While John’s aide-de-camp was delivering the press briefing on the recent operation, Aron, Nova, and the other AIs were in VR overseeing an important milestone in their unification plan.“And with that, our preparations are complete,” Aron said, then stretched his arms above his head, limbered his neck, and heaved a yawn. Even with his enhanced constitution, going through iteration after iteration of proposed government structures had exhausted him. And that was after they had already gone through a number of think tanks composed of veteran political minds in Lab City to remove inefficiencies and reduce the chances of power grabs and coups. Then, after all of that and before presenting them to Aron, Nova ran them through millions of simulations to spot any remaining flaws and smooth them out.Aron turned to the newest AI and asked, “What do you think of the plan, Gaia?”Gaia was the latest “chief” AI and would take up the responsibility of managing planetary affairs, acting as Aron’s
Colossal changes were happening one after another. The world was still dealing with the aftermath of the drug cartel takedowns and mass arrests, and just as they thought everything would be fine once another organization rose up to replace the cartels, a new shock shook them. And while Americans were still dealing with the increased prices for things like heroin, cocaine, and so on, the US dollar, which in itself was already on the edge of the cliff following the recent American surrender, received a final push and finally crashed.Without the backing of the military forces of the US, the big three credit-rating agencies—Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service, and Fitch Ratings—quickly downgraded America’s creditworthiness from AA+ to AAA, almost as if it had been planned long before but remained unimplemented due to fear of reprisals. That triggered a massive, unrecoverable fluctuation in the currency market and the dollar began crashing. The dollar crashing sent another round
Through the window of the Edenian helicopter, Alexander saw a large crowd of people who had gathered to protest the unification. Their dissatisfaction was obvious, as was the reason for it; they didn’t want to lose the privileges they thought they had.They thought things like the already failing economy was a privilege, and thanks to being raised on a steady diet of American Exceptionalism propaganda, they somehow believed that theirs was the only country that had the privilege of freedom. Every other country on the planet could only experience a watered-down version of America’s “freedom”, and they would actively reject any evidence that ran contrary to their beliefs.But there was another group of counter-protesters that believed in and supported the unification, as they saw it as the only way to deal with the incoming aliens and the potential threat they would bring with them.“Any large change will always be met with an equal opposition. But there’s always people who will support
“I knew I should’ve expected the unexpected from that brat, but he really exceeded every bit of my imagination,” Herschel Rothschild said. He had been paying close attention to the world leader summit and knew that Aron’s proposal at the end of the first round had effectively killed every other proposal made and stomped it into a mud hole to boot. Sure, they might still pass, but with an imperial government, they would be less “rights” and more “privileges”.An emperor’s majesty could not be defiled. So things like absolute freedom of speech, voting, assembly, bearing arms, and so on would definitely have limits to them and could be revoked for violations of lese-majeste or even on a whim.“What do you mean by that? Couldn’t you have predicted this?” Virginia asked her husband.“What I expected was for him to continue using Romero as a puppet leader while he ruled from the shadows. Kind of like what we do. We have a huge influence over the government and can do almost anything we want
Gaia sighed as she realized the amount of work it would take for Aron and her to push the new imperial government into existence, then to acceptance. {How are things on your side?} she asked Panoptes, who was monitoring the internet.{Judging by how things are going, and not counting the explanation Emperor Aron is going to give tomorrow, the number of rebel groups is going to skyrocket. But hopefully, most of them will lose interest in rebellions once we begin the propaganda push.}{But those that remain will be even more dangerous. They’re the problematic ones,} Nyx interjected. She realized that she really needed to focus on recruitment in the very near future, as her nyxians would be completely swamped with work for the next few years.{The recruiting drive should help,} Nova comforted Nyx.Nyx nodded in agreement, a shock of surprise passing through her as she realized that Nova could read her “mind”. The surprise shortly dissipated as she remembered who it was that birthed her a
“That’s everything I had to say, thank you. I yield the floor to President Trump of the United States.” Alexander sat back down in his seat and Trump immediately took his place.One after another, the world leaders gave their planned remarks, until the last one. Out of consideration for the limited time, they were all limited to two minutes, and none were followed by rebuttals or other “classic” debate formats. Once all of the initial remarks had been delivered, the initial list of proposed amendments was culled according to the majority opinion among the leaders, as well as some common-sense guidelines.The culling process was relatively fast, as it was only to remove redundancies and proposed amendments that were already ridiculous on their face, like the one targeted at age of consent. The rest of the culled propositions were through the majority opinions expressed in the leaders’ remarks.Soon, the list was much more manageable and the first round of voting began. Anything that wa
Aron, deciding that he had said enough about the downsides of democracy, changed tack and began speaking about imperialism.“Just because democracy has its downsides doesn’t mean that imperialism is perfect. No form of government is perfect except on paper, and we can all extoll the ideals we hold and praise them until they shine. But that’ll never negate the inherent downsides in each form of government.“And the main weakness of an imperial system is the exact opposite issue that democracy has: it functions well on a large scale while tending to fail on small scales. After all, when your governmental authority is vested in a single person, you run into issues like lack of time, as well as an overreliance on others to faithfully report things to the emperor since he can’t be in every place at the same time. “But just as its primary weakness is the opposite of democracy, its primary strength is the opposite as well. Imperialism functions best in long-term planning and projects. After
Aron retook his seat, allowing the next speaker to stand and introduce their preferred form of government. Once all of the proposals were in, the world leaders would vote to see which would be adopted.President after president stood, some of them using every second of their allotted time and speaking passionately about the forms of government that they thought best while others simply announced their support of one of the previously mentioned suggestions. Alexander, of course, had strongly backed Aron’s proposal, which came as no surprise to anyone at all. Those who knew the situation already knew that Alexander was basically Aron’s sockpuppet, while those who didn’t know the situation, or only thought they did, assumed that Alexander was backing the much younger man due to having worked alongside him for a time and received much help and many benefits.Esparia’s president, Jose Inez, also joined Alexander in supporting Aron. After all, why wouldn’t he? He was only the president than