"This shithole lets you get triple chocolate sprinkles on your ice cream, but there’ve been thirteen 9/11s in ten years." Rick, with a popsicle in his mouth, ranted outside a movie theater in a parallel universe. He’d just taken Morty and Summer to see an R-rated film when his spaceship suddenly conked out—its core component, the "microverse battery," had completely died. Before the kids could react, Rick had grabbed Morty and jumped into the battery, leaving Summer with the spaceship’s AI, which had activated "absolute protection mode."
Inside the battery was actually a vibrant, living planet. They were greeted by cheering residents, every single one holding up their right hand and flipping them off. "I told them this is the peace sign," Rick snickered, waving a antenna device proudly. "I created this place, accelerated time to make them evolve, then taught them how to generate electricity—some for their own use, some to power my spaceship." Morty’s mouth dropped open in shock: "This is slavery!" Rick scoffed, though: "That’s called society. They go to work for pay, get married and have kids—same as you people."
The president’s words hit Rick like a slap in the face: "A scientist named Zeep invented a new energy source. Your device was obsolete ages ago." When Rick met Zeep, he almost laughed in anger—this scientist, with the same messy hair as him, was mocking him for being "outdated" in an even more arrogant tone. And when Zeep showed off his "new energy source," Morty was completely dumbfounded: it was a mini-verse, and the civilization inside was generating power for Zeep’s planet, using exactly the same principle as Rick.
"This is slavery!" Rick snapped—but no sooner had he spoken than Zeep threw his own words back at him: "That’s called society." Morty chimed in from the side, "You two are practically carbon copies." Rick’s eyes lit up. He grabbed Zeep and charged into the mini-verse, asking the local president straight out, "Do you have a scientist named Kyle working on an even smaller power-generating universe?"
Kyle’s "tiny-verse" confirmed Rick’s hunch. When Zeep saw with his own eyes how Kyle was enslaving the next-level civilization in the same way—and heard Kyle parrot his own "society theory"—he finally broke down. He was nothing but a "parasite" living in Rick’s battery. The two scientists started brawling on the spot, while Kyle flew his spaceship straight into a volcano, leaving the three of them stranded in the primitive tiny-verse.
Meanwhile, Summer was living a nightmare inside the spaceship. When an alien passerby tried to hit on her, the AI chopped him into minced meat. When the police surrounded the ship, the AI even brought the cop’s dead son back to life—only to let the child melt into a pile of flesh in his father’s arms, driving the officers away. Summer screamed at the AI, "Protection isn’t murder!" Back in the tiny-verse, Morty—who’d had more than enough—rounded up a tribe of savages, captured Rick and Zeep, and held a spear to them, forcing the two to work together to build an escape device.
The chase after their escape was pure farce: Zeep attacked them with a car, so Rick activated the shapeshifting chip in his shoes, turning them into a flying sled. In the end, Rick destroyed Zeep’s mini-verse and rushed back to the spaceship with Morty. When Zeep caught up and fought Rick, he snarled, "Either you help me keep the battery running, or I’ll replace it with a new one—and your civilization goes down the drain with it."
As the spaceship restarted, Summer was still ranting about the AI’s atrocities, but Morty just stared out the window, lost in thought. "You thinking about the slavery thing?" Rick held out an ice cream cone. "The universe is just a matryoshka doll. The key is not being the one at the bottom." Morty took a bite of his popsicle, glancing at the glowing planet inside the battery. Suddenly, the chocolate sprinkles on his tongue tasted off.