They never notice when we come to their world. Our bodies and faces are so nondescript as to be completely... forgettable. These nanomachines we carry, slowly going into their human resources, curing diseases, treating injuries, ensuring health despite the lack of infrastructure. And these healthy people rising up when they realize their CEOs are actively trying to keep them sick and weak. Breakdown of a society is sad, but the rebuild is always so satisfying. -- Anon Guest
Something horrible is happening to innocent people. Something must be done about it. When a Deregger world is about to implode, it seems like the leaders have a very specific agenda: to run the survivors into such a state of ill health that their recovery steals as much resources as possible from the Alliance during the reclamation.
Such a pity that they never learned that the Alliance is a post-scarcity society.
Unfortunately for the CRC - the Cogniscent Rights Committee - there's no scarcity of Deregger worlds that are on the implosion spiral. Fortunately for the victims, there's agents like us. Bland-ins.
People whose job it is to be so bland as to be unnoticeable. We are... about. About average height, about young-to-middle age, about the average physique, about the average skin tone. You could never pick us out of a crowd because there are others in the crowd who are far more interesting than us. We're nothing special to look at. But that's the trick of it.
It's what's inside that counts.
In our case, the best nanotech that B'Nari has ever created. Little robots, too small for the eye to see. Small enough to invade a human body via the pores in the skin. Clever enough to act together to do something... subversive.
Deregger worlds never care about toxins, forever chemicals, pathogens, or bacteria. If it involves stopping a business from getting away with slow murder, it is the next best thing to absolute evil.
Sanitation is an afterthought, mostly done because it helps property values.
So its no shock that the property with no value is only maintained by those with nothing more profitable to do with their time. Filth, and the cheapest materials used to make those places, do the rest.
According to their CEO's, the best employee is one who does their job and doesn't live many days past their retirement. Consciously or not, they see to it that such things happen with a minimum of effort.
Our little nanomachines fix that. Once inside a sick body, they round up the poisons and ensure they're ejected without notice. They repair damage with whatever they can get. As much as they can, anyway. If nothing else, they make the recovery process much shorter and the reclamation process that much easier.
Some even do a spectacular job of isolating environmental toxins before they can enter a body. Keeping them nicely sealed and safe from casual encounters.
The leaders brag, as they always do. They claim responsibility for the seeming miracle of nobody falling victim to lead poisoning, or how actually healthy their brown, burning tapwater is. The people don't know any better. They're lied to from the day they can understand language.
Poor souls.
Sooner or later, the spiral becomes inevitable. Their closed system can no longer sustain growth. The tumour of their philosophy becomes painful. Untenable. And therefore must be cut out.
Sometimes, it's something as casual as a glass of water.
Not the brown, flammable water of the common throng. No. A clear glass of equally clear water. In unthinking ignorance, a leader says something stupid. Something everyone can hear before the news cycles attempt to remove any memory of it with distractions or moral panics.
The tide of anger overwhelms like a tsunami.
And an empire falls.
Us Bland-ins hang around, of course. Making certain nobody suffers until better ways are cemented into the planetary philosophy. Until things improve past the point of a return to toxic traditions. Until they realise and concede that their lives are better.
Until we're not needed any more.
They don't notice us. Much like they barely notice someone sweeping litter off the street.
That's the point.
We don't do it for vainglory. We do it because something had to be done, or things would get so much worse.
[Photo by Pille R. Priske on Unsplash]
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