“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
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
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 interpreta
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
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