Chapter 3622

Pamela wore a jacket. This didn't look much like her. Even when doing experiments in the laboratory, she preferred to wear a hoodie, or a long-sleeved shirt made of soft pure cotton with a knit cardigan. She didn't like any clothes with hard materials.

Schiller sized her up and found that she was clearly a bit exhausted: her hair wasn't well-groomed, her eyes were full of bloodshot, and her lips were a bit chapped.

"Brainiac, get this lady a drink," Schiller tapped the table with his finger and said, "She really needs a good night's sleep."

Brainiac didn't object and let the waiter bring over a glass of ice wine. This was a bit rare—ever since Brainiac took over the Earth, things like cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs that were harmful to human health and addictive had been strictly controlled. Things like cigarettes, which were less harmful to others, were all to be quit, alcohol, which could harm one's own brain and also make people drunk and crazy, was almost completely unavailable, and drugs were even less worth mentioning.

During the war, most cigarette and alcohol factories were stopped. But today there was stock in the restaurant, which proved that Brainiac might have been preparing to resume supply for a long time.

Pamela's eyes lit up when she saw the wine. She wasn't addicted to alcohol, but it had been too long since she drank it, and the texture of the ice wine in the glass was clearly good wine. She licked her lips, sat down, and tasted it slowly.

"How have you been lately, lady?"

"Don't mention it! Brainiac said my plant research laboratory violated more than 600 laboratory safety regulations and limited me to completing the rectification within a month. Recently, besides cleaning, I've been packing things up, I'm exhausted."

Schiller thought for a moment and said: "Is it because those man-eating plants you made are too dangerous?"

"That's calculated separately! There are more than 300 types of plants cultivated in violation of regulations, and they must also be destroyed within the time limit. Really, when we were fighting, I didn't see him having so many things. When he doesn't need me anymore, he remembers to settle accounts after the autumn harvest."

"I must remind you, Ms. Pamela. Your plant laboratory had three riots during the war! Considering you were fighting on the front lines, I helped you clean up the mess. Your man-eating cabbage destroyed sixteen of my combat robots! I am considering using your salary points to compensate for this part of the loss..."

Schiller started to feel a bit of sympathy for Brainiac.

If you talk about this group of magicians on Earth, they can fight, but there are also many inexplicable shortcomings. Brainiac has to manage the front-line fighting while also managing the mess left behind after this group of people left, which is also quite difficult.

"How is your house?" Schiller was more concerned about this question. Pamela hadn't bought her house for long; listening to what Pamela said just now, it seemed her house was going to be confiscated.

"Sigh." Pamela was a bit irritable and said, "My house exceeded my living space range, but it only exceeded it by 15 square meters. As long as I shrink the yard a bit, it will be fine, but Brainiac said I can't go back to live until the engineering team finishes work. It's so annoying!"

Schiller recalled. He had actually been to Pamela's new house, but he hadn't gone in, only seen it from outside the yard. It was a very ordinary two-story building, not a big villa; he didn't expect this to exceed the limit either.

"By the way, Harley..." Schiller suddenly thought, "Harley's assets should have all been confiscated, right? Is she okay?"

Pamela waved her hand and said: "Harley doesn't have much personal residence at all. She has a total of only two personal residences, one of which is a personal apartment in the city center, which is a large flat, only one floor and no garden. The calculated area is not even bigger than my house, and it didn't exceed the limit at all. The other house is the old house left by her parents, and it's not painful to have it confiscated."

"What about those soda shops and factories of hers?"

"Those are real industries and are still continuing to operate. Although they don't belong to her anymore, she is still a professional manager; after all, they still have to count on her to develop soda flavors."

Schiller nodded. The soda shop Harley operated best actually belonged to the food industry and also belonged to real industry. The factories under her hand, besides producing sparkling water, could also produce syrup and fruit juice, which belonged to the rigid demand industry for maintaining human nutrition.

Moreover, still that sentence: Brainiac's wisdom allowed him to understand why humans wanted to drink soda. During the war, humans completely banned alcohol, so they needed substitutes to relieve human mental stress, and soda was a good choice.

Alcohol would cause the brain to slow down, and excessive intake could also lead to poisoning, and getting drunk and acting crazy could also endanger social safety; although carbonic acid was not much better, talking about toxicity away from dosage was hooliganism. Under the condition of quantitative supply, it could still be controlled within a safe dosage.

During the war, Schiller hadn't drunk soda, but he heard Jason and the others say that it was quantitatively supplied in the factory. There were also some heavy manual laborers in the transportation or moving industries who had quotas. In the absence of alcohol, ice soda with a bunch of ice cubes was a rare delicacy.

And now, Brainiac was gradually lifting restrictions, even alcohol was gradually being distributed, let alone soda.

When fighting, it was good enough to have carbonated drinks; but after the war ended, living standards rose, and people would naturally have requirements for taste. You couldn't count on Brainiac to have a sense of taste to develop different soda flavors, so naturally, someone had to help research them. Harley was a good choice; the soda she developed before was very popular, and she could completely switch to being a product manager on the spot.

In Schiller's view, Harley wasn't a person with heavy material desires. She had money purely because she was smart and lucky, but she wasn't the kind of person who could painstakingly manage. Schiller had heard her complain more than once that there were too many things in the factory and she didn't have any personal time. Schiller felt she would get tired of the business life without any holidays sooner or later, and it was actually quite good like this.

Speaking of half-capitalists like Harley, one had to mention the biggest capitalist in Cat Getan, the Wei En Group. On a global scale, the upheaval dealt a heavy blow to every capitalist like Wei En—not everyone could accept becoming a proletarian overnight from a capitalist. Quite a few famous billionaires jumped off buildings, and Bruce, as the initiator of all this, was actually quite happy.

The reason for this was probably that the Wei En Group was already a bit not doing well. Brainiac didn't come to fight the landlords; he came to clean up the mess.

The Cat Getan renovation project drew too much capital from the Wei En Group, which caused the group's various departments to shrink drastically, the cash flow became more and more sluggish, and production couldn't keep up, otherwise it wouldn't have been pressed and hammered by the Luthor Group.

The livelihood problems brought about by the gradual decline of such a large group were terrible. The positions that the Wei En Group could provide decreased year by year, which led to a gradual rise in Cat Getan's unemployed population.

It was said before that the main cause of gangs was economic downturn and too many unemployed people; refugees would naturally gather in groups of three or five, endangering social security.

The Great Depression had already led to a deterioration of the global economic situation, and the Wei En Group was hit even harder, plus the Luthor Group constantly squeezed Wei En's industries on the East Coast to turn the tide, almost forcing the Wei En Group to the edge of a cliff.

Many people always said that Batman didn't use the Wei En Group to save Cat Getan, but in fact, at the level of the Wei En Group, salvation was actually a paradox.

Looking at the scale of the Wei En Group, the greatest contribution it made to society wasn't developing any new technology, but providing countless job positions. This allowed social capital to keep flowing downward, guaranteeing the lives of thousands of ordinary people.

So what it actually had to do was manage itself well—as long as the group stood firm, these positions would always exist, and it could always keep thousands of workers fed.

If it wanted to draw capital to do something else, once it affected the group's operation, leading to the group's scale shrinking and large-scale layoffs in factories, that might lead to many workers losing their jobs, which would be a real nightmare for ordinary families.

Starting a project on the scale of the Cat Getan renovation project was basically equivalent to cutting the main artery to bleed; death was only a matter of time. Once it was beyond saving and collapsed completely, Cat Getan might return to the gang era overnight.

The market rescue operations done by Bruce and Thomas were actually just delaying time. Bruce didn't deliberately bring Brainiac over at this time; it was purely that he had to do so—if not Brainiac, there would be others; he had to use this method to save the nation from extinction.

If saying it this way is a bit complicated, it can also be explained in another way: what is the so-called deindustrialization of the United States? In fact, it is large groups like the Wei En Group cutting the main artery to bleed, drawing too much capital into the financial stock market, counting on financial investment to let money make money.

All groups are doing this. The group's blood has been drained, but the heart's ability hasn't increased. To keep the group alive, they can only shrink the scale and reduce the money invested in production, which naturally leads to factory closures and worker unemployment.

It can be said that this is a curse of capitalism. Every group, every country, will one day experience this curse: flourishing to decline, collapsing completely, and then building a new country on the ruins.

Because of this, Bruce had no opinion on Brainiac taking over the Wei En Group, and was even happy to throw this mess to him—anyway, I have already used up the money, but such a large group cannot collapse; how to deal with it can only rely on your Brainiac's 12th-level wisdom.

The trap of capitalism cannot limit a planned economy. A great war allowed the Earth to directly enter the state of wartime control by super artificial intelligence; economics didn't exist anymore, and the situation of the Wei En Group couldn't be considered a big deal.

After all, the capital that Bruce drew out at the beginning was also invested in real industry. In a certain situation, it could be considered left hand to right hand—those buildings that were built stood there and wouldn't disappear with the stock market crash; they could always be used.

Although the factories shrank quite a bit, most of them just changed ownership; the factory buildings and production equipment were still there, and the workers could also be on the job at any time. In the situation of not caring about efficiency and only requiring production, the situation stabilized quickly.

And the Wei En Group's arch-rival, the Luthor Group, was a bit different. Lex also didn't engage in finance, but his problem was over-expansion and gradually moving toward monopoly, and there was also a trend that couldn't be controlled.

Obtaining more capital meant being able to expand the scale of production; the larger the scale of production, the more capital could be obtained, and then continue to expand, expanding from one industry to another, until reaching a complete monopoly.

Before Brainiac came, Lex had already controlled every aspect of Metropolis. Almost all necessities for survival were produced by the Luthor Group, and it had even stretched its black hands to other cities on the East Coast.

Because of this, Congress didn't dare to easily touch its tiger's whiskers and even acquiesced to the independent state of Metropolis—because the expansion of the Luthor Group was already unstoppable.

(End of this chapter)