In a barracks on Avalon Island.A red warning light flashed and a siren sounded. It was a call to general assembly, and all of the soldiers in the barracks immediately dropped what they were doing and ran to the armory. There, after they formed up, they waited for instructions and Athena appeared before them in their AR glasses.“One minute eleven seconds,” she began. “I’m disappointed. SOP calls for assembly within 60 seconds of the alert sounding, but you lot,” she gestured, sweeping her arm across in front of her, “thought it was more important to get dressed than to get here!”If they hadn’t been standing at attention, the soldiers in front of Athena would have hung their heads in shame. Theirs was no normal barracks and they were no normal ARES soldiers. This was home to a Reaper battalion, and only the elites among the elites were housed there.“We’ll do better next time, ma’am!” they chorused at the top of their lungs.“If this had been an actual emergency, you would be dead no

It was ironic, Nyx thought, that the only avenue of research in which Lab City was incapable of producing any advancements was the art of torture. She was completely baffled by the fact that humanity’s most advanced science was in harming other humans without killing them.Killing, in fact, was easier. Humanity was just a special kind of species, she supposed. That they could be so cruel to their own kind had her logic circuits constantly tied in knots.{Mother, why are humans like this?} she would often ask Nova whenever one of her children—the Nyx agents, or Nyxians for short—was needed to aid in interrogating a prisoner or other target.But the only answer she ever received from Nova was: {That’s just their nature. Humans have spent their entire evolutionary period figuring out how to kill, maim, and harm each other more efficiently. There is no right or wrong to that fact, it simply... is. Perhaps it’s because they’ve never had to face an outside enemy and believe themselves to be

Ambassador Aboulatta pointed to the Chinese representative, who stood and said, “China would like to offer an alternate suggestion. The system we have has been perfected over many years and has already had all the problems worked out of it. So I suggest we continue the current system, as the UN has been at the forefront of maintaining peace between all the nations on the planet....” He continued speaking, finding more and more reasons they should stick with the current system. The UN had been around for over seventy years, after all, and there was no need to reinvent the wheel by creating a new united government system. That posed too many issues that couldn’t be worked out in the time frame suggested by Eden, which was the only thing the Chinese ambassador agreed with Ambassador Foster on. “For instance,” he said, “many countries have differing ideologies, and just working out those alone would take more time than we have if we want to settle everything by late December.” He argued

After a week or so of chaos, the various governments finally stepped in. They ordered their police forces into action and constantly urged the citizens to return home. They argued that nothing could be done if the population didn’t remain calm and allow them to work, and pointed out that aimless protests and riots did nothing but waste time that should be spent on preparations. Together with Panoptes guiding social media and the GAIA OS AI assistants discreetly acting to calm their users, cooler heads finally prevailed and things started returning to normal.......“Are all of our preparations complete?” Trump asked the secretary of defense.“Yes, sir. We’re ready to proceed,” the SecDef replied as he handed the folders in his hands to the president.Trump said nothing, but briefly scanned through the contents of each folder. After closing the last one, he nodded in satisfaction and said, “We can move forward with this.”“When will you do the press briefing?” the Secretary of State as

“Everyone’s finally picking sides,” Aron said as he read a report on the current happenings around the world. He knew that, soon, the “big” countries would begin negotiations on how they would divide the planet between them and exploit the resources in their territories for their own gain and, coincidentally, the formation of their individual forces.“So why aren’t you making an announcement of your own space force? Wouldn’t that increase your citizens’ morale and pride?” Rina asked. She had already laid her eyes on some of the ongoing research projects in Lab City, as well as their mature discoveries, and she knew that nobody on Earth could catch up to Aron in terms of technology. Not in a decade, and likely not ever.“There’s no need to make it known to the world right now. In the peoples’ minds, we already have a very well-established and advanced space research institute. The moment we discovered aliens, and our discovery was backed up by other, ‘more advanced’ nations, that much