Taller Tetha was quite happy. The work to make sure that the local market for various feeling rations were coming out in their favor. In fact although they did not want to expose it there was a surprising abundance of the raw materials for all the refugees provided by the vessel’s crew.

Without care and management of favors and debts it was likely that the entire exchange rate would have dropped to zero. But Taller Tetha had been clever and wise and with its consortium had managed to use temporary deficits and bubbles to wrap up via debt the majority of the refugee’s rights to stimulants and motivation into a centralized fund which was parceled and distributed for services and further work vouchers among the small community.

Naturally Taller Tetha and their collaborators were left fat and plump able to draw long and deep of satisfaction and contentment while the others had to labor at their whim for the privilege. Equally thankfully the crew seemed disinclined to interfere with these actions and furthermore they seemed to be greatly employing the juveniles and larva. Which made for a limited labor pool and further cemented Taller Tetha’s monopolization of the various whims and motive fluids. For the necessary valve adjustments and maintenance jobs were already favored by their decrees and requests.

All of this made the discomfort of organs shifting against its chambers bearable as the vessel began to accelerate free of Redweed and proceed out into the unknown.

Taller Tetha was hopeful about the future. They had come board a brain shriveled and panicked refugee and already even before departure they were growing fat and rich again!

It made the intervening travels seem bright and hopeful!

...

There was oddities in the market, the labor pool of juveniles was crashing. Where before they had possessed thousands of spawn and juveniles to see to the various chamber maintenance in the hold now there were scarcely a dozen. All indentured to Taller Tetha of course but it was becoming inconvenient. It had been required to request crew interventions to maintain the various life support and recyclers for the population of refugees.

This crash was disturbing but at the same time the crew were happy to oblige with requests for care and even accepted requests for increased feed stocks to begin another spawning of reproductive contracts.

Inquiries into where precisely all the spawn had gone were simply met with ‘employed elsewhere in the vessel’.

The crew even offered to distribute reproductives as Taller Tetha dictated.

Taller Tetha was still rich and free to rule the refugee hold as the richest clerk on the ship. Now it even had a manner in which to direct the reproductive contracts of the others as well? It did not see anything wrong with having an even more privileged position.

All the better to secure itself a good position when they made port.

...

The market was growing even more odd, although any instabilities were easily resolved by direction of the crew to shore up gaps. In exchange for favors and credits of course!

However with the crew being so diligent there was very little work being done by most of the actors in the market any more. Very little demand for focus, or motivation. Just reproductive contracts and bliss juice selling strong while everything else diminished into worthlessness.

In addition Taller Tetha had started noticing quite a few of its peers in the original consortium had gone quiet and settled into simply producing offspring. Joining what had originally been the lower rungs of their little micro-economy in the same endeavors. It seemed a bit perverse honestly.

The Refugees were spawning what by Taller Tetha’s count must have been millions now. But was hardly making a dent in the massive employment demands the crew seemed to be filled with. It was honestly getting more and more disturbing. But their accounts were relatively speaking thousands of times greater than any other on the ship.

Still the crew were dutifully willing to allocate more of the infrastructure vouchers to Taller tetha in exchange for filling their labor shortages. It seemed excessive but at the same time it was obvious their demand was so high they would accept lucrative deals.

...

It was hard to realize when precisely it had happened but Taller Tetha came to realize they were alone. Yes there were other clerks. If you could call the half dissolved nerve stems endlessly bursting with eggs the same creatures at all. But there was no real exchange to the market. Taller Tetha was no longer the richest clerk in a thriving economy, but the sole gardener of a mass of living-dead egg factories.

Taller Tetha had not seen or heard from any of the millions of juveniles that should have been produced already. They were alone, with only the crew to talk too.

And it had come to realize that there had never been and never would be any exchange with the crew.

They simply gave Taller Tetha whatever it asked for they simply took the harvests of juveniles. They murdered and mulched one of the breeder bags that had come of its closest partner in the initial coalition simply because they had said there was a infection ( a completely invented and fictional statement).

Taller Tetha was alone and where they had thought they were rich they realized this was actually incredible poverty. Was all their vouchers even worth anything at all if there was no meaningful exchange?

...

“You are no longer pleased?”

One of the crew members spoke to Taller Tetha, for there was no one else here who spoke to it. Everyone else was little more then gonads surging with endless rivers of offspring. Pieces of meat to produce children in terrifying quantities. They were hooked into high intensity feed pipes that would have killed the clerks they once had been.

Specialized coolant systems were needed to keep their cells from denaturing under the metabolic intensity.

Taller Tetha felt no desire to be content or happy or satisfied. It clung to the emptiness.

“I just wanted to be rich”

The crew member was quiet for a time then said.

“You have all the riches of your peers, you have all their life vouchers, you control who will live and who will die. You are paid in full for every one of their offsprings indentured service to us. You are the richest thinking being among the refugees. ”

“Only because I’m the only thinking being among the refugees!”

“Oh not as such. The larva are plenty coherent and aware. It would be a waste to utilize their thinking kernals otherwise.”

Taller Tetha had no functional eyes but sensors and inputs and interfaces told them roughly what orientation to face its blind atrophied and decayed facing to the crew member outside their chamber.

“But in a way you are correct little clerk. They think only in the ways required by our products. Which they do very well. Fresh young minds are so flexible and their thinking kernals were so clean with unweighted webs.”

The clerk, the last survivor of the refugees who boarded lutish had nothing else to say for a time.

"I did not think you would find fault in this, although many species finds it a horror. We have done nothing that was not already done long ago by blind nature. We cut away their eyes, their limbs, but that's why you are so great, in that this is not a crippling. They'd have digested them soon enough anyway, we just helped them find jobs and adapt quicker."

Taller Tetha did not want to draw on satisfaction or pleasure. There was enough of that going around in the mindless churning children factories all around it. It found the words to voice its deep discontentment.

“A market of one can have no wealth...”

The crew member was now quiet.

“I suppose that is true. Well you were very useful in streamlining this process. But you are right, there is little point in you anymore.”

The sensory inputs slammed shut around Taller tetha, there was no inputs, no market, no environmental factors.

There was nothing, no sensation at all.

No sense of time.

And then with a terrible warm wash of joy they began to feel the pumps start up at no direction of their own. They felt their flesh quiver in anticipation of eggs.

And Taller Tetha knew that they would soon be no more.

Just more meat in the machine.