You would have thought that picking up however million prawns from District 9 and then dumping them in purpose made camp would've solved most of South Africa's problems.
You'd think that wouldn't you? I thought that.
All the illicit networks, the bits of alienware that fell off that mothership, the labrynthine maze of alleys amidst the shanty shacks- poof! All gone. Eight million prawns- give or take- removed from their hovels and dumped in a purpose built encampment.
Multi-National United spared no expense. Videos monitored almost every square metre. UAVs patrolled the skies. They even had PMCs... sorry, Private Military Companies in case you didn't understand... driving the perimeter and doing sporadic random patrols inside. And to top it all off, District 10 was in the middle of nowhere. No humans- Nigerian hahahaha- or otherwise were able to drive the couple of hundred clicks from civilisation and through the PMC check points.
But you see, the problem was keeping the place policed. I remember reading some RAND report that suggested that effective peace-keeping and stabilization missions required one soldier for every eighteen citizens. Human citizens.
Now District 10 wasn't a warzone back then, but you get the picture. Ten million prawns and then maybe ten thousand contractors. That's a LOT of area of cover with very few men. And it was expensive. It cost MNU upwards of - wait for it- a BILLION dollars. It boggles my mind. I try and do some of the sums when waiting for sleep. Each top tier shooter gets one hundred k per annum minimum- likely more. The less fancy operators get at least sixty to eighty k per year. There are ten thousand shooters. Then add in the cost of admin and logistics, the signals component, transport, building the patrol bases... you get the picture.
The prawns were costing the proverbial tonne of cash and MNU was stuck holding the can.
Oh, the RSA? Yeah, they helped- they'd paid MNU to police the place- so I guess the real suckers holding the can were the South African tax payers. But they paid only a fraction of the billion, because MNU signed on the contract thinking they'd make a profit from alienware and didn't ask the RSA to bankroll all of it.
I'm getting a bit carried away here. Where was I? Oh yeah- prawns and their problems.
So the PMCs couldn't patrol the place as tightly as they wanted and Corporate- well, District 10 was that far removed from Jo-burg, that they didn't really care. So things happened inside D10 that nobody knew about.
Things like what? It seems obvious now, but you have to remember that everyone was still learning.
Ok, like how alienware "metal" isn't actually dug out of the ground- it's grown. Or how the hatching process for prawns actually develops critical castes- soldiers being one of them- once the population reaches a critical mass. Or how alienware bio-fuel is- I kid you not- in the substance they shit out. Yes- it's true- the first powered combat body armour was running on prawn shit.
The other thing the PMCs couldn't prevent were the eventual escape of prawn squirters. Squirters, meaning the ones that squirted out of the camp and ran off into the wilderness. Why did they do it? They're sentient- so they would've known that running off into a hostile world where they'd get eaten by the wildlife AND the native dominant species was a risky proposition. But I suppose, enough of the "thinkers" had been hatched by this stage, that different prawn groupings knew that life in D10 was pretty shit.
And it got more shit in 2021 when MNU realised it could harvest bio-fuel from ten million captive prawns. The actual scientific breakthrough was a year or two earlier. I'm no scientist, but I remember reading in a small segment in the news that an Australian scientist- Florey- determined that biofuel acted like- well, a fuel. A fuel for utilizing alienware.
Humans before that couldn't use alienware. Not in the conventional sense of picking up the alien laser gun and shooting it. We could take it apart and try and tease out components- difficult because remember that much of the alienware is grown and moulded into a semi-alive thing. Ok- alive as in the same way that maybe a coral reef is alive- but you get the idea.
So Florey comes up with this breakthrough on a prawn component- on a little engine from a drone actually- thinking that it'll signal the next golden age. He said in a speech at Stockholm that he hopes it will lead to greater co-operation between the species as now we need each other. His research was protected- but enough of it was stolen, bought or traded- that it triggers the big tech leap we see around the world today.
MNU share prices break records that same year.
Because now Prawns equals profit.
