Corporal Cuervo lay on the ground, his head in a small crater, as his AI assistant’s augmented reality form continued madly laughing at him. If it weren’t for his NUTS, he would probably have been nothing but ashes and small pools of molten metal with some chunks of solid alloys in it. The temperature readout on his retinal AR display had long passed the 6,000 degree celsius mark and was still climbing, albeit at a continually slowing rate.Soon, the raging fire ran out of fuel, leaving him surrounded by ashes and obscured by smoke. He rolled over and gazed into the smoky air above him and couldn’t help but wonder if anyone else had ever lit Jurassic Planet on fire. For some reason, he doubted it. Effective though the tactic had proven to be, it was still highly embarrassing and the NUTS colonies had only been recently developed. In fact, the active reaper teams were still cycling through in order to have their new tech implanted, and Tekillya’s batch was the first to have the implant
Nuevo Laredo, Mexico US border.Everyone in the city heard a loud buzzing coming from the north. When they looked up, they saw one of the Edenian flying carriers, but something was different about what they had seen of them before. After scratching his head for a moment, one man in the crowd shouted, “It’s flying too low!”The only time they had seen a carrier, it had been flying so high that it was barely the size of a book of matches and the sound of the rotors breaking through the air hadn’t reached the ground.Although the carrier hadn’t come to a complete halt, it was moving slowly enough to see the details of its sleek hull. Though they couldn’t see the flight deck on the top of the carrier, they soon saw dozens of aircraft rising above it and streaking off in different directions.A murmur ran through the crowd as they realized that one of them was headed toward the area controlled by Los Zetas, a cartel formed by disgraced former members of the Mexican military. Locals knew th
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