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,
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
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
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 differ
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 so
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 poo
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 f
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