The next few days passed in a blur of exploration, logistics, and the slow unraveling of BuyMort’s abandoned domain.
We scouted planet after planet in nearby solar systems, each one telling the same story. It was a universe emptied of its people. Vast cities still stood, but they were lifeless in the same way as the BuyMort Core had been, their planets full of signs of the apocalypse that had ended their civilizations.
On one planet, announcing itself as Hilfer EconoHills, we landed in what must have once been a corporate utopia. Entire city blocks were designed as open-air shopping complexes, their walkways lined with holographic storefronts still cycling through their final, unanswered advertisements. Whole rows of fruition warehouses stood, filled with BuyMort delivery drones that sat motionless, row after row, waiting to be activated and sent to the nearest customer.
I walked through a massive park, trees and lawn still trimmed and pruned by a small but diligent band of robots. Even here, in this place of rest, holo-ads popped up from every nook and cranny, digging for a sale.
“Bored in the park? Need something to walk? Sign up for our pet rental program TODAY!”
A flickering holo-projection showed a smiling family, eagerly tearing open a package and releasing the primitive clay clone terrier within. Their transaction data scrolled beneath them in neat, numerical precision, showing the morties deducted from their account.
At the center of the plaza, a metal kiosk whirred and flashed, bright and gaudy rainbow lighting pulsing around it. BuyMort Self-Loan Kiosk, floating letters declared. I moved forward, stepping around one of the strangely long-lasting alien skeletons, curious as to what this old outdated BuyMort program could even do anymore.
“Hello, Valued Consumer!” it chirped. “Would you like to take out an emergency loan in the event of financial hardship? Simply review our agreement and get an influx of morties today!”
I scanned the many keys, using them to manually type commands and check the kiosk’s backend logs. The last attempted transaction had been over a hundred centuries ago. The request had been denied.
My eyes flashed to the corpse lying nearby, the implications clear. Whoever this had been, they'd been out of morties, probably in a world dying around them. Without them, they had been unable to eat, or receive medical aid, and simply perished.
Our next stop was Vendel Prime, a massive planet-wide storage facility whose welcoming video claimed to offer eternal virtual life. Within the mega-structure were housed billions of habitation pods, still powered but long since abandoned. Apparently, the beings here could lie down in a pod, plug into the system, and live out the rest of their days in a utopic virtual world, or worlds, using technology similar to the later ad-space. A few of the pods opened automatically as we walked through the warehouse, their neural-interface chairs still holding the mummies of their long-dead users. Systems attached to the pods allowed me to see their worlds, to see their avatars standing stock-still in the middle of their virtual homes and yards.
Manipulating the options, I was able to see their mortie counts, and their last purchases. What I saw was still displaying their last-purchased entertainment packages, paused mid-stream.
I rolled through one user's, then another, in mounting horror. The users had run down on morties, then tried to sell their cornucopia of virtual items for more. However, each of the sales attempted were marked as (NO BUYERS) and between them was a slowly depleting mortie account that was growing increasingly thin.
A certain desperation could be felt. Food/nutrient purchases dropped in quality, extending the ability of the users to stretch their mortie purchases until, finally, they had nothing left.
Two of them tried to purchase an exit, but didn't have the morties to do so in a pre-Storage BuyMort. All three had tried and failed to take loans, being denied due to their credit levels and existing debt.
And all of them ended the same way:
* [Morties Remaining: 0]
* [User Activity] – Avatar inactive.
They'd been trapped in what amounted to a fully-immersive online game, knowingly starving to death as their game world continued on around them.
I spent a long time looking over the pods afterwards. Graves, all of them. Technology that would certainly benefit the post-BuyMort society that I wanted to thrive in the aftermath.
BuyMort would take them, use them, and sell them.
Us? We left the pods behind.
Everywhere we went, we saw the same pattern; commerce without consumers, infrastructure without purpose, planets rendered inert by chemicals, pollutants, extreme cold or heat. BuyMort’s home universe wasn’t just dead—it had committed suicide, monetizing every aspect of life and disregarding what that meant. Whatever their society had once been, they'd changed it into a simple machine, transactions within transactions without any regard to the consequences.
I catalogued it all, sending projections of the investigations and travels to the entire BuyMort viewing multiverse. The horror was so universal that, when I finally announced the looming shutdown of the entire system, the response was both immediate and favorable.
Still, I set the shutdown timeline for six months, giving people time to adjust, relocate, and decide which universe they wanted to stay in. Logistics would be a nightmare, but people would figure it out. They would have a choice in how to progress their civilizations, and no longer be stuck to the whims of a long-extinct society’s mindless algorithms and the horrors they pushed sapients to commit.
BuyMort was finished.
And now, the only thing left was what came after.
Of course, a handful of folks still wanted to keep things as they had been, but their voices were drowned out by the flood of those who wanted it gone. Many of them had stopped using it already and were experiencing some of the blessed peace that came with no longer being a customer. Instead, they acquired their needs and wants from each other, through equitable barter or rudimentary currency exchange. Gold was making a come-back, as in each universe the valuable metal was still needed for various practical applications.
The universes under my control began cutting final ties to one another and pulling back from their various BuyMort gates. I started the process of handing Silken Sands off to Terna, who would be staying in Sol system with my home planet. A final expedition formed around me, zealots and fanatics signing on to give their lives to my final adventure. We were going to live in the ruins of BuyMort’s original society and study every inch of it that we could find. There were far more volunteers than required positions.
Through it all I kept the image of that interface station in my mind, the simple command keyed in to shut down all of BuyMort’s processes. It remained a fixed point in my mind, an inescapable future and sense of purpose that drew me ever closer to those final keystrokes, to the day I could finally kill my last enemy.
But first, I had to deal with Tower.
He was the final item on my clean up list, the last remaining bit of the old, violent world I had constructed before my untimely betrayal and death. I couldn’t just leave him as he was.
So I took my fleet to Nergal, and slowly descended from space onto the red-green planet below. I’d ordered comprehensive scans of the surface, and we had only one location on the entire planet that held any of Tower’s biosignature. Nergal’s version of Olympus Mons, named simply ‘The Shield.’
It featured a fortress-city, built into the dormant volcano’s crater, and all across its peaks, as a testament to the civilization that could build it. The entire fortress was a spectacle, with huge titanium alloy walls built up around the crater’s rim, and glittering spires infesting the crater itself. The Crown of Thorns also scanned a massive amount of living matter with Tower’s signature in the city.
I couldn’t see any Tower golems as I descended from orbit, leaving my thorny starfish ship hovering far above. In fact, there was nothing visible in the streets of the old fortress town. No people, no vehicles, no garbage, no wandering animals. The entire city of Shield was a ghost town, seemingly never occupied but for remnant Martian fines, a type of virulent microscopic dust.
Satellite images had shown a long progression of Tower golems making their way into the fortress decades ago. He had never left but was nowhere to be seen, even with our scans confirming his biosignature.
“Tower!” I shouted as I came lower, where there was air to carry my voice. Nergal’s atmosphere was thin, and shallow, from the electromagnetic rails that spread across its equator to hold the air particles.
I activated my booming helmet function and shouted the name again. “TOWER!”
As I set down in the city, my voice roared through the crater, bouncing from wall to wall and carrying through the empty streets. There was no response.
“I know you’re here Tower!” I yelled. “Stop hiding from me! You’ve no reason to be afraid!”
This time the ground beneath my feet began to rumble. Buildings in the crater began to crumble as the Mars-quake increased in severity. I raised an eyebrow and lifted off again, hovering a few hundred feet above the fortress town. Tower’s head rose massive from the crater, great bouts of steam roiling from his pink flesh. Bits of the fort were lodged in his skin, as though he had formed just beneath the structures.
Armored walls adorned his arms as those too rose, ripping the entire lip of the volcano’s crater free as Tower rose from its depths. Buildings crumbled and fell past his eyes, which fixed upon me as soon as they were free. He continued to stretch upward as he stood. Tower’s body smoked with heat, trailing white and black clouds everywhere he moved.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
He leaned his head back and roared, as a thick cloud of steam boiled out from within. Part of his face was covered in metal, the underground fortifications seemingly welded into his body. “AFRAID?!” Tower roared at me.
His kaiju form was massive, towering out of the crater and crushing Olympus Mons as he leaned against it. Stone and metal screamed as the city tore itself apart when Tower flexed. Ruins of the fortress town clung to him, jutted from within his body, and rained down across his back as Tower stood to his full height and stared at me with overt hatred in his eyes.
“Yes, Tower,” I said quietly. “Afraid.”
The air crackled and snapped as the massive flesh golem moved, raising a metal-encrusted hand to swat me from the sky. Tiny sonic booms formed and were crushed by his momentum, and the fist glowed pink with fresh plasma as it struck me.
I was torn from the sky and hurtled down the slope of the long dead volcano, bouncing and tumbling through the Martian desert at its base and tearing up a huge swath of land with my own impact.
“I fear nothing!” Tower bellowed, climbing free of the caldera to reengage with me.
I shook the impact out of my head and rose from the dust, streaking back up to face the monster.
“You are nothing but fear!” I yelled back at him. “BuyMort’s slave, used for cheap packing tape! I saved you! I freed you! I broke your chains and gave you back your mind, you ingrate! And how do you repay me?! With betrayal and death! With more of your helpless fear driving you to this pathetic place.”
His eyes swam and rolled with anger as I spoke, but his hands did not move again. “I took Nergal,” Tower rumbled. “Made it mine! My home, free of all false friends.”
I nodded. “I see that. And here you’ve sat,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “Alone, afraid of who might come. Hiding from sight beneath a walled city. All I see is your fear. You have always been a pathetic creature, Tower, but never have I pitied you more than here, in this place.”
“PITY!” the golem roared. “PITY?”
I was ready for him this time and concentrated on holding myself perfectly still. His fist rushed toward me, stuttering with waves of pink and orange plasma. I clapped my armor into place at the last second and pushed my suit to hold my position in the sky.
In a great gout of blood, Tower punched me so hard that I simply tore through his hand, from the knuckle to the wrist. I had a brief flashback of memories from inside the body of Kraken, and then the Martian sky brought me back to the present.
“AGH!!” Tower roared, clutching at his hand and drawing it in close to his body.
“Let me take you off this planet, Tower,” I growled, dropping my armor. “Allow it, and we can part as true friends.”
“LIES!” he screamed back. “You were never my friend!”
“You’re right!” I yelled. “You’re a monster, why should I be friends with you?!”
Tower’s giant, steaming face contorted. “You lied!”
“No, I tried!” I yelled back. “I tried to talk to you several times, and every time your true personality came to the surface you lashed out, just like you’re doing now.”
Tower surprised me then, lunging forward to bite me. I didn’t react in time and the massive flesh golem caught me, crushing me between two building-sized teeth. My Stoneskin Perk Patch saved my life once again, as it prevented me from being injured regardless of the pressure Tower tried to apply. I just cracked his tooth and was blasted with his rancid breath.
With a sigh, I turned my palms up to the tooth above me and activated my breaker gauntlets. His tooth erupted with blue light and shattered, causing another giant roar of pain. I flew free and shook my head, deploying my armor.
“Enough!” I shouted back in his face, booming voice active. “Stop this, and come with me,” I ordered. “I can’t leave you here like this.”
Tower’s hand had rushed to his face, and he was tonguing his broken tooth, sending more fragments of it tumbling from his mouth like an avalanche. His eyes welled up with lakes of saline, as he scowled deeply and turned partially away from me. “Go away!” he whimpered. “Stop hurting me.”
My eyes squeezed close and my brow furrowed in shame. “I’m sorry, Tower. I can’t.”
“Crown of Thorns,” I whispered, activating my com channel to them. “Do it.”
Tower scowled in confusion, and then vanished in a flash of blood and plasma. The Crown of Thorns used its powerful gravity drive to crush him, at a molecular level. In less than a second, there was nothing left of the flesh golem aside from a lake of viscous, steaming, charred blood running down the side of Olympus Mons.
I looked at the mess and wallowed in the sting of his last words. Then I shook my head clear of it. BuyMort’s wonders and in-shop morties had made so many monsters. And I’d just slain its last.
“Crown of Thorns, confirm biomatter signature status,” I ordered.
A quiet hobb on the other end said, “he’s gone. No further biosignature readings, that was all of him.”
I nodded, then rose into the sky and away from my last shameful kill. I thought of Mr. Sada, Garthrust, Kraken, Dario, Izan, Jada, and then finally Tower again. I remembered his human-sized golems charging into battle, mindlessly asking every enemy to be their friend, and how I had ignored him. My complacency and poor tool-use had doomed the creature as sure as BuyMort had.
A unique life was lost to the multiverse forever, but my job was done. That was what mattered, I could go home. I tuned my emotional response, activating the crystalline colonies in my mind to take the edge off my guilt, but I couldn’t do anything about my eidetic memory, and its ability to replay Tower’s final moments, afraid and in pain, once more because of me.
With Tower dead, I was free to return to BuyMort’s source and shut it down, once my final expedition had finished forming. Terna took the reins of Sol System’s various industries, from her place of power on Terna’s World. She gifted our expedition the Crown of Thorns, as well as a full complement of our remaining relic ships.
Phyllis decided to join me. She grumped that I would get everyone killed without her, and I didn’t complain or disagree. It was just good to have her back, and back to who she was supposed to be. I still remembered her execution of a good hobb and prevented Phyllis from having any position of power within the expedition, but I was glad to have her with me in spite of it all.
She was a killer, yes. But also so much more, especially to me. I was grateful to have my oldest friend with me when we left Nu-Earth for good. My planet threw a going away party that cost trillions of morties. Parades and public celebrations of the expedition took place in every major city on the planet, but none more wild than Prescott.
The city we had built down the slope from its former namesake was alive with hope, and the sheer joy of exploration. The Knowle Institutes declared a system-wide holiday, their last before we closed the links between universes. The idea was to commemorate the expedition in each universe, to preserve the history of our accomplishment in defeating the BuyMort system.
It was one of the last things that spread from universe to universe.
The affiliates cut ties and focused on operational realities within their own universes. Storage went to the gobbs, as it always should have. A small contingent of Knowles and hobbs stayed in that universe, making lives on the space stations above to monitor the primitive Dyson sphere. We had repaired what we could of it, and the structure was built to last. The entire thing was a relic, we couldn’t even reproduce the metallurgy that had gone into its hull plating.
Save the Cubes on Nu-Earth had retrieved and rehomed just over two-thousand Cubes while I had been working to change the multiverse. In just three decades, Shoshanna had managed to accomplish most of her goals, and only a small handful of Cubes were lost permanently. She had even launched a mission to one of the universes we uncovered in our expeditions, once data trails led her to the Cube lost within it.
The day after our planet-wide celebration, I boarded the Crown of Thorns and left Nu-Earth behind for good. While in transit to the Jupiter gate, I triple-checked our system’s ready-status. Each universe was ready to be separated. Black hole generators ensured post scarcity in each universe, and none of them were hosting any major conflicts that could destabilize their civilization hubs.
In the place of other universes, my people were going to start exploring their own. New solar systems were already mapped out for colonization, and industry was tuning up to take on the project.
For the first time since BuyMort had invaded my life, I didn’t have any work left. There were no tasks that required my presence, and a strange hollow sense came over me as we entered the gate for the last time.
BuyMort’s citadel awaited us, thick clouds of gas swirling around its many sparkling arms. My final expeditions advance team was waiting for us on the docking platform, with a new party celebrating our arrival. Yarsp was barbecuing on grills set up around the ship’s main ramp, and people of many species were enjoying food and a beverage before continuing on their day’s work.
My fleet was going to need to unpack. We were planning to use BuyMort’s citadel as our home base and launch exploratory missions to other planets in the universe. The citadel wasn’t connected to any solar systems, but the energized nebula we were in was part of a larger galactic disk, so there were plenty of stars within range of the Crown of Thorns gravity drive.
The plan was to explore. To reach back along the citadels path and investigate the worlds that had spawned BuyMort. My people had an insatiable curiosity in addition to the tools they needed to satiate it.
While my crew stepped off the ship’s ramp to join the barbeque on the pad, I slipped away and flew toward the central processing core. I quietly went through the tour one last time, the excitement in my gut growing. When the tour’s automatic walkway slid to a stop to show me BuyMort’s primary command console again, I lifted off and floated toward it.
The screen flickered into life and showed that my last work had been saved. The shutdown command was primed and ready, blinking at me while I stared down at it. A wave of fear washed over me, and I took a second to realize that even I was afraid of life without this system.
I took a deep breath, shook my head, and hit the command key.
The icon in my vision was gone. There was no ceremony, no fanfare or flash. Just a sudden, and obvious absence. I collapsed onto the stool, waiting for my starfish suit or crystalline colonies to malfunction. Nothing happened. I could still fly, and my colonies were all working as intended. All the years of speculation from my Knowles had added up to nothing but noise, anyone wearing a starfish suit was still free after BuyMort was gone.
BuyMort was gone! I sat on the stool and stared at the dead console in front of me. It had shut off with the rest of BuyMort, but the station hosting it still worked. Even the tour’s moving walkway quietly hummed in the background, waiting for me to get back on the path so it could take me to the gift shop at its end.
For an hour, I sat and stared at empty space. There were no more ads. No more sales, no more affiliates or associates. I was free. Free from BuyMort at last, something I had wished for when dying to a vein-scorpions venom a century and a half earlier. All the suffering and death was over, I had won.
Finally, a soft voice at my back startled me out of my reverie.
“Warlord Dawes?” a female voice asked, quietly.
I snapped my head around and saw a Nah’gh woman wearing the Nah’gh-standard jumpsuit of the expedition, with a pair of large, circular glasses. She was also beautiful, with dark, forest green scales traveling across her face and body in exotic striations. When I turned to look at her, she smiled.
“Hi,” she said, raising one hand timidly. “I’m Bryanne Rush, head of ethnobotany for the expedition.”
I smiled at her, then turned on the stool and fully faced her with a small sigh. “What’s up Bryanne?”
The Nah’gh woman gestured over her shoulder. “Oh I was just . . . well, I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss the barbeque.”
After staring at her for a moment, I smiled again and stood. “Absolutely,” I replied. Then I reached into my dimensional storage pocket and retrieved the last pack of bacon my old world, Earth, had produced. “Have you ever had bacon?” I asked her.
Bryanne blinked large, beautiful eyes and shook her head. “Only yarsp,” she replied.
“Well, come on then,” I said, my smile growing easier. “You’re in for a treat.”
As I followed her out of the room, I glanced back at the console once more. Still dark. My war had finally ended, but my life was just beginning.
The End
We have a special message for you all in the pre-chapter author note, so make sure you don't skip over it!
Be sure to sign up for our newsletter!
CHECK IT OUT AT
HTTPS://DAMIENLEEHANSON.SUBSTACK.COM/P/DAMIEN-HANSON-AND-FRIENDS-SIGN-UP?SD=PF