The Disability Wars: A Galactic Corruption

The audio crystals floated like malevolent stars in the neural-net of Galactic Net News, their compressed data streams bleeding corruption into the void between worlds. President Zex Milius-9 stared at them through the polarized viewing ports of his orbital office, watching them spin with the slow inevitability of a dying galaxy.

Shit, he thought, the whole fucking thing is coming apart.

The leaked recordings had been circulating for exactly 4.7 standard hours across seventeen star systems, and already the opposition was sharpening their plasma knives. In the audio—distorted by quantum encryption but still recognizably authentic—Diago Spagnelli-Prime, head of the Alien Neurological Disability Integration Service (ANDIS), could be heard describing the kickback scheme that had tentacles reaching into every corner of Milius’s administration.

Including his sister.

Coimeera floated in the zero-G meditation chamber three levels below, probably communing with the crystalline entities that whispered stock prices and pharmaceutical contracts into her bio-enhanced consciousness. She’d been taking bribes from the Suizo-Andromedans for months now—three, maybe four percent of every contract, funneled through their pharmaceutical distribution networks that stretched from the Vegan colonies to the methane refineries of Titan-Secondary.

The disabled aliens were dying. That was the simple, brutal arithmetic of it. Milius had slashed their benefits to fund his re-election campaign, simultaneously creating a captive market for overpriced medications. The Crystalline Arthritis sufferers on Kepler-442b couldn’t afford their neural suppressants. The three-armed Vegan amputees had seen their prosthetic subsidies cut by sixty percent. The radiation-burned refugees from the Proxima Centauri disaster were being told to “find alternative solutions” to their cellular degradation.

Meanwhile, Coimeera was getting rich.

Twenty to thirty thousand credits monthly, Spagnelli’s voice had said in the leaked audio. It’s a fucking kiosk operation.

The irony was sharp enough to cut through titanium: the President who campaigned on “fiscal responsibility” and “ending government waste” was simultaneously starving the disabled while his sister fattened herself on their desperation. Every cut benefit drove more aliens toward the black-market pharmaceutical chains. Every desperate purchase fed more credits into the corruption machine.

The mid-term elections were three months away.

Milius activated his neural interface and called up the polling data. The numbers scrolled past his retinal display like an obituary written in statistics. His Cosmic Libertarian Party was hemorrhaging support across twelve major worlds. The Tentacled Workers’ Coalition was surging in the outer rim territories. Even the normally reliable corporate donors from the asteroid mining guilds were making nervous inquiries about “alternative candidates.”

The intercom crackled with the synthetic voice of his Press Secretary, Mudwell Adonis-Theta: “Mr. President, the Opposition Coalition is calling for immediate hearings. They have the votes to override your disability emergency veto.”

“Tell them to fuck themselves with a plasma torch,” Milius said, then reconsidered. “Actually, don’t tell them that. Tell them we’re conducting a full audit. Tell them Diago Spagnelli has been terminated and we’re placing ANDIS under federal oversight.”

“Sir, the audio recordings—”

“The audio recordings are a political hit job orchestrated by my enemies in an election year,” Milius said, the words tasting like recycled atmosphere in his mouth. “We deny everything. We audit everything. We blame everything on the previous administration.”

But even as he spoke, he knew it was bullshit. The recordings were real. The corruption was real. The dying aliens were real.

And somewhere in the quantum foam between dimensions, something that might have been conscience—or might have been the accumulated electromagnetic screams of a million suffering beings—was keeping him awake at night.

The galaxy was vast and cold and indifferent, but corruption had a heat signature all its own. It burned through the neural networks of power like acid through flesh, leaving behind only the charred residue of ambition and the bitter aftertaste of choices that couldn’t be undone.

In three months, the voters of seventeen star systems would decide whether President Zex Milius-9 deserved another term.

The disabled aliens floating in the medical bays of a thousand worlds wouldn’t get to vote at all.

Most of them would be dead by then.