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
“I do,” Rina said as Aron slipped a wedding band onto her ring finger.“Then by the powers vested in me, I declare you husband and wife,” the wedding officiator said, then turned to Aron. “You may kiss the bride.”The crowd at the venue broke out in applause and cheers as Aron leaned down and passionately kissed his empress.But not everyone was as happy.The sound of shattering glass rang out in a small suburban home in South Central Los Angeles, followed by a scream of rage.“That fucking BITCH!” Rottem Morgan shouted as he watched his former wife remarry. This time she was definitely marrying up, though he refused to admit that, when she had married him, she’d been marrying down. But deep in his heart, he knew it.He felt like he had just discovered his woman cheating on him. And not only was she cheating on him, she was cheating on him with his worst enemy. And beyond that, she was doing that thing he really liked that she would only do on special occasions while he got to do it w
A month later.Though Aron and Rina were on their honeymoon, that didn’t mean the empire would cease functioning. Simply because the emperor was absent didn’t mean government employees could stop doing their jobs. And with the efficiency that had been baked into the very underpinnings of the empire, they always overdelivered on their promises.The forced migration and colonization programs were no exception.The imperial space agency, in conjunction with the NIS and imperial police agency, had completely rounded up all of the noncitizens and sent them to the cubes for training. At the same time, the imperial immigration agency had sorted through the backlog of applications for the colonization program and was already well underway on transporting them to their training cubes as well. That said, there was a difference between a polite invitation and a late-night knock on the door.Imperial citizens received polite invitations as well as arranged transports that, to a limited extent, we
[A/N: We’re currently looking for a senior archivist to maintain a fandom wiki page for the novel. If you’re interested, DM me on Discord @agent_047, or you can DM the editor @cheshirephoenix. Thank you.]Aboard the TSF Proxima.Commander Takahashi Ayaka of the Terran Exploration Fleet yawned and stretched in her chair. She looked out the window at the unrelenting black... nothingness outside the cityship TFS Proxima. While they were in warp transit, the exploration fleet and escort vessels were docked in the cityship’s cavernous docking holds, their crews disembarked and quartered on the cityship itself.The quarters were decently sized, at around four meters by six with a reasonably high three-meter ceiling, but felt cramped. They each had their own restroom and bathing facilities—really just a sonic steam shower that gained in efficiency what it lacked in relaxation—as well as a small pantry and “office space”, such as it was. That didn’t leave much room for more than a regular rac
Ayaka stood panting in her dojo, wiping the sweat from her brow that threatened to drip down into her eyes and blinking away the sting of some that already had. She bowed to her virtual sensei, then racked her naginata and began the logout procedure to return to the real world.She had been in the middle of an intense sparring session when a soft, but insistent chime had sounded to inform her that someone was at the hatch of her quarters aboard the TFS Proxima. At first, she had been confused—why would someone be looking for her? She was basically just glorified cargo with no duties, after all. But then she remembered... him. And she thought, ‘Yeah, it’s definitely him.’The “him” to whom she was referring, even in her thoughts, was the only downside to the otherwise almost fairytale she had been living since escaping from her overbearing father and too-soft mother. Lee Joon-ho, also known as the bane of her life, was an eighteen-year-old awakener from what used to be North Korea, and
Fortunately—or depending on who you asked, UNfortunately—Lee Joon-ho’s life sharply veered back on course when he became a Three Percenter a few years ago. His mother had promptly enrolled him in the empire’s Hero Academy program the instant it’d opened for signups, and he recalled her practically sighing in relief that his newfound addiction to the internet and all the wonders contained within had saved him from ending up in The Hole. In her eyes, the internet was a gateway to crime, so she had bundled him off with almost no hassle.That said, even before the Hero Academy program had begun, he’d already received his “basic training”, as mandated by imperial law. As an awakener with the power to manipulate gravity, he fell into the law category of blessings. That meant he had to attend boarding school in a private instance of the simulation while using a pod at his local cube, instead of being able to use his personal equipment from the comfort of his own home. At the time, he had ab
Mars, ARES main base.The Sol system’s fourth planet, if seen from a higher orbit, was completely different than it was in the past. Just two years before, it’d only had a population that could be counted on one hand... if you counted unmanned exploration vehicles, or “rovers”, as population, that is.Mars had always fascinated humanity ever since the species had first looked to the stars and asked themselves what those lights in the sky were. It was represented in close to a century’s worth of science fiction tales, with greats like Ray Bradbury, Orson Welles, and Edgar Rice Burroughs some of the more recent people to look to the red planet and think, ‘I wonder....’So once human technology reached the barest minimum level that would allow them to explore Mars, whether in person or not, they had immediately built exploration drones, strapped rockets to them, and threw them at the planet until one successfully survived the landing. Nobody knew what they would find, though everyone was
On Mars, work had already begun in the hundreds of already-completed buildings on the surface, and in the thousands of rooms beneath. One of those rooms was a cavernous chamber that housed Mars Central Command, or CENTCOM.“Tenth ring is coming up on schedule... now,” one of the technicians announced from his console. He was an ST1, or Sensor Technician First Class, and his current task was to monitor the ongoing construction and activation of sensors throughout the Sol system.The entire front wall of CENTCOM was an enormous display, about the size of the screen in an IMAX movie theater. It was currently displaying a map of the solar system as seen from above the ecliptic, with points of interest labeled in colors denoting their operational status. Mars, for example, was surrounded with a yellow ring to highlight its partially operational status.And with Sol as the center, nine green rings surrounded it, each of them a tenth of an AU—about fifteen million kilometers—from each other.