The Billionaire Scientists’ System:Ten Geniuses. One Mission

Chapter 7: The Price of Order

The trust Adrian had painstakingly earned in the Kibarani distribution line evaporated in the time it took for Abasi’s daughter to seize. The air, once filled with the tentative warmth of gratitude, turned cold and heavy with suspicion. The crowd’s murmurs were no longer curious; they were accusatory. The food. The machine food. The foreigner’s poison.

Dr. Sofia Delgado’s medical team arrived in a whirl of efficient motion, their portable scanners humming. Adrian stood rooted to the spot, his own heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. The System’s reward of +10,000 lives felt like a cruel joke, a blood payment.

Delgado knelt beside the convulsing child, her face a mask of clinical focus. After a tense minute, she looked up, her expression shifting from concern to grim understanding. She held up a small, half-eaten piece of fruit—a traditional mango, not their hydroponic produce.

“It’s not our food,” she announced, her voice carrying across the silent crowd. “She has severe food poisoning. From this. It’s contaminated with bacteria our systems filtered out weeks ago.”

A collective sigh of relief washed through the onlookers, followed by a wave of shame. Abasi crumpled, clutching his now-stabilizing daughter, sobbing with relief and guilt. The immediate crisis was averted, but the fragility of their progress had been exposed. The old world, with its dirt and disease, was still just outside the gate, waiting to undermine the new.

The incident, however, was merely a prelude.

The next morning, the first truck carrying the aeroponic harvest to a neighboring district was stopped a kilometer from the compound. The driver was shaken but unharmed, his vehicle untouched. The message was delivered not with violence, but with a chilling simplicity: the entire cargo was gone. Vanished.

The following day, a second truck was hijacked. This time, the tires were slashed, and a note was left on the windshield, written in rough Swahili.

“The road has a toll. You will pay for it.”

Elena translated it for Adrian, her face grim. “It’s the Mamba gang. They control the unofficial economies here—the water trucks, the protection rackets. We put the water cartel out of business. Now we’re the biggest supplier in the area. They want their cut.”

Adrian’s first instinct was to fortress. He wanted to call in the private security team he’d hired with his liquidated billions, to arm the trucks and dare the gang to try again. It was the logical, efficient response. Isolate the threat and eliminate it.

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The System’s solution was clear, cold, and mirrored his own initial impulse. It was the way of Voss, of Sterling—to meet pressure with greater pressure. But the new metric in his interface gave him pause: COMMUNITY TRUST – KIBARANI: 71%. He had just barely recovered from the scare with Abasi’s daughter. Sending in armed mercenaries, turning their haven into a battleground, would shatter that trust irrevocably. It might secure the roads, but it would poison the community.

There was another way. A harder way.

“No,” Adrian said, surprising both Elena and himself.

“No?” she echoed. “Adrian, these aren’t corrupt officials you can blackmail with data. These are violent men.”

“They’re businessmen,” Adrian corrected, a plan beginning to form in his mind, leveraging the System’s logistical data and his own understanding of incentives. “Of a sort. They see a new enterprise moving product through their territory. They’re applying their own… tax code. We need to renegotiate the terms.”

Elena stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “You can’t negotiate with a viper.”

“You can if you understand what it wants more than to bite,” Adrian replied, his focus turning inward to the System’s maps and socio-economic data streams. “Set up a meeting.”

The meeting place was a dusty, abandoned lot on the edge of the industrial port, a no-man's-land between the order of the Zone and the chaos of the old slum. Adrian went with only Elena as his translator and two security men waiting at a visible but non-threatening distance. He felt acutely vulnerable, his billion-dollar intellect feeling like poor armor against the potential of a machete or a cheap pistol.

The leader of the Mambas, a man who called himself Jua, arrived with a retinue of six young men. He was tall, with sharp, intelligent eyes that missed nothing, and a scar that pulled his lip into a permanent sneer. He didn’t look like a mindless thug; he looked like a CEO of a particularly ruthless startup.

“So,” Jua said in passable English, skipping the preliminaries. “The water man is also a food man. You are a busy rich man. The road is busy, too. It needs… maintenance.” He smiled, a cold, predatory expression.

Adrian didn’t smile back. He held up a tablet, not with the threatening dossier the System had prepared on Juma, but with a different set of data. “I’ve analyzed your operations,” Adrian stated, his voice calm, devoid of fear or aggression. “Your revenue from ‘road maintenance’ on this route averages five hundred dollars a week. Your risks are high: police raids, rival gangs, drivers who fight back.”

Jua’s smirk faded slightly, replaced by wariness. This was not the reaction he expected.

“I am prepared to pay you one thousand dollars a week,” Adrian continued.

A flicker of greed in Jua’s eyes, quickly suppressed. “Two thousand.”

Adrian shook his head. “No. One thousand. But not for ‘protection.’ For distribution.” He switched the screen on the tablet to show a map of the wider Mombasa county, highlighting areas of extreme food insecurity. “My trucks will only go to the Zone and one other location. You will become my licensed distributors. You will take the food from our central warehouse and you will sell it in these areas.”

Jua laughed, a harsh, barking sound. “You want me to be a grocery boy?”

“I want you to be a franchisee,” Adrian corrected. “You sell the food at a fixed, low price. You keep every dollar of profit beyond that. My analysis suggests your weekly profit, if you leverage your existing networks, will be closer to three thousand dollars a week. With zero risk. No hijackings. No police. A legitimate, scalable business.”

He had taken the gang’s criminal enterprise and, with a few slides of data, transformed it into a business proposal. He was not appealing to their morality; he was appealing to their greed and their desire for stability.

Julia was silent, his men shifting uneasily behind him. The offer was so far outside their paradigm of conflict and extortion that it left them disarmed.

“And if I say no?” Julia asked, his voice low.

Adrian finally allowed the steel to show on his own. “Then I recall my trucks. I build a vertical farm in every district, making distribution irrelevant. You get nothing. And the System—” he used the word deliberately, knowing it would sound like a vast, unknowable power “—notes you as an obstacle to the mission of feeding ten million. And it deals with obstacles permanently.”

It was a bluff, mostly. But the System’s cold, inhuman presence was a palpable force, and Adrian had learned to channel its authority.

Jua’s eyes flickered from the data on the tablet to Adrian’s unyielding gaze. He saw the inevitable future in the numbers: a world where Adrian’s method made his own obsolete. He could be a relic of the old, violent way, or a pioneer of the new.

He spat on the ground, a final act of defiance. Then he nodded. “We will try this… franchise.” The word felt foreign and awkward in his mouth. “One thousand a week. Up front.”

“Five hundred,” Adrian countered. “The rest you earn. The first shipment leaves tomorrow. Your men will load it. Without slashing the tires.”

A tense silence hung in the air, and then, miraculously, Jua gave a curt nod. He turned and walked away, his confused gang falling in behind him.

Elena let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. “You just hired a street gang to be your sales team.”

“I redirected a parasitic enterprise into a symbiotic one,” Adrian corrected, the tension draining from his shoulders. “I used their infrastructure for our distribution. It’s efficient.”

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The System had approved. Not through overwhelming force, but through superior strategy.

As they drove back to the compound, Elena looked at him with a new, appraising respect. “That was… surprisingly cunning. For a man who talks to himself about pH levels.”

“I learned from the best,” Adrian said, a faint, weary smile touching his lips for the first time in days. “A journalist who taught me that trust is a currency. And a System that taught me that every problem is a system, waiting to be optimized.”

He had faced down sabotage not with a fist, but with a spreadsheet. He had fought violence with wit. And in doing so, he hadn’t just secured his food distribution; he had taken the first, tentative step toward weaving his new world into the fabric of the old, flawed one he was trying to replace. 

The real battle wasn’t against poverty; it was against the entrenched systems that profited from it. 

And today, he won a skirmish.