True chaos arrived the morning following Aron’s address as swarms of delivery drones and fleets of trucks left each of the training centers. The drones were carrying AR glasses and VR helmets to those who had ordered them, and the trucks were loaded with VR pods. The delivery blitz had come without warning and created even more panic and rioting in some areas, especially those that were already leaning toward resisting Aron’s empire.
That didn’t stop the delivery, though, as the uncaring drones and trucks being driven by ARES troopers cared nothing for the chaos. They merely rerouted around any trouble hotspots and continued on their way.
Once the equipment was delivered to their new owners, reviews and discussions began springing up on Pangea mere hours later. All of the users were basically in agreement about how wonderful the new devices were, and of course, they were posted to Pangea through the devices themselves since the lucky people who already had them couldn’t bring themselves to log out. Naturally, that only included those with helmets and pods, as the glasses had been marketed as Augmented Reality devices and nobody knew they could also access VR as well.
Still, with the glowing reviews posted by verified VR and AR users on Pangea, others who had ordered theirs were praying for their deliveries to arrive faster.
@JaiPatel(AR): [Damn! I can’t believe they had this for years and didn’t even tease it!
@SunKing(VR): But why’d they prevent us from modifying our avatars? How am I supposed to find a wife like this!? cryingface.emoji
@beautifulgirl(VR): And what’s with the queue at the ID place if we’re the first ones in the city??
Comments like those started appearing all over the internet as people almost overwhelmingly praised both the AR glasses and VR helmets and pods. There were a few minor complaints, but no one had said it was false advertising.
That said, though most people couldn’t wait for their hardware to arrive and kept urging the delivery drones and trucks to arrive faster, there were still holdouts. Not everyone had been convinced by Aron’s long address the night before; there were people who had ideological or trust issues, those who thought things were working fine as they were and saw no point in changing for change’s sake, those who refused to believe out of an overweening sense of arrogance, and even those that believed it was a publicity stunt meant to drain money from their wallets and would be shut down once Aron had sucked enough financial lifeblood from the people.
Thus, the short period of calm that had begun when Aron took the stage to deliver his address came to an abrupt end at sunrise, as people took to the streets in many cities again, despite the “protest fatigue” they had been feeling. They dragged their tired bodies out of their beds as the sun rose, then trudged along the roads heading toward the newly constructed cubes on the outskirts of major population centers.
The protesters were also, by and large, armed. Some carried guns, others had metal pipes or baseball bats, and knives were common. So were bricks, oddly enough, with quite a few “extremely online” fans of light novels even muttering something about the dao of bricks to themselves.
They all had one thing in common, though: an overwhelming desire to fight against the encroaching empire.
Within each group were people acting as instigators and impromptu leaders directing the masses of people. They were invariably calm, well rested, and in shape, and they all moved with an obvious purpose, though those in the crowds around them didn’t even realize they were effectively being herded along with someone else’s agenda.
……
Nyx was in VR, sitting next to Gaia and eating her latest weird snack, popcorn that glowed a bright, radioactive green but tasted like a combination of both chocolate- and caramel-covered popcorn. [That’s... a lot of operatives,] she said, blue light flickering across her eyes as she directly observed the feeds from the delivery drones as they passed over the head of the protesters on their way to drop off their packages. [A lot of people are pulling a lot of strings really hard for this, it looks like.]
Gaia was stuck between sighing over the actions of humans and feeling satisfied with the new snack she had come up with. [Winning the war was the easy part. The intelligence operatives were always going to be a problem—would they roll over and accept their loss just because we said so? Of course not!] she said in her floating, ethereal voice. [They were always going to fight back no matter what, and that’s what we’re seeing now.] She was extremely calm and well informed, despite being only a few days old and the mess in front of her happening on her second day of work.
“Well, it isn’t like we didn’t expect something like this. I was even willing to give them a month to rethink their actions and accept the retraining, not that I thought they’d ever take me up on that offer,” Aron said with a shrug. He cast a side-eye at the bowl of “popcorn” on the coffee table in front of the chair he was sitting in. For today’s meeting, they had settled on an old-fashioned castle library, with many tall bookshelves, hunting trophies on the wall, and a fireplace with a bearskin rug in front of it. Scattered around the middle of the room were many comfortable chairs, sofas, loveseats, and low tables within easy reach of each seat. The bookshelves were mostly empty, but books were rapidly popping into existence on the shelves as time passed.
[By then, the retraining would be over. And for intelligence operatives, ‘retraining’ equates to ‘reprogramming’, so of course they have to make their move now. Plus, with a full quarter of all the police forces being replaced by a small number of ARES troopers, they probably thought they could ride on the negative image associated with using military forces for law enforcement,] Gaia sighed.
[Another factor is the adoption rate of VR equipment,] Nyx added. [The more people that receive theirs, the less people will be out and about on the streets instead of stuck in the comfort of their own homes wandering through virtual reality. Eventually, the only people outside will be those who can’t afford the long-term pods and protesters.]
“Oh, we’ve started to move,” Aron said as he calmly watched the embedded nyxians moving toward the worst of the mob herders.
[Yes. At the moment, due to our low numbers,] Nyx cast an inscrutable glance at Aron, [we can only deal with the worst of the people behind these coordinated protests. For those in the former United States, we can use a bit of a heavier hand, as I’m pretty sure I’ve spotted more guns than people in those protests—what the fuck? Is that a homemade ROCKET LAUNCHER!?] she exclaimed, interrupting herself when one of the GAIA Tech “delivery” drones flew over a particular protester. She had caught sight of what she thought was one of Musk’s “not a flamethrower” flamethrowers and had another drone diverted to rescan that particular protest to take a closer look at their armament. When she did so, the drone had captured someone that’d jerry-rigged what looked like an old pineapple grenade to a stick and shoved it in a homemade potato gun.
Aron was just as flabbergasted as Nyx when he caught sight of that piece of “good old-fashioned American ingenuity”. He blinked a few times and took a moment to collect himself, then said, “I’m pretty sure that guy’s more Taliban than the actual Taliban was.” He was referring to the issues the US troops had with improvised explosive devices during the War on Terror.
He blinked a few more times, then shook his head and turned to Nova. “Anyway, how’s progress on your front?” he asked.
[We’ve collected two hundred million brain scans from everyone logging into VR or using the AR glasses already, and the number is increasing. Those are being analyzed and collated as we speak, and I estimate that once we reach five billion users, we should have about 90 years of historical data to use in the simulation. As long as someone was there to view or hear something, we’ll know about it,] Nova reported.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re all downright frightening?” Felix asked. He still wasn’t sure he was entirely comfortable with that level of intrusion into people’s privacy, but he was slowly coming to terms with it. After all, just because they collected the data didn’t mean they would use it for some kind of voyeuristic thrill or something; most people’s lives were mundane and boring, anyway, and of absolutely no interest to anyone but themselves.
[If it helps, just think of it as a living history and record of humanity,] Nova patiently explained.
“And an excellent source of blackmail material,” Sarah interjected. “As long as people keep logging in, our ‘burn file’ will continue being updated,” she looked at the bookshelves around the room they were in and the books that were constantly appearing on them, “and growing, too,” she finished.
The atmosphere grew a little bit heavy at that, but it soon lightened back up as the three friends began chatting back and forth with each other. Felix and Sarah would never treat Aron any differently no matter what hats he put on himself, whether he was a techpreneur, explorer, businessman, military leader, or even an emperor... to them, he would always be their friend, first and foremost.
