The collapse of the medical fortress was like toppling a crucial domino. The panic it triggered among certain strata of society was no longer an undercurrent, but a boiling beneath the sea. The news-silent, its captions scrolling through my gray field of vision-began to feature new terms: "divine punishment," "systemic correction," "the invisible hand." They no longer blamed mere coincidence or cyberattacks. A vague but enormous consensus was taking shape: some force above the existing order was conducting a ruthless process of selection and purification.
That consensus carried fear, mingled with the secret cheers of those dissatisfied with the old order.
Ryuk still gnawed on his "allowance apples" every day, but the gaze from those hollow eye sockets had grown more appraising, as though he were waiting to see whether I would show even the slightest hesitation when I paid the next price.
Hesitation? There was none.
My gaze swept past that clamor-silent-and turned toward a deeper foundation on which civilization's survival depended: the environment and energy. Entrenched in this sector were interest groups larger and more deeply rooted than the pharmaceutical giants. In the name of development, they practiced plunder, mortgaging the planet's future for immediate profits. The plastic gyres in the oceans, the rainforests corroded by acid rain, the methane escaping ever faster from the permafrost... these were all "tumors" that needed to be removed.
The target was a multinational alliance of oil giants called the Deep Blue Consensus. They controlled nearly a quarter of global fossil fuel extraction and systematically funded climate skepticism and obstructed the development of new energy technologies. They were the heaviest link in the chain shackling the planet's ecology.
*Eliminate their leadership directly? That would only let the vultures divide the carcass, without shaking its foundations. I needed a more thorough "ecological niche