Chapter 62

I brought the fleet with me, but we kept the larger ships tucked safely at the back side of the world ship, where fewer people would see them. The Crown of Thorns gravity drive was capable of reaching across Terna’s World from its position behind the engines, so it wasn’t necessary to frighten the people on the ground by displaying it while we worked.

We were adapting the normative way that people held prisoners in a system that allowed for portals on demand. Use something simple to cause damage to the pod, then stand ready with powerful weapons to clean up the bug that followed.

The issue was how specifically to destroy the fruition center. Terna had her people pulled back from the area, so we weren’t terribly concerned about civilian casualties. She also informed me that, by her calculations, the fruition center wouldn’t be rebuilt by BuyMort if destroyed. There wasn’t enough traffic.

Visual scouting confirmed that only a few pods came or went from the massive structure, so I ordered my assault fleet into position. For safety’s sake, we flew three starfish suit capable hobbs in Brisingida demolitions cruisers, flying support for the Crown of Thorns itself. The oversized star hid in the shadow of Terna’s World’s engines, manipulating a crude explosive jelly into place with its gravity drive.

BuyMort was particular, and with full access to the Knowle Institutes of History and Record, I knew exactly how particular. If you attacked it, BuyMort was capable of calculating some level of intent. To get around this, you had to do things in a particular manner.

We used the ship’s gravity drive to install a spread of explosive jelly, then had a man on the ground set timers into the gel manually. This ‘man’ was a hobb explosives specialist, who was trained to make their way into the compound and leave before the bombs went off.

His advertisement had been impressive—unlike the more serious ads, his was a reflection of his personality. It had started with the simple scene of an old home, the sort of place that had already seen its good years go by and was ripe for retirement. Tranquil bird song played, the scent of fresh-cut green grass rolled over me, and I was about ready to chalk the whole thing up to a strange advertising error when suddenly the whole home blew to pieces, a veritable whumph-kabloomie of lovingly-constructed instant demolition.

Heavy metal began to shriek, replacing the birds while the smell of soot and fire overwhelmed the grass. Above me, the sky turned crimson-red and the skies opened up to rain blood over top of us all.

"Meet Boomer, your friendly neighborhood demolitions expert!" a cheerful voiceover declared, as Boomer cart-wheeled into view, winking at the camera before tossing a lit stick of dynamite over his right shoulder. "Whether it's home demolitions, fortess demolitions, trash demolitions, or just an awesome party kicked up to the next level, Boomer's got the style and jazz to take you and your explosive operations above and beyond.

The whole thing had been insane, but the right kind of insane. The sort of insane that told you he loved his job and was very much a king in his field. Considering what we were planning, I knew he was the man for the job. Especially after seeing him lay explosives on a concrete dam, and watching the digital timer flip to a smiley face before exploding hard, chunks flying everywhere.

This process was completed one bomb at a time, but we could get creative with them thanks to the semi-solid form of the explosive itself. The first section was installed by floating a glob of the explosive jelly into place, and then the Crown of Thorns released all gravitic control. This would stop BuyMort from associating the ship with the attack, since all it had done was lay an inert object on a BuyMort surface. No damage was done, no hindrance was caused, so no response was warranted.

The hobb we sent in wore plain clothing and carried no weaponry aside from the detonators. He walked, almost casually, through the fences and barricades up to the bomb that was smeared across one corner of the fruition center and pressed a timed detonator into it. Once this was accomplished, he returned the way he had come, and stopped to wait in the open no-man's-zone that was between the fences and the surrounding agriculture domes.

The bomb exploded, and a BuyMort bug was summoned. The entire thing cost about a hundred and fifty morties per detonation, which pleased the few accountants we had attached to the project.

We were using crude blasting jelly, an explosive compound made from decaying fertilizer and readily available chemicals. The timer sent a small electrical jolt through the jellied mass and ignited it. Each explosion was relatively weak, and only took down a portion of the wall at a time.

But it also only summoned a pair of electrically charged rhinoceros beetles. Each was the size of a large truck and could release powerful bolts of electricity into their targets, or any grounding material nearby. My hobb was in immediate danger, but that’s what the demolitions cruisers were for. Two ships swept in and used their long, grappling arms to capture and destroy the beetles before they could do any real harm.

The hobb on the ground had an intense job. They were, in essence, bait. Somebody had to be directly responsible for the damage to BuyMort, and that meant the bugs got summoned on top of them no matter where they were. But they also couldn’t be armored or armed, because that would influence BuyMort’s bug criteria and increase the risk to them instead of making their job safer.

On our first day, only a single charge went off early. The hobb was still trying to traverse the many holes we had cut in the layers of fencing around his target. Still, the beetles summoned nearly killed him by zapping the fence he was touching.

We paused the project after that incident, and the hobb was taken for medical care before being declared in good health. The charge had dissipated enough by the time it reached his section of fencing that no serious damage had been caused, and he was merely stunned for a brief period of time.

Still, we considered increasing the sophistication of the timers on our bombs. Ultimately that was shot down, and the risk to the hobb on the ground was deemed necessary. If our bombs increased in complexity, BuyMort would respond with a more dangerous bug and the risk to him would increase during our ship’s response phase.

The Brisingida’s pilots had to have good reflexes and careful control of their ships in order to do their part of the job. They had to capture the angry beetle, lift it away from our vulnerable hobb on the ground, and kill it as efficiently as they could. I wanted the beetles dead, but not damaged any more than necessary. Selling them back to BuyMort not only helped us recover our costs, it funneled more food into Storage’s gruel system.

This type of hunting quickly became a game for the competitive pilots, who worked to kill each beetle as fast as they could while causing as little physical damage to it as possible. There was no damage to the ships, thanks to the Brisingida’s adaptive energy-leeching, and the beetles were helpless once lifted in the air. Eventually my pilots discovered the creature’s nerve center and would use a single atomic breaker burst from one arm to destroy the cluster of nerves. Death was instantaneous, and the entire process became cleaner and more efficient.

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Bug corpses typically sold for more than the explosives we used to summon them, and by the end of our first week on Terna’s World, we had completely destroyed our first fruition center. The project had one minor injury, zero collateral damage, and had a very low mortie cost. Terna was happy with the new lot, which she started construction on once it was clear BuyMort wasn’t coming back.

The handful of pods using the fruition center floated away like aimless fruit flies, before being reassigned and zipping off to their new homes. Terna’s World still had dozens of fruition centers on it, but our first mission was a success.

Once we reduced traffic, BuyMort would abandon its destroyed property and stop trying to rebuild. Our demolitions, if done carefully, would result in no damage or lives lost, and we could even balance our expenses, because BuyMort would pay us for each bug it impotently tried to kill us with.

After our first bomb had knocked a hole in the corner, I had inspected the structure to satisfy my own curiosity. The giant vat Tower used to sit in was replaced by a simple machine that made tape from plant matter.

His service had been easily replaced, which told me BuyMort had only used him because he was cheaper than the next easiest alternative. This suggested that he may not have entered his service willingly, and he certainly didn’t get paid enough for what BuyMort had put him through.

Going to see Tower rose a few notches on my to-do list, but I kept putting it off. I felt uneasy anytime I thought about the creature, as a certainty settled over my mind that he would be changed too, and not for the better.

As much as I didn’t want it to, the encounter felt likely to end in violence.

So I focused on other tasks, and my own desire to advance anti-BuyMort logistics drove me. The win on Terna’s World had me ready and eager to do more. I knew BuyMort was a vast physical system and my goal to dismantle it would take many years. In addition to being in all our heads, it had a physical presence everywhere its customers were.

I could pull that back to a degree, depending on affiliate composition, but the vast majority of BuyMort’s infrastructure was still outside my ability to safely target. If I destroyed it, BuyMort would just build it back again.

Terna led the way on that front, in accordance with our plan. She rolled out initiative after initiative on her world ship and produced entire communities that had stopped using BuyMort completely. Her world ship was starting to return to what it had been when we met.

This, of course, got the attention of the rest of the BuyMort system. The public started occasionally discussing what life without BuyMort might be like. A great deal of that conversation was push-back on the very concept, but it felt like progress was being made nonetheless. Back when the Church had people worshipping BuyMort as a benevolent deity to further their own system of economic fiefdoms, the very conversation about life without it would have been deemed blasphemous and could have resulted in violence.

Now, only a year after my return, people were curious, and free enough to talk about the possibilities.

I kept my demolition efforts a secret from the public with industry-standard non disclosure agreements and pay that went along with them. There was no reason to get everyone up in arms about what I was or wasn’t doing behind the scenes while they pondered the various failures of our shared system.

Mostly they cared about my campaign promises in that first year.

My dream crime initiative was working. In the course of a year we had reduced occurrences of dream crime home invasions by seventy percent and dealt with some of the bigger cartels. A series of ads describing how to protect one’s assets overnight accompanied a series of funds that took morties in for the night and handed them back in the morning, with only a tiny surcharge for the service.

Consumer trust was critical for that service, so Silken Sands ran it directly. People enjoyed the big name, and the surety of their deposits. My direct involvement ensured that no shady business was run, and everyone had easy access to their morties on demand. Nobody that used my mortie storage service lost their deposit, or even had to wait to get it back. Our guarantee was absolute.

This coupled with a story-purchasing program that we used to keep down the inflammatory media driving dream crime. For-profit media companies abused us, at first. They concocted stories to sell us, and focused their coverage heavily on dream crime to maximize the profits they could make from it.

I happily ate the costs. It didn’t matter; all I needed them to do was be quiet. To stop spreading dream crime stories that spread dream crime itself. While I was paying to let me gag them, my other tactics dramatically lowered the occurrences themselves. We hunted down the pirates running dream crime operations and pushed steps that would prevent unwanted dream sales from the public at the same time.

Eventually, about six months into the project, I stopped paying for the news stories and let them run. By then the culture that had created the crime was changed, and isolated incidents aside, my society no longer had to deal with the inconvenience. Many people even avoided news outlets that ran dream crime stories, which quickly changed the media affiliates’ behavior.

The odd occasional dream storm still happened, of course, but they were quickly dealt with. BlueCleave, reverting from an authoritarian military faction, happily dealt with any dream storms that threatened damage or death. It was considered a public service and was something I insisted we no longer charged communities for.

An increase in public approval was all I needed for it to be worthwhile.

Dream storm wreckage or waste was also ours to sell, which mostly covered costs. I was an ideologue, but not an idiot. We still needed funding for our many efforts, and I had to be careful to avoid waste wherever possible in order to fund my various non-profit endeavors.

A great deal of this funding stemmed from Nu-Earth’s many industries, all of which fell under my umbrella. Importing ore from Midnight and other planets, the Boing affiliate operating on the continent of Australia crafted thousands of spacecraft. Most of the continent had become dedicated to this task and brought in a tremendous amount of morties. Of particular profit was our gravity drive line of craft, which were a direct descendant of Specter’s ships.

Our engineers had figured out the mysteries of gravity drive tech while I was dead, but each drive required exotic matter at its core, which made them incredibly expensive. The Crown of Thorns and its accompanying battleships were still the most martially capable ships in BuyMort, but now we sold smaller versions, with more limited functions.

The cargo ship I had given to Save the Cubes was a good example. It wasn’t weaponized, but the gravity drive itself was an intensely powerful defensive weapon. If an attacking ship was within range, the gravity drive could simply take control of it directly, or tear pieces off from it as desired. It was also capable of catching or avoiding most incoming weapons fire, by shifting its armored hull plates and allowing the projectile or energy burst to pass through.

Most of the Top Ten had contracts for ships with Nu-Earth. We had started off selling raw spider silk for novelty goods and had ended up as the main industrial shipyard in the multiverse. Morties flowed to us for each big ticket sale, but I also saw one of the critical points of conflict with my overarching plan. With everyone reliant on Nu-Earth for spacecraft, it would be difficult to detach BuyMort from the planet, once traffic was reduced enough.

A big part of that traffic, when looking at sheer mass transported via pod, was the product of our shipyards.

I was going to have to figure out how to sabotage my own businesses without hurting any of the people who worked for them. My plan there stretched into the long-term and was two-part. First, I slowly seeded new shipyards on other planets, seemingly in an expansion of the Boing affiliate. Then I set limits on service contracts and purchase orders.

The limits were minimal at first and were presented as a cost-saving exercise to hide their true purpose. Once the limits had been normalized, I could use them to throttle back on each ship yard, and on the industry as a whole. To slowly force each shipyard’s production level’s down. Of course, the process would take decades if not a century or more.

That was for only one of a thousand different industries.

Each associate had to be inspected for cross-planetary involvement. Each affiliate had to be established so that it could eventually retract and serve its universe and its universe only. If I was ever going to actually kill BuyMort without causing untold death on a mass scale, I had to prepare its people for a life without the multiverse at their fingertips. Every planet would have to be able to stand on its own.

The logistics work was a nightmare, but it had to be done to accomplish my long-term goal. This was the fight against BuyMort, for the time being. Paperwork, and finance manipulation.