Why join a chaos cult?
Why do people in the Imperium of Man betray the Emperor and become heretics? What madness drives them to eternal damnation? Rather than simply write them off as fools, this story examines a plausible example of why a sensible human would become a chaos cultist.
Chapter 1(why)
Jessica Lincoln screamed herself hoarse as she fled with the crowd of rag clad poor people through the burning shantytown, the smoke was almost choking her, and the heat of the burning buildings was horrific. Above the sounds of screaming could be heard the speaker system of the local Ecclesiastical police forces, blaring out righteous condemnation and verses of scripture.
"Blessed are the rich men, for each rich man pays much in taxes to the Emperor, blessed are they and exceedingly glad, for their tax contributions are great and bountiful, and assured is their place in eternal paradise."
"But accursed are you lazy poor men, for too little do each of you pay in taxes and offerings to the Emperor! Cursed are you who breathe the Emperor's air, drink the Emperor's water, eat the Emperor's food, occupy the Emperor's space, but don't pay enough of the Emperor's taxes!"
"HERETICS! CRAVENS! CURSED! It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a poor man to enter the Emperor's paradise!" The speakers blared hatefully at the rag clad mass of poor people.
Jessica Lincoln and the rest of her shanty town had been condemned of the crime of being too poor, one of the worst crimes on the planet Vipp, an Imperial Hive World that was completely average in every single way as Hive Worlds went. Jessica was not only a little bit poor, she was in the bottom 1 percent, the "heretical poor" who could not afford to pay the bare minimum annual taxes. To be unable to pay taxes to the Emperor was to rob the Emperor himself, and people who robbed the Emperor were heretical scum who deserved to die!
The shantytown was located on top of a rubbish dump that was itself on top of a former poor district that had been burned down in past purges against the heretical poor, the rubbish dump was inside the under hive, and used by the rich for dumping trash as the land prices in this particular district, while too high for the poor to afford, were too low for the rich to justify building investment properties on it. The hive had large landfills outside the city limits, but it cost less dump truck fuel and was cheaper to just buy up the poor districts and convert them into landfills much closer to where the rich people and their businesses were located. It literally saved a few credits per trip in fuel to dump the trash on the poor people instead of the landfills outside, and this tiny saving trumped any moral concerns about the poor people.
Jessica had had no where else to live, she certainly hadn't wanted to live in a reeking landfill. She had spent months and months fashioning a tiny little shack out of plastic and cardboard, had finally gotten it nice, and now it was being burned down with flame throwers!
Jessica reflexively dropped to the trash ground as she heard the sounds of lasgun fire strafing the milling crowd of rag clad poor people. Others in the crowd were not so quick, and cried out as laser beams burned holes through their bodies! Jessica and the other survivors desperately crawled over the ground below the lines of fire, searching for some escape from this shot up inferno!
"BURN HERETICS! Thieves of the Emperor! Burglars of his taxes! Greedy lazy vagrants! Heretical robbers of the Emperor's coin! Criminal scum!" The speaker system blared in hate as the police forces gunned down the burning shantytown.
Jessica crawled away desperately, if she died now without somehow earning tax money then she would burn in hell for all eternity! If she could just LIVE, then she would try harder to whore herself out to more wealthy men, she could go with less sleep, earn that little bit more, and maybe, just maybe, she could pay back all her taxes and be permitted into paradise when she died!
The taxes were just so high! She worked 12 hours a day every single day as a whore, she ate trash rather than buying food to save money, scraped and saved to just SOMEHOW afford to pay the bare minimum taxes she owed to the Emperor. Jessica was young, so she made far more money as a whore than she could possibly make doing any other type of work, but she was just not quite pretty enough to be accepted by the licensed brothels to be eligible for the licensed employment tax rate cut!
On the planet Vipp anyone who was the registered employee of a licensed business had to pay only 10 percent as much tax as anyone who wasn't employed in a licensed business. To get licensed, the business had to be owned by one of the "virtuous class", which meant a member of the richest 1 percent of the Vipp population. If a business did not have a suitably "virtuous" owner, than it was ineligible for a business license and was considered to be part of the "amoral economy", meaning any economic activity that wasn't overseen by someone virtuous.
On the planet Vipp, a person's virtue was determined by how much tax they could afford to give to the Emperor, as a lump sum amount rather than as an actual percentage of their income. For example a multi trillionare who paid 100 million credits in taxes to the Emperor each year was far far FAR more virtuous than a poor person who could only afford to pay 1000 credits a year in taxes, even if that poor person only earned 1000 credits and gave 100 percent of their wage to the Emperor in taxes. All that mattered to the Emperor was the size of the individual lump sum that was paid.
The minimum tax that a poor person could pay without breaking the law was either 1000 credits if they were a registered employee of a licensed business, or 10,000 credits if they were not a registered employee of a licensed business. Finding a licensed employer was a matter of life and death, and was the difference between having money spare to rent an actual place, or having to live on a landfill because you had to cough up 10 times as much money in taxes.
Jessica was tantalisingly close to being attractive enough to get work in a virtuous licensed brothel, but she was only just not quite beautiful enough to make the cut. The competition to get work in a licensed brothel was cutthroat, with thousands of young women competing to work in them, and so these brothels could be as picky as they liked and only accepted the most remarkably attractive young women.
The sex industry was pretty much the only licensed industry that ever employed women on Vipp, the licensed businesses of other industries mostly had no use for women, and the ones that did would not let a rag clad poor woman like Jessica even set foot on their premises to apply for a job.
The only other option that women on Vipp had was to find a husband with registered licensed employment and become eligible to use his 10 percent tax minimum through the spousal clause. The problem was that the Imperial Guard and Imperial Navy kept conscripting men by the billions, and even out of the remaining men less than 60 percent had registered licensed employment, and every unmarried woman in the entire damn hive world was competing with each other for these men. A rag clad gutter whore like Jessica wouldn't even get a chance, these men would happily sleep with her, but they would NEVER marry her, she was "damaged goods".
Jessica had failed to raise even 7000 credits this year, nor the year before that or the year before that. She owed the Emperor so much back pay for so many years to earn her salvation! No one in this shantytown had managed to pay their full taxes, and the Ecclesiastical police forces had finally had enough and were purging them with fire for their crimes against the Emperor!
The fire and laser beams killed and burned people all around Jessica, if the lasers didn't get you then the spreading wall of flame still burned you alive behind whatever cover you had found! Jessica did not dare to stop moving, she would burn if she delayed!
The flimsy buildings offered no protection against the lasers, the beams burned holes right through the cardboard walls. So many times the fleeing mass tried to take cover behind walls, only to have beams burn right through them to burn holes through their chests!
Panic gripped Jessica as she swerved and zigzagged, dropped and crawled, clambered and leapt about. The beams missed her by inches as she dived and swerved in a blind panic, too fast and agile to be aimed at properly.
Other people around her were not so lucky, and caught fire as the lasgun beams burned huge holes in their torsos!
Jessica bolted about like a panicked deer, and it was nothing but blind luck that kept her from being hit by the inhuman fusillade of laser beams. She didn't know where she was fleeing to, she was just running away, away from the men with guns, no plan, just run away!
Through blind luck she stumbled upon a reeking sewer grate, thank the Emperor that the locals had already sawn through the grate bars to open the way, she was saved!
Without thinking about it Jessica hurled herself through the hole in the grating, and then she was falling, falling, SPLASH!
A putrid taste was forced into her mouth by the force of the sudden impact, and she found herself swimming in raw sewerage in a giant sewer, YUCK!
Jessica swam for dear life to get out of this filth before she got sick, and swam through hundreds of meters of deep underground sewerage canals, before she finally found a rusty ladder to escape out a manhole to the hive city above.
Jessica crawled out of the manhole cautiously, and found herself in a neighbouring industrial district that was not being swept up in the purge. She was saved! This district paid its taxes! She was saved!
***...
Far above the scummy under hive, away from the heretical poor, away from the filth, away from the worthless sweaty masses, Planetary Governor Donald Elon Zuckergates called the cabinet meeting to order in a magnificent white marble palace. Before him in the most luxurious chairs that money could buy, at a table made of solid gold, sat the Cabinet Members of the planetary government of the planet Vipp.
The people in this room were all among the very richest of the Virtuous Class, not just the top 1 percent, but the top millionth of 1 percent, the tiny handful of men who collectively owned the entire world. Every single one of them was born in the Virtuous Class, the only way to become a member of this class was through birthright, scummy poor people were not permitted to claw their way up into the Virtuous Class, there were no inspirational rags to riches here, you were either born Virtuous, or you were not Virtuous.
Donald Elon Zuckergates was the richest of these extremely rich men, he had the most Virtuous ancestral line, so that made him Planetary Governor by right.
"Gentlemen, I regret to tell you that the currency has inflated again. Who has been printing more than their quota of Vipp Credits this quarter?" Donald asked his cabinet members grumpily.
There was a brief pause, and then every single person at the table guiltily raised his hand. Donald sighed, the Virtuous were getting careless of late.
The planet Vipp printed its own fiat currency, the Vipp Credit. To be more precise, every member of the Virtuous Class printed this currency, rather than a central bank doing the printing, and the government then had the unenviable task of trying to keep inflation down as the super rich printed as much money as they liked.
Outside of the planet Vipp, this money wasn't worth the paper it was printed on, no interplanetary traders accepted the stuff, nor did the Imperium of Man, nor did the church of the Emperor. The currency was a joke, it had always been a joke, but what made this joke so funny was that the sweaty masses were not aware that the currency was a joke.
The Planet Vipp had massive manufacturing capacity, and made products that were highly valuable, hugely more valuable than the impoverished dirty poor people realised it was. Traders came from everywhere to buy these manufactured goods, dealing directly with the Virtuous Class at every stage of the transaction, using actual REAL currencies to trade with.
The Virtuous Class had complete control over the space ports, complete control over the media, complete control over the educational system, complete control over everything that came in or out of the planet. The dirty sweaty poor scum were not permitted to meet with people from outside the planet, all meetings happened directly between the Virtuous Class and the outside people, usually up in orbit, without the sweaty masses coming into contact with anyone who might tell them anything except the narrative that the Virtuous Class allowed them to be told.
The Virtuous Class bought everything that the sweaty masses needed, buying it directly from interplanetary traders, and then reselling it to the locals with the worthless Vipp Credits. All food, all natural fabrics, all imported goods of any description, bought for the masses as a gift to keep them all alive to keep manufacturing the valuable goods of the planet.
The locals worked very very long hours in exchange for some of these worthless Vipp Credits, and were then able to redeem these credits to buy food and other such things from the Virtuous Class. In a perfect world the amount of currency should equal the amount of purchases, but the Virtuous Class had gotten greedy with how much they printed, and the poor scum had tried to use the surplus currency to save up and claw their way out of poverty!
Inflation coupled with social climbers had threatened to collapse the entire system of exploitation the Virtuous Class had built for themselves, and drastic measures had been needed to salvage the situation.
The completely fictional "Emperor's Tax" had been invented by the Virtuous Class as a solution to both of these problems. The media and education system that the Virtuous Class controlled had done an extensive propaganda campaign to brainwash into the masses that the Emperor himself demanded an extremely excessive annual tax of Vipp Credits, and had even taught the population from earliest childhood that their very eternal salvation depended on paying this fake tax. The fools had believed it, and now they worked themselves to an early grave trying to pay this fake tax.
The collected tax money was completely worthless, no Imperial organisation wanted the stuff, and the annual tax was merely burned in a furnace to destroy the excess currency as a measure to bring down inflation. The tax not only compelled the population to dispose of all the excess currency, but it also kept them too busy to cause mischief and gave them an incentive to work even harder than ever.
The second purpose of the tax was to give the Virtuous Class a convenient excuse to cull the surplus population. The people kept breeding furiously, but there were only so much factory labor that was needed, and the population kept exceeding this needed amount. If this surplus population weren't fed then they tended to riot in dangerous mobs, and it was expensive to feed all of these extra people without profiting from their exploitation.
The surplus men were eagerly accepted by the Imperial Guard and Imperial Navy, but the masses of surplus women were not accepted by the Imperial military, and they had a bad habit of getting pregnant from whoring themselves to the remaining men for a subsistence living, multiplying their number exponentially!
The Emperor's Tax gave the perfect excuse needed to justify culling these women in purges, under the pretence of executing them for "tax evasion". The Virtuous Class of course never actually checked whether these women had paid their taxes or not, they simply killed the poorest districts at random, knowing that pretty much anyone living in the scummiest districts were completely unable to pay the taxes.
The taxes had been deliberately set to be higher than what a surplus woman could ever earn in a year, just low enough to seem like they were attainable, but always still just out of reach. The media airwaves were also carefully filled with completely fictitious "personal success stories" of surplus women who were able to afford their taxes with money to spare, just by working harder and being especially devout in their prayers to the Emperor. These stories were pushed so hard and so consistently that the women actually believed them, and this false hope kept them from rioting, kept them busy with work.
The surplus women believed the propaganda that told them that they actually COULD pay the taxes required of them, and so instead of rioting, they simply condemned themselves and felt guilty when they repeatedly failed. This carefully cultivated guilt consumed these women so much, that they didn't even question the fact that the "Ecclesiastical police" death squads that continually culled their numbers were performing an act of well deserved justice. It was so easy.
Now however, the currency had over inflated once again, and there was a very real danger that much of the surplus population would actually be able to pay their full taxes this year! The Virtuous Class had printed far too much this year, given far too much away to their favourite whores as tips and gifts, gone to far too many of the services provided by the "amoral economy" that they didn't directly control, and as a result a huge surplus of money was floating around in the pockets of poor people this year!
This was a disaster! If the surplus population could actually afford to pay their taxes, then they would riot when the death squads of the fictional "Ecclesiastical police force" came to cull their numbers to make less potentially riotous surplus people to feed! If once the scum questioned that they deserved to die, then the entire system would be in danger of a revolution!
Donald Elon Zuckergates frowned at his irresponsible cabinet members, there was only one solution that would destroy the extra large credit surplus this year. He had no choice but to raise the taxes on the surplus population, raise them high enough to suck in every last wayward credit until none remained. This might cause riots, but it would cause less threat to the entire system than letting these unwanted people pay their taxes and get a taste of life without extreme poverty.
Faced with the choice between a lot of small riots from a tax increase, and complete system collapse from the surplus population getting a dangerous taste of money surplus, Governor Donald Elon Zuckergates chose the lesser of two evils and increased taxes by 50 percent on all citizens who were not in licensed employment.
He really had no other choice.
***...
Jessica Lincoln screamed in utter horror as she saw the public announcement on the public display monitors that was informing the public that the Emperor in his righteous wisdom had decreed that all adults outside of licensed employment in a Virtuous business would now permanently be paying 15,000 credits as a bare minimum tax rather than the previous 10,000!
Jessica was not alone in her upset, all around her, rag clad women were weeping and lamenting for their very souls. They were going to burn in hell for certain now!
"It serves you lazy amoral layabouts right! You scum sit around all day instead of finding Virtuous employment, leading our husbands astray and parasiting on society! It's about time that you pay your fair share of the taxes you lazy bums!" One of the married respectable women shouted at Jessica and the other weeping women from an apartment window above the public walkway the public display monitor was located in.
Other respectable women added jeers and insults of their own from the safety of other overhead windows, and Jessica's hair became wet with spit as the women in the apartment windows began to spit on the rag clad poor gutter whores.
Jessica and the others were used to being spat on and abused by more well off women, but these words about them being lazy and not working really bit deeply. Jessica now worked 16 gruelling hours a day as a whore trying desperately to make enough to pay off her taxes to the Emperor, she had skipped sleep, stayed homeless without a shanty home to save time to earn more money, and she had managed to save up an unprecedented 9000 credits!
She had been so CLOSE to earning her eternal salvation, so so CLOSE to paying the Emperor his due this year, and maybe a little extra to gradually pay off the previous taxes she had fallen short on as well! She was going to be a success story like all those women on the news, she was going to earn her salvation through hard work! She had been going to make it, but with this new tax increase it would now be impossible!
Jessica vomited violently in the gutter at the certain knowledge that she was now well and truly eternally damned, the knowledge of her damnation was so distressing that she physically vomited from how wretchedly upset it made her! She could not POSSIBLY pay this tax, she had already been working herself as hard as physically possible, there were not enough hours in the day to raise 15 thousand in a single year!
The spit and accusations of laziness rained down on Jessica from above, and her entire world fell apart. She could not endure being spat upon by women who lived off their husband's wages and paid a mere thousand credits tax per year, she could not endure listening to women that were home in their rented apartment homes in the middle of the workday cursing her for being too lazy!
It wasn't FAIR! For the first time in her life Jessica fully understood just how utterly UNFAIR life was! This tax increase had shocked her so much that she was suddenly profoundly fully aware for the first time that it was IMPOSSIBLE to escape damnation, no matter how hard she worked!
Jessica fled for dear sanity, away from the spitting, away from the cursing, away from the terrible screen that was announcing the tax increase. Jessica fled behind an apartment building, searching for some dark hole to crawl into, but found homeless people occupying every nook and cranny. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to brood, she was forced to stay in the open, contemplating her own damnation.
Jessica felt a terrible fury fill her, angry tears filled her eyes, and she just walked the streets, not heading for any destination, just walking, for if she stopped moving she would scream.
For many hours Jessica walked aimlessly, her mind in turmoil as she processed her certain damnation, trying to even comprehend it, let alone come to terms with it.
It was a long walk, the longest she had EVER walked in a single day without stopping, neither resting nor heading anywhere, just thinking furious thoughts as she walked and walked in the streets of an unfair world.
When that walk finally ended, Jessica had changed, a day of thinking on her eternal damnation had had a profound effect on her. She believed without question everything she had ever been taught about the Emperor, and she now understood that the Emperor had hated her since the day she was born in a gutter from the loins of her gutter whore mother.
Jessica had been born a member of the Heretical Poor, and she had been fooling herself all this time by thinking that she could somehow earn her eternal salvation. She now saw that this was folly, she had been born to be damned, and now at long last she had begun to accept this very simple fate that had been certain from birth.
Try or not, do good or not, behave or not, pray or not, no matter what she did, Jessica Lincoln now understood that she was going to burn in hell. This thought was utterly horrible, but the truth of it was just too obvious to ignore any longer.
She was damned either way, so why not start acting like it. She would burn either way, so why work so hard to do the impossible to appease the Emperor? Why not just use her short life to have some actual enjoyment before her inevitable hellfire? Why not use her hard earned money to make herself more comfortable?
Jessica Lincoln held HER money in her hands as she walked into a clothes shop to replace her rags with something more nice. She would clothe herself, she would eat proper food rather than trash, and then she would rent an apartment to live in rather than sleeping in the gutter!
Jessica was damned either way, so she might as well have as nice a time as possible in the process.
***...