Galactic Credit HQ

"The whole hecking planet?!" Sarah asked incredulously, "we're supposed to sanction their whole planet?"

Cathy nodded at her sympathetically over the Internet and said, "that's just for us to buy time until we figure out why the Zakabarans are conducting a massive military buildup."

The news had hit the people of Earth hard. Cutting them off from money was the weakest of all the possible responses thrown around. The idea of aliens invading Earth that had gone away when humans found out about the state of the galaxy were now returning. Some pundits were calling for a preemptive strike.

"Is this even technically possible?" Sarah turned towards her team.

"Sort of, we already have FTL triangulation worked out to a pretty good accuracy that we can essentially geo-fence them off," Jen replied, "but there's nothing stopping them from relaying their transactions with FTL to other systems. At that point, we'll be playing whack-a-mole."

Cathy nodded and said, "that's a good start. We just want to make it inconvenient for them for a while, force them to come to the negotiating table…"

Gophor, Gakrek

Enrico woke up with an ear-splitting headache. His eyelids felt like they were welded shut. He'd had too much champagne at the franchise deal celebration last night. Chicago had finally signed the franchising agreement. He barely remembered being helped into his straw mattress by Rey.

"Rise and shine!" she said cheerfully, holding up a cup of freshly brewed coffee. One of the first things she had the space trucker FedEx over to Gakrek was a load of coffee beans. Without electricity and electric-powered coffee machines, it was a lot more complicated to make the drink, but it was ultimately just beans in hot water, and she had the beans.

"How are you always up so early?" Enrico asked sleepily.

"I think my body rhythm will just never adjust to these longer day cycles," Rey said, referring to the slightly longer days and nights on Gakrek, "but we've got so much to do before we can open our business, gah! C'mon let's go!"

She then bent down and planted a chaste kiss on his exposed neck.

That woke him up in a hurry. Rey was his boss, and some part of this constant flirting felt deeply, deeply wrong even though they'd done nothing. Yet. But to Enrico, she was also the first human woman he'd had physical contact with in over a year. It didn't help that they were probably the only two human beings in at least a few hundred miles.

"Ugh, fine. Let me get dressed."

Grood was in the dining room, cooking on the new mini stove they got her. Wet rice, again. Do these Gaks never tire of it? Rey thought.

"Grood, do you need something from the spaceport market later?"

"No," Grood replied without taking her eyes off the stove, which was handling just fine by itself, "we have plenty of food in the stasis box."

From what Rey saw, Grood always seemed busy with housework and could never make time for her needs.

"Alright," Rey said, "one of these days we'll find you something you want, other than more food to cook for us."

McDonald's, Gophor Location

At the unopened store, Rey and Enrico split off to try to cover the maximum ground possible. Today's objective was to work with the locals to get her restaurant off the ground.

For the last month, human contractors from Earth had been space lifted in to install most of the kitchen equipment and interior decor they needed. This was by far the most considerable expense so far in the project, exceeding even the cost of its construction and surrounding infrastructure, but they couldn't avoid it.

Now, Rey had a kitchen but nobody to run it. Sure, she could just hire some adventurous folks from home who want to see the galaxy, but that would be inconvenient. Besides, hiring locals would be good for the Gak economy, and the more buy-in she got from them, the easier it would be to do business here in the future. It would surely look bad if she only ever hired humans in her store, and it wouldn't look bad just here on Gakrek but also Earth if people back home found out about it…

Which was why Enrico was out hitting up his contacts, and she was sitting at a temporarily setup fold out table outside, under a big sign that said, "SEEKING NEW EMPLOYEES, PAY 1 CR AN HOUR" in Gak, and handing out fliers and employment application forms to curious Gak merchants passing by.

From the perspective of a resident of this poor planet, this was an incredibly generous offer. Heck, even in some parts of developing countries like China, this would be an improvement over the average fast food workers' hourly wage minus benefits. Though skeptical, there was now a growing line of Gaks who were interested to see what the catch was.

Some of them were illiterate, but Earth's relief volunteers did a lot of teaching in their downtime the last few years, so she only had to help a few of them fill out the forms.

"Because every day is twenty eight hours," Rey explained the free meal policy to one applicant who was very, very interested in the concept, "we've divided up every day into seven shifts of four hours each. Every shift you work, you can get one free meal on our menu." She pointed at the colorful menu, and added, "except for the café items."

Because of the low cost of labor and high cost of transport for imported food items, Rey realized that unlike Earth where some employees don't even take full advantage of the free meals, the cost of feeding her employees here on Gakrek would probably far exceed their wages. She cursed herself quietly for not prominently featuring that on the banner, then took a sharpie and asked the applicant to add "FREE MEALS" in Gak to the banner for her.

Rey noticed that she was now getting significantly more applicants.

Enrico was in the food tent, with a slightly different mission from Rey. Instead of labor, his job was addressing the much higher cost of doing business on Gakrek: food imports. Though the newly constructed orbital outpost was beginning to drastically lower those costs, they were still much higher than they would be on Earth. His goal is to lower the cost of imports by seeing whether he could buy some of it here on Gakrek.

Naturally, he immediately walked over to Ghili's booth to find to his surprise that she was not there. Instead, there was a slightly older female Gak, standing in her place. He racked his brain to try to figure out who this was, but he was bad with faces to begin with, not to mention Gak faces.

"Buy some bread, Enrico?" she asked boldly as she noticed Enrico's stare.

"Hey, sorry I'm just awful with faces. Where's Ghili?" he asked, "normally she would set up here."

"I'm Garns," she giggled, then nodding, "Ghili's older step-sister. Dad found out that she is so good at numbers that he makes her stay at home to do all of his numbers for us now."

"Ah," Enrico nodded, Ghili was indeed excellent at math, "that makes sense! Nice to meet you again, Garns, do you bake the bread too?"

"Sure! Ghili and I learned how to bake bread together!" Garns said proudly, "it was from a human book that one of my brothers sent back from Earth, and recently, we got shipments of garlic which makes it taste wonderful. Would you like to try some?"

Enrico smiled, "I think I'm good for now, but Rey and I are considering buying a lot of bread from your family in the future. How much do you think you can bake if you just made bread all day?"

"If I made bread all day?"

There is a field of study in economics called development economics. It came into vogue in the middle of the 20th century, when industrialized nations started looking at investments into the underdeveloped world, and they produced several important theories that are still studied today.

One of these ideas is the strategy of unbalanced growth. It proposes that certain sectors of a developing economy should be focused on, rather than letting investments spread equally, to produce an imbalance in economic growth. This imbalance would allow the country to develop faster. The layman's analogy looks like this:

Two hikers come across a high wall on their path. They could both choose to climb it at the same time, which would be very hard because the wall is taller than both of them. The obviously better option would be one hiker crouching down and giving the other a boost to the top of the wall. Then, the hiker on top of the wall would lean over, hold out their hand, and pull up the person at the bottom.

The hikers represent sectors of the economy. The idea is to boost one sector of the economy efficiently due to scale, and have them pull the whole economy along.

To stretch the analogy, a critical part of this process is that the hiker on top of the wall has to actually lean down and pull the one on the bottom up instead of just going on their merry way, and this is not always a given.

If this happens, the economy stagnates, like it did in certain Latin American countries in the post-war era. If they can avoid this pitfall, the economy thrives, like it did in certain East Asian countries during the 1970s. In the economist world, it became a contentious debate as to which sectors should be the ones boosted up onto the top of the wall first and which sectors are more likely to pull other ones along.

The strategy of unbalanced growth rests on the concept of linkage, forward and backward linkage. Linkage is the idea that interdependence between different parts of the economy will encourage growth when outside investment stimulates any part of it.

When Gakrek's craftsbeings started increasing their productivity with imported Earth machines, they started producing more farming equipment. Because of cheaper steel plows and other machinery, farmers increased their food output. This is forward linkage.

And as the craftsbeings began increasing their productivity, they needed more raw materials from miners to feed their new machines. Because of that, the mining industry grew as well. This is backward linkage.

In the 1980s and 90s, McDonald's expanded internationally into many developing countries, and they created these kinds of backward linkages in their supply chain because they needed locally produced food, which helped industrialize those economies. This was inevitable because internationally, they were not a very vertically integrated company, and they didn't try to be.

Vertical integration is a buzzword that many business managers use as a synonym for success, but what it really means is that a business owns their supply chain. McDonald's does not do this; they do not own their food suppliers. Some analysts would call it a "vertically aligned" business, but that new buzzword is even more broad and ill-defined that it could be used to describe all successful businesses.

The bottom line is: McDonald's keeps open-book contracts with their suppliers. They succeed if their supply chain does, and vice versa. This allows them to set the exact profits each of their suppliers get, and in return, they don't need to shop around for the lowest cost suppliers that could meet quality standards. When they raise standards, McDonald's ensures compliance by investing in these suppliers to make sure they produce higher quality goods.

In some ways, it seems like an ancient way of doing business that relies on trust and handshake deals, but there is no doubt their supply chain is one of their business strengths. This has positive knock-on effects for the local economies of their supply chain.

When McDonald's went to Mexico in the late 1980s, one of their buyers stopped at a local bakery company, Bimbo, to sample their bread. After one mere bite, he rejected its taste out of hand. Sensing a massive opportunity slipping through their fingers, Bimbo spent millions of dollars to develop a better bun and get McDonald's business back.

Now, Grupo Bimbo is its exclusive supplier for hamburger buns in all of Mexico and some parts of Latin America. The business that started with less than a thousand employees is now the largest bakery brand in the world, employing hundreds of thousands of humans in its hundreds of locations all around Earth.

Similarly, when McDonald's went to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, they started with one single store. A company representative stopped by a lettuce collective farm outside Moscow to see if they could sell them a few boxes of lettuce a week, which was almost an unreasonably low volume for a farm.

One of their growers, an astute farmer named Viktor Semenov who had heard of its large operations in the West, said yes and sold them all the lettuce they wanted. Less than ten years later, Mr. Semenov became the Minister of Agriculture for all of Russia; the company he owned has a monopoly on packaged vegetables for the entire country.

Such is the power of backward linkage and the wealth it can create in rapidly developing economies.

McDonald's, Gophor Location

"We'll post the names on the walls. Just come back here from tomorrow to next week," Rey responded to a question about how they would get the answer for their application. This was yet another problem that needed to be solved when almost none of the Gaks had phones and some took a long time to walk to the spaceport. "The training will start after next week for the employed."

Then she saw Enrico heading back towards the restaurant and asked, "back so soon?"

"Ah, I have a lead on where we might be able to replace our buns' supply chain, but it'll require a trip we can take another time," he replied.

"Buns are a great start," she encouraged. It was true, though. Because bulk intergalactic trucking was now mostly done with Earth made spaceships that had efficient reactors, the biggest bottleneck to shipping was not mass but rather volume. Buns took up plenty of space even if they weighed very little. "Where did you find some?"

"We can get Gordorker to supply us," Enrico replied, "but from what his daughter described, it's gonna take a bit of investment for us to scale up."

"Alright, I'll let Chicago know," Rey said, "they did say they'll pay for these kinds of upgrades, for other franchises that are looking to move into other spaceports on Gakrek."

"In the meantime, I found you a prospective employee. The bagged soda merchant in the food tent. His name is Goripli. He already knows how to load and clean the machine, so that'll save some time on training, and he can probably train some of the others. I figure he already knows how to work with human machines so the other stuff in the kitchen wouldn't be too hard for him to grasp," he suggested.

"Sounds good. Did you already ask him?" she inquired.

"Yeah. He's agreed to it already if a position is open for him. We might need to teach him the secret to why our soda tastes better than his though."

After dinner, which was a salted potato, more wet rice, and a bowl of carrot soup, Rey and Enrico gave their compliments to Grood and retreated to their guest room.

As Rey tucked herself into the sleeping bag, she turned off her translator, turned to Enrico who was getting ready for bed on the straw mattress next to her, and asked, "what do you think Grood does at home all day?"

"She mostly cleans and cooks," he replied following her lead, "I think Grood has a small stash of human magazines that she reads from time to time, but she mostly takes care of the house and prepares food and water for us."

"That's it?" Rey asked a little incredulously, "she just does that all day?"

"Yeah," he turned on his side on the mattress to face her, "this is what humans used to do too. Before washing machines, driers, electric stove tops, and vacuum cleaners. Not a lot of free time for the people doing household chores. Why do you think the original feminist movements started around the times they did?"

"Ah I knew that," she said, "but it's still a little hard to grasp that she would spend all day at home just doing the same four or five things every day. Poor Grood. Maybe we should get her some of those appliances… if only there were electricity."

"Yeah that's the thing I keep running into, too. And it's not just Grood, lots of Gaks are like that," Enrico said, "I could ask some of my trader friends from other planets what-"

Suddenly, they heard a high pitch Gak giggle and Grood calling out to them at the door. They hastily turned on their translators, "-hahaha I can hear you guys saying my name in there, what are you guys talking about?"

"Just gossiping about your… very pretty eyes Grood," Rey teased, "good night!"

McDonald's, Gophor Location

Rey ended up deciding on fifteen Gaks per shift, which translated to a little over forty total. It was a big restaurant, and labor was affordable, to put it lightly.

She posted the names of the ones who she hired and their respective shifts on the walls of the restaurant. A crowd gathered around to see, as if to see whether they've won the lottery. After all, despite what seemed to the first world humans like starvation wages, it was significantly higher than what any of the locals earned. And it was steady work and meals. Seeing the names, some walked away excited; others were disappointed. She couldn't hire all of them.

Then, as Rey was about to head to lunch, a tall, skinny Gak wearing a baseball cap walked into the restaurant with Grob trailing behind him.

"Hey, Grob. Who's your friend today?" she asked.

Grob introduced him, "this is Garber. His family is in charge of the operation of the spaceport."

Mildly concerned, she turned to Garber and nodded, saying, "hello Garber, nice to meet you! I'm Rey. How are you doing?" The gears in her brain started to turn, wondering why he was here as she glanced worriedly at Enrico. From his expression, they were both thinking the same thing.

"Hi Rey," he said, "I've noticed you put up a big brick building on our spaceport. I wanted to talk to you about that."

Ah, here it is. Here comes the shakedown. This Gak hadn't objected or even showed his face when they were building the restaurant, she thought, but he's finally figured out its value, and now he's coming to extract his portion of the pie.

Garber continued exactly as expected, "because my family is fed and now paid by the central Gak government, we ask for only small donations from the merchants whose businesses operate on our spaceport to keep it running and fix all the problems that can appear. Of course, this is all a donation, but we really want to make sure things go very smoothly for your new business."

"I understand, how much money is this donation typically?" Rey asked, thinking fast.

Her franchise was already paying rent to Chicago, which was paying rent to Grob, who transferred the money straight back to her. McDonald's headquarters charged them a cool 30,000 credits a month above what they were paying Grob for rent, so that was essentially what she was paying in rent now since she had no revenue.

In the grand scheme of things, it was peanuts, barely an inconvenience. Even some stores in developing countries would salivate at this rental price point for a lot this big. She expected the revenue share to be much more costly in terms of her ongoing cost. But she only got it this cheap because she essentially squatted on the spaceport for free and built a structure there with her own money.

If this Garber guy comes in and decides to take his cut, then she might need to redo some of her business plan calculations-

"Good, good, I like dealing with people who know what they're doing," Garber looked around and contemplated, "This is a nice store, and it's in a prime location. The best on the entire spaceport, no doubt. It sits right in between the food tents and luxury good vendors. You will get many customers."

Plus, you're gullible humans, and it should not be that hard to squeeze money out of you, he thought silently in his head. After a bit more calculation and factoring in the fact that some human volunteers did save his life a while back, Garber decided to high ball a figure to start the negotiation, "I think fifty-five credits a month is a reasonable donation, wouldn't you agree?"

Rey almost burst out laughing in relief, but her professionalism forced her to keep her face neutral to avoid angering him or changing his mind.

On her right, Enrico was already pulling his card out of his pocket.

Enrico saw N'har, the trader, while grabbing a couple of peaches for lunch at the food tent. He was still making trips down to Gakrek well despite the orbital outposts; in many cases where the goods aren't transported in bulk, the profits were still well worth the reactor fuel prices of traversing the gravity well, especially for the general purpose ships that most aliens were still using.

"Hey N'har, how are your routes going?"

"Hi Enrico, business is good and 'demand' is high," N'har beamed as he savored the new human word he learned from a trader, "I'm so glad I got into the Earth goods trade early because everyone wants them now. Have I told you the story about how I was one of the first aliens ever to take Galactic Credits?"

"Yes, N'har, many times," Enrico smiled, "what are you carrying now?"

"Mostly human appliances now," N'har replied, then rattled off a list of goods he was carrying in his hold, "stasis boxes, coolers, freezers, stoves, ovens, microwaves, washing machines…"

"I actually have a question about that," Enrico said, slightly puzzled, "how are the aliens on the other planets using those? They couldn't have gotten electricity infrastructure to everyone that quickly, right?"

"Ah, right and wrong," N'har said smugly, "they don't have the electricity lines like you do on Earth. That seems like a lot of time and work to set up, especially if they have to dig underground like you guys do. What many of the other planets do is they set up a generator at the spaceport hooked up to the reactor fuel depot, and then they plug their Bhak batteries in-"

"Bhak batteries?" Enrico asked. He'd never heard of those yet, even though he'd had to set up the solar panels on the roof and some batteries to go with them.

"Yeah, the new standardized high-density batteries that are coming out of Earth. They adapted some technology from a machine they imported from Bhak a while back," N'har replied amused, "and everyone thinks it's funny that the humans name the things they make… Bohor air filters, Bhak batteries, and Ribb engines, but the rest of the galaxy just calls them Earth air filters, Earth batteries, and Earth engines."

"Ah ok, so these batteries hold enough juice to power household appliances?" Enrico asked, ignoring his commentary on xeno linguistics upon seeing the possibilities light up in his head.

"Sure! They can power anything and everything I sell. You just need to charge them at the spaceport once every few days."

"How much are they?"

N'har thought for a while, put on his businessbeing's hat, and then replied to him, "because you're such a good friend, I can get you a generator and charger for 2,200 credits, and 150 credits for each battery. I will throw in an outlet adapter for every battery you buy, free of charge."

Enrico thought about it, but not for that long. They could use the generator chargers and hook them up at the reactor fuel pump. It'll be useful for the restaurant if it ever ran out of battery power for the solar panels when the sun is not up.

Besides, this was also an opportunity to get Grob and Grood some household appliances to thank them for occupying their house.

"Deal. I'll take the generator and ten batteries. And I want one of those rice cookers I know you have in your cargo."

He was getting really tired of wet rice for breakfast and dinner.

Galactic Union HQ

"Secretary General Wilson, the bird face is on the line," Amanda's secretary said outside her office.

"Put her through."

The face of an oversized parrot appeared on the projector. It was Popptaw, her counterpart from Zakabara, and also the leader of their planetary government: some species just didn't delegate responsibilities very well. They exchanged greetings, and she got down to business immediately.

"Amanda, you know that your money ban is hurting our people and our industries. We need imports from other planets to feed our factories. This goes against your own principles of free trade and galactic exchange of goods and wealth! "

"Popptaw, our people see you and your war economy as an increasing threat. Please. We've made our ask very clear. You just need to publish honest reports about the state of your weapons manufacturing industries, and we'll lift our sanctions."

Popptaw shifted uncomfortably in her perch, then said, "and if we give you reports about the state of our weapons industry, you will promise to restore our access to Galactic Credits?"

"They need to be detailed reports about numbers, deployments, and our people will need to see that you are serious about transparency," Amanda said, hedging, "we know from our history that the galaxy will not survive an industrialized interplanetary or even galactic war. Nobody wants that."

"And if we publish this information, we will put ourselves at the mercy of Earth and other planets," Popptaw countered, "we will need assurances that there will be no invasion of our planets or subjugation of our species."

"We're not looking to invade!" Amanda said, almost exasperated. This was a common conversation with new planets joining the Galactic Union. They were always suspicious that the humans were looking to expand into their territory and suck their resources dry. Which wasn't that surprising given that's exactly what the humans thought the aliens would do if they had the chance. "The Galactic Union charter specifically prohibits wars of expansion, and we have never violated those principles."

"We need guarantees. We need Earth to promise in front of all the other species in the GU that none of its ships will ever enter the Zakabara system without our permission!"

Popptaw was throwing up many red flags here, but Amanda could not tell what they were. Maybe the Zakabarans were planning on banning Earth traders from entering the system? They were already doing that at most spaceports and humans weren't really making that much of a profit from Zakabara. Unfortunately, she didn't have much time to consider it.

The sanctions on Zakabara were hurting, but they were also making a few other planets nervous. The other species may not be fans of the bird faces, but they were not happy with the idea that Earth could just arbitrarily decide to turn off the tap of wealth that was flowing into their planetary economies.

"Alright. We'll draw up that resolution and lift sanctions if you publish your most detailed reports about your armaments industries and the deployment of your ships," she said. If there were anything off about these reports…

"Thank you, Secretary General. We take our sovereignty very seriously."