Letting go of time, allowing it to pass me by without care, became a major focus of my life after Axle died. He was a reminder of what systems do to people, if given power over them. All that he did, for an entire century of my absence, was turn the crank on the machine. He kept BuyMort going, played by its rules, and allowed its atrocities to occur as a natural part of the multiverse.
My goal of tearing it down contrasted with his leadership. Status quo wasn’t anywhere near good enough for me, but I was restrained by the sheer quantity of lives dependent upon my actions.
Of course, people died every day. Some died of accidents, others old age or illness. Crime claimed a few more, even under my benevolent rule. But no longer did anyone starve. Even those in Storage always had enough to eat and lives worth living. Despair was becoming a foreign concept to my people, even as I worked to undermine the system they had lived with their entire lives.
People born into BuyMort didn’t typically bother believing that there were other possibilities. The system demanded too much of them. Too much time, too much effort, too much blood. If I tried to change it overnight, they would rebel. Hopelessly injured, people would fight to protect the system that kept them from power.
My profit-sharing initiatives, while excellent for raising prosperity and quality of life across the multiverse, sapped my own power. Morties were power, under BuyMort, and the fewer of them I had in proportion to those around me, the less power I had to enact change. In the earliest days of my rule, I kept the mortie exchange flowing in my favor. My base of power stacked up into numbers that were so large as to make no sense to the human mind.
Knowles were better about scale, but even they would struggle to fully encapsulate my fortune so others could understand it. But, for the first few decades that I ruled, I kept enough morties on hand to buy every other affiliate under Silken Sands simultaneously if needed. The brute force of my mortie reserve ensured my seat of power.
As the years passed, and morties began to spread more among my subjects, that power waned. I kept my lion’s share, using it to push the system to better my people’s lives and stabilize their various conflicts. As I did this, I instilled a sense of reverence in the people of BuyMort.
My altruism began to outweigh the warlord title I had acquired in my youth. Among the people of BuyMort I was thought of as a wise immortal. A human born to lead. Someone who not only held power but deserved it.
No one recognized the way my mind worked or knew about the crystalline colonies in my brain that led us all inexorably closer to my goals. Instead they saw me as their benefactor. I became capable of pulling my own consciousness back from the present, viewing the timeline I wanted to manifest, and pushing the levers of power to realize it. All without harming those under my protection.
Profit sharing was just the first step. It instilled a sense of ownership in the workers who kept my civilization running. Instead of punishment for failure, success was rewarded. Effort and merit began to produce profit, in the place of oppression and exploitation.
People began to genuinely care about their workers, and workers began to genuinely care about their affiliates. The mindset toward morties began to shift. Instead of being a treasure forever beyond their reach, morties became a normative tool of daily life.
My personal pursuits took a backseat to the daily operation of my affiliate. For years Terna did more work to distance us from BuyMort than I ever could. My focus was on peace, stability, and prosperity, as I had promised in my campaign.
On Terna’s World, things progressed back toward her vision more every day. She worked on pushing BuyMort off her world ship one section at a time. As our food dependency switched from Terna’s World to Storage, she was free to pursue her goal of independence from BuyMort.
More and more self-contained portions of her world ship became BuyMort-free zones, their people living No-Mort lives. Traffic to them was closely controlled, but press attention was allowed and encouraged. The story of life without BuyMort grew in relevance, until a resort opened on Nu-Earth promising BuyMort-free vacations. It marked a turning point in the culture.
The resort paid for service stoppage on a small island off the coast of China, and people came from the world over to enjoy a weekend off from their daily grind. The entire resort was built around the lack of BuyMort, treating its absence as a desired luxury. While on the grounds, even the icon in the corner of your vision was removed. Many customers noted that as their favorite part of their vacations in the reviews.
My goal began to manifest itself. People began to want freedom from the system. They began to think of BuyMort as an obnoxious necessity, a system they had to work within to sustain themselves. Worship of BuyMort as a god had fallen to almost nothing, and the last vestiges of Church cultural influence waned more with each passing year.
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In its place, Terna led our shared culture. She was another leader in the BuyMort system that had elevated to legendary status in her people’s eyes. Those on Nu-Earth had their perception of her altered as well, the rebel leader that had held off BlueCleave and found victory through non-violent regime change. Hobbs began to unite under her banner, even those from BlueCleave. The rift between the hobbs of Terna’s World and BlueCleave began to heal, as violence became rare on the world ship once more.
Each new section of her world ship that managed to transition away from BuyMort reduced its influence in the solar system. Less pods were in the air, and fewer fruition centers plagued the land. I saw to it that they were each demolished when the time came, including the more difficult facilities we found in space around our worlds.
In orbit of each major planetary body that BuyMort operated on, was at least one pod hangar satellite. These facilities were relatively small orbs that housed inactive BuyMort pods and deployed them to nearby orbital vessels as needed. Of the many BuyMort structures we regularly demolished, these carriers gave us the most trouble.
The need for pods was far more random in orbit than it was on the ground. Ships, passing through or holding position, would often have needs only BuyMort was capable of addressing conveniently. In response, dormant facilities would often become active for short periods of time before going dark again. This made scheduling their demolition more difficult than other facilities, and even caused BuyMort to rebuild them in some cases.
Each satellite was roughly the size of a football stadium and contained a few thousand pods. Attacking them had a tendency to bring swarms of energy-sucking celestial jellyfish, which were a major threat to my fleet in particular. They required energy weapons to kill, and each one of them was capable of both swarm and individual behavior patterns. Chasing them all down before they drained the reactor of a nearby civilian vessel was a chore, especially because we had to use different ships for the job.
Our sand star frigates were completely useless against the glowing creatures, with only minimal damage dealing potential at a huge resource cost. Only the radioactive ammunition tubules from the sandcasters could damage the jellyfish, and even they typically only slowed the creatures down. Feeding them too much was the only real way to destroy them quickly, and none of my relic fleet ships were focused into energy weaponry, instead relying on gravity-controlled kinetic warfare and atomic breaker technology.
To that effect, the Boing spacecraft affiliate provided ships. The sleek fighters came with three primary weapon’s systems that could eliminate the threats. Phased energy cannons were built into each ship’s spine, feeding directly from its on-board antimatter reactor. Secondary charges could be dropped, which would seek the jellyfish and then explode within range to overwhelm their digestive tracts, but those were dangerous to our own ships, and risked further BuyMort intervention. The star of the show was the ship’s specialty shields, without doubt. I didn’t mind paying for the relatively useless weapons suit, because of the shields. Each sleek fighter’s shields could be temporarily accelerated to create an explosive energy radiation effect, in essence turning the ship into a large bomb that could explode multiple times.
It was a common tactic among our pilots to overcharge the shield’s explosive burst, drawing in the swarms of glowing jellyfish, before releasing it to great effect. During operations civilians on the ground often reported seeing the bright flashes in their night sky, which combined with orbital craft reports to bring press swarming to my demolitions.
Questions were asked, publicly, and then speculated upon endlessly. Old reports of my supposed war on BuyMort began to resurface and I was forced to answer for my military’s actions. Excuses about routine orbital clean ups gave me a couple of years before the questions were able to sharpen, to better reflect what I was actually doing.
Eventually I gave them the answer they sought. I confessed to the multiverse that I intended to slowly, but surely, remove BuyMort from our multiverse altogether. I explained that the process was still several generations off from realization, and that no one would be negatively affected by it thanks to meticulous planning. When pressed, I outlined the plan in detail, making the entire endeavor public knowledge.
The response was mild. People cared, but only as a point of interest. Some few were outraged at my dishonesty during the campaign so long ago, but I explained it away as an evolving decision. Something I had come to after my return to power, as yet another way to improve people’s lives.
Debate and discussion went back and forth in the public forum, as captains of industry, military leaders, and Knowles from the Institute of History weighed in. The conversation cycled for another year, headlines occasionally pushing various new thoughts or questions.
My demolitions became a normal part of life within BuyMort, and secrecy was no longer required. We destroyed the pod hangar satellites, cleaned up the celestial jellyfish, and nobody cared enough to do anything about it. Normalization of anti-BuyMort activity progressed at a natural pace.
While I worked on the day to day business of running my affiliate, the Knowle Institute of Record worked on my standing request for more defunct gate addresses. They sifted through sales orders and receipts, timestamps and location coordinates. The work of collating data, at boring desk jobs only Knowles would value, occasionally produced something important.
Our relic hunt was real, and the goal of all that data scraping was to find relic storefronts. Eventually the trail of receipts always led to one. Two decades after my first expedition, we found our biggest hidden treasure yet.
From a time before MortMobile, my relic hunters found not just a single storefront, but an entire world’s worth of abandoned storefronts. If the receipts were to be believed, there was a BuyMort-operated city waiting to be found that predated the Church by two thousand years.
Another distant universe became worth direct investigation, and with the discovery of its gate coordinates, my next expedition was formed.