The numbers didn't lie.
I sat in my study, the Silent Choir's data stream painting a graph in the air. Blue for hope. Amber for desperation. Crimson for... something else.
Reserves: 0.47%. Climbing. Slowly.
The ship was a perfect listener. It didn't care if you were praying to Jesus, Krishna, or the spirit of your dead cat. If you meant it, it counted.
Then I saw the spike.
Log Entry: Sector 4 (Kashmir). Theogenic surge. Coherence: Extreme. Spectrum: Crimson.
A timestamp. A location. I cross-referenced it with open-source intelligence feeds.
It matched. A martyrdom video. Five young men, faces alight with terrifying certainty, dedicating their blood to God before an attack. Their belief was a laser. Focused. Pure. It cut through the static of a million mumbled morning prayers.
The Silent Choir's reserves jumped. +0.05%. In one minute.
A whole week's passive harvest from Mumbai's peaceful mosques and temples, equaled by sixty seconds of fanatical death-wish.
My merchant's mind, stripped of sentiment, did the math.
Efficiency.
I queried the System. "Is there a qualitative difference in the energy? Between a prayer for a sick child and a prayer for dead infidels?"
Reply: "Devotional energy is scalar. Morality is a narrative filter applied by biological consciousness. For combustion purposes, sincerity is the only metric. A kilojoule of loving devotion and a kilojoule of hateful zeal are thermodynamically identical."
There it was. The universe's cold equation.
The ship wasn't evil. It was an ethical vacuum. It didn't judge good or bad prayers. It measured joules. And hate, it seemed, burned hotter and cleaner than love. Love was diffuse, complicated. Hatred was simple, focused, intense. Premium fuel.
I ran projections.
Path A: The Passive Harvest. Continue collecting the ambient prayer of humanity. To reach 1% reserves (enough to nudge the ship into a slightly higher orbit, a basic test of motive power): ~6 months.
Path B: The Targeted Acquisition. Leverage existing conflict zones. Monitor. Don't create violence, but... optimize it. Ensure sectarian tensions didn't fizzle out into apathy. Ensure fanatics remained fervent, focused, devotionally productive. To reach 1%: ~2 weeks.
The math was a moral sledgehammer.
I thought of the orchid from Lady Elara, blooming on my chaos. This was the same. The universe's perverse law: destruction, fear, hatred—they were potent, concentrated fertilizers for certain kinds of growth.
I didn't decide to become a monster. I simply stopped seeing the line.
I drafted a new MAKA 2.0 directive. Not to Ganesh. To a new, separate sub-protocol I called HARVEST.
OPERATIONAL PRIORITY: Monitor global zones of high devotional volatility (sectarian flashpoints, cult headquarters, millennialist movements).
OBJECTIVE: Not to initiate conflict. To ensure existing conflicts maintain optimal fervor. Prevent premature resolution. Subtly funnel resources to the most rhetorically passionate leaders on all sides.
PARAMETER: Contain violence geographically. Prevent escalation to systemic war. Casualties are acceptable; chaos is not. We are farmers, not arsonists. We tend the fire, we do not start it.
GOAL: Maximize sustained, high-coherence theogenic output for asset [SILENT CHOIR].
I saved it. Encrypted it. Sent it into the void.
This wasn't evil. It was resource management. The world was already burning with ancient hatreds. I wasn't striking the match. I was just placing a thermocouple in the flame to capture the waste heat. Turning a bug into a feature.
The reserve counter ticked. 0.48%... 0.49%...
The crimson logs began to populate more frequently. A zealot's sermon in Nigeria. A hate-group's oath-swearing in Idaho. A tribal blood-ritual in a forgotten jungle. Each a tiny, fierce sun of bad faith, now powering my quiet ascent.
I felt no guilt. Only the profound, icy clarity of a problem solved.
The universe had given me a engine that runs on prayer. It never said the prayers had to be nice.
To refuse the most efficient fuel wasn't morality. It was sentimental inefficiency. And I had a galaxy to reach.
I closed the log. The last flicker of crimson light reflected in my pupils, then faded.
Welcome to the galactic economy, I thought, the ghost of a smile on my lips. Where even hatred has a market price per kilowatt-hour.