The story of a talented man, clamped in a vice by a powerful patron. A story about the destruction of an immortal soul, about freedom of creativity and justification for evil. With the course of history, the processes of globalization were supplanted by the desire of each individual state to become a sovereign unit. Every small piece of land declared independence and inviolability, its own laws and a special path of development. My story is about a new country called Cardboardia, new, but already strong. All characters are fictitious. The names taken are familiar to me, those that are heard every day, and there are no hidden meanings in this. Inventing new names means putting some meaning into them, but I don’t plan any separate hidden or obvious meanings other than those that are in plain sight, and in order to write about the life of Elizabeth or Jones, you need to at least once see how they live, but this has never happened to me.