Felix looked at Aron with a face full of disbelief. “Man... I know you’re the emperor and above us mere plebeians, but... really?” he asked in surprise as he swiped his hand across in front of him, closing the file he had been reading.“What’s the problem this time?” Aron shot back, rolling his eyes.“You have less than ten friends. Ten! Doesn’t that make you the least social royal in the history of the world? And! AND! Half of those are the people you dragged in to be the CEOs of your companies using magical contracts!” Felix scoffed. He jokingly continued, “Can you even consider that friendship? And besides me and Sarah, don’t you have any friends from your time in school?”“You seem to have forgotten how everything started. You and Sarah are the only two people that stuck with me when Rottem Morgan threw his little hissy fit and had me expelled under false pretenses after I proved him wrong in public. So however many I have now, it’s still more than two!” Aron playfully punched Fe
“So everything’s final then?” Rina asked, gesturing to the list of people eligible for the lucky draw attendance at their wedding.“Ah, wait... there’s a girl that asked me for an autograph when I was on my ‘European tour’. Come to think of it, I wonder if she ever solved the problem I gave her....” Aron looked around and saw the strange expressions on the other people at the table with him. He suddenly realized how what he had said could be misinterpreted and sputtered, “Y-y-you people! Who do you think I am!? Sheesh! She was the front desk attendant when I was checking out of the hotel and she recognized me and asked for an autograph. That would’ve been that, until Nova looked through her information and discovered she was a talented engineer, so she set a question that, if the girl answered it correctly, she’d find some rewards from Nova.”He shuddered at the cold shoulder he was expecting from Rina later. Even though he was almost positive they were just fucking with him, he had a
Aron, Rina, and Jai were having a conversation in a room filled with toys, play mats, and small desks. Three of its walls were decorated with childrens’ art in bright primary colors and shapes, and a digital display adorned one wall. The sound of children at play drifted in from the windows.“We’ve established a presence in every city in the world after finishing the last round of renovations. We’re still negotiating with noncitizens to purchase land from them so we can build our own schools, but that’s taking more time than we initially expected. “We may actually have to continue using the renovated buildings until the completion of the fortress cities, since we’re now responsible for a little under a hundred million orphaned children around the world and the locals are putting up stumbling blocks in our acquisition negotiations,” Jai said, his tone a mixture of satisfaction and frustration.The total number of children being looked after by the Coeus Foundation made them the world’
Aron nodded. “It’s exactly what you think,” he said. “The awakening phenomenon isn’t over, and when people reach the early stages of puberty, the clock will start ticking down to their eventual awakenings as well. Thankfully, though, the process will be much smoother as it won’t be as... abrupt as the first awakening was.“So, to prevent the orphans who are soon to awaken, the House of Hope plan was brought forward and made the main thrust of the Coeus Foundation’s activities. We will guide the newly awakened through their growth phase and seamlessly shift them into ‘hero academies’ as they reach the age of awakening. That serves a dual purpose—first, it’ll prevent them from their desperation driving them to a life of crime, and second, it’ll guide them into working for the empire instead of becoming part of private forces in the hands of noncitizens.“Prior to the mass awakening of the three percent, we’d already made plans for the House of Hope project, but at that time, it was mean
Somewhere in the solar system.An asteroid the size of one of Mars’ moons floated alone in orbit around the sun, in all its majesty. Formerly a cosmic dust-covered rock, it had been completely worked over and half of it had been cut off, leaving a flat surface from which grew an enormous docking tower. The half that remained was still a natural rock, though the cosmic dust coating it had been swept away, leaving the surface clean, while the docking tower was made of a dark gray hadfield steel alloy, as most of the empire’s hardware in space was.A study in contrasts, the natural half of the asteroid was dark, while the docking tower was brightly lit with brilliant flashing lights and painted signage highlighting the various docking bays of different sizes.(Ed note: Picture Omega, from Mass Effect 2.)[Outpost 134, this is ISA-EV-343398 on leading approach, requesting approach lane and docking assignment,] the captain of a two-kilometer-long vessel reported.[Outpost 134 copies reques
“So, did you figure anything out?” the communications officer, Lieutenant Perez, asked Scotty.“Not a damn thing,” Scotty answered, clearly frustrated. “The empire is more than it seems on the surface.”Scotty was almost sixty years old and had spent the past thirty years of his life on the bleeding edge of engineering as a professor emeritus of MIT. Then he was one of the first people to successfully graduate from the engineering track of the imperial space agency’s training program, making him among the most skilled engineers on Earth.But despite all of that, he still had no clue as to just how the hell the empire had built so many outposts throughout the solar system, when just a year before, man had barely set foot on the moon. And to top it all off, not a bit of the empire’s space program had leaked whatsoever! Not the outposts, not the ships, and not even the machines used to build the outposts and ships or the tools used to build the machines themselves!His innate curiosity w
Captain Miller and Commander Campbell had remained aboard ISA-EV-343398, waiting for their meeting time to arrive. Everything was proceeding apace, as it would be difficult for any imperial force to run ahead of or behind schedule thanks to the AIs in the background ensuring that “the trains ran on time.”They didn’t have to wait long before they received a notification with a link to a virtual meeting room. When they logged in, they found themselves in a large amphitheater-style room that would be instantly familiar to anyone who had attended college before: a lecture hall. Seated around them were hundreds of other ship captains and executive officers.No one was speaking; everyone simply gave each other courtesy nods when they made eye contact with someone else. But the silence didn’t last long before Huang Wei, the head of the imperial space agency, appeared on the stage in the front of the hall. Administrator Huang was a middle-aged Chinese man with salt and pepper hair and a rega
After the five minute wait, Administrator Huang opened his eyes and swept his gaze across the crowd receiving their briefing. “I see none of you left,” he said. “Good.“The empire has recently developed a new warhead as well. Dubbed the ‘black hole bomb’, it’s exactly what it says on the tin: an oversized capacitor and artificial gravity generator strapped to a rocket engine. When detonated, it creates a short-lived, yet highly destructive, black hole in a small area. ‘Small’, by the way, is a relative term. “And the only reason you’re being informed of its existence now is that we don’t want you asking about it later when you’re in potentially hostile, unsecured environments....” He continued on the topic of weapons for a while, explaining each of them in detail, then finished that portion of his briefing by asking, “Any questions?”Nobody in the lecture hall had any. At least not about the weapons of the EF and TSF, anyway, but they had already been taught not to ask questions that