The Real Estate Wars
The Real Estate Wars
Same as crocodiles, Landlords became low-energy yet high-impact predators, driven by economics and market pressures rather than bloodlust and starvation.
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The Landlords were like us, once. They were regular people living regular lives with ordinary ambitions and occupations. They just happened to own a few more properties than everyone else for reasons that are vague and complex. But that was a long time ago. Before they were twisted into the leasing and leveraging leviathans we know today. Now, they own everything and, by extension, everyone. No one can say for sure how the Crocomorphia disease ravaged their minds and mutated their bodies, but there is a theory. One that persists in whispers and shadows. One paid in blood and suffering. One we owe to a band of underground researchers who worked to untangle this mystery, even as it cost them their lives. Step into the shadows, draw your ear close and hear their whispers.
Before the Landlords united beneath a common agenda, to which we will come, Crocomorphia splintered them into a network of families and factions. More hostile towards their own internal rivals than even their most hated enemies. Auctions and open houses devolved into scenes of unimaginable brutality, culminating in the Real Estate Wars, an all-consuming conflict that reshaped our entire society. As the years wore on, the cannibalised corpses of Landlords littered scenes of unimaginable economic carnage.
Our researchers were opportunistic and disorganised scavengers, dedicated to combing these carrion-scattered wastes for viable specimens, forced to work in their secret sharehouse laboratories. Eventually, they captured a live specimen, a wounded Landlord, whose writhing remains betrayed its secrets. The researchers dove deep into this creature's eerily familiar chemistry. But the experiments and tests were too much for its already fragile body, and it soon expired in a gasp of frantic tentacles and gnashing teeth.
Even in death, the Landlord's body held terrible secrets, for when the researchers began their dissection, a cloud of noxious gas spewed from the excision, boiling them inside their hazmat suits. With foam-filled lungs, clinging to their last moments, they uploaded their findings to an encrypted online database, where it slipped through the Landlords' grip like smoke from a ferocious forest fire sifting between unsuspecting trees.
According to the researchers, amassing a property portfolio was so fundamentally at odds with humanity that it caused changes to both brain chemistry and physical appearance. These changes were significant enough to class property investors as an entirely seperate subspecies. Property speculation activated an otherwise dormant section of the human brain, one that prioritised self-preservation over empathy. This remnant from our cut-throat ancestors also triggered receding hairlines, long fingernails, beady eyes, withered skin, weight retention and other slightly reptilian features. But these changes, while relatively unsightly, were minute enough for them to pass as ordinary people who merely gave off vaguely threatening vibes.
Of course, there were good Landlords, people who were in the right place at the right time, who invested or inherited shrewdly and then cared for their properties and the people living within them, who later relied on this below-market rental income through old age. But diseases and deformities don’t discriminate, so, sooner or later, they found themselves acting contrary to their otherwise generous nature.
But how did such a minor deformity in an otherwise healthy brain lead to the polluted minds and mutated bodies of the Landlords we know today? Well, courtesy of the researchers, we now know that humans and crocodiles once shared a common ancestor, a brutally self-interested missing link, ostracised by its communal homo sapien cousins and, thus, doomed to extinction. But just like its reptilian origins, this dormant region was merely hibernating, waiting to strike at a single ripple on the surface.
Same as crocodiles, Landlords became low-energy yet high-impact predators, driven by economics and market pressures rather than bloodlust and starvation. They were creatures that likewise stalked, drowned and then fermented their prey, only with leases and evictions rather than claws and fangs. Still, savage as these relatively benign mutations were, they merely opened the door for something the researchers would dub Crocomorphia.
Along came a brain prion, one with no name, harmless in ordinary humans, but one that gorged upon the altered brain tissue of Landlords and changed their DNA. Within days, the prion overrode the Landlords' identities, flattened their humanity and mutated them into a hive-minded species driven above all else to survive and consume.
Their bodies, meanwhile, took years to fully transform, so as time wore on, the Landlords sprouted tentacles, claws, eye-stalks, stingers and other evolutionary throwbacks hidden in our genetic code. Each Landlord was as unique as a snowflake. Some morphed into flying squid-like creatures, while others transformed into reptilian marsupial hybrids. The older they grew, the more fins, jaws and eyeballs erupted from their barely recognisable bodies. The eldest among them, seasoned by interspecies conflict and a lifetime of investment carnage, eventually morphed into balls of patchwork appendages. But they all shared the same terrible powers; telepathy, regeneration, bulletproof hides, camouflage, night vision, extreme longevity and abilities that defied explanation.
While linking them to the top of the food chain, these powers also inflicted a terrible burden on the Landlords. It was an insatiable hunger that no animal, vegetable or mineral could slake. So the Landlords turned to an unlikely food source, one no other creature would consider, let alone crave. They began to gorge themselves on human brain waves. And not just any thoughts and feelings. No, their powers required an endless stream of anxiety, without which their bodies would wither and decay like bones bleached by the sun. Perhaps it was no coincidence, then, that tenants in unstable rental situations with looming evictions concocted this exact mix of unease.
Here is where the researchers' data ends. The rest is history, though told by those living through its repercussions. So it is a blend of reality and mythology, where everything that happened is literally true but also little more than fantasy.
It's impossible to imagine our ancestors watching as this alien species, these Landlords, steadily consolidated their property portfolios into a global sharehouse. How they felt as the Landlords then drew up rental agreements for entire countries, states, cities, buildings, houses and even the planet itself before handing humanity its lease.
Few opposed them. How could they? From brutal dictators to benevolent democracies, the political class were Landlords at the time of the outbreak and were effortlessly absorbed into Crocomorphia's hive. While the few idealists and advocates unaffected by the disease attempted to sway their old colleagues, the Landlords steadily infiltrated their ranks with negative gearing and fixed interest rates, infecting them one by one. In a series of ravenous bites, the Landlords devoured whole governments like a slithering slimeball of worms reducing an already rotten apple to its core. Once they stopped squabbling among themselves, the Landlords ushered in an age of what they believed was peace and prosperity, but that was, in actuality, a brutal regime of perpetual anxiety and austerity.
Next, the Landlords targeted those foolish enough to believe they owned the single house they lived in and thus saw themselves as separate from this new system. But, as the Landlords knew, greed was an even more powerful disease than Crocomorphia, so when these homeowners were offered bargain prices on studio apartments with tremendous returns, they invested accordingly and succumbed the second they signed the dotted line.
Our ancestors learned too late that the Landlords were no longer like them, and that Crocomorphia had twisted these investors into unknowable creatures, unable to think or feel as before. Whole cities succumbed to homelessness and exposure, unable to keep up with the Landlords' constant need for evictions, their appetite for infinite economic growth, their addiction to periodic increases, their desire to flatten interest rates and, of course, their dependence on mass evictions.
But the Landlords' rapacious appetite soon threatened their dwindling feeding stock, so they plotted and schemed and, after another wave of internal bloodshed, reformed society beneath The Great Rental Tiers. This factory farm of tenants and sharehouses traded the relentless leases and evictions of the previous era for an echo of the society our ancestors knew.
In one decisive act, known as the Eve of Infinite Equity, the Landlords evicted the world's tenants en masse and signed them onto this new structure. A bargain, a steal, one they would be crazy to miss.
The Great Rental Tiers ranged from unspeakably inhuman to incredibly luxurious. A tenant's placement in TGRT was decided by a complex algorithm that evaluated their mental health, personal finances and social media standing every seven days. These were the three ingredients required to brew the Landlords' brainwave stew. They drenched their feeding stock in a delicious marinade of ceaseless uncertainty that took their attention and energy away from rebellion. Suddenly, something as simple as feeding a pet fish could elevate tenants to the next tier or, just as easily, send them crashing back down.
Tenants who advanced through the tiers moved into slightly nicer houses with fewer roommates. Multiple failures, however, led to eviction after eviction and eventually landed them in even more squalid and overcrowded conditions. Escape from these lowly tiers was essentially impossible.
Meanwhile, those at the top, sympathisers, informers and collaborators with the Landlords, were granted leases that gave them spacious houses with immediate family. But these precariously positioned Tier One Renters - or TOR, as they came to be known - were keenly aware that such precipitous heights inevitably lead to terrible falls. Staying at the top was a relentless battle, just as fierce as those raging below, though infinitely more insidious. TOR, who were outmanoeuvred by their competitors, were tossed down the tiers and never seen at the top again. Like the majority, they were now trapped somewhere in the middle, the average class, occasionally rising, though never far enough to prevent a minor issue from causing a sudden slip.
There was always further to fall. Not even the destitute, insane and deeply unpopular tenants confined to bunks crammed within giant windowless warehouses knew how many tiers there still were to go. There was always somewhere worse, somewhere even more inhospitable. Like a bed writhing with cockroaches in a partially submerged sewer tunnel, a pile of sheets stained with generations of grime, a constantly vibrating 3x6 concrete slab, or a train carriage moving through a seemingly unending tunnel crammed with hundreds of other unlucky roommates.
However, enforcing such a complicated social structure, with whole populations shuffling through mysterious sharehouses like cards in a magician's deck, was impossible for even the Landlords to enforce. They needed an army of unscrupulous, selfish and unquestioning underlings. Expendables content to feed upon scraps. The Landlords knew precisely where to turn. They looked to an industry already steeped in incompetence and arbitrary power, driven by avarice and blind ambition yet deeply servile and seemingly devoid of sentience.
While many real estate agents had already succumbed to Crocomorphia, some, for whatever reason, were unable to secure investment properties of their own. The Labndlords summoned these REAs by beaming telepathic visions of fame and fortune directly into their dreams. The REAs swarmed the Landlords' lairs on moderately priced sedans like millions of cockroaches scurrying for a single crumb. Here, the Landlords tested their future disciples, the dreaded REAs, by evaluating them within a specially-made arena. The REAs faced a series of gladiatorial tests designed to showcase their abilities. They inflated auction prices to unsustainable heights and bludgeoned each other with gavels. They smiled as wide as possible for headshots, which they exclusively posted in 'no junk mail' letterboxes. They inspected immaculate properties and were tasked to find (or create) bond-shattering damage. They evicted hordes of single parents, struggling pensioners and terminally ill cancer patients without a shred of emotion. They sent confusing rent increases to incorrect addresses and were tasked with enforcing the rise anyway. They leased and sold dilapidated houses with no floors at phone number figures. In short, they did what they did best, and their tenants paid the price - on a week-by-week basis.
Ultimately, 99.99% of the world's estate agents proved their worth, while the .01% who showed signs of mercy, creativity, intelligence and morality were flung to the lowest tiers, where their descendants remain to this day.
The Landlords then subjected their champion REAs to a barrage of psychological torture, physical abuse and genetic mutations, devolving them into a subspecies of repulsive scavengers who, like their Landlord masters, fed on their tenants' anxiety-scattered brain waves. The Landlords sustained them as lions sustain vultures with piles of leftover gristle and gore. In many ways, the REAs were worse, for while Crocomorphia pushed the Landlords over the edge they were already peering down, the REAs embraced their primal nature quite willingly and masked this desire beneath a friendly yet unsettling disguise.
And then there were the tenants. There's not much to say about them. About us. As time wore on, as years turned to decades and decades to centuries, history faded into memory and, finally, mythology. Humanity's wounds healed but with infection sewn through the scars. We came to accept this new era of Landlords, REAs and rental tiers as the inescapable cost of convenience. Our lives are, at the very least, livable, full of online shopping and subscription services. But they are also full of outlandish things, puppeteered by the Landlords and their REA underlings, who throw up daily obstacles, unthinkable to our ancestors. And while commonplace to us, these pitfalls and windfalls are perilous to navigate and impossible to predict. This is the only reality we know and the only one we dare imagine. There are rumours of secret organisations, surviving researchers, underground resistance movements and even rebels among the Landlords themselves, dedicated to abolishing the mundane austerity and overt cruelty that define our lives. But for the majority, ceaselessly spinning the plates upon which our mental health, social standing and finances revolve, well, there is only this constant cycle, and the time it takes, the energy required, to keep everything in motion, to prevent our reality from taking off entirely.