Some of the highly militant vegans finds the Plant Life Colony Bubble and the few humans, also vegans, living in the food factory part of what's left of the colony. They insist that this can be fixed despite what the humans in the food factory try to explain, and learn the hard way WHY it can never be the way the humans had wished it to become.
@internutter/challenge-02932-h009-nature-s-not-nice -- Anon Guest
Determination is ordinarily an admirable trait. Determination turns Vorax away from their raids. It drags injured friends across kilometers of wilderness just to reach a point where they can set off a rescue beacon. Determination cleans out hoarder warrens and restores a lost habitat to live-able condition.
Determination also sent aggressive Vegans back into the Plant Life Colony Bubble to fix the mistakes of the previous generation. They knew what they had done wrong this time.
So they thought.
They brought along an Alliance techie and paid hir well. Time Plus, in this case, Time Plus salvage when they all finally admitted it was a nightmare they could not forge into a dream.
Techie Drez looked over the scans, checked the cams that were still operational[1] and said, "I could haul this whole lot to a terraforming planet and they'd pay you by the molecule for it." Even a heavily imbalanced ecosystem was better than nothing.
"Absolutely not," protested Viggin Miu. "They'll introduce predators. Sinful vicious carnivores. This is an Eden that must be protected. Nature in its purest form."
"You... understand that... predators are also natural, right?"
This earned Drez a deadly glare. "If you're not going to help us, we can hire someone else."
"Oh no. I'm here for the long haul. Just pointing out something obvious so it goes on the record."
"You do not have the right to violate our beliefs with yours," sniffed Viggin Fleur. "We will thank you to keep your horrible omnivorous opinions to yourself."
Thanks and an empty box is worth the box.
Nevertheless, with an eye on a true fortune on payday, Techie Drez did as ze was told. Starting with boosting the food factories so that all the peaceful herbivores inside could eat in a natural forest without eating it into a dustbowl.
This included enough food for the bears to grow fat.
"You're gonna need another annex," insisted Drez. "A flakk-off huge one. Sure, you can introduce bots to harvest all the dung in there, and use molecular manipulators to rearrange things into edible food again, but that only gives you half of the nutrient load. You're going to have to constantly input more than you get out of it. Which means farming. You will be breaking your backs trying to wring enough food for the animals out of your days. And even then, the bigger animals will be eating the smaller ones. You can not stop them."
The Viggins said, "We're going to penalise you an Hour every time you violate our beliefs like that. This is your last warning."
Some people can only learn the hard way.
They began with salt licks, but for each of the nutrient gaps in the ecosystem. Calcium to make bones. Iron for their iron-based blood. Salt, of course, because Terran life needs some of it in their diets.
While they were busy with that, tending the supplement crops was not going well. Soil became depleted, even with crop cycling. The armour-plated, spiky cockroaches got into the crop systems and caused abundant devastation. Worse, they were savage little things that used their armaments against anything willing to give them grief.
The Viggins insisted there was a natural, peaceful way to deal with them without causing them harm.
Drez cheerfully engineered all of their solutions and documented the failures. One by one. Week after week. Month after month.
Until, crying and tearful, the Viggins admitted defeat. "You can have this one. We're just going to have to start over with a new bubble."
Drez cheerfully wished them good luck and began open bidding on the entire ecology. While ze was waiting for the bids to roll in, ze installed Skitties and Cleaners to the overall ecology, which balanced things wonderfully.
The Skitties played merry hell with the cockroaches. The Cleaners scooped up the corpses of those and the mice that had been ignored by the Viggins as "peaceful, tiny animals." The resultant bubbles of usable stable compounds easily fed the crops.
Drez became a corporate entity, earning Years for the salvage of Plant Life Colony Bubble. Ze used some of those earnings to buy a team of tugs to tow the whole thing to its ultimate destination several systems away.
Ze named it Bubble Salvage Corp, hiring several like-minded techies who would put up with anything for Time Plus.
After all, the Viggins and those like them refused to learn. They would be making the same mistake again. And again. And again. And again...
[1] Even some of those had nests in them
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / rsaulyte]
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