Hours passed as George and Birch negotiated, seated at a table she had grown for the specific purpose.“What do you mean ‘provisional’ citizenship, Lady Birch?”“We cannot promise full and lasting entry into the empire as an auxiliary society without first meeting the very emperor we would be swearing our allegiance to, can we, Mr. Stefanopolous?”“Well, if you put it that way... no, that’s an unreasonable request.” George pondered for a moment, then continued, “Very well, I can accept that in our tentative agreement.”“How will you meet the emperor?” Ayaka asked. She agreed that the meeting would be of pivotal importance to both societies, but the logistics of facilitating such a meeting would be an absolute nightmare. Even at their ships’ fastest speed, it would require the emperor of humanity to be absent from Earth for a full year. And that didn’t take into account the length of time he would need to spend on Proxima Centauri b.“We have no idea,” Birch answered. “But until we per

A month after the initial diplomatic contact, the frantic period of activity in the protostellar forge finally came to an end. Ten billion VR pods had been rolled off the production lines in the space of four short weeks; the fleet engineers had truly lived up to their motto—the impossible had been accomplished, it had just taken a short time.Birch and the other treefolk had been invaluable to the herculean task, delaying the birth of their children and ensuring their safe transfer to the pods may have been easy for them, but without their aid, the entire effort would have failed.As the pods were filled with occupants, they were activated on stasis mode, waiting for the quantum superclusters to come online to generate a VR environment conducive to raising and educating them. And during the wait, the researchers of the task force were practically driven insane by the wealth of data generated by their scans. After the initial building and transplantation efforts, it fell to the scient

(Ed note: Apologies for the spotty uploads lately. I’ve been apartment hunting in 80%+ humidity and by the time I get home, I’m fair well shattered and unable to really do much of anything.)The silence within a nursery was broken by the sound of an infant’s wail. It was allowed to continue crying in the brightly painted nursery for a few minutes, then a merely “pretty” middle-aged woman walked into the room and moved to the side of the crib.(Ed note: For those curious as to why the baby was left crying for a few minutes, it’s an early childhood development strategy. By picking up an infant as soon as it starts crying, you teach it that crying equals attention. In a nutshell, never pick up a crying baby unless it’s sick or injured. Let it cry for a few minutes, then distract it until it stops crying before finally picking it up.)She leaned over the crib and teased the infant with a canary-yellow plush toy until it stopped wailing with a hiccup and focused on the toy, reaching out fo

The messenger was swiftly ordered to proceed directly to Earth, escorted by the picket detachment nearest to her. After signaling an acknowledgement of the order, the small vessel’s VI fell into formation between the two corvettes and behind the destroyer. Once everything was in place, they lit off their gravity drives and began maneuvering through the Oort cloud and the Sol system’s heliopause beyond it. As it passed through the system, the VI communicated with CENTCOM and received the updated map and access to the system plot, allowing it to see all of the public ships in the system. Almost all of the industry and shipping was distributed along the system ecliptic. Humanity still thought of things along 2d planes, it seemed. But it was unimaginably difficult to overcome hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years of evolution telling the species that ground was ground and sky was sky. Learning that “down” was more loose as a concept than they had imagined would naturally take s

A few hundred meters away from Aron, a rolling black thundercloud was scudding across the sky in his direction. He lifted his right leg and, when he set it down, he had moved ten meters away from the children, placing himself between the cloud and them. Behind him, the two emperor’s aegis members of his close guard activated the area protection feature of their PAPS, surrounding the children—and themselves—in a dome of solidified mana that glowed a faint blue.Aron faced the incoming cloud, an unnaturally grave expression on his face as he raised his hand and a shield rune popped into being between him and the cloud. Milliseconds later, a lightning bolt impacted the shield and the crackling boom of thunder almost instantly followed.“Interesting, interesting,” a voice filled with confidence drifted out of the dust kicked up by the lightning strike. “You reacted to my approach before anyone else... even before your security team. Interesting indeed!”As the dust settled, a muscular man