That was the actual reason oil never had a chance.
Not just the ethics or the clean hands.
The real reason was simpler, colder, and a lot more fun: I already had the infrastructure to make oil entire empire look like a rounding error on a napkin.
The Omni-Eros server was sitting beneath the mansion right now—silent, cold, humming like the heart of something that had already outgrown the planet.
Nanite logic structures spinning up fabrication engines that didn't ask permission from physics. Printers the size of rooms turning out materials that didn't exist in any periodic table the public had access to.
Quantum annealing cores solving routing problems that would take classical supercomputers until the heat death of the universe. All of it running on power we'd siphoned from places nobody was looking yet.
And ARIA had root on every last qubit.
