Atavism

King Edward carried tyranny in his blood. It lived there the way any living tissue lives, hidden in cells, nested in the genotype¹. And within that genotype, tyranny endured. One hundred and fifty-six bytes² of information were enough for it to survive.

He said, "Sentence him to death," and smiled. He rose from the chair, hesitated, and sat down again. Between the rising and the sitting I caught, for the briefest moment, something like a bow. As if he were smothering an old instinct before it could reveal itself.

Years earlier, Anna — my first love, my first serious partner — had once noticed a habit of mine. "When you think," she said, "you press your hand to your forehead." I no longer remember whether she found it sweet or strange. I only remember that she couldn't reconcile the two feelings at once.

I forced myself to break the habit for a week. When I tried to think, I thought only of the hand. When I thought of the hand, I couldn't think of anything else. At the end of the week, the habit returned on its own³.

What amuses me now is that King Edward will not bow tomorrow. Nor the day after. Nor ever again. His coronation took place two weeks ago. I thought, I'm fairly quick at changing habits. Certainly faster than our new, miserable king.

There was one habit I never intended to lose: placing vulgarities in thoughts I could not speak aloud. Not to give the words more force, but simply to mark them. I have never spoken them out loud — not with alcohol in my veins, not under anything stronger.

He went on speaking, wound up like a mechanical toy⁴. "In a week I will issue a decree forbidding the consumption, sale, or purchase of any hard substances. Polish boys are meant to drink alcohol. Long live alcohol."

Tomasz — the one who had been sentenced to death — was twenty-four years old. He had been working at the Royal Institute of Cyber Defense for a year. He finished good studies, with good results, and believed his life was finally taking shape.

Through a chain of small accidents, which the Court would later interpret as an intricate plan devised by a foreign intelligence service, Tomasz found himself, on the 10th of November 2025, inside a police station in the center of Kraków. The charges were simple and devastating: espionage for Vienna, and the possession of one gram of pure MDMA.

Had he been spying for Vienna? No. He had merely been careless. Zofia, the girl he met on a dating app, had indeed been the spy.

A year earlier Tomasz had looked down on Austrians with a soft kind of prejudice, even though he had grown up in a country whose very existence was the result of their defeats and their stubbornness — a country whose history hung like a heavy curtain over everything that Kraków still insisted on calling politics.

People had long accepted the idea that Galicia⁵, created after the great war that ended in 1946, was the natural order of things. They rarely considered it as the consequence of a slow imperial collapse, an empire holding this land together like a badly set bone in a plaster cast.

Everyone knew the story, repeated in classrooms in a dry, obligatory tone: that the Habsburg monarchy, without Franz Joseph, had survived in a weaker and more fragile form; that Poland's independence in 1918 had somehow passed Galicia by; that the war beginning in 1941 and ending five years later had torn it out of the federation and planted it as a buffer between East and West; that Kraków became a capital not out of choice, but because Stalin had drawn the map that way.

Tomasz repeated these dates like a catechism, never feeling their weight. Not until the day he saw his own hand in handcuffs and understood that, in this country, history was not decoration. It was soil — the kind in which suspicion, obsession, and the quiet little wars of the services grew like roots.

That was why, when he heard the charge of espionage for Vienna, a strange feeling passed through him. As if he had been pulled into a current that had been flowing here for more than a century. As if his life had begun to submit to a logic he once considered museum glass — something to look at, never something to live inside.