There's an old saying. Actually, a very old saying, so old that almost no one alive says it anymore. But, in my family, we didn't only know the saying, it was the golden rule of our household.
It comes from the Asiatic continent on Earth, in the North, as measured by the old magnetic poles, before the flip, pre-dispersal. There used to be a country there, called Russia, and the people who lived in that country were called Russians.
Russians were very pragmatic folk. They suffered a great deal throughout their long history, and as a result, they learned to persevere. They also learned to make a great many beautiful things in the midst of pain, but that's neither here nor there.
The saying comes from the old, poor Russian wives and grandmothers who lived out in the great steppes and forests of Northern Asia, where famine came frequently, from war and winter alike.
"Buy a goat."
That's the saying. That's it. It requires a bit of unpacking.
In thin times, a goat is an irreplaceable life line. When your neighbors are starving, eating the boiled bark of birch trees, your goat will be chomping away on poison ivy and turning it into fresh goat's milk.
While your friends ration the leather of their belts, your goat will be noshing on prickly thistle, and giving you delicious goat's milk. And when your good friends have starved and frozen in their huts, you will be cuddling next to your warm goat, your lawn meticulously maintained, your belly filled with goat's milk.
Of course, not everyone in Russia owned a goat. Many would just buy goat's milk when they felt they wanted it. But when the food dried up, for any number of reasons, those people would be in bad shape.
"Buy a goat."
It's incredible advice, and the underlying lesson is one I live by. If something exists that people want, and especially if something exists that people need, you can either acquire the thing, or acquire the source of the thing - and if you have the source, then you control the thing itself.
Presently, my entire business model is based on this idea. Why buy "Fury" in small vials, at twenty credits a pop, when you can purchase the source of "Fury."
Fury is the street name for the illegal drug that drives you out of your fucking mind. The chemical name is different depending on the system your in, but in Sol, its called Adrenalin.
I started off selling Fury, selling the thing itself, just slinging it on the streets to low level users who wanted a quick high. The money was better than taking my check from the local municipality, or selling my plasma on the black market. But I wanted better for myself. I scrimped and saved until I could afford my own extraction unit, stolen from some lab a couple of systems away. Then I put out the call for volunteers.
They came in droves, the poor and the desperate, my goats. Milking adrenaline from a living human being is not fundamentally dangerous, but it is unavoidably painful. Still they return each time, happy to have a few credits or a supply voucher. I package their "Fury" and ship it off to the far reaches of the galaxy, selling at a handsome profit to every non-human species in the known universe.
I have control of the source of the Fury, and therefore I control the Fury itself.
"Buy a goat."
That's goddamn right.
Very good article and it is on the rise excellent that shows the power of the quality of your article.
It's great the way you blend past and future (and the way you narrate it). In a way sci fi is always caught between these two extremes, even their futures often seem like re-worked pasts. And future Armageddons are often just a device intended to simplify the world, take it back to a simpler times (like the Walking Dead) through destruction of all complexity. Here, in a way, unintentionally perhaps, you make it even more evident how the two (past and future) relate as literary devices in sci fi.