After John had finished his show of neutralizing threats that barely even counted as such, he put down one of the two extra teleporters he had on the roof of the Ikea. Really good for him that he managed to get the special ingredients for the upgrade on the side while doing the other grinding. He didn’t have an exit point on this side of the bay, so it was a good place even without the circumstances.

“If you get attacked, contact me through one of the means on this card,” John handed Brett a small business card; it was a plain white thing with black letters. While he had soon realized he needed some of cards like that, he hadn’t found a great design for them yet. Collide, with all the power it commanded by now, was still without a proper symbol.

As for Trebba and the supervisor, both of them had left, as John had promised them they were allowed to.

“Also, I will do you the favour and leave you with this as well,” he gestured at a barrel shaped thing, placed next to the pavilion shaped teleporter, out of which a cleaning slime soon crawled and began its journey filled with trash and more trash. “They will help with the hygiene situation. For the moment I won’t raise taxes, so all you need to do is get your affairs in order and follow my laws.”

“About that,” Brett chimed in, “can we read them up somewhere or are we supposed to just guess?”

That was a good question. Luckily, together with Magoi, Scarlett, a stack of books on politics and political sciences and a set of meetings over the last weeks, he had compiled an answer already. “You can find a link to a website on that card, it has several different models of small-scale governance that I approve of and something like a basic constitution. Use that.” He checked the time, while he was under no particularly great pressure to get back, he wanted to give everyone else explanations about what was happening. Not to mention, he finally had everything to create his crystal.

He had also accepted a new quest that brought this little saga to an end.

The rewards were fantastic, to put it frankly. He really didn’t need that extra dick size, but he would take it. That would put him at 20 centimetres, any bigger than that and his dick would probably start going deeper than biology intended.

“I get you aren’t the most moral fellows and, to be perfectly honest, I only put you in charge because you were around at the right time. If you don’t think you can shoulder the moral burden, find someone who can, if you want to keep being the ones in power, I suggest you use this little trick: behave as if Gaia would punish you whenever you do something to someone that you would not do to a friend.”

Brett looked at the money still in his hands. It was clear what motivated him here and it surely wasn’t that he thought John’s intentions were the best ones. If the Gamer had the time and the knowledge about the people in Ikea, he would have picked his leadership more carefully. For the moment, he hoped that they were afraid enough of him ripping them to shreds that they would keep to his wishes and install one of the systems described on the website. Usually that ended with the people he originally installed getting voted out rather quickly.

Sometimes it got violent, the overly oppressed had a tendency of lashing out when suddenly given the opportunity, but for the most part things went over rather peacefully. Not in small part because John took the Marshall-Plan as a guideline and just dumped resources into these communities. Richer and happier people were unlikely to revolt as long as they continued to be rich and happy.

John finally got on the platform and teleported.

___________________________________________________________________

He called a meeting as soon as possible. “So, Thorne declared war on us,” John broke the news, causing confusion on the table.

“Why the fuck would they do that?” Eliza wanted to know. “That makes less sense than a fish wearing a ballet-dress made from the bloody guts of its enemies.”

“If Scarlett wants to hurt us,” Magoi added, “this certainly strikes me as ineffective.”

Rave was rolling a bouncy ball over the table, passing it between her hands; her confusion settled for a dry look after she looked at John’s nonchalant look. “Y’all just wait a sec,” she told them, “he got that ‘All according to keikaku’ expression. “

“Keikaku means plan in Japanese, by the way,” John added. “But I have to remind you that this isn’t my plan. Honestly, I am still debating whether I am fine with it.”

“I could explain,” his phone rang out with the voice of the redhead who was the actual person to kick this whole thing off. “However, unlike every other evil mastermind, I don’t like monologuing. I do like it if people stroke my ego though. Explain my genius to them, John.”

“Calm your mind-vagina, I can hear you rubbing it from here,” Eliza cussed at the phone on the table.

“To put it simply, Scarlett has drawn a line in the sand,” John told everyone. “Thorne is standing on one side of it and we on the other. Everyone who is opposed to us will gather around Thorne. All of the most subversive elements in New York will be concentrated in one faction, on which we have the highest of possible sleeper agents,” he gestured at the phone. “Once we beat that coalition, we are the only real power in the area and we can do what we want without pushback.”

“Why didn’t we do this from the start?” Rave wanted to know. “Could’ve just started this war when we met ya in the strip bar, if this was what ya wanted from the start, Scarlett.”

“I needed to get the situation right. The decision to go to war had to originate from the board of directors, not me. Otherwise it would have raised suspicion within my own rank. Can’t have that, now can I?” the blood-soaked technocrat answered. “That’s why I coordinated which territories you take over by highest emotional impact. Some ruined personal projects here, some private funds set aside confiscated by you guys there, with a dash of attacks randomly executed while they were visiting.”

“And all of that while still making their declaration on us look rather unjustified,” John said, “meaning that I will get out of this with the clean vest I wanted. Collide will be seen as the ones defending themselves. At the same time, our name and reputation should have travelled far enough by now. The people who are afraid of us can’t afford to care about the optics. When the biggest fish in the pond is going after us, they need to ride with the swarm.”

“We will have an officially clean vest,” Magoi raised his voice in critique, “but this is a conspiracy of the highest order.”

“I agree, which is why I said I don’t know if I am fine with it.”

“I knew you people would have moral questions like that,” Scarlett’s dry voice stated. “Which is why I didn’t tell you. The snowball is already tumbling down the hill. I am getting e-mails asking to be part of this coalition as we speak.” News really did travel fast in the third millennium. Without a doubt, Scarlett was helping that along with some anonymous e-mails or other ways to spread the info. “You can blame and curse at me if you want, but I cut the amount of time you will need to install the new order by a tremendous amount.”

Magoi sighed but shrugged while shaking his head, “Guess she is right on that front. Nevertheless, I cannot continue to work with you if you string me along. I have a short patience for non-disclosure.”

“Yeah, this is the only time I will let you get away with something of this scope without informing us,” John was completely with Magoi on that front. If he had known then that this was how it would end, he would have maybe agreed to do this only after several hours of discussion. “It’s true that this is effective, morality aside, but I don’t believe for a second that you did it this way just because it helped me. What is your endgame here, Scarlett?”

“You seriously want to ruin the surprise?” she asked.

“I rather wouldn’t be surprised by another war, yes,” John told her. “Spit out the whole plan, or you better believe I will take this war seriously instead of going by your playbook.”

“… Okay, fine,” Scarlett sounded annoyed on one hand and smug on the other. “This is stage two out of four, my personal endgame is eliminating a certain person…”

___________________________________________________________________

“You know, I love that we have someone of my intellect levels around now,” John told Rave after they had retreated back to the living room. “That plan, the conspiracy side of it notwithstanding, will leave us with a minimum of casualties in a minimum of time. Unless something truly awful happens on the way there.”

“Way to toot your own horn,” his girlfriend laughed. “Ya know, I think that strategy is way too complicated. This is why I ain’t sitting in any of those fancy bureaus, drowning in wealth and paperwork. I would just punch the bad guy.”

“I find that whole fucking thing disgusting as shit,” Eliza declared; she was not a fan of all this secrecy. “Look at you asshats, tricking the history books with your uber-move.”

“The truth of the matter, Eliza, is that we would eventually have to face a coalition one way or another,” John told her. “With the difference that they would feel cornered, and cornered people that practice human-trafficking and exploitation don’t tend to have a moral code that keeps them from doing whatever they think necessary to cling onto a smidge of power. If you have to pick between the evil strategy that will immediately allow us to identify all enemies or letting those enemies do their evil shit for however long it would take us to get to all of them otherwise, plus the option of them turning into terrorists when we finally do reach them, what would you pick?”

“Option 3, fuck all of this shit, I hate both of those, let me just murder everyone in a day,” Eliza declared.

“You are going to judge thousands of people on a single day without executing a single innocent?” John continued to examine this. “Seriously, I don’t like this ‘line in the sand’ strategy, but now that it is here, it seems to be the least evil one that I can think of.”

“For someone who doesn’t like it, you are remarkably enthusiastic about it, jackass,” the blood mage still wasn’t on-board.

“I just can’t deny the genius of it,” he admitted. “Scarlett set everything up so that exactly the people that I want to blow out are going to join Thorne and those who won’t are going to stay neutral or, even better, join me out of principle. No great nation was ever built without some underhanded tricks and I can sleep at night if this is as bad as it’s going to get.”

“… Fucking fair enough, do your shit,” Eliza was obviously not on the same wavelength here; if they took this discussion to the end, she would, in all due likelihood, end up advocating for the honest but lengthier method of just continuing what they were currently doing until everything was cleaned up.

However, with her falling silent a sense of acceptance that this was what they were doing now settled in. The course was set, they would follow Scarlett’s plan.

A window opened to inform John that his current refining process was done. “Finally,” he exclaimed. He had started refining the original crystal before the meeting even began and then he had to refine it again in the middle of it because the first one did not include the essences.

Now it was time to do the usual. First, he combined both the figure and the crystal, then he cast Artificial Spirit. He didn’t think of any character traits this time around. Both Aclysia and Momo had become their own people but they also had roughly stuck to that first impulse. He wanted to dictate as little of another person’s life as possible.

With that logic he maybe shouldn’t have gone around creating souls in the first place, but he already did it twice, so what’s the harm in a third?

The mana vanished. A window confirming the quest completion opened. He waited. Everyone waited. Nothing happened. He already knew that routine, but this was taking way too long, so he gently stubbed the figurine. She fell over backwards and landed on her back with her arms sprawled out.

Still nothing. She was there, but aside from her presence, John felt nothing from her. Not in the Metra sense, where there was nothing coming through, more like he was watching a superhero movie that was exclusively a greenscreen with an editor desperately trying to figure where to put the effects.

That’s when he realized he fucked up. He had created a life. That was it. He had created a life that had and needed nothing. An Artificial Spirit did not need to eat, did not grow naturally, did not do anything. Without any predefined characteristics, be it servitude, a hunger for knowledge, or the want of anything. In that vacuum, the spirit inside was now trying to figure out what this whole living thing even was.

“I am a moron,” he muttered to himself and gently scooped up the little figure. ‘Can you hear me?’ he asked the figurine. He did not get an answer. Then, after sharing memories with her that gave her a concept of what hearing was, he asked again. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Yes,’ it was a basic answer, spoken in the uncaring tone of a binary decision-making process.

That made things more complicated. If she had been completely broken, just an existence on the level of a rock, John could have convinced himself to destroy her and try a second time. However, this showed him that she was a living being and as thus it wouldn’t be destroying but killing her.

John relayed the situation to everyone around before turning to Aclysia specifically. “If I use my own memories to teach her everything, I think that may cause too much confusion… with me being flesh, not to mention the… other differences…”

“I understand.” Aclysia’s spirit was always open to him anyway, but he still felt the need to get her approval. She kneeled down at his side and put her hands around his. “I am with you, John. Stay like this and I will always follow.”

With that, he reached back all the way to the start of their relationship and her life. He channelled her exploring and experiencing of her senses into the new being. Attempting to cut out as much unnecessary experiences and feelings as possible, John kneeled there for almost half an hour. He had to pick and choose carefully. All he wanted was for her to start thinking for herself, develop a sense of what the world was. He couldn’t just fill her up with experiences, especially the likes for which she currently lacked the capacity to reproduce them, such as speech, it would have led to some major confusion.

There was no way to catch all of it though. Memories weren’t precise in the first place and some he picked as perfect to introduce one concept also had an unbreakable bond to certain emotions. As these were Aclysia’s memories, most of these emotions were linked to John.

He made sure to repeat one phrase every now and again to try and counteract the feelings he couldn’t untangle. Call her by her name every time. A name he had gotten through the usual pattern, taking the first syllable of each of the essences.

‘These are not your memories. You are your own person and will make your own ones. I am your creator, John Newman, and I want you to think and experience the world. These are not your memories. You are your own person and your name is Beatrice.’