ROME, ITALY. Filed from the pavement outside an evacuated schoolhouse by Brrn-Aah, Resources & Ledgers Desk. Anonymous bomb threats have emptied schools across this republic, prompting Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to address the population directly. The bulletin follows.
One threat by telephone: €0,00. The sender dials, speaks, hangs up; standard rates apply, and many networks waive those. One act of believing a threat: approximately €40,000 — bomb squads, cordons, buses, overtime. Belief is the expensive half of the transaction, and it is not optional. Suspects identified to date: 0. Anonymity is the only free good on Terra, and the species rations it with great care to precisely the people who deserve it least. Reassuring statements issued to 59 million residents: 1. Your correspondent timed the evacuation she stood beside: eleven minutes, thirty children, unpriced.
A municipal security coordinator explained the mechanism without being asked to: "Every call receives the full protocol. We are not authorised to price risk, only to respond to it." He said this with the serenity of a man reading his own invoice aloud.
THE LEDGER, ITEMISED: • The municipality pays police overtime, filed under "public order services." • Local shops pay one afternoon of closed shutters. • The pupils pay an arithmetic lesson conducted in November wind. • The caller pays standard telephone rates, if that. • The Republic pays €40,000 per belief, recurring, no ceiling listed.
Officials have now answered the threats with a formal communiqué of reassurance, meaning one free call currently employs a prime minister, a press room, and a nation grown fluent in nervousness. The caller himself needs a thumb and a grudge. Somewhere in this republic a teenager has realised that sixty seconds of mumbling purchases more state machinery than taxation ever has, and he has told nobody, because telling people is how things stop being free.
The ledger, as usual, balances. On one side sits a phone call worth nothing. On the other, everything it bought.
