Avalon Island.
[Three... two... one... liftoff.]
A massive rocket took flight from the center of the island and rose through the clear sky. The cloud cover had finally dissipated and revealed the island in all its majesty to the few remaining eyes in the sky, as there was no longer any reason to continue maintaining the obscuration.
The rocket breached the atmosphere and entered orbit, where it was immediately met by the blanket of shrapnel covering the planet. The rocket’s payload and the second stage maneuvering body had been plated in a thick layer of an alloy of hadfield steel and chromium, which was more than durable enough to shrug off the impact of the tiny pieces of shrapnel. Beneath that was a layer of shock absorbent 99% aerogel, and below that was a carbon nanotube shock mesh, ensuring that any force exerted on the rocket would cause no damage to the delicate machinery in the warhead and the rocket body’s maneuvering jets.
(Ed note: Hadfield steel, also known as mangalloy, is an alloy of manganese steel and carbon. It’s the most impact-resistant alloy to date, while chromium is the hardest metal discovered to date. Aerogel is an ultralight silica gel where the liquid component has been replaced by a gas while maintaining the gel structure. 99% aerogel means that 99% of it is empty space, which makes for an incredibly shock absorbent, yet solid and durable material. It’s also incredibly resistant to temperature extremes and is often used as insulation.)
After passing through the debris field, the maneuvering jets on the rocket adjusted its course, then it entered a coast phase and would reignite its maneuvering jets once it neared its designated parking orbit.
Back on the launch pad, a second rocket was in the process of being printed. Once it was finished, it, too, would be headed into orbit. Then came another, and another, and another... finally, the process had repeated itself more than a hundred times over two short hours before the activity on the launch pad ceased, the tasks completed for the day.
…...
Once all of the rockets reached their parking orbits, they initiated a long, synchronized burn and headed toward the moon on a course that would have them slingshot around it and the Earth in a figure eight, building up speed by repeating the maneuver until they were ejected from the planet’s gravity well and shot toward the asteroid belt on the other side of Mars’ orbit.
Most, but not all of them would reach their destination there. But fourteen of them were destined for much longer journeys, equipped as they were with fusion generators and ion drives. Two by two, they would use their initial velocities for a leg up as they accelerated toward their eventual destinations. Each pair of rockets would find their new homes on or around one of the other seven planets in the solar system.
Those fourteen rockets were the precursors of Aron’s upcoming expeditionary fleet and would prepare the other planets in the solar system for the exploitation of their natural resources, thus preserving the environment of Earth for its inhabitants for centuries, if not millennia to come.
Ten of the launched rockets contained payloads consisting of atomic printers and fusion generators to power them. Their job was to clear the debris from the orbits, both the shrapnel from the recent war and the outdated satellites and other space junk that would serve no purpose in the future once Aron put his current-generation tech into use. And they would be accompanied by two tenders, which were small craft capable of collecting the output blocks of raw material referred to as “printer cartridges” for security’s sake, then bring them to the L1 Lagrange Point for secure storage until they were needed in the future.
At the moment, no one but Aron knew what the rockets were for, and only those on Avalon Island itself even knew that they had been launched. The two hours the operation had taken had been scheduled during a time when none of the surviving satellites had a viewing angle on the launch site, after all.
……
Aron was laying supine in the sky, thinking back on the recent lecture his parents had given him. He really should have told them everything, he concluded; it truly was a dick move keeping them in the dark on such important things as the recently passed events. Floating in the sky and gazing into the uncaring universe was his new “thinking spot”, and had been ever since he’d grown so skilled with using the flight rune that he no longer had to think about it and could use it at a subconscious level.
Nova appeared next to him in her augmented reality form, also laying on her back and gazing into the sky. [What’s on your mind, sir?] she asked.
Aron wasn’t surprised by her sudden appearance at all; he had grown used to her tendency of popping into his field of view every now and then in the real world. As she continued building more and more quantum server superclusters, all of the AIs had grown closer and closer to perfection in their emulation of human behaviors, and Nova was becoming more like a comfortable sister-cum-therapist for him of late. Especially after he had noticed that his most recent system upgrade was aimed at removing what it considered to be useless emotions. His take on that issue was that it was exactly those “useless” emotions that made humans, well, human.
“I’m thinking about what my mom and dad told me just now, and letting my mind work on why the system was silent after accomplishing something so huge,” he mused. “I mean, obviously my parents were right to lecture me. I didn’t tell them anything, then let them be shocked by a ‘sudden’ war, and worry about my part in it.”
[They were right to lecture you,] Nova said. [You should let them in to your life more. Don’t treat them like they don’t exist if you aren’t looking at them, or think they’re weak because they don’t have your advantages. They’re stronger than you think, and I’m positive they can handle any news you tell them.]
She changed the subject and asked, [So what’s this about the system, then?]
“If you think about it, the system is supposed to reward me whenever I use the knowledge I buy from it to benefit people. We’ve already tried all the loopholes we can think of, like when we created random ‘humans’ in the simulation, then gave them all the tech built from the knowledge I bought. But the system didn’t reward me with SP for any of the loopholes we tried exploiting, which means it’ll only reward me if I share my technology with real, living humans,” he explained.
[True.] She nodded, then remained silent and waited for Aron to continue his train of thought.
“So how come it’s silent now, even though I used my tech to bring them under my leadership? Shouldn’t that count as using it for humanity? I really wish there was some kind of instruction manual, or a system assistant or something,” he sighed. “But there isn’t. And everything I know about how it works tells me that I should’ve been rewarded for achieving such a monumental task using the tech given to me by the system.”
Nova took an entire two seconds to think of a reply, then said, [Now that you mention it, that does seem rather odd. The system definitely should’ve given you SP for the war.... But since it’s remaining silent, even after you got all of the surrender accords signed, I can think of three reasons it hasn’t done so.
[The first possibility is that what you consider a ‘monumental achievement’ is insignificant in the eyes of the system. But even when we consider the scale of the universe and the number of possible civilizations, that’s the least likely option, as taking control of an entire civilization by oneself is always a seriously difficult task, no matter the civilization.
[The second possibility is that it doesn’t consider the takeover complete, as you have yet to pacify the population and get them to accept your leadership. So only once you accomplish that will the system reward you for your actions.
[As for the third, and final, possibility, I believe the system might not be able to reward you with SP for taking over humanity and becoming its sole leader until you’ve completely awakened it. So your reward will be given then.]
Aron took a moment to think through those three options and agreed they were the most likely explanations for the system’s unexpected silence. “So let’s start eliminating them one by one. Since the easiest one to eliminate is your first possibility, we’ll work on completing the unification as fast as possible. How are our preparations for that coming?” he asked.
[The prep work should be finished within the year, then we’ll soon have an answer if our assumption is true or not,] she answered.
