Aron took a deep breath and relaxed, a compassionate expression on his face as he wrapped up his first imperial address. “I know the many changes coming all at once are difficult to accept. Especially as drastic and bold as they are.” He smiled wryly. “But there’s an old saying in my family: ‘begin as you mean to go on’, and that’s what I’m doing here. There will be an inevitable teething period as everyone grows accustomed to the new changes to, well... everything, really, but I believe in humanity. I believe in our ability to adapt to anything, and overcome what we can’t adapt to.
“Mankind isn’t the fastest animal on the planet. We aren’t the strongest ones, either. We can’t swim in the ocean or fly in the sky unaided, we aren’t particularly stealthy, and we don’t have a very thick, robust hide. What we do have, however, is a sapient mind. We can imagine, we can develop, and we can make conscious decisions to follow our better natures instead of our worst.
“I know I’m asking a lot of everyone, but at the same time, I’m not asking much. What everything boils down to is this—I’m asking for time. Time with which I can fulfill my promises to all of you, so that you can see the improvements for yourself instead of leaping to conclusions based on the worst case scenario.
“Thank you for your time, and I wish everyone a happy new year.”
Aron disappeared from the briefing room and the feed cut out, leaving the imperial seal as the only thing on everyone’s screens.
……
The world was silent after Aron’s address. A minute passed, then two, three.... Eventually, eleven minutes crept by after he disappeared.
Then the internet exploded.
The people who watched his address flocked to the websites he had mentioned, but not in an even distribution; practically 90% of them went to the GAIA Tech website to check out their VR tech. After all, anyone who claimed they weren’t interested in VR was basically sure to be lying.
What they saw there was shocking to them. It almost seemed like the equipment had been plucked straight from dreams! The equipment claims were straight out of a novel, almost, but GAIA had a reputation for delivering on their promises and, if anything, they tended to understate their technology, rather than hype it up and present software or hardware that failed to match up to their promised capabilities.
Pictures of Aron and others known to be close to him wearing glasses started spreading on the internet, showing that they had been using the augmented reality hardware years ago, meaning it was already a mature technology even then!
Discussions about the tech spread everywhere as scientists and normal people alike wondered just how the hell Aron had managed to pull everything off. Especially an accurate simulation of the universal laws of physics, since not even the physicists with the most exalted reputations could claim to know everything about their field of study.
Yet Aron had just claimed exactly that!
That sparked a number of conspiracy theories ranging from Aron having sold his soul to the devil all the way across the spectrum to Aron already having had close contact with a far more technologically advanced alien species. Some even claimed that he had regressed to the 21st century from a time far in the future.
But the most impactful conspiracy theory was the malicious and intentional spread of rumors that claimed Aron was using his tech to brainwash people into acting against the best interests of humanity. It was especially believable, as it was basically only a hair’s breadth away from the actual truth.
The people spreading the conspiracy theory pointed to the world leaders and how easily they had given up as evidence. The only difference, really, was that they hadn’t been brainwashed into giving up, but rather tortured into it.
But despite having a wider spread than usual, the rumors and conspiracy theories still failed to travel outside of their own social bubbles, as Panoptes was on the job. He identified the topic starters and passed their information on to Nyx for further investigation and closer monitoring under the suspicion that there was a single driving force motivating the spread of negative information.
……
Even before Aron began his address, the Edenian carriers in the sky had gotten busy. Their patrol schedules had been altered to pass over every major city on the planet, where they would choose a location on the outskirts of the cities and transport troopers and giant blocks of raw materials in durable shipping containers to the surface.
Once the men and materials had been landed, the carriers would move on to the next cities in their itineraries, where the process would repeat.
After landing, the “shipping containers” broke apart into millions of tiny multi-legged robots, which were collectively known as Type XVIII constructor swarms.
The small constructor bots were what researchers in Lab City had come up with to allow Aron to have the highest flexibility in construction while keeping the atomic printer technology hidden. They had an atomic printer base, which would print the bits and pieces that went into making the design, and the constructor swarm would assemble the pieces into the final object like putting together a 3D puzzle.
The constructor swarms immediately got to work building copies of the Cube from Avalon Island, which would be packed full of VR pods to be used for retraining. Each Cube would be able to comfortably process a million people at the same time.
After the buildings were assembled and the pods installed, the constructor swarms switched to building multiple things at once. They divided themselves into teams that would work on fulfilling the orders for VR devices that were coming in in droves, teams that would work on assembling enormous buses that would transport those due for retraining to their nearest Cube, and trucks that would ship out the newly ordered VR and AR devices.
......
As the building frenzy was ongoing, everyone scheduled for retraining received messages asking whether they would choose to retire or be folded into the relevant imperial agencies to continue working for the imperial family.
Based on their decision, they would either receive a time, date, and location to report to for transportation to the nearest Cube, or they would receive a discharge form they could submit to the bank of the universe to dispense their “retirement payment” in END.
Beyond that, messages were sent to every parent of a school-aged child as well as their teachers and educators informing them that schools would be closed for the month of January in order for children to get used to the VR environment their new schooling would take place in.
Many more things, ranging from the critical to the most routine operations were taking place in a coordinated chaos that was arranged and conducted by Gaia herself, who had officially taken her position as the administrator of Earth.
