Fortunately for me, I was tougher than the average ideologue. Killing me to remove my influence over the affiliate wasn’t as easy as my new enemies first thought. They all came to recognize my nigh-invulnerability one way or another, but the first month of having my affiliate back was spent moving from place to place to avoid near-constant attacks.

BlueCleave stepped up right away. The military affiliate quietly mobilized, focusing on intelligence gathering above physical security. Assassination attempts were frequent, but not particularly effective. I could survive being shot in the head by a linear cannon or cut apart by a monowire weapon, and those were two of the most common ways left to actually harm me. Of course, ‘common’ meant logistically possible. Not all affiliates could even afford to take a shot at me.

Lasers were ineffective, railgun fire bounced off. Even radiation, various acids, and poisons of all types weren’t really that harmful. My crystalline colonies ensured that anytime something had hurt me, it was much less likely to do so in the future.

There were some things that just couldn’t be defended against, however. Weapons with an edge only a single atom wide could cut through anything made of atoms, it was simple physics. Particles accelerated to a significant portion of the speed of light were another sticking point, though my exit wounds did get smaller with each hit.

One particularly clever assassin managed to trap me inside an antimatter reactor during a tour. I broke out of it before he could get it cycled up, so the attack was ineffective. Still, I valued the creativity of the attempt, as my hobbs tracked him down and annihilated him.

They were my hobbs, too. The military wing of Silken Sands saw immediate improvement upon my return to power. The hobb in charge after the dust of my arrival had settled was a direct descendant of Rayna. She was named Tollya in honor of the fallen hobb, but that wasn’t particularly surprising. The names Tollya and Rayna had become increasingly common among hobb newborns since my first year in BuyMort.

Nu-Tollya, as I thought of her back then, had studied the history of her tribe. Any good warrior is intellectually curious, and my hobbs were no exception. I had won the BlueCleave vote by mid-90 percentile, no doubt part of why Axle gave up the race. That had to intimidate him, the way my military always had.

With a mind for reform, my new hobb commander took the helm and started retracting the military apparatus from across the multiverse. We didn’t quite give up BlueCleave MortBlocks on other planets, but we stepped down their size and encouraged the military there to coexist with the native populations as best as possible, with ‘good relations’ considered a top military concern.

That wasn’t exactly easy, considering how abused many of the populations had become in my absence. Instead of allowing affiliates to grow naturally in their own environments, the military had been used to force them into Silken Sands compliance. Everything was run for the benefit of Nu-Earth, and my job was to untangle that mess while not making the situation worse for anyone involved.

Part of the military affiliate’s reform involved an internal review campaign, which led to arrests, mass firings, and executions, depending on the offense. Terna’s World required justice to heal, and as I continued operating BlueCleave directly, I realized several other worlds did too.

From an outside perspective, I can understand the panic I caused by such a sudden reduction to military assets. It had to look bad from the typical ‘BuyMort-native’ perspective. Affiliate heads also mistook the move as weakness, in a few odd cases. That specific issue cleared up on its own pretty quickly though. Reducing the military helped to overcome the loss of income our top earners were complaining about too. For me anyway.

I wasn’t exactly callous to the concerns of the ultra-wealthy, but they could afford to weather my changes. The people in poverty around the system, I helped. I often spent more hours on my Storage policy implementation than my military concerns.

My new operations manager quickly began to condemn my priorities, and I had to meet with him several times to ensure operations moved the way I wanted them to. It took a lot of convincing, and time, but eventually he started to see my long term goals. More insular, self-sufficient planets would lead to less conflict among them, increasing trade stability and allowing for more expansion. Ore prices from Midnight were a great measuring stick, I pointed to the decades of stability the wealthy planet had offered the rest of us to justify my own changes.

The steps I took were all in pursuit of more market stability, not less. Or so he believed. In reality, it would lessen the influence BuyMort had on each planet. The streams of pods travelling across each globe would thin out if the people of that world were doing BuyMort’s work for it.

In public, I made several ‘jobs’ pushes that helped my cause as well. By increasing affiliate investment in delivery services, we saved morties, I told them all. The less we relied on BuyMort and its constantly shifting prices, the better we would all be.

BuyMort and the multiverse’s wealthy had developed a strange relationship, and MortMobile was the person who helped me explore it. After I got my affiliate back, I spent some morties on a new account with his service, something I had been meaning to do since the Sleem gate.

The cost shocked me, for a simple communications service his rates were insane. Hundreds of trillions for some calls, far outside the range of most people within the system. But me he would talk to for free, once I reminded him who I was.

But even that interaction was bizarre. I asked if he remembered me, gave him my name and various titles, then waited while he stared at me in silent contemplation for a frighteningly long span of time. Eventually a slow smile crept into place and he nodded, repeating my name mechanically. I was concerned he didn’t remember me, but he broke contract and gave me sensitive information from his other customers, so he must have.

MortMobile wasn’t the same, like so much in my life. He had been stretched to the breaking point and beyond, his powerful mind connecting everyone’s calls and piping television programming into their homes and heads.

When I first arrived, I started to ease the pressure on him through my various actions. At first it hadn’t seemed to matter. A few hundred people in Arizona died and he barely felt the weight lift. A few thousand in this battle or that had never seemed to make much difference to his constant headache.

But then the Sleem had all died at once. After that, he was invested in me, and often helped me far beyond his contract stipulations. He even helped me lure certain high-level Church officials to their doom. Primarily though, the war reduced populations across the multiverse, and that trend continued after my demise.

For nearly a century, MortMobile had serviced the upper echelons of BuyMort high society. He did this quietly, without complaint or redress for his situation. The majority of his customers forgot about his role in my coup entirely, all while his prices became inaccessible for more and more of them at a time. When I got to him the second time, he had barely three-hundred clients.

I rapidly discovered he was part of a vicious mini-economy feeding on the tip-top of the economic food pyramid. Browsing other CEO’s phone bills was enlightening in more ways than one.

These people spent so much in transport, security, and amenities that it created a pool of services that catered to these whims, all from BuyMort itself. MortMobile was chief among them. BuyMort went out of its way to increase prices for things that could be achieved by far cheaper means and relied upon a handful of wealthy addicts to keep its profits on an upward trend.

Eternal growth, unending pursuit of short term profit manifest in the long term. The numbers for the rest of us operated by a totally different set of rules. The algorithm detected a weakness in a handful of people, and prayed upon that weakness with terrifying efficiency. MortMobile helped explain this to me, over the course of several cat and mouse question and answer sessions, each unlocking more valuable data.

He was infuriatingly vague in conversation, to the point that I began to suspect it wasn’t intentional.

“Why are your prices so expensive?” I asked him once.

“Why do people continue to pay them?” he replied.

My conversations with the entity often went nowhere, like talking to an old earth chatbot. The interactions were dry, empty, and often frustratingly circular. Eventually I would say the right thing in the right way and he would regurgitate information about a competitor or threat, and then he would shut down like an overworked machine.

With careful application of tact, I consulted a neurologist about it and he suggested a permanent dissociative state. I didn’t tell him who I was asking about, something told me that context would only complicate his perspective.

The powerful psychic creature, capable of entangling quantum states and touching every mind in the multiverse at once, had become so broken by his duties to BuyMort that most of his mind hid away somewhere inside itself, even while active and working with customers.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Those first few weeks, I tried to get through to him. But after the neurologist I approached the mind I was entreating from a different angle. I used his services and allowed his mental presence to become comfortable with my own again. Questions seemed to elicit the occasional moment of clarity, so I spent time, morties, and especially affiliate rewards to use his service whenever I could conjure a reasonable excuse. Then I questioned him until he shut down on me, and the process would start again.

I wound together so much of my life with the daily operation of my affiliate that I began to experience the passage of time subjectively faster. Days would blend into weeks and my sheer busyness kept me from pursuing any relationship or hobby.

My driving purpose was my affiliate. I had to fix it, to restructure it to what I wanted it to be, in preparation for a much bigger job. Taking down BuyMort from within was going to involve wielding a great deal of power with extreme caution.

My response to assassination attempts was a good example of that tactic in action. In public I lamented them. Political violence was to be condemned, everybody agreed. In private my intelligence machine hunted down the powerful elites who paid for each attempt on my life, and I resolved each situation in one way or another. Various conflicts between associates caused the majority of the attempts, as I rubbed one CEO or another the wrong way.

Most of them could be bought out. Some few were receptive to threats, and a small handful required death to remove them as problems. Still, I wasn’t resorting to killing my business rivals anywhere near as much as I used to.

Behind the scenes, Silken Sands was cut-throat. Any associate head I had a personal issue with quickly found his associate taken out at the knees. I developed a team of acquisition specialists and gave them free reign once a target was selected. Within days, the offending associate found itself swamped in fees, tariffs, and refusals of service. Occasionally, I would put together funds for the victims of these associate takeovers, depending on publicity. Charitable giving had diminishing returns, when it came to public image, but in those early days it still had some value.

I was able to walk the thin line between coldhearted businessman and caring, empathetic leader. Media manipulation began to operate itself as the various associates under my umbrella fell in line one after the other. Sometimes it required leadership changes, but I usually handled that through various funds and buried associates, to avoid direct implication.

Material conditions began to improve after only a few weeks. The homeless in each major city across Nu-Earth were finding reasonably priced housing and good-paying jobs. Each major city was reporting a reduction in houseless individuals without spikes in portals to Storage. The one issue normally went hand in hand with the other.

But even Storage was improving under my watch.

I’d used scrap material from BlueCleave’s retraction to construct and deploy five city structures for Storage. I had an absurd amount of decommissioned ships, armored personnel carriers, and various weapons platforms that I refused to simply resell into the market. Instead, I ordered them disassembled and the parts used for my pet project. The city’s fit in the tunnels by design, and came with many defensive measures, up to and including an oversized main door that could slam shut in under a second if needed.

We broadcast the locations for each prefabricated city across Storage and secured the route with armed hobbs to ensure a safe migration. People flowed into the fortresses and were greeted with thick, warm clothing and military meals. Reducing BlueCleave’s standing force had the side effect of surplus uniforms. It didn’t take much to funnel them into Storage too.

Our success, of course, was commercialized. It wasn’t just a matter of building the cities; we had to convince people to leave their precarious shelters and take a chance on what we were offering. For that, we needed a message, one crafted so precisely that it could cut through the noise and distrust.

Diving into the system, and moving to the best affiliate page I could find according to the ratings and numbers of reviews, I waded into adspace-run real non-automated person-on-person discourse, the sort of premium treatment that was once almost normal in my first lifetime. It was nice to sit down and work with a team of creatives, marketers, and data analysts, giving them my personal touch. I noticed right away that the entire team was too scared to argue with me, being the legendary Windowpuncher and all, but it didn't bother me much because they were clearly competent enough to deliver what I demanded, and to nudge me in the right direction when things felt off. I checked in via ad space often as they crafted the ads, making sure they went exactly how I wanted them to.

I was quite particular about the visuals. Zooming in on a scene of kids running through a communal growing area, their laughter muted behind a narrator whose voice was the sound of brown gravy on mashed potatoes. The crops were pristine and flourishing, and the children looked positively rosy-cheeked and bubbly. It helped that they were wearing good clothes and decent shoes. The message of prosperity was absolutely clear.

Despite that, it wasn't all to my liking. They had a few scenes dealing with big trucks, scantily clad supermodels, and giant sauce-heavy burgers. Those got the cut.

The tagline needed to be perfect, and we debated it for hours. Too soft, and no one would believe it. Too harsh, and it might scare them away. We eventually settled on one I made: “From tunnels to triumphs—claim your future in Nu-Storage today.” It was simple and to the point, and that felt like exactly what was needed despite light protestation from my staff.

The ad’s visuals came to me for approval in short clips and pieces. One showed the sprawling interiors of the new homes, with communal kitchens serving steaming meals and private quarters that were small but comfortable. Another showed gobbs drinking quietly outside a small cafe. I chopped the ones that felt wrong, and gave my approval to everything that fit my vibe of the place.

I made sure the campaign's ad bid would peak in each market at times when we’d get the most attention. The targeting algorithms would ensure they hit the right people, and I set top bids to make sure they came through in front of the pack.

When the team was finished, I was called back to the ad space to experience the final version. It started with a burst of light and sound, something like a mini-big bang exploding in my brain. I didn't wince though, flowing through it with a carefree feeling that was almost certainly paid into the ad. I leaned back, letting the calm wash over me, before landing gently on my feet within the cracked concrete of a Storage tunnel.

It was dim, and grungy, a smattering of plants sprouting out of the cracks to reach for light and moisture. Families huddled there, cold and miserable, their faces gaunt and weary. Above them, salvaged and jury-rigged lights flickered and flashed, while from the sky the narrator’s voice came in, rustic and homey.

"In the depths of Storage, life is a constant struggle. But what if there was another way?"

The camera shifted to a hobb soldier, a towering figure in gleaming armor, extending a hand to a child clutching a ragged stuffed toy. The scene transitioned seamlessly into a sunlit fortress, where the child now ran through a stately communal square. I smiled, feeling it where it counted.

"Welcome to Nu-Storage, your next step to a better life."

The visuals were pristine. Trees swayed in artificial sunlight, children’s laughter bubbled faintly beneath the narrator’s soothing cadence, and families gathered around communal tables, sharing steaming bowls of soup. The focus shifted to a growing area, where rosy-cheeked children played tag, their laughter synchronized with the narrator's tone of simple country boy optimism.

"From tunnels to triumphs—claim your future in NuStorage today."

The tagline flashed in bold, golden letters, overlaid with the rotating image of a shining fortress. Below it, an interactive display offered a menu of options: "Explore," "Reserve Your Space," "Jobs Available," and "Learn More."

And then, as a capstone, the scene cut to Phyllis's one. She stood there, towering in front of the emergency blast door, her scowl practically daring anyone to mess with her as she flashed an exaggerated thumbs-up. I chuckled despite having seen it over a dozen times.

The final moment was a simple return to the hobb soldier, smiling as they handed out a uniform to a trembling figure in rags who hesitated, then accepted it with visible relief.

"Nu-Storage: Not just a home, but a future you can trust."

The sound faded and the ad’s interactive text floated in place for just a moment before it all faded and I was back in an ad space conference room with the team.

Smiling, I nodded. “That’ll do,” I said, standing. “Good work.”

The room erupted into cheers and applause as I faded out of the ad space and back into the reality of day to day affiliate operations.

I made sure the tunnel cities were being built and deployed while funding it from a reduction of waste inherent in the system. Various middle managers and their affiliates overseeing the many aspects of BlueCleave daily operations were retired, and the funding they had tied up for their own profit went back into the machine it had been meant for.

My hobbs were happy to build the structures, they all understood the plight of those in Storage. Part of my legend in their culture was their march out of Storage with my aid. They wanted to help, and labor was never in short supply for the project. We even hired directly from Storage, giving denizens a pathway out.

Terna’s World collaborated with BlueCleave in their first peaceful interaction in years and each fort was equipped with a biome-specific growing area, as well as seeds and supplies to maintain them.

The vast majority of Storage was still wild, and dangerous for most sapients, but in the first few weeks of my return to power we established a foothold. That foothold went on to grow, and to eventually define life in Storage, but in the early days it helped boost my signal. I meant the stuff I’d said in the election, and more and more people were starting to realize it.

I sat at the head of the BuyMort system, and consolidated my power over it like any good tyrant would do. The major difference between my governance and tyranny was the consent with which I governed. At first that consent had been falsified. Massaged, gaslit, and manipulated. But as my second reign went on, the people’s support became more and more genuine, even over only a few weeks.

Some of them were hurting because of me, I was under no illusions about that, especially with the dozen or so assassination attempts in that first month. So many more were healing because of my policies, however. Enough healing for the multiverse to notice.

At the end of my first month back at the head of Silken Sands, the only job performance review I needed arrived at the top of the space elevator on Nu-Earth. The entire top docking ring had a mural painted on it during a scheduled maintenance stoppage. No cars rode up or down the elevator for two hours, during which time Mel somehow sneaked into our security system and disabled the camera drones, then flew outside in her own special spacesuit and put the mural in place.

An eyewitness recorded the woman in a spacesuit, using a handheld sprayer to install the mural with a pre-programmed design. There, immortalized in special UV-resistant paint, was a scene of people working together to repair the station, complete with falsified battle damage. From a distance, the damage looked real, as did the tiny figures painted working to repair it.

Of course Gobbs were featured heavily, wearing smaller spacesuits and working alongside the other species of BuyMort, sharp teeth exposed in innocent smiles.