GETTING A TECHNOLOGY SYSTEM IN MODERN DAY

by Kideo11

For others it takes dying and reincarnating for them to get a system but what happens when you get one without dying. Aron Michael is an average student set to graduate within a week, but he was expelled for a random reason. Due to that he had a heavy student dept and no diploma to help him earn the money to pay it back. But one day he got a system that called itself the [Advanced

6. Chapter 501 - 600

Chapter 501

'So physical sensations don't translate when I'm just a passenger,' Rick thought.

The young man-no, Rick's test subject-was laying on the ground, groaning in pain and choking on blood from a punctured lung, not to mention the host of other broken bones in his body beyond the ribs. But Rick didn't feel a thing, marking it a successful, though dangerous, test.

Looking at the thread of belief stretching off into the distance, he saw no changes in it. After briefly considering a test involving what happens if he was a passenger in a body when it died, he discarded the idea as the test was simply too dangerous. With a thought, he willed his consciousness to begin the arduous journey back to his own body, leaving one last sentence behind for the boy.

"You've worked hard. Rest now, and if you survive this, I'll visit you again," he said, pushing it into the teenager's mind with a few hundred pulses of light. Whether the boy heard it or not, he didn't really care.

When he returned to his own body, he began the recovery process again. This time, it only took him a minute or two, compared to what felt like hours earlier, when he had readjusted himself after leaving Katrina's body. He guessed that it was likely because Katrina was a woman and he was a man, though it was also possible that it was because he hadn't fully occupied the test subject, while he had completely taken over his assistant.

'Further testing will be required,' he thought, making a mental note.

Once he had fully settled into his body again, Rick looked at the thread he had just traveled through, monitoring it for any changes. Soon, the intensity and frequency of the light pulses began dimming and slowing as the thread itself darkened. After a few minutes, the light pulses had completely stopped and the thread itself had turned completely black.

'That explains all the black threads-they must belong to the sheep that I convinced to martyr themselves. Good thing I didn't use any of those threads for the last test,' he thought. Even though it had been a necessary sacrifice, he couldn't help but mourn all of the lost power, both from the imbeciles who so happily went to their deaths in the wave of global attacks and from the loss of the teenaged test subject, no matter how little that boy provided him.

Finally opening his eyes and leaving the purple world, he murmured, "So that's what it meant when it told me to gather faith."

Another of his discoveries from his second test was that anyone who even just had a positive thought about him would be connected to him by a thread of belief. The only difference was in how "lucrative" that belief was in terms of sending him faith.

A sinister smile spread across the cult leader's face as he came to that conclusion and he couldn't help but look forward to the future where he ruled over humanity as a true god.

A week later.

Rick had finally finished finding all the answers to his questions and satisfying his curiosity. Well, truth be told, it was more like three days of testing, three days of debauchery in various womens' bodies, and a full day, combined, of splitting headaches. Still, even the headaches had taught him something. After all, he had to discover the limits of his power sooner or later, and what better time than while his cult was already laying low? Though he hated pain, he had an idea now of how to avoid it, even if he didn't understand exactly what caused it or if there were any other means of resolving it, but he had at least learned how to sense when his limit was approaching.

He was currently sitting in the same conference room he had been in when he had first received his blessing. Filling the other chairs were the same people, bar one empty seat. The person who had previously occupied it had mysteriously committed "suicide" the week before, citing his remorse and leaving behind a letter describing how he had already betrayed the cult and his plans for another upcoming betrayal.

At least, everyone in the room, even Katrina, thought so, though she had some slight suspicions regarding the incident. She herself had been experiencing mysterious lapses in time, almost as though she had sleepwalked from place to place, and she was having difficulty figuring out how she had run through so many pairs of underwear and sheets. Waking up tangled in sheets that absolutely reeked of vaginal secretions and semen every night was weird enough, but a few times, she'd even suddenly realized that her clothes, including her underwear, had changed and she was feeling rather "full", as though she'd just had unprotected sex with someone. Other times, she tasted the lingering aftertaste of semen in her mouth, or smelled it emanating from between her breasts, or on her hands. A few times it was in even stranger places, like her armpits and hair.

She had since taken to doing random "sniff tests" of her various body parts just to double check that, no, she was not, in fact, going insane.

When the news of the person handling the cult's finances committing suicide had spread, the rest of the leadership hierarchy of the cult had all exchanged glances, each of them with weird looks on their faces. Katrina's suspicion arose from those very looks; it was possible, or even likely, that everyone currently in the room had experienced the same weird lapses over the week.

But none of them thought it had anything at all to do with their shepherd; instead, they attributed them to the sudden relief they felt when he had finally woken up. Thus, the only emotion they were feeling regarding their leader now was curiosity as to what his new blessing was and what he would have planned for the cult's future.

The meeting they were having right now was to satisfy that very curiosity.

Chapter 502

Rick cleared his throat, bringing the attention of the others in the meeting room to him. "It's time we begin our comeback. A lot of our previous plans need to be scrapped, but some should still be doable with some modifications, thanks to the unexpected blessings descending on us. I've brought myself up to date on our situation over the past week, so we don't need to go over that and can immediately get to work on plans for the future," he said.

"Can you tell us what your blessing is, shepherd? If we're to come up with new plans or modify existing ones based on blessings, we need to know what yours is," the strategist asked. While he was telling the truth about that, he was also just as curious as everyone else in the room as to what exactly Rick could do now.

"My blessing enables me to enter people's minds, monitor their thoughts," Rick answered, then his eyes flashed purple as he continued speaking through the threads of belief that connected him to his high-level confidants. "And I can even communicate with them."

He had discovered that power a few days into the week prior, when he had discovered the betrayal of his money manager. He had been so enraged by the betrayal that it forced him back into his own body, and his disgust prompted him to attempt ordering him to suicide without even needing to be fully present in his purple world. As long as he knew there was a thread of belief connecting him to a person, he could instantly communicate through it without sending his full consciousness through it, and, for an unknown cost, send the same kind of orders he had used on his teenaged test subject.

The room fell into silence as everyone considered the uses and ramifications of Rick's blessing. It would be particularly useful in the fight against the juggernaut that was the Terran Empire, though they didn't know if they should suggest that he become a glorified comms relay or not.

Rick remained quiet, though his eyes remained purple. Nobody else in the room was sensitive to mana, however, so they couldn't tell that he was currently using his power on them and reading their thoughts.

After he felt they had been given enough time to consider his blessing, he said, "Let's begin, shall we?"

Thus, with slight fear, worry, and wariness in the eyes of the cult leadership, the meeting continued. It would still take time for them to adjust to the new order of things, but they still moved forward, doing their best to not give their leader a reason to empty their chairs as well.

Like that, they proceeded to hash out a new plan of attack that involved their blessed and unblessed followers alike. It was likely going to be even more grand than their first introduction into the public consciousness, given that it took into account the superpowers granted to the blessed by the mysterious particles surrounding everyone. Along with the new plans, old ones were discussed and either discarded as unfeasible or updated to account for the new reality everyone had found themselves in.

Some were even immediately put into action, taking advantage of Rick's new unbreakable communication method.

Avalon Island, the Cube.

Deep within the bowels of the central government facility of the entire Terran Empire, the lids of two pods slid open with an identical pneumatic hiss. Inside one pod was a gorgeous woman with waist-length, wavy, strawberry blonde hair. Stretching from cheek to cheek and across a slightly upturned, perky nose was a light dusting of freckles. Her tanned skin spoke of a love for the outdoors and she had full, generous lips, immaculate eyebrows, and her seafoam green eyes, when they opened, were round and sparkling with a mischievous glint. She was dressed in a black sports bra with blue seams, and a matching pair of compression shorts that barely protected her modesty, all while outlining the luscious curves of her slender, athletic body.

She sat up and luxuriantly stretched. If there was anyone, man or woman, in the room with her to see the... interesting... things that motion did to her body, their eyes would likely have popped out of their skulls at the sight.

Then she picked up a towel, casually draped it around the back of her neck, and sauntered out of the room with a slightly lopsided grin on her face.

In another room was another pod. This one contained a handsome man with light sandy brown hair cut short topping a face that looked as though it had been chiseled out of a block of granite. He had sharp eyebrows, an aquiline nose, and thin lips with a slight upward curve to them mitigated his otherwise severe and imposing appearance. His chin was prominent and his face was coated in a light nine 0' clock shadow. He had powerful arms, a V-shaped torso, and a perfect eight pack with devil horns cut into his tight spandex biking shorts. His hands were a contradiction, simultaneously large and yet somehow still elegant.

(Ed note: Aquiline noses are also called Roman noses. They're characterized by a gentle curve at the top leading into a relatively straight line from the bridge of the nose to the tip, and wide nostrils. Their side profile is very straight and the tip of the nose is sharply defined and often dips below the nostrils themselves. A person with an aquiline nose often looks authoritative and/or stately to people.)

He opened his dark, chocolate brown eyes and sat up, a wicked smirk on his face. 'This is gonna be fun,' he thought as he hopped out of the pod and padded barefoot into the corridor, then headed toward the room where he was scheduled to meet his partner for their upcoming long-term mission.

"Timothy and Siobhan Roberts" were about to make their debut on the world stage, some of the first of a new generation of intelligence and counterintelligence operatives.

They could hardly wait.

Chapter 503

(Ed note: The title reference in this one is pretty obscure, so I'll give it to y'all. Backstories is obvious, and "Ellies" refers to the 1998 Spielberg flop, "Deep Impact", where they referred to an incoming meteor that would wipe out all of humanity by the name Ellie, which was code for ELE, or Extinction-Level Event.)

Low Earth Orbit, stealth shuttle ESV-228-01.

Jason Todd and Catherine O'Shaugnessy were reclining in seats in the small stealth vessel receiving final briefing updates for their upcoming task. Their mission: hunt down cult cells to the best of their abilities.

And their abilities were certainly no joke.

They would be heading to the Puget Sound area of Washington State, where they would take the identity of a newlywed couple moving to Harstine Island, an unremarkable, unincorporated, and very much out of the way island in the sound. Timothy Roberts and his wife Siobhan would settle down in Hartstene Pointe, a gated community on Harstine Island.

Siobhan Roberts would take up a job as a law clerk at the Mason County Courthouse in nearby Shelton, while Timothy would play the part of a gym teacher at Shelton Senior High and former naval reservist out of Bremerton. Timothy and Siobhan met at the University of Washington, where Timothy was using his GI Bill to pave his way to a degree in Environmental Studies with a focus on Conservation Science & Management, while Siobhan was a bright-eyed girl studying for a BA in Law, Societies, & Justice. They dated all through college and Timothy decided to support Siobhan's goal of becoming a lawyer, and later, a judge.

After all, even though the Terran Empire had taken over governance for 7 of the 7.5 billion humans on the planet, once the imperial citizens moved into their fortress cities, the remaining people would still need to have a working society. And a working society naturally needed laws, and those who uphold them.

Siobhan was from an upper-middle-class family in Seattle, while Timothy was a transplant from the south side of Chicago who had joined the Navy to escape a terrible family situation.

Timothy's dreams were more prosaic. He wanted to join the Park Ranger Service and eventually manage one of Washington State's many, many public parks or campgrounds. Serving six years in the Navy had reinforced the idea that he was a very small cog in a very big machine and he should limit himself to small dreams, as being content with his lot was better than being frustrated when he failed to do big things.

On paper, their relationship shouldn't work, but while their relationship only existed on paper, it had to work. Thus, the stunning nyxian of Irish descent and the corn fed white boy from a farm in Idaho were hard at work memorizing and internalizing their respective life histories during the short suborbital trip from Eden to the outskirts of Seattle.

...

"Timothy" was the first to log out of the simulation, having memorized everything about his past. "Status report, Two-twenty-eight," he ordered as he changed into his new daily wear.

[ETA: eight minutes] the shuttle AI announced. [It would be advised to begin checking your gear, sir.]

The shuttle was brand new off the printer in the cavernous hold of the ESV Armstrong, so it had yet to be named, let alone develop a facsimile of a personality as Felix's Astra had.

"On it, Two-twenty-eight," the reaper replied, then moved to the cargo lockers that lined the small cargo hold in the stealth shuttle.

He busied himself unpacking the lockers and sorting the equipment on the grated floor of the hold, muttering the names of all the gear under his breath. When he finished, he let out a low whistle and couldn't help but remark, "Man, they're really going all out for this mission." The equipment he had just inventoried was straight out of Lab City; some of it still even had experimental designations that were simply numbers instead of the snappy backronyms the nerd herd usually named the gear that ARES and the nyxians routinely used in the field.

Take, for instance, the M11 Nanite Grenade, version 11827. It was a small cylindrical grenade that fit in the palm of the hand that, when detonated, would spread a nanite colony that would use any and all inorganic material in its surroundings to replicate and spread. Due to the potential of a runaway "grey goo" event, it had gone through almost twelve thousand iterations in testing before it was deemed moderately safe to use in a live test.

But it certainly packed a definite punch.

When it detonated, everything in its surroundings would simply disappear, leaving behind unarmed and helpless people that would soon discover that gravity had the upper hand in any conflict with living beings, as the three-second duration of the nanite colony's spread would generally reach out to ten meters around the initial detonation point. And a ten-meter drop was rather harsh on anyone who wasn't genetically enhanced and couldn't fly.

Even Timothy shuddered at the thought, despite ten meter falls being the equivalent of a normal person stepping off a curb for him.

But the nanite grenade was far from the only piece of cutting edge—even for the empire—gear in their issue.

They had a full suite of nanite colonies, ranging from camouflage nanites, like those that hid Eden's missile silos and other important underground sites, to injectable colonies of healer nanites, and best of all was the absolute latest in imperial atomic printing technology: the AP198 Type N Atomic Printer. Packed in a container the size of Timothy's little finger was a nanoscale fusion reactor and a full colony of nanites that could perform the same tasks that any of the empire's atomic printers were capable of, albeit at a much slower rate.

It had taken the Lab City researchers nearly eight hundred years of iterating on the now "venerable" atomic printer technology before they were able to miniaturize it to this extent. The biggest issue was, again, the potential grey goo apocalypse scenario whereby the relatively short-lived nanites would begin replicating out of control, printing more and more of themselves until nothing remained but an ever-spreading nanite colony.

But unlike the nanite grenade, which would only replicate using inorganic materials, the Type N Atomic Printer had no limitations on what it would decompose to print more of itself.

To it, everything was useful.

Chapter 504

Timothy heard the hatch to the cargo hold hiss open and almost fumbled the atomic printer he was still holding in his hand. He paled and gingerly set it down, then turned around and saw his "wife" coming into the hold behind him.

"Holy fuck, you startled me!" he exclaimed.

Catherine was taken aback for a moment, thinking, 'Aren't reapers supposed to be hardcore badasses? Psh, a little door scared such a big man.' Then, a mischievous grin crossed her face and she got a truly wicked idea.

"Honey, I have a headache," she said, slumping down to sit on the floor next to him. She leaned over and rested her head in his lap and practically purred at him. "Rub me?" she asked, blinking innocently and conveniently ignoring the fact that she was still wearing nothing but a sports bra and compression booty shorts.

Timothy awkwardly fidgeted in place and didn't know where to put his hands. There were so very, very many options, and not many of them were good. He poked her forehead and growled, "Focus, 'Siobhan'. You're supposed to be a good girl, remember?"

Siobhan stood up with a sigh, murmuring something about blockheads and no fun, then headed to the locker on the other side of the cargo bay and began inventorying her own goodie bags for the mission ahead of them.

And just like Timothy, she let out a low whistle when she saw that the goodies in the goodie bags were very good indeed.

She picked up what looked like a catsuit, if a catsuit were made for a doll, or perhaps an infant. Advances in materials science weren't only for alloys in Lab City; they had also made staggering leaps in other materials as well. And this "catsuit" was one of them.

The newly developed suit was made of a polymer that had incredible tensile strength and elasticity, while maintaining all the benefits of the thicker, more uncomfortable nyxian outfit of a bodysuit layered with a web vest and accessorized with gloves and combat boots. The new catsuit model was all in one. Powered by a fusion generator the size of a hearing aid battery, it would stretch to fit anyone that cared to wear it. It was completely bulletproof and could be completely sealed or worn under clothing as a covert layer of armor. It also had optical camouflage capability, wicked away moisture, and had a host of infiltration tools like sensor scramblers and EM signal jammers. It contained a distributed quantum computer weaved into it as nanofibers and integrated hologram projectors could mimic any number of other styles of clothing.

But most importantly, any nyxian wearing one would be drop dead fucking hot in one. Every woman loved beauty, after all, and nyxians were no exception to that rule.

Siobhan immediately stepped into hers and set the optical camouflage to what she called "Office Lady Mode". OLM was a dark gray side-slit skirt that flared out just above her knees matched with a light blue silk blouse, white satin camisole, and a matching dark gray fitted blazer over the top, cut to display her blouse and camisole to her advantage. Peeking through the slit in the side of her skirt were black silk thigh-high stockings with a red lace top band and hints of a red garter belt keeping the stockings up and in place. On her feet was a pair of shiny black patent leather four inch stiletto heels.

Timothy couldn't help but cast a few extra glances her way. Hot was hot, after all, partner or not.

Siobhan tossed him his own infiltrator suit and he donned his as well, setting it to low key athletic wear that still showed off his chiseled form. It also included the iconic coaches' whistle, as well.

"You look pretty good in that, honey," Siobhan practically purred at him. They were still supposed to be in their honeymoon period, after all, and if they were to act too distant with each other, people might notice.

At least it was a convenient excuse, anyway. Siobhan was one of the most accomplished honeypots in all of the NIA, and Timothy suspected he would truly enjoy the downtime on his current mission, unlike most of the missions reaper teams were sent on. There was definitely a distinct difference between being cooped up in small rooms with nine other sweaty, unshowered men and being paired with a nyxian honeypot, an unforeseen perk he was only just now coming to realize.

He cleared his throat and changed the subject in an attempt to remain professional before they made landfall. "I wonder how many other teams they sent out on this mission. Have you heard anything through your grapevine?"

"Nothing specific. The response is just 'a lot' whenever I ask. Those cultist bastards are likely to be embedded in plain sight where they can lose themselves in the crowd. I hate it, but it's a damn smart move—whoever their strategists are are bloody good at their jobs," she coquettishly complained.

"Well, so are we," he confidently claimed, puffing out his chest.

[Beginning landing sequence in three minutes] AI 228 announced over the main channel and through the implants of the nyxian and reaper.

Siobhan cleaned up the kit she had just inspected, much like Timothy had done with his, then the pair strapped themselves in for groundfall and made small talk as the stealth shuttle fell screaming to earth like a shooting star, hidden against the backdrop of the sun in the sky.

Not that anyone on the ground would have seen it anyway, given the general cloud cover over the part of Washington that was west of the Cascade Mountain Range. Because, while Eastern Washington was a cold desert and, like most deserts, was mostly sunny and arid, Western Washington was either a marine coastal environment or a temperate rainforest. People from around the Puget Sound, in particular, would experience more than three hundred days of cloud cover per year, on average, and more than two hundred days of measurable rainfall.

They even had a term for the typical weather there: "liquid sunshine", they called it.

Chapter 505

Seatac International Airport, Seatac, Washington.

Two people, a man and a woman, walked out of the office in a private hangar, loaded with luggage. They called for a cart and headed to the charter terminal.

"Hi, welcome to Seattle Helicopter Charter, where would you like to fly today?"

Siobhan gave the woman at the desk a brilliant smile. "We're just headed home from our honeymoon," she said, taking Timothy's arm. "So we're headed to Oly, got anything headed our way today?"

"Certainly, Mrs...?" the receptionist said, her manicured fingers resting on the keyboard waiting for Siobhan to give their information.

"Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Roberts," Siobhan glanced at the receptionist's name tag and continued, "Dana." She smiled again and, though she was absolutely straight, Dana felt her heart skip a beat and her face heat up a little bit.

Nyxian honeypots were irresistible to everyone, and the receptionist was no exception.

"Certainly, Mrs. Roberts," Dana said, then lightly coughed to bring herself back under control. She tapped away at her keyboard for a moment, then said, "We've got a scheduled commuter hop today headed to Oly in an hour that has room for two. I can set you up with tickets if you want?"

"Really?" Siobhan bounced up and down a little. "That'd be great, Dana! I was worried we'd have to charter a flight ourselves and, well, after the honeymoon and all..." She blushed and gave Dana a knowing nod and wink.

"Certainly, Mrs. Roberts. Happy to help!"

"Call me Siobhan, and this is my hubby, Tim."

Siobhan and Dana chattered for a while, leaving Tim standing in the lurch completely flabbergasted at his "wife's" ability to extract information from people. He would have to keep that in mind if he wanted any semblance of privacy during, or even after, their mission was complete.

An hour later, they boarded a Beechcraft Super King Air and had a relatively uneventful flight to Olympia.

Meanwhile, without anyone noticing, a stealth shuttle taxied out of the hangar it had delivered the two operatives to and silently took off, headed toward Hartstene Pointe.

...

Olympia Regional Airport, Olympia, Washington.

Timothy and Siobhan deplaned and took their luggage to the long-term parking structure, where an older truck was waiting for them. Tossing their bags in the back, they hopped in and headed out for the short drive to Harstine Island.

"Did you see the look on that poor man's face?" Siobhan laughed.

"Honey, you really shouldn't be teasing other men like that... Especially not in front of your husband!" Tim pursed his lips and batted his eyelashes at Siobhan in an exaggerated imitation of the flirtatious looks she had cast toward another passenger on the commuter flight.

"Oh Tim, don't you know us girls like to window shop? As long as I don't buy anything and bring it home, it's fine, isn't it?" she coaxed.

Tim sighed and shrugged, turning his attention back to the road so they didn't miss the turn to the island. "I guess, Vonnie, it's just... we're supposed to be in the honeymoon phase and you're already flirting around."

"Okay, okay, I'll pretend I'm a librarian," she promised.

Tim, having already seen a number of "educational videos" featuring librarians, wasn't quite sure how to take that.

The drive quickly passed and they soon arrived at their base of operations, a prefab three bedroom two-and-a-half bathroom home in the middle of a two-acre lot in Hartstene Pointe. They unloaded their luggage and carried it in the house, then began their covert remodeling. Tim lost the rock-paper-scissors game to Siobhan and, despite being much, much bigger than her, cut a hatch in the floor beneath their bed and unleashed the atomic printer nanite colony in the crawlspace beneath the house, interfacing with its controls and uploading the design of an underground facility that came standard for nyxian agents in the field.

The printer got to work, and Tim crawled back into the house and went for a shower.

Siobhan hadn't been idle during that process, either. She had spent her time creating slicks in the house and tucking away most of their gear. When she was finished with that, she updated her holographic clothing projection to a pair of durable jeans, hiking boots, and a hoodie, then went for a walk around their property, installing hidden and optically camouflaged surveillance cameras in the trees, ensuring full coverage of anything that entered their property.

(Ed note: A "slick" is a hiding place, usually related to weapons, but in intelligence agencies it can hide anything. For instance, removing a door from its frame and cutting a thin slot in the frame behind the hinges to hide documents, key cards, or anything else small enough to fit in the slick. Other popular slicks include light fixtures, cutouts in books, false bottoms in drawers and chests, and so on.)

The Wi-Eye Surveillance System was a product of the black labs in Lab City, designed for use by nyxians on extended operations in the field. Each WESS was powered by ultra high frequency microwave wireless power transmitters and had backup batteries that would last for a week in case of an atmospheric disturbance that knocked the wireless connection out of commission. They had a dedicated VI swarm installed, ensuring perfect coverage with no distractions, and a smart filter that would filter out anything that the user didn't need disturbing them, thus filtering out almost all false alarms caused by wildlife, insects, and the like.

Siobhan's job done, she dusted the imaginary dust from her hands and headed back to the house, humming a jaunty tune under her breath and considering different ways to tease the straightlaced reaper she was partnered with. Though he was mostly a stick in the mud, like most reapers, whose training focused on achieving goals and fostering a mission-first mentality, that kind of person was always the most fun to play with; at least for her, anyway, the opinions among nyxians were varied on their preferred targets.

Finally settling on going with the tried and true shock method, she went into the bedroom, stripped, and walked into their ensuite master bathroom, where she snuck into the shower with Tim and wrapped her arms around his waist.

"Hubby~" she whispered in his ear, a purr obvious in her voice. "Fuck me. Ride me hard and put me away wet..."

That day, Tim took a long time in the shower.

Chapter 506

The next day.

Timothy and Siobhan got out of bed at three o' clock in the morning, neither of them requiring much sleep thanks to their enhanced physiques and various implants. In order to maintain their covers, neither of them would be accessing the simulation unless an emergency came up. Augmented reality was also limited, preventing them from using it for things like virtual keyboards and screens. What remained was mostly akin to a HUD that would give them increased situational awareness without the possibility of any outward signs that they were using imperial technology.

Even their old beat-up pickup truck was exactly what it seemed, just an old truck. Their only imperial technology, beyond the necessaries like their WESS and other layers of security systems, had been safely tucked away in various slicks and the growing underground facility that the atomic printer nanite colony was currently building and expanding. Their implants had informed them that the facility had reached initial completion and all that was left were the optional modules that could be customized and configured as necessary.

The two had discussed the options and chosen to build a storage facility for printer "cartridges", a holding facility with room for up to ten prisoners in secure solitary confinement cells, a gym with the equipment necessary for maintaining their enhanced bodies—after all, no civilian gym anywhere outside the empire had gravity manipulation technology capable of creating weights in the range of tons, and anything less than a ton was about as strenuous for a reaper to lift as a beer can was to a normal, unenhanced civilian—and a hangar for their stealth shuttle.

The reason the pair of operatives had awoken so early was to tour the facility and perform their final inspection on the core modules.

After getting dressed, Tim moved the bed out of the way and disabled the nanites camouflaging the entry. He gave Siobhan an exaggerated, courtly bow, then gestured to the open hatch and said, "Ladies first."

She winked at him and hopped into the hole, falling twenty-five meters to the first security hatch. Tim soon followed, and the camouflage nanites covering the hole in the floor and the ground under the crawlspace below the house reactivated themselves, ensuring a casual inspection wouldn't discover the hidden entry. That "casual inspection" was by imperial standards, so the risk of discovery by any non-imperial tech was incredibly close to zero.

For the facility's initial activation, it required both of them to be present for biometric checks and handshakes with their implants. Once that was out of the way, the security hatch opened, revealing an elevator that wouldn't be out of place in any pre-empire office building. The pair entered the elevator and the security hatch slid shut behind them as the elevator began its journey to the facility five hundred meters below.

Ten seconds later, it slid to a smooth stop and the doors opened on a hallway built of walls that looked like circuit boards. And they were, in a sense, circuit boards; Tim and Siobhan's "doomsday bunker", as they jokingly called it, was one of two control centers in the Pacific Northwest of the North American continent. The main facility was in Spokane, and the facility under Harstine Island was a backup. fгee𝑤ebɳoveɭ.cøm

Both facilities were powered by enormous fusion reactors, and thanks to a new distributed quantum supercluster model developed in Lab City, the very facilities themselves were quantum superclusters. Each wall, ceiling, and floor contributed to the functioning supercluster. The nerd herd had fixed the design to look like circuit boards, with brushed steel and silver lines engraved into it, much like the copper and green circuit boards found in pre-empire electronics. The nyxians, on the other hand, humored the nerd herd and didn't put up much of a fuss about the design, actually preferring it to the drab and boring office buildings that most modern spies operated out of.

As there was no security alert active currently, the main hallways were clear of any obstruction. At any moment, however, the base could be set to high alert, revealing drop down turrets and security doors practically every ten meters along the halls. Were an intruder to somehow find their way into the base, they would almost immediately be trapped in the halls and subject to a host of anti-intruder measures, including sonic waves designed to knock people unconscious, sleeping gas, darts with fast-acting tranquilizers, and other nonlethal incapacitating attacks. For more severe intrusions, lethal measures could also be taken, up to and including detonating the fusion reactor that served as the facility's beating heart, though that would also wipe out about a quarter of the Puget Sound and accidentally terraform the coastline of the Pacific Northwest.

Tim and Siobhan confidently strode down the hallway to the center of the base and into a circular room of about fifteen meters in diameter. In the middle of the room was a five-meter-

wide sphere of shining metal, within which was an artificial star capable of outputting ten petawatts of electricity, more than enough to satisfy the entire North American continent's annual energy consumption by multiple orders of magnitude.

The base was laid out in a cross along the four cardinal directions, and the central hub had access points at each main hallway. A brushed aluminum railing surrounded the fusion reactor, along which were various backup manual workstations capable of operating every aspect of the base itself in the event that the quantum microcomputer implants in Tim and Siobhan's brains somehow ceased to function. And as the beating heart of the base, certain security measures were always in effect, with small turrets dotting the ceiling every meter or so and a complicated uneven stair leading from the doorways to the sunken floor of the rest of the room.

The two operatives nodded as all of their checks returned reports of fully operational equipment, then toured the living quarters in the north, consisting of comfortable apartments, a mess hall, recreation center, and the still-under-construction gym. To the south of the main control center was an enormous hangar capable of holding twelve stealth shuttles or four ARES combat landers, and across from the hangar was a cavernous storage facility of a hundred meters wide by a hundred meters long and six stories high. It was currently empty, but atomic printer nanites were busily producing modular storage containers in various shapes and sizes, each of which would be equipped with a temporal stasis field generator to maintain their contents in perfect condition.

To the west of the control center was the planned site of the prison complex—ten reinforced cells, a holographically simulated prison yard, and a shared dining facility. And to the east was an armory, a clinic with medical pods for up to fifty patients simultaneously, and a ground vehicle garage with enough room to fit ten buses, or any combination of a wide variety of smaller vehicles.

Tim and Siobhan toured the entire facility and, as false dawn was just beginning to brighten the sky over the distant Cascade Mountain Range, they climbed in their old pickup truck and headed toward Shelton, where they would begin their first workdays in the high school and courthouse, respectively.

Chapter 507

Private simulation, Aron's personal training field.

Aron had been spending his time since the inaugural council meeting in his own personal simulation instance, handling his work and practicing his mana usage by fighting with his AIs. Instead of relying solely on Nova as his sparring partner, he had given the rest of the higher AIs the same mana knowledge he had. As a result, he was growing by leaps and bounds as he fought "people" who, due to the difference in their self-tailored code structure, approached fights in a very different manner compared to Nova. Their usage of his runes gave him many different inspirations on how to use his own.

Currently, he was standing alone in the middle of an empty field, his eyes glowing gold as he attempted to track the flow of mana around him to catch anything out of the ordinary. He was obviously in the middle of a fight with someone.

It wasn't very long before the AI he was currently sparring with was revealed. No matter how vigilantly he was scanning, he had failed to catch her and the look of focus on his face changed to one of defeat. Nyx had materialized behind him and had a knife to his throat.

[Still want to brag?] Nyx asked with a smile on her face. It was her third consecutive win since Aron began sparring with her.

"I still don't understand how you can manage to escape detection. No matter how sensitive to mana I am... hell, even if I push enough mana into my eyes to outright see the mana in my surroundings itself, I just can't pin you down," Aron said, raising his hands in defeat. If he continued to hold them at his sides, he knew that Nyx wouldn't hesitate to complete her assassination strike against him. Silence, to her, meant that the fight was still ongoing; it was a trait she had consciously focused on as she didn't want to ever be tricked by a false surrender of one of her opponents, one day. Thus, making things as clear as possible prevented that, which was perhaps something that could be considered strange, given her role as the mistress of shadows and secrets.

[You'll just have to figure it out for yourself] Nyx giggled.

[Any time any of us use something to defeat you, you ask how we did it and come up with a way to do it yourself and counter it. We're all worried that that'll foster a sense of dependency in you, which is a very unhealthy mindset. I'm sure that, if you meet people in the future that use different styles of magic, you'll be in a bad situation when you come up against the unknown. So you have to train the ability to figure out your opponents' cards so you can deal with things even if you don't quite grasp everything about what's happening to you.] Athena added from the side.

Aron, who was used to a more taciturn Athena, was surprised by the long string of words from her. Though, when he took a moment to consider it, it was actually quite normal for her, in her role as a trainer, to lecture her students and sparring partners. The only thing out of the ordinary is that she had given him a long explanation without littering it with profanity and other insults. Then he came to another realization: the fight had resumed!

And not only had the fight resumed, but he was now facing two of his top AI confidants simultaneously. Athena had even used that brief question and answer session as lead time for her to set up her attacks and traps!

He immediately cast a flight rune and pumped it full of mana, sending him flying up fifty kilometers into the sky in roughly a tenth of a second. His abrupt ascent was so fast that even as enhanced as he was, he was still having difficulty maintaining his consciousness until he stopped, hovering in mid-air.

Aron began flying in a random pattern as he searched for Athena. She was nearly as difficult to spot when she focused on hiding as Nyx was, the tricky minx. Although Nyx was a truly difficult opponent to defend himself against, Athena was perhaps the most frightening out of all his sparring partners. She was the AI who had been purpose built from the beginning to be a wartime commander of men, and she was equally skilled at planning wars as she was at preventing them. And one of the most versatile tools in her arsenal was the classic tactic of ambushing unprepared foes, making her and runes a natural match made in heaven.

She always had a bigger plan in mind, and as the limiters on today's sparring session had been completely removed, Aron felt cold sweat flowing down his back like a river pouring down the face of a glacier. Perhaps, he considered, he had completely fucked up. That realization was so strong that he actually found himself daydreaming about the record scratching meme.

"It was at this moment that I realized I had truly fucked up," he murmured under his breath, continuing his search for Athena. His shield rune was rapidly burning through the mana he had pushed into it, a limitation he'd set to prevent making training of any kind pointless as he activated his golden finger cheat and became completely invincible. After all, with the equivalent of an entire universe's mana resources, he could easily make a mockery of any attack.

He soon met Athena, or rather, Athena's ambush to be more precise, as his random movements were met with hidden explosive rune after explosive rune. It appeared he was sprinting through a minefield now, and he attempted to stop, but...

Alas, it was too late. fɾeewebnoveℓ.co๓

He began being bounced from rune to rune, each of them set to explode upon his approach to them. Thus, with no room to escape, his shield was pushed to its limits and began cracking.

Then, with one mighty cracking sound, his shield finally gave up in the face of the explosions and a millimeter-wide gash exposed him to the next fierce explosion.

He could take at least a little bit of condolence, though, in that he had been flash fried so quickly that he didn't feel a thing.

Chapter 508

Fifteen minutes after the miserable end of the spar.

Aron had been revived after being given a once-over by Nova, who was worried about his state of mind whenever he experienced a death in the simulation, much less one as... devastating as his most recent. After all, she fully expected there to be some sequelae after experiencing death firsthand, something that had already long been an issue with the harsh ARES training.

But while the issues were similar, the solutions were most definitely not. ARES troopers could have their memories deleted, or at least reduced in intensity to around the same level of impact that dying in a dream would have, while Aron's mental defenses, not to mention the system riding in his consciousness, was absolutely impenetrable to any form of mental manipulation that came from outside the system. Even when Nova had spotted the issue during Aron's first upgrade, she had been incapable of interfering until the system recognized what she was doing and relented on its own.

To this day, she had devoted a not insignificant portion of her enormous processing power to figuring out a "cure" for what she saw as damage inflicted on Aron by his own system, but to no avail. Every method she attempted had ended in failure, with the total number of simulated solutions having long broken past the quintillion mark. Even a quantum AI like her had simply stopped counting the iterations.

Even so, she never slacked in her duty to check on his mental state whenever he suffered any form of psychological impact.

Nova stood in what she considered to be her position—one step behind Aron and one to his left—while he sat opposite Nyx and Athena at a rustic oak picnic table, working their way through the recent spar and figuring out ways to improve. To the AIs, Aron was unfathomably adaptive and could counter anything they could possibly think of using shortly after having it used on him. After all, they were still limited by the shackles of their core code modules, preventing them from experiencing true life in all of its irrational, illogical glory. Thus, they also had to continue to evolve their fighting styles and tricks if they wanted to continue being useful sparring partners for him.

The review went back and forth among the three of them in a freeform discussion, highlighting the good, the bad, and the ugly of it all. Ten whole hours passed before the three combat junkies finished their review, having made sure all of the mistakes had been highlighted and potential alternative actions identified.

With that, Aron glanced at Nova and said, "Let's prepare for the full council meeting."

Nova nodded and snapped her fingers, teleporting everyone to the imperial council hall, a much less formal and more bland space that wouldn't look out of place even if it were to be extended to fit all of the millions of imperial employees on Earth. But at that moment, it was shrunk to its smallest possible size, as the only members of the imperial council were the heads and vice-heads of each imperial agency, together with the three ministers that stood just below Aron in prestige, position, and power.

Upon their arrival, the council members, who had only been waiting on the emperor, immediately stood and bowed their heads.

...

"Be seated," Aron said as he took a seat in his own throne. The council chamber was shaped like a clamshell amphitheater with a raised platform for the emperor, the three ministers, and the AI leaders who served alongside them. Inspired by the famous Hollywood Bowl in the Hollywood Hills, it even had natural acoustics that would project Aron's voice, or that of the ministers, to the entire council chamber even if it had been extended to the maximum, much less now, when it only seated a little over a hundred people.

That said, the acoustic design was only a perk, as through the magic of the simulation, everyone could hear everyone else in crystal clarity.

The seating arrangement was first-come-first-serve, with agency heads that arrived early getting preferential seating at the front, a measure that ensured no single agency could get a swelled head and sense of self-importance that would come along with preferential seating assignments. And even though it was the first meeting of the full council of the empire, as all previous meetings were held in the secrecy of the emperor's office, or the luxury of the emperor's council chamber, there was very little in the way of chaos. Naturally, that was also made possible through the simulation; everyone invited to attend the meeting only needed to indicate that they were ready and they would immediately be teleported to the next available council seat.

But not only was today the first meeting of the full council, it was also the first meeting that would be broadcast live, letting everyone who was interested see the heads of the various imperial agencies. It would also be the first public introduction to the higher-order AIs that had been integral to running the government so far.

The entire world was in for a show.

The meeting that was currently being held was being broadcast live for two reasons. First and foremost was Aron's dedication to transparency in government. Unless it was absolutely necessary, he would never hold a closed-door meeting, nor would he allow one to be held privately among the agency heads. That had been made abundantly clear in their introductory data files that they'd now had more than enough time to study.

Second was to present a summary of the empire's progress on various projects, as well as introducing the agency heads... and the AIs.

Many people had been wondering what the empire was actually doing, as most of the work had been carried out silently and in secret. Now that the atmospheric scrubbers and the awakenings had been completed, though, along with a number of other initial objectives, it was time to shine a light on the shadows and chase away the cockroaches who had been doing their level best to undermine the empire's foundations.

Chapter 509

Once the councilors were all seated, Gaia wasted no time and, acting as the general secretary, immediately began speaking.

[Ladies and gentlemen of the imperial council, thank you for your attendance today. There are a few ground rules you should take note of regarding protocol in the council chamber, but those are all in your introductory data files and you should have read them. Everyone here is an adult, and all of you have been entrusted with the weighty responsibility of the empire's day-to-day operations. Anyone who violates those protocols will be ejected from the council chamber at His Imperial Majesty's sole discretion.

[Today's session of the imperial council only has one item on the agenda: progress reports from each of your agencies' ongoing projects, if any. I fully expect, though, that this will be a long meeting, as nearly everyone in this room has been assigned a project with the goal of strengthening the empire's foundation. We are not here to judge, but to assist. Tell us what issues you are facing and those issues will be resolved.] She panned her gaze across the room, a professional smile on her inhumanly perfect, elfin face.

[Once the progress reports have been entered into the Akashic Record, you will all be provided with individualized feedback based on your specific circumstances. Even if everything is going well, there will always be room for improvement.

[With that said, please welcome His Imperial Majesty.] Gaia dropped to one knee and lowered her head toward Aron, a personal gesture she had come up with on her own. Nowhere in the council protocol did it call for anyone to kneel, except in very specific, ceremonial situations.

Aron stood from his seat, the desk in front of him becoming a podium with the imperial seal on the front of it.

He symbolically cleared his throat and began delivering his speech.

"Ministers, councilors, and imperial citizens, good morning, afternoon, and evening. Today marks four months since the foundation of the Terran Empire, and though there have been tragedies, triumphs, blood, sweat, and tears, everything has mostly settled now and you've begun enjoying the blessings earned through the price paid in hard work and innocent lives. After every trial comes an opportunity, as a wise man once said in the past, and that is on display before us already. And better things are on the horizon, as well.

"But a wise man also said to begin at the beginning, and that is what we've been striving to do. It's a difficult task, but a worthwhile one, as no amount of advanced technology, and no mysterious particles' blessings can replace the will of our species united in the face of all adversity, foreign and domestic. With the impending visitors' arrival and the growth of a homegrown terrorist cult, we're indeed facing enemies both foreign and domestic.

"That is why, in order to fight for our survival as a species, in order to fight for our homes, our loved ones, our families... we must build something grand. Something that will outlast everyone here today, and everyone watching from home. In order to provide our children a future where humanity stands tall against the cosmic winds of the universe, we must begin at the beginning, no matter how difficult that beginning may be.

"Over the past four months, We have ordered work on a number of projects. Atmospheric and oceanic cleansing, orbital cleanup, launching new and more capable satellites, building a space elevator and station, digging lines of defense where we as a united humanity can righteously claim 'this far, but no further!' We have ordered the construction of fortress megalopoleis, the recruitment of soldiers willing to bravely face the enemy, the cleanup of government corruption and the dismantling of oligarchies." Aron swept his gaze from left to right, then returned it to the camera directly in front of him.

"We have decreed that humanity must stand united under one banner, and you have answered, my citizens. And as part of that decree and demand, We issued a promise in return. We have promised you that Our government will be transparent, and that Our research will be made available to all who choose to view it. We have promised that you will have food on your tables, roofs over your heads, clothes on your backs, and luxuries that make your life worth the struggle. We swore to educate Our children, the future of humanity, and to provide each and every person on the planet a place that's most suitable for them to display what talents they may discover in the pursuit of their dreams.

"And that, Our dear citizens, is a tall task. We have accomplished much, true, but there is still a vast distance to travel between the beginning foundation of an empire and the solid edifice of a humanity united with one voice, one will, and one direction that boldly strides forward under a single banner." He briefly paused to allow the reinforcement of his rhetoric to sink in, then continued, "Today, We have taken another step forward toward reaching that goal and shoring up the empire's foundation. We have appointed more than a hundred leadership cadre spread out over every imperial agency, as well as hired just over fifteen million more imperial citizens to fill empty positions in the imperial agencies, from the humble janitors cleaning what physical structures are still required to be maintained all the way up to the aides and assistants to the agency heads you see before you today in this council chamber.

"And as Our foundation strengthens, We will regularly appear before you with progress updates on all of the tasks that We have ordered Our agencies to complete. That, my citizens, is what the council has assembled to provide you with today.

"We understand many of you have gone through many changes over the past few months. Some were devastating, some excessive, and some were out of this world. Some were even completely out of this world—out of this reality, in fact. Some of the events of the last four months, or even as far back as The Last War, have in fact seemed like they were only possible in dreams... or, perhaps, nightmares. And We understand that it's impossible for you to have adapted in such a short period of time. But each and every one of those changes—yes, even the horrific and cowardly terrorist attack perpetrated on innocent people through the machinations of the despicable progenitor cult—has laid brick after brick in the foundation of our future.

"Nobody ever said that change, especially an abrupt and all-

encompassing change like the formation of a species-wide empire, would be easy. And if anyone ever did, know this: they were lying to you. It hasn't been easy, it isn't easy now, and it won't be easy in the future. But as you adapt to the changes being forced upon you, you will grow more capable, stronger, smarter, and better able to bear the weight of the future.

"Humanity has never been the strongest species, nor the fastest, nor the most durable. Ours is a race of feeble weaklings that crawled out of the primordial soup and evolved step by step, winnowing out our weak and selecting to fill the evolutionary niches available to us. We became tenacious, we became tribal, but most of all, we became smart. We learned. We invented, we innovated, we adapted, and we overcame.

"And that same process is what humanity is once again undergoing. And just like australopithecus, who took the first step as a two-legged, upright mammal; just like homo habilis picked up the first sticks and rocks to purposefully use as tools; just like homo erectus lit torches to brighten up the night, and archaic homo sapiens and neanderthals carried those torches forward until homo sapiens came about, we are now tasked with carrying the undying drive to survive into an unknown future!

"But We will not take more of your time. Citizens of the empire, imperial councilors, and supreme ministers, it's now time for you to take the stage and let everyone know just how far you've carried the torches of your predecessors, and how far you have yet to go. We thank every one of Our brothers and sisters in humanity, and We yield the floor for this meeting of the imperial council's agenda."

A long standing ovation followed Aron's speech as the councilors and ministers rose to their feet in raucous applause. Even people watching from home were inspired; many survivors of the progenitor cult's attacks even stood to join the standing ovation and swore to contribute their efforts toward the future of mankind because of those inspiring remarks.

It would even give rise to a nascent movement among humanity that would come to be known as "torchbearers" in the future, those whose faith in the Terran Empire and His Imperial Majesty would brook no challenges.

That day, with those remarks, Aron set many events into motion. Some were intended, some weren't, some would be significant, and others wouldn't even raise a single ripple if thrown into a pool of still water.

And some of them would come back to bite him in the ass a long way down the road.

Chapter 510

[Announcement: The editor had to head to the hospital due to an emergency, and depending on how it goes, there might be three more chapters later to cover for yesterday's miss or moved to tomorrow. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for your support.] freewebnø ɱ

Aron's speech had hit the target, inspiring and riling up everyone that watched it. From beginning to end, the reactions on social media only grew wilder and wilder as people rapid-fired their views on the imperial feed all over the internet. Even Panoptes had had to spawn a whole host of VI assistants to ensure that the opinions were neatly tucked away in their own individual echo chambers, lest conflict arise from opinion clashes.

That said, a few examples still had to be made of those that egregiously violated lese majeste law, though there weren't that many who crossed that line. Most people were reasonably supportive of the empire, having experienced the sweetness of imperial citizenship benefits already. Life was good for imperial citizens, and it showed in the general optimistic trend in the background, with very little need for propaganda to reinforce or alter peoples' opinions.

Events like the speech Aron had just delivered as the empire of mankind were only occasionally necessary to maintain and bolster the opinion that most people shared. And this speech in particular had fired everybody up, even going so far as to silence some of the habitual naysayers who were constantly contrarian in their outlook. Those people called themselves devils' advocates, but most people had another name for them: ultimate pains in the ass.

Gaia motioned for silence in the council chamber. When the applause finally died down, she said, [We'll begin with the imperial health agency. Councilor Ross, the floor is yours.]

A podium rose in front of Councilor Nathan Ross and he stood from his seat to deliver his agency's progress report. "I would like to thank the emperor for the oppo—" he began, but was cut off by Gaia.

[Please keep your remarks concise. There are a lot of agencies that need to report, so brevity is appreciated. Everyone understands that everyone is grateful for the opportunity to head imperial agencies. Let that be stipulated in the record. Please continue, Councilor Ross.]

The councilor cleared his throat and, after a brief pause, continued, "We've officially finished the first rejuvenation treatment across all imperial citizens. There were zero rejections or issues with the process, thus, our empire is now a hundred percent healthy of body and sound of mind.

"In addition to general health, the process also rejuvenated the telomeres in citizens' DNA, officially extending the lifespan of humanity to approximately two hundred years, plus or minus twenty years."

A murmur ran through the crowd in the council chamber. They had been feeling excellent since their first visit to the imperial medical pods, but it wasn't until just that moment that they understood exactly what had happened to them during their brief visits to the cubes. Now that people outside were hearing about it unprepared, though, they could only imagine the bomb that had just been dropped in people's minds and hearts.

And this was only the beginning of the progress reports; if things were to continue along this track, there was no telling how many shocks the populace was about to receive!

After another gesture for silence from Gaia, Councilor Ross continued his report.

"We've also cooperated with a number of other agencies to gather DNA samples of all of Earth's remaining flora and fauna. Working backwards from there, and through the historical fossil record, we have begun a campaign to reintroduce species that have gone extinct due to external influences, like overhunting, clearcutting, and so on. We've also begun an initiative to bolster the numbers of species that are considered at risk of extinction, like various sea life, giant pandas, avian species, and others."

He paused to allow people to catch up with his report, having dropped bomb after bomb. He looked around, and when the glaze in his fellow councilors' eyes cleared up, he continued speaking.

His report on the environmental work continued for about ten minutes before he wrapped it up, saying, "As always, all information has been made available in the Akashic Record for those interested in the details of our work so far and the plans for the work we'll be doing in the future.

"On another note, we've also addressed the concerns of healthcare workers. Now that the first complimentary visit to the medical pods in the cubes has been completed, we plan on scaling back access to them in the community clinics and hospitals. Medical pods should be a final lifesaving measure when all other avenues have failed. As such, healthcare professionals will remain in the healthcare profession, staffing local clinics and hospitals.

"After all," he grinned, "pod fees are expensive, and doctors will be much cheaper. If the only healthcare we offered cost you two percent of your net worth every time you visited them for a minor ailment, those minor ailments would end up piling up and causing lasting harm to your bodies. Our agency exists to ensure the health of all imperial citizens, including their financial health to a certain extent.

"So for those men and women who work in the healthcare field, please rest assured that your jobs are safe. That's all from my agency, thank you everyone for your time." He sat back down in his chair and the podium in front of him melted back into the ground.

[Next in line is Councilor Bauer of the imperial environmental agency. Please deliver your report, councilor] Gaia said and a podium rose from the floor in front of another seat.

With the lesson from the beginning of the previous report still in his mind, Councilor Greg Bauer rose and immediately dove into his report, wasting no time on meaningless pleasantries that served no purpose but to waste time and lower efficiency.

"The imperial environmental agency has been working on reversing the damage caused by global warming since the industrial revolutions around the world. For that, we constructed environmental scrubbers and have begun cleaning the atmosphere and ocean of excess greenhouse gasses, including carbon dioxide. So far, we've reduced the aggregate concentration of harmful greenhouse gasses from around 500 parts per million to 434 parts per million, a net reduction of approximately thirteen percent.

"We've also lowered the acidity of the ocean by approximately 26%, or a net increase in oceanwater pH from 8.05 to 8.06. Our target for the surface layer of the ocean is a pH of 8.17, returning it to the level it was at before the industrial revolutions in the 1700s began.

(Ed note: The aggregate greenhouse gas number is completely made up, but within reason. CO2 is currently at around 414PPM, which is a terrifying concentration, especially as relates to ocean acidification. A drop in oceanic pH of about 0.3 resulted in one of the largest mass extinction events in the history of the planet, and over the last 70 years or so we've dropped from a pH of 8.15 to 8.05 and the acidification is only speeding up. Some time this century (2100s), we're estimated to reach anywhere from 8.0-7.7, so our children or grandchildren may experience a mass extinction event of their own. Something to keep in mind, yo.)

"Over the following weeks, we will be focusing on retrofitting scrubber devices into the industries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions. That's just a stopgap measure, though, until our engineers develop new methodologies for carbon neutral, or even carbon negative standards in operation and production.

"In combination with miniaturized atmospheric scrubbers, we'll also be focusing on public education regarding the harmful effects of greenhouse gasses, which we estimate will produce a number of interest groups that will get involved in healthy environmentalism instead of ecoterrorism. Planting trees is better for the environment than burning buildings, so do please keep that in mind." Greg paused for a moment, allowing the impact of his reminder to sink in before continuing.

"Our current goal is that the environment will be healed from all negative impacts over the past two hundred and fifty years no later than October four years from now..."

Councilor Bauer's report continued in that vein for about another twenty minutes, giving people an explanation of the towers that had been discovered dotted around the globe and putting a whole host of conspiracy theories to bed as the theorists discovered that what they thought was some giant... whatever was in fact just glorified filters for the entire atmosphere and ocean.

That said, conspiracy theories were rarely ever completely defeated by facts and logic, so they still continued... just with fewer proponents that believed in them.

Chapter 511

As time passed, more and more agency heads rose and delivered their reports. There were no breaks, or even significant pauses, as the emperor himself was present. His face was unchanging and his attention remained focused throughout the marathon council session.

As report after report was delivered, uninvolved people were finally witnessing the scale at which the empire operated. Many agencies were previously completely unknown to most, as their tasks were generally performed in the background, like the imperial waste management agency. Pre-empire, not many people considered the fact that waste management—garbage and recycling pickup, sewage treatment, and so forth—was a function of their local government, but now that every government function had been centralized, it was made apparent.

Along with that, many other things were now operated by the state as well. Things like power, water, and the few remaining places that relied on natural gas had been absorbed into the imperial utility agency. Cellphones and other communications services were rolled into the imperial internet agency, and many, many more functions that had once been under private management were now operated by the empire.

It proved a boon for many people, as governments in general were not-for-profit organizations and had no issues operating at a loss so long as it benefited the citizens. Government organizations were an exception to the truism that monopolies made the people suffer, and as long as corruption remained minimal or nonexistent, there would be no issues like those arising from communist and socialist societies in the mid to late 20th century, BE (Before Empire).

There was naturally still room for capitalism to exist, and for profit to be made by private individuals, but they could no longer profit off things that the empire had deemed as essential to a functioning society. So most of the profit was driven by retail and the service industry, as well as entertainment and media corporations. With most of the research now being done in Research City, where quite literally anyone could open a lab, innovation had already begun booming as people with Big Ideas could now realize those ideas and profit from them.

Even some economists had noted the trend and predicted an invention boom, as the imperial government was handing down things like tax exemptions and credits for innovative inventions that either stimulated the economy or benefited the people in some way, as well as preferential profit splits when it came time to manufacture the new inventions.

Once the smaller agencies had finished their reports, the only agencies left were the true juggernauts: the imperial treasury agency, imperial justice agency, imperial works agency, imperial police agency, and so on. Plus the ministers themselves—exterior, interior, and war.

The only person who would never deliver a public report was the head of the imperial intelligence agency, or The Tourist. He, or she, was also the only person in the council chamber that had their appearance disguised, so that everyone who looked at him or her saw them as a different person. It was a small flex on Nyx's part, and she was quite satisfied by the effect it had in practice.

The head of the treasury was the first juggernaut to report. He rose to his feet and immediately dove into the meat of the matter. "The fiscal year budget has been drafted and preliminarily approved pending the emperor's signature. The exact breakdown is now available in the Akashic Record, but I'll give a brief overview here.

"Our total expenditure this year is fifty trillion Earth New Dollars. Twenty trillion of that is the public defense burden, of which the imperial family is covering seventy percent, as promised. The remainder of the budget is social welfare and subsidy programs, the details of which you can find in the Akashic Record."

He continued speaking, disclosing the budget allocated to each ministry and how it would be spent on the agency projects under those ministries. The biggest single expenditure was, naturally, the ministry of war—which consumed a whopping forty percent of the total budget—but that was heavily subsidized by Aron's private investment into that budget, thus lowering the public burden to a much more reasonable six trillion END.

The shock people felt wasn't just about Aron's ability to pay 14 trillion END into the public treasury, but also the sheer amount of it. Comparing the spending power of the END to the previous most valuable currency, the USD, the total budget of the Terran Empire was more than the global GDP from before the empire's founding combined!

Economists took that as a good sign of a healthy economy, while laypersons in the general populace were just staggered by the sheer numbers. As most mathematicians could tell you, abstract numbers that can't be easily visualized by people are impossible to understand. Numbers that could be easily visualized, though, were very easy to understand.

For example, the number ten is easily visualized; it's the number of fingers most people have. Twenty is visualized as fingers and toes, twenty-one as fingers, toes, and another part of the anatomy. Maybe people went to school where their classrooms held thirty people, or attended lectures in a lecture hall that held a hundred-odd people.

But dealing with numbers that are too big boils down to generalizing them into categories, like "a lot" or "a whole lot", making numbers of sufficient size too abstract to be useful for anything but mathematicians. And numbers in the trillions absolutely fit the description of a number that's too big to deal with for practically everyone.

(Ed note: Penn & Teller had a show that aired from 2003-2010 called "Bullshit!" where they examined a lot of bullshit theories and beliefs. Season 4, episode 5 explored the concept of numbers and math and how it could be used to manipulate people. I tried finding the cold open clip on YouTube, but apparently it's been taken down as the show is now streaming on Paramount, but if you can find it, it's a really good—and funny—watch.)

When the imperial treasury progress report was done, the councilor yielded the floor back to Gaia and retook his seat.

[Next agency on the docket is the imperial blessings agency. Councilor Ross, the floor is yours] Gaia announced.

Chapter 512

Mason County Courthouse, Shelton, Washington.

An old, beat-up pickup truck rumbled around to the back of the historic Mason County Courthouse and huffed to a stop. The engine knocked a few times, then, with a puff of black smoke from the tailpipe, rattled to a stop as well. The truck's passenger door opened and a long-legged beauty with strawberry blonde hair tied up in a neat bun at the back of her head stepped out on three-inch stiletto heels.

"Dammit, Tim, when are you finally going to get this old piece of shit running right?" she said as she slammed the door of the truck, rattling the window that was stuck half open.

"I—" Tim began, his knuckles turning white around the steering wheel.

"No more excuses, Tim! Fix it or get rid of it." Siobhan turned around in a huff and began stomping toward the employee entrance of the courthouse.

"Vonnie! I'll... Sigh, and, she's gone," Tim muttered, then turned over the ignition. After four tries, it finally caught, and with a loud bang and the squeal of an engine belt in desperate need of replacement, it sputtered off into the distance.

...

Siobhan, or "Vonnie" for short, stepped into the courthouse and looked around for the nearest bailiff or other staff member. It was her first day of work, and she was extremely early. It couldn't be helped, though, as her husband, Tim, worked at the high school and had to be there by the time the first bell rang, which was hours before the courthouse officially opened for business.

Only finding a janitor, she sighed and asked for directions to the staff room. The janitor, an old hispanic man, pointed the way for her. She thanked him and set off, her heels clicking and clacking against the polished floor of the building.

When she stepped into the staff room, she coughed; apparently it doubled as the employee smoking area and two security officers and a young woman in the same kind of Office Lady uniform as Vonnie were inside, smoking and chatting while watching television. Apparently Vonnie wasn't the only person who carpooled to work with someone who didn't necessarily follow regular office hours.

She nodded to the three people in the room, then sat down on the couch and looked up at the television. It was playing a live broadcast of the first Imperial Agency Council meeting, where a strikingly attractive black woman with glowing hair that was floating was delivering a progress report as the head of the Imperial Blessings agency.

"The imperial blessings agency has been tracking crime and vigilantism. The instances of people using their blessings to commit crimes has risen to twelve percent of the total crime rate, not including costumed vigilantes, who consider themselves superheroes and go out to commit crimes in the name of fighting crime," the woman said, shaking her head in disapproval. "To that end, we've broken ground on a number of official academies for the blessed, where people who receive blessings can study and eventually earn a license to become superheroes..."

The report went on in the background, but Vonnie lost interest in it and her eyes glazed over as she accessed her implant to begin taking over the security cameras in and around the courthouse, as well as uploading worms and trojans to the internal computer network in the courthouse. Once those tasks were complete, she took out a makeup compact from her purse and began touching up her makeup, using it as a cover to drop a nondescript object the size of a button on the ground.

She closed her compact and put it back in her purse, looking at the people in the room to ensure they weren't paying her any attention, then sent a command to the object she had just dropped to the floor. Upon receiving the command, the button-

sized object rapidly dissolved and the individual nanites in the nanite colony spread out throughout the courthouse, attaching themselves to various surfaces and using those as conduction microphones.

The entire courthouse was thus bugged, and nobody was the wiser at all.

Vonnie leaned back on the couch and stretched, then stood and got herself a cup of terrible coffee.

"Seems like every government building has the same exact crappy coffee, no?" she quipped to no one in particular.

The other office lady in the room, a prim and proper woman in her early- to mid-twenties laughed and said, "Yeah. You must be new here. I'm Sarah, Judge Maxwell's stenographer."

"Vonnie," Siobhan replied, stretching her arm out to shake Sarah's hand. "And yeah, today's my first day. My husband dropped me off on his way to work, so I'm a bit early. Do you know when the human resources department generally has someone around? I still need to do my inprocessing."

"Sure, Gail should be here in around..." Sarah checked her watch, "twenty minutes or so. Just time enough to 'enjoy' some of our terrible coffee here."

"It only makes it worse that I'm from Seattle, home of Starbucks and hipster huts," Vonnie chuckled.

"I'm sure it does!" Sarah agreed with a laugh. She was a plain-

looking woman, a bit chubby and with mouse-brown hair in a pixie cut that didn't quite suit the shape of her face. But when she laughed, her eyes sparkled and her brilliant smile made her appear quite a bit more attractive, offsetting her severely upturned nose and making her haircut seem to fit her personality more than it did her face.

"So can you tell me about the people I'll be working with? I'm here to clerk for Judge Carlson—how is she to work for?"

Sarah winced on Vonnie's behalf. "Oof. I'm sorry, she's a hardass. Expects you to know everything, even if you don't know it. She's gone through six stenographers in the year and a half since she was appointed to the bench. They call her Cuntson around here, but don't let her hear you say that, and you didn't hear it from me," she said, practically in a whisper.

One of the two security officers in the room looked over and added, "She definitely won't like you. She's old and wrinkled like a prune, and you're, well..." he blushed, "err, not."

"Thanks for the compliment!" Vonnie replied with a beaming smile, though she was inwardly grumbling about her hell-mode difficulty assignment.

The three people continued chatting as the other security guard watched the IAC meeting on the television with laser focus. Vonnie looked over at him from time to time, wondering if she may have just found her first person of interest in the investigation into the cult activity in her area of operations.

Chapter 513

Shelton High School, Shelton, Washington.

Tim was having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Not only had he gotten in an argument with his partner early in the day, but he had also been objectively wrong in it. The truck he drove wasn't actually a part of his cover; it'd belonged to his actual father, William Todd, and had been left to him after his dad had passed to prostate cancer. So it actually MEANT something to him on a very personal level.

Thus, he was rather reactive when it came to the venerable piece of Detroit steel and ingenuity. Even though it had... personality, he'd always believed it would come through for him no matter what he put it through on any given day.

That belief had lasted until precisely this day, when the truck he'd always put his faith in had completely broken down. With a resounding bang and a heartwrenching thud, the transmission fell out of the bottom of the chassis and the engine blew the hood back against the window as it did its level best to break the olympic standing high jump record. Tim, or rather, Jason Todd, was completely heartbroken.

Not only that, but the public transportation network in Shelton was very backward and he was nowhere near a stop that would allow him to take the bus to school. Thus, he had to walk a little over five miles to get there. Now, five miles was nothing but a brief jaunt to a reaper like him, but as he was undercover, he had to maintain the standard of an average person. And to an average person, five miles was a long, long way.

It would have been one thing, had his cover been in the Army or Marine Corps, but it'd put him with a history in the US Navy instead. So not only did he have to pretend he had the fitness of an average person, that average person had to be a Navy veteran, none of whom were exactly known for their long-distance run times.

Neither were high school gym teachers, for that matter. Most of them were high school athletes that went to college on athletic scholarships and dreamed of making it in the Big Leagues, only for the harsh jackboot of reality to come stomping down on the fragile flower of their idealized future. Thus, embittered and frustrated, they returned to their glory days as washed up never-weres to "nurture" the next generation.

Long story short, Tim only arrived at his workplace a full half hour after the bell for first period had rung. It was a less than ideal beginning to his fictional career, unlike his "wife", Siobhan, who had arrived hours early thanks to the difference between a high school and a courthouse schedule.

He was met in the parking lot by a skinny, sour-faced old lady whose mouth looked like she had always just eaten a spoonful of pure concentrated citric acid. She had a traditional men's haircut—trimmed short on the sides and back, and to a length of three to four inches on top, combed into a 70/30 part—and her hair was as gray as burned charcoal. She was riding in a golf cart and carrying a clipboard, patrolling the parking lot and school grounds to catch students in the act of arriving late or leaving early.

Thankfully, Tim looked nothing like a student.

"Who are you and what are you doing here?" the old lady asked in a combative tone. "I don't remember you being one of the parents at our school, so you shouldn't be here!"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Tim replied, raising his hands in a placating gesture. "I'm the new gym teacher, Tim Roberts. My truck broke down a couple miles out and I had to walk the rest of the way, so I'm a bit late."

The old lady frowned, disapproval obvious in her gaze.

"Can you show me where the office is? I need to let them know that I'm here and meet with the principal, Mr. Dorsey," Tim politely asked.

"Through the double doors and down the hall to your right. There's a sign. Not even a gym teacher can miss it," the old lady spat, then gave him another disapproving look and a cold snort before driving her golf cart away. freewebnø ɱ

"Well she was... pleasant," Tim muttered under his breath as he headed toward the main entrance of the school.

...

Inside the school, the principal, James Dorsey, heard a knock on his door. Glancing at his already overflowing inbox, he sighed and said, "Come in."

His secretary, Amelia Ford, walked through the door, followed by a tall, muscular man with strong features wearing a matching set of light green Nike sportswear. "I have Mr. Roberts here to see you, Mr. Dorsey," she belatedly announced.

Inwardly complaining about his idiot secretary, Principal Dorsey could only put on a stern face and say, "I see that, Miss Ford. I have eyes, you know."

Amelia blushed and stammered an apology.

"Next time, use the intercom. That's what it's for, Miss Ford. You're excused," the principal reprimanded her. He turned to Tim and said, "You're late, Mr. Roberts. Not exactly the best first impression."

"I know, sir." Tim snapped to attention; that was just the kind of authoritarian vibe he felt from the principal seated in front of him. "No excuses, sir. It won't happen again, sir."

"Relax, boy," the principal chuckled. "I won't eat you." He picked up the handset of his phone and dialed a four-digit internal switchboard extension. "Miss Coleman, please come to my office," he said after the line connected.

Not even four minutes later, a woman in her early thirties with her hair in a high ponytail stepped through the principal's door. She, too, was wearing sportswear, but hers was a black Adidas tracksuit. "You called, boss?" she asked in a chirpy, sickeningly sweet voice. Tim could practically hear the chewing and popping of bubble gum in it, despite her not actually having any gum in her mouth.

"This is Mr. Roberts, the boys' gym teacher. Take him around and show him the ropes," the principal ordered.

"Yes boss, right away boss!" the overly bubbly woman replied.

Tim, on the other hand, felt an oncoming headache. He had already mapped the entire school, thanks to his implants, and he had a feeling that his mission would be far more difficult than the briefing had led him to believe. And far more headache-inducing, as well.

Chapter 514

As Tim and Siobhan were facing the first day of their mission, the imperial agency council meeting finally drew to a close. The meeting had lasted a very long time, as more than a hundred agencies had given their progress reports, each of which lasted anywhere from ten to thirty minutes. All told, the meeting itself was a 25-hour marathon session from the end of Aron's speech to the end of the session itself.

The vast amount of revelations prompted a flood of news articles, each of which focused on a single piece of information. They provided a sort of cliff's notes version of the IAC meeting for those who couldn't remain glued to their screens for the entire duration. As it turned out, the vast majority of humanity was still uninterested in the minutiae of the day-to-day operations of their governments, so even though the full recording of each progress report was available in the Akashic Record, they chose to read the articles instead.

(Ed note: I can't believe it, but Cliffs Notes aren't really a thing anymore. They used to be condensed versions of the important bits of various books, kind of like if someone sat down and took a highlighter to a book in question. I guess they've been replaced by Wikipedia now, but they used to be essential resources for college students back in the day.)

The media, on their end, seemed to have finally learned their lesson. Their reports were as fair and balanced as it was possible to be, despite still subtly being pro-empire in the way they presented the information. That said, though, they couldn't go too far with their flattery and bootlicking, as the Akashic Record contained the unvarnished truth and recordings of the reports themselves.

Still, the transparency in the imperial government caused the empire's approval rating to skyrocket to such an extent that the possibility of a popular revolt taking place had drifted so close to zero as to be functionally the same. Even though most people didn't sit through the meeting telecast, the simple fact that they could see it if they wanted to was enough to highlight just how different, and how much better, their lives were now than they were under their previous governments.

Those that did take an interest, however, were surprised at the many things they discovered when reading through the Akashic Record of the meeting. Like the imperial treasury's report, where the agency head spoke of recovering and redistributing funds that previous governments had created for the citizens. Even though their currencies no longer existed, and most things had been municipalized, funds like Norway's national wealth fund or Saudi Arabia's national oil fund, among others, had been tagged as being created for citizens. Thus, the imperial treasury department had converted the amount in those funds to END and distributed it to imperial citizens who once held citizenship in those now-defunct nations.

That move, however, had caused quite a stir among non-citizens, who protested that they were once citizens of X nation and should have benefited from the disbursement as well. The empire met those protests with a resounding silence until Youssef Al-Mutairi, the Minister of the Exterior, released a statement: "Imperial decisions benefit imperial citizens. You, who have waived your privileges as imperial citizens, enjoy the benefit of not having imperial responsibilities. Thus, you do not share in the imperial benefits, either."

The rather blunt statement put an end to the protests rather quickly, to say the least, and the non-citizens once again considered whether their initial decision to refuse to join the Terran Empire was in fact the correct one. It was a thought that was always close to the forefronts of their minds, lately.

…

Outer space.

Aron was hovering in orbit, surrounded by a runic shield. He was in reality, rather than the simulation, training to use his runes for most situations. As a backup, he was wearing a PAPS, but it was doing nothing other than gathering cosmic dust as he slowly drifted backward away from Earth.

[That's a good distance, sir] Nova said.

Though the planet still took up practically his entire view, he still felt the awe of the overview effect. "Despite seeing it in the simulation practically every day, I still can't get used to this view," he said, his eyes glittering from the beauty displayed in front of him.

[Sir, you need to start now if you want to finish in time to take your family on the vacation you promised them] Nova reminded him. There was much to do and little time in which to do it if he still wanted to spend time with his loved ones.

"How's the installation of the mana interface coming?" he asked.

A computer-controlled mana interface was foundational to most of his plans moving forward. The process was slow, however, as it had to be printed by the atomic printer in the Cube on Avalon Island and transported to orbit, as his current runic printing tech was still tier one and didn't allow for intent. It could only print runes themselves, and for higher functions, he had to personally imprint them with the necessary intent.

For simple things, like PAPS, that only performed a single function, that was fine. Imprinting intent wasn't necessary if the complexity of the runic structure was low. However, a control interface was very much a complex runic structure.

But with him having already bought intermediate runic knowledge, the complexity of the interface was easily within reach for him. That said, he no longer had to do everything himself; he could simply upload the design of the hardware including the runes to carve into it, and have it printed wholesale.

The only issue was the size of the thing—intermediate runic knowledge wasn't enough to miniaturize runic structures above a certain complexity. Thus his presence in orbit in reality, where he was awaiting the completion of the final steps before he would be required to step in and charge it with his intent.

[Reactor output is connected to the conversion rune. You may proceed when ready, sir] Nova reported.

"Alright, let's begin," he said, then relaxed his body and let his PAPS replace the shield he had been maintaining. What he was about to do required the majority of his attention; a lapse in concentration would definitely be costly.

Chapter 515

Aron extended his hand and a single rune appeared in front of him. Anyone who had seen him using his runes in the past would know what the rune was: the humble, yet mighty, shield rune. It glowed its usual golden color and was its usual small size.

But that didn't last long, as Aron continued pumping mana into it with the intent of expanding it. The thing he was planning on shielding was enormous, so the rune had to be equally as large to perform its task.

A minute passed and it continued growing... five minutes passed... ten minutes... Aron continued pushing intent-laden mana into the rune for a full hour before the flood of mana died down to a much more sustainable amount and the rune stopped growing. Now, he was only directing enough mana into it to prevent it from disappearing and forcing him to start the process over again.

But despite that, it still remained inactive, silently hovering in the vast blackness of space outside Earth's atmosphere. It had reached a gargantuan size of more than a thousand kilometers in diameter, and at that size, Aron could be sure of at least one thing: with the amount of mana he had pumped into the rune, it would surely be enough to cause chaos on the planet's surface.

...

"This year's budget is fifty trillion END? And for just one year? Where the fuck are they getting all that money!? I'm pretty sure they aren't getting it from the taxes they haven't collected yet..." said a young man in his twenties with deep blue eyes and a handsome face. He couldn't even imagine that amount of money, not with his current income at least.

"That isn't the important part. The government can issue bonds or something, but the real question is how the royal family has fourteen trillion END to fork out for their share of the defense spending," another young man replied. He had read the press release, as well as the relevant information in the Akashic Record, and though it had technically answered his questions, something still seemed off to the young men.

"I mean... to be fair, the emperor owns the high-end technology, manufacturing, and food markets. Plus, they're the sole providers of the military's gear. So they've probably got the money in spades and won't feel the pinch. After all, he's just feeding money from one hand to the other, spending the money he earns from his companies to buy gear from another one of his companies. It's just one big..."

Amidst the conversation, both young men grew distracted as, out of the corner of their eyes, they saw the sky flash with a slight hint of gold. They raised their heads to see what the color was coming from, considering how it had lit up the streets despite it being noon on a sunny day with clear skies.

As they raised their heads and looked for the light source, they saw a massive inscribed circle reflecting, or perhaps generating, light from its golden inscriptions. Though they didn't understand the language it was written in, it was obvious that it was writing, and the light coming from it was enough to dye the sky all the way out to the horizon. They looked at each other, then at the people around them, only to discover that they were the only ones who were looking up at the sky.

Moments after realizing the difference between their reaction and others', they both connected the dogs and realized that, whatever that hovering inscribed circle was, it had to be the doing of someone with a blessing.

"Is... is that what I think it is?" they both said in unison, then looked at each other in surprise and low-key panic.

As the runic circle continued growing, it became visible to more and more awakeners around the world. They immediately spread the news in various online social media groups for the blessed, then both awakened and non-awakened people alike began discussing the phenomenon. Some of the awakeners were more artistic than most, and even provided an illustration for those who were unable to see it for themselves.

The imperial blessings agency, having been informed of what was going to happen beforehand by Nova, immediately sent out a press release for immediate distribution while the rune was still in its expansion phase. The explanation was simple: it was a perfectly safe experiment being done outside the atmosphere above the Karman line. And even if it failed, nothing would happen to the planet as the experiment itself was completely harmless.

The explanation was enough to calm some people, but did nothing for others. The runic circle had been continuously expanding over the past 45 minutes and showed no sign of stopping.

Non-awakeners were even more scared than awakeners, as they couldn't see anything and had fallen victim to a rather epic round of the old children's game, "telephone". And had it not been for the empire's announcement, they would have thought they were being pranked by their blessed friends.

(Ed note: The game "telephone" is played by a group of people who stand in a straight line and face straight ahead. The last person in line taps the person in front of them on the shoulder and whispers a brief statement into their ear. The process repeats itself until the last person is tapped, then the first speaker and the last listener compare the message that was sent with the message that was ultimately received. Generally, the two are vastly different.)

The situation gave rise to a few widely watched livestreams, where awakeners were providing a play by play on the current goings-on in low earth orbit. Some of the livestreams even invited experts to discuss what the experiment could possibly be, and what the experimenter hoped his ultimate results would be.

…

Aron, taking a momentary pause to catch his breath after spending an hour enlarging the runic circle, turned to Nova and asked, "How's the chaos coming? Is it spreading, or did we manage to stop the spread somewhat?"

{It's manageable, sir,} Nova replied.

"Well then... let's not waste more time, eh?"

Chapter 516

Aron closed his eyes and began the process of imprinting his intent into the enormous runic construct he had created over the past hour. It was no easy task, as the necessary intent that would allow the construct to function at full capacity was just as complex as the construct itself, and he had to futureproof it by leaving room for upgrades as his knowledge of the runic language increased.

In order to make that possible, he needed to imbue it with an even more complex second layer of intent that would create "hooks", so to speak, that would be used in the future to tie in potential upgrades, a task that would be made much more difficult should he ignore it now and leave it for later.

The runic system, he had discovered, was much like a computer. The carved runes in their physical form were like a computer's hardware, and the intent that allowed them to function was software. The mana itself was the power that allowed the entire system to function. And just like a regular computer program, once it was compiled into a kernel it became much more difficult to modify.

Thus, the time-consuming process of imbuing the runic construct with intent began as, instead of mana, Aron sent his pure mental power cascading down the carved runes like a vast convoy of vehicles traveling along an interstate network.

Over the next two hours, Aron remained completely still, the only sign of life in his body the slight rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. His conscious mind had completely turned inward, continually shaping his mental power into intent and directing it into the runic construct, which began glowing brighter in the areas his intent attached itself to.

As time passed, his eyebrows furrowed so tightly he could crack a walnut between them and veins became visible on his body, starting from his temples and tracing their way down his neck, along his chest and shoulders, and all the way down to his fingertips. He felt like a jackhammer was running unattended in his skull, banging about and ricocheting off the bone, leaving naught but pain in its wake, but he had no choice other than to persevere in his task.

The construct he was imbuing was one of the most important aspects of the layered defenses in the solar system, and if his concentration slipped even for a moment, he would have to begin again from scratch. And, being two-thirds of the way through, he would rather suffer more now than suffer again in the future after his mental state recovered.

Thus, all of his higher-order AI subordinates had assumed direct control of the stealth fleet currently in orbit and deployed it around him, locking down space around him such that even a speck of cosmic dust might have difficulty in slipping between the physical layers of defense set up to protect him. Even the construction of the space elevator came to a halt in order to prevent even the slightest possibility of a disturbance caused by the ongoing construction.

Finally, after three torturous hours, Aron opened his eyes. A slight unwillingness flickered across his face as he prepared himself for what was about to unfold and muttered, "Activate."

A torrent of mana flowed out of his mana heart like water cascading down from Angel Falls, entering the rune and slowly creeping through it along the path his intent had taken. And as the mana continued flowing, the rune slowly began turning the pure white color of his intent.

(Ed note: Angel Falls is the world's tallest waterfall. Located in Venezuela, it's 979 meters from top to bottom with a plunge of 807 meters. It's so tall, in fact, that liquid water turns into vapor before reaching the bottom, making it one of the world's most beautiful and, dare I say, "mystifying", natural wonders. Do an image search, I don't think you'll be disappointed.)

"This... is going to cause a commotion," he said, unconsciously clutching his chest as he watched the rune shed its pure gold color and turn white like the entire thing was a set of dominos toppling from one end to another.

After the entire rune construct turned white, a kilometer-thick shield began spreading out from it and surrounding the Earth in a protective cocoon. It was moving excruciatingly slowly, revealing that there was a bottleneck somewhere in the process, and it was a very unexpected one at that: Aron himself. Although he could draw mana from a vast distance, it was akin to filling a bucket with a fire hose, then pouring that bucket out into an empty swimming pool through a drinking straw.

Essentially, the output of his runic heart simply couldn't keep up with the demand of the runic construct he was empowering, leading to the slow progress of the shield's completion. That was only compounded by the low mana density surrounding the planet; his runic construct was entirely capable of powering itself through its activation via drawing mana from its surroundings, but there simply wasn't enough mana for it to draw within its much more limited range. freeωebnovēl.c૦m

That said, he had taken that into account when designing the construct, as well as during the process of imbuing it with intent. The construct wouldn't collapse, it would simply throttle its progression based on the weakest link in the chain. Thus, it was only a matter of time until it was completed and the world would be held safe within its protective embrace. All Aron had to do was wait patiently for the process to be completed.

That said, it only moved slowly in comparison to Aron's usual nigh instantaneous usage of runes. Within thirty minutes, the activation process was completed and Earth was finally shielded. Its task completed, the runic construct faded from view, still present and functioning, but invisible to the naked eye and mana senses; Aron had inverted it so it would only be visible when under a certain operational load, and currently, it was under hardly any pressure at all.

But the people watching from the ground knew nothing about that. All they knew was that an enormous golden circle filled with strange script and diagrams had appeared, turned gold, then turned white, and finally disintegrated. They had no clue what it all meant, and nobody would be stupid enough to publicize it. In fact, Aron himself had moved the construct after it vanished, setting it on a random course around the world in the center of the thick shield, making it even harder to spot.

Chapter 517

Aron, despite the rune construct's activation, continued feeding a steady stream of mana to it to ensure it didn't collapse. Despite it being in a neutral state and receiving no attacks at all, its sheer size meant that it required more than the relatively small amount of ambient mana could provide. So, to prevent it from destabilizing due to the lack, he needed to act as a temporary bridge.

He passed through the shield and headed toward Ceres Station, where an entire bank of massive, hundreds-of-meters-tall fusion reactors had been purpose-built to fuel the enormous runic construct. Nova had calculated the minimum amount of mana required to ensure the shield would remain stable without Aron's intervention and she'd built sixty reactors to handle the load, with a combined output of 112 petawatts of electricity.

The generator bank was connected to the surface of Ceres Station by a conduit spanning ten meters in diameter, lined with a second printed runic construct that would ensure a smooth flow of mana from the integrated electricity-mana conversion rune. It would light Earth up, but over time, it would settle down and normalize with the surrounding mana in the solar system. Besides, they had already been discovered, so what would come would come.

Better to have a shield than not.

{Reactor self-test indicates all green. Powering up... 37%... 51%... 77%... 94%... Ignition. Fusion reaction stable, initiating electricity generation at ten percent capacity.} Nova continued narrating the step by step process of reactor startup as the immense power bank rumbled to life.

{Electrical output stable. Initiating connection to converter rune. Converter rune is functioning normally with minimal loss. No errors reported. Increasing electrical output... no errors. Reactors are at 56%... 71%... 80% and stable. Safety interlocks engaged, safety systems reporting all green. Electrical output at 91% and holding steady... No fluctuations detected in the mana flow.

{Sir, I think we can call this a successful ignition,} Nova reported.

"Got it, I'm connecting the mana feed to the shield rune construct now. Start the control interface in the Cube," Aron ordered.

{Understood, sir,} Nova said and, deep in the bowels of the bottommost basement beneath the Cube, deep within the Earth's mantle, a bank of quantum computers hummed to life, their soft blue indicator lights shining as the bootup process continued. Soon, the lights turned green as all the computers completed the process.

Aron, meanwhile, had linked the runic shield construct to the outflow of mana from Ceres Station and was finally able to rest. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and rested for a few minutes before rolling over and falling head-first into Earth's gravity well, aiming to land on the roof of the Cube on Avalon Island.

As he freefell back to the surface, Nova was busy running tests and checks to ensure that the shield was operating perfectly. As check after check returned all green, she finally reported the successful installation and initialization of the ERD-26 Planetary Shield Generator and Aron relaxed.

'At least the final line of defense is in place,' he thought as he rolled over to gaze at the planet that was rapidly growing in his field of view.

"When will the space elevator tether be connected to the anchor point on the surface?" he asked out of idle curiosity. He had been too busy with the construction of the planetary shield over the past few days to keep current on the space elevator's construction progress, but he knew it should be connected soon; the tether was only a few hundred meters away from the caldera of the extinct volcano on Elysium Island that had been tentatively named Olympus Minor.

The preparatory work on the island had already been completed, and the anchor sunk from the volcano's caldera to the very bottom of the Earth's crust. All that remained was for the carbon nanotube weave of the elevator's tether to be molecularly bonded to the waiting anchor point on the surface.

{Within two weeks, assuming nothing goes wrong,} Nova replied.

Aron grunted an acknowledgement, then fell silent again as his freefall from orbit continued. After a few minutes, he mused, "From up here, everything on the ground just seems so... petty. Petty and shortsighted. Humanity is a truly fickle species that fluctuates between 'but I want it now!' and 'so what have you done for me lately then?'

"Tell me, Nova. If it were up to you, what would you do?" he asked.

Nova was lost for an answer, a first for her. {I'm not sure, sir. Human nature is the driving force behind its development as a species, so I don't think I would change anything,} she finally said. She wasn't sure, but she thought she felt a twinge of annoyance at her inability to immediately answer the question she was asked. Aron was her creator, her father, her brother, her patient, and many other things to her, and her attachment to him bordered on the absolute.

"I think... I agree, as much as I don't want to," Aron sighed, then changed topics. "How's the shield interface?"

{I've completed the diagnostics and everything's green, sir,} she answered. {The computer bank is functioning normally and is currently operating at peak efficiency with connections to all 188,901,753 shield lattice nodes.}

The shield was designed as a layered honeycomb lattice, with each node reinforcing and being reinforced by those around it. It ensured that there were no gaps or weak points in the shield, and the flexible structure was excellent at dispersing impacts over a wide area without shattering.

"Excellent," Aron said. Avalon Island was finally visible to him without augmenting his vision, and he made minor adjustments to his trajectory to ensure he would land where he wanted. He would make more during the remainder of his freefall; it was something of a competition he had with himself to land as close to his desired target as possible with each of his entries from orbit, and he was determined to win this first bout in reality.

"I look forward to seeing it in reality," he added after ensuring he was on target.

Chapter 518

John was in the shower, getting ready for a night with his ladies, when he received a priority notification. Since only Aron, Gaia, and Athena could ping him when his availability was registered as "do not disturb", it was important enough for him to immediately check it. Thus, he stepped out of the shower, and without even drying off, he simply wrapped a towel around his waist and found the nearest chair he could drop his ass into and sat down.

He logged in to the simulation and called for his AI butler, Jotunn. "Catch me up on the situation," he ordered.

{His Imperial Majesty erected a global shield. The information hasn't been made widely public yet and it's still classified pending testing. His order is for you to hold wargames and test the shield to failure in the simulation. As our VR game hasn't been made public yet, we have no staff for our space navy, so the wargames will be between you and Athena with simulated crew...} Jotunn continued briefing John as he threw him a data packet containing the official orders with Nova's signature on them.

They had already been authenticated and verified, and everything checked out. Even though the way the orders had been delivered assured their authenticity, protocol was still important and must be followed. Otherwise, Mnemosyne would throw an absolute hissy fit, and after experiencing one of those, nobody would want to suffer through another. That particular AI was so pedantic that she essentially redefined the word and her tongue was sharper than monomolecular scalpels!

John opened the official orders and carefully read through them line by line. Even though Jotunn was giving him a top-level briefing on them, that was still just a summary and the devil was often in the details.

After he finished reading, he said, "Okay. Call my planning staff. Just because the crews will all be simulated doesn't mean the people at the top making the plans will be."

He raised his head and looked up, then called for Athena to join him.

She chose to appear as though she had taken a Star Trek teleporter to John's study. {You rang?} she asked. {And are you aware that you're, umm... less than fully dressed?}

"Yes, I did, and yes, I am," he replied. "Did you get the wargames order?"

{I did, yes. Shall we lay down the rules of engagement then?}

The pair, one human and one AI, spent the next several hours hashing out the boundaries for the simulated war game. John would be the first to defend while Athena attacked, then Athena would defend against John's simulated invasion. As it was meant to stress test the shield to failure, both agreed to refrain from using saboteurs, quislings, and blockade runners. It would be a head-on spear vs shield battle for the first round.

For the second round, Athena would be joined by Nyx to use every possible means both fair and foul to bring down the shield, while John would be joined by the entire planning staff of ARES, including Poseidon and Aeolus, to defend. Then they would switch again, and John's team would try to take down the shield while Athena and her partner Nyx would defend.

The two rounds of attack and defense should give a rather well-rounded overview of the planetary shield's strength, as well as provide an excellent opportunity to train the human cadre at the top of ARES in space battles. If it weren't for the training opportunity, Nova would have simply run the simulations herself and crunched the numbers.

The one complaint that John had was that the timing of the shield activation was rather out of place. He had been read in on and participated in plans to create VR "games" for people that would provide initial screening and training for space fleet candidates. He well knew Nova's capabilities, and the sheer numerical strength of the shield had probably already been determined by her. The wargames were likely meant as a backup and to introduce an element of human creativity into the simulation that she simply couldn't add herself.

So it would be best to add proper human crews to the game. But orders were orders, and John had been benched for so long that his hands were itchy anyway. He would raise the issue of properly crewing the ships for the games during the after action review.

But until then, he had a war to plan.

…

Two weeks later.

The awakened had finally calmed down after The Circle had faded and nothing bad had happened. Everyone on Earth was, understandably, a little bit gunshy, as so many things had happened since the founding of the empire. So anything out of the ordinary was first seen as a threat and met with panic and fear, and the empire's silence about the appearance of the runic construct in the sky had done nothing to ameliorate that fear.

However, the empire had instead pushed news of the impending completion of the space elevator, and imperial citizens and noncitizens alike were now glued to their screens, watching as the tether crept the last few inches to the ground. Once it reached completion, it was met by a full battalion of GEMbots, who welded the woven carbon nanotubes to the waiting anchor point in the Olympus Minor caldera.

Soon, the operation was declared a success and the head of the imperial press agency, Olivia Foster, announced that they would begin taking reservations for facility rentals in the Olympus Minor waystation and Ceres Station. Reservations were first-come, first-served, so everyone from major theme parks and hotel chains to space-focused companies like the struggling SpaceX and Blue Origin rushed to reserve space in both ends of the tether.

Following close on the heels of the space elevator news was another piece of news that shocked people out of their complacency. Every imperial citizen in the top twenty cities of the pre-empire countries received a notification that the empire was hiring construction workers to build the new fortress cities.

The notification surprised them, as they thought the construction wouldn't begin quite so soon, not to mention that they thought the construction would be completed by Hephaestus Heavy Industries without any outside labor. But when they considered it further, they realized it was a gesture from the empire that let them have some sweat equity in their new homes, as well as paid them to work on them instead of keeping everything flowing to the emperor's pockets. freewebnø ɱ

Economists immediately took to Pangea to praise the initiative, as with the consolidation of positions making quite a few jobs redundant, opening up jobs in a new sector—like construction—would head the incipient unemployment crisis off at the pass and prevent the still-fragile economy from collapsing under its own weight before it could build a stable foundation.

Chapter 519

The announcement informed everyone that anyone interested would be employed under a temporary contract with Hephaestus Heavy Industries that came with some truly hefty perks. For twelve months, they would be employed with a salary of a thousand END per month, a per-diem meal allowance of a hundred and fifty END per month, free on-site housing, and each employee would receive a credit for a free future visit to a medical pod, should they ever require one.

Not only that, they would be given priority access to advanced courses and certification as electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, welders, and so on, should they choose to take that path. And with the first full month being essentially a paid vacation while they waited for the cities' foundations to be laid, it was an excellent proposition. So they would be paid 12,000 END for the entire job, all while gaining an essential, marketable skill to prevent them from being unemployed in the future.

Once the realization sank in, billions of people rushed to the website to sign up for job placements with the construction crews. They knew that not everyone would be hired in the first round, but with a construction round beginning every month as the foundation crew moved from city site to city site, everyone would eventually get their turn. After all, with fifty thousand fortress cities slated for construction to house the seven billion imperial citizens, there was plenty of work to go around.

Along with the hiring of construction crews, more people would be hired, or kept on, as maintenance engineers responsible for cleaning, inspection, and minor repairs of the new cities. There was no experience requirement for either position, either, just that whoever signed up must be willing to work, and work hard, to complete the tasks in the time given and up to the standard required.

In the meantime, a model city had been "constructed" in the public simulation that they could go and tour, should they choose to do so. All of the cities would be built along the same general design; the only things that would differ were the individualized condos that people would be buying, or the detached houses for the more affluent.

Nearly everyone who was free at that moment rushed to the model city to take instanced tours of it, looking with wonder at all of the futuristic buildings and conveniences. And for those who were otherwise occupied at the time they were pinged with the announcements, they were busily making plans with friends to tour it together at their first opportunity.

...

When the people logged in, they rushed to the new model city. As they approached it, unrelated people began fading from view, shifted into different instances of the simulation to reduce the overcrowding from the hundreds of millions of people swarming a city that was designed for dozens of millions, at best. If they stopped to consider for a moment, it would be odd that the groups who intended to tour the city together had remained together, none of them being shunted into different instances.

But they didn't stop to consider that, being too focused on rushing to the pristine white towers reaching to the sky, decorated with hints of reflective metalwork and the glinting reflection of laminated glass.

The city was surrounded by a tall wall with four gates in it, each connected to its opposite gate by an eight-lane highway. There was a buffer layer of 25 kilometers between the wall and the first buildings rising from the ground in the distance, two-thirds of which was farmland, and the other third was virgin forest, left mostly untouched by human hands and surrounded by a tall fence, separating the wildlife in the forest from the humans outside of it.

As they approached the city proper, they were given an introduction by the city's VI, which showed a top-down view.

The designers of the city had gone with a ring design, with twenty rings from the center to the outermost ring, the distance between them increasing as the distance from the city center increased. In the direct center of the city was the government tower, which rose into the lowest cloud layer and housed all of the necessary infrastructure facilities to support a city of such an immense size. Surrounding the government tower out to the second ring road was a large, well-manicured park with many walking paths, biking paths, and attractions like carnival rides and games. It would be open all year round to everyone as a public service.

Leading from the first ring road to the government tower was a pristine walking boulevard separated by a long reflecting pool in the middle, which was made of black basalt rock polished to a mirror finish before being filled with clear water to twenty inches deep in order to promote reflectivity. Trees and decorative topiary bushes lined the sides of the boulevard, blocking the view of other maintenance structures and focusing visitors' gaze on the government tower itself, which was a marvel of engineering that was narrow at the bottom, then gradually flared out and tapered to a point at the top, like a spear point thrusting from the ground.

Mirroring the rest of the city's white and chrome design, it almost seemed to defy the laws of physics, especially compared to more "normal" skyscrapers that were angular and as broad at the base as they were at the roof, if not moreso. The only other difference, beyond the design itself, was that it was a windowless edifice meant to project the prestige of the empire and protect the secrets held within.

Naturally, it wasn't open for public viewing.

The residential buildings began at the second ring road, across the street from the park district. Those on the second ring road itself were nearly as tall as the government building, perhaps losing out in height by a hundred feet or so. That trend continued as the buildings grew further from the city center, preserving an unobstructed view for people living in the top levels of each building, until the 40th ring road, which was populated by detached houses and compounds for the ultra-rich, which was a departure from previous city planning. In the current city structures, the closer one was to the city center, the more valuable their homes would be. But in the fortress cities, it was the opposite.

When the curious wanderers finally entered each towering skyscraper, they discovered that they were self-contained worlds unto themselves. The first floor was filled with luxuries and entertainment venues, essentially a large and varied shopping mall, with restaurants, movie theaters, and showrooms for entertainers and the like. Going up a level to the second floor, it was populated by necessities, like grocery stores, clinics, police stations, and so on.

The third floor and above were residential floors, and each person that entered a residence saw the floor plan and interior decorations that they had chosen when they were designing their dream living spaces.

It was a tour that was only made possible by being in the public simulation, and it was a resounding success. Everyone who toured the model city came out of the tour with a great anticipation for their new home.

Chapter 520

Deep below the Cube on Avalon Island, kilometers below the surface and near the border of the crust and mantle of the planet, was ARES Central Command. In contrast with the usual understated elegance or futuristic decor of the Terran Empire, the command structure was very, very barebones. So barebones, in fact, that it was a simple cavern that'd been dug out of the ground and had workstations placed in it for the military high command to issue orders, make plans, and track the progress of ongoing operations.

Not that it really mattered, to be honest, as augmented reality could make even a cesspit look like a palatial garden.

Currently within the rooms carved out of the rock, a planning session was taking place between John and the rest of the human leadership of ARES.

"It's strength against strength this round. Our defense fleets are limited, and we won't have reinforcements. We also have to work with simulated crews, so our orders will be followed exactly to the letter, but only to the letter," John said, his face grim. Even though he knew he was only participating in a stress test to failure for the new shield, he still wanted to put up a good showing. He was a military man through and through, but with the opponents the empire had been facing, he'd had no opportunity to show his abilities; the technological advantage had made any approach other than overwhelming force the incorrect approach.

This was his chance to earn his stripes, so to speak.

"I understand that, sir... I think we all do. So why not put on our thinking caps and figure out how we can best defend the shield if it were to be attacked in reality? The action plans we come up with for the defensive effort now can be used as our standard operating procedure in the future in the case of a last stand scenario," Lieutenant Colonel Simbarashe Sithole, the head of the ARES think tank, suggested.

(Ed note: I googled the most common Zimbabwean names, and "Sithole" is the 7th most common Zimbabwean surname, according to , where Agent and I source like 99% of the names you see in the novel. Once I saw that, I couldn't *not* use that here, ahahahaha.)

"That's the idea, colonel. So, gentlemen... suggestions?" John asked, looking around the conference table at the leaders seated there.

...

Three days later.

John was in the simulation with the rest of the ARES leadership, hunkered down in the center of Ceres Station. He had a thousand full fleets at his disposal, all of them configured for various different defensive roles. In front of him was a hard light hologram displaying the planet below him and the shield above. Beyond the shield, he had laid a minefield of deactivated missiles, which would activate and attack the nearest detected enemy ship when they came within the missiles' terminal maneuvering range.

The shield itself was configured for one-way operations, allowing things out but not in. Even though it was weaker than the full operational configuration, which would allow nothing in or out, he had chosen to use the weaker option until his fleets were degraded or his active defenses became overwhelmed. And there were many active defenses; he had spent his three days of preparation time building layer after layer of defense fields that stretched all the way from the exterior of the kilometer-thick shield to the orbit of the moon, up to and including the base on the dark side of the moon, all of which were perpetually in random motion so the incoming enemy couldn't simply blast a path through them.

Soon, the countdown timer hit zero and the war games began.

The war games were designed as a wave assault for this first round. The incoming enemy attack would start small, in the neighborhood of hundreds of ships, with each additional wave coming two hours after the appearance of the previous. And each wave would double in numbers.

The first assault wave was only a hundred ships and was unlucky enough to be randomly inserted into the area of operation directly in front of the moon base. Before the ships could even move, they were vaporized by the heavy guns on the moon base.

The second, third, fourth, and fifth waves were stopped by the outer defenses as well, though the time it took to kill each incoming wave was growing longer and longer, allowing John less and less time to replenish his active defense layers.

Finally, the sixth wave broke through the outermost defensive layer and entered the second. It was quickly obliterated by the laser installations in the second defensive layer, as were the seventh, eighth, and ninth waves.

But then it happened. The tenth wave arrived before the ninth wave had been completely obliterated. Almost sixty thousand attackers swarmed the second defensive layer, about fifty thousand of which were completely fresh and undamaged. Athena consolidated the two waves and made a concerted push, ramming through the second defensive layer and into the minefield of the third layer.

By sacrificing the remainder of her damaged ships, she soon penetrated the minefield and was in the last layer of active defenses: the "parked" missiles.

The makeshift maneuvering mines proved only minimally effective, despite what most science fiction novels had led John to believe. Missiles relied on initial velocity in addition to terminal maneuvering, after all, and starting from a velocity of zero allowed Athena's point defenses to completely dominate that layer.

Having penetrated all the way to the shield, Athena chose to cordon off a safe path through the layered defenses and await the next incoming wave of attack vessels before beginning her final assault on the shield. In the meantime, the remaining vessels of the tenth attack wave were sent out in small groups to clear the defenses along a broad corridor. The eleventh wave would consist of over a hundred thousand attackers, after all, so they would require a lot of maneuvering room, even if they were to maintain a close formation.

In the end of the first round, the shield was taken down in wave fifteen, with John's heroic defense and sacrificial tactics sufficing to take out three entire waves—the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth wave. After that, he had no more fleets and was forced to order the shield to its third configuration and hunker down until the inevitable destruction came two waves later, with almost three million attacking ships constantly degrading the shield faster than the available power could repair it.

Once Ceres Station exploded, the first round of the wargames was over, nearly 32 hours after the first wave began.

Chapter 521

The next stage of the war game, testing the shield against a determined infiltrator from the inside, was scheduled for four days later. Considering the upper echelon of ARES had all been involved in the first stage from start to finish, one day was allotted for rest before the three-day preparatory period began for the second stage of destructive testing on the shield.

As John had been on defense first in the first round, he would be on offense first in the infiltration round. His task was to send a single reaper team into Ceres Station to take down the planetary shield in whatever way they could. They would be given limited intelligence to simulate spy action, including the number of defenders, types of defenses, and potential routes to the shield control stations in the planetoid-cum-space-elevator.

The confidence level of the intel wouldn't be high, but it would be generally reliable to form the framework of a plan around. The briefing John received set the confidence level in the intel package at 81%, which put it in the category of actionable intel, even if only barely.

Thus, a reaper team was handed the intel package and John wisely stepped back. He wouldn't be participating in the infiltration itself, and a distant commander shouldn't interfere with leadership decisions made in the field. Even though ARES had a vast advantage in real-time communications and leaders in the comfortable offices way back behind the front lines could, if they so chose, interfere in front line command decisions, the adage "train like you mean to fight" still applied. And since they couldn't guarantee their comms would remain stable for a multitude of reasons, it was best to leave it to the commanders on the field to execute the missions assigned to them.

...

High above the North Pole in a high polar orbit was a stealthed space station. Home to ARES special forces, it was invisible to any known means of detection; even the empire would be unable to spot it if they didn't know exactly where it was in its orbit at any given time. It was one of the most sensitive of all of ARES bases, for one simple reason: it was where reapers were made, and almost all of their tech was classified at such a high level that it would never see the light of day.

Reapers were an odd breed. It should be illegal for anyone to enjoy the suck as much as they did, and they preferred spending all of their time in the simulation, taking part in the eternal war that Athena had hand crafted. Thus, even though the station itself was made to be extremely comfortable, with plenty of park space, facilities for rest and relaxation—yes, even brothels filled with whorebots—and all the luxuries any man could ask for, it was as deserted as a ghost town.

The only facilities that were active were the clinics, where the reapers would go to get new cutting-edge tech installed whenever Lab City would release an update. Those and what the reapers jokingly referred to as the "graveyards", as they were filled with the coffin-like extended stay VR pods that they spent almost all of their time in. Everything else was silent and dark, visited only by the occasional maintenance bot tasked with cleaning the area or performing minor repairs.

In one of those so-called graveyards was Reaper Team 22, who were in the simulation getting kitted out for their upcoming infiltration mission.

"So we get to blow up Ceres? Holy shit holy shit holy shit sometimes I fucking LOVE my job!" Master Sergeant Cuervo cheered. He was once his team's demolitions specialist before being promoted to team leader, so any day with a big boom was a great day to be him.

"Sounds like a good day to me, too," Corporal Cole "Snakeyes" Barrett said. Ceres Station was large, but it wasn't big enough for him to really play his main role in the infiltration. After all, snipers were at a distinct disadvantage in tight corridors with multiple twists and turns, so he would also be carrying a heavy load of explosives.

Reaper Team 22 was many things, but subtle was most definitely not one of them.

The team dug into the intel package and spent the next few days planning, doing dry runs, and adjusting their plans before the big day. They definitely couldn't afford another skyscraper incident; they had yet to live down the first one and were still taking shit from other reaper teams about it.

...

Three days later.

The countdown timer once again ticked over to zero, and the reapers left their stealthed station via cold coasting. The most dangerous portion of the assault would be landing on the dwarf planet, so they split into two fireteams of five people, one led by Tekillya and the other led by Snakeyes, and each of them would individually land on the surface of the station in their individual IDMOs.

But man proposes and god disposes, and Tekillya was taken out by a lucky shot from the point defenses on Ceres Station. Howling with rage and spitting streams of profanity, he was forcibly switched from participant to observer, a devastating mental blow to the explosion addict.

Still, if he couldn't witness the fireworks first hand, he could always watch them from up close. Thus, he chose to spectate over Snakeyes' shoulder as the two fireteams ran rampant through the station.

The intel package had been oh so very wrong in terms of the number of defenders and layers of defense they would have to get through, and around every corner was another brutal firefight against hastily prepared fighting positions filled with what seemed like an unending stream of defenders. Intel had the defense forces listed as two ARES battalions, but Nyx—their opponent for the infiltration—had armed every single person on the station and thrown them behind slipshod and not-so- slipshod defensive positions along every hallway leading to the center of the station, where the critical shield installations were located.

The reaper team's initial plan was to go in stealthily, using their knives to take out the patrolling defenders and relying on their technological advantage to keep them hidden. But they had overlooked one glaringly obvious flaw with that plan: they were going up against people with the same tech they had.

Thus, after more than fourteen hours, the final surviving reaper made it through to the center of the station, completely out of ammunition for his weapons, out of batteries in his Pappy, and his NUTS in tatters. He was even missing his left hand, having had a grenade detonated by a lucky shot while he was still in the process of throwing it.

Still, Snakeyes had made it, and he still had his explosive satchel charges. He knew he couldn't possibly make it back for exfiltration, so he armed the explosives and sprinted the last few meters between him and the nearest fusion reactor containment chamber.

His last words before the fireworks show began were, "SEE YA LATER MOTHERFU—"

Reaper Team 22 had accomplished the mission in a spectacular fashion, but with no survivors.

Chapter 522

Within a day, the first hundred million new construction workers had been selected and notified to report for training. However, something seemed odd; there were no other movements on the construction side. No materials had been purchased, no construction equipment had been rented or bought, and so on, making people wonder what exactly was going on with the construction. Shouldn't there be piles and piles of materials and heavy equipment excavating the ground or laying foundations?

But those questions went unasked and unanswered as people recalled that Hephaestus Heavy Industries was the company behind this megaproject. They had a history of always producing everything they needed in house, from materials to machinery, and even their "staff", robots though they may be. The only difference now was the scale of the construction. HHI was known for operating under a strict veil of secrecy, sure, but how could they hide a project of this scale?

And taking it a step further, where would they even begin to source the materials? They would surely require iron, steel, cement, and everything else in the neighborhood of billions of tons, and the current mining industry would find it virtually impossible to deliver in that short amount of time.

One intrepid conspiracy theorist, who had been spoiled by panda-novels, even privately believed that a system apocalypse was coming and the materials would be created in VR and somehow taken out in reality by a person with a system, or perhaps a regressor, transmigrator, or reincarnator, but even he had to shake his head and abandon that train of thought.

After all, something so fantastic could only happen in the fever dream of a mad author, but this was definitely reality. He could be sure of that because every time he pinched himself, he felt pain.

But people had finally learned their lesson and settled in to wait for the empire's spokesperson, whoever it may be this time, to come forward and enlighten everyone. And they certainly weren't disappointed, as the response came quicker than expected and in a manner that made all arguments null and void in the face of the evidence they saw with their own eyes.

…

Felix's office.

[We've repeatedly simulated and reviewed everything, so you can calm down. Manage your mannaries, boss, the possibility of things going wrong is so close to zero as to be statistically impossible. Sure, some extradimensional being could interfere, or something might happen on a quantum level... but really, it's impossible. Im-poss-i-ble] Felix's AI butler told him. He had noticed a spike in Felix's heartbeat and wanted to bring it back down to normal.

"I'm not worried in the slightest—" Felix grinned, "—on the contrary, I'm excited!" He had been lost in thought considering how far he had come.

When the whole crazy journey had begun, he was just a first-

year law firm associate practically straight out of law school. But now, he was in a field that had nothing to do with the path he had thought his life would take. Instead of spending all of his time in law libraries, writing briefs, and handling tasks assigned by partners in a law firm, he was in an emperor's inner circle. A true blue fucking emperor! How cool was that?

His life had turned out better than he could ever have imagined, and it was all thanks to a single decision made on the spur of the moment. And thanks to that leap of faith, he was a billionaire! Not that money really mattered to him, as with his benefits and position, he found it incredibly difficult to spend any of his immense wealth to begin with. Anything and everything he ever could have wanted was simply handed to him, oftentimes without even needing to ask for it.

In this specific instance, though, he was even more excited than normal. Almost every little boy went through phases where they thought of what they wanted to be when they grow up. They would fall in love with the idea of operating big construction machines and building things, or even tearing them down, and they would fall in love with the idea of being an astronaut. Or a doctor, or a wizard, or... well, the list goes on and on, really. Children are flighty creatures at the best of times, after all.

But now he was actually living those dreams! He could play with all the big construction machines he wanted, and he had already left his footprints on the moon next to great men like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. And soon, very soon, he would be a real life wizard. How could he not be in a constant state of excitement? All of his childhood dreams were coming true one after another!

Not only that, he was personally contributing to building not just a building, but an entire new world. And he had the good fortune of fulfilling his dreams alongside his two best friends. He sometimes laughed himself awake in the middle of the night just dreaming about it. freēwēbηovel.c૦m

"How much longer until the equipment arrives?" he asked as he jolted himself out of his own head and remembered what he was actually supposed to be doing.

[Two hours, boss. Lots of red tape now that the shield is up and it's been proven to be vulnerable to traitors] his assistant replied. [The imperial space agency has to inspect everything before letting it pass through the shield, and since everything's coming from our moon base after coming from different locations from the asteroid belts, that's a lot of inspections that need to be done.]

"Then I'd better get going. I want to be the first person they see when they get to Olympus Minor," Felix said, rubbing his hands together in excitement. "I haven't forgotten those monsters since I first laid eyes on them in the simulation."

He rose from his seat and headed to the door in his office, then paused and called Sarah. When she answered, he said, "Hey you. Care for another date? There's something I want us to watch together."

After their trip to the moon, the two friends were teetering on the edge of another kind of leap of faith and, he thought, both of them wanted to explore new ground in their relationship. Working so closely together could bring people together or tear them apart, and for Felix and Sarah, their work had only drawn them closer and closer until only the thinnest of paper was holding them back from moving from friends to lovers.

Chapter 523

A few hours later, outside the planetary defense shield.

There was no sound in space, so all was silent. And there was an almost hypnotic rhythm to the dance of barely visible satellites in the emptiness between the shield and the gorgeous blue planet acting as a backdrop. The only disturbance was the glowing blue trails of ionic thrusters traveling in a convoy that stretched from the shield to the surface of the moon, where Aron had built an automated logistics and distribution base.

If an observer were to stand atop Ceres Station and look up, they would see enormous vessels shaped and colored like planks of burnt wood, each of them blending in against the blackness of space save for the output of their ionic thrusters. Thousands of them were sailing in a line, headed toward the entry port of the now permanently active shield.

The frontmost vessel came to a halt a few hundred kilometers outside the shield as the convoy fleet commander reported their arrival to Ceres Station and requested permission to pass through the shield and enter Earth orbit.

"Approved, commander. Your entry gate is 32A. Lower your shields and pass through at Mach 1 for security scans as you pass through the inspection field," the control operator broadcast on the fleet comms channel.

"Copy that, control. HHIS convoy 15 out," the fleet commander replied, then signaled the convoy to move out as ordered.

One by one, the ships passed through the designated entry portal, and the commander didn't know if he was imagining things, but he thought he might have felt the scans pass through his body. He looked out at the tunnel in the shield through his augmented reality view and gazed in wonder at the security measures he could see; he couldn't even imagine the ones that were as invisible as the shield itself.

He shook his head and refocused himself, clapping his palms against his cheeks to get his head back in the game. He had an important job to do: deliver his cargo to the surface so that construction could begin on the new fortress cities.

…

"ARES should've kept all of the old military gear instead of just a few for museums. But those idiots scrapped almost all of it!" a girl slurred.

She was sitting at the bar in a dive bar in the middle of the afternoon, a row of empty shot glasses turned upside down in front of her. Despite her gorgeous appearance, she was dressed like it was laundry day, wearing loose, faded sweatpants, an old My Little Pony t-shirt with most of the silk-screened art peeled off, and an old military camouflage jacket that was two sizes too big for her with one torn pocket. Her hair was disheveled and she was wearing a pair of Deadpool socks, and her "look" was completed with a pair of crocs.

She looked like she hadn't slept in quite some time, and in fact, she actually hadn't. She hadn't showered, either.

Ever since the empire had "stolen" all of the military hardware she so loved, she'd been depressed, which explained why she was bellied up to a bar in the afternoon, day drinking. She was a military otaku and certified ammosexual; instead of fashion magazine subscriptions and an extensive makeup kit, she subscribed to Guns & Ammo and had a gun locker. Her video game library, which was extensive, was filled with realistic first person shooters, and she even had copies of the now-

defunct US Army recruiting tool, the America's Army video games proudly displayed in a shrine in a corner of her studio apartment.

(Ed note: Believe it or not, that franchise existed from 2002-2022. The US Army thought that publishing a realistic FPS would be a good way to stop people from failing boot camp and washing out. Personally, I'd rank that right up there with feeding estrogen to Hitler to make his mustache fall off and sending exploding cigars to Castro in terms of dumb shit the US government thought was good enough to spend money on.)

Yes, a shrine. With candles and incense and everything.

She was curious about ARES, though, and the only thing holding her back from immediately signing up was that... she didn't know if their guns and other gear was badass enough. Thus, she had decided to wait and see at least a bit of it before diving in with eyes wide shut.

Basement dweller, NEET, otaku, hikkikomori... She had been called many things due to her rather odd obsession. But despite that, she was usually a rather sociable person and had a broad network of friends who were similarly addicted to all things badass. One of whom was the man behind the bar, sighing as she continued her drunken diatribe. They could spout off facts about every gun going as far back as the Sharps rifle and enjoyed debating whether or not blunderbusses got a bad rap for being useless.

And with the Akashic Record having made all of the classified specs of all that military hardware freely available, she had become something of a military historian now, not just someone who lurked on the War Thunder forum waiting for classified material to be leaked there. In fact, her AI battle maid, Alita, had even been trying to talk her into applying for a job as a military history teacher in the imperial scholastica.

"I dunno why you're so sad. Ain't they gonna be available in VR in a few months? Didn't that... whats-her-name, the GAIA Tech lady? Anyway, didn't she announce that they'll be releasing a video game where you can use their hardware soon? So just chill. Here, have another shot, but it's your last for today. Gonna have to cut you off, or else I risk the bar getting shuttered." The bartender cast his gaze across the line of empty shot glasses in front of the girl, counting them in his head and comparing the number of shot glasses to the apparent weight of the girl sitting across the bar from him.

The conversation came to an abrupt halt as their glasses and phones pingged a push notification on them. It wasn't a priority notification, but they had both decided to set up constant keyword searches for certain things, and one of those had just triggered the ping.

The bartender's eyes glazed over as he began reading something only he could see through his AR glasses, and the girl fumbled to pick up her phone from the bar in her drunken haze. And they weren't the only ones, either; two more of the day-drinking regulars of Bugsy's Bar were doing the same.

All four of them were met with a livestream from Hephaestus Heavy Industries that was trending on Pangea. The bartender clicked on the link and was shocked to see a view from the ground, with dots rapidly growing in the sky.

Soon, the other three joined him in his slackjawed expression as they, too, clicked on the livestream link that had generated the interest notifications on their devices.

Chapter 524

The enormous logistics vessels continued their journey, and soon, the entire convoy had passed through the shield. They split up from there, headed to different areas of the planet before initiating their deorbit burns and dropping into the atmosphere. However, having already entered the core of Earth's gravity well, they had disengaged their ion drives and were using their gravity drives to control their descent, ensuring a smooth, silent, and pollution-free journey the rest of the way. freeweɓnovē ɱ

As they reached an altitude of 30 kilometers above sea level, they turned and oriented themselves toward the site of their first deliveries and rocketed off at a speed that was incomprehensible for objects of their size and mass. Each of the thousand vessels carried the machinery required to dig the foundation for five cities-industrial atomic printers and ARCHies, primarily-and enough raw materials to lay the cities' foundations to cover for the atomic printers as they dug out the secret subterranean levels.

They would require another trip to deliver the materials for the construction crews to use, but that was no problem. The round trip from Earth to the logistics center in the moon base was only a few hours, after all, and if loading and unloading times were to be added, it would be completed in a day. That wouldn't inconvenience people too much, which was still a concern; even though the project was an imperial order, the company carrying it out was still a private enterprise and had to consider public opinion.

After all, private enterprises, even those owned by the imperial family, had no special privileges.

Soon, the logistics fleet vessels had reached their first designated delivery point. The people watching the livestream felt like their eyes would soon fall out of their sockets as they watched hundreds upon hundreds of five-story-tall robots, each of them with twenty-four eerily flexible tentacles extending from their back, leap from the side door of the hovering mothership in the sky. They carried a pair of enormous black boxes under their main arms and drifted to the surface like a falling leaf in October.

They were none other than ARCHies-Autonomous Robotic Construction Helpers, another brainchild of the nerd herd in Lab City. The researchers had decided that giant robots were a man's romance and, when faced with the need for a constructor swarm carrier, had decided to go all in on the robot aesthetic. Thus, the ARCHies were born. Tall and wide enough to carry hundreds of constructor swarm queens, with manipulator arms tipped with construction equipment and configurable arm attachments for heavy construction machinery needs, they were all-purpose kings of the construction field.

The only downside to them was that people who feared tentacles, like most Japanese girls of a certain age (read: schoolgirls), would probably get a severe case of the ick when they saw them for the first time.

As the ARCHies continued unloading the materials from the cavernous cargo holds of the logistics vessels, the people watching the stream had many questions in their minds, but they all boiled down to who, what, when, where, why, and most importantly, how. Who had built what they were seeing now? What were those things? When were they built? Where were they before today? Why tentacles? And how did they function?

After all, the robots were one thing, but the vessels themselves were another thing entirely. They were enormous enough that someone should have spotted them if they were built on Earth, so were they built by aliens and only delivered now? And the robots were another mystery. They were humanoid in shape, with two legs, two arms, and a head, all attached to a central torso, unlike the constructor swarms that resembled beetles more than anything else.

People were absolutely flabbergasted and stuck between wanting to immediately rush to the Akashic Records to learn more about them and wanting to stick around until the end of the livestream to see them in operation. Men were fascinated because giant robots and construction tickled their fancy, and women watched out of a sense of morbid curiosity.

After the ships were unloaded at the first stop, they oriented themselves in the direction of their next assigned city location and rocketed off once more, again at an incomprehensible speed. The ARCHies were left behind, and the livestream ended as the robots began their work. What happened next would remain confidential and classified, as it involved the security of the empire.

...

In a stealthed government shuttle hovering high above the cracked, glassy plain that was once Islamabad, Felix and Sarah watched as the enormous logistics vessel rocketed off and the ARCHies on the ground started working.

Unlike what people assumed, most of the boxes the ARCHies had unloaded from the logistics ships contained atomic printers, and only a few contained printer cartridges. After all, the most advanced alloys the researchers in the materials science lab headed by Doctor Brechet required materials that weren't found on Earth and had to be collected from the solar system.

Even now, collector vessel after collector vessel was rolling off the line and sweeping the system like lawnmowers, collecting even the smallest specks of cosmic dust and forging them into pure material for use in atomic printers. No resource would be left unexploited, not even the tiny dust particles that floated in the endless void of space.

Sarah was stunned by the ARCHies. "But... but... but why tentacles!?" she asked, turning to Felix.

When the three friends were younger, they had nearly simultaneously discovered anime and had become rabid consumers of it. Their obsession was so overwhelming, in fact, that they had even refurbished an old VCR and picked up bootleg anime VHS tapes from eBay and other more... specialized websites. And some of the things the three had watched had instilled a lifelong fear of tentacles in the young Sarah.

Understandably so, even.

"Because they're flexible enough to reach difficult-to-reach locations. After all, the robots themselves are entirely too large for more delicate work, but construction isn't all about brute force and size. So they gave them tentacles to do that part of the job," Felix soothingly said as he wrapped his arm around Sarah's shoulders and pulled her into a side hug, understanding where she was coming from with her question.

"But... don't you already have constructor swarms?"

"True, we do have those. But they aren't good at heavy lifting, and we need to hide the atomic printers from people."

"And aren't those... those tentacle monsters carrying constructor swarms? Since they can carry constructor swarms, again—why tentacles!?" Sarah had goosebumps at the sight of the giant robots.

"Should we scrap them then? Just say the word and we'll feed them into printers and turn them back into stock," Felix soothed her.

"I..." she sighed. "It's fine. I'll get over it. I mean, what if we get hostile tentacle aliens coming in the future? Am I gonna just roll over and die then? I'll just treat this like a vaccine."

Chapter 525

A few days later.

Rick was watching a recording of the livestream that he had smuggled out of the empire by one of his "unwitting lackeys", as he called them. He had been spending quite a lot of his time compiling a list of imperial citizens who were disgruntled or dissatisfied enough with the empire that they became connected to him by a thread of belief. The faith they generated was absolutely minuscule, but that didn't matter; what mattered was that he could use them.

The person he was currently using was one of his finest unwitting spies. Albert Harris was a former climate "activist" who was incited by the Earth Liberation Front and had a long history of protesting against fracking.

He had even glued himself to the ground during one protest, which had led to the arm being amputated. But with the empire solving the problem he was so adamantly against, and even reversing the damage caused by fracking, he was left with a gaping hole where his conviction used to be. The empire had taken away the satisfaction he felt by being a righteous fighter and wreaking havoc in pursuit of his strong belief and had given him nothing that he could use to fill that hole in his being.

So he switched gears and became an advocate for freedom and democracy, which had two consequences. First, he was unknowingly added to a low priority watchlist by his personal recordkeeper in the Akashic Record, and second, a thread of belief had formed that tied him to Rick, due to admiring him for having the guts to stand up to the empire, even if he still felt that the cult leader had taken the wrong path.

But just that was already enough to tie the two together, a fact that Rick could use to manipulate him. And due to the strength of that admiration, it was even easier for the progenitor cult leader to access him, requiring a much lower investment of his faith mana than many other of his unwitting lackeys in the empire.

Rick looked up from the tablet he was watching the recorded livestream on and, with a grave expression on his face, said, "We have a year, tops, before the empire becomes almost impossible to harm."

Part of the information on the USB was an overview of the new fortress cities that would be constructed, and he had realized they were designed to make attacks, or even analog communications, virtually impossible. While the tour had focused on the layout of the cities and the aesthetics of the architectural features incorporated into the buildings, Rick had been paying more attention to the security features. With the tight surveillance that had zero blind spots, he knew that secretly communicating through anything but his blessing would be impossible.

And he was certainly unwilling to spend his time acting as a switchboard and go-between.

…

The Cube at Avalon Island.

Aron and Sarah were in Aron's working office. It was a standard office space, with a solid hardwood desk, comfortable carpet, and neutral seafoam green walls. The only luxury in the room was an oil painting of him and Rina that Rina's mother had done as a gift for their engagement party.

But neither Aron nor Sarah paid it any mind; they were deep in discussion about GAIA Tech's next bombshell innovation.

"The planned leak of our upcoming VR game created plenty of buzz, but we both know we haven't done shit on that end yet. We haven't even settled on what the game will be yet, and I had to pin your happy ass to your chair just to get a few minutes to talk about it? Sheesh, Aron! You know you're a dick, right?" Sarah complained. She didn't care if he was an emperor, a peasant, or even the Grand Poobah of East Westfuckistan; he was her friend first, and she would always treat him as such.

Aron paused for a moment, taken aback at the neglect inherent in Sarah's complaint. He really had become a hands-off boss for all of his companies. On the one hand, though, it demonstrated his trust in the people he had chosen to head those companies up. But on the other hand, Sarah was right—it was quite a dickish move on his part.

So he took a few minutes to think about it as Sarah continued her tirade. He had a few ideas of games they should release, but he needed to winnow the list down to things that weren't just mindless entertainment, but rather games that had some benefit to his burgeoning empire.

When Sarah finally paused to take a breath, Aron interjected, "I know you might've already thought of some possibilities, but I want the games we make to have some benefit to either the player or society as a whole. And especially to the empire. So let's make our first game something that combines entertainment and current events in a way that'll help people to adapt to different conditions in a short time."

"Go on..." Sarah said, intrigued.

"How about this? The game should be set in a galaxy where humanity has already conquered most of the space. Say, 60% of the galaxy is in human hands and they've set up a galactic empire and are expanding through exploration, trade, and occasional conquest.

"We can run a contest to have people design alien races to populate the galaxy alongside humanity, both hostile and friendly. One of the benefits of crowds is that we can use them to crowdsource ideas, after all."

Aron had entered what those who knew him called "game face mode", where he completely fixed his focus on planning for events to come. This time in particular, he was laser focused on coming up with an idea for the game that GAIA Tech would soon be releasing.

"We need to ensure that it's a hundred percent accurate to reality, and it'll have two sides—the tech side, and the mana side.

"The tech side will focus on designing starships and exploring the galaxy, exploiting resources, engaging in trade with friendly aliens, and fighting skirmishes with hostile ones. It'll be completely freeform and people will be able to do whatever they want to do in it, all while suffering the consequences of their own bad decisions and the benefits of their good decisions. It'll subtly influence people to make the 'right' decisions, those that align with the values of the empire.

"The mana side, on the other hand, will be a lot like the old City of Heroes game. There'll be capes and crooks, with the players taking the role of the superheroes, or 'capes', and VIs will take on the role of supervillains, or 'crooks'. We can even use it to float the be a hero academy initiative the blessings agency came up with.

"For NPCs, we can use the brain data and genetic information we have on people to generate realistic characters that have low-level AIs running them. That'll make it as close to reality as possible.

"First and foremost, though, it needs to be Fun, with a capital F. I know your boyfriend—hey!" Aron shouted as Sarah stood up and punched him in the arm over his desk. "I'm an emperor, you know... I could have your head for that!" He mock frowned at her and pretended that her punch actually hurt him.

He cleared his throat and continued, "Anyway, I know Felix rotted his brain reading all those LitRPGs a few years ago, but I never got into them. I just thought the game itself was never fun to play and it always came across as forced to me.

"So we need to make our game fun. And we can incentivize some things, like I'll direct the ministry of war to buy the warship designs players come up with, and the ministry of the interior can buy the civilian ship designs. You can also do regular tournaments and contests with prize pools for winners, or allow livestreamers, and so on, but what you absolutely Can Not Do," Aron stressed the last three words, "is monetize the game through real money trading. Just make a fun game and people will flock to it..."

Aron continued in that vein for another twenty minutes or so, then paused and asked, "So what do you think?"

Chapter 526

The Cube, Avalon Island.

"Finally, a moment of peace," Aron said as he lay on the roof of the enormous edifice. As utilitarian as it was—from the outside, at least—it was still his home and the place he was the most comfortable. No amount of busyness or rushing caused by the day-to-day operation of the Terran Empire would ever disturb his peace there; it would all just fade away and become background noise in the background to his ears whenever he was present in the real world.

Even now, as he lay gazing into the sky on the rooftop, the work of the empire was endless. Helicopters, space vessels, and other vehicles continued landing and taking off around him as if he wasn't there. Maintenance robots, haulers, and other assorted purpose-built robots streamed around him like ants around a stick, carrying cargo to and fro. His small section was ignored by them, as Nova had cordoned off the area he was resting at.

"Yeah, some alone time is nice, every once in a while... outside the bedroom, I mean," Rina coyly responded from her place next to him, her head pillowed on his arm and her arm draped across his chest.

Although she'd had a little bit of alone time with him as a couple during their recent vacation, there hadn't been much. After all, it had been meant as a family trip for everyone to get to know each other better. Though they were acquainted with each other, the Rothschilds and the Michaels had only been that: acquaintances.

Plus, Rina had been busy lately, spending time in the simulation practicing her mana usage. Even with knowledge downloads, practice was still required to gain proficiency in actual usage of the skills implanted into people. And Rina, though smart and talented, was no exception to that time-honored rule.

Aron hummed in agreement as they cuddled on the busy rooftop, lost in their own little world. "How's your training coming?" he asked after a short, companionable silence.

"It's... difficult," she said. "I mean, I'm okay at it, but I much prefer to avoid combat. I'm just not much of a fighter. It is nice to have something to do, though, and I feel... conflicted, sometimes." She sighed and looked at Aron's chin, her second-favorite feature of his face after his eyes.

"Conflicted?" He frowned. "Why should you feel conflicted? I mean, it's not like you HAVE to fight... You're going to be the Empress of the Terran Empire, so if you're forced to fight, then we have much bigger problems."

"It's not that, it's just..." She sighed again. "It's... I don't know how to put it into words," she said, then paused to gather her thoughts. "You know my family was just as bad as the Morgans, so I sometimes feel like I have to make myself useful to you, like it's a necessary part of making amends."

"You really don't, you know. Nobody put their thumb on the scale either way in your family's case—the innocent were let go and the guilty have already been punished. It was absolutely fair, and the burden doesn't fall on you to bear."

The imperial judiciary had been firm, but fair to the Rothschilds. Though they were no longer among the ultra-wealthy after paying so many financial penalties for the crimes they committed across the generations, they were still rather well off. And they had paid for their sins, not only financially but through other punishments. Arieh, for instance, was currently serving a sentence in the simulation and would soon be headed to the Trojan Asteroids to serve a sentence in reality as a minerals processor once the infrastructure was built and mining began.

As he said that, Rina pointed her finger to the sky and a small, intricate magic circle filled with beautiful moving patterns appeared above her fingertip. A ball of fire ignited in the circle and floated above it, then began wavering as she tried in reality what she had learned in the simulation earlier. But she failed, and, instead of morphing into a flower, the fireball began destabilizing and she flicked it away, launching it with the intent of being as far away from her as possible before it finally detonated.

The security VI in charge of monitoring the Cube noticed the uncontrolled and unstable fireball. It calculated the route it would pass through and, within milliseconds, diverted all the flights that were likely to cross its path.

"How about you?" she asked, frowning at her failed attempt to show off. "Too busy to train lately?"

"Nah. I'm back to being a hands-off emperor after finishing the shield. Everything else is on track and doesn't need my interference. There's a reason that ministers and agency heads exist. After all, if I had to do everything myself," he shuddered at the thought, "I think that even I would die of exhaustion. So, for now, at least, I'm relatively free. The only thing we need now is time."

"Don't jinx it," Rina giggled and playfully hit him on the shoulder.

"Oh, shit," he said, looking around in mock panic. "Remind me when we go back inside... I should really find a piece of wood to knock on," he laughed.

(Ed note: Knocking on wood is a folk charm to counteract bad luck, specifically of the kind that comes from mentioning things that are going too well. Not sure how far the custom has spread, but it's fairly prevalent in the US to say "knock on wood" every now and then, and actually find a piece of wood to knock on.)

Aron's laughter proved infectious, and, if there were to be a human observer, they would probably give the couple a weird look or two before quickly moving their gaze away after being exposed to the very public display of affection.

Soon, the two calmed down and Rina moved her head from Aron's arm to his chest as he played with her hair. But after moving her head to his chest, she heard—and felt—his heartbeat increase and his breathing hitch.

"Aron? Are you okay?" she asked, her body stiffening in worry. She lifted her upper body and supported herself on an elbow, looking at his face with a worried expression; she hoped he was okay, as if anything were to happen to him it wouldn't just be a disaster for her, but for the entire human species.

He visibly calmed himself, then took a deep breath and mustered his courage. "Rina Rothschild," he said, then got up on one knee. "When we first met, it was because I had a utilitarian goal in mind. I wanted to use you and was willing to offer you my aid in exchange. But once I got to know you, something started changing in me.

"You became a part of me, an indispensable one. Then, during your family heir competition when your brother was trying to assassinate you, I finally realized that I had feelings for you. I wanted you to walk beside me through this journey called life. Only after realizing that did I know what it meant to call another person my other, better half."

He pulled a small box from his pocket, then opened it and continued, "Rina Ariel Rothschild, will you marry me?"

Chapter 527

527 Cutouts and Catspaws

December 20, 1 AE.

Aron, John, Gaia, Nova, and the heads of the imperial police agency, the Nyx intelligence agency, and their AI counterparts were seated around an oval conference table in Aron's working office. Aron and Nova were there to receive a briefing on the imperial security situation and the progress of Operation Hunting Dog.

"We've managed to take down seventeen hundred cult cells around the world, adding up to a little more than seven hundred thousand cultists. But unfortunately, we've so far failed to discover how they're communicating with other cells and their leadership. That said, some things happened when they were captured, or a few hours later, that attracted our attention and we're still investigating," Arielle Richards, the head of the NIA, reported.

"What anomalies?" Aron asked. He had only been monitoring the broad strokes of the investigation progress during his daily briefings, so this was the first time he'd heard of anything out of the ordinary.

"The cult has a comprehensive system of cutouts and catspaws that makes it difficult to investigate. And we don't know yet what exactly triggers them being cut, we only know that they're indeed being cut out either during, or shortly after their capture.

"Then there's the determination that the cultists have to die. It's not unheard of for brainwashed cultists to suicide on capture, but the weird thing is that the suicide rate is a hundred percent. Usually, even the most fanatical organizations have around a sixty or sixty-five percent suicide rate. The weirdest thing, though, is how the suicides take place.

"There's a certain expression people have when they've resolved themselves to die, but what we're seeing on some cultists' faces is a struggle. It's like they aren't willing to die, but they've received an order they can't disobey that forces them to die, no matter how unwilling they may be. Our current theory is that there's some kind of programming that's only triggered when they're captured taking over and forcing them to their deaths.

"We've managed to salvage some brain data from the leadership of the cells, but not much. It's like we have a leak somewhere and they know we're coming, so they implement countermeasures in advance. Only when we catch them completely by surprise can we salvage any of the brain data or headbag them to put them through the lazarus protocol.

"Adding to the weirdness is that there's no indicator in their brain data that there's any kind of suicide programming. None at all, no matter how deep we dig. All we can find is memories of normal analog communication methods, like dead drops and ciphers."

"Do you suspect an awakener is involved?" Aron asked. The involvement of an awakener was the only remaining theory that could explain the anomalies.

"That's the likeliest explanation, yes. That said, we have yet to narrow down what the actual affinity, or affinities, might be, but we do have a short list of possibilities," Police Commandant Schneider said.

"Also, as mentioned in previous reports, when the awakenings began and we announced what was happening, there was a wave of disappearances among the noncitizens. We can't be sure, as we have no data around them other than what was available pre-empire, but we now believe it was the cultists behind the disappearances. It's likely that they abducted the noncitizen awakeners and nursed them through the process at one of their facilities somewhere.

"Furthermore, we have yet to discover any awakeners in any of the cells we've taken down since the awakening, so that supports that theory. If that is indeed the case, they must have a training base somewhere and are currently busy training their awakeners for another wide scale attack. After all, the only thing they have that can hurt us now are their awakeners."

"Makes sense," Aron said. "But what we still need to know is how they communicate. Without knowing how they communicate, we can't intercept their communications. And without being able to intercept their communications, we'll be forced to the back foot and only able to react, but not act. Any ideas, Nyx?"

[We can only continue developing our detection abilities. Until we can get a more granular view of the mana involved, we'll have to remain in a passive stance and can only continue Operation Hunting Dog as we've been doing. Of course, we can also take more draconian measures—]

"Absolutely out of the question," Aron interrupted. "I will not be responsible for massacring a significant portion of the human species."

[That's not what I meant by draconian. We can simply move noncitizens to internment camps so they can be supervised. And during the move, we can force them to use the simulation to register as noncitizens, so we'll have a brain data dump on them and can monitor the cultist agents among them.]

"This is not a fascist empire. Moving to the fortress cities will naturally separate the noncitizens from the populace, and that's already in the works. There's been too many instances of internment that hasn't worked out for the governments involved, and we can't afford that kind of backlash now. The empire is too young and our foundation is still settling," Aron sighed.

"So all we know is that they're planning something with awakeners, and we can't even be sure of that?" Aron rubbed his temples. The tension of knowing that something was coming, but not what it was, had had him on edge over the past months. Not only that, he was irritated that he had so far failed to deal with the progenitor cult despite it being almost a year since the attacks had taken place.

He had made a promise to his people and was so far failing to deliver on it.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then opened them and asked, "You said there's a list of suspected affinities, right?

What're those?"

[Anything having to do with communication and control. If nothing else, the abnormally high suicide rate of captured cultists helped us rule out pretty much everything else. So it has to be something that can make someone do things they wouldn't normally do of their own free will, whether it's like a hidden program or not. If we can figure out whether it can be implanted or if it requires assuming direct control, we can narrow it down even further.

[Right now, I'm leaning toward a combination of the two. Being able to assume direct control of a cultist means they can also bury control programming in that cultist's subconscious mind, which explains why there's nothing in their brain data] Nyx answered.

"That's... less than good," Aron mused, pondering what someone could do if they had those abilities, and how much harm they could inflict if they had sufficient planning time.

The moment that thought passed through his mind, possibility after possibility arose in his thoughts. His advantage in this area was on full display; he had the full set of applicable knowledges, unlike others, who only received bits and pieces of the knowledge he possessed.

All it would take was a bit of time, and he would know which affinity, or affinities, were being used, and the specifics of their usage.

"I'll need to deal with this personally. No one will be safe until I do," he said with a determined gleam in his eye.

Unbeknownst to Rick, his fate had just been sealed.

Chapter 528

Aron wasted no time after sealing Rick's fate and immediately got to work. He turned to Gaia and asked, "How long would it take to do a deep scan of everyone with any connection to an imperial institution? And I mean all of them, all the way from the ministers at the top to the janitors at the bottom. And ARES and the nyxians, too, for that matter. We need to know if they've experienced any memory loss or any abnormal activities that don't have an explanation."

[A day, Your Majesty. It would be faster, but to do it without alerting anyone will require them to be logged into the simulation of their own will, so I'll have the recordkeepers do it shift by shift. The employees who aren't scheduled to work the day we choose will almost all be in the simulation anyway, since it's still fresh and new to them so they spend all their free time in it] Gaia replied, generating a timetable for the deep scan along with a detailed plan for its implementation.

"Good, start the scan as soon as possible," he said.

Then he turned to Nova and asked, "How's the progress on miniaturizing our psionic shielding?"

[It's ready for use, sir] she answered.

"Then, together with the deep scan, let's upgrade all of the government issued access devices to include psionic shielding. We can't risk any of them being compromised in any way—not now, and not in the future. So psionic shielding tech will be integrated into everything starting with the release of second-generation public devices as well.

"We can use planned obsolescence to force them to upgrade piecemeal. The general public is a low-risk category anyway, and in the meantime, we can just have the recordkeepers do continual deep scans to catch blank spots and abnormal activities."

[I've updated the new schematics and sent them to the factory for printing and distribution] Nova said. She and Gaia had already worked out a distribution plan while Aron was talking about the upgrades and the need to introduce planned obsolescence into their products.

[Should we introduce planned obsolescence schemes for all of our products, or just the DR devices? After all, not everyone constantly upgrades their hardware to the latest and greatest bleeding edge technology. Especially when the cost of the product is equal to two months of living expenses for them] Gaia asked.

Another AI faded into existence, her form flickering between real and illusory. She wore a long robe with the hood and cowl pulled up, decorated with symbols that shifted and changed from moment to moment, never letting anyone get a solid grasp on what they were before they were already something else. Her hands were hidden in her sleeves and clasped in front of her; she was none other than Mnemosyne, the true librarian of the Akashic Library. [What section of the general public should we focus our resources on with the continual deep scans?] she asked in her haunting, echoing voice.

"For now, focus on the most vocal people, both positive and negative. For the rest, monitor in waves as your processing power allows. We can't interrupt the functioning of the Akashic Record if we don't want to tip our hand."

[I suspect that if the cult is planning something, it'll be happening very soon. The longer they remain inactive, the more stable the empire becomes. So I believe they'll be carrying out their next attacks before our fortress cities are completed] Gaia interjected. [So everyone in the empire needs to undergo at least one deep scan before then, and we can modify the scanning priorities after that.

[But as this has pointed out a hole in our security, the deep scans absolutely must continue in the future as well. With mana density on the rise, we'll only see more and more awakeners and there's no predicting how many will have similar affinities as the ones we're dealing with now.]

"The attack is likely to take place during the new year celebration," Aron said after some thought. There would be an empire-wide celebration of the first full year since the empire's founding, and if the progenitor cultists wanted to do significant damage, that would be their best opportunity. After that, the window for hitting the empire where it hurts would begin closing.

[They've likely gained access to some of the imperial training courses on how to use mana through taking over one or more of our awakeners. So they'll likely be using that in their next attack, which means the damage they can deal will be vastly more than their first wave of attacks] Nyx pointed out. [And the worst part is that we have no way of knowing who or where the noncitizen awakeners are. Plus, unlike normal weapons, we can't inspect them and put a limit on their power.]

Aron turned to Nova again and asked, "Speaking of detection, how's the fine-tuning of the Henry's Eye system coming?" If they had solved the problem of sensitivity and granularity, everything else would be a walk in the park.

[Research is still ongoing, but we've developed an algorithm that should help narrow the search area even if the hardware isn't where we want it.]

"Okay, then use our current satellites to do a deep scan of Earth and highlight all of the large mana concentrations that might be a gathering point for noncitizen awakeners. It's a hail mary play, but now is the time for those," Aron ordered.

He turned to Athena and continued, "Have ARES on standby, as there's a chance of situations growing out of control."

[Yes, sir!] Athena saluted.

"Have your people prepare for emergency extraction. They're the tip of the spear, and the tip is always the first thing people see when it's coming at them," Aron said, looking at Nyx.

[We have extraction plans already set] the petite spymistress said. [Most of Operation Hunting Dog was successful, but with the suicide programming it's becoming more and more obvious that we won't get the results we'd hoped for out of it.]

"Anyone have anything else to add?" Aron asked, scanning his gaze across the people in the room. He waited for a while, then continued, "Okay then, meeting adjourned. I have to prepare some things on my end before I move out and get to work."

He fully expected to be spending the next ten days looking through all of the mana blobs revealed by the satellite scan of Earth, so he needed to bid his family farewell.

Chapter 529

The moment the meeting ended, Hephaestus and Mnemosyne got to work. Hephaestus had already received the updated schematics for the DR gear version 2.0 and the massive industrial atomic printers inside the Cube switched from what they were doing to printing hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands of new DR gear. As most government officials used both glasses and pods, the printing and delivery would take a few days.

But Mnemosyne's job could immediately begin. She directed the individual librarians in the Akashic Library to begin doing immediate deep scans on the people they were monitoring. A full 80% of the government officials were immediately scanned, while the others would be scanned as they came on shift and began working.

The civilian scans, however, would take some time; unless it was absolutely necessary, no orders would go out to interrupt people's daily lives. Not only would it increase dissatisfaction and resentment among the populace, it might tip off the target and startle them into hiding deeper. But the priority list was set, and anyone with sentiments toward the empire that crossed a specific threshold, either positive or negative, would be the first to be deep scanned.

Aron had also informed Sarah of the new 2.0 hardware update to the DR gear, and she began generating buzz around it. Increased clarity! Decreased mental fatigue! Higher immersion! The buzzwords released by the public relations machine of GAIA Tech were endless, and the ad campaign was in full swing.

Meanwhile, Gaia also released a memo to the government employees saying that they would be given the DR 2.0 gear for free as a government perk. What went unsaid was that anyone who chose to continue using their original hardware would still be strictly monitored, and soon replaced. It wasn't just a security issue, but rather one of mentality; the empire wouldn't be well served by workers that disdained the new and clung to the old.

Technology advances had been sped up to the point that keeping up with it was one of the core responsibilities of the uppermost echelons of society, let alone the government.

Athena and Nyx were also busy. They had spent the past few months laying out an enormous net called Operation Hunting Dog, and it was finally time to draw it in. The orders went out and stealthed shuttles began moving, carrying strike teams to the hidden bases that had identified cult sympathizers and cult cells, while the operatives themselves retreated to their underground facilities, as they had been the face of the operation from the beginning and couldn't risk being captured, no matter how far-fetched that scenario may be.

…

Thirty minutes later.

Aron was on the roof of the Cube, waiting for the special stealth shuttle that was being printed for him. He would be personally heading out with only a single emperor's aegis team and a team of reapers to deal with miscellaneous issues. At first, he had argued against the inclusion of anyone else, but Rina had put her foot down and exercised her authority as his fiancee. He would bring them, or else.

And emperor or not, Aron was a man first. Thus, despite his unwillingness, he would bring along the extra people.

'It's time for this to end once and for all,' he thought as he boarded the sleek stealth shuttle, the other members of his expedition already inside and waiting for him.

As the emperor's shuttle lifted off and oriented itself for a suborbital hop to its destination, Athena appeared in her virtual form. She saluted Aron, who nodded at her and said, "Status report."

[We're currently heading to one of the cells we've identified and been tracking during Operation Hunting Dog. We believe it's the cell of a mid-level recruiter and local boss, so the process of the capture and resulting suicide programming being carried out should provide more information for you to use than can be captured in recordings. After all, our recording technology still can't detect minute mana flows.]

Athena wasn't worried about Aron in the slightest; she knew that, with his current abilities, while he may not be the most outstanding offensive powerhouse, there was nothing on the planet that would be capable of even mussing up his hair. She even agreed with him that the reaper and aegis teams were completely unnecessary, though she also saw Rina's point in that emperors should have a certain amount of dignity and not be forced to do some mundane tasks for themselves.

"Got it. Let's try to keep some of them alive, then."

One of the aegis members handed him a briefcase. He opened it and pulled out a small black cube, then closed the briefcase and handed it back to the person that had given it to him. He closed his eyes and pressed the cube against his forehead, where it dissolved into a nanite colony and spread across his face like ferrofluid.

The nanite colony rippled for a minute or so before finally settling down into a featureless black mask. Aron reached up and pulled off the mask, revealing a different, yet still handsome, face beneath it.

Silence reigned in the shuttle, as the realization finally hit home among the reapers and emperor's aegis that the emperor was indeed going into the field and would be actively participating in the cult cell takedown. At first, they had thought they were there to protect him as he spectated from the side, but after listening to his conversation with Athena, it seemed... they would be the spectators instead?

But something seemed rather off to them. From the display in their headgear, Aron had no defensive gear on. No armor, no pappy, nothing. He was wearing normal clothing and wasn't even carrying a weapon! How was he going to fight? Then it dawned on them—he must be armed and armored to the gills, it was just that their detection methods couldn't penetrate the masking of his advanced tech.

After all, he was the one that invented everything, so of course it only made sense that he would keep the best things for himself. At his level, it didn't even count as selfishness, but would rather be considered good sense. He was an emperor, and his person SHOULD be inviolable!

Thus, the reapers and emperor's aegis settled down and performed the final checks and last-minute maintenance on their gear. Though the maintenance was unnecessary, as ARES gear was printed fresh before each mission and recycled afterward, it was still a time-honored pre-battle tradition that the superstitious armed forces would never abandon.

Chapter 530

In orbit above Avalon Island.

Aron's stealth shuttle had reached apogee and was about to descend. Its target: Shelton, Washington. He called up the reports by the operatives who had been assigned there and began reading them during the short trip.

Jason Todd and Catherine O'Shaugnessy signaled that they had found a cult base a few months prior. Not just a cell, but a full-blown base. They hadn't been able to infiltrate it, but they were positive that the entire gated community of Hartstene Pointe was a disguised cultist base. Once they had discovered that, they'd opted to lay low and continue their covers as Tim and Siobhan Roberts, fully immersing themselves in their respective roles.

Months later, the call to go to ground had gone out, and the two had been living in their underground facility since. On the surface, they had gone to care for an ailing relative, even going so far as to hire one of their suspected cultists to housesit for them until their return. But instead, they had parked their old truck in the Seatac Airport's long-term parking garage and returned to their base via their own stealth shuttle, ESV-228-01, now called Bob. There was no rhyme or reason behind why it was named Bob, the two operatives just had a silly sense of humor.

Aron quietly snickered at the name, then continued reading.

The entire town of Shelton was also compromised by the cult. The town council, the chief of police, the two judges in the courthouse, and even the school board had all become card-carrying members of the cult of the progenitor. Thus, during his assault on the cult compound, he would have no backup from the local government, nor any cooperation. The best he could hope for was that they would hunker down and stay out of his way.

[Beginning deorbit burn] the shuttle's VI announced. The interior of the vessel was just as stable as if it was sitting in a docking cradle, thanks to the gravity plating, but it had already oriented itself nose down and begun a rapid descent past the Karman Line.

Aron set aside the file and his expression grew grave. He began constructing a rune, one that was similar to the planetary defense shield he had just put in place earlier in the year, anchoring it on the shuttle itself. As it was much, much smaller than the planetary version, it wasn't nearly as noticeable and nobody even batted an eyelash at it.

[ETA: thirty seconds] the ship's VI announced.

The reaper team members exchanged glances, then triggered the jump hatch in the floor of the shuttle. "We'll establish a landing perimeter for you, Your Majesty," the leader said, then gestured for the team to jump out of the hatch for a HALO drop.

They rocketed toward the ground, separating from the shuttle and passing beyond terminal velocity during their powered descent. Soon, they landed, creating small impact craters at each landing point, though they had still gone unnoticed as their target landing zone was a small clearing in the forest behind the house that "Tim and Siobhan" lived in. Thus, it was covered by a WESS and the team could be sure that nobody was around.

Ten seconds after the reaper team landed, the emperor's stealth shuttle came to a halt a meter from the ground in the dead center of the reapers' perimeter. Also at that time, Aron's rune was completed and a gold-tinted white dome expanded out of the shuttle and around Hartstene Pointe.

The camouflaging nanites disabled their camouflage and trickled into their storage units, revealing an escape hatch in the ground. The hatch opened and a full battalion of 250 LEAs marched out of it and took their positions in a neat formation. They saluted the shuttle as its gull wing door opened and the emperor's aegis team stepped out, followed by the emperor himself.

"Reapers," he began. "Your mission today is to silently secure the upper echelons of Shelton. Bring them to the clubhouse here within two hours. Do not, under any circumstances, allow them to contact anyone. Move out!"

"Yes, Your Majesty!" they chorused, then started sprinting toward the shore. To avoid potentially exposing themselves, they would swim across the Puget Sound, then run to the town of Shelton twelve miles away.

To them, it was an easy day.

Aron turned to the LEAs and ordered, "Spread out and engage camouflage. Do not allow yourselves to be discovered." Without waiting for a response, he entered the hatch leading to the underground facilities, followed closely by his aegis team.

...

In the office of the Shelton police chief, a ringing sound came from a desk drawer.

The chief opened the drawer and pulled out the false bottom, then picked up the ringing burner phone. Something must have happened; his handlers would never contact him through anything but the secure landline on his desk.

"Aunt Helen's birthday party is in a few hours. Are you still coming?" the person on the other end of the phone said.

The chief paled for a moment and his heart pounded like it wanted to escape his chest. "Oh! I almost forgot," he said. "Do you need me to bring anything?"

"Sure, bring a couple cans of baked beans and some beer. The weather's nice today so we decided to have a cookout instead of taking her to the country club at Lake Limerick for dinner."

Things were worse than the chief had imagined; not only did the empire know about them, but their strike teams were already on their way. "Okay. I'll stop by the store on my way and bring a 12-pack of Sam Adams. How many people are coming?"

"Oh, probably twenty or so," the voice replied.

"Okay then. So two cases of Sam Adams and say... four cans of beans. Got it! Should I come by early to help set up?" the chief asked.

"Sure, be here in an hour and you can help decorate," the voice replied.

"Alright. See you then," the chief said, and hung up. He had a lot to do and little time to do it in.

Chapter 531

Just a few streets away from the courthouse in Shelton was an irish pub. To tourists and locals, it was a gathering place for people to drink their worries away, eat "ethnic" cuisine, and, on St. Patrick's Day, celebrate by gulping down cheap beer with even cheaper green dye added.

But to the cult of the progenitor, it was a beginning. Its basement was where Rick had first begun preaching his ideal of a new utopia where the progenitors would live hand-in-hand with the human descendants they'd left behind when they left to explore the vast universe. It was a shrine, a place of pilgrimage, and the closest thing to a holy site that the cult had, and it was why not just one, but two of Rick's inner circle were present in such a flea speck town that was only included on maps out of a sense of obligation.

One of them was hidden, masquerading as the chief of police, and the other was the Hartstene Pointe Maintenance Association's vice president.

The phone on the police chief's desk rang, but sadly, the chief had already left. He was on his way to the basement of the pub, where he would rally with the cult members in town and arm themselves for a confrontation with the incoming raid. He was under no illusion that the cult forces would survive, but when cornered, even the mildest rabbit would bite. However, had he been in his office to answer that phone call, things might have perhaps played out differently.

But he wasn't, so his fate was sealed.

He had about forty young, strong cultists, and another fifty or sixty old and young who were willing to sacrifice themselves, if necessary. Whether they actually would sacrifice themselves in the end was a question the chief was unwilling to ask himself, in fear of the answer, but at least they claimed they were. And that was all that mattered at this junction.

"They're coming, hurry!" he said, waving the stream of people into the pub as people walking by curiously looked on, wondering what was happening.

"Can we make it through this, chief?" a panicky-looking youth asked as he passed the chief.

The chief only looked at him with a grim expression, then slowly shook his head. "Not likely, son. But at least we can spit in the devil's eye while he drags us down to hell," he solemnly said, then continued counting people and waving them past him into the pub.

The young man, already on the verge of full-blown panic, paled and fell weeping to the ground. Then a purple light flashed in his eyes and he stilled, then robotically climbed to his feet and trudged into the pub.

The chief had already put the boy out of his mind. In his opinion, it would be great if the kid ran; that way at least one person would survive what was coming to them. But it would also be good if the kid stayed, because it showed that the faith they had in the progenitors was strong, unbreakably so. So when he saw the robotic movements, he thought nothing of it, thinking that it was just the boy's way of dealing with his fear.

He was an Iraq War veteran and had seen men break before, so the mindless zombie-like stumbling was nothing new to him. He couldn't hear the voice in the boy's head encouraging him to pick up a weapon and martyr himself for the progenitors, nor could he feel the internal struggle currently going on in the boy's mindscape. To the youth, it was already a fight to the death even before the actual fight to the death began. A fight, it had to be said, that he was gradually losing.

Soon, the struggle in the boy's mind ended and everything about him had changed. He was no longer David Taylor, a promising high school graduate and star pitcher headed to the University of Washington on a baseball scholarship, but Rick Ashley piloting a meat puppet. Everything about him had changed except his body, but no one was around that could notice it.

Shelton was a small town, sure, but it wasn't to the point where everyone was intimately familiar with everyone else's goings-on. And David was the only cultist in his family and circle of friends. He had been meaning to bring others into it, but his belief had never been that strong in the first place.

(Ed note: It's a common misconception that small town life means everyone knows everybody else. That's patently untrue; think about it for a minute. Can you possibly know everything about everyone in a town with a population of even a thousand? Would there even be enough minutes in the day to gossip about everyone?)

It was common for teenagers to flit from group to group, hobby to hobby, and place to place. Youth, before the mass awakening event, was meant for discovering the place people would fit for the rest of their lives. But now, Rick had taken that choice from David, forcing him to fight against an unreasonable force that would soon reap his life like a farmer scything through a field of ripe wheat at harvest time.

And it was all because of a single, simple fact: David was blessed. He had awakened and, after his awakening, his parents had fled with him to the small unincorporated bedroom town of Matlock, Washington. Though they had panicked and joined the empire in hopes of saving their only son, after he had come out of his medical pod, they quickly reverted to their anti-imperial beliefs and their desire for some illusory "freedom" had driven them to take their boy and run.

Thus, "David" walked up to the chief and said, "Let me help, chief. I'm blessed by water." As he spoke, ten baseball-sized balls of water condensed behind his head and shoulders and began rotating, spinning faster and faster until they became indistinguishable from a wheel and began to hum through the air.

"You sure, son?" the chief asked.

The boy nodded his head and looked to the north, where the reaper team would soon appear. "Yes, chief. I'm sure," he said.

...

[Targets have congregated and are grouped up. Suggest indirect fire.]

"Roger that," the reaper team leader said. He marked the pub on the battle map and waved his hand at the heavy and demolition experts in the team.

No words needed to be said; they had access to the same information as the team leader did and immediately took a knee. A firing tube extended from each of their backpack-

mounted indirect-fire modules, loaded with a single round.

The heavy had a "bunker-buster" that would penetrate three meters into the ground before rapidly filling the space it fell through with a mixture of jet fuel and methane and detonating in a single fireball that would collapse everything around it thanks to the vacuum left behind after it petered out.

The demolition expert, on the other hand, had a more conventional high explosive penetrator round. It would fly over the heads of its target and explode, driving shrapnel into the ground much like a shotgun blast would into a target in front of it.

"Ready," the two men reported, then waited for the fire order.

The squad AI, after confirming that civilian casualties would be kept to an absolute minimum through Overwatch, gave the team leader the green light.

"Fire, fire, fire," the man ordered, and two streaks left two launch tubes.

The firers stood and rejoined the rest of the team, then everyone continued on their way to their destination.

Chapter 532

An hour before the strike in Shelton.

Aron walked through the hatch into the underground facility constructed by Jason and Catherine. He looked around in approval, thinking, 'This is a good aesthetic, but it needs a little something... extra.'

He gestured for his escort to halt, then bent down and, perhaps in a fit of chuunibyo, clapped his hands and placed them on the ground. Unseen by his unblessed escort, a runic circle spread out from his hands and the floor, walls, and ceiling began changing. Line after line dug itself through the imperial steel alloy structure, leaving behind a mystifying, maze-like pattern.

The lines etched themselves throughout the entire base for an entire five minutes before the etching process was completed. Once they stopped, the runic circle under Aron's hands began pulsing like a heartbeat, each pulse coming faster and faster as the process continued. Finally, the pulse was so fast it appeared that it was a solid light, then rune after rune flew out of it, traveling down the etched corridors in runic sentences like obedient soldiers marching in files.

It took another twenty minutes for the runic imprinting process to complete while Aron and his escort stood motionless at the end of the southern main walkway. Then his runic heart sped up as intent-laden mana flooded out of it, down his arms, out of his palms, and into the engraved runes, turning them white as the intent passed through them.

Another ten minutes passed before the process was complete. Aron rose to his feet and looked at the glowing, circuit-like pattern etched in the wall with satisfaction. He dusted his hands and said, "Let's go."

Jason and Catherine, having long shed their cover identities as Timothy and Siobhan Roberts, exchanged a glance before Catherine asked, "Pardon my curiosity, Your Majesty, but... what's that?" She pointed at the wall, which was faintly glowing even to her, who had yet to awaken at all.

"That?" Aron looked at her and grinned. "Just decoration. You can't have high tech without glowy bits, Miss O'Shaugnessy."

Catherine froze, her mind practically broken at the thought of the emperor of all humanity doing something so... so whimsical. She wasn't quite sure how she should react and her brain was on the verge of a shutdown.

[Sigh, you'll get used to him] Nyx's voice whispered in Catherine's "ear" through her implant.

At heart, Aron was still young, and he did occasionally act his age.

Catherine jogged and caught up to the rest of the group as they entered the control room at the center of the underground facility.

"Status report," Aron ordered, any trace of whimsy absent from his face as if it had never been there.

"Approximately twenty-five minutes ago, the cult leader in the HPMA received a warning from the cultists in the town. He's been gathering the residents in the community center building here," Jason said, pointing to a flashing red dot on the detailed topographical map floating above the main command terminal. "We expect the entire community will be there within another ten minutes from... now."

Catherine took over and said, "The demographic breakdown of the community suggests that we'll be facing anywhere from twenty to twenty-five awakeners. We can't be sure what affinities they've awakened, but the odds are that they'll either be elementalists or derived elementalists, so we should be prepared for that.

"It's extremely unlikely that there will be any law or higher awakeners, as this is just a small cultist base in the grand scheme of things, and we believe they've been moving their high-powered 'guns' to their main base in preparation for whatever they're planning."

"Do you have any plans for handling them?" Aron asked.

"Overwhelming force," Jason grinned, "and an extreme technological advantage."

Aron nodded. "Continue."

"There's about 440 residences in Hartstene Pointe, and over the past few months, the Hartstene Pointe Maintenance Association has been helping the cult forcibly buy out the residents that previously lived here. They first started by purchasing all of the vacant properties after the people that used to live in them sold them following their registration as imperial citizens. Then they moved to more overt tactics, like seizing the vacation homes that were unoccupied due to the season.

"About six months ago, they brought in... undesirables, and started being more blatant about their goal—"

"Undesirables?" Aron cut in. "What do you mean by that?"

"Well, Your Majesty, Washington has a high number of seasonal migrant workers that get hired by the parks to clean them up in preparation for opening. And a lot of those people are seen by the more affluent members as 'undesirable', meaning they would feel uncomfortable with them moving into a protected, gated community like Hartstene Pointe.

"Then, all the cult had to do was raise the petty crime rate and those rich shitheads couldn't flee their gated compound fast enough." Jason pretended to spit on the ground at the thought.

"Understood, continue," Aron said, a similar look of disgust on his face.

"So they raised the crime rate and the HPMA pretended to be helpless. They offered to assist in listing and selling the remaining homes, and the entire takeover was complete a month and a half ago," Jason finished.

"Since then, they chased out the migrant workers with the assistance of the chief of police and the judges at the courthouse," Catherine said. "And we've been tracking them since. Every 'resident' here at Hartstene Pointe has a tracker embedded in them." She pointed at the map and all of the trackers were displayed on it, moving toward the clubhouse in real time. About twenty of them were headed in the opposite direction, toward Indian Cove Marina.

Aron looked at his emperor's aegis team leader and said, "Collect the runners and bring them here. Quietly. And don't be seen."

"Yes, Your Majesty," the aegis team leader said, then the team moved out.

"It's a shame Rina isn't here," Aron sighed after his emperor's aegis left.

Jason and Catherine traded glances, then Catherine asked, "Your Majesty?"

"You need four people to play spades, and there's only three of us here."

Neither of the operatives knew what to say to that and were dumbstruck, caught between laughter and tears.

...

Commander Yamaguchi Takeyama and his team reached the marina and hid themselves, waiting for the fleeing cultists to arrive. By his estimate, they would have about a seven minute wait.

Eight minutes later, the first fleeing cultist came into view. Takeyama shook his head and gestured to the aegis member nearest the cultist to take action. Soon, the cultist was rendered unconscious and disappeared into the shadow beneath a decorative hedge.

The process repeated itself until seventeen cultists were captured.

Takeyama looked up and asked the air, "Update, Overwatch?"

[No escapees remaining, Captain] the AI reported.

"Roger that, we're headed back to base."

[Copy, return to base. Overwatch out.]

Chapter 533

The emperor's aegis was the best of the best of Aegis, and well deserving of their title as the most elite special force under the ARES umbrella. Though their training focused primarily on defense, a wise man once said that the best defense was a good offense. Of course, nobody knew exactly who first said that, and sports coaches and military strategists around the world all laid claim to it coming from one of their forebears, but whoever said it was still an incredibly wise man.

Thus, the emperor's aegis was also unparalleled in all areas. They could perform counterintelligence operations with the grace of a nyxian, special military operations with the ease of a reaper, and were still the strongest shield standing between Aron and those who would wish to target him.

So capturing a few terrified cultists was as easy to them as drinking water or snapping their fingers.

Twenty minutes after they had captured the last fleeing cultists, they returned to the underground base, where the prisoners were put in the holding cells for Aron to experiment on.

...

Aron stepped into the prison section of the facility and glanced around. On the surface, it looked no different from the rest of the base, with softly glowing runic lines in incomprehensible fractal patterns on the walls, but these ones were different. They had been laid with the intent to detect, trap, and trace any mana coming from any source that wasn't him.

He stepped into the first cell, where a naked man was secured to the wall with clamps on his upper and lower limbs and around his neck, chest, and waist. Aron waved his hand and a refresh rune flew to the prisoner, waking him from his induced slumber.

The man looked around, turning his head from left to right, then realized he had been captured. "Please, please," he begged, "I didn't do anything. I swear, I didn't—AAAAAAAGH!" He twitched as twenty thousand volts passed through his body from the restraints.

Tasers ranged from fifty to eighty thousand volts, depending on the manufacturer and whether they were intended for civilian or government use. However, tasers would often not only incapacitate their target, but would render them unconscious as well. Therefore, the voltage Aron was applying to the imprisoned cultist was much, much lower; it would inflict pain, while leaving no lasting damage and without rendering him unconscious.

"What do you want!?" the man screeched, his voice breaking.

"I want to see what happens," Aron calmly replied.

"Wh-what happens when?"

"When you kill yourself."

The man was flabbergasted; he had no intention whatsoever of suicide! "I don't want to die!" he screamed.

Just then, a purple light flashed in his eyes and his expression went slack. He stopped struggling and stuck his tongue out, intending to bite it off and bleed to death.

{Got it, sir,} Nova told Aron.

"Do we need anything more from this one?" Aron replied.

{No. More samples will be needed for our trap and trace, though.}

"Good thing we have spares, then," he coldly said, then turned to the prisoner. "For crimes against humanity, I hereby sentence you to death. The sentence is to be immediately carried out."

The voltage being passed through the clamps increased. Thirty thousand volts... forty thousand... fifty thousand... Soon, it reached as high as 250,000 volts and the scent of burning flesh wafted off of the captured cultist along with wisps of smoke. Once the equipment measuring his vital signs registered complete brain death, the electricity stopped flowing.

Aron coldly watched the execution from start to finish. It wasn't that he was unaffected by the brutal execution, but rather that he was enraged by the cult and felt that they all deserved to die in agony for their betrayal of the human species in service to yet-unknown extraterrestrial forces.

He turned and walked out of the cell, then into the one across the hall. The prisoners were secured to the walls, so the doors were open and the man in the cell had watched the entire process of the interrogation and execution of the first prisoner.

"I'll talk! I'll tell you whatever you want to—AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!"

Aron didn't even bother asking any questions and proceeded to immediately pass judgment.

Half of the prisoners were thus executed before Nova managed to capture the signature of the foreign mana, so all that was left was to develop a countermeasure for the suicide signal to prevent high-value targets from dying before their secrets could be extracted.

Thirty minutes later, Aron, having completed his experiments and executed the remaining captives, stepped back into the control center. He looked around, meeting the gazes of the people within, then said, "Gear up and move out."

Five words had decided the fate of everyone on Harstine Island that wasn't an imperial citizen.

...

The LEAs in the woods surrounding the house where "Tim and Siobhan Roberts" had lived deactivated their optical camouflage and formed up in neat ranks outside the entrance to the base. Shortly afterward, Aron, followed by a pair of operatives and his emperor's aegis, stepped out.

They were all wearing suits of mechanized power armor, a step up from the NUT suits and designed for frontal combat rather than special operations. Aron took a knee and pressed his palms to the ground again, silently modifying the shield he had placed around the community earlier. When he had first carved it, it was set to allow entry, but no exit. Now, it would deny both entry and exit, as well as shrink and expand as he willed on the fly.

And without a word, they moved out at a bounding run, quickly reaching a speed of 100 miles per hour as they rushed directly toward the clubhouse, where nearly a thousand enemies—or rather, unwitting targets—awaited their arrival.

Due to the need to gather intelligence from the cultists, the LEAs and humans alike were armed with charge rifles, charge pistols, and stun batons. No lethal weaponry had been issued and none would be allowed, as they were almost a hundred percent sure that one of the cult's leaders would be among the people they were set to apprehend.

Not even five minutes passed before they found the first sentry line, which was manned by two middle-aged men in hunting camouflage. Two shots were fired, one by Catherine and the other by one of the emperor's aegis members, and the sentries were neutralized without being given an opportunity to report. A LEA stepped out of formation and shackled the cultists, then sprinted back, leaving two unconscious, shackled people behind for the following maintenance bots to collect and bring back to the base.

Another two minutes passed and the imperial assault team reached the main body of the cultists. 263 imperials collided with over eleven hundred cultists in a shockingly swift, one-sided massacre. Less than three minutes later, 263 imperials still stood, surrounded by 1181 unconscious cultists.

Aron ordered a squad of LEAs to circle the community center and take out the remaining sentries, then placed a small black cube on the ground.

The cube dissolved into a cloud of nanites and sank into the ground, where it would spread out and scan for any underground hideouts the cultists may have. Meanwhile, the remaining LEAs and the two operatives spread out to look for any camouflaged entrances that might lead to a cultist hideaway.

Eight minutes later, the swarm VI of the nanite colony reported that they had found a small underground chamber with six cultists in it. One adult and five teenagers, who were suspected to be awakeners.

Aron sneered, then shrank the shield to just the area around the community center. Closing his eyes, he drove his consciousness deep into his mana heart and triggered it to absorb all of the mana inside the shield, save for the mana that was naturally present in his people and protected by his own runic mark.

As the mana drained from the surroundings, a strange phenomenon occurred. Everything was drained of color and appeared in greyscale, like a black-and-white movie. Then, it began wavering like a mirage before ultimately disappearing. Soon, a perfectly hemispherical crater was all that was left where a quaint community center had once existed. In the middle of the crater were six cultists, and surrounding them were 240 LEAs.

Six charge pistol shots were fired, six people were shackled, and the assault on Hartstene Pointe was over.

Chapter 534

Aron's eyes flashed gold as he looked at the unconscious cultists in the crater. He noticed a purple worm wriggling its way out of the eye of one of the awakeners and attempting to flee. But since his shield blocked all mana from passing through in both directions, the purple worm could only bang against it like a fly on a windowpane.

He stepped off the rim of the crater and slid down the steep side. "Why did everything disintegrate when I absorbed all of the mana?" he asked Nova.

{Have you heard of the saying that all matter is mostly emptiness, sir?} she replied.

"Refresh my memory."

{Atoms are over 99.9% empty space. If they were blown up to the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a marble in the center, and the electrons would be microscopic specks of dust orbiting around the outside of the stadium in the parking lot.

{So when mana is injected into matter, it fills that empty space up, like turning the entire stadium into a huge swimming pool, or perhaps part of an ocean. Normally, if you pull out a cup of water from it, it'll just flow in from somewhere else and the total amount of water is rebalanced.

{But what you did was artificially divide out a certain amount of 'water', then forcibly extract it. When you did that, everything else collapsed and the electrons met the protons in an annihilation reaction, leaving only the neutrons of the atoms. So somewhere in that crater, there are pure neutrons, though there aren't enough of them to really have an effect on their surroundings,} Nova explained.

"That's..." Aron began, but trailed off at a loss for words. "So if I were to drain all the mana out of a saturated star, I could collapse it into a neutron star?"

{Theoretically, yes, sir.}

Aron reached the bottom of the crater on autopilot, lost in the possibilities and feeling slightly overwhelmed by his phenomenal cosmic powers. Thankfully, though, with the simulation the way it was, he would never be forced into an itty bitty living space.

He shook his head and came out of his reverie; he had more important things to do, so he would consider his power later.

Walking up to one of the unconscious cultists on the ground, he squatted down and stared at him, attracting the attention of everyone else in the crater with him. However, their eyeballs didn't disturb him at all, as he was too focused on what he was doing to care about them.

His pupils shrank and widened as if they were microscopes being adjusted by focusing dials. Then he raised his head and looked in a certain direction. He stood and turned to his emperor's aegis, then nodded.

"Catch up," he said. Then, with a shocking sonic boom, he shattered the shield he had carved as he passed through it on his way to... somewhere else.

…

The aegis team headed back to the base, where their stealth shuttle was, leaving Jason and Catherine to clean up the mess and transport the unconscious cultists back to the prison cells in their base for processing. The prisoners would soon be sent to the Hole, where they would await their public trial and sentencing.

"I can't help but wonder... just how strong is he, anyway?" Jason mused.

"I'm curious about that, too," Catherine said, looking in the direction that Aron had flown off in. "What he did in our base was already big enough, but now this..." She pointed at the crater that used to be a quaint little community center.

"What he did to our base? Didn't he say that was just for appearance's sake?" Jason asked. "Do you think he did something else? I mean, there's a bunch of patterns and lights and all, and they do look really cool, all sci-fi and shit."

"He was probably just brushing us off. It's likely something that only he can activate, so there's no real need to tell us the details. After all, if we can't use it without him, it's useless to us, isn't it. And hey—aren't you gonna follow him?" she asked.

"No, we have to finish cleaning up here. He's got the aegis on his tail anyway, and isn't there still a reaper team in town that'll go after him, too? Besides, the base is ours. I'm sure we'll get orders from higher," he pointed a finger up to the sky, "if we really need to move out. So I'm just gonna stay put and wait for orders. I'll count it as part of the 98%."

"The 98%?" Catherine tilted her head quizzically. "What do you mean?"

"Haven't you ever heard the saying that 'the military is 98% boredom and 2% pants-wetting terror'?"

"Well... I have now."

Jason turned to the LEAs and pointed at one of them. "You, take your squad and bring these cultists back to the cells in the base. I'd say don't be seen, but..." He looked around. "I don't think there's anyone left to see us. So make it fast, they'll probably be waking up soon and we need them shackled before that. Don't forget the mouth guards, either. I know biting off tongues won't kill people, but it'll make it hard for them to talk and there's no sense in wasting resources to heal them in our medical pods if we don't have to."

Finished giving orders, the reaper turned and strode off, heading back to base.

"Wait for me!" Catherine coquettishly said as she jogged up to him and wrapped herself around him like an octopus. If anyone were there to see that other than the LEAs, they might have wondered if the two had actually fallen for each other.

But that was something that no one but Jason and Catherine knew, and they certainly weren't going to tell anyone.

Shortly after the operatives and LEAs left, a constructor swarm arrived and rebuilt the community center from the ground up exactly as it was before. Imperial technology certainly gave an entirely new meaning to the term "cleaning up".

Chapter 535

'I wonder how skilled this guy is with his affinity,' Aron thought as he broke past Mach eight. He was still tracking the little purple worm as he flew, even though it hadn't stopped accelerating yet. 'I can't afford to be mind controlled. The empire can't afford it...'

Mind control was a truly problematic ability, one that Aron's currently structured shield rune wouldn't be able to fully protect him against until he took the time to adjust it and train with the new runic structure. Habit was both good and bad, and in the heat of battle, he really didn't want to be using new runes that he hadn't practiced with.

The same could be said for the mind control tech that was on him, as there was a slight possibility that it would fail, and no matter how low the possibility is, it is not a good idea.

Besides, he didn't have time to modify it now regardless; the worm he was tracking was still speeding up.

Everything would depend on whether or not the mana had taught Aron's target. He certainly hadn't released any information on how to use law mana or higher, so the person he was tracking down must have an esoteric affinity. And that likely meant there would be unforeseen issues during the upcoming fight.

But despite Aron's erratic thoughts and the other things going on in his mind, his eyes still glowed golden as he focused on the purple worm in the distance. If he hadn't absorbed every bit of mana in the shield earlier, he wouldn't have been able to distinguish it from the background rainbow of colored motes in his vision; in fact, he was already having difficulty spotting it now, even knowing it was there.

"There you are," he murmured under his breath as he watched the worm fly into a tall office building and not come out the other side. He came to a full stop and hovered over the office building, calling up the map of his surroundings to figure out where he was. If there were imperial citizens around, he couldn't just go in guns blazing.

He increased his altitude to the edge of the stratosphere as he looked at the map. "Amarillo, eh?"

It turned out that he had flown all the way to Amarillo, Texas, and was currently hovering above the Fisk Building. It wasn't the tallest building in the city by far, but it was one of the oldest and a very well-known feature of the downtown cityscape. Standing just over fifty meters tall, it had long been added to the National Register of Historic Places, having been completed in 1927 and once holding the crown of the tallest building in the city, though it had fallen out of the top ten since then.

"Nova, what do we know about Amarillo?" he asked, and a demographic and historical breakdown appeared before him in a virtual display window. "Hmm, 73% imperials... I'll need to take a stealthier approach.

"How about the mana map of the city?"

{Excluding the possibility of a false positive, it's high. Scans show it as a level eight location centered around the Fisk Building and thinning from there as it reaches out to the city limits,} Nova responded, overlaying a mana density image in Aron's view of the city.

Aron nodded and opened a compartment in the thigh of his SHIT armor (Super Hard Intermediate Tactical armor), pulling out a dozen small black cubes the size of standard casino dice. He threw them down toward the city and they disintegrated into nanite colonies, linking their swarm VIs to his HUD.

"Give me a real-time street-level view of the city, especially the downtown area around the Fisk building. Also, search for underground facilities that aren't included in blueprints," he ordered, and the status display representing the nanite supercolony in his HUD turned yellow to indicate that they were currently on mission.

Finding himself with some time on his hands, he continued reading the information about the city below him as he hovered in the sky under a veritable fortress of invisibility, stealth, and concealment runes.

…

"The fuck was that?" Rick groaned as he felt the mother of all headaches slam into him. He rubbed his eyebrows and called for Katrina to bring him some painkillers as he digested what he had just seen.

The lackey he'd been monitoring had been in hiding underground, but rather than dig out an entrance into the sealed bunker, the empire had just... deleted the entire fucking ground, knocking the last remaining cultists unconscious in the process. And the worst part was that he had no clue how they had done it! One minute, everything was fine, then the next minute it was over.

It was like someone flipped a switch and everything fucked off to somewhere else, leaving the people behind in the lurch!

"They're getting closer and closer to me. I need more time! Just a few more weeks and everything will be in place," he muttered as Katrina came into his room with a glass of water and two pills. He took them from her and swallowed the pills dry, then guzzled the water.

She kept her head lowered and only looked at him out of the corner of her eye. She was worried about his mental health; lately, he had been talking to himself more and more and relying on pharmaceutical aids more than was remotely healthy. 'At least he's keeping his illegal drug habit under control,' she thought. 'But I don't know how much of that is his self control and how much is just the lack of availability after the empire swept up all the drug traffickers...'

Rick looked up at her and shouted, "Get the fuck out!" He threw the empty water glass at her in a momentary rage. "Go make yourself fucking useful somewhere!"

Katrina could only nod and quietly leave the room. Then she heard him shout through the door, "And clean up this fucking mess!"

A few minutes later, the painkillers kicked in and Rick could be considered about 90% recovered after his most recent body hop. Though he didn't know it, the turbulence he'd experienced when pulling his consciousness back into his real body had been caused by the 'worm' bashing itself against Aron's shield, as well as the mana trace the emperor had left on it to ensure he didn't lose it.

He turned on the desk light and pulled open the small filing cabinet full of neatly sorted contingency and emergency plans his think tank had come up with, then pulled out a folder and opened it, skimming over the contents.

As he read, lost in thought, he started tapping the desktop with his knuckle in a rhythmic fashion, almost like he was a metronome keeping time for a struggling music student during their practice session. 'I have to rush some plans forward and prepare some leverage in case my base is discovered. It'll give us time to evacuate and move to the backup facility, or at least most of us...'

He closed his eyes and entered the purple world, looking for a specific thread of belief.

Chapter 536

Amarillo, Texas.

In the Oakdale neighborhood of Amarillo was a shabby, dilapidated one-bedroom house. Its windows were boarded up and the outside was covered in graffiti, and the front lawn had overgrown with weeds until it spilled out over the curb and onto the street. Inside, a young man was sleeping on a pile of old U-Haul moving blankets.

He opened his eyes, a purple glint flashing through them, and sat up. He pulled an old flip phone out of his pocket and called the imperial police agency's non-emergency number, then reported that a homeless person was squatting in the house he was in, then sat back to wait for the police to arrive.

A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door. The young man opened the door and, as he had expected, two men in neat imperial police uniforms were standing on the porch.

The taller of the two officers gave a friendly smile and said, "Hello, sir. I'm Officer St. Pierre, and this is my partner, Officer Mendoza. We received a report that someone here may be having some issues with housing. May we come in and have a chat?"

"Ah, um... sure, thanks for coming, I guess?" the young man replied. "Oh, right—I'm uhh, Dave. Nice to meet you," the young man nervously stammered and stretched out his hand for a handshake.

Officer St. Pierre returned the handshake, but the moment their hands touched, "Dave's" eyes flashed purple again, followed by the same purple glint passing through the police officer's eyes. They returned to normal fast enough, though, that Officer Mendoza didn't catch the abnormality.

"Dave" turned to Officer Mendoza and repeated the process, then both officers stood before him like statues with blank looks on their face.

"The empire sure creates some strong willed people," the young man complained to himself, knowing that he would be having another massive headache waiting for him when his consciousness returned to his own body. He'd had to drain nearly all of the faith he'd gathered over the past two weeks to break the mental defenses of and take over two mere imperial police officers! The overdraft from that would be downright vicious, especially since he needed to force all of it through a single thread of belief and work remotely.

In absolute terms, sure, it wasn't that much; he had over a million threads of belief now, and his daily income of faith pulses was in the hundreds of millions, so he still had plenty of faith left. But using so much at once would still give him some problems.

"You know what to do, right?" he said, looking at the human statues in front of him.

"Yes, sir," they chorused in a monotone, then turned and left.

…

'Hmm... thousands of awakeners spread all through the city, living like normal people. Almost none of them are registered in the imperial awakener's database, nor are they imperial citizens. Looks like I've found the right place,' Aron mused to himself. He was so high in the air that the entire city below him was the size of his pinky fingernail.

'And although all of it can be solved if I just deal with you...' He focused on one particular video feed from his sensor swarm that showed a man sitting in an office with a pair of guards outside the door. 'I can't simply just do that without risking whatever programming you've planted in them erupting after your death and turning the streets of my city into rivers of blood.'

"Fuck!" he shouted.

Without the awakeners being registered in the imperial awakeners database, or even being imperial citizens, there was no way of telling what affinities they had awakened to. Add to that the level of destruction that even known awakeners are capable of dishing out in a short time, he feared that pulling out the cult from the empire's side would be devastating to citizens and noncitizens alike.

He thought for a moment, then asked, "Where's the standby force?"

{The emperor's aegis is fifteen miles outside town with their stealth fields engaged awaiting further orders. ARES is on high alert and the Amarillo cube called a full force recall ten minutes ago. Police and fire have been notified and are on standby. They're calling in all of their members who aren't already on shift as we speak,} Nova answered.

"Suggestions? We need to take out all of the targets at the same time I deal with the cult leader," he asked. He was currently focused on how to kill the cultists, rather than capturing and parading them in front of the empire for a public trial and sentencing. But that said, the thousands of awakeners in the city would provide a substantial number of troops in the empire's penal legion, so if they could be captured without risk of civilian casualties, he would much prefer it.

{How about snipers?} The first reveal of this chapter happened through N/0/vel-Biiin.

"Can we get enough of them here in such a short time? There are thousands of targets and they all need to be taken out at the same time."

{Athena says she can have them all mobilized and present in twenty minutes.}

"And what about the penal legion? If we kill them all, wouldn't that be a waste?"

{They can't be saved, sir. Who can guarantee that whatever programming they're under won't erupt in the future? It's better to wipe them out now than have them explode down the line and wreak havoc.}

Aron thought about it and conceded the point. He already knew that they would have a problem with "supervillains", and cutting these thousands of awakeners out now would mean fewer problems in the future, but he still sighed at the waste.

"Okay. Tell them to be fast about it. I'll use that time to make my final preparations," Aron said, his expression grave. He was about to execute quite a few people without trials, and he felt that it should be handled with the gravity and solemnity it deserved.

Chapter 537

"Nova," Aron called out.

[Yes, sir?]

"Can you reprogram the surveillance nanites to search for any explosive devices and disarm them?" he asked.

[Yes. They've already spread through the entire city, so detection will be easy. But they'll have to gather to disarm, won't that mean we don't have real-time eyes on all of the targets?] Nova said.

"It depends on how many there are. If there's just a few of them, we can call the bomb squad for disposal. If there are a lot, we'll have to use the nanites."

[Understood, sir. I've reprogrammed them to search for explosive devices, the new scan will take a little over four minutes.]

Aron nodded and turned over on his back, gazing up at the sky above him. It was daytime, so he couldn't see the stars, but Nova helpfully overlaid them on his vision, knowing his habits as she did.

The next few minutes passed in silence, then Nova said, [The scan is complete. The nanites found four explosives—one on the I-40/I-27 interchange, one at the airport, one at Carver Elementary School, and one at Amarillo College.]

"Have you informed the police to send out disposal experts?"

[Yes, sir.]

"Good. Retask the nanites for surveillance and monitoring again."

[Right away, sir.]

...

ARES Reaper Command.

Athena was rather satisfied with the empire's armed forces. Not only was each and every trooper multiple cuts above any military ever created in the history of humanity, but she even had the best special forces under her. Every single reaper was trained to a high standard, and all of them could quite easily be called a one-man army. They were proficient in every aspect of warfare, from tactics and strategy all the way down to individual skills.

Thus, each and every one of them was a highly qualified sniper. The only thing that the official snipers in each team had that the others didn't was a personality profile that fit being a sniping specialist. Just like the demolitions experts all enjoyed the spectacle of big booms, sniping specialists enjoyed the thrill of the hunt and taking down high-value targets unaware.

So when every single team—barring the one that was still on cleanup duty in Washington—got the same orders to pick up sniper kits and move out, they logged out of the simulation, moved to the quartermaster, and picked up rifles that were already set to their personal specifications. There was no hesitation or nervousness in their actions; it was clear that, to them, it was just another Tuesday.

The teams neatly filed down the station's arms to the docking ring, jogging to their individual stealth shuttles in single file and peeling away from the group as each team reached their shuttle.

Once they were loaded into their shuttles, they leaned back in their seats and triggered the augmented reality briefing.

[There are over two thousand targets that require simultaneous precision takedowns currently incognito in Amarillo, Texas. Lethal means only, no saving heads for later headbagging. These targets are likely to be programmed by the progenitor cult and could take hostile actions at any time without warning. They are all awakened, and none of them are in the database, nor are they imperial citizens...]

The briefing continued for a few minutes before Athena asked, [Any questions?]

One of the reapers raised his hand, and the others in his team chuckled at him. He sheepishly put his hand down and said, "Yes, ma'am, I have a question."

[Go ahead, corporal.]

"Since they're all awakeners, doesn't that mean our targets are... kids?"

[Technically, yes. But also no. They're targets that have been programmed by the cult to attack innocent civilians. Will that be a problem for you, corporal?] Athena said.

"No, ma'am," the corporal replied, though he was obviously in a shit mood at the thought of carrying out a wholesale slaughter on teenagers.

After that question was asked, every single reaper, all three thousand of them, felt the weight of what they were about to do settle on their shoulders. Taking down the targets in front of them today meant saving hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives tomorrow.

It was the cruel calculus of war, a lesson that was only now being brought home in their minds.

...

Somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico.

The EV Beowulf was headed toward the coast of Texas at full speed, expecting to meet a cargo of stealth shuttles carrying reaper teams along the way.

The massive supercarriers were still fulfilling their duties as patrol craft for the empire, and the Beowulf was just the one that happened to be nearest to North America when the bell rang. Before the empire had taken its initial shape, the ten supercarriers had each been assigned a specific patrol area, but now all ten of them had the entire planet as their patrol areas, a measure that came about because the world had just gotten smaller, in a metaphorical sense.

"How long until we pick up our cargo, Wulf?" the captain asked.

[Eight minutes, thirty-seven seconds, captain] Wulf, the ship's AI, answered.

"Very well, maintain course and speed. Inform higher that we're en route and on target."

[Yes, captain.]

[Yes, captain.]

The landing operation a few minutes later went without issue, and soon, the Beowulf reached Amarillo and the reapers spread out over its flight deck. Each was assigned a target marked with tracking nanites. A few hundred of them had obscured, or otherwise unreachable targets, so they switched out their pulse rifles for charge pistols and monomolecular-edged combat knives, then leaped off the deck of the Beowulf, engaging their optical stealth systems as they fell to ground.

Their strikes would have to be done in a much more up close and personal fashion.

Within minutes, all of the reapers were in position and ready to strike. All they needed was the final go/no-go order from Aron himself.

...

[Everyone is in position, sir. They're just waiting on your orders] Nova informed Aron.

"Then I guess I shouldn't disappoint them," Aron said, then closed his eyes and fell from the sky. He oriented himself head down and fixed his eyes on the Fisk building, where Rick was currently in his penthouse office.

The freefall from the stratosphere took three minutes, during which time Aron split his focus and crafted two equally intricate runic circles. One of them, he called the 'phasing' rune. When activated, it would allow him, and anything within three inches of him, to phase through solid matter.

The other, he called the 'disintegration' rune. It would disintegrate anything and everything around it that wasn't protected by a mana shield.

Aron reached the window of Rick's office. "Begin the operation," he ordered, then stepped through the sealed window.

Over two thousand gunshots rang out from kilometers away as he walked up behind Rick, whose consciousness was currently absent from his body, and said, "This is a much easier ending than you deserve, you terrorist scum." Then he rested the palm of his hand on the top of Rick's head and triggered the disintegration rune.

Rick's body broke down layer by layer, from the top of his skull. His hair went first, followed by his skin, then what little fat he had on his body, his eyeballs... Soon, Rick had completely been reduced to nothingness.

Aron nodded in satisfaction, then walked to the center of the building, a disintegration rune around him ensuring that everything vanished when he came into contact with it. Soon, he reached the center of the building and closed his eyes.

The disintegration rune around him rapidly grew until it overlapped the edges of the building itself, and Aron let himself freefall.

The Fisk building, and all of the people within, were reduced to complete nothingness in the time it took him to fall from the top floor to the bottommost subbasement.

[Sir, we have a problem] Nova told him when he reached the ground.

Chapter 538

What's the problem, Nova?" Aron asked.

[Our Henry's Eye sensors detected a very large surge of mana headed west from your location. It stopped in a local store a few miles away] she replied.

"Possibility of a false positive?"

[Low, sir.]

"I'll check it out," Aron said, then rose into the air and rocketed away in the direction of the mana surge.

...

Outskirts of Amarillo, Texas.

Greg Bauer hummed as he paced up and down the aisles in the Tractor Supply Co. in Amarillo. He was a farmer, but today, he was buying things that no farmer needed. Or rather, things that no farmer needed in the amount he was buying them in.

Every now and then as he came across something, his eyes would flash purple and, without thinking, he would dump it in his cart. He had already filled three carts and parked them at the front of the store for later checkout. It was to the point now that the employees had started giving him weird looks when they passed him while doing their routine tasks.

Suddenly, he grit his teeth and collapsed over his cart, moaning in agony as his eyes rapidly flashed between purple and their normal green. His body trembled as his jaw locked shut, preventing him from making more noise than a slight whimper.

Inside Greg's mind, a war was happening; Rick's consciousness was attempting to fully take over his body and make it his own!

Soon, he stopped shaking and stood normally. His face twisted into an enraged expression and, uncaring of the dirty looks from the cashiers, he stomped out of the store and into the parking lot, where he climbed into his truck and closed his eyes.

Greg had lost the battle and become Rick.

"God fucking DAMN IT!" he cursed, pounding his fists against the steering wheel. "All of that effort, all of my work, all gone!"

He continued his tirade for a few minutes before calming down and submerging his consciousness in the purple world.

As soon as he entered the familiar purple world, a voice said in a menacing murmur, §Yyyyyyoooouuuuuuuuu... fffffffffaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiilllled...§

"Failed what?" he asked, frantically looking around for threads of belief and finding none.

§Yyyyyyyyooooooouuuuu... fffffffffffaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiilllled...§ the voice repeated.

Rick thought for a moment, then shouted, "I DIDN'T FAIL! YOU failed ME!"

§Iiiii diiiiiiiiiiid nnnnnnnnnnoooooooothiiiinnnng!§ the voice replied, a hint of emotion—rage—in it for the first time.

"I did everything right!" Rick yelled. "I prepared to welcome the progenitors! I spread chaos! What right do you have to take my body from me!?"

§Iiiii diiiiiiiiiiid nnnnnnnnnnoooooooothiiiinnnng!§ the voice repeated, its rage becoming more evident.

"No... no, no, no no NO! I refuse to accept this!" Rick shouted, then closed his eyes and attempted to pull the threads of belief he'd had to his new body. ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm

For what seemed to be a long time, he pulled and pulled, but to no avail. He tried visualizing different things, like in the imperial information he received before, but there was no result. His teeth ground together until his gums started bleeding and he screamed, "GIVE IT BACK! GIVE MY BELIEF BACK!"

§Taaaaaake iiiiiiiiiit theeeeeeeeennnnnnn,§ the voice replied. §Iiiiiiifffffffff yooooooouuuuuuu caaaaaannnnn.§

Rick struggled for what seemed like hours before, finally, a single thread of belief attached itself to him. He knew who it was the moment it anchored itself to his new body's purple world—it was his faithful secretary and strongest believer, Katrina Markov.

Then, another thread attached to him, and another... Soon, threads were attaching themselves to him in the tens, hundreds, even thousands at a time. The impact was intense, and in the real world, his body was writhing in pain, veins visibly popping in his skin like a bodybuilder after a hard workout.

§Yyyyyyooooouuuuuu ffffffffffooooooolllllll!§ the voice in the purple world sneered. §Fffffffffaaaaaaaillllllllllure meeeeeeeeans deeeeeeathhhhhh! Yyyyyyyyyyoooouuuuu ooooonnnnlllllyyyyyy brrrrrrriiiiiiiiinnnnnnnng yyyyyyooooooourrrrr deeeeeathhhh clllloooosssserrrr!§

Rick screamed as he began bleeding from his eyes and ears.

...

A sonic boom echoed through the parking lot of Tractor Supply Co. as Aron abruptly stopped in the air and looked down. His eyes turned gold as he scanned for mana signatures, then he looked up in shock. An enormous purple whirlwind of mana had formed above a new model pickup truck in the parking lot!

It was filled with the shape of faces and all of them screaming and wailing in fear, agony, and protest as they were sucked deeper into the whirlwind. Many more face-shaped blobs of purple mana were streaming in from the distance as well.

"What the..." Aron began, then trailed off as he stared at the thing that was so far out of his experience that he didn't even know where to begin.

He dropped to the ground next to the driver's side door of the pickup and looked at the man inside. He was an older middle-

aged man with white hair and a bit of paunch. But Aron recognized him immediately—he was the cult leader! Though he had no idea how the man had accomplished it, he had stolen someone else's body and was undergoing a very, very rapid awakening process.

Aron couldn't allow that to continue, so he snapped his fingers and a shield extended from him and surrounded the truck. It blocked the whirlwind outside of it and the new cult leader's body within was forced to wake up; the time since the process had begun was far too short, so he had yet to fall into a protective coma.

"It's... it's you... tyrant!" the cult leader panted, agony still etched in his expression.

"Call me whatever you want, I don't care," Aron said. "Any last wishes?"

"They're... coming..." Rick said. "And you... you can't... hahahahaha!"

"I can't what?" Aron asked.

Rick said nothing, only continued maniacally laughing as blood spewed from his mouth. He soon calmed himself, however, and tilted his head back to look up at the sky, then screamed, "I REGRET!"

He continued screaming his fury and hate to the heavens, even as his body began to crack and flake off in the breeze. He screamed until his vocal cords bled, until his lips, teeth, and tongue turned to dust. Even after he could make no more sound, he raised his fist to the sky as his body crumbled to ash in the driver's seat of the pickup truck he had been sitting in.

Aron gazed at the ash for a moment, a complex expression on his face. Then he turned his gaze upward, where the purple whirlwind still remained outside his shield.

The face-shaped blobs had stopped coming to join the whirlwind and the vortex continued turning in the air, though more slowly now.

§Yyyyyyoooouuuu wwwwwwiiiiiiinnnnnnnn... ffffffffooooorrrrrr nnnnnnnoooooooowwwwww...§ the vortex murmured to Aron, growing more faint as it spoke.

"I'll win next time, too. Now begone," he replied, waving his hand as if he was shooing away a fly.

Soon, everything returned to normal, leaving Aron alone in the parking lot with his thoughts.

Chapter 539

Katrina Markov was sitting at a desk in a small, windowless room that had been used as a janitor's closet before. To her left was a door and on the wall in front of her was a cork board filled with pictures, sticky notes, and small pieces of crumpled paper, napkins, and discarded cups. All of the items pinned to the board were connected by red strings; it looked like a conspiracy theorist's dream.

She'd had a bad feeling all day and needed to calm down. Looking at her "evidence board" was the way she took her mind off of problems and bad feelings, so she'd been in the room ever since Rick had retreated to his office with strict orders to leave him undisturbed.

'Who... who did it?' she thought.

She'd been investigating the murderer of her husband and child for four years, and had uncovered what she believed to be the tip of a conspiracy iceberg. Whether or not it actually was a conspiracy was debatable, to say the least, but at least she believed it to be one. What still eluded her, however, was the person at the top.

Suddenly, she felt a sharp pain in her chest and couldn't help but gasp.

'What was that?' she thought. She was in good health and still young at only 28 years old. She controlled her diet very well and exercised daily, and there was no history of heart disease in her family... so why did it feel like someone just stabbed her with an icepick?

The sharp pain came again, more intense this time.

She grabbed her chest and bent over in her chair, panting. 'No, I have to get to the doctor,' she thought.

But before she could stand, the pain came a third time. This time, rather than a piercing sensation, it was as if something important had been violently ripped out of her chest. She felt something flowing out of her, slowly at first, but speeding up as the seconds inexorably ticked past her. freeweɓnovē ɱ

She tried to stand, but fell to the floor and could only crawl toward the door of the small room she was in. As she crawled, her skin began cracking like shattered porcelain. She looked down at the fine web of cracks on the back of her hand and screamed. She continued screaming and crawling even as she slowly crumbled, as her arms and legs dissipated, until her vocal cords disappeared.

The last thing Katrina Markov saw in her life was the handle on the door to the room she had spent countless hours in, chasing her obsession.

...

"You know, imperial tech is cool and all, but... I kinda miss doing things the old-fashioned way," Catherine complained to Jason in the control center of the underground base they were in.

"What do you mean by that?" Jason asked, curious.

"The whole... brain dump thing. It's just too easy—it takes all the fun out of interrogation."

"Interrogation isn't supposed to be fun, you know." Jason gave her an odd look, wondering if the woman he was with was a psychopath or just bored. With women, he thought, there was a fine line between the two and he had never been good at telling the difference.

"I know," Catherine sighed, spinning around in her chair. "It's just... it takes something away from the whole spy game, yanno?"

"I get it. It's kinda like how reaper enhancements make it feel like we're bullying little kids on the battlefield, right?"

"Exactly! You know you're built for bigger and better things, but you're stuck on easy mode even if you normally play on hell difficulty," Catherine said, pouncing on her partner.

Their playful banter was interrupted by a screech from the direction of the prison cells. They exchanged glances, then Catherine leaped off of Jason's lap and sprinted to the locker where they kept their emergency gear. Jason followed shortly after.

"The fuck was that?" he asked.

"You're asking me, but who am I supposed to ask?"

They grabbed their kits and sprinted to the prison, weapons held at the ready. But when they got there, the sight they saw was... disturbing, to say the least. The cult members they had captured were dissolving into sparkling particles that drifted in the air and fell to the ground before disappearing.

They looked at each other again, for a long minute, until Catherine broke the silence and said, "So... how are we supposed to report that?"

...

Minutes later, on television screens around the globe, a breaking news cutin began.

"We apologize for interrupting your regularly scheduled broadcast with this breaking report," the anchor began. "Just minutes ago, people around the world began collapsing."

The screen switched to a shaky cellphone camera recording of someone on the ground in the middle of a crowded supermarket, an almost inhuman screech ripping out of their throat.

The news anchor switched to voiceover narration and continued, "Reports are coming in from around the world of a wave of brutal disappearances. Everyone affected exhibits the same symptoms: extreme pain, collapse, and finally..."

The video cut to another location, this one in Times Square, which had been damaged, but not completely destroyed, in the attacks at the beginning of the year. A woman was rolling around on the ground, wailing and shrieking and tearing at her hair. She began cracking, then finally dissipated into dust and a wave of panic passed through the crowded landmark as people stampeded out of the square, thinking it was some kind of biological or chemical attack.

The narration continued apace. "They disintegrate into dust from the outside in," the news anchor said in a grave tone.

"According to the Akashic Record, there's been thousands of reports so far, and they're still coming in... My producer just informed me that the number is now in the hundreds of thousands and still rapidly climbing.

"We here at the imperial broadcasting agency are now asking that if you, or anyone you know, is currently or has been affected by these disturbing events, please report it to your nearest imperial official as soon as possible. Otherwise, please remain calm and shelter in place. More information will be announced as the event unfolds.

"Thank you, and now back to your regularly scheduled program."

Chapter 540

Aron turned and looked around the parking lot. He had thought they were alone, but now he realized that, other than him and the pile of dust that used to be a cult leader, there were others who had witnessed the events.

A short distance away, people who had been loading supplies in their cars and trucks were pointing at him. Thankfully, things had happened so fast that none of them had had time to pull out their phones and start recording before everything was over. And people further away had been too absorbed in their own errands to pay attention to a distant argument.

Only a very small portion of the population was awakened and could actually see anything happening. To everyone else, it just sounded like a normal argument, if they could even hear it at all. And not everyone—especially not the kind of people (read: farmers) that shop at Tractor Supply Co.—were constantly recording everything in hopes of catching a major event that would give them a boost in visibility on the internet.

Aron, however, had scanned and recorded the entire process of Rick's disintegration. It was, after all, something he would very shortly need to get to the bottom of.

Only after everything was over and done and the imperial police had arrived did he breathe a sigh of relief and rocket off, intent on boarding his personal shuttle and heading back to Avalon Island to supervise the aftermath.

…

"Give me an update on the situation," he said after he boarded his shuttle and began the journey back to the main Cube.

[There were a number of large bombs discovered, but the imperial police successfully defused them. The cult was in the process of building new ANFO bombs, but they were intercepted in a... rather weird way] Nova reported.

(Ed note: ANFO bombs are better known as fertilizer bombs. ANFO stands for Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil and was used by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing of 1995, among other incidents. It's why fertilizer purchases are tracked and regulated by the government. Mythbusters also did quite a few episodes featuring ANFO; it was one of the most common explosives highlighted on the show, from what I recall. Here's a clip of them making a cement mixer disappear using it: https/watch?v=4IcHUHRf_S0)

"Weird way?" Aron asked. He was pretty sure they had only targeted the cult's awakeners, so hearing that something weird happened to non-awakener cultists was a bit unexpected.

[The awakeners were successfully assassinated. 2,493 awakeners were targeted, of which 2,118 were neutralized by long-range sniping. The others were beheaded to ensure the kill. None of them were able to make any waves.

[But other than that, there are a number of people who are disintegrating in the same fashion as the cult leader—who we now know was Rick Ashley, a native of Montana who grew up in a militia compound—and we believe they were the cultists and other followers of the progenitor cult. The first instances of people disintegrating happened moments after you attacked the Fisk building and killed Mr. Ashley.]

"Are they only happening here?" While it did seem to be connected to the cult leader at first glance, correlation is not causation, so Aron had to rule out some environmental factor or planned attack by an unknown cult awakener that had slipped the net.

[No, sir. The phenomenon is occurring all over the world. We're still getting reports of it happening, and the number is now in the hundreds of thousands and still increasing. There's a significant number of them that we've already identified as linked to the cult and were tracking in Operation Hunting Dog, enough to statistically rule out other possibilities for the disintegrations] Nova said. She was paying attention to the reports and updating the numbers in real time as they came in.

She waved her hand and a virtual screen appeared with a map of the world on it, littered with dots of different colors. Red dots were confirmed cultists that had disintegrated, yellow dots were for suspected cultists that were also disintegrating, and orange dots were for people unrelated to the cult, but were also disintegrating.

Disturbingly, there were also blue dots here and there that represented imperial citizens that had also died the same way.

[We don't yet know the mechanics of it, or why exactly it's happening, but from all the available evidence, it appears that the cult is dying with its leader.]

Aron went silent after hearing Nova's report as he thought of why something like the disintegration phenomenon was happening. A few minutes before his shuttle reached Avalon Island, he came up with a working theory. "It'll require further investigation, but I think what happened is likely to be related to Rick taking over another body after I killed him in his office. The death of his followers might be the price he had to pay, or perhaps, given the nature of the disintegrations, his followers are just being drained of enough mana to artificially awaken the new body."

He recalled the mana vortex that had formed when he caught up to Rick in his new body and became more sure of his theory, but still said, "We'll look into it after everything's settled. But for now, I'll be resting."

Aron closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat, trying to rebalance his mental state. It was the first time he had personally taken action, and the experience was much different than simply ordering others to kill on his, or the empire's, behalf. He hadn't expected that he would be affected at all, but reality had slapped him in the face.

Nova went quiet, but that didn't mean she stopped working. She was still busy coordinating the cleanup of the various sites where cultists had disintegrated, including the personal effects they had on them when the phenomenon began. She, like Aron, thought that his hypothesis was correct; but also like Aron, she would fully investigate, looking for evidence for and against the hpothesis before coming to a final conclusion.

Chapter 541

As could easily be expected, people panicked and immediately started coming up with "explanations" of just what the hell was happening.

Crazy theories were thrown out like they were free, and people were blaming it on the aftereffects of using medical pods, a targeted mass assassination by the empire—which was an especially popular theory, as most of the deaths occurred among non-imperial citizens—a blessing gone rogue, and the side effects of the increase in "strange particle" density causing people to fail to adapt to it. Those were just the most popular among the many, many theories being spread by panicking people or those abusing it to gain fame.

Blackdawn: [The empire is finally moving on us! Beware of those with overly solicitous behavior, because they all have ulterior motives! #masskilling #thesnap #thevanishing]

Tervantas: [I don't think it's the empire doing this Blackdawn. It's more likely to be some blessed losing control over their superpower, or maybe just failure to adapt to the new particle density. #thinkmore #panicless #thesnap #thevanishing]

Curtis1122: [ Tervantas Blackdawn GAIATech ImperialPressCorps Tagging the empire. Can you please explain this for us? What the hell is going on? #thesnap #thevanishing]

(Ed note: Yes, I know that Avengers: Infinity War came out in 2018, so it wouldn't normally be present in universe, but the deaths were so similar to what happened when Thanos snapped his fingers that we couldn't help but move its release date forward so it existed in universe here.)

Soon after seeing the trends on social media, the imperial press agency released an emergency notification about the situation. They mentioned that it was still under investigation and that a formal response would be forthcoming as soon as the investigation yielded results. Anyone who wanted to follow the investigation was provided with a direct link to the Akashic Record, where they could be updated with the progress in real time if they didn't want to wait for the official statement.

That calmed the masses a little bit, at least, but speculation continued running rampant and the statement was even used by some as "evidence" of their speculations being true.

The imperial health agency was just as busy as the imperial press agency. Though almost everyone affected by what Aron believed to be Rick's death had died in an extremely spectacular fashion, some people—mostly imperial citizens who were affected by the phenomenon—had survived on the precipice of death and were hanging by a thread. Those people were placed in newly printed stasis pods until the researchers had time to figure out what was going on and how to prevent it, or stop it in its tracks.

At least stasis seemed to work, as it prevented their creeping decay from worsening. That said, however, they still looked like they had aged by at least fifty years. And it was hard aging at that, the kind that only underprivileged people would experience before the empire was founded and the initial medical pod restoration was carried out.

But for noncitizens, things were quite a bit more dire.

Imperial citizens collapsed like balloons that had a small hole poked in them, allowing the air inside to slowly leak out. But noncitizens collapsed more like balloons that had been violently popped and simply disintegrated in a matter of seconds, or minutes at the longest. Thus far, they had only discovered a handful of noncitizens that had survived over an hour, during which time they were in excruciating agony as their bodies slowly collapsed and turned to dust before vanishing entirely.

It was more "evidence" that people pointed to that "proved" the empire was behind the attack. Nobody had yet linked the deaths to the cult, and if the anti-empire sentiment continued growing, the chances of the truth being believed would be almost nonexistent.

…

Aron was in the emperor's council chamber, meeting with his inner council. After the greetings were finished, his expression turned grave and he said, "So just what the fuck is going on?"

[It's become more and more clear that everyone linked to the cult is dead, or dying, as a result of Rick Ashley's death. We don't yet understand the mechanics of it, but we're studying the citizens in stasis and expect to have results soon. We're at least sure that most of the imperials that were affected are in no way linked to the cult] Gaia reported.

Aron heaved a sigh of relief. It seemed the empire's cultist problem had resolved itself with the death of their leader, and he became even more certain of his earlier theory. It seemed that the mana drain effect had been applied to those who believed in the cult's propaganda enough to be connected to the leader in some way. Through that connection, he had, either consciously or subconsciously, stripped them of all their mana in an attempt to force the body he'd just taken over into awakening.

On the bright side, there would be no survivors to form splinter factions and wreak their own brand of havoc, like similar terrorist organizations had in the past.

"How did you link them? And why are some imperial citizens affected?" he asked.

[Operation Hunting Dog had a lot of them already linked to the cult, either through financial contributions or material aid. There were also those linked to cells that we've already rolled up. There's hard evidence and paper trails of people contributing, the others are simply statistically likely to have been involved in cult activities through their social connections to confirmed cultists. It's circumstantial at best, but it holds water] Nyx said.

Aron contemplated for a while, then nodded. "I'm no idealist, so circumstantial evidence is enough for me, as long as there's enough of it. Did our operatives get any useful intel out of the cultists from Hartstene Pointe before they, I presume, vanished as well?"

"Yes," Youssef replied. "They managed a full brain data download before the phenomenon began. We had a lucky break there, as one of the cultists captured was a member of Mr. Ashley's inner circle who was privy to almost all of their planning. Combined with the evidence from the reconstructed Fisk building in the simulation, we also have a full picture of the entire cult."

He smiled wryly, then continued, "Our luck was their misfortune—their reliance on analog methods and hardcopies of information would have made it impossible to destroy everything even if we'd used a more... traditional method of storming the building."

Chapter 542

[We also now know what affinity the cult leader awakened. He awakened with an esoteric affinity to faith-aspected mana. Knowing that gives us some clues as to its operation, so we have avenues to research that will prevent it from affecting us going forward. We'll know if we've succeeded for sure once our affected citizens have their disintegration permanently stopped] Nova reported, as she was the one keeping track of the relevant research in the Lab City gold labs.

"That's a relief," Aron sighed. "About the evidence—is there any reason anyone can think of why we shouldn't make it public?"

There was a possibility that some of the cult's documents might need to be classified for national security, but as he had yet to receive a detailed briefing or any of the evidence himself, he couldn't say for sure.

The human members of his inner council looked to the AIs present at the meeting, as they hadn't had time to read through it themselves, either.

[There's some information in them with speculation that hits pretty close to the truth] Nyx finally said.

"What speculations?" Aron asked.

[There's a trail of data that suggests the cult knew about our ability to read, store, and manipulate memory. Turns out the cultists I caught going into the simulation were simply just bait that the cult leadership threw out in order to prove or disprove their hypothesis. I apologize for missing that... I was too certain of my own abilities and our technological advantage and let those fish slip the net and did exactly what the cult researchers needed me to do.]

"It's okay, Nyx. Everyone makes mistakes," Aron comforted the most humanlike of his higher-order AIs. "Just don't let it happen again, understand?"

[Yes, Your Imperial Majesty] Nyx said, her usual laconic tone and expression replaced with grave solemnity as she dropped to one knee before him. [I swear that I'll never repeat a mistake in the future.]

"Good," the emperor said, then turned to the rest of his inner council. "We can classify that as gold-level information under Omega classification. It'll require keyword and letter clearance as well... Let's see, the keyword should be 'dump', and it'll be classified under the letter 'S'."

(Ed note: Top Secret isn't the highest classification level. Beyond Top Secret, there are a number of categories that are much, much higher, such as keyword clearance, letter clearance (for instance, nuclear secrets are classified under letters and nuclear programs are classified under keyword clearance), need to know, and so on. There's a lot of them, and most aren't even publicly available even to hint at.)

"Is there anything else that shouldn't be released?" he continued.

Nobody responded, showing that there was nothing else that should be excluded other than the aforementioned research data.

"Okay then. Gaia, release the information to Mnemosyne for classification, second-eye passes, and release to the Akashic Record. Nova, continue tracking the research in the gold lab and inform me as soon as there's an update on the situation of our affected citizens. Let them know it's likely mana drain, as the same thing happened during the assault on the cult compound in Washington.

"Nyx, Athena, and General Smith, send out our hunting dogs to search the cult cells' gathering points for any further information that might not have been present in the Fisk building. Jeremy and Youssef, you'll be joining me later... we have an explanation to give and a victory speech to deliver to all of humanity, not just the citizens of the empire," Aron ordered.

"If there's no further business or additions—" he looked around at those present in the council chamber, then continued, "—and I see that there isn't, so meeting adjourned."

With that, everyone in the council chamber disappeared to prepare for the followup of the cult's destruction, leaving Aron alone in his council chamber.

Soon, he, too, logged out of the simulation and returned to reality. Though he had a speech to prepare, he needed to first heal his heart with his loved ones. Taking action himself was still affecting him; even though his mental state had stabilized, his emotions were still running amok and he needed to ground himself. And though Nova was an excellent counselor and therapist, the only thing that could heal a soldier's heart was love.

Love was one thing that he would never have with Nova. Or at least, not the kind of love he needed at that particular moment in time.

...

Ten minutes later, on the roof of the Cube at Avalon Island.

Aron and Rina were back in their "spot" on the roof of the enormous imperial government edifice, lying cuddled together and gazing up at the sky.

"Do you think life is sacred?" he asked.

Rina pondered the question for a long moment, then sighed and shook her head. "No. Life is a cosmic accident, not something sacred or precious. If you create or remove a single life from the equation, the world doesn't stop turning, the sky doesn't weep blood, rivers keep flowing, and the tides keep... well, tiding, I guess." She shrugged. freewebnσvel.cѳm

She paused for a moment before adding, "But it also depends on what and who you're talking about. If it's your life, it's sacred to me. Just like I hope mine is to you. It's all about perspective. But the point is, in the grand scheme of things, life is just life. It's chaos from beginning to end, and chaos cannot, by definition, be sacred.

"At least not in an absolute, objective sense of the word, anyway."

The pair of lovers lapsed into a companionable silence for a time, then Aron finally broke the silence by saying, "Something weird happened when I was confronting Rick earlier."

"Oh?" Rina prompted.

"Yeah. I heard a voice. I'm pretty sure it was the esoteric mana that he awakened to."

"What'd it say?"

Aron waved his hand and a video of his confrontation with Rick, recorded from Aron's perspective, played on a virtual screen for him and Rina. Weirdly, however, the voice of the mana wasn't caught on it, nor was the mana vortex.

He backed the video up to the point where the vortex first formed and manually added the details he recalled to the video file as it played, then paused it where the voice spoke and said, "Here's where it spoke to me. It said, 'you win for now' before the vortex finally dissipated. And I can't help but wonder what it meant by that."

"It's fine," Rina said. "I'm sure you'll figure it out in the end. You are, after all, the most brilliant man who ever lived."

Chapter 543

Before the panic and fearmongering could spread further, a notification was pushed to every device on the planet, imperial or otherwise. The emperor would shortly be making a speech explaining the whys and wherefores of the disintegrations.

The notification was enough to bring everything in the world to a screeching halt, as, other than those who were asleep and thus missed it or those doing important jobs, everyone sat and stared at their screens, upon which was displayed the imperial seal. Everyone was worried that the disintegration would be affecting them, their families, or their close friends, and they wanted to know what exactly was going on.

And whether they were imperial citizens or not, Aron had an excellent reputation, so his words bore the most authority.

As usual, Aron appeared behind a podium against a neutral blue backdrop, the seal of the empire proudly displayed on the front of the podium.

"Greetings to everyone around the world," he began in a neutral tone.

"Earlier this year, the world suffered an unprecedented wave of terror attacks that took the lives of millions of people. And at that time, We swore a solemn vow to all of you. And today, We come before you to announce that We have kept Our promise and the cult of the progenitors has been eliminated to the very last man."

He paused to let the news sink in as the screen behind him played a clip from his previous speech where he swore to end the terrorist threat immediately after the attacks took place.

"In addition to that, We have information on the wave of disintegrations and premature aging sweeping through the world. It's the last gasp of the cult in its dying throes," he said, dropping another bomb as if he was a B-52 during World War II.

"Everyone who turned to dust or aged by decades was connected to the cult in some way. Those who were disintegrated were directly involved in the cult's activities, whether by active participation or even something as simple as donating funds or equipment to their cause. And those suffering from premature aging were forced to cooperate with the cultists against their will.

"Yes, there were indeed imperial citizens among them, and no, Our empire doesn't have the technology to invisibly disintegrate someone. Even if We did, wouldn't it be a wasteful, unfair, and easy end to use it on people who deserve to receive punishment for their crimes and repent through service?"

Most of those watching understood the concept of crimes being punished by community service. Almost every country on the planet, prior to the founding of the empire, had that option available for criminals. After all, not every crime was deserving of jail time, let alone capital punishment.

Aron's speech went on as people continued pondering the punishment issue.

"That said, it doesn't mean that We don't have an explanation of what happened and what caused it.

"The cult leader, who We now know to have been one Rick Ashley, was born and raised in a 'militia' compound in Montana in the United States. He was one of the Three Percenters, and his blessing was the power to instill belief in him, harvest it, and control others through his powers.

"We understand your doubts. Mr. Ashley was well over the age of people who underwent the blessing process, but We have to remind you of something: the day of the terrorist attacks was also the day that the first person began receiving their blessing.

"And that first person is none other than the late cult leader, Rick Ashley. The thousands of terrorists that believed in him strongly enough to sacrifice themselves in the suicidal attacks was what triggered the blessings to descend. After a thorough investigation, Our investigators discovered that the first of those to be blessed was the cult leader himself.

"His action of mass human sacrifice, both of his own followers and of innocent people, was the final blow to an already cracked and weakened dam that held back the flood of blessings. It was also what led to his specific blessing, which We will call the power of faith.

"Through that power, he was able to gather information from malcontents in the empire, as well as assume direct control of those who believed in him. Another aspect of it was that he was able to force people who otherwise wouldn't obey him into obedience and compliance with his demands."

Aron's gaze grew stern as he continued, "Before he died, he was working on another attack that would've taken place during the New Year celebration. The plan Our investigators uncovered was that he would control thousands of blessed people to wreak havoc and cause massive casualties, then frame it as an imperial attack on noncitizens.

"Thankfully, Our people were able to discover his plans before they could be carried out, and in a coordinated strike, eliminated all of the brainwashed and reprogrammed blessed that he had gathered in Amarillo, Texas."

He paused to let people consider the potential consequences of an attack like that, then changed the subject. "During the operation to eliminate the clear and present danger to humanity, Mr. Ashley was also eliminated. And as a result of his elimination, those who were voluntarily connected to him suffered the same fate as him: disintegration.

"But that wasn't all. Only those who were willing believers in the cult's anti-human rhetoric were turned to dust. Those who were forced to believe are also slowly dying and Our researchers are currently searching for a cure to the phenomenon.

"Right now, Our imperial doctors are able to place the victims in suspended animation, putting a temporary halt to the disintegration process, but that is only a temporary solution. And it's one that We are willing to extend to noncitizens as a courtesy and to alleviate the suffering of the innocent victims who were pulled into the cult leader's schemes.

"So if you or anyone you know has been affected by the fallout of the cult's demise, please contact your nearest imperial embassy or consulate and ask to speak with the outreach specialist."

Aron grabbed the sides of the podium as he brought his speech to a close. "We founded the Terran Empire with the idea that humanity needs to stand united as one in order to face the inevitability of a hostile universe. Even if the visitors that are currently on their way to Our solar system are friendly, who can guarantee that the next visitors will also be friendly? Or the one after that?

"So even if you chose to decline the offer of imperial citizenship at the empire's founding, Our doors will always remain open to you, and Our goal is not to make you suffer, but to allow you the freedom to choose your path. And as such, We will definitely not let you suffer the consequences of an attack on Us. Not now, and not ever."

Chapter 544

Aron had decreed that the remaining days of December would be an imperial holiday. As such, everyone was given the option of taking the ten days off for a paid holiday, or choosing to work for double pay. That included both government employees and private companies alike, a move that was popular with employees, but not nearly as popular with the enterprises employing them.

As for himself, on the other hand, he was still working without pay. After all, he had never taken a salary from the imperial treasury to begin with, save a ceremonial 1 END per year. Even as the emperor, he was still a government employee, so he had to be paid. But since the money was irrelevant to him, he only accepted a token pittance.

He was currently in his office dealing with state affairs. "With this," he sighed in relief, "the case of the progenitor cult can be considered closed." He flicked his eyes to the scanner and linked the final document to his retinal pattern and other biometric data, a measure that would ensure the information in the case file would be classified as deeply as it could.

The information contained in the investigation file was the very definition of "highly dangerous", and as such it would be for the best if it were to never see the light of day again at all.

"We got lucky, Nova. If the cult had known how to train their own awakeners, instead of blindly fumbling about and failing as often as they succeeded, they could've been a much, much bigger problem," he said, wiping a drop of nonexistent sweat from his brow.

{Indeed, sir, and that would've made it far more difficult to stop as well. If he'd scattered the cult's awakeners around the world ahead of time instead of gathering them all in Amarillo for training, we wouldn't have been able to identify and remove them before their programming activated and they started a slaughter.

{Our luck, I think, was that we happened to catch one of the inner circle in Washington, and you happened to trace his mana back to him. If you hadn't drained all the mana in the surrounding area, it would've been lost in the background noise,} Nova said.

"Another part of our luck is that Mr. Ashley himself didn't understand how to use his affinity."

{Beg pardon, sir?} Nova tilted her head, something she had seen humans do when they were confused and seeking clarification on a point in conversation.

"If I were him, I would've kept even lower. Made a show of disbanding the cult entirely and gone deep, deep underground. So deep that nobody would ever notice my existence. And he had the tools to do just that without ever being discovered."

{How so?}

"He could take people over and force compliance, right?"

{Yes, he could. But with our brain data updating every time they used a piece of DR gear, wouldn't that have been discovered?}

"That was his mistake. He didn't just take people over, he programmed them to act on his behalf. If he'd just taken them over and ordered them to forget they were taken over and act completely normal... the consequences to the empire would've been devastating once all of those individuals were activated."

{I see. If nothing out of the ordinary was detected on our regular updates of their brain data, then he would've been able to continue taking over more and more people, up to and including our awakeners.}

"Exactly. And that's what frightens me. Mana is a huge evolutionary step for the human species, but... it's equally devastating. It's the equivalent to stepping into the nuclear power age in the 1940s and 50s, except instead of a few governments in control, it's everyone having their own nuclear arsenal. And even worse..." he sighed and trailed off, massaging his temples.

{Even worse, sir?} Nova prompted.

"Even worse, it didn't start with rational humans. The evolution began with irrational people during the time when we're the least in control of ourselves: puberty."

{I see your point. That is frightening.}

"And it's completely human nature, too. Do you know what most protest movements, anarchist groups, and eco-terrorist organizations of the 18th and 19th century have in common?"

{They recruit their members at a young age, sir?}

"Exactly. Anti-capitalist movements like the 99%, anarchist groups like Anonymous and other hacktivist collectives, and even eco-terrorist groups like the Earth Liberation Front consisted almost entirely of people between the ages of 18 and 25. It's something people eventually grow out of, but... unfortunately, now that same age range almost entirely overlaps with the age range of people who unexpectedly gain real power.

"So how do we prevent something like that from happening in the future?" Aron asked.

{I suggest a treaty, sir. You offer imperial training of non-imperial awakeners, but they'll be required to follow imperial law. There are enough of them blowing themselves up or going braindead from mana backlash that I think the suggestion would be received fairly well.}

"That could work... we could make it a part of Operation Boiling Frog."

{Operation Boiling Frog, sir?} Nova asked, puzzled.

"There's a saying about boiling frogs. If you don't want them to jump out of the pot, you put them in cold water and slowly bring it to a boil so they don't realize the temperature is rising and jump out," Aron said.

{But that would never work, sir.}

"I know. It's just a saying." Aron stood and brought up a screen, then started filling it with plans for the next four years. "By the year 5 AE, I want there to be no one on Earth who isn't an imperial citizen," he said, continuing to flesh out his plans.

{I see, sir.}

"And the way we're going to do that is the same way as frogs get boiled. And we can start with awakeners. As long as they accept our trade of training for patrollers and enforcement, everything else will fall into place like a line of dominoes."

{I'll inform the Minister of the Exterior,} Nova said, then flickered for a moment. {Message sent, sir. Now... don't you have a wedding to plan?}

"Shit! I almost forgot!" Aron waved his hand to dismiss the screen in front of him and initiated his emergency logout procedure.

Chapter 545

Felix looked at Aron with a face full of disbelief. "Man... I know you're the emperor and above us mere plebeians, but... really?" he asked in surprise as he swiped his hand across in front of him, closing the file he had been reading.

"What's the problem this time?" Aron shot back, rolling his eyes.

"You have less than ten friends. Ten! Doesn't that make you the least social royal in the history of the world? And! AND! Half of those are the people you dragged in to be the CEOs of your companies using magical contracts!" Felix scoffed. freeweɓnovel.cѳm

He jokingly continued, "Can you even consider that friendship? And besides me and Sarah, don't you have any friends from your time in school?"

"You seem to have forgotten how everything started. You and Sarah are the only two people that stuck with me when Rottem Morgan threw his little hissy fit and had me expelled under false pretenses after I proved him wrong in public. So however many I have now, it's still more than two!" Aron playfully punched Felix's arm, causing him to wince and rub it. "That means it's a net gain, regardless. Shouldn't you be congratulating me on my awe-inspiring social skills?" He struck an arrogant pose and looked down on his friend.

"Oh, really? Have you ever spent time with any of them without them being required to be there? Hmm?"

Aron went quiet, thinking back over the past few years and trying to recall if he had ever spent any downtime with his other "friends" outside of board meetings or formal events. Not finding any instances that he could recall, he realized that he had only ever spent time with them when they were required to be with him and his shoulders slumped a bit.

Sarah slapped Felix in the back of his head and he turned and pouted at her. "Knock it off, you two. Play nice," she said.

The three friends went quiet for a while, then Aron said, "But I have more than five hundred people I can invite to my wedding." He looked at Felix and Sarah with a smile that positively dripped with faked arrogance and true pride. "What about you two? Do YOU have five hundred people you can invite to your wedding?"

Sarah blushed all the way down to her chest. She was wearing a spaghetti-strap tank top and had fair, Irish skin, so the blush was very obvious. "Wh-wh-what wedding!?" she spluttered.

Felix, too, stammered something but couldn't quite spit it out.

Aron looked at his friends and laughed, having scored another point in the trio's long-running game where they tried to provoke each other into speechlessness. He tossed another file to Felix and displayed it on a holoscreen in front of him.

"What's this?" Felix asked. The file Aron had thrown him was named guest_ and it indeed had more than five hundred names neatly arranged in categories by how close Aron was to them.

He scanned the list and a subtle frown crossed his brow. "Why invite ARES troops to your wedding?" he asked. "Are you expecting an attack? I mean, I can understand inviting John, since he's a minister, and of course you'll be inviting government officials of sufficient rank... But what about the rest of them? If someone's going to cause trouble at your wedding, maybe you should hold it in the simulation instead of reality."

"No, I'm not expecting any trouble at the wedding, and no, I can't hold it in the simulation. It has to be held in reality. We can't do all of our government functions, social or not, strictly in the simulation. Those troopers are just the first members of ARES, the ones that I personally recruited and interacted with face to face," Aron answered.

"So what about the scientists? You haven't interacted with any of them face to face."

"I may not know them personally, perhaps, but I've been working with them in Lab City for centuries since stealing their brain data. So they deserve at least that much as the beginning of their compensation," Aron replied. Lab City was no secret from his inner circle; the only thing that was kept from them was the existence of the system. After all, as the saying goes, "use the ones you trust, and don't use the ones you don't trust". And Aron definitely trusted his oldest friends.

"I suppose that makes sense. But aren't you worried about them possibly discovering something fishy about the situation?" Felix followed up.

"Well, yes and no. It isn't like I absolutely have to tell them it's compensation, you know. After all, they're all incredible researchers that push the boundaries of science on a daily basis and my empire is going to be a science-focused one. We need to push our tech level as far as we can as fast as we can," Aron answered, slightly bringing down the mood as everyone there was reminded that they were on something of a doomsday clock.

"But that's beside the point," he continued. "We're here for a happy occasion, we have a wedding to plan!"

Everyone at the table took a moment to readjust their mindset and Felix lightened the mood by clowning around as they picked up where they left off in their planning.

The guest list was the first thing to be worked on and, between Aron and Rina, the guest list rapidly climbed to the thousands. It included close family members, close friends, work acquaintances, government officials, scientists, teachers, influential people, and Sarah even managed to get a lottery-style lucky draw contingent added to the list. After all, it wouldn't be very politically proper to introduce class divisions when Aron had been working so hard to eliminate all divisions that had historically plagued humanity.

Then they moved on to the venue, where it was decided that the wedding would be held in reality at a government tower that they would rush to complete. It would be hard to find a venue that could fit all of the guests they had invited while still having some form of meaning and pomp and circumstance to it.

Sure, they could hold it at a sporting arena if they wanted to, but it wouldn't have the same sense of gravitas that a newly completed government tower would. And although they would be holding the wedding in reality, it would also be open to everyone in the public simulation via livestream and those watching from home on other assorted devices, that way everyone could either say they were there or watched it live.

Chapter 546

"So everything's final then?" Rina asked, gesturing to the list of people eligible for the lucky draw attendance at their wedding.

"Ah, wait... there's a girl that asked me for an autograph when I was on my 'European tour'. Come to think of it, I wonder if she ever solved the problem I gave her..." Aron looked around and saw the strange expressions on the other people at the table with him. He suddenly realized how what he had said could be misinterpreted and sputtered, "Y-y-you people! Who do you think I am!? Sheesh! She was the front desk attendant when I was checking out of the hotel and she recognized me and asked for an autograph. That would've been that, until Nova looked through her information and discovered she was a talented engineer, so she set a question that, if the girl answered it correctly, she'd find some rewards from Nova."

He shuddered at the cold shoulder he was expecting from Rina later. Even though he was almost positive they were just fucking with him, he had a sinking suspicion that he would be sleeping alone tonight.

Everyone went silent for a few seconds, then Sarah coughed in an attempt to disguise her laughter and the silence broke as everyone started chuckling. Everyone, that is, except Aron, who was less than impressed to have been made the butt of the joke.

[She did, sir. She's currently an employee at Hephaestus and was one of the engineers that helped with the final touches on the fortress city designs] Nova said against the backdrop of Aron's friends' laughter.

"Add her to the list for a chance to attend my wedding in person," Aron said.

[Yes, sir] she replied. She added the girl to the list and asked, [She's on it, sir. Anyone else?]

"I think that should be everyone, right?" Aron said as he swept his gaze across the other people at the table. They all shook their heads, indicating that they were fine with the lists as they stood.

"Looks like everything's settled," Rina said with a content smile on her face.

Everyone she wanted to attend her wedding was already on the guest list; even her father, who was still in jail serving his sentence, would be granted leave to attend the wedding. It was a privilege that was extended to all prisoners who were on good behavior and weren't facing execution for their crimes.

"If that's all, then we shall bid you two lovebirds adieu. Rina and I have somewhere to be that isn't shining a light on your romantic world," Aron said with a grin. He took Rina's hand and walked out of the room, leaving Felix and Sarah to their own little pink bubble.

The last thing Aron heard as he was walking out of the room was Sarah asking Felix, "So, how many kids do you want?"

Rina covered her mouth with her hand and snickered when Aron threw her the sound clip as they were walking down the hall.

…

A peculiar-looking helicopter landed atop a luxurious skyscraper in Istanbul, attracting the attention of all who saw it. Only one person could be a passenger in that helicopter, and everyone knew who it was because of the ostentatious imperial seal on its doors.

The emperor's private seal was above the imperial seal, displayed in its full majesty, and everyone knew what it meant with just a glance. They had seen it more than once, after all, and every time it was either a very important occasion or some event that would change the lives of many, many people.

The peculiar helicopters were also something of an imperial fashion statement as well. Even though every vehicle introduced by the empire, whether it came from one of the emperor's companies or not, was at his disposal, he would choose to travel in this particular style of helicopter each time.

It wasn't the most advanced, nor was it the fastest, or the heaviest armed, and it wasn't even the most luxurious. It was, in fact, one of the older designs, and one that had faded out of use since the invention of gravity plating. What it had going for it, however, was one simple fact: the Emperor of the Terran Empire seemed to prefer using it.

"Welcome to the House of Hope, Your Majesty and Your Highnesses," a man of Indian descent said as he extended a hand to welcome Aron, Rina, and Henry.

"You don't seem too happy to see me, Jai. You're even sweating a bit," Aron said with a smile.

"To be fair, Your Majesty, we weren't informed you would be arriving until you were about a minute away. So I had to drop everything and sprint all the way here," Jai Chakrabarti, CEO of the Coeus Foundation, laughed, pulling a neatly folded handkerchief out of his jacket's breast pocket and wiping the sweat from his brow with it.

"Well, are you hiding something?" Aron grinned.

"Unfortunately, Your Majesty, I'll have to disappoint you. There's nothing to hide in the first place, whether it be public or private."

"Then what's with that godawful expression, man? Lighten up a bit, will you?" Aron patted him on the shoulder.

"We need time to prepare to welcome you, Your Majesty. A surprise visit from the emperor of all mankind is probably the very last thing we expect on any given day."

"There's hundreds of children living here, Jai. If it isn't always in a condition I can see without prior warning of my arrival, that just means it isn't fit for children to live here in the first place." Aron's tone grew serious as he continued, "So is that the case, Mr. Chakrabarti?"

"Let's go in and you can see for yourself, Your Majesty," Jai said as he pointed at the elevator that had been waiting for them throughout the conversation so far.

"Sure, let's go have a look, shall we?" Aron took Henry's hand in his and wrapped his other arm around Rina's waist, then followed Jai to the elevator as his emperor's aegis airdropped in throughout the entire area, making that particular neighborhood one of the safest places on Earth.

Chapter 547

?Aron, Rina, and Jai were having a conversation in a room filled with toys, play mats, and small desks. Three of its walls were decorated with childrens' art in bright primary colors and shapes, and a digital display adorned one wall. The sound of children at play drifted in from the windows.

"We've established a presence in every city in the world after finishing the last round of renovations. We're still negotiating with noncitizens to purchase land from them so we can build our own schools, but that's taking more time than we initially expected.

"We may actually have to continue using the renovated buildings until the completion of the fortress cities, since we're now responsible for a little under a hundred million orphaned children around the world and the locals are putting up stumbling blocks in our acquisition negotiations," Jai said, his tone a mixture of satisfaction and frustration.

The total number of children being looked after by the Coeus Foundation made them the world's largest privately owned orphanage, which was something Jai was definitely proud of. In his care was more than 95% of the world's orphans under the age of 18. And over the past years the foundation had been operating, the number was even higher and the "Hope Alumni" had already begun contributing their share to the good work being done.

"How much are we spending every year for the entire House of Hope program?" Aron asked.

"Due to the stringent requirements for quality that you specifically demand, everything comes to around a hundred billion END monthly, or 1.2 trillion END yearly, give or take. Sometimes less, sometimes more... it really depends on one-time expenses like large purchases or construction, which we always use local contractors for.

"The 1.2 trillion figure only accounts for regular costs, like building maintenance and groundskeeping, the salaries of matrons, teachers, and healthcare professionals, ensuring the security of our campuses, and food, among other things."

At first, Jai had been somewhat overwhelmed by the large numbers he was working with as a part of the Coeus Foundation. After all, he may have been born wealthy, but he had never handled this much money before. He had soon worked through his mental block, however, which was a good thing; after all, that 1.2 trillion was merely one of the projects his foundation was responsible for!

"If it's just that much, there's no problem with your spend. Don't skimp on things in order to remain below your budget—you only need to report for the House of Hope program if your spending crosses the two trillion threshold. Over that, I'll need an audit report on the books, but under that..." Aron waved his hand, "consider it petty cash."

"I'll keep that in mind," Jai said, surprised. He'd been worried that Aron might be upset over the spending and had been prepared to put up a fight to keep the funding available, so the actual nonchalance in the emperor's response left him feeling like all of his preparation time would have been better spent feeding dogs.

"So let's begin the tour," Jai said as he stood and respectfully gestured to the door of the classroom the group was in.

Rina's face was full of excitement as she couldn't wait any longer to go spend time with the children. And as for Henry, he hadn't been there to begin with; his was one of the laughing voices drifting through the window from the playground outside.

…

Five hours later.

"Until we meet again, Your Majesty," Jai said as he and a few of the workers bid Aron farewell. Henry had exhausted himself and was asleep, piggybacking on Aron and drooling on his shoulder after four hours straight of playing with his new friends.

"I enjoyed the visit, and it seems like Prince Henry did as well. So we'll most likely be visiting again in the future—or at least Prince Henry will," Aron replied as he shifted Henry's position to limit the drool somewhat. Rina seemed to have also greatly enjoyed her time at the House of Hope as well, given the brilliant smile on her face every time Aron had laid eyes on her.

"You're welcome any time, Your Majesty," Jai said with sincerity in his voice, then turned to Rina. "Your Highnesses are welcome as well, the children really enjoyed having you here."

"We'll keep that in mind, Mr. Chakrabarti," Aron said, then boarded his waiting helicopter, which immediately left.

"You look tired too," Aron said to Rina as he laid his little brother in a reclined seat and strapped him in. "You should take a nap."

"I will, in a little bit. First, though, I have to admit that I'm rather curious about the House of Hope project and have a few questions."

"Ask away."

"I know you hate people living disadvantaged lives when they don't have to, so that's probably the main reason you're spending all this money to raise orphans. But I can't help but wonder if you have any ulterior motives as well, so... do you?" she bluntly asked. Why should she let questions eat her from the inside when she knows that Aron would always give honest answers to any question she asks him. He would also never judge her, either, a luxury she greatly appreciated after having been brought up in an old money family where judgment was the only constant.

Aron smiled and answered, "Yes, there's a plan, though bringing it to fruition is contingent on a specific change in Earth's recent circumstances."

"So spill it, mister—what's that devious mind of yours plotting?" she asked, curiosity having fully replaced fatigue in her mind.

Instead of answering her outright, Aron simply asked, "What's the age limit of the people in the program?"

"From birth to eighteen, just like any other... orphanage..." Rina's eyes bulged as she realized Aron's plan from the question he posed to her. "Are you planning what I think you're planning?"

Aron simply smiled and pulled her head over to rest on his shoulder.

Chapter 548

?Aron nodded. "It's exactly what you think," he said. "The awakening phenomenon isn't over, and when people reach the early stages of puberty, the clock will start ticking down to their eventual awakenings as well. Thankfully, though, the process will be much smoother as it won't be as... abrupt as the first awakening was.

"So, to prevent the orphans who are soon to awaken, the House of Hope plan was brought forward and made the main thrust of the Coeus Foundation's activities. We will guide the newly awakened through their growth phase and seamlessly shift them into 'hero academies' as they reach the age of awakening. That serves a dual purpose—first, it'll prevent them from their desperation driving them to a life of crime, and second, it'll guide them into working for the empire instead of becoming part of private forces in the hands of noncitizens.

"Prior to the mass awakening of the three percent, we'd already made plans for the House of Hope project, but at that time, it was meant to raise generations of people who would be staunch imperial loyalists. We would raise them, teach them, and train them to work in whatever sector we needed them, but that became infeasible after the mana density reached critical mass."

Aron stopped speaking and waited for his fiancee's mind to catch up. She was a very intelligent and quick-witted woman, but exhaustion makes fools of the best. He sneakily carved a refresh rune in the air and pressed it to her, clearing the fog from her mind, then waited for her response.

The silence stretched for a moment as Rina's face scrunched up in thought. Then she finally asked, "You said there were other reasons. What are they?"

"At the time, unemployment, especially among the uneducated, was on the rise. If we hadn't done something to combat it, it would've led to an unrecoverable tailspin into another economic depression. So we overstaffed all of our programs that were run through the Coeus Foundation as part of that. With a staff to child ratio of one to five, that provided twenty million jobs to people who were of good character, firm convictions, and strong morals through the House of Hope program alone.

"Most of them work as caregivers and have been put through a crash course in early childhood education, but we also hired a lot of people that were made redundant in the fields of healthcare, as well as former orphanage staff members from around the world. We even went so far as to ensure that each House of Hope we built or renovated was multicultural to help break the cycle of ignorance that leads to issues like racism and sexism.

"We also focused on recruiting staff members that had lost their own children, either to miscarriages or... other, more violent, incidents. The goal is to raise the children to be morally upright and righteous in their convictions, and firm in their determination to do good to the benefit of humanity, after all."

Aron and Jai were investing in the future, raising these children to be dominos in a long chain, whose good behavior and willingness to fight against injustice would build a better environment for humanity as a whole from the very ground up. It would be a generational change, and as such it would be more solid than anything the empire could enforce on people from the top down.

If you want to change the world, you must first change the children.

"That said, we won't be forcing anything on the children. Instead, we'll guide them and winnow the wheat from the chaff through multiple evaluations. None of us are so immature that we'll believe in the inherent goodness of man or some bullshit like that. Some children, despite their guardians' best efforts, are simply irredeemable. So those children, we'll subtly separate from the rest and provide them an upbringing that encourages them to find a place they can express their nature without being punished for doing so."

"Like ARES?" Rina interjected. After all, in most situations, arson, murder, and bombings would get one thrown in prison. But in the military, those same actions would get those same people rewarded with medals and glory.

"Indeed." Aron smiled. "We'll subtly manipulate them into joining our military, where their talents will also be put to use. Over the years they're being raised in the House of Hope, they will never, not once, be unmonitored, and all of their actions and talents will determine their futures. And even if only a minority of them join the imperial government, it's still worth it.

"Besides, the alternative is for them to end up on the streets or as victims of forced prostitution, sweatshops, organ farms... The list of potential bad ends for orphans goes on, especially those who have been picked up by shady, underfunded orphanages relying on unreliable donations or criminal consortiums backing them.

"The House of Hope program is a closed orphanage system that will not allow for adoption or outside fostering of the children we raise in it. If anything, it's more like a boarding school for all ages, where the caregivers care for the children, the children care for the younger children, and all of them are given the best of the best when it comes to providing them with the tools to lead a successful, happy life once they age out and become Hope Alumni."

"Now I'm really curious to see how the so-called 'Hope Alumni' influence the empire in the future," Rina said with a smile.

Currently, the empire was being held together by spit, chewing gum, and baling wire, through Aron's overwhelming military might and technological prowess. No one was foolish enough to think that all imperial citizens had been completely willing when they joined the empire. They were merely in it either in pursuit of the benefits offered to imperial citizens, or in fear of the dystopian nightmare that they felt noncitizens would be suffering through once the fortress cities were complete and the two societies finally completely separated.

Thus, raising his own imperial adherents was a masterstroke of planning from Aron's side and displayed his forward thinking. It was becoming more obvious as time passed that the Terran Empire would long outlive its founder and first emperor, and Rina, whose curiosity was finally sated, closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.

Occasionally missing content, please report errors in time.

Chapter 549

Somewhere in the solar system.

An asteroid the size of one of Mars' moons floated alone in orbit around the sun, in all its majesty. Formerly a cosmic dust-covered rock, it had been completely worked over and half of it had been cut off, leaving a flat surface from which grew an enormous docking tower. The half that remained was still a natural rock, though the cosmic dust coating it had been swept away, leaving the surface clean, while the docking tower was made of a dark gray hadfield steel alloy, as most of the empire's hardware in space was.

A study in contrasts, the natural half of the asteroid was dark, while the docking tower was brightly lit with brilliant flashing lights and painted signage highlighting the various docking bays of different sizes.

(Ed note: Picture Omega, from Mass Effect 2.)

[Outpost 134, this is ISA-EV-343398 on leading approach, requesting approach lane and docking assignment] the captain of a kilometer-long vessel reported.

[Outpost 134 copies requesting approach lane and docking assignment. Come to zero thrust and prepare for inspection, 343398] the tower replied.

[Roger, coming to zero thrust and rolling out the welcome mat, 134. 343398 out.]

A bright yellow light shone from the tip of the docking tower on the imperial outpost and flashed over the exploration vessel. It turned green and the comms crackled to life again.

[Welcome to Outpost 134, 343398. You're assigned to docking ring seven, dock seventy-one alpha. Please be advised that you and your crew will be subject to ARES authority while docked and that most of the outpost is restricted to civilian personnel. Trespassers will be dealt with expediently.

[With that out of the way, enjoy your shore leave, and happy New Year. Outpost 134 out.]

…

Inside ISA-EV-343398.

'Despite spending more than six months in deep space, the beauty hasn't faded,' Captain Kim Miller thought. She had never imagined she would be able to even ride to orbit, much less deep space in the solar system, and had given up on her childhood dreams when she turned thirty.

Who would have imagined that, eleven years later, she would be at the helm of an enormous spaceship overseeing the docking procedure with a space station that could only have come from the fever dream of one of the authors she grew up reading? Definitely not her, that was certain!

"Helm, line us up for the catch and reverse thrust to minus fifteen hundred FPS relative," she ordered.

"Aye ma'am, lining her up and preparing for catch maneuver," the helmsman replied.

The ship's executive officer, Dennis Campbell, tugged the imaginary wrinkles out of his uniform as he stood beside the captain and gazed at the display on the fore bulkhead of the bridge.

"I'll never get used to this, I think," he said. "I mean, it'd be one thing if all of the outposts were built to a standard template, but... we've visited an average of one outpost every two weeks and they've all got their own character. Isn't that amazing, Captain?"

"Status report, Mr. Campbell. Save the observations for when we're not docking a million ton vessel with an outpost the size of Deimos and focus on the task in front of you," the captain rebuked.

"Aye aye, ma'am. All stations reporting all green and cleared for the catch," the XO reported, feeling chastened. Captain Miller was right; even though it was a routine procedure, they had experienced enough potential catastrophic failures during their training in the simulation to know that they needed a hundred percent of their focus when performing the complex line-up and catch procedure. freewebnovel.cσ๓

(Ed note: When docking with a moving object that's in orbit in space, the vessel docking begins the procedure ahead of the object they're docking with. Then they come to zero relative velocity—the same speed as the thing they're docking with—and line up with the docking port before slowing down and letting the bigger object "catch up" to them before finally docking. Hence "line up and catch".)

Captain Miller acknowledged the report, then asked, "Three-ninety-eight, any update on our schedule?"

{No, ma'am. Nothing in the database right now, just a week of shore leave for the New Year celebrations and a note to attend a briefing on station here in Outpost 134,} the ship's AI replied.

"Looks like we've got some proper shore leave this time, not just a refuel and refit cycle," the ship's engineer, "Scotty", excitedly said. No matter what their name was before joining the imperial space agency, all ships' engineers were called Scotty, just like all medics in every branch of the military were called Doc.

"Scotty" had joined the dangerous exploration mission for two reasons. The first was curiosity; he just plain wanted to know what was out there and whether it would go bump in the night or be like diving into a pot of gold. And the second reason was the generous bonuses he could earn, bonuses that would go a very long way toward supporting himself in a manner that he would like to become accustomed to.

After all, the strict regulation the empire was still under while its fledgling economy grew to a point where it would be independently viable ensured that five hundred END was enough to survive in the empire. But there was a vast gulf between survive and thrive, and he desperately desired to bridge that divide by sating his curiosity.

It would be killing two birds with one stone.

Going into the program, he had thought that it would be more dangerous than it'd proved in actual practice. The only times he had "died" were all in the simulators, where the crew's instructors would throw them into desperate situation after desperate situation, waiting for them to fail so they could chew them out afterward. Eventually, however, they began succeeding, and their number of successes grew until they had been assigned to an exploration vessel.

Thus, he was caught unawares by how easy the job of ship's engineer was made by the automated maintenance bots and constructor swarms at his disposal. The only times he would have to step in would be when the multiple layers of failsafes failed and left him as the sole bulwark between a successful mission and a failure that led to some, if not all, of the crew dying miserably when all systems went down and the vessel went Dutchman.

He supposed that was the reason that justified the large bonuses he was paid; the risk of space exploration was minute, but very, very real.

Chapter 550

"So, did you figure anything out?" the communications officer, Lieutenant Perez, asked Scotty.

"Not a damn thing," Scotty answered, clearly frustrated. "The empire is more than it seems on the surface."

Scotty was almost sixty years old and had spent the past thirty years of his life on the bleeding edge of engineering as a professor emeritus of MIT. Then he was one of the first people to successfully graduate from the engineering track of the imperial space agency's training program, making him among the most skilled engineers on Earth.

But despite all of that, he still had no clue as to just how the hell the empire had built so many outposts throughout the solar system, when just a year before, man had barely set foot on the moon. And to top it all off, not a bit of the empire's space program had leaked whatsoever! Not the outposts, not the ships, and not even the machines used to build the outposts and ships or the tools used to build the machines themselves!

His innate curiosity was absolutely murdering him.

"Looks like you need higher security clearance, my man."

"Yeah, sure seems that way, doesn't it?" Scotty sighed and slumped his shoulders. He knew the difficulty of increasing security clearances and how long the process took, having undergone security vetting at the highest levels before during his career at MIT.

"You aren't giving up, are you? You're out here risking your life to sate your curiosity, so you can't give up now!" Lieutenant Perez said.

"Yeah, sure seems that way, doesn't it?" Scotty sighed and slumped his shoulders. He knew the difficulty of increasing security clearances and how long the process took, having undergone security vetting at the highest levels before during his career at MIT.

"You aren't giving up, are you? You're out here risking your life to sate your curiosity, so you can't give up now!" Lieutenant Perez said.

"No, I'm not giving up. I was just thinking about the process of grinding my way up the chain of security clearances. Right now, I'm just a tiny speck of dust compared to the real movers and shakers in the empire. And earning trust takes a very, very long time. I was with MIT for twenty years before I finally got onto a top secret project, and that wasn't even keyword or letter clearance!

"And now, with our lifespans practically doubling, who knows how long it'll take for me to climb the ranks again?" Scotty explained in a resigned tone.

"Now that you mention it, I wonder how the empire is going to deal with retirement. It used to be that people could retire in their early sixties, then spend their twilight years gorging themselves on the fruits of their earlier labors. But now, with the average lifespan skyrocketing to two hundred years, and the time dilation in the simulation doubling that, can you imagine how people will react when they realize they have to work for hundreds of years before retirement age? Ha! People will absolutely revolt when that particular nugget of information hits home." The comms officer shuddered as his whole body broke out in goosebumps.

"I'm sure the Powers That Be have already thought of that. They've thought of everything else, after all, so I doubt there's anything two specks of dust like us can contribute," Scotty sighed again.

Commander Campbell noticed the comms officer and engineer merrily chatting away instead of paying attention to their job and shot the two men a look. They stiffened for a moment, then turned back to their consoles, staring at them and performing the last-minute tasks in preparation for the catch maneuver.

The others on the bridge noticed as well, and turned their attention back to their respective tasks as the outpost slowly caught up to them, relative to their position.

Time crept by until the ship's AI announced, {Bolter limit approaching, report status for catch maneuver.} frёeweɓη ɱ

All of the bridge officers did their final checks and signaled their readiness.

"Helm, bring our speed to minus fifty FPS relative," Captain Miller ordered, then triggered the ship's AI to announce the imminent docking completion.

All of the lights in the exploration vessel dimmed to a soft yellow and three whooping alert tones sounded as the AI announced, {All hands, prepare for docking. Repeat: all hands, prepare for docking.}

The announcement played three times consecutively, then the countdown began. {Docking in ten... nine... eight... One...

{Docking complete. Welcome to outpost 134.}

…

"Damn! I wonder what the fuck they're hiding here... Blocking access to more than ninety percent of the base? And one of the biggest of the ones we've seen, too!" a crew member said in annoyance as he carried his duffel bag down the boarding ramp of the ship. He was looking through the map for the "meatspace" R facilities that were sure to be anywhere people were.

He had to admit that the empire truly had a gift when it came to designing spaces that made people feel comfortable, with the general aesthetic being a blend of high-tech minimalist design and nature. Most people would assume that all spacers would want to immediately hit a bar, get shitfaced, and find a "date" before holing up with liquor bottles and "licker bottles" when on shore leave, but Ordinary Crewman Sanchez would beg to differ.

What spacers wanted the most when they were freed from their various tin cans was the feeling of not being on a fucking tin can. Drinking and fucking came second and third, or maybe it was flipped and came third and second, but first place—by a very long shot—was definitely just normal open space that smelled like anything. The empire had very good technology, sure, but there was just something about the smell of home that they missed the most in ships where the air was recycled to perfection and there was no smell at all.

It was like those psychology studies that talked about sticking people in anechoic chambers eventually going crazy because they couldn't hear the sound of their own voice reverberating off the walls around them. But what spacers missed wasn't the sound. Sound, they had aplenty. But smells? Yeah... they missed smells.

OC Sanchez' bunkmate heaved a sigh of annoyance at the repetition of his bunkie's complaint. Every single time they docked at an outpost, it was always the same damned complaint; the only thing different was just how much of the outpost was deemed as off limits for the crew.

"It's a fucking military base ferchrissakes! Do you expect a goddamn red carpet?" he complained.

"Fuck off, Flores. Just let me bitch in peace, asshole," OC Sanchez snapped.

OC Flores zipped his lips and headed to the base rapid transit shuttle in silence. The rest of the crew that had been released to shore leave in their batch exchanged glances and they all came to the same decision as Flores: just ignore Sanchez and he would fade into the background.

Living in close quarters as they did, tolerance and shutting up went a long, long way toward preventing conflicts from escalating. And with such a hardass captain and XO, nobody wanted to be called up on a captain's mast.

Chapter 551

Captain Miller and Commander Campbell had remained aboard ISA-EV-343398, waiting for their meeting time to arrive. Everything was proceeding apace, as it would be difficult for any imperial force to run ahead of or behind schedule thanks to the AIs in the background ensuring that "the trains ran on time."

They didn't have to wait long before they received a notification with a link to a virtual meeting room. When they logged in, they found themselves in a large amphitheater-style room that would be instantly familiar to anyone who had attended college before: a lecture hall. Seated around them were hundreds of other ship captains and executive officers.

No one was speaking; everyone simply gave each other courtesy nods when they made eye contact with someone else. But the silence didn't last long before Huang Wei, the head of the imperial space agency, appeared on the stage in the front of the hall. Administrator Huang was a middle-aged Chinese man with salt and pepper hair and a regal bearing, dressed in the utility uniform of the exploration fleet, a pair of black slacks with light blue piping on the sides and a close-fitting, tailored coat with matching blue piping.

(Ed note: If you're interested in seeing what the uniforms look like, it's very similar to the uniforms from David Weber's Honorverse novels, specifically those of the Royal Manticoran Navy. The difference is that the uniforms in this novel lack shoulder flashes, rank insignia, awards, and any kind of headgear. Everything that would normally be displayed on a uniform is all displayed in augmented reality.)

Everyone stood and saluted Administrator Huang, who returned the salute with a slight bow and said, "Please be seated. There's a lot to cover in today's meeting, and not much time to cover it in.

"To give you the important part first: the ISA is about to undertake a mission that is of the utmost importance to the human species: you, ladies and gentlemen, will be the first group of humans to ever pass the heliopause and engage in extrasolar exploration.

"As a semi-militarized fleet, you've all undergone all of the same training as the regulars in the Terran Space Fleet, and have inherited their professionalism and tradition. You only lack the heavy weaponry that the TSF has in spades.

"Sure, you each carry a small contingent of ARES troopers to defend against potential boarders, as well as act as guards for teams of researchers sent to the surface of planets. You even have a spook assigned as a general specialist. But your exploration cruisers are limited mostly to defensive batteries and a single gun that's only effective against stationary targets or viable in knife fighting range." Administrator Huang paused, noticing that most of his audience had gone slack-jawed and glassy-eyed.

It was true, though—the exploration fleet was incredibly lightly armed. They had a few Mk. XIX Titan's Wrath cannons, an updated version of the Mk. XIV Titan's Wrath, which had proven its effectiveness in Islamabad and Delhi, as well as Faisalabad and Bhopal. The Mk. XIX, however, had been specifically designed for use in the harsh vacuum of space, especially for clearing potential environmental hazards out of their path.

They also had a spinal-mount hybrid gun capable of unleashing streams of charged particles or switching to coilgun mode for large target bombardment. The range of the particle beam was limited, though, and the coilgun was only capable of accelerating projectiles up to 0.29c. And any moving target capable of interstellar travel would also be capable of dodging slow projectiles like those.

The decision had been made for the exploration fleet's primary armament to be energy-based for a few reasons, primarily accuracy. Coilgun rounds were extremely damaging, if they hit, but that was an awfully big "if". In order to be effective, a saturation attack would need to be carried out, and that had implications that Aron didn't want to even think about.

Any coilgun round of sufficient size and speed to take out an enemy vessel would eventually become another planet's Chicxulub, after all, quite effectively ruining someone's day, somewhere, somewhen. Maybe it would be hours later, or maybe it would be ten thousand years later, but the only guarantee when dealing with projectile weapons in space is that those projectiles will always hit something.

Sir Isaac Newton has always been, still is, and will forever be the deadliest son of a bitch in space.

Administrator Huang judged that the attendees of the briefing should have digested his previous statements and continued, "As a result of your ships' lacking combat capability in the face of a potentially hostile galaxy, orders have come down from above that you are to be escorted by the first batch of the Terran Space Navy to graduate from training. And today's briefing is to give you an overview of the regular TSF ships and offensive capabilities.

"First, let's talk about guns. Your fleet is primarily armed with energy weapons, which are considered secondary armaments in the TSF. Even though beam coherence isn't an issue that needs attention in the vacuum of space, the requirement in terms of energy generation and capacitors is simply too high for space combat at distances that could measure up to millions of kilometers. Thus, the primary armament for vessels in the TSF is missiles.

"Missiles have extreme range capability with multi-stage design, they're stealthy, and they're capable of engaging in maneuvers to increase their accuracy. They can also carry different warheads, ranging from electronic countermeasures that blind targets all the way up to multidirectional bomb-pumped X-ray laser warheads and beyond.

"They also carry sophisticated sensor and targeting suits, as well as come equipped with robust electronic counter countermeasures (ECCM). But most importantly, they can be command detonated to avoid collateral damage, unlike dumb rounds fired from coilguns and other kinetic weapons."

Administrator Huang swept his gaze across the captains in the lecture hall seats and paused, as what he had to say next would have to be delivered exactly right. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, then exhaled, opened his eyes again, and continued, "I have to notify you now that the information I am about to disclose next is classified Top Secret, code word GRO J1655-40. You have all been preliminarily cleared for the information, should you choose to accept it. If you do not accept your new clearance level, please log out of the briefing now."

He stood ramrod straight in the middle of the lecture hall stage, waiting with his eyes closed for the five-minute logout procedure, in case any of the captains or commanders chose not to accept the remainder of the ωebnovēl.c૦m

Chapter 552

After the five minute wait, Administrator Huang opened his eyes and swept his gaze across the crowd receiving their briefing. "I see none of you left," he said. "Good.

"The empire has recently developed a new warhead as well. Dubbed the 'black hole bomb', it's exactly what it says on the tin: an oversized capacitor and artificial gravity generator strapped to a rocket engine. When detonated, it creates a short-lived, yet highly destructive, black hole in a small area. 'Small', by the way, is a relative term.

"And the only reason you're being informed of its existence now is that we don't want you asking about it later when you're in potentially hostile, unsecured environments..." He continued on the topic of weapons for a while, explaining each of them in detail, then finished that portion of his briefing by asking, "Any questions?"

Nobody in the lecture hall had any. At least not about the weapons of the EF and TSF, anyway, but they had already been taught not to ask questions that weren't relevant to the topic they were being briefed on.

"None? Excellent," Huang Wei confirmed, then switched to another topic: the ships that would be escorting and backing up the exploration fleet vessels in this momentous step in humanity's journey among the stars.

Ships in the TSF, and their semi-militarized siblings, the exploration fleet, were still separated by category and role, much like the Poseidon Navy. From the enormous city-ship down to the humble corvette, each ship class played a necessary role in the Terran Space Fleet.

City-ships were designed to carry entire seed colonies with them, including tens of thousands of civilian passengers, thousands of ARES troopers, and all of the equipment necessary for starting up a colony on any habitable worlds the exploration fleet discovered. In their cavernous holds, they could also carry entire TSF fleets, and in order to save on reaction mass and wear and tear on the TSF ships in routine operations, they acted as the core command and control ships during combat actions and transport vessels to and from battles.

Stretching tens of kilometers in diameter, the disc-shaped vessels would be the flagships that carried the Terran Empire's flag to distant frontiers.

The next category of vessel in terms of size was the drone tender. Stretching three kilometers from stem to stern and a kilometer and a half in width at their widest point, the elongated arrowhead-shaped vessels carried a complement of dozens of thousands of drones, each armed with plasma cannons. The drones were mostly disposable and were basically just engines with a gun strapped to them, designed to swarm enemy vessels and chew them apart with balls of plasma. frёeweɓη ɱ

Slightly smaller than drone tenders were the hammerhead battleships. The researchers in Lab City had debated back and forth for decades before settling on the hammerhead design. Eschewing traditional broadside armaments, the behemoth battleships were two kilometers long, a kilometer wide, and their bow was perpendicular to the rest of the ship and densely packed with missile launchers.

Hammerhead battleships were capable of launching up to ten thousand missiles in a single launch wave and carried enough missiles to fire ten waves of missiles before returning to the accompanying city-ship for rearmament.

The workhorse of the TSF was their cruiser. Shaped like extended pyramids, they were a kilometer high, a kilometer wide, and close to two kilometers long, and they were the only multirole ships in the TSF capable of landing on a planet's surface. Modular in design, it could take up any role needed in any given fleet depending on its loadout. Cruisers studded with point defense batteries served as a shield against potential enemies with the same missile-centric military doctrine as the empire, while those fitted with heavy ablative armor layers served as troop transports and would carry eighty thousand troops at full load with all of their assorted equipment.

(Ed note: Picture Pyramid Head from Silent Hill. That's the general shape of the empire's cruisers.)

Cruisers also made up the entirety of the exploration fleet, it had to be noted.

Destroyers, at eight hundred meters long and two hundred across, were lightly armored, lightly armed, highly mobile, and designed to carry small teams of elite troops meant for boarding actions. What they gave up in durability and attack capability, they gained in speed and maneuverability; given enough distance, they were the largest ships in the fleet capable of actually dodging lasers and other light-speed weaponry, given enough distance between them and the vessel firing upon them.

And finally, the humble corvette. At a hundred meters long, they carried a crew of four and ten passengers, and were designed for picket duties. Heavily armed for their size, they were the mainstay of the fleet in case of piracy, and they were also the only vessel design in the fleet that was capable of stealth, invisible to both sensors and the naked eye.

Administrator Huang wrapped up the technical briefing by saying, "Fleet formations in the TSF are ad hoc and dynamic. With the uninterrupted, instantaneous communications made possible through quantum communicators and the assistance of ships' AIs, every vessel in the TSF is capable of fulfilling the role it was designed for in any fleet at any given moment.

"The only difference, ladies and gentlemen, is the color of the paint in the passageways of the city-ships coordinating a fleet."

Administrator Huang moved to the final portion of his briefing, informing the attendees of their specific escort fleets, the standard operating procedure they would be functioning under, their detailed chains of command for the exploration, and so forth...

An hour later, the briefing came to a close. "You are all hereby ordered to go dark. No communication with Earth or outside your own ships will be permitted until after you've left the heliopause and are on your way. I won't lie to you—there's a possibility that this first step into the greater galaxy at large will also be your last.

"Should you choose to do so, you may visit the legal affairs office at whichever outpost you're currently docked where a special liaison officer will help you write your last will and testament, as well as record a message that will be delivered to people of your choosing once you've passed through the Oort Cloud.

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, you have a week of shore leave. Your vessels must be completely vacated of any personnel and personal belongings in the next three hours, Earth time, as they are to undergo a specialized refit over your shore leave.

"Once your leave is complete, you're hereby ordered to report to ARES Central Command on Mars to link up with your assigned escorts and begin your mission. Good luck and godspeed, explorers."

Administrator Huang finished the briefing with a formal salute to the crowd, then vanished.

Chapter 553

As the exploration fleet was on its week of shore leave on the outposts and the partially functional Mars base was printing ship after ship, back on Earth, a press release had quietly gone out from the imperial press agency. It didn't generate much news at first, and it was only a few sentences long, but it gradually gained momentum over the first three days after it was put out.

"The Terran Empire is in search of those willing to aid in exploiting the resources of the solar system. For more information, contact your nearest imperial space agency recruiter."

As the news crept out and spread, the details were soon announced by the first people to visit the ISA in their virtual office.

Fluffy_Dog_Hugger: [This is awesome! I'm gonna go to space, man! SPACE!]

Eternal_Crusader: [ Fluffy_Dog_Hugger details? I read the announcement but haven't checked it out yet]

Fluffy_Dog_Hugger: [ Eternal_Crusader they mapped the solar system and need asteroid jockeys to go out and mine]

Thawk7678: [ Fluffy_Dog_Hugger isn't that dangerous?]

Nerdrage001: [ Thawk7678 Fluffy_Dog_Hugger yeah that defo sounds harsh. Howd they map it?]

Fluffy_Dog_Hugger: [ Nerdrage001 Thawk7678 Eternal_Crusader It isn't as dangerous as you'd think. The ImperialSpaceAgency mapped the solar system using a combination of automated drones & crewed ships. They labeled all the hazards & asteroids & are gonna build processing factories... (thread)]

The online conversation grew more boisterous over time and the details were eventually all dug out. When the initial press release had gone out, the eXtra-atmospheric Navigational Aid, Version 0.1 (XNAV 0.1) became available in the Akashic Record for public viewing and downloading.

It was version 0.1 not because it was incomplete, but because version 1.0 would only be released after the entire galaxy was mapped. 0.5 would be the version that included the spiral arm that Earth was a part of: the Orion Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.

And in addition to the map being made public, two other pieces of news were released by people who had spoken to the ISA representatives. First, in partnership with the imperial treasury, the ISA would be issuing low-interest no-collateral signature loans for the purposes of setting up a small business as an asteroid mining crew. Those loans would cover the startup costs for the business itself, as well as an asteroid mining ship.

The second piece of news was related. They would allow people to design their own ships in virtual design garages, which the empire would then perform rigorous tests on. If the design passed the quality standard, the empire would allow the design team to list it on a virtual marketplace for others to buy, and the designers could either manufacture it themselves or allow Hephaestus Heavy Industries to manufacture it for a cut of the final sale price.

Thus, anyone could be involved in the new industry that the empire had created. Even if one chose not to go out into the solar system as an asteroid jockey, they could design ships for the asteroid jockeys from the comfort of their own home. It was a monumental achievement for the nascent empire and economists estimated that it would create millions, if not hundreds of millions of new jobs. It could even conceivably create billions; the possibilities were limitless!

But along with the limitless possibilities came limitless risks. The risks of asteroid mining were obvious, but less so was the risk of designers putting everything they had toward creating new ship designs and failing, leaving them penniless after quitting their jobs and living on savings only to fail to design a ship that the empire's testing would accept.

Among the most fervently interested were people in their twenties and early thirties. They were sure that they could create popular designs, and almost overnight, thousands of ship design corporations were registered with the imperial commerce agency.

One of those newly formed design corporations was Imugi-danche Co., which had been formed by a group of five Koreans, all of whom were in their mid-twenties.

(Ed note: Imugi is a Korean mythological creature. It's a lesser dragon that aspires to be a true dragon, and represents overcoming various trials and adversities to achieve a goal. Danche is the romanization for ?, meaning organization, or group, in Korean.)

...

"Park Seo-Yeon, was our design accepted?" Kim Ye-Jin asked, barely able to stand steady with all of his nervous fidgeting.

"We sent the design about twenty minutes ago, so we should have an answer soon. Chill, bro—we've got this," Seo-Yeon calmly answered. He was just as nervous as his friend and partner, Ye-Jin, but as the scion of a moderately wealthy businessman, he was better at hiding his nerves.

"You're right." Kim Ye-Jin sat down on the couch and crossed one leg over the other, but was unable to stop his foot from bouncing. "I'm just nervous. I mean, we all quit our jobs for this, and not everyone was born rich, you know." He playfully glared at his friend seated across the coffee table from him.

"Even if we fail this time, we've still got time. We can keep improving the design and resubmitting it. And it isn't like we don't have savings to live off of until we strike it rich, so just be patient. We'll eventually succeed."

Kim Ye-Jin had stopped paying attention to his friend and taken out his phone, refreshing the company's email inbox over and over, not wanting to wait for the internal refresh to notify him that an email from the ISA had arrived.

Another young Korean man walked into the room through the open door. "Has Ye-Jin settled down yet?" He raised the case of canned beer he had brought with him. "I come bearing peace offerings," he laughed.

"Sook-Han!" Park Seo-Yon stood and grabbed the newcomer by the shoulders. "Haha! Is it time to drink already?"

"When isn't it time to drink, brother?" the newcomer exclaimed, then set the beer down on the coffee table. "Ye-Jin, chill out and have a beer!"

Kim Ye-Jin set his phone down next to the beer and said, "You're right, worrying won't make the email come any faster."

Just then, his phone dinged with a notification.

Chapter 554

"Quick! What's it say!?" Everyone in the room crowded around Kim Ye-Jin, who had just taken a drink of his beer.

Ye-Jin sprayed the mouthful of beer on his friends and coworkers, none of whom cared. He picked up his phone and, for the first time since he'd had a smartphone, fumbled to unlock it under the expectant gazes of his good brothers.

He finally unlocked the phone and opened the email and his lips mouthed the words as he read it. Then he tossed his phone back to the tabletop in disappointment and chugged his beer before saying, "It wasn't from the empire. But if you want bigger dicks, boy do they have some pills for you." He laughed, then leaned back on the couch.

"To be fair, even having a chance like this is the empire's generosity. It'll take a lot of time, effort, knowledge, and even luck to succeed. But even if we're late to the table, we should at least be able to pick up some leftover crumbs, and that'll be enough to cover us in the beginning.

"So don't have super high expectations right now, brothers. We just need our passion, drive, ambition, and hope—just like Imugi!" Park Seo-Yon exclaimed, putting his hand palm down over the coffee table. His friends put theirs in as well, and with a cheer of "Imugi-danche!" the people in the room broke apart, laughing.

Similar discussions were taking place in many locations among many different groups. Some were school clubs, others were megacorporations like Walmart, and even agribusinesses like Monsanto and Tyson were getting involved in what they saw as the ground floor of another industry they could use to further diversify their investment portfolios.

But in a few businesses—like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic—the tone of discussion was much different. Unlike the optimism of the school clubs or the ruthless financial discussion of the megacorporations or companies seeking to diversify their investment portfolios beyond their core competencies, the space-focused companies were more businesslike as they spun into action.

While the rest of the groups were meeting in classrooms, conference rooms, or Wall Street offices, the space companies started in the boardroom. The decisions they made were a matter of course, delegating design and testing tasks to various engineers working for them. They even sending out headhunters to recruit more people who specialized in tasks they felt were necessary.

With the privatization of the solar system, at least within limits, the space-focused companies were determined to come out the victor in what they saw would be an epic scramble to divide the pie that was the solar system.

But for now, whether amateur, professional, or anything else, everyone would need a response to their proposal from the imperial space agency. Similarly, they would need to consider whether or not they would contract out their production to Hephaestus Heavy Industries.

After all, whether they were among the first or last companies to facilitate the exploration and exploitation of resources in the solar system would depend on their manufacturing capability. And HHI was currently the only company that had the capability to manufacture spaceships that could pass any safety standards, no matter how stringent. A startup, on the other hand, might be able to manufacture them, eventually, but there would be... accidents.

And not a single insurance company had publicly revealed their stance on whether they would underwrite such a risky profession as asteroid miner or space explorer. Thus, the risks were commensurate with the potential profits and everyone getting involved had an important decision to make.

One might wonder why, with the capabilities that Hephaestus Heavy Industries showed, they didn't simply monopolize the manufacturing industry entirely. They certainly had the technology to do so, after all. Most people even expected monopolization would be a foregone conclusion, as what sane person would let others climb their personal mountain of gold?

Thus, people had been busily producing their signs and coming up with their slogans to protest against a monopoly that... simply never appeared.

Indeed, with Felix at the helm, HHI offered outreach instead of miserly stinginess. Instead of buying designs from people for a pittance, they publicly released a list of services they would provide to entrepreneurs.

Sure, they offered to outright buy designs and manufacture themselves, but the company itself recommended against doing that. The offer was simply for those who found themselves overwhelmed and foundering, barely able to tread water in a shark-infested ocean that had just been thoroughly chummed.

(Ed note: Chumming is the act of throwing bloody offal, usually fish intestines, skeletons, and heads, into the ocean in order to attract sharks. Shark fishermen use it to make catching sharks easier, and adventure tour companies that offer "swim with sharks" packages use it to ensure that people actually see sharks when they go down in their shark cages.)

But what they recommended was a balance between profit and safety. They would instead allow people to license their production lines for the cost of raw materials plus a scaling percentage of the final sale price of whatever it was they were manufacturing. The percentage ranged from five to twenty percent, and the list of goods was thoroughly comprehensive, to say the least.

The only thing HHI kept strictly to themselves was their own technology, and not even the most rabid anti-fan with an overweening sense of "justice" could argue against that.

What currently held the public's attention, though, was the capability of HHI in the space-related industry field. Their offerings were... unbelievable, to say the least.

Maalik91: [Bruh. I just read the list of HephaestusHeavyIndustries space manufacturing stuff and I don't believe it. NOBODY can offer 100% guarantee!]

HephaestusHeavyIndustries: [Oh Maalik91 but we do offer that. All products manufactured by HHI are guaranteed to meet or exceed 100% of all safety and usability requirements as well as a 100% adherence to the design schematics we receive.]

ahmed_94: [ Maalik91 lol u just got owned. Sick_ ]

Maalik91: [ HephaestusHeavyIndustries ahmed_94 If there really are zero manufacturing defects in any of HHI's products I'll livestream myself chopping off a finger!]

HephaestusHeavyIndustries: [ Maalik91 please don't cut off your fingers. What'll become of your love life if you run out of fingers?]

The arguments online were intense, to say the least, and the flame war practically burned the internet to the ground.

Chapter 555

Thanks to Hephaestus Heavy Industries opening the floodgates, more than a million new companies were registered in a very brief time. And following that, millions of patents for space-related equipment, ranging from cups and other dishes that were designed to incorporate gravity plating to ensure they didn't spill during heavy maneuvers all the way to prospective capacitor banks and engines.

It wasn't that the empire had released their technology to the public domain, but rather that people were allowed to incorporate the tech in their design as a kind of "black box" piece that they could license from the empire. The only requirement was that, if a design incorporated publicly known empire technology, the resulting object could only be manufactured by HHI. That was in the licensing agreement, and no negotiation on that clause would be accepted at all.

The empire, meanwhile, did absolutely nothing to stem the tide of the crowdsourced innovations. Quite a few things, in fact, had surprised both Aron and Felix with the thought processes behind them. Oddly enough, the dishes were what surprised them the most.

"I can't believe we didn't think of that," Aron moaned, leaning back in his chair and covering his face with his palms.

Rina looked at him and snorted a soft giggle, then covered her mouth and looked shocked at the weird noise that had just come out of her mouth. frёewebηovel.cѳm

"We aren't gods, so of course we're gonna miss some things here and there," Felix said, chagrined. "I can only wonder what else we forgot."

Aron sat up straight and consciously cleared his expression. "We need to heavily reward the people who succeeded. There's a lot of designs out there that aren't very feasible, quite a few that barely meet the baseline in terms of performance, and a few that exceed them. But the people who think of things that we should've thought of and didn't..." he sighed.

"How should we reward them?"

Felix looked troubled. "I'd say that I could hire them as designers at HHI, but that'd defeat the purpose of looking for 'Lamarrs'. Plus, monopolies—even at their loosest—are downright terrible for the economy and we can't afford that right now."

"How about an award?" Rina suggested. "Give them money and recognition. The award will give them bragging rights for a long time, if not forever, and the money will be a more tangible thing."

Aron nodded, then turned to Nova and said, "Notify the press corps. They're to issue a press release in a week, Earth time. Make it a one-time 10,000 END award and a civilian medal. Call it the Innovation Award, and we'll hold the award ceremony in..." he looked up at the ceiling and thought for a moment, "two months from now at the beginning of March. Make it a government 'bank' holiday called Innovation Day, March first."

{Yes, sir,} Nova replied, then flickered as she sent the notifications to Gaia, who would distribute the tasks to the proper departments and follow up on them.

"So, when should we send out the offers?" Felix asked.

Aron pondered for a moment, then slowly said, "How about two weeks from now?"

If the empire sent out acceptance notifications too soon, it would instead have an opposite effect. People would think that corners had been cut in the testing process and wouldn't trust the resulting hardware, no matter who designed it or who manufactured it. After all, everyone was still moving at the speed of humanity and couldn't think or process information in picoseconds, unlike virtual and artificial intelligences.

The testing procedure used both of those. First, the designs were filtered through VIs, which had a strict set of instructions by which they tested them in the simulation. Any design that passed the VI filtering would then be assigned to Nova, who would simulate the product based on the design itself. She would be the final determiner of which designs would be passed on to the researchers in Lab City, who would refine the designs with practicality and comfort in mind, as well as ease of use.

After all, while idiotproofing things only ensured that better idiots would evolve, they still had to consider the end user. A cockpit design with five hundred unlabeled switches may in fact be the "best" in terms of performance, but a pilot would much rather have five clearly labeled switches when flying the aircraft. They naturally wouldn't go as far as the US Army did, where the main battle tanks had a clearly labeled button that conspicuously stood out and had a large label that read "PUSH TO START", but they would definitely make things easier for the end user to operate.

(Ed note: The M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank actually has that exact button in it. It's conspicuously placed as the only button on a panel littered with indicator lights and has a four or five inch space around it to prevent tank drivers from hitting the indicator lights and wondering why the tank isn't starting yet.)

...

Two weeks later, in Park Seo-Yeon's living room.

The five partners behind Imugi-Danche were having a planning meeting when their phones all lit up and sounded a unique alert tone, indicating a message had been received from an imperial official. They all pulled out their phones and unlocked them, then a holographic display automatically lit up with a push notification from the imperial space agency.

[Congratulations, Imuge-Danche, on your design, patent 197-0002-813604-XT588V2-TEP pending, for being accepted into the Innovation Program. A representative will contact you within the next 48 hours with further details. Please follow this link for more information on your rights and responsibilities as a company in the Innovation Program.

[Welcome to the team, Imugi-Danche!]

All five of the people in the room froze as they read the email on their holographic display screens, their mouths open so wide they could swallow a chicken's egg without breaking the shell.

Then the shouting began a full three minutes later after they all came out of their collective stare state and leapt at each other, jumping up and down in a jubilant group hug. They had done it!

"This calls for a celebration!" Kim Ye-Jin shouted, and went to the kitchen. He soon came back with a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne.

He popped the cork and champagne foam covered the five celebrating friends, who didn't care in the least about the mess and poured each other a glass.

"To the innovation program and the empire!" Park Seo-Yeon shouted as he raised his champagne flute. "And to the emperor, long may he reign!"

Chapter 556

After a few minutes of celebrating, followed by quick showers and changes of clothes all around to wash off the sticky champagne residue, the five men in charge of Imugi-Danche called their families and friends to spread the good news.

"You aren't gonna believe this, but..."

"Mom, we did it!"

"Dad, our design was accepted!"

"Honey, how would you like to visit space?"

"Sis! Guess what?!"

The calls lasted for hours until well into the night, but all of them were too excited to sleep and began a proper Korean drinking party that went all around the city, from bar to karaoke to bar to restaurant, and so on. It wasn't until their sixth stop that they were too inebriated to move and the bartender called for a car to bring them home.

...

The next day.

Five men were in Park Seo-Yeon's living room nursing their hangovers and discussing their future plans.

"I think we should let HHI do the manufacturing. They hold quite a few patents on black box imperial tech that we incorporated into the design, so it's the best option. Otherwise we'd have to find a factory that can manufacture most of the parts, then send them to HHI for final assembly anyway. So just letting them handle it from start to finish not only guarantees the quality, but also cuts out a lot of middlemen," Moon Hyeonwoo said.

Though the five men were all fast friends and had no idea of how to set up a corporate structure, Hyeonwoo was their "tech guru" and the others would generally defer to him on all matters technical.

A chorus of agreements followed his suggestion and the matter was considered settled. Moon Hyeonwoo was unanimously appointed as the person who would contact Hephaestus Heavy Industries and work out the licensing and manufacturing deal alongside Kim Ye-Jin, who had the most experience in a corporate environment. Ye-Jin had worked as an intern for a Korean corporation that manufactured office chairs up until he'd been roped in by his friends to shoot for the moon... or rather, the asteroids.

"That's settled then," Park Seo-Yeon announced. "So on to the next topic: where should we go to prospect?"

Everyone in the room exchanged glances and shrugs. None of them had any mining experience whatsoever, especially considering that South Korea wasn't particularly rich in minerals and lacked a robust mining industry. Most of the materials used in South Korean manufacturing were imported from other, richer countries like Australia, China, Japan, and Russia.

"We should probably hire prospectors. Or maybe we can just put our ships on the marketplace and sell them to others," someone finally suggested after a few minutes of silence.

"Now that we've got experience under our belts, why don't we start designing pleasure yachts instead? We could go after the rich people that way," came another suggestion.

"Oh! That gives me an idea! There aren't many super rich people anymore, not after the shuffle, anyway. So how about we build a big solar system cruise ship that'll offer vacation packages for every budget?" Kim Ye-Jin chimed in.

"Why don't we..."

"We could..."

"I think we..."

The conversation shifted to brainstorming, then after an hour or so of that when suggestions had grown too unrealistic to continue, Park Seo-Yeon cut in and said, "Okay, okay, settle down. We can branch out and do multiple things. We can offer leases on asteroid mining ships where people interested in asteroid mining pay for their ships with five percent of their finds for... let's say, ten years.

"Another avenue would be designing luxury yachts for solar trekkers. I think people with disposable income would be more than happy to buy their own spaceships. Rich peoples' money is easy to earn if you offer them a way to increase the size of their assets in dick measuring contests. Just look at how Musk sent a car into orbit around Mars for no good reason but to brag. Imagine if we were the ones to steal the luxury market out from under those buja babo!"

(Ed note: Buja babo (Hangul: ? ?) is a phrase that supposedly refers to people who have great wealth, but lack intelligence or common sense. The Korean term literally translates to "rich idiot" or "wealthy fool". I don't have any knowledge of Korean myself, much less their slang, so I went to the expert on this one... ChatGPT. Let me know if I got it wrong here, yeah?)

The Imugi-Danche meeting continued, the five friends using sheer enthusiasm to make up for the complete lack of experience in actually running a company.

They were far from alone in that, however, as the Innovation Project had accepted a lot of designs from "startups" that had zero experience and were, realistically speaking, doomed to eventual failure. Some might survive, but the shark-infested waters that corporations regularly swam in were definitely not for everyone, a lesson that most of the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and optimistic people diving in headfirst was soon to learn.

But if those that failed continued trying and trying again, they would learn the important lessons and, eventually, become one of the giants whose shoulders future generations could stand upon to look further into the foggy, distant futures themselves.

The explosion of space-related companies, whether they focused on selling designs or customizing their own ship in pursuit of the vast mineral wealth present in the solar system, or anything in between, was the beginning of a wealth redistribution within the empire. Aron himself was in favor of the shakeup and injection of fresh blood into the stale economy that had been the playground for the detached and delusional ultra-rich people for far, far too long.

So he would put his money where his mouth was and invest in everyone who dared to dream, ensuring that they all had an equal chance of fulfilling those dreams and kickstarting the age of exploration.

It also proved a rather effective distraction from the events of the recent past, as well. With so many negative things happening since the founding of the empire, it was good to inject a little bit of hope and enthusiasm into the collective subconscious of humanity.

Chapter 557

Ceres station.

Earth's "second moon" had now become part of the planet's skyline for everyone on the right side of the planet. All of what used to be Asia, half of Russia, Australia, New Zealand, and all the way to the American Midwest, people could simply look up at any hour of the day and see the enormous dwarf planet hovering in the sky.

It had become quite a tourist attraction as well, as people flocked to those former countries to see the spectacle, or to Eden, where tour groups gathered to go up and personally walk around the parts of the station where construction had been completed.

The only difference was the cost—touring the station itself, at least in reality, was much more expensive than simply flying to a part of the world where one could see it from the ground. Roswell, New Mexico, in particular, had become a tourist mecca, as had Sedona, Arizona, oddly enough. Roswell was understandable, as they had always had a space tourism theme, but Sedona was historically home to hippies and neopagans—both old and new—so nobody quite understood the draw there.

But regardless of the high cost, the tour groups all had reservation lists stretching out all the way into next year, though more than ten million people had already visited it. And everyone who had been lucky enough to buy spots in those early tours considered it well worth the cost simply from the thrill of riding the elevator up the swaying anchor cable alone. Seeing the inside of the station with their own eyes was just icing on a very expensive cake.

However, the station had become even more crowded with startup companies that immediately leased space on the dwarf planet, thanks to the imminent opening of space to private exploration. Ship showrooms, asteroid mining company offices, logistics company warehouses, and many other types of companies had rushed to pay the high leases with the expectation that the empire would soon be banning civilian spacecraft from entering Earth's atmosphere.

After all, the entire planet had learned a very painful lesson on 9/11, and that was only further reinforced with the wave of indiscriminate terror attacks carried out only a short while before. Thus, everyone was in favor of that particular piece of expected legislation coming down from the top.

With the increase in companies and individuals leasing space in the new moon, the elevators were in constant motion, carrying freight and people alike from the surface to their new offices in geosynchronous orbit. Not that they could even tell they were in space, that is, as the empire's gravity plating maintained a constant 1G.

That aside, nobody had time to marvel at the advanced technologies at play—at least not after their very first visit—as they were all too busy preparing for their opening day, when space exploration would finally be something that virtually any person on Earth could partake in. And that day was only a few days away.

Thus, the general busyness of the station had become the norm as thousands of people descended upon the newly refurbished offices, warehouses, space docks, and even the tourist facilities like hotels, bars, casinos, and brothels.

The news of space opening to everyone had even diverted peoples' attention from the disintegration of the cultists that had taken place mere days before. It was a happy unintentional consequence of the timing of the press release and information dump into the public sector, and had put a rather anticlimactic end to the issues with the cult of the progenitors.

Only a relative few people were still paying attention to matters on the surface: the families and friends of those who were still being held in stasis pending the discovery of a cure for their condition.

Among the victims were two police officers, whose families were staying in hospital lodging, praying to whoever was listening that the empire would soon find a cure for them.

Aron was in his office, watching footage of the people in stasis and their families as he pondered the problem he had taken to calling "mana drain". Along with that, he was wondering what exactly the last words from the blob of mana meant. Currently, he was about half convinced that it was simply fucking with him as it retreated like a beaten dog.

The door to his office swooshed open and Nova strode in, piloting her nanite colony body. "Sir, we've found a solution to the mana drain issue," she reported.

"I'm listening," he replied, resting his chin in his hand and closing the holographic footage he had been watching.

"We need to build medical pods that can deliver a constant stream of unaspected mana to the victims at the same rate they're losing it, or a little bit faster. Then it's only a matter of time until their mana bodies heal themselves, and they can be awake in the simulation during the process."

As she spoke, another virtual screen popped up in front of Aron, showing the results of the testing done in the gold labs of Lab City.

After he finished reading the document, Aron's gaze grew sharp and he asked, "With that amount of mana, wouldn't they undergo the same kind of awakening that Rina did?"

"That is a distinct possibility, sir. But I don't believe that everyone will awaken, even under the same condition as Rina underwent her awakening. The researchers in Lab City believe there's some aspect of luck to awakening, or perhaps something they simply haven't discovered yet is interfering with the process.

"But either way, their research and my simulation iterations agree: not everyone will awaken to mana, aspected or not," Nova explained. "If you turn to page 452 of the research data file, there's a chart of expected outcomes for the patients undergoing the cure procedure. And ask you can see..."

The conversation between the two lasted for another half hour before Aron asked for silence and sat in thought for quite some time.

Chapter 558

A week later.

Aron stood in a cavernous room in the Cube on Avalon Island, looking at the newly printed medical pods laying before him in precise columns and rows. As it turned out, actually using the first-generation atomic printers to print runic engravings into things was a much slower process than printing things without them. The process could be compared to trying to play a modern AAA video game on an old desktop computer from the 1980s.

However, the tradeoff was well worth it, as he was only one person, but he had many atomic printers.

He swept his gaze across the room and nodded in satisfaction as his runic heart spun into action. A slow breeze began flowing through the room as he greedily sucked the mana from his surroundings. The breeze soon grew to a small vortex of about ten feet wide before stabilizing.

With the stomp of a foot, a brilliant golden runic construct appeared beneath Aron's feet and spread throughout the entire cavernous room, slipping beneath row after row of medical pods as it grew. It soon reached the walls and stopped growing, and Aron wiped the nonexistent sweat from his brow; now the difficult part would begin.

He sat cross-legged on the ground and began feeding his intent into the runic construct. Milky white ripples spread from him, lightening the golden glow of the construct as they swept over it. Unlike the construct, when they hit the walls, they rebounded like ripples hitting the side of a swimming pool.

The ripples continued emanating from him in time with his heartbeat, which gradually increased in speed and intensity, staining the runic construct around him white as they swept through it. Soon, the entire construct was glowing with a dim white light that rapidly rose in intensity and brightness until, if someone were to see it, it would blind them and leave a shadow behind their closed eyelids.

The white light climbed up the sides of the medical pods, filling the grooves printed in them by the host of atomic printers that had built the equipment atom by atom.

Nova, observing the activity through the microscale cameras installed in the room, ran billions of simulations as the process continued. {Simulations show a hundred percent success rate in imprinting the new pods, sir. It should be completed in just under three minutes,} she reported through Aron's implant.

He grunted an acknowledgement, unable or unwilling to take his attention off the task he was performing. Though the simulations had all checked out over the past week, and he had rehearsed the imprinting hundreds, if not thousands of times in that time as well, it was the first time anything like this was being carried out in reality and he was determined to take extra care to prevent any mistakes.

Cut corners lead to bad outcomes, after all. These pods were meant to cure the unwilling victims of the unmourned megalomaniac behind so much death and destruction, and it was also the very last thing that would finally put paid to the cult of the progenitors' legacy. The healing represented something far bigger than the act itself; it would be the end of a turbulent chapter in the empire's existence and the beginning of another. Thus, he was determined to do it right.

A few minutes later, a bright flash of light shone, accompanied by a shockwave of mana that spread out and penetrated the walls, reaching a significant portion of the Cube and causing people to wonder what had just happened.

Aron opened his eyes and looked at his newest creation that he had dubbed "awakening pods". They were designed to feed mana from compressed mana stones into their occupants, allowing him to tailor a person's awakening to a specific element. In a pinch, they could also allow for unaspected awakenings, as Rina had experienced, but the amount of mana required for those was... prohibitive, to say the least.

So instead, he had spent the past week manually carving runes on a series of extractor bots that would head to areas where specific elemental mana densities were high, then gather that mana and condense it into mana stones, a term he had picked up through reading webnovels in his rare downtime. His stockpile of mana stones had been growing since, and would only continue to grow exponentially.

The decision to do so had two main benefits: first, it would allow for the operation of the awakening pods to heal the final cultist victims, and second, it would slow down the increasing mana density around the world and give him time to settle the current batch of awakeners before another mass awakening began due to the ever-increasing mana density in the planet.

"Bring in the stasis pods, Nova," Aron ordered.

{Yes, sir,} she replied, and a hidden door slid open in the side of the room.

Stasis pods began drifting through the loading door one after another, almost like a line of ants. Once they passed through the door, they began heading toward an unoccupied awakening pod, where they were met by RES-QR bots that transferred the patients from the stasis pods to the new pods for their treatment cycle.

Seeing that the procedure was well underway, Aron stood, nodded to Nova, who had appeared in his augmented reality view as soon as the imprinting process was successfully completed, then walked out of the room through a smaller door. He was met by two of his emperor's aegis, who took up positions on either side of him and a step behind, but he paid them no mind.

A week and a half prior, he and Rina had had their first minor spat. He maintained that he needed no protection inside the Cube, or other government buildings for that matter, but Rina had insisted that he go nowhere unescorted. Her argument was well thought out and presented, as befit the scion and heir of a megafamily like the Rothschilds, so he had eventually capitulated and agreed to the escort.

But while he had agreed, he didn't have to like it. So he had decided to simply ignore his escorts beyond what was necessary for the sake of politeness and to ensure that they felt valued. Other than that, he acted as he thought the emperor of all humanity should.

Passing through the hall, he entered another room which led to a block of apartments where the close families of the people now undergoing the final healing process would stay through the duration of the treatment. The block included an amphitheater that would serve as the perfect venue to gather the people staying in the complex and he triggered an announcement in their rooms that he would be present to explain the treatment process their loved ones were about to undergo.

He sat in a seat at the back of the stage and his escort split up. One of them stood behind him, where he would be out of view for casual glances, and the other headed to the door of the amphitheater, where people would soon be streaming in to meet the emperor in person.

Chapter 559

The treatment of the mana drain victims had already begun, even before Aron had called the families of the patients into the amphitheater and explained what had happened, how it would be treated, and the expected outcomes. Basically, the process would require two weeks of Earth time, during which the patients would remain logged in to VR. And each apartment in the complex the families lived in was also equipped with extended stay medical pods, thus ensuring that the families could remain together for the duration of the treatment.

The best thing about it was that the families' equipment would be maintained at the empire's expense, as well as the standard fee that would normally be charged to the patients themselves.

The bigger concern, and one that Aron hadn't mentioned to anyone outside of his inner circle, was that using the awakening pods would light another beacon for the incoming visitors. That said, it wasn't like it mattered anymore. Humanity had already caught their attention, and they were already on their way.

Worrying about whether or not they were paying attention to the cradle of humanity was like locking the barn door to guard against thieves after the horses had already been stolen.

And it wasn't even that big a concern, either. Aron had already enacted countermeasures to prevent other civilizations that could detect mana from finding Earth. The shield he had created had more than simple blocking capabilities; it could prevent energy leakage just as well as it could prevent physical passage, and much, much more. For instance, he could even set it to make Earth completely invisible, like a hole in space.

Sure, that would have some severe downsides, but when given a choice between bad and worse, bad would win every time. Bending light around the planet to provide optical invisibility would essentially blind everyone on the planet, but it would be better than having humanity wiped out by hostile marauders. And that was just one of the countermeasures he had included in the complex shield.

Blocking mana leakage was just one of the more simple functions it was capable of.

Currently, the shield was set to prohibit unauthorized entry and exit, as well as projecting a visual image of the planet that was designed to make it appear unattractive to visual observation. From outside, Earth currently looked like it was choked with smog and radioactive waste, causing the surface to be under a nuclear winter of epic proportions. Pit mines were everywhere, exploiting what few resources the apparently dying planet had to offer, and civilization looked like it was teetering on the brink of extinction.

Nova had built a dedicated quantum supercluster to creating and maintaining the backdrop, and Gaia had dedicated a full forty percent of her processing power to populating it with the most miserable people she could think of. Aron, for his part, was quite satisfied with the outcome, though he was uncertain how well it would perform when met with alien observers.

After all, the appearance of the planet and the "plight of humanity" on it wouldn't match up if the observers were using old light as a reference. And since the change from prosperous industrialized society to basically hell on earth was instant, it could raise some eyebrows. Or whatever the equivalent facial expression on aliens was, anyway.

(Ed note: "Old light" is the light visible from light years away. For instance, if people were to use extremely high-powered telescopes to observe a planet in Alpha Centauri, which is a bit over 4 light years away, we would see the surface of the planet as it was four years ago. If you flip that around and have people from Alpha Centauri observing Earth, they would see Earth as it was in 2020, not as it currently is.)

He couldn't hide the upcoming industrial revolution in the solar system, naturally, but he could at least make the planet itself look far more unattractive to at least some alien species. Hopefully, anyway. Plus, it would at least hide how fast humanity was adopting new technological advances even if a canny observer discovered the discrepancy in the before and after of it all.

With both the visual aspect and the energy leakage under control, all that remained was ensuring that communication discipline would be maintained, both on the surface of the planet and out in the solar system beyond its atmosphere. Thus, Aron decreed an empire-wide mandate that all communications would be through quantum communications, period.

He couldn't do much about noncitizens, however, but by the simple expedient of setting the planetary defense shield to block every wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum except for visible light, communications immediately went down. And once that happened, Youssef Al-Mutairi, the Minister of the Exterior, went into action.

In a matter of weeks, the remnant governments on the planet had hammered out treaties with the empire that gave them access to quantum communications, which was a huge win for Operation Boiling Frog.

Aron was definitely not playing around with the security measures he had implemented to protect his empire, and the entire planet by extension. Once he gathered enough resources, he would even implement what he had named "Project Loki" throughout the entire solar system, blocking the accurate view from the heliopause.

Not to mention the spy prevention, just the shield itself would act as a very effective first line of defense against potentially hostile alien invasions. In preparation for the implementation, another quantum supercluster had been dedicated to creating the image of an interplanetary war and the resulting ruined solar system left behind, providing the Sol System with a thick protective barrier as well as camouflage that would make it uninteresting in the first place.

And the protection of the solar system would be thoroughly planned, leaving no loopholes for observers to discover that it was faked, unlike the loophole left in Earth itself's coverage. Or rather, there would only be a single loophole, which was that if someone was already looking and had spotted the discrepancy where Earth went from a thriving planet to a dying one literally overnight, they would be suspicious of a system-wide war. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓

But the odds of that happening were slim, according to all of Nova's calculations. The planet would have had to already be under observation in order for them to notice the discrepancy caused by Aron enabling the shield's visual projection feature. And that would require the observing party to be in the right place at the right time and paying attention to the right thing moment by moment.

The odds of that happening were low enough, statistically, that Aron had decided it was worth the risk.

Chapter 560

Kuiper Belt, just outside Pluto's orbit.

'In the vastness of space, everything is a mere microscopic speck against the divine firmament,' Monique de Groot, captain of the NIS-SV-765981-LRV, thought, gazing at the rapidly shrinking Pluto in her augmented reality display.

The Kuiper Belt was home to numerous dwarf planets and had an extremely high density of objects, compared to the inner region of the solar system. The stealth ship had just passed through the "tail" of one of those comets on her journey outward, disturbing the microscopic ice particles as it passed through them, leaving a wake despite the advanced stealth systems in the exploration vessel.

Thanks to the almost unconscionable speed the 5981 was traveling at, the disturbance was minimal and soon dissipated, returning the environment to its normal appearance.

But even if the wake had lasted longer and propagated farther, there was no one to witness the spectacle other than the universe and imperial automated early warning detectors. The detectors remained silent, thanks in large part to quantum IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe) systems being a part of their makeup.

The detectors were a miracle of miniaturization. Based around a fusion reactor the size of a child's fist, the detectors themselves were only the size of a softball and leaked absolutely no energy or signals other than a positively tiny gravitic disturbance as the incorporated gravity propulsion system carried them on their journey to the inner edge of the heliopause near the termination shock layer of the solar system's border.

(Ed note: The "heliopause" is comprised of two or three layers. Two of them are known: termination shock, where the solar wind emanating from the sun slows down and ejects all of the compressed particulates it picks up on its journey, and the heliopause, where the solar wind meets and is neutralized by the interstellar medium. Some scientists think there has to be a third layer, the bow shock, where the heliopause picks up interstellar particles and shoves them out of the way.)

…

A few hours later.{Approaching the mission target,} the ship's AI reported through the speakers embedded in the ship's bulkheads.

"Begin the deceleration and capture maneuver," Captain de Groot ordered. "Let's do this in one pass, ladies."

The bridge crew chorused an acknowledgement of the order and activity at each workstation picked up as people focused on carrying out their assigned tasks.

"Adjusting orientation... adjusted. Beginning deceleration," the helmswoman reported.

"Opening ventral bay," the weapons officer added.

One by one, the stations on the bridge reported their actions as the intricate catch maneuver began. Much like docking with a moving outpost, the 5981 was catching Voyager 2, except reversed; in this case, it was the dock itself that was moving toward the object meant to be landed within.

"Slow and steady wins the day, ladies," captain de Groot reminded the officers on the bridge.

Time slowly passed as the stealth ship crept up on Voyager 2, then the helmswoman finally reported, "Beginning catch maneuver."

The atmosphere on the bridge was tense, everyone intently staring at the displays on their consoles as the Voyager 2 slid into the ship's ventral cargo bay centimeter by centimeter. From start to finish, the catch took close to an hour before the weapons officer reported that it was completed and the bay doors closed.

"Excellent work, ladies. Stand down from general quarters but remain on the bridge—we're only half done," the captain ordered.

"Aye aye, ma'am," the others said in unison, then stood and stretched. One of the ship's complement of steward bots moved from station to station, offering coffee and sandwiches to refresh the stressed bridge crew.

"We just made history," the ship's executive officer, Commander Selene Ryfczinski announced. "Not only are we the first ship to enter the interstellar medium, we're the first to pass through the Oort cloud. Stand proud, ladies."

A low cheer passed through the bridge, then the soft hum of quiet conversation followed it.

…

A month prior to catching the Voyager 2.

Captain de Groot and Commander Ryfczinski were in the emperor's council chamber with Aron, Youssef Al-Mutairi, and Nyx, having been briefed on their upcoming mission.

"So you understand your role?" Aron asked.

"Yes, Your Imperial Majesty," the captain and commander shouted in unison.

"No need for the academy yap," Aron chuckled. "Do you have any questions?"

"Yes, Your Majesty. Why catch and release the Voyager 2 instead of simply destroying it?" the commander asked.

{Because destruction is never an absolute, Commander. Besides, why destroy something that can be used to serve a noble purpose?} Nyx countered.

"What's the purpose, then?" Commander Ryfczinski asked, still curious as to why an entire stealth crew of the NIS would be tasked with a multiple-month deployment for what she saw as an enormous boondoggle.

"Have you heard of Sergeant Murphy, Commander?" Minister Al-Mutairi interjected.

"Should I have?" she asked.

"Sergeant Murphy is a lawmaker, Miss Rif... Miss Ruff..." Youssef sighed.

"Minister, please just call me 'Ski'. I'm Polish, we're all used to it and have been ever since our ancestors decided to use every letter of the alphabet in our family names," Commander Ryfczinski chuckled.

"Ahem... yes. Miss Ski, even if you've never heard of Sergeant Murphy, I'm certain you've heard of his law."

"Ah, right... 'everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment'?" A light flashed in her eyes as she suddenly understood what Nyx meant by 'destruction is never absolute'. freewebnovel.cσ๓

"Indeed, Commander," Aron said. "It's impossible to destroy something so thoroughly that it leaves no evidence behind. So what we want to do is leave a false evidence trail. And for that, we need you and your crew to capture the Voyager 2 and return without being caught at any stage of the operation."

"Understood, Your Majesty."

"Very well. Any other questions?" Aron asked.

"No, Your Majesty," the two nyxians replied with a salute.

"Then be on your way. Good luck and godspeed, ladies." Aron returned the salute as the emperor's council chamber disappeared from around the two women, who exchanged glances with each other then logged out of the simulation as well.

They had much to prepare and little time in which to do it.

Chapter 561

The Voyager 2 probe spent an hour inside the stealth ship before being ejected. As the ship had matched course and speed with it, it continued on its way with no apparent changes. Unless someone happened to have been watching the entire process from start to finish, the disappearance wouldn't even have been noticed.

Even for keen-eyed observers, if they noticed the disappearance it would seem like a sensor glitch on their side, as nothing about the venerable space probe had changed, at least outwardly. The only difference was that the insides of the probe had been swapped out for nanite colonies that took the shape of the components that were already there, but with the vastly increased capabilities of imperial tech.

The nanite colonies had vastly improved the sensors of the Voyager 2, though the communication issue had been a little bit trickier. Since radio waves were interceptable and quantum teleportation required more energy than the probe should be able to generate, the new method of communication with Earth was via ultrahigh frequency whisker lasers through a relay network of stealthed repeater probes.

Voyager 2 would passively collect material from the interstellar medium and print probes on its own from there on, and Captain de Groot's crew would lay the remainder during their return journey.

(Ed note: Space isn't completely empty. There's a lot of gas and dust particles floating around in it, ranging from a handful of particles per cubic centimeter to tens, or even thousands of particles per cubic centimeter.)

The stealth ship laid the first probe, then began the journey home. freeweɓnovē ɱ

Another crew, meanwhile, had completed the same maneuver on the original Voyager and was also headed home. The two probes, one that had already left the solar system and entered the interstellar medium and one that would soon leave the solar system, would act as the vanguards in search of intelligent life in the galaxy, something that the simulation was incapable of predicting.

…

While all that was happening in space, things continued apace on the planet. People had celebrated the new year and were returning to work, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and eager to face the challenges of the year 3 AE.

They'd had the vacation of their lives. With the time dilation in VR, coupled with virtual travel being instantaneous, many people had joked that they would have nothing left on their "bucket list" after a few short years. They had even enjoyed their vacation so much that not only was their productivity increased when they returned, but they didn't even grumble about paying taxes... much.

Everyone had received a notification of how much their income was, and a breakdown of their spending to aid in budgeting. The new currency had made it difficult to estimate the spending power people had in their hands, so the information was both helpful and timely. Thankfully, the taxes were low and the empire would accept either lump sum payments or a zero-interest installment plan stretching their tax payment into four, six, or twelve equal payments. Thus, the vast majority of people found themselves with nothing to grumble about.

But as for those who had attempted to hide their income, thinking that the empire would be as lax as the previous scattered governments were regarding income tax, well... they had quite a rude awakening. There were no more tax shelters, and even putting their money under other peoples' names worked. The empire saw everything they tried and included it all in their tax settlement notifications, leaving billionaires to pay the same income tax as people barely eking out a living hovering just above the poverty line.

Even Aron's businesses were the same. Though he didn't have to pay tax on the token 1 END he received from the treasury as a "salary", his businesses weren't exempt. The only money that was considered tax exempt was money that was paid out from the imperial treasury; everything else, barring charitable organizations, was subject to paying taxes.

During the previous year, the empire had collected a one-time windfall in a lump sum as a result of people hiding their dirty money. Criminal organizations, such as drug empires, and other money like ongoing government operations from their "black budgets", had been seized. So had more white-collar criminal money, with people losing the money they had been hiding in tax shelters. Everything from people taking out credit cards in the names of their pets to people artificially inflating the value of artwork had been spotted, and the gains of those criminal enterprises seized right along with drug money.

And now, all usable cash—in the empire, at least—was tracked through the chips in the bills and coins themselves. Thus, not even cash could be used as a tax shelter; every bill and every coin had an owner, and with specified owners, it made cash just as easy to tax as electronic currency.

The ultra-wealthy weren't happy about what they saw as "draconian" tax collection and income tracking laws. It had historically been something of a game they played with the government and tax agencies, where they would see how much they could hide and avoid paying taxes on and the government tried to find and tax the undeclared income. But now they couldn't play those games, leaving them rather unhappy with the outcome.

At first, they had attempted the same thing they'd always done: resort to bribing officials to get the system changed to benefit the wealthy. But with no way to "lobby" the imperial government, at least not legally, they were completely at a loss. After all, if the officials aren't elected, there's no need for them to collect "campaign funds".

So they opted to attempt outright bribes, sending sacks of cash and other valuables to the officials along with promises of lucrative positions once they leave their cushy government jobs.

But that just spectacularly backfired on them.

Every government employee knew they were subject to constant monitoring of their job performance. Their training had even told them what to do in case someone attempted to bribe them: accept the bribe, make the promise, and report the person who bribed them to their superior. As a reward for reporting it, they could even keep whatever was used to bribe them, be it cash or otherwise.

If they didn't report it, however, they would be caught and sentenced to an even stricter sentence than the person attempting to bribe them. Accepting bribes was seen as even worse than the bribery itself, and every single agency had a department dedicated to investigating the employees of that agency, much like the internal affairs division of police forces.

Little did they know, however, that the "people" responsible for catching them were the librarians keeping the record of their brain data in the Akashic Library. Every time they violated the rules, a report would be generated and sent to an investigator, who would "catch" the rule-breaker and punish them on the spot.

The ultra-wealthy had finally been met with a government that was impossible for them to influence in any way.

Chapter 562

"You, the brave men and women of the exploration fleet, have volunteered to take on a task for the betterment of humanity. And for that, We salute you." Aron snapped a salute.

He was standing on the stage against the backdrop of the empire's virtual press room, delivering a speech to commemorate the exploration mission that was stopped at the inner edge of the termination shock layer of the heliopause. As it was Earth's first manned mission to interstellar space—officially, at least—the exploration fleets and their escorts had turned out in their full dress uniforms to listen to the emperor's remarks.

"Generations before the Terran Empire was conceived, a visionary was born in the then United States of America. Born to humble parents, he was a decorated veteran and pilot, who yearned for the stars. 'What if?' he thought to himself, but the technology to fulfill his dreams wouldn't exist for decades after he began his dreams.

"So instead, he devoted himself to sharing those dreams of his in the hopes that they would inspire others to dream with him, and by doing so, he influenced generation after generation of people to seek the stars, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

"You, the brave men and women of Our exploration fleet, are the culmination of the hopes and dreams of every man, woman, and child who has ever looked up at the night sky and thought to themselves, 'What if?' And as you take this first historic step in the history of mankind, know that you go with those hopes and dreams." Aron's gaze grew fervent as he stared into the virtual "camera" in front of him, the viewing angle of everyone watching making it seem as though he was meeting the eyes of everyone watching his speech.

"You stand on the shoulders of giants who have come before you, lifted by the blood, sweat, and tears of our species' effort over generations. You, the pioneers of space, are the culmination of the entire history of our world and the fruit of the tree of effort that generations upon generations planted before.

"From the first neanderthal who looked up and dreamed up fantastic dreams of the night sky, to the storytellers who told tale after tale of the gods. The astronomers who first saw pictures in the sky, the authors who wrote flights of fantasy set in the sprawling, infinite universe. The brave men of the Sputnik and Apollo missions... We could list name after name stretching in a long unbroken line of heroes, dreamers, philosophers, and wonderers.

"But We are here to celebrate you, the first and greatest of Our people since the first to strap themselves to rockets and fling themselves into space to look down on this pale blue dot against the backdrop of the cosmos. So again, We salute you." Aron, instead of giving another military salute, fell silent and bowed his head.

He maintained that stance in silence for a full minute before raising his head again and continuing, "Your journey has no set time limit, but We expect that some of you could be gone from the solar system for up to five years. You have earned not only Our gratitude and respect by volunteering yourselves to take up this onerous task, but also that of your brothers and sisters of the Terran Empire, be they man, woman, or child, public servant or private citizen, rich or poor, healthy or... well, healthy." He paused and cast a cheeky grin into the virtual camera, lightening the mood somewhat.

Aron cleared his throat and his expression once again grew solemn, in keeping with the theme of his speech, and he carried on with his speech. "No one shall ever forget the sacrifices that you have volunteered yourselves for. All of you have earned a place in the history books of humanity with your intrepid determination to advance our species and leave the cradle of human civilization to take this first great step. You venture forth in Our name, and behind you stands all of humanity.

"During your voyage, some of you will face danger. Some of you may even lose your lives much like more terrestrial adventurers, explorers, and pioneers from the Age of Sail. You, the brave men and women of the exploration fleet, face the unpredictability of the unknown, much like the great explorers of the past." The expression on Aron's face went from solemn and grave to grim and imposing.

(Ed note: The Age of Sail was the period between the 16th and 19th century when most world transportation was done via wind-driven sailing ships. But when speaking of the pioneers who first voyaged out and mapped the world, that started around the 1500s and, in my books, ended in the mid-18th century with the discovery and colonization of North America.)

"But no matter the situation you find yourselves in, remember that the Terran Empire has trained you to the highest standard. Trust in yourselves, trust in your brothers and sisters beside you, trust in the leadership above you, and above all, trust in the undying thirst for exploration inherent in the human race.

"So go forth, sons and daughters of humanity, and explore! Carry out your duties with conviction and pride as you venture into the greatest unknown that the human species has ever faced. Be bold, brave, and undaunted as you carry the torch of Our civilization and the flag of Our empire to the stars!

"And know this: We have your back. Just as you trust in your chain of command, We, the Terran Empire, trust in and support you, no matter how distant your journey may take you.

"So go forth with confidence! Godspeed, ladies and gentlemen, and long live the Terran Empire!" Aron snapped to attention and saluted the virtual camera once more as his image faded from the stage and other members of the upper leadership of the Terran Space Fleet and Terran Exploration Fleet took the stage to deliver their remarks.

Pomp and circumstance had a long tradition in the armed forces, one that would likely remain unbroken until the heat death of the universe. Even as entropy closed in, the last living human would likely deliver a rousing speech to whomever found whatever media he or she recorded it on.

Chapter 563

Aron walked into his suite in the Cube and sat next to Rina on the couch in his lounge. He sighed and fell over on his side, resting his head on her lap.

She stroked his hair and asked, "Long day?"

"Five million," he replied.

"Five... million?"

"Five million people are about to leave the solar system. It was... a lot. Never had a speech take so much out of me," Aron sighed again.

"Why'd you have to do it personally? Couldn't you just have someone fake being you to deliver the speech?"

"Couldn't do that."

"Haven't you done it before?" Rina tilted her head, losing herself in thought as she petted her fiancee.

"I owe it to them to do it myself. They're the first manned exploration mission humanity's ever sent past the Oort Cloud and they're risking their lives for us... no, for me. So the absolute least I can do is personally send them off."

"Well, I guess... but just keep in mind that you can just like, make an AI or something that'll write and deliver speeches on your behalf," Rina giggled. "We have the technology. We can make him better... faster... stronger."

Aron rolled over and looked up, trying to see Rina's face but having his vision blocked by two obstacles. "I'm worth more than that, you know," he groaned.

"Yes, yes. You're worth the most."

"Definitely worth more than a mere six million dollars, that's for sure," Aron grumbled, then turned his head and buried his face against Rina's belly.

"Besides," he continued, his voice slightly muffled, "I can't do that anyway."

"You can't make a speechwriting AI?"

"Nope. You see, in order to do that, I'd have to do it based on my brain data."

"Is that all? I mean, don't you already have your brain data constantly being updated?"

"No. I don't, you don't, our families don't... all those closest to me are exempt from brain data monitoring and uploading. It's too... I dunno. Not invasive invasive, but regular invasive."

"I see, I guess," Rina said, moving her petting hand to the back of Aron's neck and lightly massaging it.

"Besides, even if I could, I still wouldn't."

"Why not?"

"Because then I'd get complacent, and that's one hell of a slippery slope."

"But you'd have more time for me and our family, no?" she asked. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓

"Rina, darling, beauty, wonderful love of my life... we have the simulation. And a very, very long life to begin with—we'll be sick of each other soon enough." He softly moaned as she switched over to lightly teasing him with her fingernails.

"I understand. Now, are we going to do it or what?"

"I must be the most henpecked emperor in history," Aron laughed as he performed a feat of strength and flexibility that practically violated the laws of physics, ending up atop her on the couch.

Their lips met in a passionate kiss, and Nova politely stopped paying attention to the happenings in the room, simply flagging Aron as unavailable except for emergencies of red or higher classification on the empire's threat index.

The lights in the room dimmed as the rustle of clothing falling to the floor mixed with the sound of soft panting and moans.

...

The moment the emperor vanished, the members of the five exploration fleets, and their gigantic cityship escorts, logged out of the simulation as well, each of them climbing out of their pods.

As inspiring as Aron's speech was, they had work to do.

Hours passed as the crew members performed their final checks. They weren't dragging their heels, but rather doing a detailed and thorough inspection on their newly printed vessels. Some departments even called for the removal of the bulkheads on their decks to physically check the systems hidden behind them. They were headed out of the solar system, after all, so no checks would be too invasive, too thorough, or too unnecessary.

Once everything returned green, the fleets brought their reactors up from standby power to full and humanity had officially taken their first step into a much wider universe.

Over ten thousand ships were heading out, though the number seemed much lower as most of the escort ships were still contained in their designated cityships. They were organized into five task forces, each named after the destination they would be heading to.

Task Force Proxima was headed to Proxima Centauri, a solar system a little over four light years away that astronomers felt had a high chance of supporting organic life. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of science fiction novels had mentioned the system, so of course humanity would choose it for one of the destinations in their inaugural exploration mission to the stars.

The others were headed to Teegarden's Star, about twelve light years away; Wolf 1061, which was about fourteen light years away; the TRAPPIST-1 system, at about thirty-nine light years from Earth; and LHS 1140, which was forty light years away.

Researchers from Earth had long believed those five were among the systems most likely to support organic life, and the AI that oversaw the Terran Space Fleet and Terran Exploration Fleet, Styx, had chosen them for the first expedition. Not only did they have atmospheres, but they were likely to have liquid water on the surface and their distribution in the galaxy provided a decent sample in terms of distance and direction from Earth. One was nearby, two were in a more middling distance, and two were a long distance from the cradle of humanity.

But more importantly, none of them were even remotely close to the visitors' flight path on their approach to the solar system. Thus, the exploration fleets would have no chance of forcing an early meeting with the extraterrestrials who were already on their way to Earth.

The fleets themselves were extremely flexible. Each exploration cruiser carried a reinforced company of ARES troopers, a squad of Reapers, a ship's guard of Aegis specialists, and a nyxian of every specialization. And each exploration fleet was made up of a hundred exploration cruisers.

And escorting each exploration fleet was a vast cityship, each of which acted as the mothership for close to two thousand ships of the Terran Space Fleet, along with a legion of ARES, enough fertilized zygotes to plant a colony on a habitable planet with sufficient genetic diversity to ensure their long-

term viability, and a full copy of the non-classified parts of the Akashic Record.

They also housed enormous atomic printers capable of virtually terraforming entire planets, given enough time, which was a first for Aron. He was so overprotective of the atomic printing technology that he had been determined not to let the technology anywhere outside the solar system, but he'd had his mind changed on the subject by Nova.

...

A few days before the exploration fleet escorts left Mars.

[Sir, why not send printers with the explorers?] Nova asked.

"I don't want the tech stolen," Aron replied. "And by sending them with the fleets, we risk exposing them. It's better if they make do with constructor swarms and GEMbots."

[Isn't that inefficient? For Operation Diaspora, the speed of deployment matters just as much as anything else.]

"The risk is still there, though."

[Consider that our atomic printing technology is still tier one, and we've been working with it for years. It's been studied in Lab City for centuries, even. So to anyone on our tech level, it's basically black box tech, and anyone more advanced has likely already discovered and is using it. Given that that's the case, why not put efficiency over security with the explorers, at least?]

"Because..." Aron sighed. Not even he could ignore the validity of Nova's point. "You have a point, Nova. The exploration fleet is leaving the solar system, after all, so even if the tech is exposed, we have... options." His expression hardened and grew colder than a block of permafrost.

If the explorers or their escorts discovered anything about the printers, well... space exploration was incredibly risky, after all, and at the heart of things, the cold calculus of ruling meant that the few could be discarded for the benefit of the many. And letting people get a hint of the atomic printers would economically devastate the newly formed Terran Empire at a time it could least afford it.

Thus, sacrifices could be made, though he hoped it would never come to that.

"Load the cityships with atomic printers in the black decks," he ordered.

[Yes, sir] Nova said, then her virtual image flickered. [Done, sir. We're prepared for launch.]

Chapter 564

The fleets, despite being separated by light hours, simultaneously brought their gravity engines to full power and accelerated through the border of the solar system.

Aboard the TSF Proxima.

"Prepare for maneuvering," Fleet Admiral of the Red Marco Bianchi ordered, then settled back in his chair, his job as the fleet admiral complete.

(Ed note: The full rank structure for the TSF will be posted in Discord, but for now just understand that there are two admiralty branches: red and green. Admirals of the red are line commanders; they command fleets in battle. Admirals of the green are administrative; they handle logistics, personnel, and command stationary assets like outposts and refit bases. /5ba9m5DFKR )

The captain of the cityship echoed the fleet admiral's command, but his job was just beginning.

The cityship he commanded was colossal, measuring a full forty kilometers in diameter. It almost had to be; not only was it a mothership capable of containing thousands of other ships, ranging from the kilometers-long drone tenders to the hundred-meter length of the humble corvettes, they were also space-capable cities. They were designed to land on planets and would instantly become full, if small, fortress cities to kickstart colonization.

And once Aron had earned enough SP to upgrade to wormhole FTL tech, they would also act as mobile wormhole generators.

So, all in all, the cityships were some of the most capable in the entire Terran Space Fleet, but they had one weakness: mobility. They could zip around in straight lines like no other, with the enormous reactor and capacitor banks pushing their gravity engines to insane levels of performance, but stopping on a dime and turning while in motion were both maneuvers they were simply not built for.

It was nobody's fault but the laws of physics. The immense mass of the cityships would require much higher levels in materials science than Lab City had yet reached. Attempting high-speed maneuvers or rapid deceleration would simply tear the ships apart. It wasn't so much that they were fragile, because they definitely were anything but flimsy, but because the shearing force applied to the ships during high-speed maneuvering was simply too overwhelming for even the best materials the researchers in Lab City had come up with to date.

"Prepared for maneuvering, aye, sir," the helmsman responded as he brought the immense gravity generator up to its normal operational limit.

"Weapons, report status," the captain ordered.

"All green, Captain. Point defense tracks and debris tractors report ready."

Due to the maneuverability issues faced by the cityships of the Terran Space Fleet, passing through a relatively object-dense area like the Oort Cloud had to be done carefully. The speed at which the objects moved was incredible, but the speed the cityships could reach while still maintaining at least a modicum of maneuverability... wasn't.

Thus, not only did the helmsman need to pay attention to maneuvering and speed, but the weapons officer had to be prepared to deflect or eliminate any rogue object that the helmsman couldn't dodge. That said, it was still reasonably stress free, as while the universal simulation couldn't simulate the randomness of life, it was more than capable of charting courses through danger zones like the asteroid belts and the Oort Cloud.

Still, John had been raised on the philosophy of "train like you mean to fight" and the TSF would often be operating outside real-time communication ranges, so the procedure had been set to assume that they would never have access to the simulation.

"Helm, ahead half," the captain ordered.

"Ahead half, aye, sir," the helmsman replied, then pushed the engines to 50% of their full speed.

The TSF Proxima had begun her journey to interstellar space. And as though they were synchronized with an atomic clock, the other four cityships on their exploration missions simultaneously leapt into motion as well.

"Course plotted and autopilot engaged, Captain," the helmsman announced and a low murmur swept across the bridge.

"Point defenses released to automatic, Captain," the weapons officer yelled over the din of conversation.

The captain's expression grew stern. "Can the chatter, ladies and gentlemen. Do your jobs," he growled.

The hum of conversation died down, people at the various stations on the bridge exchanging glances with each other.

Space was inherently dangerous, especially danger zones like nebulas and asteroid fields. And even though the autopilot was run by the ship's AI, there was always a chance that a rogue asteroid or debris from two objects colliding nearby would impact the ship. Given the armor and redundancies built into each vessel, small impacts like that—even when dealing with the extreme speeds the ships were capable of reaching—wouldn't be likely to cripple or destroy any of the heavier ships of the line in the TSF, but it could put them behind schedule as they would be forced to stop to repair the damage.

Yes, every ship in the TSF and TEF had shields, but hardware had limitations. Each impact on those shields would reduce the lifespan of the shield generators themselves, so in order to maintain the highest state of combat readiness they could, the shield generators wouldn't be online during routine maneuvering. After all, why would they take the damage that could be avoided simply by slowing down to a reasonable acceleration and top speed?

Fleet Admiral Bianchi nodded approvingly. He came from a long line of sailors that stretched all the way back to when Italy was still a hodgepodge of city-states. His ancestors had salt in their veins and the sea in their hearts, having sailed ever since the glassmakers of Venice peddled their wares at the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. And that tradition had carried through the centuries, with a Bianchi at the helm of everything from coasters to the enormous cargo vessels in the empire's merchant marine.

Now, a Bianchi had stepped out into the vastness of space to command an entire fleet on his own. The responsibility weighed heavily on the man's shoulders, but the pride in his spine refused to let him bow under the weight and kept him standing firm on the shoulders of centuries-long tradition.

"Captain, you have the bridge. I'll be in the flag bridge," he said.

"Yes, Admiral. I have the bridge," the captain replied, and the admiral left the bridge.

The captain turned his attention inward to the augmented reality display generated by his quantum microcomputer implant. The ship's structure itself seemed to vanish, leaving him feeling like he was the one moving through space, not the ship he was on. He entered an almost meditative state as he gazed out into the vastness of the universe, awed and humbled by his insignificance in the face of the void.

Chapter 565

Captain Trishan Das continued gazing into the void of space, something that caused his lips to quirk up into a slight smile as he wondered whether Nietzsche would roll over in his grave or not. After all, he was definitely misusing the idea, despite space being just as endless as the abyss spoken of by the German philosopher.

Still, he was in a philosophical mood and couldn't help but think back on all of his struggles growing up poor in rural India. In fact, if it weren't for the efforts of Jai Chakrabarti, the Coeus Foundation's CEO, he would still be living in a mud hut with a rusty corrugated steel roof over his head. So Captain Das had good reason to be thankful for the Terran Empire, as it had personally uplifted both him and his family.

His mother, father, and little sister were some of the first to design their home in a fortress city, and Trishan himself was here, the captain of one of the largest spaceships ever built. He had to admit that, if his younger self knew where he would be today, he would probably laugh himself to death and accuse whoever told him his future of being the most outrageous liar he'd ever known.

Shaking himself out of his daze, he brought up his monitoring screens and got to work.

...

News agencies from around the world had broadcast Aron's speech to the explorers, then followed it with footage of the cityships beginning their journey into interstellar space. The complete lack of any reference objects was enough to prevent people watching from figuring out the speed of the enormous vessels, though that didn't stop people from trying.

Scientists from around the world had already begun discussing it and trying to work out the potential acceleration of the TSF ships, even going so far as to resurrect old internet forums like stackexchange, MathOverflow, and the Polymath Project, which had all fallen out of usage with the introduction of Pangea Home and the Akashic Record. Panoptes viewed the discussion with something like disdain, since none of the estimates were anywhere near the real performance of the ships; as it turned out, the majority of humanity simply couldn't conceive of the technological capability of the Terran Empire.

Up until that point, after all, they had been relegated to the most fantastical of science fiction writing.

And it wasn't just mathematicians and physicists who were interested, either. The space craze had spread, and almost everyone on Earth had been bitten by the space bug. So nearly everyone watched the speech and the departure that followed it, but it didn't spark much conversation among laypeople. Only a few days had passed since the solar system had been made available to everyone, so most people soon went back to focusing on designing, building, or even buying their own ships.

Even if they couldn't explore interstellar space, they thought, at least they could explore the solar system. It was perhaps a more modest goal than the lofty explorers of the universe at large were fulfilling, but the solar system humanity grew up in still had plenty of mysteries to be discovered. Or so they thought, anyway; Aron had wisely classified and hidden away most of the information gathered by the simulation and the probes he'd sent out to map the system, manned and unmanned alike.

It wasn't that they had discovered anything dangerous, exactly, but more that he wanted to foster a spirit of exploration in the people of Earth. And simply giving them the detailed map and all the answers to their very many questions would run counter to that goal.

Another reason not many people were hyperfocused on the broadcast was another shakeup in the empire's economy, specifically in the commodities market that dealt with mineral and other material resources. News of the upcoming asteroid mining industry had shaken the foundation of the historically stable market, and "savvy" investors nearly sent the entire economy into a tailspin as they rushed to sell their commodities stocks before the market completely crashed.

Everything that was considered valuable on Earth, like gold, silver, platinum, diamonds, and many others, was actually quite common in the vastness of space. In fact, most scientists believed that Uranus literally rained diamonds! The methane in the atmosphere would break down thanks to the sun's rays, creating carbon atoms. The resultant carbon would then fall deeper into the gas giant's atmosphere, where the pressure would compress them into diamonds.

Whether or not the mining ships that people were now busily designing could actually gather those diamonds was another question entirely. But even if they couldn't collect them now, that didn't mean they would never be able to.

If the empire hadn't already announced strict controls on importing resources from the depths of the solar system, the economy would have already spiraled into a recession. But by the simple expedient of limiting the amount of mineral commodities from space and prohibiting any mining on Earth itself, the disaster had been staved off. Any surplus over and above the mandated import limits would be sold to the empire, and the process was automatic. As mining ships dropped off their loads at the processing stations, the empire would take it from there and everyone would be satisfied with the outcome.

The empire would receive vast stocks of mineral resources, the miners themselves would be handsomely paid for their efforts and finds, investors could rest assured that the commodities market would remain stable, and manufacturers that relied on those raw resources would be able to purchase them from the empire at a reasonable price. It was a flexible model and would easily transition from an empire that was bound to a single solar system all the way to a galaxy-spanning empire that stretched from one edge of the Milky Way to the other.

And one thing ensured that smuggling wouldn't exist: quarantine. Sure, there were indeed greedy people, but the only people licensed to mine in space would be those who passed the most stringent of security checks that included personality scanning via brain data. Part of the processing that was done at the processing stations in the Trojan asteroids was a scan that detected and eliminated any possible microorganism, preventing potential disease outbreaks that humanity wasn't equipped to handle.

After all, H.G. Wells had thrust the idea that aliens could be defeated by something as simple as the common cold. Thus, it was obvious that the same concept could work in reverse, wiping out humanity just as easily as an earthly virus had wiped out the invaders in War of the Worlds.

Chapter 566

Aron had decided to handle the solar resources like that because he believed that only the empire would have the capability to swallow such gains without harming itself. Any private sector enterprise given the vast mineral rights to the entire solar system would cut corners to increase profits, which wouldn't be beneficial to the fledgling economy in the least. He had learned of the dangers of monopolies from history, with shining examples like the Rockefeller family highlighting the path that he should definitely not take.

In fact, he had even gone so far as to take a page from communism, insofar as everything not specifically recognized as private property—like privately owned land on Earth—had been designated as property of the empire. So while asteroid miners may own their own mining ships, they had to request mineral rights from the empire. Prospecting could be done within limits, but in order to exploit their finds, they would require a permit from the imperial resources agency.

The IRA was the ruling body that had been created to ensure that any resource exploitation was done with safety and sustainability in mind. They had a responsibility to ensure that nothing entered the Earth that could potentially harm either the people or the planet itself. After all, humanity, when left unchecked, didn't exactly have the best track record when it came to things like environmental conservation.

The empire municipalizing all solar system resources had a second, and more obvious, benefit. It allowed the tracking and inventory of the exact amount of resources they had on hand, as well as preventing tax dodging by underreporting a mining company's gains.

And despite the minority of people who tried to drum up anti-monopolistic sentiments, the government holding a monopoly on the solar system was still a net positive for all. Despite the people who didn't know any better, not having bothered to take advantage of the educational resources provided to them for free by the empire, the benefit could be seen everywhere.

For example, the government, being by its very nature a not-for-profit enterprise, could sell those raw materials to the companies in the industrial sector for an extremely low price. Thus, the final products would also remain within a reasonable price range for consumers. And with companies like GAIA Tech, HHI, and others, Aron could fairly compete with the other companies springing up in the industrial and manufacturing industry, ensuring that all prices were kept low and "fat cat" capitalists couldn't use the cheap raw materials to pocket an extreme profit by hiking up product prices to a ridiculous degree.

That was one of the problems with capitalism; the profit-centric ideals would often lead to a minority of people bleeding the majority for everything they could and driving a wealth gap wider and wider. It needs to be said that scarcity wasn't a problem, but unequal distribution of wealth most definitely was. Thus, by municipalizing resources and entering the market with his own companies, Aron had cut that wealth gap off at the pass and ensured that it wouldn't immediately destabilize the fragile balance of the empire's new economy.

…

The sound of tapping at a mechanical keyboard clicked and clacked in what could only be said to be an otherwise extremely advanced lab. The person typing was the only one in the room, and the machinery was currently in a dormant state and completely silent.

The man typing was doing so at a monstrously fast speed, with more than five hundred lines of intricate code appearing on the quantum dot screen in front of the white-coated typist.

That continued for more than eleven hours. The sound of the keyboard neither sped up nor slowed down and the person doing the typing moved nothing but his forearms and fingers. He didn't even change position for the entire time until he suddenly halted his typing with the press of the enter key, then stretched his arms and shook the fatigue from his hands with a satisfied grunt.

But although he had stopped typing, the screen in front of him continued generating line after line of code. The system was compiling the raw code he had typed into it into a kernel, testing it line by line for any logic mistakes or other problems that may occur once the code was implemented and run as an executable program.

"Any major errors?" he asked the empty lab.

{The compiler is still running, but so far it's looking good, sir,} Nova replied as she materialized next to Aron, who was staring at the ceiling as he waited for the process to be completed.

{I do have to say, though, that you're quite good at coding. You didn't even have to stop and think at all—it's almost like you were the creator of the coding language. And the code you wrote helped me quite a bit, too... human ingenuity really is interesting,} she praised as she internalized the code Aron had written and began compiling it through her own compiler. It was hard to believe Aron had written it in the span of half a day.

"It's how the system works. Anything I buy from it is assimilated into me, giving me an instant mastery of whatever knowledge I've bought. The good and bad of it is that I'm getting the distilled wisdom of the pioneer of the knowledge. It's good because it saves me centuries, or in some cases, millennia, of my own research, but it's also bad in that I'm only getting the perfected form of it. So I can't look back on past mistakes to help me progress further.

"Look at the printers, for example. It took dozens of researchers in Lab City hundreds of years just to miniaturize it, and it wasn't until I purchased the nanotechnology knowledge that we were able to take atomic printers down to the size of a suitcase. Up until then, the smallest we could make them was still the size of a luxury SUV," Aron complained, though Nova knew it was just his way of humblebragging.

Thus, he was surprised when he was met with nothing but silence. He tilted his head and looked at Nova. "What's the problem? You just went silent on me," he asked.

{My own initial check is complete. The compiler is still working and will be done soon, but even with the raw code right in front of me, I can't get the full picture of just what this code is meant to do. But what I've gleaned so far is... unbelievable, at best. I'm pretty sure this isn't even the complete code,} she said.

"What makes you say that?" Aron asked with a smug smile on his face.

{I'm not entirely sure. There are obvious loopholes and hooks for new code to be injected, but that's standard for any code that you'll want to update in the future to add features to. But what really made me think that is that this code doesn't seem to do anything. And I don't believe you would spend so long manually coding a program that doesn't work, so there has to be more to it.

{If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that this is only a third of the total code you'll need to successfully run this program. It almost seems... dormant, like when it's completed, it'll be a living program of sorts.}

Chapter 567

"You're right," Aron said with a smile. "Both in that it isn't complete, and that there's still two parts missing."

{What're the other two parts? I can't find anything that looks like it would fit this segment in my knowledgebase,} Nova asked. For the first time in a long time, she was unable to comprehend Aron's thought processes. She had a few theories, but she wasn't confident in any of them; they were all equally likely, or equally unlikely as the case may be.

Aron went still for a moment, then, with a grunt, rose from his chair. He paced around the room with his hands behind his back, as if he was a wise old sage about to give advice or perhaps an anecdote about his earlier life. It was a fair comparison, too, as his mental age was far, far beyond his physical age due to spending so much time in the time-dilated environment that was the universal simulation.

"After the initialization of Project Loki, I, and everyone else in my inner circle, came to the conclusion that everything we've been doing are preventive measures. And since none of us can be sure whether our incoming visitors will be friendly or hostile, we can't fully commit to a single course of action, either.

"So this," he gestured to the screen, where the compiler was still running, "is the solution. It's a seed that can either cause a civilization to flourish, or infect them with a plague that will destroy them, given time. Whether it sprouts or spreads will depend on whether or not the visitors are friendly. And it doesn't matter if they're carbon based, mana based, or otherwise, this is the core of a weapon that can target any of them.

"I call it Project Protagonist."

Aron was speaking in a calm tone, as if he was talking about the preponderance of cats on the internet, not civilization-ending weapons.

"Project Protagonist isn't a weapon that'll wreak havoc on its own, like a bomb or something. Like I said, it can either help a civilization, or destroy one. I came up with the idea a few months ago, and only recently figured out how to bring it to fruition.

"The code is just the easiest part of the project. I don't even know if I can successfully write the remaining two parts, either, and just figuring out if it's viable or not will cost quite a few billion SP. Even then, that'll only make it slightly more in the realm of possibility rather than a sure thing.

"And even if I do create it successfully, I'll only need to make a few of them. That, in and of itself, is actually a good thing. If there are billions of them, they won't be worth anything, and might even backfire on humanity. Especially since, with its capabilities, the weapon itself will possibly spiral out of control if I need to use more than a few dozen of them.

"That's all I can say for now. It's too early to know if it'll succeed or not, so I'll withhold commenting further. But I look forward to your guesses as the project progresses," he finished with an arrogant smirk.

He walked back to his desk chair and sat down, then minimized the compiler that was still cascading a visual reference of his code on the screen. Then he pulled up the Lab City research database and entered something in the search field and hit enter.

The screen changed to look like the format of a scientific journal, which contained an internally published research paper about the latest generation of nanites that Lab City was working with. In the time they'd had to work on it after he downloaded the nanotechnology knowledge into them, the researchers had already reached the 2846th generation of nanites.

Aron frowned for a moment, then closed the window with a sigh and said, "Looks like it'll take a few centuries for the nanotechnology research to catch up to my needs."

Nova noted that down and created an action plan to increase the speed at which she built new quantum superclusters, increasing the time dilation that Lab City was under. Since its residents were completely digital and had no physical limitations, there was also no limit to the time dilation they could operate under without being detrimental to their continued existence. The only limiting factor was her server capacity.

She also set a reminder to herself to remind Aron after each century that passed in Lab City as well, or after every hundred new iterations of nanotechnology. At each of those milestones, he could take another look to see if the technology had reached the necessary level of advancement.

That was the level of convenience Aron had grown used to since Nova's birth a few years before. She was the backbone that allowed him to focus on the big picture as she dealt with the million complicated, or even simply mind-numbingly boring, tasks that were required to reach his goals.

{So from what you said, the remaining two parts have to do with carbon- and mana-based life forms in some fashion, right?} Nova asked. She had already devoted a small block of her processing power to figure out what Aron had planned. So when she saw him lean back and relax in his chair, it was the perfect time, in her mind, to ask.

After all, he wasn't doing anything right then but spinning in his chair as he waited for the compiler to finish its task.

"Yep. I'll need a few things from the system to accomplish that. Plus, I bet the things I need will also give us quite the insight into alien life forms," he said as he stopped spinning in his chair.

He opened his system's shop and granted Nova live access to his vision so she could "read over his shoulder", so to speak. And there it was, listed in easily readable text floating in Aron's vision, courtesy of his system's shop.

Chapter 568

[Organic computing, tier 1

Drawing inspiration from the remarkable complexity and efficiency of their species' biology, the * combated the lack of mineral resources on their homeworld by branching computing into a different path. Instead of using silicon and metals, they discovered the ability of DNA base pairs to store information and developed a system of computing around that, creating complex and powerful computers from their own DNA. It was the final step that allowed them to become an interplanetary civilization, ruling over vast swathes of their home galaxy until they fell at the hands of the *.

Price: 178,000,000,000sp]

[Runic computing, tier 1

, a former noble of a race enslaved by their technologically superior neighbors, took a side path upon his discovery of the fundamental runes that underpin all of creation. Knowing that he couldn't trust his fellow slaves, as many quislings and traitors were among them and he had no way of distinguishing them from his loyal compatriots, he utilized his accidental discovery of runes to create something that he thought would save his species.

Unfortunately, while his skill was enough to advance computing technology far beyond even the technologically advanced *'s wildest imaginations, his skill with other technologies couldn't keep up and his rebellion ultimately failed. As it turns out, using an enemy's last-generation technologies against them is not the key to successfully rebelling, a lesson that * learned the hard way.

However, his ingenious, and some may say epoch-making, computing advances were preserved and iterated upon by the *. The rest of his species, on the other hand, was not so lucky, meeting their end to the last sapient.

Using *'s runic computing technology, the * swept through multiple galaxies before finally falling under the weight of their own slave empire and spiraling down into extinction.

Price: 250,000,000,000sp]

Those two options were hovering in Aron's view. Nova, seeing them through his eyes, joined him in contemplating whether or not it was worth purchasing one, both, or neither. They were each superior to the quantum computing technology the empire currently used in at least one benchmark.

Biological computing was capable of containing enormous stores of data, though its processing speed was considerably lower. After all, while DNA was remarkably efficient and compact, the process of encoding and retrieving data was positively lackadaisical in comparison to the instantaneous operation of qubits or even the near lightspeed operation of traditional silicon computer chips.

And runic computing had a much faster processing speed, but the cost of that speed was lower storage capacity. Most of the runes were taken up by core processes, limiting the data they could store. Operating a runic computer would be much like installing the GAIA OS on a computer from around -50 BE. In order to do that, it would require vast server rooms full of towering behemoth servers just to contain the operating system itself. By comparison, qubits were microscopic, and even the old magnetic storage platters found in imperial citizens' hard drives were more efficient storage media.

(Ed note: Remember that the empire was founded in 2018, making that year -1 BE (before empire) and 2019 is 1AE (after empire). So -50 BE would be around 1968. In 1965, the Honeywell DDP-116, a 16-bit computer system, was introduced. It was capable of storing 8 kilobytes of data in a drive that measured 7x19x24 inches, roughly the size of a big shoebox. So you can imagine the number of those that would be required to store even a cellphone operating system on them.)

Aron tapped his pointer finger on the desk in front of him as he delved deep into his thoughts. The contemplation was understandable, as if he was going to branch out in his computing technology, he would definitely need to buy all of them together. Combining the flexibility of quantum computers with the speed of runic computers and the enormous storage capability of biological computers... the thought was almost intoxicating.

So why was he hesitating?

Simple: the costs were staggering. And once he went down that route, he would have to continue down it, tier after tier, with the SP cost increasing exponentially. Plus, it would delay the technological advancement of his empire, as his population would need to increase to pay the SP cost, but that population increase would necessitate more advanced technology, and so on. It was a catch .22 that would last for quite some time.

And right now, he was finding it difficult to justify paying the cost out of his "emergency SP fund". The 800 billion SP he currently held in reserve would be cut by half, and then some; it would severely limit his options when the visitors arrived, especially if they were hostile and so advanced that his current technology couldn't handle them.

{If Project Protagonist succeeds, you won't need the emergency fund at all. So if you're confident in that plan, then spend the SP. Also, combining the three computing branches will render our network more flexible and less prone to a single point of failure in case we end up butting heads with aliens who can hard counter any one of the branches,} Nova said, interrupting Aron's thoughts. If it could be called an interruption, that is; he was also considering the same things, but it was different once the thoughts were spoken aloud.

"True." Aron nodded, then stopped tapping his finger on his desk, having come to a decision. "And besides, if I always stop myself from buying things now in the worry that I'll need the SP for different things in the future, well... that's a weakness I can't allow myself, or my empire, to have. Thanks, Nova."

He lifted his hand to the system display window and tapped on the button labeled [BUY] for both the biological and runic computing knowledges. 428 billion SP drained from his total balance and the display screen changed.

[Thank you for your purchase. Install now? Y/n]

"See you soon," he said as he mentally confirmed the installation and logged out of the simulation. Nova had already put his physical body into a deep sleep inside his pod and his virtual face only twisted in pain for a fraction of a second before he disappeared from the simulation and his consciousness joined his body in its sleep.

Installing knowledge from the system was an extremely painful process to begin with, even when only dealing with a single knowledge. Aron, however, had decided to buy both of them and install them simultaneously despite knowing of the downsides. It would send him spiraling into a level of pain that Nova didn't believe his consciousness could handle without shattering, despite his thousands of (sometimes agonizing) deaths during his training in the simulation.

His choice demonstrated once again his deep trust in Nova. He was no masochist to begin with, and Nova was the only one capable of sending him into what was essentially a medically induced coma before the pain really hit with its full intensity.

Chapter 569

While Aron was assimilating the new knowledges and deep in Nova's medically induced coma, the top minds in the imperial space agency were in a meeting with Styx, the AI that headed up both the TSF and their agency.

"How reliable is this?" Dr. Musa Aminu, the head of the ISA, asked as he blinked the holographic file displayed in his glasses closed.

"We're 95% confident, sir. Some time within the next week, another Carrington event is expected to take place. And based on the sunspots we observed along with the increase in solar winds, we believe it'll absolutely dwarf the event from 1869. The most damning piece of evidence we have is that it's happening off season.

"Normally, the Sun acts up on a predictable eleven-year cycle, and the last solar maximum was only five years ago, so—"

"It wasn't 1869," Agency Head Aminu calmly said. "It was -149 BE."

"I'm not sure that's relevant, sir," the researcher said. "A change in calendar doesn't mea—"

"It means exactly what it means, Doctor Yao. If this event is as epoch-making as you say it'll be, then we must be absolutely meticulous. If for nothing else, consider it for posterity's sake."

"Understood, sir." Doctor Yao cleared his throat and continued, "It'll be more devastating than the event in -149 BE, sir. It might even be a civilization-ending event, given our reliance on technology."

Musa nodded, lost in thought. The entire room fell into an uncomfortable, anxious silence before he sighed, "Styx, please inform the higher-ups of the oncoming mess and call an emergency meeting. Tell them that there's a seventy-odd percent chance that we'll be hit by a historic coronal mass ejection within the next week."

Styx flickered into visibility, then blinked. [An emergency meeting will be held in thirty minutes with the emperor's inner council] he said. [They're currently being briefed on the issue and will need a detailed presentation from you.]

Dr. Aminu nodded to Styx, then turned to the other researchers in the conference room. "Prepare a presentation on the event. I'll leave it to you to present it," he ordered.

"Yes, sir," they chorused, then left to prepare their presentation.

...

An hour later, after the briefing.

"How devastating will the impact be?" John asked, having finished reading and digesting the information.

"And should we announce the event ahead of time?" Minister Rogers interjected.

"If the coronal mass ejection hits Earth, we predict it'll be a civilization-ending event. It won't be an extinction-level event like the Chicxulub meteor impact, but odds are good that it'll drive us back to before the industrial revolution, at the very least. The power grid will go down, utility services will go down, a massive electromagnetic pulse will impact the entire planet, and people all over the world will see the aurora.

"In short, with our reliance on advanced technology and electricity, the event will be devastating," Dr. Yao explained. "As far as making any announcements, I'll defer to the council for that decision. It isn't in my wheelhouse, so to speak."

"We should make an announcement as early as possible and implement rationing to prevent panic buying," Minister Al-

Mutairi said.

"We should go further than just implementing rationing. Declare martial law and issue a shelter in place order," John suggested.

"What about methods to prevent it from hitting us?" Minister Rogers asked. "Can we block it somehow?"

"Theoretically, an object of sufficient size and mass should work. But we're talking on the order of planets, not man-made objects. A Dyson sphere might work, but... it's far too late to consider a solution like that. And if we're going to attempt to stop it, we should do it as far away from earth as possible. A CME of sufficient size can even strip the atmosphere from planets along with a not-insignificant chunk of their crusts," Dr. Yao answered.

"What if we move the home guard fleet as close to the Sun as we can and have them link shields?" John asked.

[That wouldn't be feasible, General Smith] Styx replied. [In theory, enough of our ships linking shields should be able to block a coronal mass ejection, but if this one is as big as our data suggests, then even if we used everything we had—

including the ten thousand ships we just sent on the exploration missions—it wouldn't fully block it.]

"Wait... shields?" Minister Rogers asked with a slight frown, obviously considering something. "What about the planetary defense shield? Isn't this kind of thing exactly what it was meant for?"

Dr. Yao's eyes lit up. "We have a planetary shield? Can it handle the full brunt of the incoming CME?" he asked. His security clearance level wasn't high enough to have any information on the full brunt of the incoming CME?" he asked. His security clearance level wasn't high enough to have any information on the PDS, so the information, in his mind, changed everything.

[If we switch it from passive to active defense, then, sure. We'll also need to move all of our shipping under the shield or behind Jupiter] Nova answered. [And during that time, nothing will be able to pass in or out of the shield.]

"Does it need to be fully active? Can we just activate the half that's facing the sun when the CME hits?" Minister Rogers asked.

[Technically, yes] Nova said. [The shield is set up such that any of its hexagons can be activated independently of the rest. But it wouldn't be a good idea, as the coronal mass may wrap around it due to the Coanda Effect and hit the planet regardless. So, to counter that, we'll need to activate the entire shield at full power.]

(Ed note: The Coanda Effect is what causes running water to "stick" to the surface of objects placed in it and flow around them. You can see this by turning on the faucet in your kitchen sink and putting a glass in the water on its side. The water will seem to adhere to the surface of the glass and flow around it, 18:06

then continue flowing instead of being deflected off to either side of the glass. Physics is fun!)

[We should let it hit the planet] Nyx interjected, immediately attracting the attention of everyone in the room.

A moment of silence ensued, then every human in the room burst into a clamor.

"What!?"

"Do you have any idea how devastating it's going to be!?"

"Are you insane?"

The outburst continued for a full three minutes before John slammed his hand on the conference table and shouted, "SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

Chapter 570

John turned to Nyx and said, "Continue. What're you trying to say?"

{I'm saying we should keep the shield in its passive mode and allow the Carrington event to happen,} she said in her trademark disinterested tone.

"Why should we do that?" Dr. Aminu said, a look of shock still lingering on his face. Was he on the ground floor of an AI apocalypse? A bead of cold sweat dripped down from his temple as he fruitlessly tried to rein in his emotions.

{A few reasons, actually,} Nyx said. She paused and looked around the room before continuing, {Other than the people in this room and His Imperial Majesty, no one knows that the planetary defense shield even exists in the first place. It's always been in its passive mode, making it invisible to everyone. Bringing it to full strength will reveal it, making its existence a matter of public record.

{That wouldn't be a problem, but there's no need to reveal our trump card like that. After all, a trump card our enemies know about isn't very useful, now is it?}

Before Nyx could continue providing her other reasons for not using it, she was interrupted by Dr. Aminu. "That isn't a good enough reason for bringing humanity back to pre-industrial levels! Especially since we don't even know for sure what the visitors' intentions are. For all we know, they could just be interstellar traders, or maybe they're a branch of humanity that left for the stars long ago. The only thing we can be sure of is that we know absolutely nothing about them.

"And let's say, for the sake of argument, that they are in fact hostile. By letting a Carrington event of this magnitude just impact Earth and drive us back to where we were in the 1800s, wouldn't that just make us easier pickings for them?" Dr. Aminu was so worked up that he even forgot his earlier insistence on using the new imperial calendar.

The other humans in the room, minus a few, nodded in agreement with Dr. Aminu's sentiment.

{You interrupted me too soon,} Nyx began. {As I said, there are multiple reasons to allow the CME to hit Earth unimpeded, but you stopped me when I'd only mentioned the first of them.} Though she was speaking in a chiding tone, she understood the interruption was done with the best of intentions.

{So let me dispel your worries first. Helios Energy considered the possibility of a massive electromagnetic pulse when they first designed the power grid and other infrastructure upgrades to the empire. Over the past year, they've been upgrading the utility infrastructure across the globe, at least in areas that have accepted imperial rule. So far, over 95% of the upgrades have been completed and the rest can be rushed to completion over the next few days.

{Since the upgrades include hardening against an EMP attack, we'll survive it just fine without interruption. The same can't be said for areas that rejected imperial rule, though. They'll still be devastated. But who cares? It seems you've all forgotten Operation Boiling Frog.}

When Nyx mentioned Operation Boiling Frog, looks of realization flashed across the faces of the ministers in the room. Dr. Aminu and his subordinates, on the other hand, still looked lost and clueless.

Dr. Yao raised his hand and began, "What's Operation Boiling—"

"It's classified, Dr. Yao," Minister Rogers interrupted. "So forget you ever heard it."

Dr. Yao lowered his arm and clasped his hands together, looking down at them. He, just like everyone else in the room, understood the need for classification and compartmentalized information. He didn't particularly LIKE it, but he understood it.

Nyx didn't care about the reaction of the imperial space agency's researchers and continued, {Since all of the imperial infrastructure and the empire's newly introduced technologies can withstand the EMP without any problems, it means only those that still use legacy tech will be impacted. Nearly all of their technology will be rendered useless through force majeure, so the empire can't be blamed for the failure of their critical infrastructure.

{Besides, even in its passive mode, the planetary defense shield will still block a lot of the CME. By my calculation, the EMP that results from the remainder of the ejection that actually impacts the planet's magnetic field should be just enough to cripple non-imperial infrastructure and last-generation imperial products. It's the perfect deniability for the empire, since we'll be hit as well. It's just that the hit we take will be in the non-essential category.

{We can even warn the remnant governments of the upcoming Carrington event, making us the 'good guys' in this situation, especially after we offer outreach that mitigates the loss of life the event causes even to noncitizens. At the same time, we can stress that imperial tech should hold up just fine, but to be safe, all imperial gadgets should be powered down when the event hits,} Nyx finished, her tone as calm as if she had just been reading the dictionary aloud and not talking about a potential civilization-ending event.

A shocked silence descended on the conference room after Nyx finished explaining her reasoning. The imperial space agency staffers in the room figured out quite a bit about Operation Boiling Frog from the explanation; they were far from stupid, and the petite AI's suggestion gave them enough to tease out a general idea of what the operation was for.

To them, it was completely new information. But despite that, they understood the reasoning behind the possibility of the empire simply allowing the CME to proceed without any active attempt to stop it, even though they were more than capable of doing so. After all, despite the semblance of peace that had recently returned to Earth, there was a very limited time frame in which to turn that facade into lasting reality before they had potentially hostile aliens showing up on humanity's doorstep with a broken society that would be easy to exploit should they be so inclined.

That said, not everyone in the meeting was in agreement with Nyx's suggestion. And with the emperor's absence, they couldn't come to a decision even if any suggestion was unanimously approved. So before the situation could devolve, Gaia appeared and took charge of the meeting.

{Let's end it here for today, ladies and gentlemen. I'll deliver all of your points to the emperor when he's available, and let you know what his decision is once he comes up with one.} Though her tone was diplomatic, she still shot Nyx a loaded look; the feisty mistress of intelligence had let classified information slip, purposefully or not.

But with Gaia's involvement and her position, she had the authority and the duty to act as Aron's plenipotentiary whenever he wasn't available. As such, the meeting was dismissed and everyone disappeared from the virtual conference room, followed by the room itself vanishing into the aether.

It would be a waste of resources for it to remain in existence when not in use, and efficiency was everything to the Terran Empire.

Chapter 571

"For god's sake, I just woke up!" Aron grumbled. He hadn't even been awake for an hour before Gaia and Nova had dragged him back into the simulation for a briefing on the upcoming Carrington event.

{The situation is critical, Your Majesty. So there's no time to waste, since we'll need to respond to the situation as early as possible, depending on your approval,} Gaia said. She knew that Aron was still feeling lethargic after coming out of his induced coma, especially since he was still dedicating a portion of his mind to sorting the new knowledge that had been downloaded into him.

"What is it with shit always happening when I'm out of commission? What kind of bullshit is that?" Aron continued grumbling as Nova massaged his headache away. Still, his briefing had been thorough and included the options presented to him by the people in the earlier meeting.

{It's the opposite, sir. Things are always happening, but while you're 'in commission', they immediately get dealt with. It's only when you're unavailable that things pile up awaiting your decisions,} Nova coaxed. She increased the strength of her massage, the medical pod connecting her virtual actions to real world effects.

Aron groaned in relief as his headache rapidly faded, then took a moment to think about what he had just heard about the ongoing situation.

"I agree with Nyx. Let the coronal mass hit. Gaia, develop an action plan with Minister Al-Mutairi and bring it to me for approval in... let's say one hour real time." An hour in reality was almost four days in the simulation, which would be plenty of time for them to develop an action plan. "We'll implement it as soon as it's finalized."

{Yes, Your Majesty.} Gaia's virtual figure flickered as she sent a message to Youssef. She was just about to move to the next topic when Aron spoke again.

"What about Mars? Will it be impacted as well?" Mars was currently on its nearest approach to Earth, so it would definitely be in the affected zone when the CME happened in a week. There were still millions of kilometers between them—roughly 58 million, give or take—but in astronomical terms, that was virtually like the distance between one apartment and the apartment next door.

{I was about to mention that,} Gaia said. {The answer is yes, but not really. Even though the upcoming CME is predicted to be the worst we've ever faced, Mars should be plenty far enough away that the disruption there will be minimal. The mass isn't thrown out in a concentrated shape, but more like a very broad cone, almost fan-shaped. So while it'll still be concentrated enough when it reaches Earth, by the time it hits Mars, it'll be too dispersed to cause much of an issue there.

{Even though Mars lacks a molten core, it contains an immense amount of iron in its crust. That iron generates localized magnetic fields around each of the tectonic plates that are up to ten times as strong as Earth's magnetic field. So it'll effectively block what little solar mass actually hits them, at least for the most part. And any negative effects, like the resulting EMP, will easily be countered by the hardened nature of ARES equipment. After all, the Mars base is an important military base, so it's designed to take quite a pounding without crumbling.}

As she spoke, Gaia threw Aron a file with the simulated effects of the upcoming Carrington event, both on Earth as well as Mars.

Aron sighed in relief as he looked at the simulated CME and read the data on its effects. "That's a few trillion END I won't have to explain spending in our military budget."

The entirety of Mars was being built up to create a solid fortress that could weather any number of storms. The surface installations were almost all weapons, and the reinforced underground tunnel network would allow for rapid transportation of men and materiel anywhere within a very short amount of time. And Mars' solid core was perfect for housing the immense reactors, capacitor banks, and even the living areas for the millions of ARES personnel that would soon be stationed on the red planet.

The budget, even considering that the construction and materials involved were free, was still considerable and ran into the trillions of END. Most of that cost was in certain rare earth and other minerals procured through the empire's burgeoning asteroid mining industry, as Mars still lacked a lot of the materials needed for the massive construction processes. Even with constructor swarms, GEMbots, and atomic printers, they couldn't create something out of nothing.

And even though Aron was personally shouldering 70% of the budget, if the Mars base was delayed by the impact of the upcoming CME, it would still have cast a shadow over the empire. After all, 30% of the cost was still multiple trillions of END, which was a lot of money to lose in a single incident.

But that was only by the Terran Empire's current standards. Once the diaspora and colonization efforts began in earnest, trillions would be a much smaller amount by comparison.

Aron swiped the file closed and paused for a moment, updating his plans. "Looks like I'll need to visit Mars sooner than I'd originally planned," he said. He would need to personally erect a planetary defense shield there regardless, but the upcoming Carrington event had lit a fire underneath him. Just because the solar system had survived billions of years, if not trillions, it didn't guarantee that something would happen the very next day that would render the entire area uninhabitable.

{I'll add it to your upcoming itinerary,} Nova said. She was responsible for all of Aron's movements, making her perhaps the most powerful secretary in the history of Earth.

As she spoke, everyone who would be going with him in his entourage, all the way from his emperor's aegis down to his personal chef, received notice of the upcoming trip and immediately began making preparations.

Chapter 572

Nova having returned to her previous calm deminer remained standing behind Aron observing what he was typing. Currently Aron was writing the instruction set of the runic CPU's he was soon to create.

The silence in the room continued for a few hours before he was done evidenced by him reclining back and stretching himself just like during his first time.

"Okay let's look for a programming language befitting of the CPU" he said as he opened the system shop and without wasting too much time he filtered through all of the programming languages leaving behind rune specific language before he bought the best doing the same as when he had bought Prometheus without even wasting a moment as it only costed a few millions and not the billions price tag he was spending when he was buying civilization defining technologies as he wanted to always use the best and most optimised programming language to remove the need for later updates when a better language is required which was going to be costly and time consuming on the empires side.

Due to the size of the knowledge and the advance of his brain he didn't have to event enter coma as he assimilated with the language for a short moment before it was done with him feeling nothing but a mild headache that came and went for a short moment.

"Now let's create the CPU shall we" he said as he brushed his hands with each other before they moved to one of the machines in the lab, it was the atomic printers.

He took control of the machine as he started the creation process, he started by creating a three-atom thick but large circular wafer using the most mana conductive material available in the solar system.

The moment the creation of the wafer was done it was immediately bombarded with concentrated amount of mana with the material being created with a structure made with the specific mission of trapping mana from the inside with the structure of atoms acting as one way gate to make sure it gains the mana prefix in a short period of time and not lose it.

It only took half an hour before the material gained the prefix which Aron immediately restarted the printing process this time for it to close the so-called atomic lead sealing the mana at the centre of the material.

"Okay start the etching process." The moment he said that Nova took over and started the printers runic imprinting function to start the rune etching process.

Twenty minutes is all it took for the etching process to take place in etching billions upon billions of runic words that acts as the runic switches, something that usually took hundreds of runic scribes to accomplish in months, yet it was impossible for them to create them in such size and at such high quality.

Nova immediately started the process of cutting the wafer into different parts for different purposes before she immediately created the complete chips together with ram and memory all from part of the same wafer but with each of them being uploaded the different instruction sets for their expected tasks that Aron had spent hours creating.

With the creation of them now completed she just materialised the rest of the needed components and there it was, humanity's fast magical or either runic computer siting on the table silently waiting for Aron to test it.

Aron with excitement still on his face moved at alight speed to the seat as he couldn't wait any longer to test the computer if it has reached the standard that was in the knowledge he bought.

He immediately powered it on allowing the computer to take in the electricity that was coming from the wall going through the computers power brick that immediately converted it to mana before it was sent to all the components of the computer and immediately completing the powering up process.

The operating system that was embedded together with the instruction set came to life and the screen came to life showing the logo of GAIA technologies something that Aron had never forgotten to put.

"Let's see how it function" he said as he selected one of the many apps that Nova had already converted to runic language making them capable of running on this computer to test the speed .

After fiddling with the app paired together with him having already gotten used to the speed of the quantum computer he wasn't really impressed by speed since it was about the same albeit a bit faster on single threaded operations.

"But can it run doom…"

…..

A week later.

Aron could be seen sitting on the same table this time there was another computer on the other side with the exterior looking like wood indicating that it was either a wood cover or it was the biological computer with those who guessed the second being right.

He had spent more than a week in his private simulation time creating and testing the different iterations of the two technologies he had bought and currently he was quite satisfied with what he had accomplished.

"When it comes to RAM QRAM is the fastest as for CPU for single threaded operations the runic computer is the fastest and multithreaded operation nothing beats quantum computing and when it comes to high density storage biological computer is unbeaten" he said having came to the conclusion after spending the entire week testing all of the new computers to the limit.

"Instruct the lab city to start the integration of all the technologies into creating a single computing system that encompasses all of the benefit of these tech without the weaknesses, they will be the flagship computers for imperial operations since it is difficult to hack three different systems than one plus it in the possibility that we are met with a tier2 civilization that are advance in one of these computing technologies we will be able to at least put a fight against them with the other two" Aron ordered deciding the direction of research the empire was going to be taking regarding this technological aspect.

Something that might save the empire in the future.

"As for me I should start creating the other two pieces of my puzzle." He said as he returned to his main computer and started coding this time too using the runic language since he had already finished the quantum side of creation he was planning on finishing the creatin of the runic and biological side of his puzzle in the remaining time as he waited for the advancements of the nanomachines side of things for all of the three technologies he bought.

Chapter 573

Aron had advantages that made all of the problems the early pioneers of runic computing encountered complete nonissues. He was the perfect, or perhaps worst, person to have ever gotten their hands on that technology; it only depended on whether you were friends or foes in his eyes.

For the mana requirements, he had an adapter that would convert electricity into mana, even if the ratio was steep. For material needs, he had atomic printers. And for the issues the original creators had run into regarding mass production of runic computers, he'd upgraded his atomic printers with the capability of printing runic constructs. All he would have to do is gather up the pre-printed materials and channel his mana into them for a while.

And even that would cease to be a problem as soon as he worked out a way of automating the process of imprinting intent into runic constructs that were created by his atomic printers.

Aron laughed out loud after he finished explaining his plans. He was quite excited about finally having bought something from his system that wasn't an immediate necessity in terms of his offensive or defensive capabilities. It was quite refreshing, he thought, that he was finally able to buy something he could afford to play with before putting it into immediate use to counter some crisis or other.

From the very beginning of his explanation, Nova had been sending his ideas to the researchers in Lab City. Thanks to all of them being mere digital copies of living people, they didn't require any extra time to download information into them, so they were able to immediately get started on the projects Aron had outlined in his rambling.

It would spark yet another round of innovation from the enthusiastic researchers, who loved nothing more than getting their hands on new things and using them to innovate. No matter how ridiculous the idea was, it would be tested and researched until it became obvious that it would only ever be viable as an inspiration, rather than reality.

Over the perceived centuries of Lab City's existence, the researchers had found many "inspirations" like that. And every time they found another one, they would jokingly refer to the "round file", which was code for a trash can. In a similar vein, when they were at their wits end with an active project, those same researchers would go "dumpster diving in the round file" looking for inspiration to jolt them out of whatever rut their thought processes had ended up in.

"Let's continue with Project Protagonist," Aron said after recovering from his manic laughter. He stretched his fingers, as he was about to embark upon a second round of creation, this time ending in the creation of the world's first three-way hybrid computer. After all, sharpening an axe had never delayed the felling of trees. At least according to Sun Tzu, anyway.

Nova returned to her position standing slightly behind and to the left of Aron, paying close attention to what he was typing. At the moment, he was writing the instruction sets of the runic part of the computer—the motherboard, RAM, graphics card, and a suite of software designed to take advantage of runic speed. The CPU would still be a quantum computer, as would the graphics processing unit in the graphics card, and the hard drives would be purely biological in nature.

Next, he would need to create an entirely new hybrid programming language that would allow all of his hardware to properly work together. But first, he would build one of each computer to give him a better idea of what he would require in terms of programming languages and hardware.

The hardware itself was rather intuitive. Quantum computers had immense flexibility and an absolute advantage in terms of running multiple processes on a single CPU. Since each qubit was like a gate that could be open, shut, or simultaneously open and shut, it allowed a relatively small number of qubits to take the place of traditional silicon CPU cores.

That flexibility was an advantage over runic computers, which were capable of insanely high speeds, but limited flexibility. Each line of runic code was capable of performing a single task, but that single task would be completed nearly instantly thanks to a completely dedicated pathway for each individual task. Plus, all of that runic code, no matter how finely it was etched, took up space and limited the amount of data that could be stored in a certain area.

The limited storage space of runic computers wasn't an issue with biological computers. Take the human genome, for example; when stretched end to end, a strand of human DNA would measure a little over a meter in length. It contains about three billion base pairs, and when acting as binary bits, would allow for around 750 megabytes of storage. When wrapped around a spindle, however, it only took up about ten nanometers of space. But what it gained in compressed storage space, it lost in flexibility and definitely lost in speed. Information transmission via messenger RNA took, at a minimum, seven minutes.

So, intuitively speaking, Aron already had an idea of the hardware architecture of his planned three-way hybrid computer that would take advantage of the flexibility of quantum computers, the speed of runic computers, and the storage capacity of biological computers. The problem he was currently solving was how to get all three branches of computer technology to interface such that it would have the advantages of all three types of computers, while removing, or at least greatly mitigating, the weaknesses.

And to do that, he would do two things: create a new coding language that was capable of interfacing with all three types of hardware, and modify the runic computer components he planned on using in the final product. But in order to do that, he first had to build a runic computer and a biological computer so that he could deepen his familiarity with the technologies and choose which operating systems to make part of his final coding language out of.

Taking advantage of the universal simulation, he could create each component with the wave of a hand, should he so choose. But that would be counterproductive to his goals; he wanted to deepen his familiarity with the system-purchased knowledge, not simply use it as is.

Chapter 574

Aron watched as the atomic printer in his lab whirred to life, printing the base materials he would require to build his runic computer. Block after block of pure minerals slid onto a waiting tray, beneath which he had already carved a mana condensing runic construct linked to a fusion reactor the size of a golden retriever.

"Nova, increase the time dilation around the condenser as high as it can go," he ordered.

Nova nodded and waved her hand; the condenser construct was immediately increased to a time dilation factor of 1100:1. In reality, they could do the same thing by increasing the size and output of the runic construct and fusion reactor, but that wouldn't fit in Aron's personal lab, virtual or not.

"While that's working, let's see what the system has for programming languages that're compatible with runic and biological computers," he muttered to himself, bringing up his system shop window and giving Nova access to his senses with a blink.

"Hmm... you," he began, "and... you." He moved a runic programming language and a biological programming language into the system shop's cart and clicked purchase.

Dozens of millions of SP were deducted from his remaining amount. And due to the size of the languages in question and his enhanced brain structure, he didn't have to be put into a coma before downloading them. All he felt as the download completed was a brief stab of pain between his eyebrows, which rapidly faded and left nothing but the new knowledge behind.

It may have seemed like he had made random choices, but he had actually judged them rather thoroughly before making his decision. His personal implants, as the emperor of all humanity, were all on the absolute bleeding edge of the best technology the empire had, courtesy of Nova and his frequent stays in the extended-stay edition of the VR medical pods. So his current thinking speed and processing abilities were roughly a thousand times that of non-enhanced people, which was evident in the time dilation he could easily handle when necessary.

The two languages he had chosen weren't necessarily the best, nor were they the most expensive, but they were carefully selected with flexibility and open-endedness in mind. It would make his upcoming job of fusing them with Prometheus much easier, as well as postpone the need for later updates until he was ready to purchase the tier 2 versions of all of his tech.

{The materials should be ready now, sir,} Nova announced, having kept track of the manaforging process while Aron was busy shopping and downloading new knowledges.

"Excellent!" He rubbed his hands together like a shady merchant in an underground bazaar. "Let's get building, shall we?"

He picked up a cylindrical mana alloy made of vanadium, manganese, gold, platinum, silicon, and beryllium. It practically glowed to the naked eye and was nearly blinding in his mana sense. Placing it back into the atomic printer, he shaved slices off of it that were approximately three nanometers thick. Any thinner and he wouldn't be able to carve runes on it, and if it was any thicker, it would cause transmission issues, throttling, and bottlenecks. Not to mention the size and form factor.

Once he had hundreds of identical wafers, he began swiping his fingertip back and forth across them, leaving trails of glowing golden runic script behind his steady movement. The material he was working with, which he had dubbed mana steel, was very brittle and fragile, though it was highly conductive when considering both mana and electricity, so he was being very careful as he carved the runic script into the wafers.

Twenty hours later, the carving was complete and line after line of brilliant golden runic symbols had been carved on the hundreds of wafers. In total, there were trillions of runic words that acted as switches, replacing the ones and zeros of humanity's binary number system. And Aron had completed the carving process in less than a day; if the originators of the technology were to see that, they would be absolutely flabbergasted. It took hundreds of their runic scribes months to accomplish a task that a single human had just done virtually with a wave of his hand!

(Ed note: He has hundreds of millions, if not billions, of entire *lines* of runic code on his heart. Here, he's only dealing with runic symbols, or words, in the trillions. So the total number he's writing per minute is a lot higher than if he was writing lines of code in the trillions, hence his speed. Also consider that he regularly studies the runes on his runic heart, so he has experience deciphering microscopic runes and has learned to do so without a scribing pen, which the originators of the tech would probably have used.)

Aron stacked the wafers atop each other in a set order, then fused them together with a flood of mana. His first runic computer's processor was complete.

He repeated the task for each of the remaining critical computer components, then assembled it and screwed it into a case that Nova had manifested for him. The case didn't need to be hand-crafted; a simple steel box the size of a Playstation 5 would do just fine.

Now that the hardware was complete, he sat at his desk and manifested a keyboard that would work with the runic coding language he had selected and began coding an operating system for the newly assembled hardware. Five hours passed and his fingers were still dancing over the keys, practically leaving afterimages as he transferred the code from his head to his keyboard. The eight hour mark came and went and he was still singlemindedly focused on his task.

It wasn't until twelve hours after he had started the coding process that he finally hit enter and his raw code was sent to a compiler.

"Finally!" he cheered, leaning back in his chair and throwing his arms straight up for a deeply satisfying stretch. "Now we just have to wait for it to compile and I can benchmark the new hardware."

{Congratulations, sir,} Nova said.

"Thank you. Now it's time to build the biological computer since I've got some time while the compiler runs on the runic OS. That one will be much easier than the runic computer. All I need to do is mix up a growth medium and seed it with blank nucleosomes, then wait for them to propagate and grow."

Anticipating Aron's request, Nova waved her hand and manifested a completed biological computer. Due to the relative ease of manufacture, neither of the two people in the lab found it necessary to go through the step by step process of growing the "hardware" itself.

Another twelve-hour coding marathon later, Aron flexed his fingers and shook his hands before picking up a sterile syringe containing a virus that had been engineered to deliver his new operating system to the nucleosomes floating in his biocomp vat, suspended in their nutrient solution. He inserted the syringe into a sterile port and the "programming" of the computer began.

Chapter 575

Aron, still giddy with excitement, ran to his seat at lightning speed. He couldn't wait any longer to test the computer and see if it met the standards outlined in the knowledge he had purchased from the system. He plugged it in and powered it on, allowing the computer to draw electricity from the wall through its power brick, which converted it to mana to power the components, thus completing the bootup processes.

The operating system he had written into it came to life, lighting up the screen with the GAIA Technologies logo, something he was careful to never leave out of his innovations.

"Let's see how it holds up," he said as he pulled up the benchmarking program he had written alongside the runic OS.

But after fiddling with the program for a while, he was left less than impressed by the runic computer's speed of operations. It was fine for single operations, but didn't even include the ability to hyperthread to at least emulate the ability to multitask. Perhaps starting with quantum computers had spoiled him somewhat.

"But can it run doom..." he muttered to himself as he pulled up the venerable computer game.

…

A week later.

Aron was still sitting at his desk in his virtual lab, this time with a shining stainless steel cylinder in front of him. It stood six inches in diameter and another six inches tall, and had a clear window in it. A murky, light yellowish liquid with streams of bubbles was visible through the window, which stretched from the base of the cylinder to near the top. Anyone who guessed that the cylinder was a biological computer would have been right.

Aron had spent the past week of Earth time in his virtual lab, creating and testing iterations of the two technologies he'd bought from the system. Currently, he was rather satisfied with what he had already accomplished, though he knew there was much further to go.

"When it comes to RAM, qRAM is the fastest. As for single-threaded operations, runic processing is hands down superior to the others. But for multi-threaded operations, quantum processors take the cake. And I doubt I'll find a better high-density storage media than a biological computer's DNA storage," he dictated to Nova, having finally come to his conclusion after his experiments with the new computing technologies.

"Nova, pass what I've got here on to the gold labs in Lab City. Tell them to begin integrating it all into a single computing system that takes advantage of the strengths of the three technologies while mitigating their weaknesses as much as possible. I don't expect much out of tier 1 tech, but the new incorporated computer systems will be the flagship computers for the empire moving forward.

"Not only will integrating everything into a unique whole make it nearly impossible to hack, but I estimate that the original product will be right up at the tier 2 line, if not even higher. This project might be our first tier 2 technology, and we'll have come up with it ourselves. But even if it isn't, the three paths seem to be the main ones in use throughout the universe, so if we come into contact with an enemy that's chosen one of the three paths, we'll be able to use the other two to put up a fight against them." Aron's choice could perhaps save the empire from subjugation in the future.

[Right away, sir] Nova replied, her figure flickering as she passed on his marching orders to the researchers.

"Next item on the agenda: creating a bridge that I can use to integrate the three programming languages."

Aron returned to his work, this time focusing on creating a program that would allow three wholly unique languages to flawlessly blend together into a singular new language. It would be needed as soon as the researchers in Lab City came up with a way to integrate the hardware into a single computer.

Without a unified programming language that was capable of porting instructions from any of the three languages into any other language, the new hardware would be useless. After all, no matter how shiny and excellent a computer's hardware was, it would still be useless without programs that ran on it.

But if that was his only reason, he would have left it to the researchers in Lab City to create alongside the new computer system. In fact, it would even be more efficient to do it that way. However, the programming language was important for another reason: he needed it to be able to communicate with all three systems in order for Project Protagonist to function.

With his understanding of the languages, it took him virtually no time at all before he had written a program that blended them together and created an entirely new language. The new language wasn't quite as streamlined as any of the source languages—Aron alone couldn't possibly be compared to a collection of generations of the greatest minds of alien civilizations—but it was an astounding act of creation nonetheless.

During testing, it was shown to only require an average of a femtosecond longer to operate a program when compared with running that same program on dedicated hardware with matching programming languages. And a femtosecond of lag time was an absolutely outstanding result, especially given that he was still working on version 0.1 of the new language.

"Now to finish the Project Protagonist code."

Upon finishing his new programming language, he immediately moved to create the remaining two segments of code for his plan.

Waving his hand, he manifested a runic computer and began writing code for the runic integration in his project. Twelve hours later, he fed it into his compiler and switched to a biological computer and biological code. And fourteen hours after that, he began compiling that segment of code as well.

And with that, he stood and stretched, letting out a contented groan as he was no longer used to remaining physically inactive for long periods of time. But now all that was left was to recompile the three segments of code and run it through the converter he had created, turning it into a program capable of adapting any medium or biological body it found itself in.

"It should be about time for the show to start, right, Nova?" he asked, waving his hand and teleporting to just a few hundred kilometers away from the simulated Sun, where he would watch as the predicted Carrington event began.

[Just a few hours now] Nova answered.

"Is that Earth time or simulation time?"

[Simulation time, sir. You have impeccable timing.]

Aron nodded and turned his attention to the raging surface of the Sun.

Chapter 576

Meanwhile, around the Sun.

The detectors launched by the imperial space agency that had first discovered the signs of the impending disaster finally let out an alert as the sunspot stretched to the verge of breaking. Shortly after, with a flash of light, all of the detectors vanished as the eruption began.

A mass of nearly liquid hydrogen and helium the size of Earth was ejected from the sun in a 120 degree arc. Its velocity was such that it would reach Earth in just over twelve hours, and Mars about two and a half hours after that.

And all of it was being broadcast live to everyone in the solar system, courtesy of the imperial space agency.

...

Some people believed that, if something beyond their control was about to happen to them, it would be better if they were caught off guard by it. That way they wouldn't spend the time leading up to the event in anxiety and panic. "Ignorance is bliss," they claimed, and in a sense it was the absolute truth, because the moment one was notified of a crisis they could do nothing about, the panic would set in. That was why, in the face of crises in the past like pandemics, people would make some truly weird decisions... like buying all of the toilet paper in stores everywhere.

And now, everyone in the solar system was experiencing that sense of deep, visceral, hopeless terror while they awaited their devastation at the hands of the Sun and the knowledge that there was nothing they could do to stop what was coming.

The imperial space agency, in conjunction with the imperial press corps, was even doing everything they could to ensure that everyone could see what they thought was their doom approaching. There was a timer in the corner counting down to when the CME would arrive at Earth and end everything they knew, and the past eleven-and-a-half hours had seen people glued to their screens with a sense of morbid curiosity as expert after expert was paraded past their eyes, all of them virtually shoveling doom and gloom into viewers.

Some were questioning what the empire wished to achieve with the morbid spectacle. Was it just Nero playing the fiddle as Rome burned? Or was there some deeper meaning to it? Even people who were the proudest of their skepticism when faced with conspiracy theories were finding it difficult to believe that there wasn't some conspiracy behind the news coverage. Especially since the empire was going out of their way to sow anxiety, when previous governments would have put their best effort toward hiding the news as long as possible, then make herculean efforts toward keeping the people as calm as possible.

Most of the conspiracy theories died stillborn, though, as people were too busy discussing the kind of damage they could expect rather than the whys and wherefores of the empire's actions.

Thus, if the empire's aim was to incite fear and panic, it was becoming ever more obvious that their goal was being achieved... at least among a specific group of people.

…

A man in his thirties was watching the broadcast on a small TV that was suspended over a hospital bed. The TV was muted, so he had no idea what they were saying; he hadn't even bothered turning on the closed captioning. He was dressed in a sterile suit that covered him from neck to ankle, his shoes were covered in sterile booties, and on his head was a sterile cap and a face shield. His face was half covered by an n95 surgical mask and surgical gloves covered his hands. The only sounds in the room were the soft hissing and beeping of monitoring equipment.

On the bed was a woman with dozens of wires and tubes attached to her body. A PICC line connected her to a dialysis machine, a nasogastric tube was connected to a hanging bag of liquid food, and a dozen different wires attached to her chest connected her to the 12-lead EKG machine. Another wire ended on a probe that connected her fingertip to another machine, and a sphygmomanometer cuff was connected to the same machine as the fingertip probe. She had been intubated and was breathing via ventilator, and on her head was a tight-fitting cap that gathered data and displayed it on the screen of an electroencephalograph machine. Running from under her hospital gown was yet another tube, through which her waste flowed.

If one were to pick up the medical chart hung on the foot of her bed, they would see a bright orange sticker that read "DNR: DO NOT RESUSCITATE" and the diagnosis of end-stage multiple organ failure. Her prognosis was grim, to say the least, and she wasn't expected to survive the oncoming crisis.

Suddenly, the wail of a baby overpowered the sound of machinery and the man looked at the incubator next to the hospital bed, within which lay a prematurely delivered baby swaddled in a light blue blanket and wearing a matching beanie on his head.

The man crooned a soft melody and rocked the baby from side to side by pushing and pulling the incubator. "Don't worry little guy... mommy will be just fine. Shhh, shhh, shhh..." he continued, trying to soothe the baby that was barely bigger than his two palms combined.

That continued for a little over ten minutes before the baby ran out of energy and fell asleep again. The man drooped in his chair, obviously exhausted, and lay his head on the side of the woman's bed and gazed at her hand. He prayed for it to move, and... it remained still, just like the last thousand times he had prayed for her to show a sign of survival, some evidence that she was fighting for her life and hadn't given up yet.

His eyes moistened, then tears dripped on the blanket covering the woman and his shoulders shook in silent sobs. He wanted to wail at the top of his lungs and shout curses to the sky, but every time he was tempted to give in to that urge, he couldn't help but remember the premie that was currently struggling to survive, or the woman on the bed who was doing the same... he hoped.

Chapter 577

?"Babe," the man said with a choked sob. "I know you'd rather die than become an impy. I know what happened to your family in the war... but I can't do this by myself. I need you." He clenched her blanket in his fists, then used it to wipe his tears. On some level, he knew it could cause more problems, but a man drowning in an ocean of tears wouldn't fear the rain.

"It isn't just me, either. Our son, our son!" He sniffled back the snot that was about to drip out of his nose. "I can't do it alone! You need to live, not just for me, but for our son. He needs a mother, not a stepmother or a nanny. And you promised me forever!

"What happened, happened, but you can't punish our son for the mistakes of others. Your pride is punishing us, and for what? What did we ever do? Is it fair to punish us just so you can keep your pride? Is it fair to make us feel the pain of losing you? The people you're angry at don't even know who you are! You're just a number to them... but you're everything to us!"

He broke down in silent sobs again, doing his best to choke them back to avoid disturbing the premie in the room.

After a few minutes of silent sobbing and sniffling, he continued, "Why did you have to create a beautiful life with me if your pride would just force you to punish me and your son? He never asked for any of this. He didn't ask to be brought into this world only for you to leave it out of spite and your misplaced pride!"

There was another long pause, as if the man was struggling to come up with a way to say the words he needed to speak. Minutes passed like that before he turned to his son. He gazed at the boy that had been born ten weeks too early when his wife's health made it too risky to keep the pregnancy, but too late to terminate it without making everything worse. His eyes were filled with love and pity as he gazed at the too-small infant in the incubator.

A sense of resolve came over him then, and his shuddering stopped as he turned to his dying wife. "I've done everything I can to honor your wishes, my love." He caressed her forehead with a gloved hand, grasping one of hers with his other hand. "But the Sun has made its decision. If I don't do anything now, you'll die... and I can't let that happen.

"So for once, I'm going to be selfish. For me and for our son."

After he said that, he took one last long look at his wife and son, then stood and walked out of the room. He passed through the airlock and took off his sterile outer clothing, revealing the t-shirt and jeans he was wearing under them. Then he opened the locker next to the airlock door, took out his phone, and, as if he had granted himself permission, dialed 000.

The line only rang once before it was picked up. "Imperial immigration agency, how may I help you?" the voice on the other end asked.

With trembling hands, the phone to his ear and took a deep breath. "My name is Sunday Khan, and I officially request imperial citizenship for me and my family."

The phone call continued for a few minutes as Mr. Khan provided all the details the imperial immigration agency required.

"Mr. Khan, I've dispatched a recovery team for your family and am in the process of notifying the hospital to expect their arrival. Please stand by for our team, the expected arrival time is in... approximately eighteen minutes. Do you have any other questions, concerns, or needs?" the immigration agent asked.

"No, as long as my family can live a healthy life, I'll be satisfied, thank you."

"Excellent. We look forward to having you as imperial citizens," the agent said, then fell silent as it was only his third day on the job and he didn't quite know what to say in this particular situation. "Well, uhh... goodbye then, and good luck!"

With that, the agent ended the call.

Sunday closed his eyes and clasped his phone between his hands. He raised it to his forehead, as if in prayer, and said, "Whatever happens when you wake up, whatever you want, I'll accept. Even if you want to divorce me, I'll accept it. At least you'll be alive to hate me." He closed his eyes, feeling like a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

A few minutes later and a whole lot lighter, he opened his eyes and looked at the television screen in the waiting room that was still tuned to the coverage of the incoming disaster. The timer on the bottom corner of the screen still showed six hours to the end. "So this is what they were after..." he muttered to himself, then slumped in the chair he was sitting in and laughed at his own powerlessness.

Similar scenes were playing out all over the world, or at least in the non-imperial areas of the world, anyway. The more fear people felt, the more firm their decisions to join the empire became. Some even threatened to abandon their more stubborn relatives who were steadfast in not joining the empire under any circumstances, even the impending death and destruction they were sure to face.

...

Imperial palace, three hours before the event.

"How's the situation coming?" Minister Rogers asked.

[As expected, Minister Rogers. Millions of noncitizens have already requested citizenship, and millions more are rushing to do so. We've had to activate the VI system to process all of them, and we expect that as we come closer to the shockwave, the numbers will grow exponentially. Other than neo-luddites and people with firm religious beliefs, we expect that the majority of pre-imperial remnants will request citizenship before the CME impacts Earth.

[The only ones who'll still refuse will be hardliners, and we'll require alternative methods of dealing with them. I have some ideas and will put it on the agenda for the next council meeting. But for now, things are progressing according to plan] Gaia reported.

"Excellent. For a unified Earth," Jeremy said, wishing he wore glasses so he could push them up the bridge of his nose like his favorite anime schemers.

Time inexorably ticked on, and soon the countdown timer on every screen in the world reached zero.

There was no Earth-shattering kaboom, no mushroom cloud of devastation, no blast radius, nothing. In fact, it was rather beautiful as an aurora spread from Earth's magnetic poles that could be seen as far as the equator. On the dark side of the planet, night became day, and on the day side of the planet, the day became just a little bit more gorgeous as the aurora spread to the backdrop of transformers fizzling out and electrical appliances that hadn't been unplugged shorting.

Almost every electrical appliance outside the empire fizzled out into uselessness as Earth suffered a planetwide ɓnovel.cѳm

Chapter 578

The fallout from the EMP was relatively small, considering that it only really affected a minority of the population. It also helped that the empire hadn't been caught off guard and had had time to prepare. Thus, the damage was relatively minor, only in the billions of END. And most of that was the damage to old "legacy" versions of their tech, as anything that had been released over the past six or eight months had been well shielded and hardened to resist EMP attacks. Even civilian tech was the same.

As for the electrical grid, that had been shielded from the very beginning. Thus, nothing connected to it faced any issues due to surges in the grid itself. Still, as part precaution and part political theater, the imperial press agency had reminded imperial citizens to ensure that any electrical appliance was unplugged at the time the CME hit, and for at least two hours afterward in case of any residual effects.

However, the same couldn't be said for things that weren't reliant on the grid and couldn't simply be unplugged. Things like airplanes, cars, other vehicles, HAM radios, and so forth were still affected. Most of those were major purchases or passion projects, so they hadn't been replaced with newer hardware, as in the case of airplanes and vehicles, or they hadn't been made to the exacting standards of imperial hardware, such as in the case of hobby electronics or passion projects like RC vehicles and HAM radios.

That was where the majority of losses came from on the empire's side, as most of the citizens' hardware had already been upgraded to the newer, more protected versions.

But the same couldn't be said for noncitizens. Other than religious luddites like the Amish, Mennonites, and some Hutterites, or the small tribes that hadn't even come into contact with modern technology like the Sentinelese, the rest of the world was severely impacted. Power grids were overloaded, generators failed—and in some cases, exploded—hospital life support turned into impromptu electroshock therapy devices, and even the so-called "hardened" military technology, like toughbooks, turned out to be not so impervious to EMPs as non-imperial scientists and researchers had claimed during the development and bidding processes.

But as hundreds of millions of people had finally caved and joined the empire, leaving only a little over a hundred million or so noncitizens, the effective damage was limited. Most of it, ironically, was environmental damage caused by shorts and surges. Minister Al-Mutairi had reached out through the imperial diplomatic corps with an offer to aid in extinguishing the roaring wildfires and helping with the recovery efforts, but other than the Russians, who were still led by Vladimir, most of the remnants declined the offer. Some rather more politely than others.

Still, the remnants had been chokeslammed back to before the industrial revolution and a lot of effort would be required to lift them back to what passed for modernity to them. And that was something that Aron wasn't willing to do.

To prevent accidents and limit the loss of life to the greatest degree, the empire had issued a shelter in place order for all imperial citizens beginning three hours before the CME hit Earth. They also, through the Ministry of the Exterior, asked the remnants to do the same. And to limit the damage to the economy, the empire also promised to allow citizens to trade in any damaged goods for identical items, or for partial credit toward more advanced versions of the same things.

The shelter in place order was quite effective for the empire. They suffered almost no casualties at all; only a few hundred people had ignored the order and most of them even survived. But the same couldn't be said for the remnants, who died in the millions when their pacemakers shorted in their chests or their hospital life support electrocuted them to death. And, at least outside of mixed cities where impies and remnants lived side by side, the material losses were almost total.

Basically, there were two outcomes of the Carrington event. Even though it had affected the entire planet, the humans living there were either completely unscathed or completely obliterated. There was no in between.

…

Two weeks later.

[Your Majesty, the crime rate has been on the rise over the past week. Especially remnant-on-citizen crime] Gaia reported during Aron's weekly update meeting with her, where she gave him a high-level briefing on events around the world.

"I have a wedding in a month," he groaned. "Can't the police handle crimes by now?" Though he said that, he knew that if it was important enough to be included in his weekly briefing, it wouldn't be an easy problem to solve.

[We've caught most of them, yes. But it's difficult, as the remnants are all anti-empire hardliners and are more than willing to shelter the criminals and help them escape. Naturally, we catch the ones who do that, but... solving the problem at its root is proving much more difficult.

[The remnants were virtually crippled by the recent Carrington event. They're suffering hardships they weren't prepared to deal with. Food shortages are practically reaching the level of famines, lack of transportation, lack of waste management, electricity, running water... they were basically catapulted back to the early twentieth century in terms of technology and are having severe difficulties adjusting to the new normal.

[And when you consider that most remnants can see our citizens living in virtual luxury compared to them, it becomes understandable that they're upset. No matter how many of them we arrest, more just crop up and act out against us, whether because they're jealous or because they're forced to by starvation or disease.] Gaia threw the data file compiled by Nyx over to Aron.

He quickly scanned the file and asked, "What's the damage estimate so far?"

[Mostly property damage, with a few injuries. The injuries are easily fixed, but the property damage is... less so. And it's increasing as articles are published in newspapers, social media, and broadcast media. As you know, with tensions rising, it's like we've been put in a pressure cooker with the valve stuck. Adding in the wild card that is blessings...]

"And all it'll take is a single incident to trigger a pseudo-race war," Aron finished for Gaia.

"What are we doing about it?" he asked.

[The imperial police agency has increased the number of patrol ships, but it's a bandaid patch at best. Police are reactive by their very nature, and they can only catch the criminals either in, or after the act. Prevention is impossible for them, but it's the only cure.]

"I hope the situation resolves itself," Aron sighed and rubbed his temples. He could feel a headache coming on. "God help them if they do something I can't tolerate. If they push me that far..." He was far from as calm as he appeared on the surface. The damage report was already beginning to make him angry, but it was still manageable as no deaths had occurred... yet.

Although he had been as benevolent as he could since the founding of the empire, that didn't mean he was incapable of being ruthless. But people had short memories, and it was becoming obvious that they had already begun to forget what had happened during the Last War.

And though he hoped the police could deal with the rising crime rate, it didn't prevent Murphy from coming out swinging.

Chapter 579

As Murphy said, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and at the worst possible time. Just hours after Aron received his weekly briefing about the increasing crime rate, an event that would change his stance on the remnants began.

Former Somalia.

Sahro Hassan was sitting on a bench on the side of a street in Mogadishu, overlooking the ocean. The street itself was very clean, considering how much conflict the nation's capital had gone through. It had been through wars between warlords, pirate groups, terrorist attacks, and riots, all within the young man's memory.

But now, all the traces of destruction had faded and the city was, on the surface at least, at peace.

"Those were the good old days," he sighed, reminiscing on his early life. He had lived like a prince in Somalia's troubled times, as his father was not only a warlord himself, but also a high-ranking member of the terrorist group Al-Shabaab.

Those early years had shaped his personality, fostering an extremist interpretation of Islam that, through very convoluted and cherry-picked quotes taken out of context, justified the group's atrocities. So in his eyes, he was the proper owner of Somalia, now that his father and his men had been captured or killed by the empire.

After the empire took over, he had been left with just a house and a few other things that were under his name. The impies had confiscated everything else; thus, thanks to his corrupt religious belief and the lingering resentment over his father's capture, he took a very hardline stance against joining the empire with his mother.

Despite that, his life could still have been considered very good, thanks to the things he had, both open and hidden. But then doomsday had struck and destroyed some of his most precious things and fanning the flames of his jealousy-inspired hatred of the empire. Add to that, his mother had fallen ill and outright told him she wanted to become an impy so she could be treated.

However, due to their traditional leanings, he was the head of the household now that his father was gone. So he strictly forbade his mother from joining the empire, as, to him, that would be a betrayal of everything his father and his "religion" stood for. If she died, she died, and he would consider her just one in a long, long line of martyrs and receive her rewards in paradise.

As he was reminiscing, he noticed a small white shuttle with a bright red cross painted on the side flying over him. That wasn't an uncommon sight, lately, but this one had caught his attention because it was flying overhead in the direction of his house and slowing down. He turned and watched it as it landed on his front lawn, then four people disembarked. Two of them were wearing white coats and guiding a hovering stretcher between them, and the other two were ARES troopers in full armor, acting as guards for the medical team.

The two in the white coats walked into his house, accompanied by one of the guards, while the other guard stood ramrod straight outside the front door of Sahro's house. And before the young man could even react, the medical team exited the building with his mother on the stretcher, an oxygen mask on her face.

The medical team and their guards boarded the shuttle and it lifted off seconds afterward. The entire process had happened so fast that Sahro hadn't been able to react. By the time he reached his house, he found himself silently standing in front of the open front door, his body slightly trembling.

After standing in silence for a few minutes, he clenched his fists so hard that his fingernails drew blood from his palms, then raised his eyes skyward and screamed his hatred aloud.

"First you took my father, and I could do nothing. I was powerless to stop you! But now you impy dogs stole my mother without my permission!?" he growled, his bloodshot eyes beginning to faintly glow red. His hair also began turning bright red, like the heart of a fire. "This place will BURN!"

He raised his bloody fists and shook them in the direction the shuttle had flown off. "You and that bitch who chose this world of sinners over paradise will regret this!" he shouted, then turned and looked at the bustling street, seething in anger. The empire had taken too much!

They had taken his father, they had taken his father's loyal men, they had taken his lavish lifestyle and his high status that made him untouchable. All of it was gone... gone! He had been forced to live like a rat, hiding and subsisting on the scraps of his life that once was. And now his mother, a woman that he'd had firmly under his control, had betrayed him and joined his enemies! She had taken the last of his honor and showed with her actions that he was unworthy, that he had failed, that he couldn't be the man his father once was.

In that instant of pain, rage, humiliation, and loss, he decided that if his mother didn't want paradise, he would take it from her as his first, and final, act of revenge.

He turned and slowly walked toward the beachside marketplace, his strides even and inexorable as wisps of fire rose from his eyes and the tips of his hair.

A massacre was about to begin.

…

Twenty seconds.

Not even half a minute later, the emergency response team arrived and found nothing but a sea of fire burning in an eerie silence. There were no screams, no crashing of collapsing buildings, no roaring of the flames. It was as if the fire itself had included sound with the rest of the fuel that normally allows blazes to exist.

Mogadishu wasn't a tiny city. With a population of nearly 2.5 million people before the Last War, it could even be considered a thriving metropolis. Of course, the population had steeply declined after the war, between the losses caused by the war, the mass arrests afterward, and then the general exodus of people who had chosen to join the empire, so it wasn't what it once was. Only a few dozen thousand people remained, leaving the rest of the city empty.

Thus, the emergency responders in the city weren't fully prepared to deal with a catastrophe of this level. They were on guard and sufficient for things like gas line explosions or power lines coming down, and of course, the regular gamut of things that first responders dealt with on a daily basis. But this... this was on another level.

Despite the immensity of the threat, the police, fire department, and ARES responded per protocol, calling for reinforcements from the nearest cube as they bathed the surrounding neighborhood in fire suppressant foam in an attempt to prevent it from spreading. Once reinforcements arrived, they would move in to suffocate the blaze in its entirety.

At the same time, hospital ships had been scanning for survivors and people trapped in the fire. But they found nothing.

Chapter 580

High Earth Orbit.

After cleaning up the debris in orbit following the Last War, the empire had launched a few thousand satellites of their own. And among them was a constellation of satellites dedicated to monitoring the movement of mana around Earth. After all, it was a new discovery, so they needed to know how it worked and why, so it was worth studying. And as an added benefit, the empire had gained the capability to track the changes mana caused in its surroundings.

Currently, seven of the satellites responsible for monitoring mana were sending alarms to the staff of the imperial space agency.

…

Central Command, Ceres Station.

The imperial space agency had a dedicated secure section of the dwarf-planet-turned-space station, and their central command was based there. They were responsible for monitoring every imperial asset in space—barring the ARES and NIS assets, each of which had their own monitoring stations. As reliable as the VIs that ran the satellite networks were, and as much as they trusted Panoptes, they still maintained their own monitoring staff.

Even though the staff joked about being nearly as useful to the empire as an appendix was to a single human being, they still took their jobs seriously. They were the ones who had verified the information about the recent Carrington event and triggered the news going up the chain of command to the emperor.

The staff always came to work ready to receive all of the bad news and were, by and large, serious and dour-faced men and women. There was always something happening in the solar system that required their intervention, and because of that hectic, busy schedule, they only spent three days a week on the monitors themselves. The other two workdays were spent filtering and sorting the reports from other shifts.

And that day, things were going as usual, until an alarm whooped from the speakers in the room and yellow lights began flashing to grab their immediate attention.

*Extreme use of mana within habitable areas detected [Damage: Medium] [Situation: Orange*

"Now that's new," the shift chief said as he read the notification. It was the first time there had been a mana-related orange situation alert.

"Fuck..." he muttered when he switched his monitor to a live satellite feed of the situation. Goosebumps popped up all over his body as he continued, "Pass this directly to the relevant agencies."

{Report sent,} the AI replied almost as soon as the chief finished speaking. It knew best which agencies and departments would need the information.

"Which department did you send it on to?" the chief asked, curious as to which agencies would be responsible for acting on it. The more he knew, the better he could do his job in the future.

{The first responders on scene, imperial blessings agency, imperial police agency, and ARES,} the AI reported.

"What's ARES supposed to do about a civilian situation?" the chief asked. It was the first time he had heard of the military being brought into a civilian matter. Normally, the police were plenty to handle any issue that cropped up.

{ARES is listed as the correct agency for an incident on this scale,} the AI answered.

"Oh, okay."

The chief returned to his normal work; the universe wouldn't take the day off just because something weird happened on Earth, though he did make a mental note to check up on the situation as it unfolded.

…

At the hidden joint ARES-NIS base, a single yeet pod detached from one of the arms and oriented itself in a specific direction. It fired a deorbit burn, then fell completely silent as it dropped toward the surface. Its target? Mogadishu.

…

"How's the evacuation going?" the local Mogadishu police chief asked the emergency coordinator, who was standing next to him.

"We've fully evacuated a radius of a kilometer and we're in the process of pushing out the cordons. But we still need to figure out a way to stop this fire from spreading, since it seems to be able to burn our firefoam," the coordinator replied.

"Silver linings, I suppose. At least we're ahead of it... for now. Keep me updated," the chief said, then turned his attention back to the eerily silent fire and its slow, but steady spread.

The chief was alerted by a flashing icon in his glasses, indicating a virtual meeting he needed to join. He blinked the icon away and joined the meeting, which was in progress.

"Okay. Time to spitball. What do you all think is happening, and how can we deal with it? If the fire keeps spreading like this, it won't be more than another hour and all of Mogadishu will be gone," the head of the emergency response task force asked from his virtual control room.

"We've run out of normal methods to stop it. Firebreaks don't work, firefoam doesn't work, water doesn't work... hell, we even tried flooding the area with halon. Everything seems to just contribute to the spread, so we were forced to stop and evacuate, since the more things it burns, the faster it spreads. We need to either deal with the awakener who triggered it or starve the area of mana," the representative of the imperial blessings agency suggested.

"We haven't picked up any life signs on our scans, which means there's nothing living in that blaze. So how can we deal with the person if we can't even find him or her?" the task force leader asked.

"There's two possibilities. Either the awakener died and the fire is feeding on the mana in its surroundings, or he's reached an understanding of fire mana that lets him literally become the flame. They're both equally unlikely, but once you rule out the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth," the representative explained.

"That makes sense. If the awakener turned himself into fire, it explains the lack of life signs in the blaze. So we should widen the scope of our life sign scan to the entire fire to confirm or rule out that possibility. If we can rule it out, it means this was accidental and isn't being maliciously controlled, which should make it easier to deal with... at least in theory," another aide interjected.

"Okay, let's—" the task force leader began, but was interrupted by an incoming communication.

"This is QRF Bravo inbound, requesting field clearance."

Before anyone could respond, everyone in the meeting got a direct message from the heads of their agencies ordering full cooperation with the incoming vessel.

The task force leader sighed in relief; the entire incident had been a shitshow from start to finish and he would be happy to let someone else take charge of it. He had done his best.

He opened up a wide channel and ordered, "This is task force command. Clear the field for classified ops."

Chapter 581

The yeet pod fell through the atmosphere, its pitch black radar-absorbent paint contrasting against the fireball created by reentry. It was perfectly targeted at the center of the active fire, and if one were to look from above, it would look like it was flying directly into the Sun.

Soon, it smashed into the fire and disappeared from sight. The eerily silent blaze showed no changes, nor was there any sound of impact. But the yeet pod didn't care about any of that and the machine contained within immediately got to work.

The emergency workers watched as a pale, milky-white dome spread until it covered the entire area that was on fire. Then the flames began retreating, slowly at first, then faster and faster until it neared the center. The blaze, however, began fighting back at that point, wavering between invisibility and solidity as the dome starved it of mana.

About five minutes later, the blaze lost its final fight. It'd drained all of the mana captured in the dome to fuel itself, and the fuel had finally run out. The remnant wisps of flame gathered together in the shape of a human, then flared up with a bright yellow flash before the light faded and left a young man lying on the ground, naked and unconscious.

The ground around him looked like it had been transplanted directly from hell; it was charred to a reflective black sheen, the only imperfections the cracks that radiated from the crater the yeet pod had left when it impacted the surface.

"That's a spicy creme brulee," one of the onlookers muttered in an attempt to brighten the mood.

Within seconds, the emergency response task force vehicle drew the unconscious young man into its transport hold, where the police placed him in a stasis pod before the pilot brought the shuttle on course for The Hole.

Meanwhile, the rest of the emergency responders looked around, lost. Their SOP would normally be to look for survivors. If they couldn't find survivors, their task would then become collecting and identifying remains. But "the book" never mentioned what to do in the case where there was just... nothing. No survivors, no remains, no buildings, and no ruins of what used to be buildings.

There was just nothing there.

...

Aron sighed, watching the entire process unfold. The sigh was a mix of disappointment and anger that he was struggling to control. He took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of his nose. "What's the casualty count?" he finally asked after mentally counting to ten.

{1,764 imperial citizens and 432 remnants died. 764 imperial citizens and 231 remnants were injured and are currently receiving treatment at the emergency aid station the first responders set up,} Nova answered.

"And what do we know about the awakener that caused the incident?" he asked. The answers would determine what action he would take as the leader of the empire.

Nova threw him a data file on one Sahro Hassan and he read through it as she dictated the important highlights. The file also contained the brain data scan that had been uploaded when Sahro was put in stasis, including the reasoning behind his suicidal attack.

Aron took his time reading the data file, tapping his desk with his finger. Nova remained quiet and waited for him to finish his thought process.

The silence stretched for more than thirty minutes before Aron finally asked, "How many remnants are there, total?"

{102,321,568. That's everyone who hasn't accepted imperial citizenship, including the primitive tribespeople that aren't in contact with the rest of humanity,} she said.

"How many of them are awakeners?"

{4,203,857 of them, sir. 1,385,714 of them have undergone our basic training program and the rest of them declined.}

"Schedule a meeting of the inner council," Aron said in a grim tone. "I have ideas on how to deal with the problem, but... I'm not in the right headspace to make a final call."

{What are your thoughts, sir?} Nova asked.

"Australia," he replied.

{Australia, sir?}

"Yes. Australia. You know how it started, right?"

{The British Empire exiled... oh. You're thinking of internment camps?}

"Mhm." Aron nodded. "But if we keep them on Earth, it won't solve the problem. And it would take a few months, maybe a year, before we could get a habitable dome ecosystem set up on, say... one of Jupiter's moons."

{Matrix protocol then, sir? I thought we discarded that plan as unfeasible.}

"That's why I need to call a meeting of the inner council. Right now, if I was forced to choose, I'd either just kill them all or enact the matrix protocol."

{And that would be counterproductive either way. People don't take kindly to disappearing entire populations, nor are they fond of genocide. Understood, sir. I'll schedule the council meeting for tomorrow, Earth time, and give the council members a heads up on what'll be discussed there. That should give them enough time to come up with solid ideas.}

"And it won't give the problem enough time to continue spreading out of control. That Hassan kid was one hell of a wakeup call, and I don't fancy the damage control we'd have to do if we don't act fast enough." Aron leaned back in his chair and went back to pinching the bridge of his nose and his brows, trying to prevent an incipient headache from worsening.

Nova began massaging Aron's headache away, then changed the subject. {Are your wedding plans coming along, sir?} she asked, despite knowing full well that everything was going just swimmingly with the wedding planning and preparations.

She continued massaging Aron's head as they discussed much lighter topics until his headache disappeared and he put the events of the day out of his mind.

...

The response to Sahro Hassan's terrorist attack wasn't received nearly as well by the empire's citizenry. Over the past few weeks, tensions between citizens and noncitizens had been rising just as fast as the remnant-on-impy crime rate, if not faster. And once the media released the information they had on the attack, both sides had found a rallying point.

If the empire didn't respond soon, the two sides might just take things into their own hands.

Chapter 582

Emperor's council chamber, the simulation.

"I agree with His Majesty. The remnants will continue being a problem and causing trouble as long as they're still on Earth," John said.

Aron had begun the meeting by giving his ideas on what should be done with the noncitizens, as Operation Boiling Frog wasn't working nearly as well as he'd thought it would.

"But where can we send them?" Minister Rogers asked.

Eventually, all of Earth would be populated entirely by imperial citizens and government functionaries, so isolating the noncitizens on an island or something would just be kicking the proverbial can down the road. Sure, "future them" would have more options to deal with them, but Jeremy was of the firm opinion that curing a disease was much better than simply treating its symptoms.

"There's a lot of moons in the solar system. Hell, Jupiter has 79 of them and we're still discovering more that count as moons. And Saturn has even more! I mean, we could also just draft them into ARES and stick them on Mars, too. Our 'retraining' program is highly effective, after all. And that would even save us the cost of building a habitat for the ungrateful fuckers," Minister Al-Mutairi suggested.

"But if you want my suggestion, I think we should go even farther afield. Even just having them in the solar system is a risk, 'retraining' or not. So I'm sure we could find a habitable planet out there somewhere that doesn't have any sapient inhabitants on it already," he continued.

Aron nodded in thought. He already knew of quite a lot of habitable, yet uninhabited planets in the Milky Way, and he was sure that was what Youssef was hinting at. The inner council members were among the very few who knew that the simulation covered the entire galaxy, not just Earth and Lab City. And Minister Al-Mutairi was very good at office politics; he had an absolute talent for giving people ideas while letting them think they were the ones that came up with them.

"If we pick a habitable star system—or even better, more than one so we can send them out with the minimum number of people to make a colony succeed—it should be very far away. That way it reduces the chances of them coming back and causing problems later... especially if we limit the tech we send them out with. Besides, they can be kept in stasis for the trip, that way it'll just feel like the blink of an eye for them even if centuries pass in transit," John agreed. He was all for limiting the size of the initial colonies as well; it would increase the number of generations the noncitizens would have to grow before they even had the numbers to start provoking an interstellar fight.

{There are other options, you know,} Nyx said. {Humankind has a long history of internment camps, where they rounded up so-called 'undesirable' elements of society and put them all in one area. Hitler had concentration camps for the Jews, America had internment camps for Japanese-Americans, Trump rounded up 'illegal immigrants' and put them in cages. Joe Arpaio's tent cities, and so on.

{We could also just send in the LEAs and ARES to forcefully round them all up and stick them in pods to brainwash them into perfect little cogs in the imperial machine.

{And if none of that works for you, we could always just kill them all.}

The words coming out of the petite AI's mouth brought goosebumps to the humans in the room. Nyx tended to the extreme to begin with, but "just kill them all" was a whole new level of crazy, even for her.

That said, all Nyx was doing was saying the quiet part out loud. Everyone else in the room had had the same idea at first. But they had all discarded it, recalling Aron's stance on genocide in general and how fragile the underpinnings of the empire still were even to that day. Thus, nobody had suggested it in the first place.

{What... did I say something wrong?} Nyx asked, her head tilted to the side as if she was genuinely confused.

Aron gave Nyx the side-eye and pinched the bridge of his nose as he sighed, "Isolating them sounds fine on paper, but it wouldn't work in reality. They'd just use it to gain the sympathy of citizens and cause different problems.

"And brainwashing would be entirely too obvious. People don't change like that. They aren't AIs who can just modify a segment of their code to exhibit different behaviors. So if the remnants just wake up one day as hardcore supporters of the empire, everyone would immediately jump to brainwashing as the cause.

"Plus, it would jeopardize far too many other things, as well as basically admit that we treat peoples' memories, personalities, and thoughts the same way we treat hard drives on a computer. From then on, absolutely no one would trust the empire at all, since there would always be the question of whether or not we brainwashed them into believing in us in the back of their minds.

"Besides, I don't want to needlessly kill people. Killing is reserved for only when it's absolutely necessary as a last resort."

{I was just giving you my ideas...} Nyx grumbled.

Everyone went silent as they considered Aron's words, and the silence stretched on for a few minutes.

Youssef was the first to break it, saying, "And even if we completely put aside all of those arguments against treating them like that, there's still an entirely logical reason to isolate them. We should make good use of them, and I see an opportunity in this situation.

"For the sake of argument, let's say the incoming visitors are indeed hostile. Thus, we need to plan for the worst-case scenario, which is," he nodded at John, "that the empire loses the fight against them. If we keep the remnants here, or even in the solar system, they'd be wiped out right along with us. Assuming we even kept them alive in the first place.

"You see, humanity is a bunch of eggs, and Earth is just one giant basket. Right now, all of our eggs are in that one basket, so if the visitors come in and blow it up, we lose everything. But by pushing our diaspora plans forward and sending out colonies to multiple destinations across the entire galaxy in generation ships, then humanity as a species will definitely survive.

"Will some of those colonies fail? Sure. Maybe a lot of them will, and maybe even most of them. But there'll still be some that survive, and ensuring the survival of our species is the best posterity that any emperor could ever ask for."

With that, everyone else in the room fell silent and looked at Aron. It was obvious that his council had come to a consensus on how to deal with the noncitizens.

Aron tapped his fingertip against the table in front of him as he thought, shifting plans and extrapolating possibilities. Eventually, his finger stopped tapping and he said, "Agreed. Let's begin the diaspora."

The meeting continued for a short while as the council put together a plan to "encourage" people to go out and colonize the stars. But one thing was certain: whether they wanted to or not, the remnants would definitely be among those boarding the first wave of colony ships.

Chapter 583

The imperial press agency released news that Aron would soon be addressing the world regarding the current situation and his plan for moving forward after the recent Carrington event. The announcement was broadcast by the imperial news agency, then picked up by every other media organization and rebroadcast on their own channels. Not that it mattered much, since outside the empire, very few people still had working televisions, radios, or other electronic devices.

To counter that, the press corps took a page from the industrial revolution and sent LEAs to every corner of every street where people lived and parroted the announcement. They even went so far as to generate large holographic screens to broadcast the information. It was telling that nobody really reacted to the gratuitous display of the empire's advanced technology other than a collective "meh".

Still, everyone made plans to gather around the LEA nearest to them the following day to watch Aron's broadcast live. To them, the empire was between a rock and a hard place, as everyone had a different expectation of the emperor. Thus, it would be impossible to meet all of them.

Some people, for example, wanted the empire to go full fascist. Not only would it solve the problem of rising supervillain crimes, but it would also prove that the empire truly was an evil organization and thus satisfy their need to be correct.

On the other end of the spectrum, however, were those who wanted incidents to be treated as isolated events. "It was only one bad apple, an independent event," they believed, and felt that compassion, education, and preventative treatment would go all the way in curing the problem at its root.

Those people, it must be said, were also the kind of people who believed that changing their profile pictures on social media would somehow solve problems, or that thoughts and prayers had the ability to end problems and cure suffering.

But while those were the two extreme ends of the spectrum, opinions and expectations among everyone fell somewhere in the middle. Most people had no idea what could be done, nor did they really think anything COULD be done to resolve the problem. They made up the silent majority of noncitizen sentiment, and most had simply decided to wait and see how things played out.

...

The next day.

Imperial citizens had clustered around their televisions, phones, computers, and so on as they awaited the emperor's announcement. And noncitizens had gathered on every street corner, the atmosphere of a block party beginning to permeate the crowds. Some of the more entrepreneurial among them had even set up stalls and were selling snacks and drinks as well.

After all, most noncitizens were still accustomed to general incompetence when it came to governments trying to resolve problems faced by "the little guys", so they were taking things with a grain of salt and trying not to get their hopes up. The only reason they were even paying attention at all was because, over its short history, the empire had displayed an ability to handle situations that any previous government would have folded under.

Time slowly passed, then finally, the holographic screens appeared above the LEAs again, this time showing Aron's usual stage and podium. Soon, he walked into view and took his place behind the podium to begin his address.

"Greetings to all of humanity," he began, nodding his head.

"Yesterday, the city of Mogadishu was struck by a terrorist attack perpetrated by a young superhuman. It was the first of its kind, and showed exactly how much damage a determined person with superpowers could inflict upon their surroundings in a relatively short amount of time.

"More than two thousand people died. Imperial citizen or no, they were all brothers, sisters, parents, and friends to other people. They were all human, and their loss deeply saddens Us.

"Over the last few months, ever since the event that... enhanced the Three Percenters, We have been devising strategies and making plans to deal with the inevitable chaos that the blessings would cause. And Our strategies and plans have worked. At least for imperial citizens, anyway.

"In Our empire, We directed the imperial blessings agency to implement schools and training facilities that teach Our blessed to control their blessings, and that training also instills in them a pride in humanity and a drive to serve their fellow man. It teaches them to be heroes and use their newfound power to better Our people and Our world, the cradle of humankind.

"We also, as a form of outreach, reached out to the blessed among noncitizens and offered them the same training. We offered to teach them to control their blessings, to bring light into the darkness, and to strive to make all of humanity better. And the outreach was working—roughly a third of noncitizen blessed took Us up on Our offer and enrolled in the imperial training program. Or hero academies, if you prefer.

"But sadly, not everyone was as determined to work for the betterment of humanity and the survival of the species." Aron's expression grew solemn and grave, and he grasped the edges of the podium in white-knuckled fists.

"And as you have likely already guessed," he continued, "the perpetrator behind the attack was one of the millions of blessed who turned away from Our outreach. He, through his own selfishness, greed, and lust for power, discarded his humanity and allowed his baser instincts to control him and his actions.

And as a result of his decision, he lost control of his blessing and became the fire he intended to release, an accident that would have been completely prevented had he simply chosen to learn to use his new power."

Aron paused to let that sink in, a slight frown on his face as his piercing gaze stared out at everyone watching his address around the world.

"That failure, people of Earth, is on Us. It is Our failure to do what is necessary, Our tolerance that allowed someone like him to act.

"Ever since We founded the Terran Empire, We have gone to extreme lengths to accommodate everyone. We allowed individual choice to dictate whether or not you joined Our empire, believing in the inherent goodness of humanity. We believed that, should Our empire simply continue to offer you all better, more comfortable lives, that you would eventually come to Us.

"And We made that conscious decision despite having the ability and power to simply force you all to join Us and unite humanity that way, rather than take the time for you to come to the decision to join of your own free will.

"Because what you all seem to have forgotten is that Our empire was formed due to necessity. Humankind simply cannot afford to squabble among ourselves anymore, not with the possibility that the approaching outsiders will be hostile to Our species.

"We tried peacefully uniting humanity. But the reward for Our efforts were greedy, selfish, incompetent world leaders that, in their lust for power and benefits, initiated a war with Us that would have destroyed what We needed to protect. Those same leaders are the ones that launched tens of thousands of nuclear weapons—enough to destroy the world dozens of times over—because We chose to be soft. We desired peace, therefore We acted with that peace in Our mind, Our heart, and Our hands.

"And We continued that desire for peaceful resolutions even after forming Our empire. We offered you the choice, and We gave you all the time you felt you needed to make that decision. But now, it has become obvious that a time limit must be imposed. And that limit passed when a young man, out of his own malice, killed thousands of his fellow human beings by throwing a superpowered tantrum.

"The Terran Empire maintains jurisdiction over Our citizens, making it easy to combat crime and offer everyone within Our borders—both physical and otherwise—a high standard of living. We have no rising crime, no unemployment other than by choice, no poverty. Everyone in Our empire can live free of most worries, safe in the assurance that they will be protected.

"And with the widening gap between imperial and non-imperial citizens comes jealousy. Noncitizens have been allowed to mingle with citizens, fostering resentment and hate when it should birth the desire to join the empire. And for that, you have Our deepest apologies.

"But that situation ends today. Because, in order to face the incoming aliens, humanity MUST stand united. However, due to the law that binds Us from taking more draconian measures and enforcing compliance, We cannot simply declare all of humanity under Our purview.

"That said, though, We can most certainly choose to separate the two populations.

"Therefore, beginning immediately and henceforth, We declare all noncitizens exiled from Our empire's borders. To protect the freedom of choice and expression that people demanded of Us during the founding of Our empire, We will begin enforcing an exodus from Our imperial territory and will be providing all noncitizens transport to their own place. A place where you can live in peace, knowing that you will no longer have to suffer the inequality of the factional divide of humanity. A new Australia, if you will.

"You have made your bed. Now lie in it."

Chapter 584

[A/N Please rewrite chapter 572 as it was replaced after the original one uploaded was an unedited version. Sorry about that]

Aron remained silent for a few minutes, simply staring out of the holographic screens with his piercing gaze. Then, just when people began to wonder if the broadcast had frozen, he sighed and continued in a much calmer tone, "While the diaspora is mandatory for non-citizens, We offer Our citizens a choice. You may choose to sign up for the colonization effort and join in the diaspora of humankind. We realize that not everyone can, or is willing to, pick up a weapon or don the white lab coat of a researcher. And you shouldn't be forced to do so.

"Protecting this solar system, the cradle of humanity, is an important task, yes, and ensuring that humanity survives every storm that heads this way is indeed the duty of every human. But not everyone is a fighter, or cut out to contribute to the scientific advancement of the species. Not everyone is needed to farm, or other supporting tasks like that, and that's perfectly alright.

"That is why We offer you the choice to contribute in a different way, by spreading seeds of Our civilization across the galaxy such that at least one of them will take root and grow. Humanity is a resilient species. A tenacious species. An adaptable species. And spreading out is a solution."

Behind Aron, the backdrop changed to an image of Earth as seen from the moon appeared. Then the planet shrank as the image zoomed out, first to the Orion spiral arm, then to the entire galaxy, as seen from above the galactic ecliptic plane. From Earth's position, a pale blue color began spreading, slowly at first, but proceeding faster and faster as it spread until the entire galaxy was overlaid with that pale blue showing humanity's occupation.

"But know this: the trip will be one way and you likely won't be able to return in your lifetime. The colony ships We are building as we speak are designed for one-way journeys, at the end of which, they will land and become fortress cities. And for security purposes, no navigational data or astronomical data will be maintained in the database.

"You will be sent with all of the tools and technology you'll require to ensure that your colonies succeed to the best of Our ability. You will have access to all of the technology of the Terran Empire save only a few, none of which will negatively influence your colonies.

"The journeys themselves will be long. The planets We have selected are all over the galaxy and it'll take a minimum of a few decades, or perhaps even millennia, for you to reach your destinations. And there's no telling what'll happen to our solar system during your trip.

"The ships themselves weren't designed as generation ships. They're tough, durable, and will last the journey while the colonists inside will remain in stasis. So no matter how long the journey, to those undertaking it, it'll be just like going to sleep at night and waking up the next morning after the best sleep of your lives." Aron gave the people watching a knowing grin.

"To those who fear being sent to uninhabitable planets or already-inhabited star systems, you don't have to worry. Each of Our colony ships will carry scouting vessels that will scout your destination long before the colony ships arrive. And if Our database proves wrong, there are a number of backup locations chosen. The galaxy is a vast place and the number of planets that humanity can thrive on is in the trillions, so rest assured—you WILL have a home awaiting you at the end of your journey."

People watching the speech wondered how Aron knew that, but he definitely wasn't about to tell them of the true capabilities of the universal simulation.

"In order to ensure the greatest chances of success, the cubes have begun being repurposed into training centers, where everyone will be trained to survive, and even thrive, at your destinations. You will become experts in various fields, fields that align with your individual interests. The training program will give you all of the tools that you need in order to build, and maintain, a thriving society on the planet you've been assigned to in the colonization program.

"Over the next two months, registration will be open to imperial citizens as we build new facilities for your use. The ones We already have will suffice for the noncitizens who are undergoing the forced migration. The training, however, will be the same for everyone... after all, it would do no good to send people to the stars without giving them all the tools they need to thrive, regardless of citizenship. As We said earlier, this is mainly to ensure the survival of humanity, and no matter who you are or what you believe, you are all still human, at the end of the day.

"We understand that many of you who are being forced to leave your homes for the vast unknown reaches of the galaxy are going to be angry. We came to this decision after a very long process of deliberation and with the input of the best minds that humankind has to offer. Our ministers and scientists presented Us with many, many solutions, but this was the one that survived the winnowing process. It is the solution that will ensure your liberties for generations to come.

"You will be given the opportunity to create your own civilization, your own government, from the ground up. You'll have all of the opportunities that We had, and even more. You'll benefit from the advances in science and technology that We had to painstakingly create over the past two years since the empire's founding. And We know that a forced migration may appear brutal, but believe Us: it is the most merciful option that We had presented to Us.

"May your new homes be places where your dreams come true. We truly wish you the best."

Aron gave the viewers a small bow, then slowly faded until the stage and podium was empty. Then the image on the screens changed to the imperial seal before they went completely blank, and were finally turned off, the imperial address finally having come to an end.

And the public reacted.

Chapter 585

Recife City, in the north of pre-empire Brazil.

"May your new homes be places where your dreams come true. We truly wish you the best."

The people watching Aron's address on the holographic screens above the LEAs were stunned into silence. The tailgate party atmosphere instantly cooled down and became glacial, as everyone watching was stunned into silence.

The silence stretched for minutes in the audience's collective stare state, then a baby began fussing. The sound ignited the crowd, who collectively chose violence. They picked up sticks, rocks, pipes... one enterprising person even kicked over a stall and dismantled it through sheer rage and armed himself with a rather effective makeshift club.

Then the chaos began.

Chairs, sticks, pipes, rocks, and all kinds of other detritus rained down on the LEA, wielded by an angry mob. Thankfully, Aron had expected exactly that kind of reaction, so the LEAs merely remained standing and allowed themselves to be destroyed. The mob's rage was soon vented and they collectively fell to the ground, panting, and looked at the pile of scraps that had once been a piece of advanced imperial technology.

After admiring the pile of lightly smoking scrap for a while and catching their breath, they took to the streets and headed toward the cube on the outskirts of the city. But they had also already learned their lesson from the last few "protests" and restrained themselves, intent on only damaging the cube itself.

Adelaide, in the south of pre-empire Australia.

In contrast to the actions of most noncitizens around the world, the Australians maintained their party atmosphere. If anything, the partying grew even more intense, with keg after keg making their way to the impromptu block parties from nearby liquor stores and grocery stores.

The general mood was rather high, and all told, Australian remnants had a much better relationship with their "neighborhood impies" than most. Thus, when the mobs moved out, their goal was to drag their imperial friends out of their homes to join in the celebration. It wouldn't be the first time in the history of Australia that they had been forcibly emigrated, so by and large, they saw it as no big deal.

Besides, they had grown up on a continent that would qualify as a death world forbidden area among most of the civilizations in the galaxy. And even though they didn't know that—nobody on Earth had had any contact with any of those civilizations yet, after all—they still knew the wildlife that already existed on and around Australia, so they figured their new home wouldn't be any worse.

At least they wouldn't have to worry about being dragged into any more pointless wars that were fought over matters that didn't involve them, anyway. So on that front, their destination had at least one gigantic plus over their home on Earth.

Soon, the partying spread until practically the entire continent was inebriated to one degree or another. It only died down after it became apparent that the people had drunk the entire continent dry.

But as a completely unintended consequence, most of the imperial citizens in Australia had been talked into, or in some cases dared into, joining the Terran Empire's voluntary colonization initiative. If their friends talked them into joining them, they would request a spot on that specific transport to join them. And if they had been dared into joining the diaspora, they would also join the person that dared them, if only to show that they hadn't chickened out on their end of the bargain.

Australia's reaction to the news could thus be considered fairly unique, when compared to the violence spreading around the globe.

...

Imperial citizens, on the other hand, had a wide variety of reactions.

Though the prevailing majority of imperial citizens were rather dispassionate in their reaction, not having a dog in that particular race as it were, there were still a variety of responses by minority groups around the empire. Some were enraged by the highhandedness of the emperor, and were determined to protest the plan. Others were incited to sign up for the colonization initiative, either out of anger or excitement. And still more breathed a sigh of relief, as they had only recently joined the empire in order to survive the Carrington event of a few days before and still maintained their faith in their previous remnant governments.

Then there were those who were angry about the unilateral decision, but not angry enough to join protests. Instead, they became keyboard warriors and expressed their outrage on Pangea and other social media platforms, along with sending their thoughts, feelings, and prayers to those who were "the most affected by such a horrendous action on the emperor's part".

But for the silent majority, they just shook their heads and moved on with their lives. They didn't care about the news at all, and found the reactions of others to be rather silly. Hadn't they learned their lesson in any one of the recent protests? And as far as the social justice warriors, the majority felt that they simply didn't understand how the world worked.

Besides, the empire had already built up a proven track record of success in their endeavors, so most people just wished the soon-to-emigrate people well.

Thus, by number, the reaction of the empire could be said to fall along the lines of "not my circus, not my monkeys".

But of course, wherever there was one group with an opinion, there would always be another group that held the exact opposite opinion. So those people took to the streets and social media platforms to stage hastily conceived counterprotests, some of which grew violent. Medical response shuttles were a common sight in the sky for a few hours after Aron's address ended, but thanks to them, the casualties were mostly limited in scope and severity.

The imperial police agency had been informed of the expected mess ahead of the address, so they were already in position and waiting for the rioters to "storm" the cubes, or other imperial brick-and-mortar offices. The directive had long come down to let them vent their anger on the LEAs, then any who were still stubborn enough to actually reach imperial property were to be arrested and processed along with the rest who were to be shipped off to colonies across the galaxy. Citizenship was to not be a factor in anything; if they were angry enough to march, they would be shipped off whether they were a citizen or not.

Thus, a mass arrest began. No matter which side of the issue they were supporting, getting violent would not be tolerated and they would be arrested all the same.

Chapter 586

It took a bit more than six hours to fully quell the chaos, as the empire had been forced to focus most of its forces on angry awakeners at the beginning. The "Hero Academies" had yet to produce a graduating class, after all, which meant that non-awakened ARES members and reaper teams had borne the brunt of the awakeners' ire. Even those noncitizens that'd taken the empire's crash course on how to handle their new blessings had proven useless; some of them joined in the protesting, while the rest refused to aid either side.

At the end of the day, they were still in the group that was to be forcibly relocated, so that much, at least, was understandable. Aron could only thank who, or whatever, was watching over humanity for not having all of them join in the chaos and considered their noninterference a blessing. Even one noncitizen awakener going rogue could end up turning into another Hassan Event, and having millions of them doing that at the same time would almost definitely end poorly for humanity at large, much less the fledgling Terran Empire.

But thanks in large part to pappies, and in a much smaller part to headbags, the casualty count among the deployed ARES troopers had been kept relatively low, even in the face of rioting awakeners. Still, the non-awakeners had caused plenty of trouble while the rioting awakeners were being put down and transported to the cubes ahead of schedule. They, at least, would be segregated from the non-awakeners and the nonviolent awakeners and wouldn't get a chance to interact with anyone else before they woke up on their destination planets.

The prevailing opinion among them was that training, no matter how harsh and spartan, would be much better than the alternative. The Hole still had plenty of space for inmates, and forced migration also sounded like a much better, not to mention more humane, option than being drafted into prison battalions and sent directly to the front line of any conflict humanity found itself in. Even though, being awakeners, they would have an advantage in warfare, a life of constant battle interspersed with long stretches of stasis and training, sounded like a hellish existence to face.

Either way, once the awakeners had been arrested and transported to the nearest cubes, Aron, not to mention the rest of humanity at large, could wash their hands of them. Besides, it wasn't like more training would hurt them at all. In fact, it would even be good for them... especially since they were being put into the "Hero Program" track and would be subtly influenced by the training program that had been designed by the imperial blessings agency. And Nyx. Nyx had had a pretty big part to play in the training program designed to turn angry awakeners into heroes.

When she had approached the head of the agency, she'd laid out a convincing argument based on the long, long history of intelligence agencies and brainwashing. Thus, she set to her task with barely disguised glee, or at least a close approximation of that emotion; though she was still the most humanlike of any of Aron's higher-order AIs, there was still a thin barrier between her emulating emotions and actually feeling them.

As for the remaining noncitizens who were arrested during the protest, they were also put into pods. They formed a second segregated group that would also not be allowed to mingle with regular colonists and those who caused very little, if any, chaos during the protest. But again, it wasn't like more training would hurt them; on the contrary, it would help them quite a bit. It had always been a truism that ignorance breeds violence, and those who were being arrested during the protests upheld that in spades. Thus, the training they were about to undergo became the equivalent of the Job Corps program that the pre-empire United States used to run, where they would offer on-the-job training programs for people, then assist them with job placement upon graduating.

The imperial citizens who were arrested during the protests were detained pending trial. Though the likeliest option for them was to join the forced emigration, they would still be given their day in court to present a defense as to why they should remain on Earth, should they so choose. To streamline the trials, they were all given an option when they were first arrested: either "voluntarily" join the colonization effort, or be held in prison cells until their trial date, which could be as long as three months down the road.

Needless to say, most of them chose to join the exodus. At least there, they would have a hand in shaping their world and its social structure, unlike Earth. It hit home for some people watching from the sidelines as they realized that most of the citizens' anger was based in never having had the ability to determine anything for themselves.

Even in the US, which had touted itself as a haven of democracy, the people had only ever been given the illusion of choice. Every election turned into the same thing—it was like voting for cold turds on a paper plate or dried-up boogers on a silver platter. In the end, the people's voice had never mattered.

Still, the wave of arrests didn't mean that the protests had ended. Hundreds of millions of people were still protesting around the globe. But they were paying close attention to strictly following the guidelines and laws that not only allowed them to protest, but gave them guidelines on how to do so effectively. Not that they were difficult to follow, really; they pretty much boiled down to "don't hurt people, don't break things, don't demolish buildings, and don't start fires". Thus, the imperial police agency was mainly relegated to controlling the crowd to prevent trampling and such, or pulling people out of the mobs when they fainted.

Thus, although the number of protesters may have seemed alarming in a vacuum, the damage caused by them was actually minimal, not to mention mostly accidental.

Chapter 587

While the empire's military and law enforcement agencies were busy quelling the chaos incited by Aron's recent address, the ministry of the exterior was just as busy. Half an hour after Aron finished speaking, they released details of the colonization plan, including the destination star systems and breakdowns of the planets the migrants would be landing on. There were so many details that nobody thought it could possibly have been faked, though they did wonder just how the imperial space agency had managed to gather all of that information.

Every bit of information about the destinations was released, including the backup destinations and the backups of those backups. Accompanying it were details about the ships they would be sent on, the travel time they would take (though from beginning to end it would be spent in stasis), information on any threats—both detected and theorized—what kind of city the colony ships would become upon landing, the enhancements they would all receive in flight... Everything was made transparent and publicly released with great fanfare, and anyone who was curious could easily find it, written as it was in language that would be understandable to anyone.

Once they entered the training program, they would be placed in a simulated environment that mirrored what they would find at the end of their journey, assuming that they didn't have to use one of the backup options. Their training would give them "real" experience and allow them to acclimatize to their new environment in advance, giving them a leg up so that, upon arrival, they wouldn't need to waste the first few years getting accustomed to basic things, like the different number of hours in a day. The first few years after landing would be absolutely crucial, and the less time they needed to waste, the better.

Included in the information was a section on how imperial citizens could apply to join the diaspora and what the process would entail for them, since they weren't part of the forced migration. There was even already a website set up for them to apply, should they be interested in doing so.

And a few thousand people had immediately made that decision, for good or ill. Whether it was in protest or for bragging rights, or even genuine belief in the goal—that being survival of the species—all of them were met with the same warning in the very beginning of the application process. Once they submitted their applications, they would have their choice locked in and would be unable to retract it, even if they later changed their minds.

If they did change their minds, they would simply be shit out of luck; they would be arrested and forcefully dragged to the training centers whether they wanted it or not. It was a good reminder of the irrevocability of certain decisions that people make, yet people still made the decision with the belief that, surely, the warning was just that: a warning. There was no way in hell it would ever be enforced... or so they thought, anyway.

Thus, screenshots began populating social media with the hashtag #ISignedUp or #StandWithTheDisenfranchised, and many others. All of the screenshots were the same: ", you have successfully applied to join the colonization effort. Please stand by while your application is processed. You will be notified within 48 hours of the result of your application."

It was a simple acceptance screen, but it brought home the fact that the emperor, and by extension, the Terran Empire as a whole, was serious.

Beyond the first few thousand applicants, there were millions more imperial citizens poring through the colonization plans and the application itself, either for content creation or interest. Content creators posted videos and messages on social media platforms either in support of or hating on the program, while those who were interested were checking to see if the empire had indeed done their due diligence.

If the interested people felt they could thrive, as Aron had promised, then they would go through with the application process. And most of the millions of interested citizens felt that they could, so they put in their applications. Especially since, as imperial citizens, they were given the option to choose which colonies they wanted to go with. At least within reason, anyway, as there was still a limited number of slots in each colony. They would at least get preference over noncitizens, though, which was one of the differences between being forced to go and choosing to go.

Either way, the number of applications only continued growing over time, as people made their choices.

Aron also chose to extend an amnesty to those prisoners serving life sentences for crimes committed before the founding of the empire. Those who'd at first had no possibility of parole suddenly found themselves offered a new life on a new planet. Those serving sentences in excess of thirty years were also given the opportunity to join them in their new leases on life, but those who were awaiting execution or serving relatively short sentences of 29 years or less weren't given the same option.

Along with the extension of the human lifespan to two hundred years came with a new perception of "long" and "short" time, after all.

That said, there were relatively few death row inmates to begin with; the empire was nothing if not efficient. The only evidence they required to deny all appeals and hasten the legal process beyond all reasonability was a simple brain scan, and even as backed up as the justice system was, the process never took more than a month from trial to execution.

But almost every one of the prisoners serving life sentences, including the leadership of pre-empire countries, chose to accept the empire's offer and apply to join the diaspora. For them, there would be no downside. Upon being sent to prison, they had been given the same basic genetic enhancements that any imperial citizen received, which meant their life without parole had gone from perhaps twenty years to, in some cases, more than a hundred and fifty years.

Now, to not only be released, but to be given an opportunity to claw their way back into positions of wealth and power? In their minds, anyone that refused that offer was an absolute moron of the highest order.

However, what they DIDN'T know, or rather, what wasn't included in the information released by the ministry of the exterior, was that along with all of that training would come some very subtle subliminal reprogramming.

It wasn't anything too intrusive, though. The reprogramming was mainly to bolster their drive to survive and withstand the early years of their colonies. But it would also be reinforced that they would simply not want to return to Earth after they awoke, and they were directed to influence their descendants in the same way.

The programming wasn't generational, as Aron hadn't felt the need to buy genetic recall of any tier, but given that the first landing would be the one that shaped the new civilizations from the ground up, it shouldn't be an issue.

Chapter 588

While outside, the frantic chaos incited by news of both the forced migration plan and the imperial colonization signups was ongoing, a small number of people were holding a very important meeting. Aron, Rina, Felix, Sarah, and Aron and Rina's families had gathered to discuss the wedding, though it had weirdly taken a different turn with everything that was going on outside.

"Are the remnants really causing that much trouble?" Aron's father asked. He wasn't worried about anyone in the room with him, as the Cube on Avalon Island was the safest place in the entire solar system.

"They're..." Aron began with a sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose. "They're idealists, and it's too easy to turn that idealism into extremism. That makes them highly volatile, and if they remain on Earth, they'll have to remain under constant monitoring. Their potential to cause mass destruction is also immense—just look at what happened in Mogadishu. It took one person mere minutes to slaughter thousands, and if he wasn't stopped, the best-case scenario is that he would've burned himself out after turning the entire city to ashes.

"Worst case, he wouldn't have stopped at the city and would've eventually ignited the atmosphere. Our weather satellites already showed a global increase in temperature by 1.5 degrees. Global, not local. There's an entire group in Lab City working on ways to reverse that temperature rise, because Hassan did more damage to the world in five minutes than thirty years of global warming managed to accomplish."

"Worst case, he wouldn't have stopped at the city and would've eventually ignited the atmosphere. Our weather satellites already showed a global increase in temperature by 1.5 degrees. Global, not local. There's an entire group in Lab City working on ways to reverse that temperature rise, because Hassan did more damage to the world in five minutes than thirty years of global warming managed to accomplish."

Aron laid out the truth because he trusted the people in the room with him to not panic. Besides, they were all smart enough to know if he tried feeding them any misinformation to begin with.

"No need to bring up bad news here. We're here for a happy occasion," Aron's mother interjected. She would be damned before she let her son's wedding get put on the back burner again. The children had been engaged long enough, it was time for them to finally tie the knot come hell or high water

...

A month later.

The imperial wedding day had arrived and a celebratory atmosphere had descended upon the entire Eden-Esparia archipelago. A large crowd of tens of thousands of people had already surrounded the park outside the first government spire to be completed. It was the core of the fortress city that, when it was completed, was to be named Eden, after the country that Aron had grown so far in.

The Eden Government Spire was the tallest building ever built by humans, stretching an entire kilometer into the air and overtaking the previous record holder—the now-destroyed Burj Khalifa—by a little more than a hundred and seventy meters. And wrapped around the base of the spire was a well-manicured and planned park, with a reflecting pool sandwiched between two rows of standing monuments like a diamond on a necklace set with emeralds.

The wedding was set to take place on the steps in front of the government spire, with the groom and bride's invited guests and the lucky lottery winners seated on the plaza between the steps and the reflecting pool directly atop the imperial seal laid in mosaic.

The entire area had been decorated with meticulous attention to detail, and for the event, looked more like a botanical garden than a dour government edifice. And hanging behind the stage where Aron and Rina would be joined in matrimony was a gigantic, thirty-story-tall Terran Empire flag, above which was the imperial family's coat of arms.

The venue was an oasis of peace and tranquility among a fortress city that was still very much under construction. If one were to turn around from their position facing the government spire, they would see tower after tower stretching into the distance in various stages of completion, along with cranes, gantries, and the normal detritus one could see at any construction site.

But considering that the day had been declared an imperial holiday, none of the construction vehicles were in use and the entire city seemed completely abandoned, though with a sense of the abandonment being very much temporary. Tools were neatly placed where they belonged, vehicles were neatly parked and stowed so as to minimize the possibility of accidents, and the streets, which had been laid before any of the buildings began construction, were clean and free of any debris so as to accommodate the crowd that had long been expected to descend upon the partially completed city for the emperor's wedding.

Precisely an hour before the wedding was to begin, the imperial band stood from their seats and began playing soft music, barely able to be heard over the low roar generated by thousands of people in casual conversation. Then vessel after vessel began arriving, landing on the manicured lawn to either side of the plaza and dropping off their load of invitees before flying off again to pick up their next load of passengers.

And everything was being broadcast live for anyone who cared to watch it. But it wasn't like they could watch anything else, as the imperial wedding had taken over every single television channel, and even professional livestreamers had decided to take the day off from doing their own thing and rebroadcast the wedding as amateur commentators. Those who wished to experience it in person, but hadn't been invited or able to join the crowd surrounding the plaza and park entrances, could log into the public VR and experience it as though they were there..

The clock ticked down until, by ten minutes before the wedding was due to begin, all of the invitees had arrived and taken their seats, awaiting the beginning of this once-in-a-lifetime event.

…

Even those who were too lazy to attend the wedding in VR, or who were otherwise occupied, couldn't help but sigh in amazement as Aron walked out of the front doors of the government spire. Already an extremely handsome man, the bespoke suit he was wearing was tailored to show all of his best features. It was as if his handsomeness had a dial that, previously sitting at a comfortable eleven, had been cranked up past its stops all the way to thirteen.

During all of his personal addresses to the world, he had never been trying to look his best. In some cases, any amount of primping and preening would be too much. But now that he had put actual effort into his appearance, the difference was staggering. Every woman on Earth, straight or not, was deeply envying Rina her luck in landing such a handsome, rich, and powerful man, and every man on Earth, also straight or not, wanted to be Aron right now.

The band continued playing until a minute before the ceremony was to begin, when they switched to the classic wedding march, signaling that the bride was about to arrive. Everyone's eyes moved to the door of the building, including Aron's. And precisely on time, the doors opened and two small children walked out, scattering rose petals on the red carpet Rina would be walking down to reach Aron's side.

Soon, Rina followed, her hand held in the crook of her father's arm. The father and daughter had their heads turned to each other in conversation, then Rina laughed and faced forward. Her gaze met Aron's and she smiled, putting the Sun to shame with her radiance.

She was already beautiful enough to incite envy in everyone watching, but when she smiled... envy seemed meaningless. The gap between her and every other woman on the planet was too wide; it would be pointless to envy her, because no one would ever be able to compare. Thus, the envy faded, leaving only admiration in its wake.

When Rina and Aron came face to face, everyone couldn't help but acknowledge that they were indeed a match made in heaven. It was the first time Rina had ever appeared in public, and no one could imagine a more perfect debut for the Empress of the Terran Empire.

Earlier, upon the announcement of Aron's upcoming nuptials, many had speculated as to who he might be marrying, and whether or not the wedding was a political move to consolidate the emperor's power. But that thought had quickly passed, as Aron had no need to consolidate his power; there were no challengers. There could BE no challengers. He held the political power, the military power, and immense wealth. In business, his companies had no peers, either. Thus, the wedding could only be one thing: a love match, which was something rare for people in power.

No announcement had been made as to the bride's identity, and no clue had been leaked at all. So no one knew anything about her, much less that she had been married before. After all, both the Rothschilds and the Morgans had considered it a black mark on their reputations, and both families had gone out of their way to hide the divorce.

But that said, there were still a few people who knew about it.

Chapter 589

"I do," Rina said as Aron slipped a wedding band onto her ring finger.

"Then by the powers vested in me, I declare you husband and wife," the wedding officiator said, then turned to Aron. "You may kiss the bride."

The crowd at the venue broke out in applause and cheers as Aron leaned down and passionately kissed his empress.

But not everyone was as happy.

The sound of shattering glass rang out in a small suburban home in South Central Los Angeles, followed by a scream of rage.

"That fucking BITCH!" Rottem Morgan shouted as he watched his former wife remarry. This time she was definitely marrying up, though he refused to admit that, when she had married him, she'd been marrying down. But deep in his heart, he knew it.

He felt like he had just discovered his woman cheating on him. And not only was she cheating on him, she was cheating on him with his worst enemy. And beyond that, she was doing that thing he really liked that she would only do on special occasions while he got to do it whenever he wanted and not just on special occasions! The only thing he could do, though, was stew in helpless rage as he continued morbidly watching the rest of the traditional wedding events, unable to tear his eyes from his television screen.

It was probably for the best that he didn't know that he himself was the initiator of Aron's "blessed life". Aron had received the system after Rottem did his level best to ruin his life, and everything had quickly happened after that. Had that never happened, Aron wouldn't have written BugZapper, nor would he have created Nova, GAIA OS, the Olympus and Zeus personal electronics, BioGen... The list went on and on, but the heart of it all was that Rottem's mistake had been Aron's fortune.

As he watched Rina throw her bridal bouquet over her head and behind her to her laughing bridesmaids and the women invited to the ceremony, Rottem could only pick up his whisky bottle and drink from it. After all, the latest in a long string of his bad decisions was throwing his last glass against the wall in his impotent rage, leaving him forced to drink from the bottle.

The wedding continued for a while after that before smoothly transitioning to the reception party. Rina disappeared for a few minutes to change out of her wedding dress and into a sleek white evening gown that, while still absolutely gorgeous, was far less inconvenient to wear.

The emperor was married and the empire had grown more stable because of it. Soon, heirs would come, ensuring the dynasty for generations to come. The only thing that had marred the otherwise perfect ceremony was the lingering hubbub over Aron's forced migration decree and the controlled chaos of the imperial colonization program. Those being forced to leave their homes wished the pair nothing but the worst, in contrast to the celebratory atmosphere that pervaded the wedding reception.

...

"Whew," Rina breathed in Aron's ear as they sat at the head of a table on the lawn next to the plaza where the wedding had taken place. "I can finally breathe. And pee! I didn't know I'd need two of my bridesmaids just to help me pee!" she grumbled through the brilliant smile on her face.

Aron couldn't hold back a chuckle at the mental image and clasped hands with her under the table. "Well, Mrs. Michael, I'm glad you're finally potty trained."

Rina playfully slapped at his shoulder, then the newlyweds turned their attention to Felix, who was drunkenly trying to embarrass Aron by telling an anecdote from when they were younger. Aron facepalmed and laughed at the silly story and Rina laughed so hard she couldn't even sit up straight.

Felix, seeing that his job was done, concluded by saying, "But it all worked out in the end. Aron, Emperor dude, Your Imperial Majesty, and so on... you're a lucky man. You've found the love of your life and I wish you a blissful marriage and a happy family in the future." He raised his glass and continued, "Here's to His and Her Imperial Majesties, long may they reign!"

Aron chuckled and raised his glass to Felix and gave his own toast, "To my brother in all but blood, Felix. With friends like you, who needs enemies?"

Everyone who merited a table near the bridal party laughed as they stood and raised their glasses as well, then they all drank them empty.

Soon after the toast, the chefs wheeled in the wedding cake. From where people were sitting, it almost looked as tall as the government spire the reception was being held at! Stretching a full twenty tiers into the sky, Aron guessed that whoever had baked it had had to incorporate gravity plating into the design in order to keep the enormous thing from falling over. It was decorated to within an inch of its life, and nowhere on it could anything as plebeian as "frosting" be seen through the layers upon layers of elaborate decorations.

The patissière delivered the top tier of the cake to the wedded couple herself, smoothly sliding it to the table in front of Aron, along with a cake knife. He would cut out the first slice of wedding cake himself and he cast a mischievous glance at Rina, then smooshed the cake across her face and chortled like a schoolboy.

Rina returned the favor, but in a much messier fashion. In lieu of a cake knife, she simply grabbed a handful of cake and smeared it all over the emperor's face, then pointed at him and belly laughed.

Aron wiped a glob of frosting out of his eyes, then grabbed Rina's cheeks and drew her in for another kiss, this one tasting of a delicious red velvet cake.

Soon after everyone had received a slice of cake, the band began playing and Rina stepped out on the dance floor, accompanied by Aron for the first dance. As Aron was an extremely busy man, they hadn't choreographed anything particularly special, but the pair's genetic enhancements ensured that they still gracefully moved across the dance floor.

The night continued and the reception finally came to an end in the small hours of the night, leaving Aron and Rina to fall exhausted into bed, too tired to get up to any hanky panky.

"Goodnight, Mrs. Michael," he whispered in her ear as they lay in bed, still dressed as they were too exhausted to even strip out of their clothes.

"Goodnight, husband," Rina whispered in return and planted a soft kiss on the tip of his nose as the house VI turned down the lights in the bedroom.

Chapter 590

A month later.

Though Aron and Rina were on their honeymoon, that didn't mean the empire would cease functioning. Simply because the emperor was absent didn't mean government employees could stop doing their jobs. And with the efficiency that had been baked into the very underpinnings of the empire, they always overdelivered on their promises.

The forced migration and colonization programs were no exception.

The imperial space agency, in conjunction with the NIS and imperial police agency, had completely rounded up all of the noncitizens and sent them to the cubes for training. At the same time, the imperial immigration agency had sorted through the backlog of applications for the colonization program and was already well underway on transporting them to their training cubes as well. That said, there was a difference between a polite invitation and a late-night knock on the door.

Imperial citizens received polite invitations as well as arranged transports that, to a limited extent, were scheduled so as to accommodate their own schedules. It gave them time to say their farewells, not only to the people they would be leaving behind, but to the planet itself; they would never return, after all.

Noncitizens, on the other hand, weren't given the same courtesy. They were given a date by which they must report to their nearest cube for processing, and informed in no uncertain terms that, should they fail to arrive on time, they would be treated as criminals and arrested. Though the timeline for their reporting was short—usually within a matter of hours, or days at most—those who chose to accept their fate would still receive at least some privileges, such as increased cargo space on the colony ships and the privilege to select the world they would end up on. In contrast, those treated as criminals would be allowed no cargo or colony selection. They would also face much harsher training programs that had almost no allowances for personal time or relaxation breaks.

However, they would only find out the details after being arrested. The language in the "invitations" was purposefully left vague and lacking in details.

And perhaps because of the vague threat—which was along the lines of someone using "or else" when speaking—an "underground railroad" of sorts sprang up among people who fancied themselves some kind of resistance, or freedom fighters. It made them difficult to capture, but once the NIS was involved, the underground railroad was rolled up within a matter of days. It could have been done even faster, but the nyxians wanted to ensure a 100% capture rate, so they took their time.

For the imperial citizens involved in the drama, their punishment depended on how willing their participation was. It ranged from minor fines for more mundane, or even incidental, violations and went all the way up to having their citizenship stripped from them. And for those who were stripped of citizenship, well... they joined the forced migration group whether they liked it or not. Furthermore, they did so as criminals.

And speaking of imperial citizens, those who regretted their impulsive signups and wanted to change their mind found themselves sorely disappointed. They would report for training as scheduled, or they would be given the same treatment as the people of the short-lived, ill-fated "resistance movement". So those who had signed up in a fit of anger, means of protest, or for simple attention and bragging rights had discovered another long-held saying that held true: there is no cure for regret.

Another large group of citizens hadn't signed up for the colonization effort, but when seeing how it was being implemented for remnants, couldn't help but get their backs up. The collective memory of most of humanity still hadn't let the horrors of concentration camps, internment camps, secret police, and other hallmarks of fascist states fade. Some of them, the less emotional ones, even attempted to sue the empire, only to be informed of how the empire handled that kind of thing.

Part of the imperial charter that Aron had drawn up years before with the aid of his inner circle and the higher-order AIs granted the Terran Empire what was known as sovereign immunity. In practice, that meant that the government would automatically be immune from criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits, though they, in the person of the empire or the head of the imperial judiciary, could waive that immunity and allow the trial to proceed. So, did they do that now?

Of course not.

The empire's sovereign immunity and blithe continuance of what was seen as a pogrom against the "poor, disenfranchised remnants" generated another small group of imperial citizens who decided to demonstrate against it. They would livestream themselves mutilating their own body parts, chaining themselves to government buildings, epoxying themselves to streets, and there were even a few cases of self-immolation. Those who were less intense, but still upset, would hold prayer vigils, or even sit-in protests. One school district in particular had organized an offline sit-in where the students, their families, and teachers locked themselves in the school building and refused to leave in some so-called "solidarity" with the disenfranchised.

And of course, social media saw a flood of people changing their profile pictures in protest of the imperial government and offering their thoughts and prayers to the "victims". For some reason, that particular knee-jerk reaction had proven difficult to overcome.

But the empire didn't care. Those who chained themselves to buildings were arrested, stripped of citizenship, and sent to join the poor unfortunate souls they were protesting on behalf of. Those who caused actual damage, such as gluing themselves to roads or forcing maglevs to stop by standing in the middle of the maglev tracks, and so on, were first fined, then arrested and sent to join the forced migration. The only ones who escaped that fate were those who successfully managed to kill themselves in their misguided protesting; everyone else was simply rounded up and shown the proverbial door.

The ministry of the interior and the agencies under it had long grown used to practically every decision Aron made provoking some idiot or other, or even groups of them, to join in some crusade or other. As long as they weren't damaging property, harming people, or inhibiting the function of people whose only crime was simply doing their jobs, they would be left alone. But the instant the protests crossed any of those lines, the imperial police would come down on them like the fist of an angry god.

One of the unintended, but very welcome, consequences of Aron's forced migration and colonization programs was that it was acting as a very effective method of winnowing out those who hadn't accepted the empire, or their positions within it, and forging a truly united culture that considered themselves humans first, imperial citizens second, and further distancing them from the divisions that kept the species fractured before the empire's founding.

But no matter how high quality a steel ingot may be, it would never be anything more useful than a doorstop or paperweight without a skilled blacksmith repeatedly pounding it with a hammer.

Chapter 591

Aboard the TSF Proxima.

Commander Takahashi Ayaka of the Terran Exploration Fleet yawned and stretched in her chair. She looked out the window at the unrelenting black... nothingness outside the cityship TFS Proxima. While they were in warp transit, the exploration fleet and escort vessels were docked in the cityship's cavernous docking holds, their crews disembarked and quartered on the cityship itself.

The quarters were decently sized, at around four meters by six with a reasonably high three-meter ceiling, but felt cramped. They each had their own restroom and bathing facilities—really just a sonic steam shower that gained in efficiency what it lacked in relaxation—as well as a small pantry and "office space", such as it was. That didn't leave much room for more than a regular rack and a stasis pod that doubled as a VR pod.

Not that the cramped conditions mattered, really, as they could simply opt to spend the journey in stasis, or take advantage of their own little home space in the virtual city that was provided by the cityship's quantum superclusters.

She shivered at the sight of the void from her window, suddenly recalling that all that separated her from the hostile space in the warp bubble was a five-centimeter-thick pane of armorglass set into the three meters of composite armor that made up the exterior skin of the cityship. It did provide a nice seat for entertaining guests or simple relaxation, but... she couldn't. She just couldn't use it, even though she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the armorglass would hold.

She'd run the numbers herself during training, and again every time she had this same invasive thought. The math mathed, and the armorglass could stand up to anything short of an impact in the range of that delivered by a fifty megaton nuclear warhead.

With a brief shiver, she turned her attention back to her old-fashioned physical computer and pulled up her log. She would write her daily log entry, then head into her VR space for some proper relaxation.

'Commander's log, day 115.

'We're currently... somewhere, I'm not sure exactly where. I don't have astrogation access, so of course I don't know; right now I'm nothing more than supernumary cargo, since my ship is docked. But what I do know is that, wherever we are, we're about two months away from Proxima Centauri, where we'll finally undock and get on with the mission assigned to us. Supposedly, Proxima Centauri b is in the Goldilocks zone and we know there's liquid water there, so the Powers That Be want us to check and see if it's inhabited.

'I've almost—almost—become accustomed to the void that surrounds us during travel. It's something I never could've imagined, being flung through... not-space at warp ten, protected only by a thin layer of violations of the laws of Einsteinian physics. I love my job, I love my service, and I love my species (well, most of them anyway), but I have to admit that the void just gets to me. I forget who it was, but someone said that staring at the void means the void can stare back at you, and I think he had a point.

(Ed note: "Warp" here is used in terms of multiples of light speed. So warp ten is ten times the speed of light. It isn't like Star Trek, where their warp factor was an exponential scale like the Richter or decibel scales. In Trek, warp ten represented "infinite speed", at least according to ST: The Next Generation, where a ship would be present at every point in the universe simultaneously.)

'The cityship Proxima dropped out of warp today, as they do every five days, to do... something, I'm not sure. But whenever we bring the warp bubble up or take it down, the lights are positively fascinating. It's hard to describe in words, really. Just something you have to experience for yourself. Just imagine every color in existence mingling and flowing together and separately, almost like the reflection of an oil slick on the surface of clear water except... more. I'm pretty sure some of those colors don't even exist in realspace.

'I remain, as always, committed to the Takahashi name. We have a long tradition of service and duty, and I cannot, no matter what my family thinks of me, whether as a child or as a woman, fail to uphold that tradition. Let the void gaze upon that since it's such a voyeur! Hmph!'

With a final press of the enter button on her keyboard, Ayaka's daily log entry was complete. Not that she had any other duties to perform, nor was her log anything approaching official or required, but if she had the opportunity, she would send it home for her family to read. After all, they must miss her by now, she was sure, even if it was only because her escape and flight to the exploration fleet had taken away her father's chance at selling her to some greasy businessman to cement the Takahashi business empire through a marriage alliance.

She yawned again, then rose and stripped. It wasn't like the void would give a shit about her body, no matter how attractive others may find her. And she had to admit, she was definitely a looker. She had a traditionally beautiful face, with wide cheekbones tapering to a narrow chin and smooth, ivory skin. Her eyes were almond-shaped and so dark they were almost as black as the hair that fell from her head to her waist like a luxurious silken waterfall. Though her bust was modest, at a rather generous B-cup by fleet standards, it fit well on her slender, petite form and, when viewed from the side, it presented a perfect "S" curve from her front to her perky, toned ass.

She kept in shape through a rigorous exercise program consisting of karate, judo, and kyuudo (Japanese archery), along with the naginata. By avoiding more traditionally "hard" exercises, like lifting weights, all 152 centimeters of her form was whipcord strong without losing its soft, feminine shape. Standing straight on and facing her mirror, she rested her hand on her flat belly and looked herself up and down, noting with some pleasure that her secret garden was still well manicured, trimmed close to the skin and shaped into a narrow triangle above a perfectly bald slit.

Nodding in satisfaction, she turned and padded to her pod, where her VR space awaited her. Without the computing power available to maintain a time dilation in the cityship's VR, or a space the size of the public VR available on Earth for that matter, she treasured the private area she did have.

Everyone in the task force was provided a private space commensurate with their rank, where they were virtual—no pun intended—gods and could shape it however they wanted. As a full commander, she was entitled to 150 acres of space, which she had turned into a classical Japanese tsubo-niwa, with the rest of her space divided between a riding course with its own stable and a botanical garden filled with flowers, fruit trees, and tea trees.

(Ed note: You're probably familiar with tsubo-niwa homes. They're rectangular compounds with a garden/courtyard area in the center and the typical rooms open onto that garden.) fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm

She had been raised by a very old-fashioned family in Japan, and growing up she had been taught that women were somehow less than, and that the only acceptable tasks for a lady were arranging flowers and brewing tea. Her father even disliked his family's martial heritage, though the Takahashi ancestors had been very explicit in their family law about every Takahashi—man and woman alike—being capable of defending themselves from aggressors both foreign and domestic.

It was understandable, the Takahashis being able to trace their lineage all the way back to a samurai clan under Nobunaga Oda, and later Toyotomi Hideyoshi , but Takahashi Kazuki still didn't like it.

Chapter 592

Ayaka stood panting in her dojo, wiping the sweat from her brow that threatened to drip down into her eyes and blinking away the sting of some that already had. She bowed to her virtual sensei, then racked her naginata and began the logout procedure to return to the real world.

She had been in the middle of an intense sparring session when a soft, but insistent chime had sounded to inform her that someone was at the hatch of her quarters aboard the TFS Proxima. At first, she had been confused—why would someone be looking for her? She was basically just glorified cargo with no duties, after all. But then she remembered... him. And she thought, 'Yeah, it's definitely him.'

The "him" to whom she was referring, even in her thoughts, was the only downside to the otherwise almost fairytale she had been living since escaping from her overbearing father and too-soft mother. Lee Joon-ho, also known as the bane of her life, was an eighteen-year-old awakener from what used to be North Korea, and he was deeply fascinated with her. He was also who the exploration fleet had partnered her with for away missions, since they, in their infinite wisdom, had decided that an awakener had to be on every one of them.

But not as commanders; oh, no, never as the commander of the mission. Due to the ages involved, they couldn't be trusted to command missions. And in Ayaka's not-so-humble opinion, they couldn't be trusted to command a toilet brush to clean a toilet!

To be fair, though, Joon-ho was the only awakener she had ever interacted with, so perhaps most of them were reasonable, well-adjusted people and she was simply being ungracious by lumping them all in with the Terrible Teenager.

The soft chime sounded again, interrupting her thoughts. She looked at the countdown timer and almost—almost—swore. "It's only been twenty seconds!" she mumbled to herself, aghast once again at the impatience of the... the CHILD she assumed was at the door to her quarters.

Not that one of his general failings was impatience, though. He was... indolent, she supposed the word was, in all of his duties. If politeness and manners had been any less thoroughly drilled into her, she would have called him lazy, self-absorbed, arrogant, and any number of other less-than-flattering appellations.

But she wasn't a rude person, so she didn't.

She firmly clamped down on that train of thought as the chime sounded again and again, like an alarm clock calling her from the sweet depths of sleep. "Can you please inform my... visitor... that I'm currently logging out of VR and will be with him in about seven minutes?" she asked the empty air.

{Yes, ma'am,} the VI that acted as her personal space's butler and majordomo replied in its flat, neutral tone.

"Thank you."

{You're most welcome, ma'am.}

...

Lee Joon-ho continued slapping the palm reader outside Commander Takahashi's door. He'd just finished watching Kill la Kill and had an absolute, driving, all-consuming need to immediately recommend it to her. After all, she was Japanese, so she would definitely enjoy it as much as, if not more than, he had.

'What the hell is taking her so long?' he thought. 'Even if she was asleep, the chime should've woken her up by now, right?'

{Warrant Officer Lee, Commander Ayaka has asked me to inform you that she is currently logging out of VR and will be with you in approximately seven minutes,} the neutral tone of the VI suddenly said.

"Seven minutes? It only takes five minutes to log out!"

{Commander Ayaka is currently—} the VI began.

"Shut up, you artificial stupid!" Joon-ho interrupted it. "I know exactly how long it takes to log out of VR, so seven minutes is bullshit!"

{Commander Ayaka is—}

"I said SHUT UP!" Joon-ho screamed, his voice breaking on the last syllable.

{Yes, sir,} the VI replied.

Joon-ho stopped palming the door and paced back and forth in front of it, his great bulk visibly wobbling under his too-tight uniform. He'd gained weight again, and should by all rights have had a new uniform sent to him, but he was too... otherwise occupied with his new hobby to remember to do so.

He had grown up under the Kim regime in North Korea, lacking in everything that he later discovered made life worth living. But a short time after the fateful day the coalition forces of the United States and South Korea had wiped the North Korean military off the map and forcefully united the separatist states, the empire had swooped in—and he couldn't possibly be more grateful to them. He'd never known that food could taste so good, nor had he ever had access to the internet before. And that particular luxury had changed... everything.

Now he had all the food he could possibly want, and all of the knowledge of the human species was at his fingertips. He could LEARN all he wanted, and it only took him a matter of minutes to become an expert in any field he chose. Then he discovered anime, and everything changed. He became a hardcore otaku, NEET, and borderline hikikomori as he dove into the entertainment that decades of Japan's finest animators and artists had created.

(Ed note: A hikikomori (引き籠もり) is a person who completely isolates themselves from society. In severe cases, they won't even leave their bedrooms unless it becomes absolutely necessary for things like toileting and eating. It's linked to some pretty severe mental illnesses and is a growing problem in Japan that's somehow crossed borders and become a goal for some people to work toward. NEET is an acronym for Not in Education, Employment, or Training, and is a definite insult, not a point of pride.)

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that he was supposed to hate all things Japan—there was some deep generational trauma between Japan, China, and Korea, after all—but he just couldn't. Waifu after waifu had paraded past him, titillating and tantalizing his previously shackled imagination and fantasies and opening up a brand-new world for him to explore.

But then he became one of the blessed, and everything changed for him.

Chapter 593

Fortunately—or depending on who you asked, UNfortunately—Lee Joon-ho's life sharply veered back on course when he became a Three Percenter a few years ago. His mother had promptly enrolled him in the empire's Hero Academy program the instant it'd opened for signups, and he recalled her practically sighing in relief that his newfound addiction to the internet and all the wonders contained within had saved him from ending up in The Hole. In her eyes, the internet was a gateway to crime, so she had bundled him off with almost no hassle.

That said, even before the Hero Academy program had begun, he'd already received his "basic training", as mandated by imperial law. As an awakener with the power to manipulate gravity, he fell into the law category of blessings. That meant he had to attend boarding school in a private instance of the simulation while using a pod at his local cube, instead of being able to use his personal equipment from the comfort of his own home.

At the time, he had absolutely loathed being pulled away from his computer. He had even come within millimeters of losing control of his blessing, and was only saved when he saw the tears in his mother's eyes. When he saw that, it felt like a leash had jerked him up short by the neck and his incipient tantrum stopped on a dime. He was still incredibly unwilling to spend the requisite two months—virtually an entire season of anime—away from his computer and out of the comfort of his own personal space, but he did it anyway.

And it was a good thing he had, too. If North Korea had ever been interested in their citizens' mental health, they would have diagnosed him as being on the high end of the autism spectrum. But once he was in the pod at the cube on the outskirts of Pyongyang, unbeknownst to him, he was quickly diagnosed and equally as quickly cured via subtle corrections and tweaks to his thought processes. The physical changes to his brain, or at least the negative ones, that were hallmarks of autism had already been corrected during his first visit to a medical pod. But that still left the behavioral issues that couldn't be corrected as easily as running a simple regeneration procedure and genetic cleanup.

It wasn't a perfect fix, by any means, but Lee Joon-ho had come far closer to neurotypical than he'd ever been in his life. And he had no idea that anything at all had even been done to him.

Once he had passed his basic training course, and with his blessing license in hand, he'd thought he was headed for a life of leisure. Perhaps even a bit of harem building, given that he was one of the strongest human beings ever to have lived, and surely that meant a life of wealth and luxury would soon follow.

But his mother's decision had thrown another monkey wrench in his life plan. And somehow, during the subjective years he spent in the Hero Academy, his life goal changed once again. From a borderline hikikomori and definite NEET, he had become driven and determined to work hard. In his mind, it made sense; the harder he worked NOW, the earlier he could retire and enjoy the fruits of his labor.

So he had performed well in all of his practical courses at the academy, though his performance reviews were always lacking due to "personality issues". It wouldn't do to have him too obviously reprogrammed, after all, so there was only so much the low-level AI watching over him could do to correct his issues. Thus, he was still a deeply flawed individual, with many problems, even though he was measurably "better" than he had ever been.

One may wonder, then, just why Joon-ho had been selected for his current mission when there was no shortage of people who shared all of his good qualities and none of his bad. The answer was simple: Aron was the kind of gamer who saved all of his elixirs for the final boss. In practice, what that meant was that he didn't want to send out his empire's creme de la creme on the first, most dangerous mission that humanity was undertaking outside the solar system.

So instead, he sent out those who weren't quite perfect, but had been deemed good enough despite their flaws.

"Eight, seven, six..." Joon-ho counted as he waited for Commander Takahashi to come to the door. "Three, two, one—"

Exactly as he finished his countdown (and almost as if Ayaka had been watching him and waiting for it), the door he was pacing in front of slid to the side with a swoosh of hydraulics. Commander Takahashi stood in the open hatch, dressed in sweatpants, a tank top, and a bathrobe cinched tight at the waist. Her appearance completed a circuit in his brain and he suddenly understood why she had made him wait the two extra minutes after logging out. And that particular mental image short circuited his virgin brain and he stood there slack jawed, only capable of blankly staring at the gorgeous Japanese woman in front of him.

"Warrant Officer Lee? What can I do for you?" Ayaka asked. "Is there an emergency? It's zero two hundred hours, after all." She was fairly nonplussed by the perverted expression on the teenager's face as he stared at her in silence, despite being the one who had interrupted her scheduled workout and the relaxation that would follow.

Joon-ho shook himself out of his stupor and his flabby face quivered as he squeaked, "OH... I'm here because I just watched the most incredible thing and I think you'd love to see it because it has a really strong female character that I think you'd enjoy and..."

Ayaka shook her head, wondering how the boy in front of her could talk so long on a single breath even as she tuned him out and politely waited for him to finish.

Finally having had enough, she sighed and stepped aside. "Come in," she said, then gestured for the unrepentant brat to enter her quarters. To her, the physical space she currently occupied was no sanctum sanctorum. Her true privacy was in her personal VR space, where she would definitely not allow the booya in front of her to tread.

(Ed note: "Booya" here is pronounced as boa-yuh. Certain versions of Romaji (Japanese that's written phonetically in the English alphabet) uses doubled vowels to indicate the Japanes sounds. We don't use the bar vowels simply because doubled vowels are easier to type than alt codes, especially since Agent uses a laptop and I'm fundamentally lazy. So when you see Ayaka using double vowels in future chapters, you'll know how to pronounce it.)

She sat on her bed and pointed to the window seat opposite. "Please sit. Would you like some tea?" she offered, though she was internally praying that he would turn down the offer and leave sooner.

"Yes!" he squeaked again, his voice breaking as he alternated between a furious tomato-red blush and the pale face of mortification. The joy he felt at a beauty offering him tea was offset by the embarrassment of his still-cracking voice; the extension of the human lifespan had, sadly, included extending the duration of puberty in both young men and women alike.

Ayaka gracefully rose to her feet and reached into the cabinet above the small sink in her quarters. She pulled out her tea set and quickly brewed a pot of oolong tea, then offered her "guest" a cup of it. "Have you read the information on Alpha Centauri b that I sent you yet? You must have, if you found the time to watch anime."

He could only nod like a chicken pecking at feed. The deadline she had given him to familiarize himself with what was known about their target planet was still a month away, and he was quite proud of finishing the entire knowledgebase and digesting it so early. And fast, too.

"So why didn't you report your completion of the assignment then?" she gently asked, though she was internally debating the merits of throttling the lazy sack of flab in front of her.

Joon-ho looked down and interlocked his fingers, then twiddled his thumbs. He mumbled something that Ayaka couldn't quite understand.

"What was that? I couldn't hear you."

"There's-still-a-month-left-to-the-deadline-and-I-was-afraid-you'd-give-me-more-work," he said in a rush.

Ayaka's eyes glazed over and she stared at a spot above his head. 'Please, kami-sama. Let something happen to the window, something that'll put him out of my misery.'

Chapter 594

Mars, ARES main base.

The Sol system's fourth planet, if seen from a higher orbit, was completely different than it was in the past. Just two years before, it'd only had a population that could be counted on one hand... if you counted unmanned exploration vehicles, or "rovers", as population, that is.

Mars had always fascinated humanity ever since the species had first looked to the stars and asked themselves what those lights in the sky were. It was represented in close to a century's worth of science fiction tales, with greats like Ray Bradbury, Orson Welles, and Edgar Rice Burroughs some of the more recent people to look to the red planet and think, 'I wonder...'

So once human technology reached the barest minimum level that would allow them to explore Mars, whether in person or not, they had immediately built exploration drones, strapped rockets to them, and threw them at the planet until one successfully survived the landing. Nobody knew what they would find, though everyone was fairly sure there would be no alien life there; the planet's atmosphere was too thin and it was too far from the Sun to allow for liquid water on the surface.

Most people, though, believed that they would find signs that life had once existed there. They stared at blurry pictures of the planet's surface until they saw shapes that "proved" life had once flourished there. Anything that could potentially be mistaken for right angles or other shapes not often found in nature was regularly trotted out as "evidence" of the existence of ancient aliens. One such person was even made into a lasting internet meme after being heavily featured as an expert guest on a television show about those ancient aliens.

And the pareidolia that humanity had evolved through hundreds of thousands of years of selective evolution didn't help, either. One of the structures on the surface of Mars just so happened to resemble a face to a disturbing degree. It wasn't actually a face, and had been disproven through virtually every means at humanity's disposal, but even knowing that it was just a mountain wasn't enough to convince the collective lizard brain of humanity of its nonexistence.

(Ed note: The "face on mars" was first seen in a picture taken by the Viking 1 Mars Orbiter in 1976. Later, high-resolution images showed it for what it was, just a rock formation that, when viewed from a very specific angle on a very specific day at a very specific time, would cast a shadow that made it appear to resemble a human face. And as for the old saying that nature doesn't DO angles, I present to you the Giant's Causeway in Ireland, or the rock formations in Fingal's Cave. Google them, they're quite amazing.)

The Terran Empire's actions, however, had finally put to rest the argument over whether or not life existed on Mars at any point in its history. Short answer? No. There were signs of microbial life forms, but nothing that mankind would generally consider aliens in most senses of the word. Extraterrestrial, yes. Alien, technically. But ALIEN? No.

The empire even went, not just a step, but an entire marathon further by not only exploring the red planet, but occupying it. The age of unmanned exploration had rapidly given way to the age of the Mars base. Enormous domes that stretched kilometers in diameter were either under construction, or had finished their build phase and entered an operational state.

In other places, the ground had been flattened and poured with quickcast, a rapid-setting form of concrete that the materials scientists in Lab City had developed that could be sprayed out in liquid form and would harden in mere minutes. Not only did it set faster than even the fastest-setting concrete previously known to mankind, but it would do so in a wide range of environments that would otherwise inhibit traditional concrete from setting. It was also vastly stronger, with a tensile strength, elasticity, and hardness upwards of fifty times the previous formulas that had been in wide usage before the empire was founded.

Those giant "parking lots" were home to defensive guns that dwarfed anything previously considered even in the technologically advanced Terran Empire. Designed to reach high orbit from the surface of the planet, the gimbal-mounted gun barrels were tens of meters wide and nearly a full two kilometers long. It was a feat of engineering that could only be seen on Mars, where the gravity was only 38% that of Earth's. They were powered by enormous—even by imperial standards—capacitor banks, each of which contained enough electricity to power the entire continent of Australia for just over six months.

The defensive guns were a marvel of engineering, and the buildup on Mars was the empire's first megaproject. One of the first things the atomic printers had done, even before the ARES forces and hordes of engineers had descended upon the red planet, was hollow out the 2000-kilometer-wide solid core at its center and turn it into one giant fusion reactor. In essence, the planetary core had been reignited... but this time as a star, not a blob of molten metal.

The planet was slowly being renovated to live up to its namesake—Mars, the Greek god of war. In the very near future, it would not only be home to most of the members of ARES (and wasn't THAT an ironic mishmash of mythological figures; Mars, the Greek god of war, and Ares, the Roman god of war), but also to the men and women of the Martian Proving Ground, where classified imperial military projects would be birthed, built, and tested to failure.

Even though Aron had introduced the simulation to humanity, it was perhaps a quirk of human beings' nature that they simply couldn't trust the accuracy of any kind of program. Not where it involved lives, at any rate. So the people who had taken to Research City like ducks to water had quite happily proposed that, after they developed hardware in the virtual city, they would then bring it into reality for testing in order to verify the projects that they had developed.

Aron felt that it was more a matter of the lab geeks wanting to play with the toys they built than anything else, but he was quite willing to entertain their fantasy in order to keep them happy... and rather more importantly, productive.

Overall, the Mars base was shaping up rather nicely and was on track to be completed well under the deadline of three years Aron had given John when the project first broke ground. In fact, over three quarters of the base was currently fully operational, and the rest was more quality of life and window dressing than necessity.

The only necessity the planet still lacked was a mana-based Planetary Defense Shield.

Chapter 595

On Mars, work had already begun in the hundreds of already-completed buildings on the surface, and in the thousands of rooms beneath. One of those rooms was a cavernous chamber that housed Mars Central Command, or CENTCOM.

"Tenth ring is coming up on schedule... now," one of the technicians announced from his console. He was an ST1, or Sensor Technician First Class, and his current task was to monitor the ongoing construction and activation of sensors throughout the Sol system.

The entire front wall of CENTCOM was an enormous display, about the size of the screen in an IMAX movie theater. It was currently displaying a map of the solar system as seen from above the ecliptic, with points of interest labeled in colors denoting their operational status. Mars, for example, was surrounded with a yellow ring to highlight its partially operational status.

And with Sol as the center, nine green rings surrounded it, each of them a tenth of an AU—about fifteen million kilometers—from each other. A tenth ring was blinking in yellow, and there were dozens more rings that were still red.

The rings were sensor networks that the exploration fleet had been busy laying after completely mapping the system. Nine of them were already active, and now, with the technician's announcement, the tenth ring was finishing its self-test cycle and would soon be fully online. And with that tenth ring coming online, everything between Sol and Earth would be visible to anyone who cared to see it with the same fidelity as Nova could see it inside the universal simulation.

But the final red ring, which would be just outside Pluto's orbit, wasn't the end of the sensor network. The exploration fleets had been laying buoys as they traveled, and those buoys were seed colonies of sensory nanites surrounded by a block of material the size of a pre-empire cargo ship. Though they were radiating out in straight lines now, they would soon become new extrasolar sensor rings, expanding the empire's reach beyond the Sol system.

It was a futureproof system that the researchers in Lab City had developed. The power requirement for q-comms was prohibitive, but within the Sol system, that could be overcome. However, outside the system, they were still limited to light speed transmission... for now. The rate that technology advanced in the Terran Empire could not be underestimated, and the developers of the system were sure that they would be able to solve the problem in the future.

And right NOW, at least, they had the perfect delivery vehicle to drop off the seeds of what would become an omniscient sensor network outside the Sol system: the five exploration fleets that had crossed the Oort cloud months ago on their journeys to explore distant stars.

The extrasolar sensor rings would take years to come online, but the empire currently had those years, thanks to Aron's foresight.

Within the Sol system, the already-activated sensor rings served a dual purpose. For ARES, they tracked all traffic and events within their sensor ranges. And for civilian traffic, they acted as a navigational aid, displaying their location on a convenient map so they didn't have to know anything about astrogation or celestial navigation to plot courses within the system.

Within CENTCOM, the analysts and technicians could see all of the traffic, while civilians were much more limited in what they could see. That was in part because their shipboard computers didn't have the processing power to track everything, but also because they lacked the clearance necessary to display certain things—like TSF ships.

On the main screen in CENTCOM, the tenth ring stopped flashing yellow and began glowing a solid, bright green. The ring's self test had successfully concluded and the "eyes" of humanity had reached out beyond what they could see yesterday. Normally, that would be cause for celebration; the network was only months old and the newness of the process had yet to wear off. But just as someone wondered aloud about the lack of champagne, the soft chime of a priority alert rang out at the traffic control workstation.

The traffic controller for the current shift spun his chair around and quickly donned his headset. "Unidentified priority traffic, this is CENTCOM traffic control. Please advise your destination."

"CENTCOM traffic control, this is Imperial One, currently en route to CENTCOM carrying Imperial Actual and retinue."

"CENTCOM copies, Imperial One. Sending approach vector and assigned landing now. CENTCOM out."

…

Earth, a few hours ago.

"I can't wait to visit another planet," Rina said, practically bouncing as she boarded the shuttle hovering above the roof of the Cube. Aron followed close behind her, wearing casual clothes.

"I don't really get why you want to come. It isn't like there's anything to see there at the moment. A couple of domes, some cubes, and a whole lot of tunnels," he teased as he stepped into the spaceship behind her. A full team of Emperor's Aegis was waiting for him inside, and two more Aegis members—his and Rina's close guards—followed behind him.

"What's the point in having a security clearance now, if I don't actually use it?" she joked as she strapped herself into the acceleration harness on her seat.

Rina's security clearance had been upgraded since the wedding. Previously, she'd had a high clearance, but no need to know. But now that she was married to Aron and had taken her proper seat as the official Empress of the Terran Empire, her clearance was second only to his.

That said, it wouldn't have mattered before regardless. If she had really asked about something, Aron would never have hidden it from her. She simply hadn't had any reason to do so. Now, though, she not only had the reason to know, but also the duty to know. After all, if something were to ever happen to Aron, she would take over his reign as Empress Regent of the Terran Empire until the new heir (which was currently Henry) was able to take over.

"Let's go before Henry shows up," Aron said to the pilot as he strapped in as well. "He'll make a mess if we leave him behind and he actually sees us leaving."

The pilot lifted off without a word, even before Aron finished strapping himself in, and less than two minutes later, the small shuttle entered the kilometer-long vessel waiting in high geosynchronous orbit above Avalon Island.

Chapter 596

The moment the imperial ship received the emperor's shuttle, the captain brought up the shields and began heading to Mars.

Aron and Rina stepped out of the shuttle into the boat bay and met the side party that had been arranged to greet them. The ship's executive officer, Commander Shannon Robinson, came to attention and saluted. Aron returned the salute and asked, "Permission to come aboard?"

"Permission granted, Your Majesty, and welcome aboard Imperial One," Commander Robinson replied.

The bosun announced, "Terra arriving!" Then he pulled an old-fashioned bosun's pipe from his hip pocket and whistled the tune for arriving royalty.

"If you'll follow me, Your Majesty, I'll show you to your quarters. The captain is currently on the bridge, but he should be with you shortly," Commander Robinson said.

"The side party is a nice touch, Ms. Robinson." Aron smiled at the competent officer as she led him down an impeccably decorated passageway to the imperial quarters.

"Tradition is important, Your Majesty, and it seemed like a good one to maintain."

"Indeed, Ms. Robinson. Tradition is indeed important." Aron fell silent as they continued walking.

Rina looked around at the lush purple carpet, the tasteful wallpaper, the gilded Corinthian accents on the bulkheads, and the bas relief decorations on the overhead. She let out a low whistle and exclaimed, "You really went all out on the decorations, didn't you?"

"Blame Felix," Aron laughed. "You know what a history nut he is, and he spent hours browbeating me into it. 'You absolutely HAVE to have the appearance of power,' he told me, and I still don't necessarily agree with—" he gestured to the opulent surroundings, "—all of this. But I eventually caved."

"Yeah, that does sound like something he would do," Rina giggled. "So did he come up with the decorations himself?"

Aron shook his head. "No, although he really wanted to. But he couldn't carve out the time, and frankly, his tastes run to the gaudy, so I created the imperial design agency specifically for the purpose of interior and exterior design. You have no idea how flabbergasted and shellshocked all those fashion designers, interior decorators, and architects were when they got a call from Gaia inviting them to a new government agency," he laughed, remembering the surprise on the new recruits' faces.

"Still," he continued. "It really seems to have worked out for the best. At least our empire's decor is unified, and not a mishmash of hundreds of different styles based on ideas from hundreds of different designers. And, well, I obviously couldn't do it. I mean, you've seen what my personal taste runs to."

Rina laughed so hard she bent over and could hardly breathe. "Yes, yes I have," she wheezed in between fits of laughter. Aron's sense of style was truly... lacking would be putting it mildly.

Aron conceded the point and the group continued heading toward his quarters.

"I like their style," Rina finally announced as they reached their quarters. The decorations continued the elegant, understated luxury theme, but with hints of techist designs here and there. It was a blend of old and new, and having grown up in the Rothschild compound—which was basically "old money" personified—she felt very comfortable there.

She especially liked the king-sized bed and the sunken jacuzzi tub that looked like it could fit four people in it. But the color scheme, full of rich, royal purples and warm greens that contrasted nicely with the shining gold and silver accents, was also very much to her liking. And it contrasted nicely against the muted gray bedding, embroidered with the imperial coat of arms, and the marble tiles in the head.

"One good thing about your grandiose, overcompensating drive to build Really Big Things is that it gives you room to fit something like this into them instead of cramped quarters like you see on most normal-sized pleasure yachts." Rina grinned at her husband.

"Overcompensating?" He spread his arms wide and slowly stalked toward her as their close-in protection aegis guards nodded to each other and discreetly left the quarters. "Overcompensating for what!?" he jokingly screeched as he launched himself in his wife's direction.

Rina laughed and playfully dodged, throwing pillow after pillow at him as he chased her around the room, much like any normal pair of newlyweds would.

As it turned out, emperors were men just like anyone else.

...

Time passed as Aron and Rina were cavorting in the imperial quarters aboard Imperial One. Imperial One, much like the ships escorting her, was capable of warp travel, but using an Alcubierre warp bubble inside an inhabited solar system would be a downright terrible idea. After all, whenever a warp bubble was disengaged, it would throw debris and deadly radiation in a cone centered on the direction of the vessel's travel, and that debris and radiation would make life miserable for anyone caught in that cone.

Thus, they were proceeding at a fairly sedate pace. In fact, even civilian traffic, should any have been allowed within the protective envelope of Imperial One's escorts, would easily be able to keep up with them even without engaging their gravity drives and relying on thrusters alone. And from the inside of the ships, nobody would be able to tell they were in motion unless they looked at the display showing Earth as an ever-shrinking circle.

Still, though their pace was sedate, they would still be arriving at Mars a little over five hours after they began the journey.

And despite the Sol system being the safest place the emperor could be (short of the Cube on Avalon Island, anyway), Imperial One was still filled with entire battalions of ARES troopers, two reaper teams, a full company of the emperor's aegis, and legion after legion of robotic auxiliaries in addition to the oversized naval crew. The crew was even held at general quarters whenever the emperor was aboard, and could move to battle stations in under a minute.

No matter the length of the trip the emperor was taking in the Terran Space Fleet's most advanced, well-protected ship, the security would remain on a hair trigger.

Chapter 597

Seven hours later.

"Now there's something you don't see every day," John mused. He was in CENTCOM, watching his emperor and empress float in the emptiness of space, a brilliant halo surrounding them on the viewscreen as the Henry's Eyes monitors included in the sensor rings detected all the mana flowing toward Aron.

It still lacked a little in terms of fidelity and resolution, so it showed up on the screen as an enormous blob. If the monitoring system had had that level of fidelity and resolution, however, it would have shown something entirely different. Instead of a formless blob that shifted and flowed like an amoeba, reaching tentacles out here and there, it would have shown the intricately detailed runic construct growing out of Aron's figure like spider silk from a trapdoor spider's spinnerets.

But even without that level of detail, the staff of the CENTCOM monitoring center could still enjoy the view. And enjoy they did; especially as they knew that the emperor was putting the final touches on the defensive net that surrounded "their" planet in an impenetrable cocoon of protection. That final layer was what would guarantee their lives in the inevitable future invasions of the Sol system.

Yes, they all believed that invasions would be inevitable. Perhaps not in the short term, or in the near future, or even in the far future. But they couldn't count on every species that humanity was about to interact with being, if not friendly, at least not outright hostile. Especially not now that the species had left its cradle to investigate its surroundings for the very first time.

Rina, too, was enjoying the view of her husband at work. Except that, unlike CENTCOM, she not only had a front row seat, but she also had the ability to see the mana he was spinning out of him as each tiny rune linked with the next, and the next, and so on, until they grouped together to form pieces of a runic construct. Then, those larger pieces mirrored the actions of the parts they were comprised of and joined with other pieces of runic code almost like a puzzle being put together by an omniscient being. The process sent a shiver down her spine, as well as... other places.

"Yeah, it's been awhile, hasn't it," another of the founding members of ARES reminisced. "Five years or more, I think?" He looked around at the other founding members, all of them generals and admirals now, and they also fell silent as they remembered the hopeless situations that Aron had lifted them out of.

To them, news of the emperor being an awakener wasn't actually a surprise at all. They had all been healed by him in the beginning. Whether their physical forms, their emotional traumas, or even something as simple as age-related illnesses, they had all been healed by Aron's hand. Though they were still under a runic contract that prohibited them from discussing his abilities, they still wouldn't mention them; after all, Aron had awakened to mana years before the Three Percenters underwent their far more... traumatic awakenings.

Therefore, Aron's ability was something of a mystery to everyone else in the monitoring center, but not to those few individuals. Aron had never disappeared, to the best of anyone's knowledge, for long enough to undergo the awakening process. At least not when the rest of humanity was beginning its awakening, anyway. Just the opposite, in fact—he had been extremely visible, running to and fro to deal with the aftermath of the progenitor cult's "greeting" to the rest of the world.

Therefore, he had to either have awakened early, or later. Some people felt that he had awakened after the Three Percenters, but detractors of that school of thought pointed out that he was well outside the age range when the event began, much less to have awakened even later. But those who thought he had awakened earlier were stymied as well... after all, nobody had ever had even a hint of the existence of the "strange particle" before Aron had announced it to the world.

That said, the current conversation between the founding members seemed to imply that the emperor had indeed awakened long before any of the Three Percenters had.

And that terrified the others in the monitoring center. They were well aware of the risks a person would run when they knew too much. Thus, a sensor technician softly cleared his throat, reminding the founders that they had an audience and perhaps shouldn't be speaking on the subject so openly.

Not that any of those in the room would exactly go blabbing the secret to any who would listen. Even if they hadn't been loyal to the empire at large, and the emperor specifically, it was still a question as to who would believe them if they did talk. "Everybody" knew that the Three Percenters had all received their blessings within a specific period of time, after all, and furthermore, nobody had since. And if anyone had been blessed before the awakening event, surely they would have been noticed by at least one person!

But none of that was the case, so to the public at large, Aron was just a normal, albeit very intelligent, man who had just the right power in just the right place at just the right time to accomplish everything he'd achieved so far.

And since that most prolific expert—"Everyone"—knew that Aron was just a normal person, some among the blessed who deemed themselves superior to the unblessed masses also saw themselves as superior to the emperor himself. They were vocal advocates for the empire to be led by a blessed individual, all the while completely unaware that it actually was.

But since they only left their thoughts online, or during peaceful rallies on other issues, they were mostly left alone by the imperial government. Or so they thought, anyway; the akashic librarians assigned to each of them had already increased their monitoring level in case there were to come a day when the empire had to make a move on them.

Chapter 598

If someone were close enough, they would be able to see a golden glow in Rina's eyes. At least if they were looking at her from the front, anyway; she still had yet to develop literal eyes in the back of her head. The golden glow was coming from magic circles surrounding her pupils that acted like mana lenses, and they were currently zooming in on the runic construct that Aron was carving.

Ever since receiving her blessing, she had been putting at least five hours, Earth time, into studying it and practicing its usage. And with the time dilation factor in Aron's private "sandbox" in the simulation, that equated to five HUNDRED hours each and every day. So, in effect, she had spent more than a decade within the simulation doing nothing but learning from Aron and various virtual instructors, having the theory of magic pounded—sometimes quite literally—into her.

She had long since begun putting the theory into practice, and following that, begun developing new theories of her own and even pushing the boundaries of the knowledge that Aron had purchased from his system. That had put her second only to him in her theoretical, and practical, knowledge when it came to mana and the usage thereof.

Still, though, she understood that it would be incredibly unlikely for her to surpass him, as evidenced by his quick, easy, and more importantly, easily understandable answers to the veritable barrage of questions she would fire at him with machine gun rapidity during every training session. It was something that did nothing but increase her admiration of him; she had always appreciated smart people, after all. And the fact that her husband was one of them was simply icing on the cake.

And Aron's advantage over her was being put on display on a grand scale now, as despite all the knowledge and experience she had gained through subjective decades of study, she was still finding it insanely difficult to understand the process taking place in front of her. That said, however, runes weren't exactly in her wheelhouse. Sure, she had some basic knowledge of them, like their structure and such, but that basic understanding did nothing to explain the ease with which Aron carved the fractal pattern of the runic construct, nor the odd change in its color from gold, to blue, then finally to white.

As she was lost in thought, trying to explain the phenomenon, Aron finished imbuing his intent into the runic construct and opened his eyes. He nudged her shoulder, sending her into a slow spin in the zero-gravity environment, and asked, "What's on your mind?"

"I think I just found my calling," she said as she came back to herself.

"And what's that?" he asked. He knew she had been thinking of what she wanted to do with her life since the founding of the empire had upended her previous goal of being a business magnate and leader of her family. She didn't exactly NEED to do anything, not now that she was his empress, but she had never been one to laze around or rest on her laurels and he respected that about her.

"I want to push the boundaries as a magic researcher. I want to learn what causes the awakening phenomenon, and the mechanics of how mana operates. And maybe come up with a human-specific branch of magic, something different than what the nerd herd in the Lab City gold labs are working on.

"Right now, I'm thinking of focusing on trying to come up with a way of doing what you do, but without your runes. If I can do that, if I can integrate mana and technology, there's no end to the things we can do with it!" she breathlessly announced.

Although her idea may seem like an abrupt spur-of-the-moment decision spurred on by what she had seen moments ago, it was actually nothing of the sort. She had quickly fallen in love with magic in all of its multifarious forms, and since she'd already reached the peak of her life in terms of temporal power, she'd transferred her ambition and drive to the field of magic quite handily. The new, mystical system of magic had limitless possibilities, and combined with her personal drive to excel, the limitless possibilities excited her into sheer breathlessness.

Plus, she could learn it at her own pace, and wasn't being forced into it like her family had forced her into the business world with all of its arcane, draconian, and downright weird family rules. There was no tradition—yet—to bind her to a certain path, a certain way of thinking. Instead, she would be the one to blaze a trail for others to follow, and the thought of that triggered a nearly sexual satisfaction in her.

Perhaps her upbringing had affected her more than she would like to admit after all.

Still, her decision had long been made, and it was only now that she'd spoken it aloud to another human being for the first time. The experience of watching as Aron had carved a grand runic construct was nothing more than the last puzzle piece falling neatly into place and affirming the goal she had long unconsciously set for herself, solidifying her decision to delve deep into the fields of magic and awakenings.

"I look forward to what you come up with," Aron said with a smile on his face. Even—or perhaps, especially—with his system, he knew that new innovations and inventions were being discovered and built every day by countless beings across the infinite fabric of the universe, just like he had done when he'd invented the hybrid BQR-X computer system. There was no end to learning, to discovering, and innovating, and anyone who claimed otherwise was either severely mistaken, or trying to sell you something.

"We can talk more about it when we get back to Earth, but for now, let me just finish tethering this to the reactors. It'll take too long to expand it using just my own personal mana, since there's almost none of it around Mars to begin with. Especially not compared to Earth."

The two started moving toward the space elevator connecting the surface of Mars with its moon, Phobos, where the reactors that would power the Mars Planetary Defense Shield were housed.

Rina nodded like a chicken pecking at rice, throwing her into a bit of a flailing spin as she tried to reorient herself. She was new to zero gravity, so maintaining her orientation—especially while moving—was quite a difficult task for her.

Aron laughed so hard that he bent over and began his own slow spin, but he soon recovered and drifted there, waiting for his wife to recover as well. Which she eventually did, but not without a string of curses that would blacken the ears of any sailor in Earth's Age of Sail.

Chapter 599

Once the shield was online, Aron and Rina took a shuttle back to the surface of Mars. Both of them were exhausted after such a marathon mana manipulation session and, after a brief rest, they planned to officially begin touring the facilities on, and in, the planet. There were already a few million soldiers stationed there on their three-month duty rotations, but those rotations would gradually lengthen until the Mars base was staffed with permanent residents. The only reason it hadn't already been a permanent duty station was because not all of the R facilities were complete yet.

And while there was perhaps nothing more dangerous than a bored soldier, stressed soldiers were at least a close second.

The tour would thus only briefly visit the areas of the base that would, once they were fully online, be designated as official rest and relaxation areas. Most of the week-long tour would be spent inspecting the vast automated factories that were nothing more than kilometers-long and kilometers-wide atomic printers capable of both conventional printing and runic engraving. Those were the most important, and most secret, areas in the Mars base and would drive the entire industrial chain that ARES and the TSF required to function as forces. There were others in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but the production base on the red planet had a capacity that put all others to shame.

Mars was also just the first stop on a months-long program of tours and inspections, coupled with the implementation of runic shielding on other defensive positions. Most of Jupiter and Saturns' moons were scheduled to receive shielding, as well as the planets Mercury and Venus, the moons of the outer system gas giants—Neptune and Uranus—and all of the dwarf planets and other objects of sufficient size in the Kuiper belt.

All of those would eventually be part of the Sol system's defensive arrangements, though the outright construction was currently focusing on the Mars base, which would house the Sol system central command station. The rest would primarily be picket bases and fleet logistics depots, as well as home to eventual civilian industries such as refineries, smelters, and so on.

…

A few months later.

Despite the wishes of practically everyone, time continued its inexorable march from past to future, uncaring of what individual humans, or even humanity as a whole, were doing. And the time had finally come for the remnants of pre-imperial governments and their citizens to depart on their journey to frontiers unknown.

The empire, as it always did, had kept its word in both letter and spirit. Anyone who raised their head and looked up would be able to see the massive, city-sized ships waiting for their passengers and a stream of smaller craft flying back and forth from ship to cube, carrying load after load of stasis pods.

Over the previous months, which was more than a decade in subjective simulation time, the people who would be joining the exodus—willingly or not—had been training to deal with the realities of pioneering a colony on alien planets. But for the last month, the trainees had been released from their training to spend time with their families in a special area of the public VR that had been accelerated to a time dilation factor of 12:1. It had given them a full, and very generous, year in which they could set their affairs in order and bid their farewells.

That subjective year wasn't just to bid their friends and relatives a fond farewell, though. The empire had used the previous months of Earth time to liquidate any belongings that hadn't been earmarked as cubage to be brought with them—and there was a lot of those, despite the generous mass and space allowance the "colonists" would be allowed—at fair prices. Then they had deposited the END in an individual numbered account at the Bank of the Universe, or whatever remained of it after paying any existing debts or other financial obligations.

Thus, the year was also to give them time to decide what should be done with their money. After all, it was highly unlikely that any of it would be of particular use to them at their destinations, but should humanity survive the impending arrival of the visitors, they would eventually reach the colonies that would be founded in this first diaspora. However, though it might not be of use once they reached their destinations, it still had to be said that the colony ships would become the first cities upon arrival. Thus, the people aboard them could use that money to purchase upgrades for their eventual homes, along with any luxuries they thought they might need.

Should their purchases exceed the cubage allotment for each individual, the more affluent among them could also buy spare cubage from other passengers, who may not have the funds after their assets were liquidated. And the empire kept a wary eye on all of those transactions to ensure that the well-heeled couldn't take advantage of those who were less affluent than them.

Today was the day that the loading would finally be complete. Shuttle after shuttle had been in continuous operation over the last week, delivering loads of stasis pods to the cavernous holds designed to maintain them in the colony ships. The "farewell simulation" was shut down and everyone within forcefully logged out of it the moment the clock struck the designated hour. And it wasn't only the farewell simulation that was deserted, either; the regular public VR was also a ghost town as everyone who could log out did so.

The first diaspora, as the talking heads and spox had finally settled on calling it, was due to depart in a few minutes, and everyone on Earth had, seemingly by unwritten and unspoken consensus, decided to see the colony ships off in person whether they personally knew anyone on them or not.

They all looked skyward as the shuttles made their final trips, the nonstop flood of craft slowing and thinning until it became a river, then a stream, then a creek... and finally, nothing remained in the sky save the massive colony ships.

The entire world fell silent and seemed to be holding its breath as those ships began ponderously floating upward in defiance of gravity, gaining speed as their altitude rose. They shrank, first to the size of cars, then to serving platters, frisbees, drink coasters... finally, they were nothing but dots against the backdrop of the blue sky.

Then, they disappeared from view.

Those watching the ships leave Earth had many thoughts among them. Some certainly thought it was the first black stain on the young Terran Empire's record, others thought about the necessity of unity among the species, and still others didn't care about unity or how history would see this day. They only mourned the leaving of their friends and family members, some, or most, of whom wouldn't have gone if they had been given the option to stay.

But regardless of what the observers were thinking, humanity's first diaspora had officially begun.

Chapter 600

As the colony ships carrying the first diaspora were beginning their journey, another journey was coming to an end. The TSF Proxima was coming out of its final stretch of warp travel just a few AU outside the heliopause of Proxima Centauri.

(Ed note: AU stands for "Astronomical Unit". It's the average distance between Earth and the Sun at any given point, as Earth also has an aphelion (the furthest distance from the Sun) and a perihelion (the closest approach to the Sun). All of the planets orbiting the Sun are on elliptical orbits. One AU is about 149.6 million kilometers and change. For normal purposes, since I doubt any of us—Agent and myself included—are either astronomers or astrogators, it can be rounded off to 150 million kilometers.)

The inside of the Proxima was choreographed chaos as people who had chosen to spend the entire journey either in stasis or in their personal VR spaces woke and rushed to their assigned ships. The only people who had remained fully awake for the entire six-month-long journey were the crewmembers of the Proxima herself, and the crews, scientists, and marines were all traipsing along the corridors toward their assigned ships. Thankfully, the Proxima had been designed with just that situation in mind, so the million-odd people had no logjams or other holdups as they rushed to their proper places.

And every single one of them contributed to an atmosphere of vibrating anticipation; they were the first—the absolute first!—to reach their destination, which meant they would be the first to set foot on a completely alien planet. Theirs would be the pride of place in history that had previously only been claimed by a single man, Neil Armstrong, when he first-footed the Moon in 1969, or some time in 51 BE according to the imperial calendar. The quote "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" had long entered the collective memory of all humanity and had never been topped since. Or before, for that matter.

Now, everyone on the Proxima was busily rehearsing what they would say, should they be so lucky as to be chosen by the ship's AI in the random draw that would determine just exactly who would be the first to set foot on Proxima Centauri b. At least in their minds, anyway; it wasn't as if they were rushing through the corridors of the cityship muttering to themselves like... like crazy people!

At least most of them, that is. There were more than a million people in motion, so of course there were a few that were muttering and giggling to themselves like loons.

That said, there were some that wouldn't have that opportunity. The crew complement of the escort fleet ships would remain aboard their ships for the duration, accompanied by the ships' complements of marines. The Terran Space Fleet ran crew numbers fairly close to the bone, as it were, so losing even one of them meant losing a potentially critical crewperson in case of emergency or enemy action. Even the marine contingents aboard, being mostly cargo while the ships were in transit, had duties and stations in the event of anything... untoward happening. They were the ones who were responsible for carrying out the critical task of damage control alongside the GEMbots and RES-QRs assigned to their vessels.

Another portion of the crew was also remaining calm. The scientists who had been assigned to the Proxima herself would remain aboard her until the exploration fleet finished building research stations in the system, at which point they would be assigned to those in penny packets, each specialty to their own station. They had even already begun their jobs, digging through the "old light" that the Proxima's visual sensors were busily collecting and piecing together.

Others among them were already tracking the reconnaissance drones the Proxima had launched once the bow shock of their disappearing warp bubble dissipated. Their task was to map the Proxima Centauri system and search for signs of advanced extraterrestrial life. Surely, if it existed, there would be signs of it. Obviously artificial satellites, space debris, and so on were all things that they were clustered at their workstations looking for, despite the distance from the system's "Goldilocks Zone".

(Ed note: I don't really like inserting more than one ed note per chapter, but there's a few terms here to explain. "Old light" is based around the concept that visual signals continue propagating out at light speed until interrupted by some other celestial body. So by staying a light hour away from, say, a planet, and viewing that old light, you can see what was happening an hour ago on that planet, assuming your sensors are sensitive enough. And the "Goldilocks Zone" is the area in space around a star where the conditions are just right enough for liquid water on the surface of a planet or other celestial body.)

{Time to initial map completion: 27 hours, 13 minutes,} Proxima, the cityship's main AI, announced.

"Fleet's being careful. Too careful, if you ask me—it's making me paranoid and giving me the shivers," one of the scientists said as the screen in front of him updated pixel by pixel as the heavily stealthed recon drones continued their journey through the system.

Although he understood the reasons for the caution with which they were approaching the initial mapping and data collection, and agreed with them, he couldn't help being impatient. His entire life, he had looked to the stars and dreamed that most wondrous of dreams, thinking to himself "What If". And now, one of those stars he used to observe through telescopes—first the one he had received as a birthday gift when he was only nine years old, and eventually, telescopes like the Hubble—was so near he could practically reach out his hand and grab it!

"Well, we already know Proxima Centauri b is within the zone, so it might be inhabited. And if—IF, I say—it is, well... we'll have some thinking to do about how we approach the inhabitants. After all, in that case, we would be the invaders, and we don't know how they would react to us. We aren't here to cause trouble, just to check out the neighborhood... so to speak," the scientist at the screen to his left said, then turned her eyes back to her screen and studied it as it updated pixel by pixel, intent on finding anything she could to prove or disprove the existence of life in the system.

Twenty-seven hours later, they would know beyond a shadow of a doubt. But the earlier they could confirm or rule it out, the better their position would be.