"They won't be changed or persuaded at all?"/ I'm afraid not, I'm so sorry.
"We both knew it might come to this."/ I know, but it's always sad.
"Don't worry, you know I don't make them suffer."/ If we want to save the people in those factories.....
"I know. Just, sometimes, there really is no other way. They'll simply fall asleep... and never wake up." -- Fighting Fit
It's easy to believe that ending the one badguy will solve a systemic problem. Eliminating the wrong person who has too much power is the ideal plotline in so very many dramas. People believe that one person can change the world by existing... or no longer existing.
This is a fallacy.
For systemic change to occur, the multitude who benefit from it must change the system... or be removed. And since they're not inclined to change from within, they must be changed from the outside. Sometimes, that change is final.
Presented for critique, a planet settled by the kind of people who want to have all the toys. Those who have risen to power profit immensely while those underneath them suffer in equal amount. Obviously that rise to power and wealth was because they were right in the eyes of their deity. And those who were suffering deserved it because they were flawed and corrupted, as evidenced by their obvious fall from the deity's grace. Never mind that the system was rigged from the get-go to favour those who already had favour... it was the will of their god.
They claimed to have a holy text, but none had ever read it. Not even the preachers who praised the cruelty of the few and the suffering of the many.
Of course those in charge would not listen to the warnings of the Cogniscent Rights Committee. They continued with their extant plans and their cruelties. Making them worse and then crowing about it.
"They don't have enough murderers to get us all," they gloated.
They overlooked that their luxury estates had a closed air system, where the air their breathed was completely different to the heavily polluted, carcinogenic chemical soup that the peasants got. Which, thanks to a large volume of takeovers and rebrandings, was essentially run by one company in one inconvenient location.
Call it... their Achilles' heel.
The CRC didn't need a thousand serial killers. They needed just one poisoner. An angel of mercy killer, pointed towards those who made the people who needed mercy. This was a trolley problem, for sure. End five thousand, save five billion. And the crucial point was that Ali didn't truly give a shit about anyone on either side. They were just statistics to hir.
It was simply a case of cold mathematics, and some of the oldest chemistry known to Humanity. Enough ether to make them all fall asleep... and enough cyanide to be certain they'd never wake up again.
They made their servants exit the cleaned air when they were dismissed. Most of the common folk would be spared. Some would be memorialised as a worthy sacrifice. Others would be reviled as collaborators.
That wasn't hir problem. Ali stayed long enough to watch the life signs within the domes of the elite to tick down to zero. Then ze ran the system to purge and clean the entire interior atmosphere. Ze didn't want anyone investigating to suffer the same fate as hir victims.
Only then did ze stroll out to hir safehouse, and send the signal that this particular Deregger world was now under new management.
[Photo by dhanya purohit on Unsplash]
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