Chapter 1031 (1/2)

Senator Cliff Heathridge poured himself a cup of coffee and then added a single sugar and a spoonful of cream in a single concise motion. With his teaspoon, he then stirred the cup counter-clockwise four times. The pure white of the cream swirled in the chestnut of the coffee to make caramel.

After he lifted the spoon out of the mixture, Senator Heathridge watched the liquid continuing to rotate for a few seconds before stopping. He felt the heat of the coffee through the cup in his hand. Then he set the spoon down on his napkin and lifted the coffee to his lips.

He didn’t drink but took a deep whiff of the thick steam that wafted upward from the coffee. A smile spread slowly across his face as his nose parsed apart the different scents presented to it. Then he sat the porcelain cup down on its saucer. Truly, even though Senator Heathridge hadn’t taken a drink, the quality of the beans was immediately obvious. But the fact that he could tell the quality without a taste wasn’t the point.

When Senator Heathridge’s assistant heard the distinctive tinkling of the porcelain on the saucer, she looked up at him and smiled. “Enjoying the coffee, Senator?”

“Of course, Margaret.” Senator Heathridge said with a smile as he turned his attention back to the documents on his desk. His assistant smiled shyly back at him and then returned to her own work. “Of course.”

The point was that it didn’t matter whether or not he actually took a sip of the coffee; the only thing that mattered was whether his assistant believed that he did. That was a lesson that he learned from the knee of Randidly Ghosthound. That was the power of image. It was the power to make the impossible possible.

That’s how I can finally reach Randidly Ghosthound. That’s how I can slow him down.

After moving his cup to the side, the Senator stood and walked to the window. Outside, a gardener was trimming the hedges of a manicured courtyard. All on the taxpayer's dime, of course. When he moved, his assistant looked up and made a pained face at him.

“Senator, your plumber called again. I believe he wants to set up a meeting to talk about your piping.”

Evan Crane called again eh? It seems like he has noticed that Randidly will move soon as well… but he still could be useful.

“See what his schedule looks like. If he can move today, tell him to meet me at my summer home. Hopefully, I can get the problem fixed before I need to entertain or I’ll be the laughing stock of Congress.”

His assistant nodded and turned back to type away at her terminal. But the senator remained at the window, watching the workmanlike movements of the gardener.

Senator Heathridge had been fifty-six when the System arrived. Depending on who you asked, Senator Heathridge possessed the good luck to have been transported into a Zone. He hadn’t been senior enough in the Senate at the time to have received word of the System’s impending arrival beforehand, but that didn’t bother him much.

In actual fact, at most 5% of the individuals who knew what was coming lived through the initial month of chaos and bloodshed. Meanwhile, later statistical analysis indicated that the average individual had about an 8% chance of surviving through the first month. It seemed that foreknowledge was one thing, but that very knowledge had made people underestimate the threat that was to come.

After all, who would have truly believed what was coming would change everything as it did?

Surprise brought with it the added benefit of caution. So many of the powerful men who thought they understood would the System was had been butchered because of their arrogance. Their deaths served as the first lesson Senator Heathridge had learned on his path to power.

Despite the fact he was getting on in years, Senator Heathridge had was motivated by ample ambition and an exacting practicality that saw him steadily rising in the ranks of the Senate while his more robust fellows left the board rooms and carried weapons to protect their families. A necessary task, but one that left a power vacuum in an already extremely depleted field. Politics, after all, was an old man’s game. When the System decimated and confused most of his peers, Senator Heathridge’s mind had seen it for what it truly was.

An opportunity.

As society struggled to stem the tide of monsters, Senator Heathridge had surged into action. He had almost beggared himself to send aid to the military, the research-industrial complex of East Providence, and also the police forces across the Zone. He had shipped out weapons and bullets by the tons. But his contributions to the Zone didn’t stop there.

Through some less than ethical experiments on his underlings, Senator Heathridge had quickly determined some of the more efficient avenues to Skills and Paths. This he used to lead himself to his modest current Level of 41, but it was really the elites that Senator Heathridge nurtured that had shined for the longest time. His first response team was the rock Zone 1 needed while they struggled against their Tribulation.

The memory of that bloody fight had even a seasoned politician like Heathridge grimacing. He turned away from the window and returned to his desk. For several seconds he sat and pressed his eyes closed, remembering the torn limbs and sobbing at the site of the confrontation.

But they had one, and most people in the know understood that Senator Heathridge had been instrumental in that success. Theirs had been the first Village in the Zone, and the good Senator had seen it successfully protected.

For himself, Senator Heathridge took some of the fertile lands South of East Providence as his estate in the aftermath. The population wasn’t high in that area at the time, but the Senator had believed that the growing demand for food would quickly pull people into his agricultural ventures in the area. In addition, he spent quite a sum of money to build the only exo-suit factories in all of Zone 1. He completely dominated that corner of the market.

It had seemed like a golden goose that would never stop laying eggs.

On the expedition into the Raid Dungeon, every individual wore one of his exo-suits. And to the public, Senator Heathridge seemed like the main power broker in Congress. He only had a few dozen votes that he could control directly, but he largely sat between the liberal and conservatives on most issues, holding the deciding vote for himself. In addition, he was staunchly in support of businesses and had passed law after law to deregulate the entrance into industry after the System’s arrival.

He had seemed to be the most powerful man in Zone 1. And rather than savoring his success, the Senator had pushed all of his money back into research to create an even more unassailable foundation for himself.

But Senator Heathridge had made two mistakes that would ruin him. Or at least bring him to his current precarious position.

The first mistake was assuming that the current agricultural needs would be the same as they had been in the old Earth. This had pretty obviously not been the case. Even at the beginning, there had been signs that the money that Senator Heathridge poured into industrial-grade farming equipment was a mistake. But he had reassured himself that even if the equipment turned out to have been a bad move, the land would hold its value.

The fertile land was supposed to have been his long term insurance. But it had become almost immediately worthless.

Senator Heathridge looked up from his desk. “Margaret, did any mail come in for me?”

“Yes, of course.” Margaret got up and brought Senator Heathridge a manilla folder. “Should I open it?”

“No, it’s fine. This… is a personal matter,” Senator Heathridge said with an easy smile. Plus, he had no desire for either of their DNA to be tied to the parcel. Better to have Randidly Ghosthound open it directly with no other interference. With great care, the Senator lay the parcel down on the far side of his desk and returned to his bitter musings.

With the System, food could be grown practically anywhere in only a week’s time. “Fertile” no longer held any real meaning. Plus, all of the labor-intensive cultivation and care that a farm used to require was no longer necessary. When it took about ten minutes a day to maintain a farm sizable enough to support an entire family, all of Senator Heathridge’s agricultural investments quickly became sunk costs.

His second mistake was in failing to predict the almost inevitable plateau of the effectiveness of exosuits. Which, Senator Heathridge privately believed, could have been postponed somewhat if not for the direct interference of one individual: Randidly Ghosthound.

How long has he known about my efforts? Senator Heathridge wondered as he leaned back in his chair. How long has he schemed against me…?

Exosuits, while individuals were low Level, were extremely useful in boosting someone’s combat capability. They required a high level of technical knowledge to create and maintain, but the boost they gave to people from Level 20-40 was very real and useful. The small number of sales that continued to trickle in was exactly individuals around that Level trying to boost their Leveling speed.

Unfortunately, around Level 40 people’s bodies became just as powerful, if not more so depending on an individual’s Class, than an exosuit that could be made with average materials. There were exosuits made with high-quality materials, of course, but they were precipitously expensive to make due to the many almost microscopic components that also needed to be made from difficult to work with materials.