Unruly Summon Chapter 21: Good Intentions (Patreon)

I've made some changes the end of the previous chapter; the original accidentally implied the royal family were depending on Miraculum to cure Stephanie.

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Christine didn't blur, despite launching herself forward at a speed that would have left a drag racer in the dust. With the amount of mana I was pouring into my body strengthening, I could see every twitch she made. With the lessons I'd already had, I could read those movements. When she swung her wooden sword, I knew exactly what to do to parry it.

Alas, despite having no issues with perception, skill or speed, things didn't go quite to plan.

"Err," I said as I picked splinters of wood out of my face, time speeding up around me as my heightened perception faded. "Were the swords supposed to do that?"

Christine looked down at the splintered stump she was holding in her hand, both of our swords having exploded in the impact. "In retrospect, perhaps attempting to use wooden training weapons for this test was a mistake."

"You're excited," goaded Wendy. "Our ice-cool genius knight is actually excited about finding an opponent she can have a proper fight with."

Christine glared, but didn't deny it.

"Wow," said Mary. "I didn't see anything. There was just a blur, then a boom, and their swords were all smashed to bits!"

"Mary, please could you fetch us some metal training weapons?" asked Christine.

"Yup! Be right back," said Mary, running off.

"While she's gone... Please could you explain exactly what that collar does?" I asked.

"You could ask even if she was here. She wouldn't care," shrugged Wendy. "Or at least, she wouldn't have cared if you'd asked yesterday. I'm not quite sure what you've done to her, but she still seems happy, so hopefully it doesn't matter."

"Here or not, I'd still like an explanation."

"Very well. We have an aphorism here. I have no idea how it will be translated into your language, but in ours, it runs 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'."

"... That translated pretty damn well, actually, assuming you mean people doing bad things for what they think are good reasons."

"Yes, and the modern slave collar is a shining example. Princess Stephanie wasn't lying when she said magic that denied someone free will was banned. It has been for centuries, and there's only one punishment for anyone caught using it, even on a slave: execution. There are few lines that all four races agree must not be crossed, but that is one of them, and they are all restrictions that are taken very seriously. They're lines that, if crossed by one race, would leave the others with little choice but to cross them to compete, and no-one wants to live in that world."

So, they consider mind-control magic as a sort of nuclear option. I'd need to ask later what the other lines were, but one difficult topic at a time was enough.

"As such, in the past, slave collars were purely identification," Wendy continued. "They weren't enchanted at all. After all, who would waste expensive enchantments on mere slaves?"

"No-one?" I guessed.

"Wrong! Baron Gristoff."

Well, that was an unfair question. How was I supposed to know that?

"He considered himself something of a philanthropist, and he noted that for some reason, all his slaves were depressed, and it was affecting their work. Odd that, right? That someone considered by law to be personal property rather than a person should be unhappy with their lives. Well, that baron decided to do something about it. Perhaps you'd think of that 'something' as treating them like people, giving them a salary, or suchlike. Alas, Baron Gristoff was not so open-minded. He simply had his slaves' collars enchanted with a basic mood enhancer."

"She's simplifying somewhat," pointed out Christine. "His philanthropism was in his tendency to hire criminal slaves with less than whole-life sentences, who would otherwise end up being used as disposable labour in miasma-tainted mines, or other such deadly work, and wouldn't survive to see the end of their sentences. It wasn't as if he could free them ahead of time. Instead, he tried to rehabilitate them, and have them learn useful life skills before their sentences came to an end."

"I didn't say anything about freeing them," argued back Wendy. "I said he should have treated them like people. Anyway, that's beside the point. He enchanted the collars, everyone was happy, productivity shot up, and all was good."

"Yes, yes. Enough with the sarcasm," groaned Christine.

"That wasn't sarcasm. It really did work well, at first. Yes, there were problems when the first group of criminals finished their sentences and had their collars taken off them, and suffered nasty withdrawal, but that was much later, and by that point, things had already moved on. You see, Baron Gristoff was hardly the only slave owner in the world. Others took notice of the increased productivity of his slaves, did the maths, and worked out that the savings from the potential headcount reduction outweighed the cost of the enchantments. Soon, everyone was doing it. Of course, it wasn't long until people started asking questions like where the inflection point was, where strengthening the enchantment would no longer pay for itself. In the name of experimentation, people produced collars with stronger and stronger enchantments, until the wearers were left practically catatonic. The things were ridiculously addictive, with a number of cases where victims murdered their masters to get their hands on one, after which they'd simply put it on, fall over in bliss, and die of thirst a couple of days later. There were also areas where productivity didn't improve, such as those mines I mentioned. In fact, it was the opposite; when the enslaved miners got a bit of magically delivered spirit back, many of them rebelled. A number of mines were destroyed."

Christine remained silent, not even attempting to offer any justification or alternative opinion for that part of the story. The outcome seemed obvious to me; magically improving the mood of someone whose entire future consisted of literally being worked to death wasn't going to make them work harder. It was going to make them attempt to escape. Had the people of the time actually been surprised by that?

"Things got bad enough that the king of the time ended up intervening. He signed the slave treatment and welfare act, giving us our modern standards on accommodation, necessities, food, and so on. Of course, the kingdom needed to continue operating its mines, so big chunks of the new law explicitly didn't apply to criminal slaves. That left the door open to continued experimentation, and some very bright minds that should bloody well have been working on land reclamation or farming efficiency instead decided to see if they could tweak the collar design to improve the productivity of the slave mines."

"Mines that produce the enchanting materials that are required for modern farming," pointed out Christine.

"Working on ways to protect the miners from miasma, then. Or on methods of extracting the materials we need without exposing miners to it. Whatever. Anyway, these people decided that what was needed wasn't a blanket improvement to mood, but a reward and punishment system. They devised a system whereby the miners were rewarded with a magical buzz for each unit of ore they dug out."

"And so the miners immediately turned on each other, killing each other to try to claim each other's work as their own," I guessed.

"You got it in one. But that setback didn't stop them. It only caused them to rethink their design. And, after a few more false starts, they hit upon a promising solution not by rewarding or punishing someone, but by messing around with their desires. You get hungry, so you eat. You take pleasure in eating, and once you're full, you feel satisfied. They managed to hijack that whole system. A slave gets an order, so they fulfil it, not because they want to or need to, but because in their mind, fulfilling it is a basic necessity on the same level as eating. And the collar didn't even need to reward them, because their own brain did all the hard work. Just like you might seek out tasty food, or find it hard to resist the urge to snack, they were driven to receive orders, finding satisfaction and fulfilment in completing them."

"How in the hells is that not mind control?!" I complained.

"Because they don't have to follow orders any more than you have to eat," said Christine. "And nothing physically stops them simply taking the collars off."

"... I kinda do need to eat," I pointed out.

"Well, yes. Bad example. It's not as if they'd die if they don't follow an order. They'd just feel progressively more 'hungry'."

"That's utterly horrific..." I complained.

"Oh, just you wait. I haven't got to the good part yet," spat Wendy. "Unsatisfied with their success, and wanting to push it further by avoiding the need to give their slaves constant streams of explicit orders, they made a version that caused the victim to consider their owner's happiness and desires in the same way as an order. The first batch immediately stopped eating, because they knew how much the researchers resented the food costs. When ordered to eat, the conflict broke them. Some committed suicide, and the survivors were driven insane."

"You have a funny idea of the definition of the 'good part'... Also, I'm not really seeing the whole 'good intentions' thing here."

Wendy shrugged. "As Christine said, the ores from those mines were vital to the farming efforts. Improving their efficiency indirectly lets us squeeze a little more out of our farmland, and hence pushes the point at which our kingdom can't feed itself just a little further into the future."

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few," I sighed. It was the same logic that resulted in them trying to kill Mary. Abusing a few criminals so that the general population didn't starve? Yes, I could see people justifying that to themselves. In another timeline, they could have simply introduced capital punishment for such crimes, to lower the number of mouths that needed to be fed.

"Yup. Anyway, they didn't consider that version of the enchantment a failure. It wasn't that it was fundamentally broken, it was just that hitting someone with everything all at once left them in a state where they couldn't process it. Logically, they should have known that even if their owners resented the food bills, they acknowledged their necessity, but the sudden application of the enchantment flooded them with so many 'needs' that it destroyed their ability to act rationally. And so the concept of an acclimatisation process was created. To slowly lower someone into that state while leaving intact their ability to reason logically. Can you imagine going through that? Slowly having your basic needs and wants overwritten? And the whole time, you'll know that at some point you'll be happy about it, because it's what the one holding your reins wants. And then you reach that point, and you simply stop caring. Not to mention that by that point, you can't easily reverse it; it needs an equally long deprogramming process to get people used to having desires of their own again. But of course, it's still not legally mind control, and the other races didn't object to what we were doing because the lengthy acclimatisation process rendered it useless as a weapon."

"It wasn't that bad," said Mary, who had returned in time to hear the tail end of Wendy's tirade, holding a pair of metal swords. No-one had mentioned what made them training weapons; merely blunting the blades would make little difference with the force me and Christine had been using earlier. A sharp blade might actually be better; a clean cut seemed like it would be easier to heal than having an entire limb mangled. "More boring than anything, to start with. It felt weird later on, and that was a little scary, but everyone was very nice and it didn't hurt."

"And here we have exhibit A, a willing victim of the process," sighed Wendy.

"Careful," growled Christine, taking up one of the swords. "Everything I said to Thomas about belittling her sacrifice applies to you, too."

"Why have you got such a bee in your bonnet about that, anyway?" said Wendy. "But at least she was willing. The ones who don't resist their 'training' are marginally better off. They tend to end up with some of their personality intact. Wait till you see an unwilling one, or someone who 'fails' their acclimatisation."

"You've missed a bit of the explanation," I pointed out as I took the second sword. "You said experimentation was banned on anyone except criminal slaves. Mary is no criminal."

"It is. This isn't experimentation; it's the finished product. Production in the slave mines shot into the stratosphere with its introduction. The slaves involved were happy and felt fulfilled with their short lives, and no-one rebelled, went insane or murdered their co-workers. Naturally, they wanted to spread such a resounding success around, so everyone started using it. Before long, the process became universal for all slaves in Ricousian. The general perception is that because they end up so happy and content, it's a good thing for them. And so now you have a slave who will willingly starve herself to death if you ask her too, and would be happy about it, because she's fulfilling her duty."

"Uh... No I wouldn't..." said Mary. "Besides, Master would never give me such a stupid order."

"Okay, you're a bad example. I still have no idea what Thomas did to you, but at least you seem to have a mind of your own again. It's a vast improvement, so make sure you cherish it."

Mary cocked her head in a way that suggested she didn't quite get what Wendy was talking about. It wasn't a difficult concept, though, so I found it hard to believe she couldn't conceptually grasp it. I was reasonably certain she hadn't been completely deprogrammed, but at least it was a start. Perhaps I could heal her further later.

... I was also feeling a little bad for Princess Stephanie, particularly since Christine had confirmed she'd been used as a scapegoat. But she'd definitely been a part of everything, and now I knew it could be reversed even without the aid of my magic, so I didn't feel that bad.

"Can we drop the subject now?" sighed Christine. "We really need to get back to training."

"Good idea," I agreed, feeling quite depressed enough already for one afternoon. Perhaps the punishment I should have demanded of the king was a tweak to their legal definition of mind control...

Despite today, my goal hadn't really changed. If I wanted to help people, I needed the power to do it. They'd summoned me to save the kingdom, and so saving the kingdom was what I would do. Naturally, saving the people of the kingdom was a part of that, even people the kingdom didn't consider people.