Marvel Reborn: Gems Of Infinite Potential

As the meeting broke up, and the ten crime bosses made their way back to their respective homes via a portal, I looked at the innocuous little pill in my hand that had ultimately made this operation possible. While we had the ability to provide synthetic variants of virtually every street drug and could decimate many of the established suppliers, the plan had kept being put off as we faced the simple truth that the Hand and HYDRA between them owned the drug trade, and both organizations had motives beyond profit as well as their own enhanced resources to call upon if necessary.

Cutting those organizations out of the criminal underworld meant breaking their connections to the street level operations that actually pushed the product, and there was no real way to get them to buy our product on a large scale. So long as our drugs were only the equal of the Hand's or HYDRA's, then the street-level gangs wouldn't much care, and the people who supplied them knew enough to be very afraid of their bosses. They weren't going to switch suppliers without a good reason. This little pill was that reason.

Bruce had managed to develop a crystalline substance that was safe for human consumption, water-soluble, and could not just absorb but store within its structure the neutral Chi that science called Vita Radiation. Each pill could absorb only a minuscule amount of Chi, but it was still pure life energy and consuming one gave a hell of a natural high while relieving all those minor aches and pains, curing headaches and the common cold, and providing an energy boost comparable to chugging a couple of Red Bulls. All with no short or long term negative consequences, unless you massively overdosed on the pills and went boom from Chi overload.

Bruce had developed them as a safer and more controllable alternative to hanging out in the Chi rooms for our rank and file staff, but after testing, had talked about Raith Industries marketing them. Honestly, I wished that we could, but trying to get FDA approval for our magic life pills would take years, at best, and that was even with a willingness to use less than legal methods to encourage approval.

"Bruce, I agree with you that the Chi Pills should be on the market. They would outright eliminate a lot of the more common sicknesses that people get. Take a Chi Pill with every meal, and you are probably going to be virtually immune to viral and bacterial infections, in addition to a much reduced risk of cancer, generally better physical fitness, and a twenty five percent increase in projected life span.

"Hell, the profit motive alone would have me willing to push these things on the general public. even if nothing else would. These things will completely eliminate coffee for starters, and the health benefits mean that you could easily convince insurance companies to pay for them as preventative medicine. One every meal, three per day, at one dollar a pill. Say three hundred million users in the US, that is almost a billion dollars a day in pure profit.

"And that's also why these are not going to get approved for public sale any time soon, if ever. Have you seen the numbers for how much of the economy that little pill would replace?" I had said after he wondered why I seemed less than inclined to take them to market.

He winced at my question. "Three trillion a year in GDP, in the US alone, if we went with a dollar-per-pill profit margin."

I nodded. "And that is millions of jobs in the US alone. If you go worldwide, you are looking at at least a hundred million jobs pretty much eliminated. Frankly, I would still do it if I could get it approved for legal sale. Hell, I could try selling it as candy, and I have thought about doing just that. The thing is, I don't think it will work. Too many people and too much money are going to do everything in their power to keep this out of the hands of the public, simply because it will destroy them if it is available. What's your take on the actual net economic benefit of the Chi Pill's being publicly available?"

Bruce thought for a moment, performing calculations in his head that would take entire teams of economists with computer support days. "Net of three trillion to the US GDP, worldwide it would see GDP double within ten years. It will also save, conservatively, a million lives per year."

I nodded. "About what I thought, and my chances of getting it onto the legal market?"

He sighed. "Virtually nonexistent. It's just that it will help so many people, I thought this is the kind of thing the Covenant was all about doing."

I nodded. "It is, and that's why I'm strongly inclined to make it public anyway."

"How? It's likely to see Raith Industries destroyed. Our enemies will declare all out war on us over this, it will be a bloodbath at best." Bruce said.

"I'm aware, and that is why it's not going to be on the legal market. I've been contemplating ways of breaking the power of the Hand and HYDRA, and one of the key pillars of that power is their influence in the criminal underworld, influence largely built upon the drug trade. I've thought about taking over that trade before, even drew up plans for it and did much of the preparatory work over the past few years, but kept running into the simple fact that it couldn't work out unless we had an edge as far as the end users and dealers were concerned," I said, looking Bruce square in the eye. "I think your Chi Pills could be that edge."

"You want us to become drug dealers?!" Bruce said in astonishment.

I looked at him flatly. "Bruce, we are guilty of murder, kidnapping, terrorism, espionage, every white collar crime under the sun, and for that matter pretty much every other criminal act you care to name. Yes, we have done most of it for good reasons, but that doesn't change the fact that our organization would be labeled a criminal one if anyone ever learned about it. So what's a little drug dealing in comparison to all the rest?"

"That might be true, Octavian, but it's still different," Bruce said, and by the look on his face, he wasn't actually all that convinced of his own claim.

I shook my head. "Not really. We do what we do because we have decided it is a net positive. Well, what do you think the net positive would be if we replaced just Meth with Chi Pills on the market? Or how about the net benefit of all of those people on the bottom of society, the ones with the least access to decent medical care, when they have cheap access to a panacea like your pill? And remember, we have a monopoly on this pill, and it will be worth at least hundreds of billions per year in profit. What rules do you think that the various criminal organizations are going to be willing to abide by if that is the price of access? What do you think about the gangs enforcing a no-r.a.p.e rule?"

"What makes you think you can get the criminals to go along with this? As you said, our enemies already dominate that world, and they have every incentive to keep it off the market," Bruce asked.

"Money, Bruce. Yeah, HYDRA and the Hand dominate crime, but there are still several independent crime bosses. Many with personal reasons to be opposed to one or the other. They generally aren't huge players at the moment, but Natasha has already assembled a list of people she thinks have the skill and temperament to rise if we back them. So we supply them with Chi Pills, and the various other drugs I suppose. At the same time, Elektra and Natasha start actively interfering with our people's competition. They will be the only connections to the street for Chi Pills, so the street dealers will switch to them once they see demand, which will neatly undercut the power base of the enemy supported organizations. Sure, some of ours will end up assassinated but we will always be able to find replacements - the money and power will just be too good."

He nodded. "I assume you'll enforce their loyalty with magic?"

"Of course, it's not like they are exactly trustworthy. So do you have an issue with me doing this?"

Bruce sighed, thought for a long moment. "No, it will be a net good. Now I just need to explain to Betty how I've found myself the world's premier illegal drug chemist. She's so going to laugh, I got pissed at her for manufacturing and selling LSD back in college when she wanted some extra cash."

Done reminiscing I stood and said to Elektra and Natasha, "Let's get killing, we have some drug dealers to help," before opening a portal to Mexico. The Vargas Cartel was going to suffer a very large number of deaths within the next day.