January 7, 2018.
With a strict curfew maintained over the past week, people had found themselves with little to do. Thus, orders had been pouring in for AR glasses and VR gear nonstop and deliveries had proceeded apace. By the end of the week, the number of people connected to VR had reached two billion, twice Aron’s initial goal, and the number was still steadily increasing.
The first batch of retrained individuals also returned home and began implementing their orders. As they got to work, the empire truly began taking shape as the imperial agencies came online. While the AIs were capable of managing the empire perfectly fine, and it could even run completely without human intervention, there was still some ephemeral difference between having real people at the helm and AIs running things.
In the finance sector, the currency issue had also begun. All digital currencies were instantly converted to Earth New Dollars at a fair exchange rate and paper currency was available, albeit in a limited amount, in every bank as soon as they opened in the morning. Relatively few young people still handled cash, so most of the people in the lines that stretched out of the doors and around the corner of the blocks the bank branches were on tended to be members of older generations.
Naturally, the night before, all of the other paper and coin currencies had been brought back to the cubes for recycling. There was a little bit of it saved for collectors, who could buy it from the Imperial Treasury with END, but the majority of it ended up as atomic printer stock for usage in other projects.
As for the “paper” currency itself, it wasn’t paper at all. Instead, it was two layers of a clear aluminum memory alloy that could be folded, but not creased. It was resistant to tearing, would melt instead of burn—but only if exposed to a sufficiently high temperature—and sandwiched between the layers was a highly durable, yet flexible battery that powered two things: a single qubit and a short-ranged holographic projector.
The holographic projector could only project a single image a few microns away from it and was completely air-gapped and immune to tampering. The images on the face and back of the bill were generated inside the currency, rather than printed on it. As for the qubit, it only served one purpose; it could communicate with a cash reader and return a checksum verification proving the authenticity of the bill itself.
With those two measures alone, the currency was completely secure without taking into account the alloy the bill was made of.
And on the information front, all of the digital and paper records had been scanned into the Imperial Archivist database, where Mnemosyne, another one of Gaia’s child AIs, was busily categorizing and sorting it into categories.
The Imperial Archivist database also contained the Akashic Record, a constantly updating living database comprised of the brain data of everyone who logged into VR. Considering more than two billion people had logged in by this point, the record was rather immense. Thus, Mnemosyne assigned an akashic librarian to each individual to maintain the record, and they operated as a hive mind for convenience and cataloguing, removing duplicate entries and generally acting as curators for the body of knowledge.
Once the relevant information had been forwarded to Minerva, a wave of true justice swept the globe as those who had abused government authority were arrested, and innocent prisoners serving jail time for crimes they didn’t commit were released and compensated. The prisoners whose crimes had their penalties changed in the imperial legal code were left in prison, but notified that a retrial would be taking place along the new punishment guidelines.
Some prisoners cheered and others sobbed, as included in the notification of their upcoming retrial was a copy of the code they would be retried under. Some crimes had lower punishment under imperial law, while others were punished with harsher sentences, leading to the cacophony of cheers and sobs.
That wasn’t the only usage of the Akashic Record, either. Those who had already registered IDs in the imperial offices in VR were immediately able to receive the benefits of being an imperial citizen. Thus, Asclepius and Coeus arranged transport for the sick and injured to their nearest cube, where they were seen by Edenian and Esparian doctors and given time in medical pods to heal their injuries and cure their illnesses.
Even those with previously incurable and untreatable issues, such as psychological problems caused by an imbalance in their brain chemistry, degenerative diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and even those with genetic issues like Fragile X syndrome or down syndrome were completely restored to normal in less than 48 hours in a medical pod.
But that wasn’t the only benefit of registering for government IDs.
Everyone who registered for an ID was surprised to find that their GAIA OS assistants had been migrated to VR to act as their personal maids or butlers. For some, the surprise was a pleasant one, while for others, the surprise was embarrassing. After all, they had never thought they’d ever actually interact with their AI assistants and had chosen their appearance based on waifus and husbandos or scantily-clad, sexually exaggerated figures.
Those who were embarrassed were soon forced to admit that they were not, in fact, true men of culture, as a TRUE man of culture wouldn’t be embarrassed at all.
Still, their maids, butlers, waifus, husbandos, and scantily-clad sexpots were extremely helpful in guiding them through their imperial benefits and designing the homes they would be inhabiting in the soon-to-be-constructed fortress cities. After they finished the design process, the designs were sent to the Imperial Design Agency, where they were checked for issues like structural stability and so on, as well as given an estimated cost of construction that the citizen would need to pay to have their designs brought from virtual reality to actual reality. Then, the only thing left for them to do was visit the Bank of the Universe, where they could work out financing options that worked for them.
