[I’ll keep an eye on things and let you know if anything comes up that requires your presence,] Gaia said, then went back to collating and sorting the brain data in the library. Though it was curated and maintained by the akashic librarians, she still wanted to thoroughly understand it to better perform her duties.
Aron logged out of the simulation, then headed to Rina’s side and watched her through the transparent lid of the pod she was in.
“Nova, increase the mana flow to her pod. The awakening process is a lot like my upgrades, so the more mana in the local environment, the process will be faster and the outcome better.” Aron sat on the edge of her pod and began sorting through the thoughts in his head. He had been through an absolute emotional rollercoaster ever since his impromptu meeting with the so-called ‘system consciousness’, or so he assumed it to be, during his latest upgrade. And he was sure that more shocks were to come as time passes, but he could only deal with one thing at a time. And right now, he wanted to be by his lover’s side.
……
The mother of a formerly disabled child was pacing back and forth in a corridor in one of the cubes. Through the window on one side, row after row of medical pods was visible. “Do you think there was a problem with the medical pod and it didn’t cure her the first time? Is it just a relapse?” she asked the man next to her in a worried tone.
The last three weeks had been some of the best in her life, as her daughter, who had suffered from juvenile onset Huntington’s disease from a young age, had been free of the effects of her illness. There was no feeling more joyous in the young mother’s memories than watching her daughter, who had previously been confined to the grasp of a motorized wheelchair as the degenerative disease ravaged her young body, step out of the medical pod and run to her mommy.
And the process was so fast, too! She had only applied for a spot in a medical pod a few minutes before an ambulance arrived and transported her and her daughter to the cube. Then she simply walked through the ID check gate, holding her daughter’s hand as she was transported on a gurney next to her, and watch as an Asclepius technician gently placed her daughter in a pod. The lid had closed and she was led to a small, but comfortable room where she could spend the next week in the public simulation with her daughter as she underwent an abbreviated, intense physical therapy regimen that would allow her to redevelop her coordination and allow her to walk as soon as she was healed by the pod.
The moment her daughter had run to her with arms outstretched was, she felt, the peak of her life. Had she died at that moment, it would have been with a huge smile on her face. But today, no sign of that smile remained; it had instead been replaced by a pinched expression of worry and a frown as she was stuck in a memory loop of the things that had happened earlier that day.
Before she had even climbed out of bed that morning, she heard a heartwrenching scream from her daughter’s room. She immediately leapt out of bed and rushed down the hall, then slammed through the door to her daughter’s bedroom, only to see her writhing in agony on the floor, tangled in blankets and sheets. When the child stopped screaming and became eerily still, her heart jumped up into her throat and did its level best to prevent her from breathing.
Thankfully, she reacted in time. She rushed back to her room and threw her AR glasses on her face, then contacted emergency rescue to come pick her daughter up and bring her back to the medical pod.
“That can’t be it. Our neighbor’s kid is in the pod right next to her,” the man said. “And there are more people being brought in as we speak.” He was worried that it might be another terror attack; even though the main wave was over, there were still occasional attacks happening. Especially after that damned news broadcast! He would love to get his hands around the neck of Sean Hannity, the anchor whose show he had been watching when what was basically a recruiting ad for a terrorist organization was played.
“Let’s just wait. They already told us that everyone’s going to be just fine and they’ll update us as soon as they’re able,” he added as he caught the woman’s arm when she paced back in front of him and pulled her to the seat next to him. Her constant pacing had been making him nervous as well.
Similar scenes were happening all over the world as people between the ages of 14 to 22 years old were reported in identical situations to the child that had been brought in by her parents. All of them had screamed, fallen into seizures, then eventually passed out due to pain before being brought to the nearest cube for treatment.
The low-level fear that had yet to even calm down from the initial wave of attacks once again erupted as news organizations reported the spread of a “pandemic” that affected children in their teens. But it was a weird spread and all of the epidemiologists and virologists the anchors interviewed as experts could only shake their heads. Diseases always spread from a “patient zero”, but this one seemed to just descend all over the world at once. Nobody said it, but everyone was thinking the same thing: biological attack.
Actually, there were a few who said that in an attempt to create mass panic, incite chaos, or just increase engagement on their social media accounts to satiate their greed for fame. There were also those who believed they were special and had discovered some secret that nobody else had, and others that believed it was a curse from the gods or an attack launched by the incoming visitors to herald their incipient arrival.
Oddly enough, a few were even close to the truth. Some lightsnovel addicts believed it was the dawning of a mass mutation that would enable people to become cultivators and cultivate immortality before shattering the chains that held them bound to their mortal selves and ascend to higher planes.
Weirdos(jk).
Still, it was true that the new empire did seem rather cursed. In just the first few weeks of its existence, it had suffered problem after problem, and a wave of opinions popped up on Pangea calling for the thousand imperial senators to use their power to vote the emperor off of his throne. That, they believed, would save the world from more calamities.
That said, the silent majority reigned, and had chosen to wait for news from official sources before making their own informed judgment.
