to check his eyes were in their correct places. But no. He didn't have a mirror. It was a tale, essentially, of poor planning.

That was the moral. The parable if you will. The Cashmere Revolution would be different. B. was a planner. A planner one step ahead of the troika. And the troika had made a costly error. One that would ultimately prove fatal to their cause.

Agent no. 1, Bill Gates, had invented the internet. He had used another name at the time - another persona - but it had been him all the same. It had been many hims in fact, but just the one him really. The archetype. If you counted all the people in the world you got to 7 billion. A number that would fit in a third of Wales. But if you divided by a billion, you got to 7. A number much more manageable. A prime number. Cicadas had used prime numbers since shortly after the dawn of time, for the purposes of synchrony. They had a scientific breeding program - that much was obvious. But so did Bill Gates. B. felt it only a matter of time before Gates would make his move. Would start to seek to control human breeding, probably beginning in the third world.

But the internet - the mirror of humanity - worked both ways.