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Chapter 61

I took Mel’s approval to heart. Her mural made up for the assassins hounding my heels, and helped revitalize me for the fight that was yet to come. Wrangling a system out of its addiction to morties was all consuming. I remembered what the Church had been like, what they had done to us all in the name of profit for a few.

The insanity of the Church’s final manager had been apparent in the extreme lengths she went to in her attempts at self-defense. The bunker-city in the depths of a gas giant cost hundreds of trillions of morties per minute to operate, and she had gone into hiding there fully three months prior to my arrival. The sheer fortune wasted trying to protect one greed-soaked life could have funded my Storage efforts for years.

My MortBlock extended to the two remaining satellite platforms there, once I had weeded through the associates to get them back. Both were in severe disrepair and scrabbling together funds for them while not stepping on any toes became an ordeal. I ended up pleading my case directly to the public in order to get the opposing affiliate heads to submit.

There was no profit in it, they correctly informed the multiverse. It took a dramatic decline into Storage happening in real time for the system to notice and care. At my request, my machine ground an opposing affiliate head into dust with various deniable deals, and the man lost everything within the span of a month. I coordinated the entire experience, using a nameless ideologue on the wrong side of the argument to get my point across.

To the public, decline into Storage was just a thing that happened. Sometimes these big risk affiliates went under in a splashy way and everything got dumped on one person. An affiliate fall guy who could never navigate life without wealth in the way most fish can’t breathe on land. Once his fortune was gobbled up, he made a series of mistakes that led him inexorably into Storage’s open arms.

Once there, I caught him, using my BlueCleave forces and a carefully deposited arrival platform address. He was funneled into one of my prefabricated cities and cared for far beyond the average Storage dweller. Eventually, I provided him with enough Morties to come back home to Nu-Earth, through a work program in his tunnel-city. But not before the media had documented the entire thing in livid, gory detail.

It served my purpose two-fold. First, affiliate heads stopped trying to keep everything the way it had been before I regained power. Most of them got the message and adopted a subservient pattern of avoiding my ire.

Second, the public loved a good story. The media storm that rippled through the popular shows helped cement my public approval, as I was seen helping the man, but not destroying him in the first place. Early data buys had my approval rating in the high fifty percentile in general, and higher when specific policies were invoked in the polls.

While my affiliate rolled forward, I took my opportunities to do good where I could. I used my own personal fund of morties to purchase and equip a cargo variant of the Crown of Thorns and gifted it to Save the Cubes. Molly and Shoshanna held a fundraiser celebrating the event, and the media lapped up the public interest story. Everybody in BuyMort started to cheer Save the Cubes again. It gave them something wholesome to root for, as another mission was launched, and another discarded cube given momentary celebrity status by association.

The people rooted for Shoshanna, and her new crew. They cheered the cube’s retrieval and placement, and celebrated the win as if they had helped it along by watching.

Good news became possible again, as the system of privilege and plenty started to change. People started to care about things beyond their own self interest once more. Material conditions improved, in some cases dramatically.

Over the course of my first year back in power, Terna’s World normalized relations with Nu-Earth, and BlueCleave was well on its way to full reputational salvage. The rebellion on her world melted into a functioning agrarian society that she ran from the top down, with full autonomy. It was one of the few worlds I stayed out of, and indeed looked to for example.

Profit sharing began on the farms and spread to the manufactories, as public services were expanded and improved upon. I willingly gave up the leverage her food production gave me, and instead focused on feeding everyone who needed to be fed. The purity of Terna’s vision was apparent, in the drop of violence and the increase in productivity that followed her return to power.

Food even flowed into Storage, with gobb tribes and my tunnel cities both able to purchase pallets specially priced for the megastructure. Many considered it waste, but there was more than enough for the participating planets within BuyMort. The extra had to go somewhere.

Even waste fed Storage, as people sold their leftovers and affiliates offloaded their out of date foodstuffs directly to BuyMort. It was all used in the gruel BuyMort offered once per day for free, but when quality in the outside system rose, so did the offerings at the bottom. Soon opposing commentators were arguing against my Storage policies simply because they felt weird.

‘If Storage wasn’t so bad, why would people work to stay out of it?’ they argued, weaker and more nonsensical with each attempt.

The fact that BuyMort faced as a population was simple; life in Storage didn’t have to be bad. Life anywhere didn’t have to be bad, if only those in charge focused on the right things.

Months slid by as I slowly pushed on BuyMort culture, using my celebrity and wealth in equal measure to bring about substantive improvements. The only few who suffered under my rule were the obstinate elite. Even the majority of them got over the threats and enjoyed the lion’s share I left them, after restructuring their affiliates.

I pandered to their sense of self-preservation, and used my access to their communications and finances to coerce and convince them that my way was what was best for us all. At the end of my first year back in power, I had no more enemies. No substantive resistance, no major groups of opposition, nothing but BuyMort itself left to overcome.

My mission in that regard was slow-moving, by necessity. I had started the cultural shift away from it, but it would be years before that took root and actually changed the people’s minds. Some of them would have to die off, but the next generation would be more likely to embrace a BuyMort-free world, especially with the examples we had planned.

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Terna and I coordinated her return to minimal BuyMort presence, though in those early days progress was slow. Mostly it involved clean up, and restructuring. Jobs had to be created, filled, and fine-tuned to respond to her people’s needs. We also operated a fund for the planetoid ship to draw from, a reparation for BlueCleave’s various authoritarian atrocities. It covered most of their larger expenses, and I made sure it always refilled.

Whitewashing my military’s reputation was a slow process, but it was working. Even in the early months, public sentiment started to turn around on the various planets they were deployed to. There was a sense of change, of calm and order being restored to the military machine. Their warlord was back from the dead, and the hobbs of BlueCleave fell back into their older, nobler warrior culture readily, if not eagerly. Those who didn’t were weeded out of the associate, and occasionally given public trials if their crimes were bad enough.

The Knowle Institute of History regularly collaborated, being unofficially in charge of justice, and societal order. The Knowles that operated the affiliate were focused on record keeping, and with standards and practices in place of any real system of law, they were the best suited to operate our system of crime and punishment.

Beneath the placid surface of my affiliate a thousand conflicts ran their course, but proper application of power, usually through morties, continued the trend of all things going my way. I was always careful to implement my changes slowly, if they were not profitable. It helped ensure the fully functional, mortie-making aspects of the affiliate helped pay for the associates that couldn’t easily pay for themselves.

Through the haze of daily affiliate management, my mind began to fixate on BuyMort again. The logistical challenge of tackling the multiversal store was enormous, and I thought about it often.

Fruition centers were still commonplace, like sores civilization had to be built around. Each squatted near or in large population centers, with loads of anti-pedestrian security built up around it. Usually the oversized warehouses had barbed wire fencing set up around it if nothing else. Anyone who ventured into one normally met with a grisly end, as it was dangerously easy to interfere with BuyMort’s normal business and land yourself a bug to contend with.

Tentacle roaches were common. Humans, hobbs, and delves all summoned those if unarmed, so it was a predictable BuyMort bug to contend with. Many scavengers made the attempt armed, of course, so the type and size of bug summoned was often an unpredictable threat.

Nearby city structures tended toward slums because of this. Wealthy affiliate members didn’t typically want to live close to a fruition center, but they got closer the more security was provided on site. Prescott’s fruition center was a good example of this, an entire BlueCleave fortress had built up around it. The disciplined hobbs were smart and well paid enough to avoid any attempts at a raid, and if a BuyMort bug was summoned somehow, they were the perfect people to handle it.

In the Shanghai Crater city, however, the defenses were minimal. Poorly maintained fencing and a large real estate area dedicated to low-income housing meant bugs happened often and were a major problem. Until the associate that operated the city could get proper infrastructure in place, I ordered a special forces unit into the area with the mission of BuyMort bug response.

The ten-hobb squad brought their own hovercraft, and a variety of weapon platforms, so the dense population of the crater’s primary slum welcomed them with open arms. They did the dirty work of cleaning up after an accidental summon, and quickly gained their fifteen minutes of fame. News media loved the stories they produced, and the public ate up their various heroics.

By the end of their mission, a movie was in production. Walls, security, and public services were funded, and quickly the need for such a team faded away. Similar stories played out in planets across the multiverse, one of many stabilization efforts Silken Sands helmed. I only got involved in one, when an industrial accident had summoned a kaiju-worm to the last remaining Nah’gh planet, Nahgah Bronze. The massive, winged menace I used to summon when I blundered through BuyMort’s physical hardware was no longer a real threat to me but could wipe a city from the face of a planet without too much effort.

The city used one of their free portals to bring me onto the scene, and I tore through the worm’s long brain stem to kill it. Messy, but quick. The corpse was used to help pay for my portal home, and I was barely on the planet for ten minutes, but I developed a celebrity following there overnight. The Nah’gh who lived there quickly became one of my plushies’ largest purchasers.

On Nu-Earth, the popular bakery affiliate Another Donut Hole offered Windowpuncher themed frosted donuts. There were two, each specially decorated to look like me or the gossamer-winged worm. The Long John-style worm donut came with a mixed berry jam filling and was notoriously messy to eat. People all over both planets posted videos of themselves eating the donut to social media in celebration of our shared victory over an aggressive flying worm. I tried one, it was pretty good for a mass produced bakery treat.

The incident reminded me that even just securing the various pieces of BuyMort infrastructure demanded my attention. I could only imagine what was going to happen once I started intentionally destroying them.

Pods were another issue. Our buildings and vehicles had to have access for the pods, or they would just damage themselves trying to get inside and summon a bug on you by no fault of your own. BuyMort was intensely stupid, and pod behavior was one of the biggest examples. The pod could match your relative speed in space, even while in most forms of FTL.

But it couldn’t turn back if you didn’t leave a door open for it.

Pods were, by far, the most common cause of BuyMort bug attacks. It was easy to damage them, and everyone had to accommodate for their behavior during deliveries and sales. They were a critical part of the BuyMort machine and had seemingly zero programming toward customer experience. You could pay more for better behaved pods, but even then they only had that one singular goal. To drop off or pick up its order.

The Church, which pushed worship of BuyMort as a living deity, had struggled to explain the pods. They were angelic devices, in most Church worship groups. In others they were considered the direct touch of the entity itself. Both descriptions were intentionally vague and seemed only designed to obfuscate the pods' strange behavior.

But it was easy to explain. The pods acted like that because they had incredibly simple programming, designed to maximize profitable interactions for BuyMort. They didn’t seem to care about the customers because BuyMort wasn’t alive. It was an idiot machine, operating on programming that led to anti-human behavior.

BuyMort didn’t care. It couldn’t, it didn’t have the proper set of instructions, and was incapable of complex thoughts or emotions. BuyMort wasn’t alive and had never been alive. It was just a system.

I hired teams of Knowle archeologists, and every one of them confirmed my own assessment. BuyMort was just code, algorithms, and numbers. In my earliest days, when I had regularly accessed the relic storefront left in place by Specter, his recording had told me much about the nature of BuyMort. He had also equipped me to fight it.

My affiliate was simply another tool for that task, albeit one that took a long time to hone. Eventually, I meant it to be the very tool I used to destroy BuyMort itself.

In preparation for that goal, Terna set me up with an abandoned fruition center on the surface of her worldship, after a year of work shutting down demand for its services. I took my military and headed gleefully toward Terna’s World, with the intention of learning how to safely demolish BuyMort property.