“Bring me to Aron,” Felix asked as he logged in to VR. With the growing number of people who had access and their varied tasks and locations, Nova had created a navigational VI aid.
Once he arrived at Aron’s location, he couldn’t help but curse in surprise. He was in a large, grassy meadow with Sarah, Henry, Rina, and all of the high-level leader AIs. The meadow itself was about fifty meters across, and outside of it was nothing but devastation. Craters were scattered around the cracked, bare earth, and more were appearing every second as explosions continued booming out in the distance.
“What the hell is going on?” Felix wondered, his jaw dropped so far Sarah considered spawning an egg to stick in it to see if it would fit.
[Sir Aron is having a sparring session with mother,] Athena answered, pulling up a screen that showed the action in real time with slow motion replays for Felix.
After watching the footage for a few seconds, he asked, “Why fight with swords and magic if it’s a sparring session? Isn’t he just playing a game while the world is in such a mess?” To Felix’s knowledge, what he was watching absolutely must be some kind of new game. There was no third human that knew of Aron’s magic, and Felix was definitely not the second; Rina was.
But before anyone even began to answer, if anyone was going to in the first place, the spar came to an abrupt end. Aron was caught in one of Nova’s attacks that cost him an arm, but in return, one final, massive explosion erupted, sending dirt and ashes billowing out from it. Then Nova’s figure, shield and all, flew out of the cloud like a bullet headed to who knows where.
The spectating AIs were shocked into a frozen state by the surprise ending. Throughout the thousands and thousands of sparring matches between Aron and Nova, this was the first time he had survived and sent her to earn some frequent flyer miles.
Not too long later, Aron, whose arm had fully regenerated, appeared in front of the spectators and immediately celebrated by giving Henry a high five and Rina a hug and quick kiss.
[That was a surprising decision, sir. Did you plan to trade your severe injury for mother’s defeat ahead of time?] Athena asked, looking at Aron in admiration tinged with reverence and a little bit of worship.
“It wasn’t a difficult decision. The calculation was rather simple, and of course, the sacrifice was planned,” Aron answered.
“Hey there Felix, long time no see,” Aron said when he spotted his friend. He moved in for a hug, as if he really hadn’t seen him in a very long time.
“It’s only been a few days since we last saw each other. What’s with this ‘long time no see’ bullshit?” Felix sneered, though he reciprocated his friend’s hug.
“Did you forget? Time dilation, remember—it really has been a few weeks since I saw you last,” Aron explained to his forgetful friend as they separated.
“Yeah, yeah, my bad... hey, listen. I had a question about your plans to deal with the rest of the world.”
Aron nodded and listened to Felix lay out the examples he had come up with when discussing things with Raven. “I can see where you’re coming from, and you’re absolutely correct. At the moment, we already have hard evidence of about seven thousand active rebel groups from all around the world. And all of them show signs of whipping up their own individual rebellions, if we don’t stamp them out,” he said once Felix finished laying out his argument.
“That many?” Felix asked in surprise.
“At least that many, yeah. We’re pretty sure there’s more we have yet to discover. The loud ones we’ve found so far are all the dumb ones and will be easy enough to deal with. It’s the ones that’re smart enough to remain hidden we have to worry about. Plus, more will crawl out of the woodwork as we work on establishing the new world constitution, then even more once we shake things up by implementing it.
“But that’s in the future. Right now, we’ve got even more groups. Not every armed organization is going to be fighting for their ideological beliefs. There were already a bunch of organizations that already existed before the war. Terrorist groups like ISIS, drug cartels, street gangs... none of them are exactly ideological in nature, but we’ve already affected their profits and bottom lines. If we add all of them to the mix, there’s about fifteen thousand different groups of varying size that we currently know of.”
“What about the smart ones? What’re you doing about those?” Felix followed up with a shudder. He couldn’t even imagine how capable someone would have to be to hide from Aron, of all people.
“They won’t remain hidden forever. The moment they attempt anything, we’ll spot them and deal with them.” Aron had everything under control.
“So why just keep an eye on them instead of doing something about them?” Felix asked.
“Who says we aren’t? We’ve already implemented a hearts and minds strategy for the ones we can do that for. A little charity goes a long way for most of the angry people, and without angry people, insurrections will always fail. But some are trickier to deal with. For those, we’re gathering evidence against them as we speak, but it isn’t an overnight process. Even though we can wipe them out, and easily at that, doing so without just cause would just reinforce my image as a villain in people’s minds. Then I’ll be a barbarian who’s using my power just because I can, and that wouldn’t be good at all,” Aron said. He knew very well just how corrupting an influence absolute power was; he had personally experienced it, and both Islamabad and Delhi had paid the price for his lesson. Thus, letting himself act extrajudicially would form a bad habit that would backfire on him hard in the future.
“As for the rest, well... what better way to prevent people from joining rebel groups than to take their focus from me and put it firmly onto something else?” he continued with an enigmatic smile on his face.
“Weapon of mass distraction? What’ve you got planned in that devious scheme factory of yours?” Felix rolled his eyes.
Instead of saying anything, Aron snapped his fingers and the two friends were teleported into space. In front of and slightly below them was Jupiter and behind them was the sun. “Welcome to the Trojan Asteroids,” he said. “To your left is the asteroid field known as the ‘Greek Camp’, and to your right is the ‘Trojan Camp’. There’s an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter as well, but,” he snapped his fingers and the two teleported to a vast, empty stretch of space, “you’re standing in it now. The Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter only has about as much mass as our moon, if you were to gather all of the asteroids together into one celestial body. The distances involved make it difficult to exploit, unlike in Hollywood where spaceships are always dodging tightly packed clusters of asteroids while dogfighting in them.”
He snapped his fingers and they teleported back to the Trojan Asteroids, then pointed at a fast-moving object headed toward the Greek Camp. “That, my friend, is the future. Prospecting and exploiting resources farther out in the solar system instead of on our mother planet. And do you see what I’m pointing to? That’s one of our flagbearers. I launched it the other day.”
He snapped his fingers and they returned to the grassy meadow where the rest of the people who had watched Nova and him spar from. “Other than that, VR itself should be enough to distract people. But space is Important with a capital I, especially since we’re going to be welcoming our first guests very soon.”
