“Quick! What’s it say!?” Everyone in the room crowded around Kim Ye-Jin, who had just taken a drink of his beer. Ye-Jin sprayed the mouthful of beer on his friends and coworkers, none of whom cared. He picked up his phone and, for the first time since he’d had a smartphone, fumbled to unlock it under the expectant gazes of his good brothers.He finally unlocked the phone and opened the email and his lips mouthed the words as he read it. Then he tossed his phone back to the tabletop in disappointment and chugged his beer before saying, “It wasn’t from the empire. But if you want bigger dicks, boy do they have some pills for you.” He laughed, then leaned back on the couch.“To be fair, even having a chance like this is the empire’s generosity. It’ll take a lot of time, effort, knowledge, and even luck to succeed. But even if we’re late to the table, we should at least be able to pick up some leftover crumbs, and that’ll be enough to cover us in the beginning.“So don’t have super high
Thanks to Hephaestus Heavy Industries opening the floodgates, more than a million new companies were registered in a very brief time. And following that, millions of patents for space-related equipment, ranging from cups and other dishes that were designed to incorporate gravity plating to ensure they didn’t spill during heavy maneuvers all the way to prospective capacitor banks and engines.It wasn’t that the empire had released their technology to the public domain, but rather that people were allowed to incorporate the tech in their design as a kind of “black box” piece that they could license from the empire. The only requirement was that, if a design incorporated publicly known empire technology, the resulting object could only be manufactured by HHI. That was in the licensing agreement, and no negotiation on that clause would be accepted at all.The empire, meanwhile, did absolutely nothing to stem the tide of the crowdsourced innovations. Quite a few things, in fact, had surpri
After a few minutes of celebrating, followed by quick showers and changes of clothes all around to wash off the sticky champagne residue, the five men in charge of Imugi-Danche called their families and friends to spread the good news.“You aren’t gonna believe this, but....”“Mom, we did it!”“Dad, our design was accepted!”“Honey, how would you like to visit space?”“Sis! Guess what?!”The calls lasted for hours until well into the night, but all of them were too excited to sleep and began a proper Korean drinking party that went all around the city, from bar to karaoke to bar to restaurant, and so on. It wasn’t until their sixth stop that they were too inebriated to move and the bartender called for a car to bring them home.......The next day.Five men were in Park Seo-Yeon’s living room nursing their hangovers and discussing their future plans.“I think we should let HHI do the manufacturing. They hold quite a few patents on black box imperial tech that we incorporated into the
Ceres station.Earth’s “second moon” had now become part of the planet’s skyline for everyone on the right side of the planet. All of what used to be Asia, half of Russia, Australia, New Zealand, and all the way to the American Midwest, people could simply look up at any hour of the day and see the enormous dwarf planet hovering in the sky. It had become quite a tourist attraction as well, as people flocked to those former countries to see the spectacle, or to Eden, where tour groups gathered to go up and personally walk around the parts of the station where construction had been completed.The only difference was the cost—touring the station itself, at least in reality, was much more expensive than simply flying to a part of the world where one could see it from the ground. Roswell, New Mexico, in particular, had become a tourist mecca, as had Sedona, Arizona, oddly enough. Roswell was understandable, as they had always had a space tourism theme, but Sedona was historically home to
A week later.Aron stood in a cavernous room in the Cube on Avalon Island, looking at the newly printed medical pods laying before him in precise columns and rows. As it turned out, actually using the first-generation atomic printers to print runic engravings into things was a much slower process than printing things without them. The process could be compared to trying to play a modern AAA video game on an old desktop computer from the 1980s.However, the tradeoff was well worth it, as he was only one person, but he had many atomic printers.He swept his gaze across the room and nodded in satisfaction as his runic heart spun into action. A slow breeze began flowing through the room as he greedily sucked the mana from his surroundings. The breeze soon grew to a small vortex of about ten feet wide before stabilizing.With the stomp of a foot, a brilliant golden runic construct appeared beneath Aron’s feet and spread throughout the entire cavernous room, slipping beneath row after row o
The treatment of the mana drain victims had already begun, even before Aron had called the families of the patients into the amphitheater and explained what had happened, how it would be treated, and the expected outcomes. Basically, the process would require two weeks of Earth time, during which the patients would remain logged in to VR. And each apartment in the complex the families lived in was also equipped with extended stay medical pods, thus ensuring that the families could remain together for the duration of the treatment.The best thing about it was that the families’ equipment would be maintained at the empire’s expense, as well as the standard fee that would normally be charged to the patients themselves.The bigger concern, and one that Aron hadn’t mentioned to anyone outside of his inner circle, was that using the awakening pods would light another beacon for the incoming visitors. That said, it wasn’t like it mattered anymore. Humanity had already caught their attention,
Kuiper Belt, just outside Pluto’s orbit.‘In the vastness of space, everything is a mere microscopic speck against the divine firmament,’ Monique de Groot, captain of the NIS-SV-765981-LRV, thought, gazing at the rapidly shrinking Pluto in her augmented reality display.The Kuiper Belt was home to numerous dwarf planets and had an extremely high density of objects, compared to the inner region of the solar system. The stealth ship had just passed through the “tail” of one of those comets on her journey outward, disturbing the microscopic ice particles as it passed through them, leaving a wake despite the advanced stealth systems in the exploration vessel.Thanks to the almost unconscionable speed the 5981 was traveling at, the disturbance was minimal and soon dissipated, returning the environment to its normal appearance.But even if the wake had lasted longer and propagated farther, there was no one to witness the spectacle other than the universe and imperial automated early warning
(Ed note: Sorry about the delay. Hay fever hit hard and early this year and I was completely unprepared for it; it usually comes in April, not mid-March.)The Voyager 2 probe spent an hour inside the stealth ship before being ejected. As the ship had matched course and speed with it, it continued on its way with no apparent changes. Unless someone happened to have been watching the entire process from start to finish, the disappearance wouldn’t even have been noticed.Even for keen-eyed observers, if they noticed the disappearance it would seem like a sensor glitch on their side, as nothing about the venerable space probe had changed, at least outwardly. The only difference was that the insides of the probe had been swapped out for nanite colonies that took the shape of the components that were already there, but with the vastly increased capabilities of imperial tech.The nanite colonies had vastly improved the sensors of the Voyager 2, though the communication issue had been a littl