Chapter 199 A Glimpse Into The Past
"You shouldn't have done that, Dante," David stated calmly as he shook his head.
Dante was surprised and paused. "What do you mean, Dad?"
Peter, his uncle, laughed. "Your dad is being straightforward, Dante, my boy. I can understand the kindness in your heart when you chose to use non-violence to promote humanity, but it is wasted on our species."
Dante was naturally shell-shocked by this. He simply sat on his sofa, and despite all his Intelligence SDI that made his brain faster, he didn't know what to think or say.
David sat forward and sighed when he looked at his son. "It's partly my fault. I have been too taciturn with you when growing up because I didn't want you to become like Peter and me."
"Whether it is your uncle or myself, we have seen enough of the dark side of humanity to know that this is a race that can never be saved through kindness, but only force," David stated simply.
Dante did not know what to say. He expected things to be like in the books and the movies - which were the only things which had a frame of reference for him - and expected his parents to be heavily adamant against violence and try to save humanity through the kindness path.
This showed Dante's age in this regard though. Fiction in general was heavily limited by the world view of the author itself, but even more heavily limited by what the author thinks the audiences want to see.
For fear of criticism for being warmongering and violent, no author would try to openly have parental figures in the fiction advise their kin to choose violence, but would rather use events like the parental figures being killed to push their protagonists down that route.
So it was sort of 'well, he's not like that and I'm not like that, but sigh, the world forced him to do this, so it's neither of our fault,' which was obviously not a problem when done once or twice, but when most popular fiction do this, it created youths like Dante who assume that this was the fact.
This was the reason for the young man's reaction.
Dante had heard about his parents' past but he did not know too much because he was too young to hear the ugly part. David and Peter shared a look and nodded, deciding that it was finally time for Dante to know what the world was really like.
"Dante, you know about your grandpa, Gustavo Alighieri, right? He was once a mafia boss of a relatively small family in Florence but was usurped by his young protege when he became old."
"Luckily for him, the young protege was raised by him and still had some feelings, so he only exiled your grandfather to Africa to live the rest of his days. Your grandfather still possessed his assets and wealth, so when he changed his Euros into the local currency of your ancestral home country, he was already in the top 5% of richest men."
"Going from top dog in a better country to some forgotten old fellow in a third-world country made your grandfather indulge himself, believing that he was obligated to spend all his money on enjoyment until he finally died."
"Cue your grandmother, a down and out attractive model who needed to leap into higher society in order to change her life. She was soon 'indulged' in by your grandfather and gave birth to your eldest aunt."
Dante was speechless. "Wait, what?! I have an aunt?!"
Peter passed a hand over his hairless scalp. "Can you call her that? She is our biological sister, but we don't recognize her."
Oh… family conflict then?
"After she was born, grandfather decided to marry our grandmother and then the rest of us came. We have one other older sister apart from the firstborn, and then it's your uncle and I," David continued calmly.
"We had a pretty benevolent upbringing until your uncle turned 13. Our grandfather was really old by that point, and he began to favor the two of us more as his successors."
"Your aunts didn't care as they had married into rich families and were taken care of. However, their husbands had only married them with the intention of eating into our father's wealth."
"Seeing us being favored at such a young age, they were not happy. Our father was an ex-mafia boss, so how could he not see their tricks? This was why he pushed us to the front quickly, introducing us to all his partners and letting the financial advisors at the banks see our faces, as well as all his main colleagues and workers."
"At that point, your uncle and I were no longer allowed to be boys, We were trained heavily from that point on to be sharp, ruthless and clam at all times."
David glanced at Peter with a hint of sadness. "Do you know, we don't typically have balding genes in our family. None of us showed any sign of hair loss, but your uncle lost all his hair by the age of 25."
Peter smiled bitterly but did not comment. This was enough to tell Dante how stringent not only the training his father and uncle faced, but the difficulty of the waters they had to navigate after.
"I'll cut the story short and say that our father passed away at age 88, when I was 23 and your uncle was 25. With an official will with the right executors, it was a closed-and-done deal. When it was read out, Peter and I saw the expression of our sister's husbands and even our sisters were not too happy."
"They could not challenge it in court, so they used other means. Collective social pressure, sabotage, corporate espionage, and more. The nail in the coffin was when our sister came out to lie that our father sexually abused them from a young age."
"It was at that point your uncle and I understood. We met and decided to liquidate all of our assets and emigrated from our home country to America back in 2005. We left what we could to your aunts and their families but promised not to associate with each other anymore."
Dante was silent. He knew the rest from here, his father and uncle came to America with nothing but a bit of money that was hastily changed at low rates and was not much. It was easy for a middle-lower-class American to emigrate to Africa and turn into an upper-class person, but an upper-low-class person from Africa going up would barely turn into a middle-class person.
David and Peter had skills, Peter in business and David in architecture, so they managed to start a company and eke out a living. They both got engaged, David to Aileen and Peter to Jacqueline.
Only David got married though, as Jacqueline simply left with a richer man to get married and broke it off with Peter. This was why his uncle never remarried and had no children of his own.
"And what about you mom?" Dante asked as he turned to the silent Aileen.
After all, from what David and Peter revealed, they had gone through enough that they were not going to bother with the idea of 'promoting humanity' at all. In fact, they were inches away from outright saying that Dante should wave a hand and send androids to smash everything to paste.
Aileen was startled being called upon, but she placed her hand sin her lap and spoke candidly. "Personally, I would have enslaved everyone at the top and then had them expose themselves before committing mass suicide. After that, you are open to controlling the rest of humanity however you want."
David and Peter did not look surprised by Aileen's answer, but Dante was even more shocked than when the two men revealed their opinions. It was one thing for them to say what they did, but Dante could accept it because of their pasts and their already tough natures.
But his mother had been the beacon of kindness since he was young. In his mind, she was standing on a pedestal that no saint in history could ever match, so to hear her say this was no different from a person being told they were adopted in their adulthood.
However, Dante soon calmed down when he realized something. His mother had always been kind, yes… but that was to him. He had never actually seen her be as benevolent to others as much as she was to him.
In fact, Dante was even now digging up memories of the past where his friends told him that his mom was kinda scary, but he always laughed it off thinking that they were either joking or were referring to her business-like side when it came to serious matters.
However, that was the power of the Mandela effect. Now that he dug out those memories with his superior Intelligence SDI, he easily noticed that they had been warped by his own perception of his mother.
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