MortMobile was an emaciated humanoid, completely bald. He was ensconced in a medical throne. The seat was part king’s throne and part advanced medical bed, with intravenous lines and gold filigree in equal amounts. Tubes and wires fed into and out of MortMobile’s flesh, and he looked down on me with ancient, tired eyes. He was bigger than a human, even seated he was over twelve feet tall. A giant compared to me.

“We have to collect him,” I said.

“You go out in that and it's going to fall on you. It seems intentional, and the mass above us right now is already growing. I’m getting a feed of the data the Crown is gathering on this stuff, it looks like it could survive your dimensional gateways. If you use your armor, it’ll have to be replaced,” Terna told me. She was still plugged into her tank’s various data feeds. “I can use the flamethrower to cover you though, that seems to slow it down at least.”

I frowned. “Now that we’re here, BuyMort is here, isn’t it?” I asked her.

She nodded. “It will forget this place again once we go, but yes. We are infested, so where we go it comes with us.”

“Crown of Thorns, I have a general order for the crew,” I said into my comms. The ship was on an open band, listening to us and recording everything we said. The Knowles on board had insisted on a full recounting.

“Go ahead Sir, you’re patched in,” a hobb replied.

“Whatever this green material is, it’s dangerous. We can’t let it get back to our universe, so I want a full quarantine. Nobody touches or sells anything from this universe. It has to stay out of the BuyMort system, or whatever happened here will happen to us too,” I told my crew.

Every soul on board listened, absorbed, and respected the information I gave them. They were all working with two living legends among hobb society. Anyone chosen for a mission with us approached that mission with a sense of reverence, and with the weight of the multiverse on their shoulders.

“Yes sir,” replied my crew member. “Shipwide channel closed.”

I turned back to Terna. “I’m going out there. If I can’t get clean, don’t let me back inside.”

She nodded once and turned back to her screens. “I’ll cover you,” she promised.

I floated up and out of the tank through its top hatch, which quickly slid shut behind me. The shield wasn’t going to lower for me, so I deployed my armor and passed through its scorching area of effect. The armor’s surface heated, which protected me from the immediate dump of material from the ceiling.

Terna’s tank fired a globe of crackling fire at it, which caused the mass of green fuzz to explode, raining down around us in cinders. What landed on my armor immediately began to spread, heat damaged or not. Its blackened surface quickly reverted to green and it spread across the plates of my armor in tiny patches.

I flew inside the giant’s formerly sealed room and mentally commanded my suit to replace the armor. Each infested plate lifted outward and fell to the floor, as my suit’s tendrils began drawing fresh sections from the turbine, one after another. Within seconds, my entire suit of armor had been replaced and I didn’t have any more of the mossy mold above my head to worry about. I focused on MortMobile.

His room had a power reactor in the back corner, hooked up to his medical throne. Tubing covered the giant’s nudity. Once the hermetic seal was broken, his sanctum immediately began to fall to the mold.

“We have to move you,” I told him. “How do I disconnect you from this throne?”

“You don’t,” he immediately replied. “Just go. Your work is done. Our deal is honored. You have freed me.”

When he spoke, his lips didn’t move. The words appeared in my mind with the full weight of his emotional turmoil. He was terrified, furious, and grief-stricken all at once.

I glanced behind myself. The Aeramo dodged another mass of green moss as it plopped down from above. The tank turned after its dodge and belched white flames, immolating the mass. More of it crept inside with us, slowly growing closer on every surface in spite of the flames.

“Why?” I asked him. “Why won’t you let me help you?”

“You have,” he sighed. “You should go, while you can. Leave me to my fate . . . and go seek yours.”

“I have to know!” I yelled. “I have to know how to beat BuyMort! You did. You held it away from this place, this entire universe. Tell me how!”

The giant’s eyes watered behind his breathing apparatus and he moaned in agony. “I paid a terrible price,” his voice said, when he regained control. “I made a deal, and the machine honored it.”

The moss behind us crackled as Terna continued to fight it back. She swept the tank’s flamethrower across the threshold of our room, but all of it that she burnt regenerated quickly and kept coming. I hovered into the air to avoid it, and to be at face-level with my host.

“I was king, here,” he whispered in my mind. “When the machine came, it infected all of my people, and me. I controlled my worlds, my armadas, my every asset. The price paid for BuyMort’s suspension of service was my fleet, and my servitude. I gave it something of equivalent value to leave us be and dedicated my mind to its service. My people were spared its horrors, only to be consumed while my mind was afield. There is-” he broke off, choking back the weight of his dead empire.

“There is no one left,” he choked out. “No one.”

Another light pattering of mold landed on my suit, and I floated forward out of its range, giving the suit the order to replace itself again. This time, something landed on my scalp while the plates were gone, and it immediately began to itch and burn. My suit scalped me without hesitation, but I ignored the sensation. My Aimed Shot perk patch had given me the ability to fine tune my own pain responses. The drug it used to flood me with was no longer necessary.

Green moss crept onto the base of the throne and made contact with the giant’s naked legs. I hovered closer, watching as my suit replaced my scalp and reinstalled my hair, before clapping my armor back in place. More mold fell on me, but I waited, watching MortMobile.

He flinched when the fungoid mold touched his bare skin, but the sensation of relief that flooded from him nearly overwhelmed me, holding me in place in spite of the falling mold particles.

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“I am free,” he whispered in my mind, green crawling across his entire body.

His presence faded, receding from my mind as his body began to convulse. Then he stilled, and his mind was gone completely.

“Tyson!” Terna shouted.

I turned and flew back toward the tank. Mounds of burning moss were piling up all around it, trying to grow through the heat shield. “Go! I’m behind you!” I yelled back.

Terna hauled the Aeramo in a tight circle and began racing back to my ship. My armor was infected, but I kept it up. The suit could only replace all of its alloy a few times before requiring significant recharging, and I didn’t want to touch anything in this universe in order to charge it.

We rapidly retreated through the structure, back into the courtyard my ship was hovering over. The mold, moss, whatever it was, had grown up from the ground in a large lump and was infesting my ship. I pushed through the Aeramo’s heat shield and flew underneath it, lifting the tank into the sky above the overgrown city.

Abandoning the Brisingida cruiser, I pushed my suit and lifted Terna’s Aeramo higher. Once we had cleared the city, she dropped the shield a

“Thank you, Tyson,” she said. “Was this trip worth it?”

I glanced back at my ship, being consumed by green fuzz, and sighed.

“I think so,” I replied. “MortMobile has been released. That’s not nothing.”

“I felt his relief,” she reminded me. “We spared him terrible pain. We gave him the death he wanted.”

“I doubt that,” I answered, floating through space toward the Crown of Thorns. Ahead of me, the Aeramo tank ejected the plate of armor I had held onto while pushing it. The infested metal fell back past me, small hairs of mold reaching out for me as it went.

Once we got close enough, the Crown of Thorns took control of us both with its gravity drive. I discarded my own armor plating one final time, allowing the advanced ship to push it away from us as we approached.

The ship’s gravity drive was our best defense against the fungoid mold. It isolated each particle of the virulent plant life and pulled it away from us. Even the burnt stuff kept healing, kept growing. Once the ship’s scans declared us clean of infection, it drew us inside and docked the Aeramo in its bay.

Terna and I floated up to the bridge platform once more and I ordered the ship home. Before we engaged the BuyMort gate, I had the Crown of Thorns lift it gently out of the planet’s rings. It was also covered in fine specs of green, so we had to wait for the Crown of Thorns to clean it before we jumped out. The process took several hours, and gave me plenty of time to think.

It felt like a defeat. We hadn’t learned where to go next, and the entire universe was quite literally a dead end. My long range thorns reported the fungoid mold on every planetary body they could scan, as we had suspected. Whatever it was, it had likely killed an entire universe.

I sulked, sullenly staring at the ship’s various screens as we waited for its work on the gate ring to be complete. It went slowly to avoid causing any damage to the ring itself, but the Crown of Thorns declared the ring safe for travel roughly twelve hours after we had arrived in-universe.

With a nod, I ordered our jump home and braced for the lengthy travel time. Being outside of the shared flow of time and space, I felt MortMobile’s final emotions again.

He had made a deal with BuyMort that allowed total service denial within his home universe. At that point, the system essentially cut itself off. His mind was trapped within the BuyMort machine’s various systems and services, always focused on universes outside of his own. The deal he made ensured he wasn’t aware of his own people’s doom, until I lightened his load enough.

Then his mind had snapped back home to emptiness, and mass death. Whatever his universe had been before BuyMort, his sacrifice hadn’t saved it.

I felt an odd, unusual rush of fear at the thought. Even a creature as powerful as he had been helpless to save his people, his world. What hope did I have?

I was nothing but a drugged out loser from a shitty campground. He had real power, and even he was helpless to save his people from BuyMort.

We arrived back in normal space with a jolt, and Jupiter hung huge on the various screens. Terna looked up at me, then scowled when she saw my expression.

“He made a deal with the BuyMort,” she said. “That is why he could not save his people from it. You are not the same.”

I cracked a small smile at the hobb woman. “I might be. He had so much power. His abilities.” I shook my head and sighed. “His abilities were real power, and he couldn’t save himself from BuyMort. Maybe it's inevitable. Part of who we are.”

She shook her head violently. “No. Never. It is only a machine.”

I scowled but kept her gaze. “We form our tools, and thereafter they form us,” I answered.

“My people were not formed by the BuyMort,” she said. “They were destroyed by it, but never formed. I used to believe the BuyMort was a living thing. A manifestation of evil that possessed people and stole their souls. I know how you feel now, I spent much of my youth dealing with the same thing.”

“How can we fight it?” I asked quietly.

“We are fighting it, Tyson,” she replied. “It is a system, we must fight it systemically. The changes in our affiliates will grow and spread. We simply need to wait.”

“Time,” I said with a sigh. “Is something we have in abundance.” I raised my voice and faced my crew. “Take us home,” I said, and the crew obeyed. Those who had heard Terna and I speaking kept their silence. Her and I together inspired a new kind of loyalty in the hobbs who served us. Even our words together were treated with reverence.

Once back home on Nu-Earth, I started to let time slip away from me again. Terna returned to her own world, and our plan moved forward as rapidly as it could. Within a decade of our first expedition, profit sharing had become a normative affiliate practice. Homelessness was all but unheard of, and responsible dream purchase habits kept crime low.

Mel, my artist friend from the campground, would occasionally dip in and provide commentary on my work, but I never saw her again. She remained a hidden entity, living a life in secret away from her identity as the multiverse’s most famous artist. Instead of direct commentary, she painted murals in strategic locations.

Some were happier with me than others, but overall I kept her content. She was focused on sapient rights, and I rarely made any mistakes in that category. Storage reform in particular was something I was focused on, in that arena.

My prefabricated tunnel-cities were working, and people in Storage were safer. Gobb raids were down to almost nothing, and the sapient peoples of Storage were living in something approaching harmony.

I still regularly visited Nozzle and his tribe, using their calm wisdom to guide my hand when it came to gobb relations. Within a few years, trade had been established between several of the local tribes and my first set of tunnel cities. Trust began to grow anew.

Gobbs, and occasionally hobbs, tended to prefer independence, while the rest of the sapient races on Storage grouped together. The tunnel cities, funded by local taxation, ensured security and productivity. After my first decade back in power, Storage was producing nearly half of the multiverse's food. The thought of Storage turning anyone a profit had been discarded centuries before my time, but I made it work. There was more than enough land and workers already there, all I had to do was make the place livable again.

BuyMort experienced population growth, system-wide. Our worker-friendly policies were ensuring that people felt comfortable and secure enough to have families, while profit-sharing initiatives spread wealth and growth throughout the known universes.

Quality of life polls were on the rise, and overall people were happier. Most of the system’s various wars were easy enough to solve once I took over. Some of them took time, but peace ruled in the place of conflict.

Some years after my first expedition, Axle passed away quietly in his retirement villa. His presence hadn’t been felt since my return, so the people of Nu-Earth barely took the time to notice his death. He had died surrounded by aids and staff, instead of family and friends. I buried him, with the Knowle Institute of Record’s help. His final resting place was in an above-ground burial chamber on his Library’s extended grounds.

Where we had once faced down swarms of wild yarsp and idiot militias, flowers now grew in the desert. Axle’s mausoleum stood dark against the backdrop of vibrant desert wildflowers, and I said goodbye to yet another friend.

It was with shock, standing outside his last place of rest, that a sleek, black pod floated lazily through the air and beamed in a small package that plopped on the lawn at my feet. It turned and left, happily whistling its transaction-complete sound.

The box had a paper sticker attached to the outside. It was emblazoned with a brand that read “BuyMort Living Will Services. Axle.”

Memories rolled through my mind, and my hands shook as I flipped open my knife and slit around the box, before opening its cover.

Inside, on a small square of silk, was Mr. Sada’s bull’s head ring.