Microstory 742: Credos, Convention Thirteen: Compromise, Chapter One

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Many years ago, before anyone in the galaxy was flying to the stars, there was group of kingdoms that held lands not far from each other, and they each had something that the another needed. One had the best soil for farming, but no water to irrigate it. One had access to a great river of freshwater, but no decent way to transport this water anywhere else. One had developed advanced forms of transportation, but did not have enough fuel to power them. One was sitting on top of a grand reservoir of chemicals that could be processed into fuel, but no way to dig into the soil. The last had the tools to access underground resources, but few crops and other food, so the highly trained workers were hungry, and unable to work. From the outside, there may seem to be a perfect solution to all of their problems. Kingdom One can give its crops the the workers of Kingdom Five. Kingdom Five can dig for the chemicals under Kingdom Four’s lands. Kingdom Four can provide fuel for the transportational vehicles of Kingdom Three. Kingdom Three can deploy vehicles to transport Kingdom Two’s water to Kingdom One. This seems easy enough to do, until you place yourself in each Kingdom’s respective perspective. No one is interested in trading with anyone else, for they are too close to the issues to see what the entire system looks like. Why would Kingdom One give any crops to Kingdom Five when they cannot get anything in return? They cannot see the whole cycle, and how it will ultimately come back around to them. Even if they could, who can start the cycle in the first place? The only way for anyone to give what they have is to first get what they need from someone else. Fortunately, there was a workable solution to this, but the whole process depended on everyone working together. Though there was no easy way to transport the water from Kingdom Two to Kingdom One, there were still much harder ways. Everyone in the five kingdoms had to band together, and get that water to the crops. The queen from Kingdom Four understood this, and she organized the labor force into something no one had ever seen before. The first batch of crops was sent to the trained diggers, and the cycle was able to begin. Eventually, this worked so well, that they ended up with a single unifying economy, and the kingdoms merged into a single nation, living in prosperity for decades.