“I think I destroyed his image of me,” I said to Zira after our conversation with Eroilan ended. I tried my best to explain things to him so that he would understand what I was talking about and that we didn’t literally go around throwing shit everywhere like monkeys, but… his expression reminded me of how somebody would look when they’re having something explained to them and they’re just not buying it at all.

It was like if somebody walked in on a man looking at questionable porn, and then the person looking at such porn had to try and explain that it wasn’t really how it looked.

Except in my case, it wasn’t actually questionable and just a joke.

Well, kind of.

Maybe not, really.

Sure, humans didn’t post their literal feces online—well, some did, but sharing their opinions online… was just as bad if not worse in most cases. Sure, they were entitled to posting their opinions online, and I would never try to limit one’s speech in any way, but that didn’t mean their opinions were ever worth giving any consideration to.

I tried to keep an open mind toward all opinions. I really did. But then when there were people who believed in things like destroying the environment to pump more oil, treating entire groups of people as less than human, or people who believed that a grilled cheese and a “melt” were the same thing rather than understanding that the moment anything beyond cheese and bread is added to a grilled cheese, it ceases being a grilled cheese, it was hard to actually believe that most people on the internet had anything worth saying.

At least most people on the internet agreed that brownies were not cake. There was some faith to be had in humanity’s virtual opinions after all.

“You know,” Zira said, “Hell used to have an issue with something similar—with everybody posting their absurd opinions to our own version of the internet, that is.”

“Yeah?” I asked. I wanted to hear more about that.

“It did not last for too long, though, as far as my understanding of it goes. While my father might promote things like absolute freedom… that is only from a governmental standpoint. Every demon is legally allowed to say whatever they want. However, every business is allowed to have any rules they so desire and nothing is owned by the government. Even our roads are not. That means if you walk on the sidewalk in front of a store, then you more or less enter the jurisdiction of that store and are obligated to obey all of its rules. The same applied to our internet. While everybody had the legal right to say whatever they wanted in public… the idea of public spaces ceased to exist, and privatized entities are welcome to make any rules they want, including those that exist to contrast my father’s laws. Our internet became, and still is, nothing more than a platform for propaganda and advertising where the only opinions you will ever see are those personally approved by those in charge. Opinions censored on one platform will simply be collected elsewhere where they are approved of, resulting in an echo chamber of fools endlessly reinforcing their own beliefs in a completely separate part of the internet.”

“The more I learn about Hell, the more I feel like I’m getting a look into the future of America. Except I doubt our government would give up its power no matter how influential corporations become. That aside, your father is still seen as in charge of everything, right? Is it just because of how powerful he is?”

“It used to be, but now it is because of how wealthy he is. As I said, the government owns no property… but we do still have a government, and it bases itself outside of my father’s privately owned property. He rents it to them and—well, in general, he owns most of Hell. Very few companies are independent from him. You could place almost a hundred percent of businesses on a family tree, and at the very top of the tree is my father.”

“That makes me feel sick.”

“Does it? Here I believed you might agree with those aspects of my father.”

I sighed and shook my head. “It’s a conflicting feeling, but ultimately no. Now, I respect the ideal of ultimate, unlimited freedom where the government never interferes with our lives in any way. But when I say ‘the government,’ I mean any ruling body that unfairly exerts its will over those less privileged. Whether they’re elected officials, a dictator, a king or an emperor, or a board of directors at a corporation—they’re all on the same level to me. Just because something may be ‘private’ does not mean that it is not still abusing the power it has over others. Having a government is the only way to keep private entities in check, and that vanishes when you have a situation like in Hell where everything is privatized.”

“I agree completely,” Zira said. “But then, what is your solution?”

“There is no good solution. I believe in giving everybody true, unlimited freedom to live however they want—to do whatever they want, but I also know just how much bad that enables. Having unlimited freedom means having the freedom to grow your own food without regulations, it means being able to build that deck extension without following a thousand local safety codes, it means being able to set up a shelter for homeless kids or animals without jumping through a bunch of legal hoops first, it means the freedom to be whoever you want to be and to love whoever you want to love… but it also means having the freedom to discriminate against others, the freedom to harm whoever you dislike, the freedom to force yourself onto those who can’t fight back, the freedom to steal from whoever you want—some people want a limited form of government that gives as many freedoms as possible while disallowing any form of aggression against others, but nobody can even agree on what is or isn’t ‘aggression’ in that case. This is why the only solution I can think of to give humanity freedom… is to earn the freedom to protect them from others while giving them the opportunity to continue developing as they are. Even if it means America continuing going down the path toward becoming literal Hell. I’ll protect their freedom to live a life influenced only by other humans and their choices. Anything beyond that and I’m playing god, forcing my will onto people and taking away their freedoms no matter how righteous my cause may be. Because no matter what I believe is right, there will always be somebody else who believes in their own ideal of what is right that will conflict with my own. So, the best thing I could do is to simply give humanity the option to proceed however it wants, even if it goes in a direction I hate.”

“I see. Then, what is your opinion of those who have great power yet refuse to wield it? Many would argue that such an enabler is just as evil as the acts they refuse to stop.”

“People ask the same question about God all the time. It’s the classic argument of, ‘If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, why did he create a universe where evil exists? If he could have created one without evil but chose not to, then he is not good. If he could not have created one without evil, then he is not all-powerful. If he did so to test us, then he is not all-knowing because somebody truly all-knowing would already know the results of the test.’ I’ve never been a religious man, but I always approached that sort of logic by viewing God as a neutral entity who created a universe where anything, both good and bad, could happen. Neither good nor evil, not righteous nor unjust. Simply neutral. Of course, that falls apart when you actually study religion and believe in it, but I’ve never been religious for a reason.”

“Well, at the very least, allow me to tell you that ‘God’ would despise being seen as neutral. He is nothing if not, as far as he is considered, the most righteous and just being in the universe. If my father is the lack of caring about anybody aside from himself, then God is the opposite in that he cares about everybody far too much and wants to micromanage every single moment of their lives.”

“So, Lucy is the neglectful parent who doesn’t bother stopping his child from drinking bleach and God is the helicopter parent who wants to manage every second of their child’s day from the time they wake to the time they sleep.”

“Essentially, yes.”

“Two different extremes, both routes humanity might take for itself. I would love to say that I believe humanity would never, as a collective whole, go down either of those paths… but if anything, I feel we’re only becoming more and more extreme. Those are the sorts of dystopian outcomes people used to write fiction about back in the 80s and earlier. Now, they’re becoming our reality.”

“And you would allow it to happen?”

“I would, if that’s what humanity chooses for itself. But.”

“But?”

“I’ll befriend some member of the Divine Pantheon capable of turning the moon into a green paradise, get them to help me out, and then start New America on the moon. Earth and the people there? I’ll leave them to do whatever they want and to live however they want. All I’ll do is make sure that no other god tries to assert power over them. But anybody who believes in the same ideals as me can come join me on the moon in New America.”

“Are… are you serious about that?”

“Half serious, at least.”

Zira sighed but then smiled. “Doesn’t sound half bad, to be honest. I’ve even met a few members of the Divine Pantheon who wouldn’t mind helping you out with that. There are many who you would find agreeable, I’m sure, especially given your actions in this game. Trust me, my father is not a respected nor appreciated member of the Divine Pantheon. The more you enrage him, the more all the others will like you. Even galaxy-devouring hive swarms dislike my father.”

“I can’t imagine not disliking him.”

“That is a common sentiment, even within Hell.”

I wondered if I would ever reach that status. I had no doubt that I would end up on a significant number of shit lists due to any potential inaction I might take to stop “evil” acts from being done, but I hoped most would be able to understand my stances.

And those who understood and respected my ideals were welcome to join me on the moon.

Thinking that, I realized something.

Weren’t I basically trying to be an actual god? A God god?

I wanted to give everybody the chance to make any choices they wanted to make, and then those who agreed with me could join me in another world.

I wanted to turn the moon into my own version of Heaven.

Clearly, there was still a massive amount of thought I had to put into that whole situation. Not to mention that I wasn’t even sure if I was going to really be gaining power or anything like that. All I knew was that if I won, then Earth and the other worlds of the minor factions would be under my control as far as the Divine Pantheon was concerned. From my understanding, that meant no other higher powers would be trying to take control of them from me to force their own wills onto them. That didn’t necessarily mean I was going to be given any godly powers or anything like that.

And without godly powers, there was nothing I could do to really influence the world, either. I would probably be given a Nobel Peace Prize, have a movie made about me, be interviewed a ton, and then forgotten about within a couple of years.

If there was one thing that I knew above everything else, though, it was that I really, really wanted a hamburger.

That was why I opened up New Liberty’s building menu and checked out what was unlocked by researching Agriculture. Agriculture unlocked the ability to place down Farmland tile modifications that could be staffed by population units in exchange for boosting the amount of food that tile produced. If we could start farming the land, then we should hypothetically be able to grow wheat. If we could grow wheat, we could make bread. If we could make bread, we could make hamburger buns.

We already had good meat to use for the burger patties, so all we really needed were the buns, fillings, and condiments.

Wait.

And cheese.

But… cheese was something that deserved to be its own technology, and the research tree didn’t show anything related to cheese in our current era. Maybe that was a next-era thing? Alcohol might be the same.

Well, that aside, playing tall was how I wanted to go. Tomorrow, our military queue would finally wrap up which meant it would be time to start building other things, so why not start with boosting our food production as much as possible? By boosting that, we would gain the population to build and staff tile modifications boosting everything else.

We were going to need a lot of people for everything I had in mind for us. If every single tile could have a modifier built on it, then that meant we were going to need hundreds of spare population units over the course of the game to staff everything we could build.

With the building queue expanded, it was time to find something else to take my mind off of the fact that we were going to war in a day.