Microstory 1143: Mahala Davidyan

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Out of everyone in the Freemarketeer faction, Mahala Davidyan was one of the least capitalistic, second only to Ramses Abdulrashid, though the question remains if Ramses was ever that open-minded, or if he managed to improve a great deal, due to his exposure to Brooke Prieto and her friends. Mahala was never much for change, even though the entire point of her faction was to completely alter the way the economy operated. She didn’t outwardly question her parents’ convictions, because she didn’t really have any of her own, but she didn’t exactly agree with them either. No one was forcing her to stick around, but she saw no reason to live any other way. If there was one thing the Freemarketeers did right, it’s that they didn’t force anyone to be part of the group. Anyone born into it was given the choice to leave with no social controversy. Mahala didn’t leave, though she probably should have. And that’s not just true because of how badly things turned out. After decades of scarce recruitment, and zero progress towards their goals of a capitalistic society, the Freemarketeers realized the only way they would be able to live how they wanted was if they did it somewhere else. The ship that was trying to transport them to a nearby exoplanet, however, suffered a cataclysmic malfunction, prompted by their own resentful leader. They thought they were rescued when a comprehensive network of portals opened up, and spirited them away, but they soon found them in a complicated situation when the same exact thing kept happening. Parallel timelines are nearly impossible to stabilize for an extended period of time. Most potential outcomes only last for microseconds, which is why they’re known as microrealities. For most universes, this is completely irrelevant on a practical level, because people aren’t conscious of the path they might have taken, especially since they’re not the only ones walking down the metaphorical path. When you’re dealing with time travel, it’s entirely possible to access these short-lived realities, and even steal from them. They’re about to collapse, so it doesn’t matter much anyway, except when it becomes cancerous. For some reason, the technology that rescued them had a malfunction of its own, and kept trying to rescue them, over and over and over again. It just kept drawing alternate versions of the same people from microrealities, and transporting them to the planet of Dardius. Every day, a new batch of alternates would arrive. This was causing problems for the planet’s natives, and for the Freemarketeers, and war broke out for resources. Both sides knew that nothing was going to get better if they didn’t start communicating with each other. Mahala was chosen as the Ambassador to Dardius primarily for her apathy. It was a strange tactic, but the truth is the Freemarketeers wanted a solution just as much as the Dardieti. They didn’t want to keep fighting either, so if Mahala could negotiate a peace, and they would have to make sacrifices, then fine. This is what she did, and after years of fighting, the war was finally over. But that didn’t mean all of the issues between them were resolved. Mahala’s job as an ambassador was just getting started.