The Story So Far:

Humanity entered the galaxy with the discovery of FTL. They began to make contact with the galactic community, based on trading ships operated by aliens of thousands of different species. Soon, they realized that the aliens had forgotten to invent some rather important concepts that humans have taken for granted.

Currency. Banking. Economy.

Without money, aliens had extremely hobbled trading networks that relied on barter. They slowly accumulated wealth and technology over generations of inheritance. Despite these inheritances, quality of life for the average alien was prehistoric by human standards due to lack of consumer goods.

As humans expanded, they started running into the Ribbiths, the first species to discover FTL, who had been oppressing the traders of the galaxy with a protection racket. They had leveraged their first mover advantage into a permanent monopoly on violence, until the rising humans quickly put an end to that.

Humans introduce themselves to their neighborhood, bringing their lean, mean economic machine into the stars, but they run into some unintended consequences:

Not all development is equal. Not all transitions are smooth.

At Gakrek, humans showed their tremendous capability for goodwill and altruism with shiploads of food aid and relief for a planet suffering from widespread planetary famine. And at Bohor Orbital, the aliens showed that the values humans held dear were not unique or unteachable.

With the establishment of the Galactic Union, the galaxy entered an age of rapid modernization, a gold rush of unimaginable scale. And as with every revolution, as the saying goes: there are winners and there are…

Gophor, Gakrek

Enrico woke up to the sun shining in on his face, from the high window of the small brick room he was boarding in. He pulled out his phone from his cargo pants pockets and checked the time. It was six and-

Has it really been four years?

From a middle-class family in Italy, he had moved to Chicago before First Contact. The stories of people getting rich off the aliens triggered an early mid-life crisis for him at the young age of 30. He said goodbye to his parents and friends and sold all his belongings. Then he hopped a ride on board a trader spacecraft with a bought cargo full of dry foods and durable consumer goods to the first destination they would go to: Gakrek.

He struck a deal with a spaceport security guard to look after his goods while he hiked all over Gakrek, looking for new experiences and meeting new folks. He introduced his race to many Gaks who had never even seen any aliens before.

And right when he thought he had figured the planet out, the famine struck.

Millions of Gaks starved to death every day. Watching them waste away, there was nothing Enrico could do other than open up his warehouse of food to feed them, as he took one day at a time himself as well.

When the Red Cross arrived, he joined up and became one of tens of thousands of people handing out supplies to the hungry aliens.

And when they left three years later, he decided to stay. It was a booming economy. He could feel the electricity in the air when the local Gaks chattered excitedly about new plows, new irrigation, and the new credits that had flooded their planet.

The past few months, he had been crashing at the place of one of his friends from back in the pre-famine days, a young security guard by the name of Grob and his wife. As he entered their dining room…

"Good morning Grood," he intoned in his terrible Gak pronunciation. He was getting better at it every day, but his mouth just refuses to make the right sounds sometimes.

Grob's wife, a teacher at a local school, giggled and also made an attempt at cultural exchange, "gnooood moooorning reecoooo". They both agreed that she was much better at English than he was at Gak.

"You're making rice for breakfast?" He asked as he turned on his translator, not smelling much from her stove.

"Yes!" She nodded enthusiastically as she glanced at her simmering pot.

Enrico wasn't a fan of the way she made rice. For some reason, the Gaks loved to eat rice at the consistency of oatmeal, which reminded him of how some Asian cultures cooked it for breakfast. His personal theory was that wet rice requires less actual rice but was just as filling, even though it contained fewer calories. This must appeal to the Gaks who were used to dealing with a constant shortage of food.

It was better than nothing.

"Anything you need me to get at the spaceport later?" Enrico asked out of habit.

Grood shook her head. She didn't need much. School wasn't in season. Like many Gak teachers, she only taught a class for three months out of the year: the three months during winter when nobody had anything to do. The rest of the time, she stayed home and tended to the house.

Without modern household conveniences, hers was a full-time job.

Grob woke up. It was a good sleep. He could see the sun from his window.

Pulling on a t-shirt, he made his way into the dining room where Enrico was making the table and serving the rice. "Good morning Enrico", he didn't even bother with English. Enrico had a translator anyway, so Grob wasn't sure why he even tried to learn Gak. Just one of the many weird things that the human did.

"Hey Grob," Enrico glanced up, squinting at his t-shirt, "ah it's the Falcons winning Super Bowl 51 today eh?"

Like many humans, Enrico always teased him about his cheap Earth-made t-shirts, but he loved how comfortable and colorful they were. Enrico had tried to explain what football was to Grob once, but the concept of deliberately expending thousands of calories of energy just to advance 120 yards in one direction repeatedly… It was simply too alien for Gakrek right now.

As he does every day, Enrico browsed the now massive selection of goods at the Gophor Spaceport market. All the vendors moved to using credits a while ago, and he could pay for things by transferring over money from his bank account back on Earth.

There were several farm goods vendors, who had by far the largest booths with multiple cargo shipping containers they'd "appropriated" from the Earth relief effort. Enrico found it amusing how much stuff the volunteers of Earth left behind as worthless junk were now being used or sold on the market as premium items. A few of the food vendors had moved into what was previously the large briefing tent for relief workers to keep their produce out of the sun.

There were now also small electronics vendors selling Earth compatible batteries and gadgets. These were mostly for the few humans who opted to stay on Gakrek, though a few of the farmers were beginning to invest in some agricultural use items imported from Earth. Enrico had bought a FTL Internet adaptor from one of them, but it was still expensive to use.

Ma Bell charged by the minute, even with the abundance of human telecom infrastructure in Gakrek space. Some things don't change.

Enrico entered the food tents. There was a vendor selling potatoes, one peddling Earth chicken, and to his surprise, there was a merchant loading up what looked like a Coca-Cola syrup cartridge into a soda machine. Enrico watched him start filling cheap plastic bags with the mixed sugary drink and placing them on the table for sale.

Bagged soda, what a world!

"Hey Enrico!" It was Ghili, one of Gordorker's adopted daughters, who had set up a little stand next to the Cola vendor. "Over here!"

"How are you doing Ghili? And are you here alone?" Enrico asked, curious if Gordorker was at the market too. He made his acquaintance with the middle-aged Gak farmer a while back when he started selling his wheat crops at the spaceport.

"Yes! And I'm good! Dad lets me come make trades by myself now," Ghili beamed proudly, and then looking a little shy, "do you want to buy some bread?"

How could he say no to her? "Ok, how much?"

"2.99 GC for a loaf of white and 5.99 for a loaf of whole wheat!" Ghili recited automatically. She had learned to read and write numbers from a human Red Cross volunteer, and when she was old enough, Gordorker immediately put her to work as a merchant for his food products. After all, doing work for the family was the entire point of raising so many children in the first place.

"Six bucks for a loaf!" Enrico feigned outrage, "I can pay for a ride to Earth, get a big load of bread, and come back for less money!"

"Maybe, but they won't be freshly baked like these are." Enrico was skeptical; Ghili's trek to the spaceport must be at least half a day. He played along, sighing dramatically and wagging his finger at her, "ok, fine, I'll have two. But you better give me your two biggest loaves!"

She swiped his card, he typed in his code, and the transaction went through. "Say Ghili, where did you learn to make bread? You ever been to Earth?"

"N…no. Gromor, my brother, has! He works at a mine and one time, he sent me back a book of how to make all kinds of Earth food," Ghili said. Then looking a little disappointed, "though we can't make most of them here because we don't have the right spices and ingredients."

"Oh, that's too bad," Enrico said. Then he added, "though I can introduce you to one of my trader friends who may be able to import some of them if enough people here want the-"

"Really?" She asked, her face lighting up very hopefully, "please! There's so many things I want: cinnamon, garlic, ginger, sesame, nutmeg…"

As he was typing a message to N'har, a trader from Yis'Meh, on the spaceport Wi-Fi requesting the items Ghili wanted, Enrico looked up at all the vendors. Suddenly, he was struck by a thought. Something was missing here.

They had plenty of goods. Food, items, wares. Goods. Raw goods. Manufactured goods. In some ways, Gophor Spaceport had so much more variety of goods on sale than even many of the spaceports on Earth. But there was one thing missing. Something nagged at the back of his head.

As he finished typing and started browsing on his phone, he saw some advertisements on social media and realized what it was.

Services.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of traders now flood in and out of Gophor every day. It was a busy spaceport. At midday, some of them would take a break, go over to the food vendors, and buy some fruit or even cooked chicken for lunch. That was where they chatted with other vendors about the latest news in the business.

Despite the massive number of customers that passed by the spaceport every day, there was not a single restaurant in sight.

In underdeveloped countries where the majority of people were poor, this would make a lot of sense. Most of the poor can't afford to eat out; even in developed countries, it was somewhat of a drain on the middle class's finances to eat at restaurants too often.

But the beings who frequented Gophor Spaceport weren't poor. Not at all. They're the wealthiest individuals in the galaxy.

When the currency revolution swept across the galaxy, most creatures got richer. From being barely sustainable feeding his own family, farmers like Gordorker would start being able to comfortably feed thousands of people soon. Crafts-beings were starting to assembly line their process and a smattering of mass-produced low tech alien consumer goods were starting to appear on the galactic markets. The factories of Earth moved fast, but there were only so many of them that could be built, and the galaxy had thousands of planets.

Traders' wealth exploded exponentially. By virtue of starting out richer, they had even better access to capital than the poor and destitute on Gakrek. Many of them were even becoming millionaires now, and many knew that the famous Zikzik probably would have eventually ended up a billionaire if he hadn't tragically died on Bohor Orbital.

Most traders spent most of their money on two things: their spaceships, and Earth. And they were mostly buying their spaceships and parts from Earth too.

Earth became obscenely wealthy from this massive inflow of capital, but this was not a factor holding back growth on other planets. After all, whether people ate out more or less often or consumed some quality of life services… It just doesn't have that big an effect on other decisions like buying a new car or house or yacht or spaceship. Maybe a little for some, but not that much.

Traders started finding themselves having plenty of disposable income to burn, and not enough places to spend it on.

Chicago, Earth

Rey Crawley was a low-level manager at the McDonald's corporate HQ in Chicago. She supervised a team of engineers who made websites for the company's promotions and special events. It wasn't terrible work, and she was paid very well. But she was finding it harder to get out of bed to go to work every morning.

Rey had started out as a promising shift manager at a local McDonald's store at 16, which is surprisingly… totally legal. She graduated to managing the entire restaurant at 22 when the owners caught the previous manager skimming money off the top. She turned the failing franchise around in a short two years, and they sent her to McDonald's HQ's famous Hamburger University.

There she got a degree in "Hamburgerology". Surprisingly, it wasn't a total waste of time. They taught her business development, management skills (some of which she already knew by intuition), supply chains, leadership…etc all that jazz. It was a prestigious place of learning, with a lower acceptance rate than Harvard, and it was supposed to put her on track to owning her own restaurant one day. This was when things fell apart. Or rather the economy did.

With stiff competition popping up everywhere else in the restaurant industry in the early 21st century, there just weren't that many places that wanted a new fast food restaurant. She couldn't find a bank that was willing to loan her the money to get started. Without a place to go, and with a fairly niche education, she ended up just applying to work at the corporate office.

It wasn't bad at all. She was earning a cushy six-figure salary and saving up cash while still dreaming the business owner dream.

A few years later, she noticed a social media post from a high school friend, featuring pictures of flora and fauna from a different planet.

Rey: Long time no talk Enrico, how's it going out there in the galaxy?

Enrico: Great! I love Gakrek. You ever been?

Rey: I wish! I haven't even been to space…

Enrico: Ah so what do you do now?

Rey: Manager at McDs HQ

Enrico: Wow! I heard that pays a lot!

Rey: Yeah… it's not bad. A bit boring though haha!

Enrico: Hey, I've got a question about that actually…

After a lengthy night of conversation, Rey quit her job the next week. She converted her savings into GC at the local branch office, and bought a translator and some gadgets. Then, she hitchhiked onto the next ride to Gakrek out of Chicago O'Hare Spaceport.

If you wrote a book about globalization and the American way of life in the 20th century, McDonald's would be its own chapter. It popularized the assembly line method of preparing food, mostly invented the drive-through restaurant, and it has a long and fascinating history around its iconic branding, American soft power, and its major role in the obesity epidemic.

One crucial thing to note about the modern McDonald's though, is that many experts, even those at the company, will tell you that it is NOT a restaurant company. Its main business is not to sell milkshakes, delicious fries, or even burgers.

It is a real estate management company, one where they tell their tenants precisely how they're allowed to pay rent.

(They do run a few of their restaurants, but those make less than a fifth of their money actually selling food. And they would really prefer that number to be less than five percent.)

This is how their franchising model works: if you're a prospective owner of a McDonald's franchise, they train you, sell you some signs and menus, and get you hooked up with their global supply chain. And then they tell you, "good luck and remember to pay rent on time."

Unless you make their brand look bad or break a few rules, they don't really care that much about what happens in your store. The most important thing for them is that you stay in business and pay them between 5% to 30% of your revenue.

That's why the quality of service and environment of every one of its franchises can seem so different, and yet the food almost always tastes the same. The coffee and burgers come from the same supply chain, but the management and ownership of each store may vary wildly.

Collecting from franchise owners instead of selling food somewhat shields the $50 billion real estate company from fluctuations in local economies. No matter how much labor pricing changes or how much the price of chicken goes up or down, they get their rent payments and franchising fees.

When humanity first reached out into the stars, the prices of shipping goods were high, and building a multi-planetary supply chain was a fool's dream. But then, credits got introduced, orbital outposts got built, standard pricing systems optimized the inefficiencies out of the galactic economy, and the major trade barrier known as the Trader Guild got the boot. Suddenly, the idea of having an offworld franchise became much more feasible.

And with a huge abundance of grown human food courtesy of the famine relief, as well as capital from the vitalized economy, the clown in red, white, and yellow was looking at several offworld planets as test sites for its plans of galactic domination.

Gophor Spaceport, A Week Later

As the hatches opened, the warmth of the Gakrek atmosphere hit Rey like a sack of moldy potatoes. That's what it smelled like too.

She thanked the Bhak trader who gave her a ride, swiped her card in his trading Terminal, and tipped him a generous 250 GC for the ride. Then without looking back at his shocked expression, Rey buckled the straps on her backpack and walked off the ramp towards her destination: the only other human she could see.

"Enrico! Haven't seen you in a while! How's Gakrek been treating you?" Rey shouted at him as they came in for a short hug.

"Great," he replied, smiling, "a lot better now that's for sure."

"Oh yeah? I saw about the famine thing on the news," she shuddered, not ever having experienced actual hunger herself, "must have been real bad."

"Yeah, yeah, it was," Enrico said, and then added quietly, "some people here don't like to talk about it."

"Gotcha," Rey said solemnly. "So… show me around?"

About an hour later, Rey and Enrico found themselves a spot around the edge of the market, where they sat down at an abandoned parking lot in use during the spacelift. They took out their tablets, and started planning the future.

"Since you came here, I assume you think this could work," Enrico started to question.

"Yup, I've heard that the higher ups have been talking about something like this for years," Rey said, getting excited. "And there's always been one thing or another stopping them, but the big thing has always been shipping cost."

"Right."

"But costs have been decreasing for years. Even if it isn't profitable today, it will be soon," she concluded, "so we gotta start now for when it is."

"Got it. Alright, heheh, so I actually have no idea how to run a company or a restaurant-," Enrico said nervously.

"Yup. You'd have no idea where to even start. That's why I'm here," said Rey very matter-of-factly, "what I need for you to do is to help me with the supply chain."

"Supply chain?" he sputtered, "But I have no idea how that works either!" Before he came to Gakrek, he was a development chef for a large pizza chain that had a less than popular reception in Chicago, which had its own pizza culture. The most management experience he'd ever had was making sure that he didn't run out of beer in his fridge at home.

"Don't you? When you showed me around the spaceport, you told me which trader brought in the syrup for the soda machine. You pointed out that the chicken farmer was a growing business that didn't have many chickens. You know who the honest crafts workers are and which ones might try to get one over on you. You're on a first name basis with the daughter of the biggest farmer around, and Enrico," Rey said seriously, continuing without taking a breath. "We're staying at the house of the guy who enforces the laws here! One of the biggest problems chains have expanding into Third World countries at home is having to pay all the right bribes to the right people, and you said his wife loves you? Bruh."

"Oh."

"Yeah, don't get a big head or anything," she smirked. "But did you think I was gonna get on a spaceship without knowing the kind of person who I was going into business with?"

Their talk segued into the finance discussion they had started online: Rey had enough savings from her work as a corporate manager to get started and to get people interested. She was the one who wanted to own the place, so there wasn't much dispute there.

Enrico just wanted to get into the ground floor of a new business. He knew this would help the people he'd grown to like, and it would be an exciting new adventure with a business his Gak friends have never seen before.

Their interests aligned.

At the end of the day, Enrico found Grob to drive them home.

He was chatting with another security guard, which their translators caught from far away. "… and since they both wanted the last cargo container, they shared it, but Gromula keeps taking the wares on his side… ah hey Enrico", Grob was saying as he came into view. "Ready to go home?"

"Yeah sure, and this here's the friend I was talking about. Grob, this is Rey. Rey, Grob."

After introductions, Grob drove with them sitting in the back of the truck while complaining about his work. The vendors were petty and got into catfights all the time. The traders threw their trash everywhere and never cleaned up after themselves. The spaceport doesn't pay them enough.

Judging from Enrico's amused expression across from her, Rey surmised it was a pretty average day for Grob.

"Grooooooood," Grob yelled into the open door, "we have another visitor from outer space!"

"Welcome to our homes!" Grood had known that Rey was coming for a week now, and she had spent it cleaning and preparing everything. She showed Rey around her makeshift kitchen attached to the dining room. She noticed it was just a plastic fold out table from the Red Cross and several plastic stackable chairs placed next to it.

Grood then pointed to their guest room and shrugged, "we don't have that much room, only one for guests and one for us, so you will have to share with Enrico." Then Grood made a big theatrical wink as if she had some unique insight into the nature of their friendship.

Rey had expected to have to share rooms, but blushed at the comment anyway, "that's not a problem. I brought my own sleeping bag," and as she pulled out items from her camping bag, said "and I've got something for you, Grood."

"For me?" Grood actually squealed.

It was a portable sewing machine kit that took double-A batteries. "I heard they haven't started importing these yet-" and the rest of what she was about to say was muffled by Grood giving her a joyful teddy bear hug.

Wife of the guy who they'd normally have to pay bribes to and all.

While Rey and Enrico were sleeping in the house of Grob and Grood, a major geopolitical shift was happening a mere few hundred light years away.

Of all the species, the Zakabarans were some of the slowest to adapt to humanity's introduction of credits and economic reforms to the galaxy.

The Zakabarans were an old species. Like many other such species, they had achieved space travel countless generations before, and they were able to colonize and exploit the resources of other planets in their system. When they discovered raw resources on an outer system planet with a liveable atmosphere, they sent ships, machinery, and people there.

Over time, Zakabara Second developed a population of almost a billion and a distinct economy from the homeworld. Without arable soil, they could not cultivate crops. They had to import them all from Prime, which they exchanged for the raw materials they mined and the output from their growing processed goods manufacturing sector. This was not a problem; after all, Prime traded food to everywhere else.

When humans and their money came, Zakabara had been the center of food exports for centuries. When cheap Earth fruits that were higher in nutrition and lower in cost hit the galactic market, farmers lost the most in the food export business.

Doing what most other planets did, Zakabara Prime started to industrialize. Agricultural abundance was no longer the path to prosperity, so they diversified. They put their highest skilled laborers to work in factories, developing and creating new engines, new ships, and even weapons in some cases. Their farmers abandoned farms, and they started to work in large factories manufacturing low cost, low tech goods for newly formed corporations.

After all that happened, despite how poor the entire galaxy started out, it still had thousands of planets, full of billions of thinking, working, and productive beings. The aliens were catching on.

Unlike what other species did, Zakabara started heavily restricting what could be imported into their spaceports. Food was, of course, banned. What Zakabarans would eat, they would grow themselves.

On the other hand, Zakabara Second was also undergoing changes. As a colony, the people of Second traded mostly with their cousins on Prime, and were mostly unaffected by the money revolution at first. When cheap Earth food flooded the galactic markets, Prime farmers' were forced to sell their food below cost (in credits) to Second.

However, as the Prime food export industry collapsed, they started to grow less food, and the cost of Zakabaran food in their colony went back to normal.

Normal was way above galactic average.

To make things worse, with the mass development of Prime's industrial sectors, the price of goods dropped in the system. They were no longer as willing to buy from Second.

In direct contradiction to the policies dictated by the centralized government on Prime, Second started directly trading with the outside galaxy and with Earth.

This made some people on the homeworld very, very unhappy.

These new developments did not go unnoticed at a quiet government building at Langley, Earth.