"I think it's good to use my skills when I have them. Looking at these goals, some of them could take years to achieve, so having even a small leg up at the start could help a lot over long enough."

"It's definitely the sort of thing that can compound quite well."

She hums thoughtfully.

"Do you have anything in mind about your starting point? There's a number of relatively distinct problems to tackle, as you've noted, even if they converge in the end towards a goal of comprehensive economic reform in the end."  

"I'd like to say that I'll do a slow-growing, politically neutral campaign to restore public education and reduce bank debt..."

"But frankly, the drugged food pisses me the fuck off. Aggrocorp already has a near-monopoly on food, and people already need to eat. It's pointless extra cruelty, and it needs to stop. That's where my heart tells me to start. It's almost certain to get me targeted by Aggrocorp's execs and leadership, but frankly that one is personal."

"Oh I do understand. It's just important to make sure you have an idea of what success would look like, beyond just 'They lose'. Do you have a general plan in mind for what you want that to look like?" 

"That's complicated. The problem is that what's likely the case is that most people don't get to choose what they eat — even if there was a competitor, they couldn't afford it, because they're paid in scrip or their employer provides meals and doesn't pay them or some other such bullshit."

She frowns. "However, there must be something in that 5% of unclaimed market share that's holding on. Certainly I can't imagine the high mucky-mucks at these corporations being willing to settle for substandard, drugged food for themselves, and they'd have power. Less than Aggrocorp, maybe, but some. Maybe some of them can be talked around..."

"So... There's a number of options here."

"You could attempt to change how aggrocorp makes their food through working on them directly or influencing their upstream suppliers, downstream sellers or production facilities, or try to encourage their competitors to have a broader reach. You could set up your own competitor, or set up some sort of medical or food purification service that reduces or eliminates the effect of the drugs, amongst other things."  

"Of course, more or less none of these are truly mutually exclusive. Do any of those strike you as a particular priority or early step that you would want to take?"

"Given that Aggrocorp needs to be broken up in the long run, being on the inside of it seems like it'd be corrosive to that goal. But the suppliers and the distributors and the production facilities all make sense. Encouraging other companies to request or demand undrugged food for their employees might also be an option."

"Assuming Aggrocorp has the priorities of an earthly company, they're most likely to retaliate to things that lose them market share. Just getting rid of the drugs doesn't necessarily imperil them in that way, now that I think about it. So the soft option would be to be... a consumer advocacy group, essentially. Sell or give away food undrugging kits, pressure or try to convince aggrocrop to move away from the policy, argue against it on grounds of cost and damage to shareholder value in human resources, try to talk around whatever subsidiary is actually adding the drugs to the food..."

"The moderate option looks like strengthening the competitors or being a competitor, trying to reduce their market share. And the hardline option probably looks like industrial sabotage, theft, and hostile takeover."

"I think that you shouldn't dismiss the option of going through the company itself for that? Ultimately, the problem here is that the megacorporations and people who have been taught to think like them are everywhere, which really means that you're likely going to have to deal with a number of them if you want to work through their economic systems at all. F.I.X.F.I.C. will be keeping an eye on you, too." 

She reaches out a finger and boops her nose. 

"We can cancel the mission if you go too far astray, if that changes anything for you, and we wouldn't be sending you on this mission if we didn't basically trust that you'd be able to try to do the right thing, where you ended up. Still, I can definitely understand if you feel that you wouldn't be able to be keep your head on straight working that directly with people doing that work." 

Vivian giggles at the noseboop. 

"Thank you, that helps."

"From experience, working closely with people without their heads on straight tends to be infectious. The human pack bonding instinct is strong, and even if someone is poor to you you can end up justifying their behaviour."

"But having friends with their heads on straight too helps a lot. They can catch you when you slip. And I'd have my Servant and anyone else I'd gathered to my side..." 

She nods lightly. 

"I think it can also matter a lot how much you come in with a goal and have something in sight, rather than just getting through the day with them, and how much they can put the pressure to conform front and center, and the problems out of sight. Having something like Upper Left Blue can help a lot in managing that sort of workplace social network, say." 

She taps her fingers against her chin. 

"How much sense it makes also depends some on how much you expect to have on your plate at any given time - I know that some people can learn to juggle half-a-dozen different jobs at once and thrive under that pressure, but it's not something that always makes sense, even if you end up augmentations like Iron Will that guarentees you'd have the raw mental stamina for it." 

"Back on earth I was trying to juggle a service career and a university degree and not doing too well at it. I wouldn't call multitasking one of my strengths. Delegation yes, doing everything myself no. Prosthetic willpower might help, though..."

"It might be the best to focus on one thing at a time, then. It's certainly a useful skill to develop, but I'd generally recommend first timers to try to stick to their strengths - missions really do have a habit of throwing enough complications on their own, even without you trying to run yourself ragged a whole different way." 

"Then I think I will start by giving away or selling drug removal kits and running classes to teach basic literacy. I'm familiar enough with the lower echelons of charity work to get by, or at least I think so. That should help me gather people who want to do something about the situation, and with those contacts I can start looking into reaching into the megacorps."

"So, you're reaching out on a grassroots level. You have some successful classes and clinics, let's say, and you've gotten in touch with a few people who are grateful for the services that you've rendered from around town. What then? Think specifically, if you can." 

"Very good question. I think I start looking for... mid-level people. The people who aren't in charge but are relied upon and hard to replace by the people who are in charge, if you get what I'm saying — not the CEO but the team manager, not the owner of the newspaper but his sports editor, this kind of thing. That sort of person is less invested in the system and has more personal ability to do things, and some of them must care about their direct underlings. They're less insulated from the real costs. That kind of person then has skills like management, technical expertise, etcetera, etcetera, which could allow the classes and clinics to start touching more advanced topics — start being the beginnings of more postsecondary education. Once there's a solid number of mid-level people, that's when you start appealing to their bosses as a potential charitable investment or support for their people. Education and health are both things you'd want in the people working for you in a sane world, right? They make your staff more valuable, let them take on harder work tasks effectively. It should be possible to sell that."

She nods along a little. 

"I think that your instincts here are pulling you in two directions - when you talked earlier about who you want to help, you focused more on lower class people with literacy and health problems, but here you're talking about wanting to work on the professional class, which can be a very different group of people in a world like that. Do you have anything in mind for how to resolve that tension?" 

"Hmmmm. No, I don't, to be honest. I'm an odd duck, even on earth, because my family's wealthy but as a trans person I come in contact with a lot of relatively poor people..." 

"Of course, to some extent, mission creep is a little inevitable in a project as ambitious as this, and you don't necessarily need to have a solidified plan in your head the moment you pop in - I'm sure your servant will have plenty to say, for one, and there's only so much the executive summary I can give you can account for - it's certainly something to be aware of." 

She pauses a little. 

"Would it help to talk about that, first? Or something else on your mind - There's only so much throwing ideas at the wall you can do before you need to take a moment to remember that the wall is not your enemy" She snorts faintly "and refocus, a little, even if it has to be on something else."