467 Enrichment
“Did sister Rina already wake up?”
When Aron opened his eyes, his little brother’s question was the first thing he heard. It would still be a little bit before Rina completed the logout procedure, but Aron, due to his intimate connection to the simulation, had completed his logout almost instantaneously.
“She did, yeah. What’re you doing here?” Aron said, ruffling Henry’s hair and eliciting an annoyed groan from the young boy.
“Mom told me to come ask if you would go out and play with us now that we can leave the Cube,” Henry wheedled. He was just shy of grabbing his big brother’s hand and dragging him to the elevator.
“Sure,” Aron laughed. “Let’s go play, I’ll bring you to visit the air and sea scrubbers.” Now that the empire had gone into full swing, he would focus on carving out as much time as he could to spend with his family.
“Yay! I’ll go let mom know so she can pack our stuff!” Henry exclaimed, then ran to the elevator. “Oh, I should let Uncle Herschel and Aunt Virginia know too. I’m sure they want to go out and have some fun with us, too!”
The elevator doors hissed closed and Henry bounced up and down until they opened again, then sprinted at full child speed down the hall to where the adults were staying to tell them the ‘good news’.
Around the world, people who, like Henry, preferred to live in the ‘real’ world had also left their homes. One explorer had discovered the air scrubber in the Thar Desert in Pakistan and posted pictures and a short video clip to his Pangea account, prompting others to take trips out to remote areas in search of other towers. The empire, meanwhile, hadn’t even bothered hiding their existence. Not that they couldn’t hide them, Aron and Gaia had just determined that it would be pointless to even try.
As more and more of them were discovered, people wondered what they could be. The discussion on the internet was wild... until someone checked the Akashic Record and learned exactly what they were, what they were built to do, how they worked, and much, much more. And when he posted that information in the form of a long forum post, instead of people getting upset that their entertaining discussion had been ruined, they were excited. All of those enormous towers had been built in the course of one short month! Didn’t that mean the fortress cities would be built just as ridiculously fast as the behemoth air and sea scrubbers?
Everyone had “built” their dream homes in the public simulation and they were all itching to move in!
The reveal and resulting discussion surrounding the air and sea scrubbers had also taken some of the spotlight off of the people lying unconscious in medical pods receiving their blessings, at least mostly, anyway. Conspiracy theorists were notoriously stubborn when it came to promulgating their pet conspiracy theories, after all, and had stubbornly continued denying that the empire had the best interests of humanity at heart.
Two weeks later.
Things had finally gotten on track. Once the empire was functioning at peak capacity, the economy began picking up. The events of the past few months had devastated everything, but most of the actual damage had been to the fragile economy. The space bubble bursting, followed by a shooting war, followed by mass protests, followed by a lockdown, then worldwide riots, then another lockdown, a wave of terrorist attacks.... People had been petrified, and when the emotion that economies are the most sensitive to is fear. So it wasn’t surprising that it had taken so long to wrench it back on track.
The empire had been fighting a losing battle against the crashing economy at first, but the past few weeks had seen it stabilize, and finally, begin climbing again. Stopgap measure after stopgap measure was rescinded, and the new flat tax stimulated spending to the point where the rapid fall was followed by a just-as-rapid climb.
The biggest contributor to the newly burgeoning economy, however, was the empire’s compensation to its citizens. The past few weeks of relative peace had allowed the super-efficient imperial treasury to calculate and disburse payments to those affected by the recent riots and attacks, as well as those who were included in the imperial scholastica’s debt forgiveness program. Combined with an initiative by the Bank of the Universe to offer low- or zero-interest loans to people and the imperial housing agency’s buyback of unused and unwanted real estate together with people’s house who have finished the mortgages of their houses to incentivize their movements to the fortress cities but also to use the lands for the reconstructions of the fortress cities within the former cities, the atmosphere among imperial citizens could be described by three short words: buy, buy, buy!
And it wasn’t as though they had nowhere to spend that windfall of cash, either; Aron’s companies had been releasing product after product and partnering with small, medium, and large businesses to sell, sell, sell!
Thus, trillions of Earth New Dollars had been changing hands, not only helping the economy climb, but also enriching the lives of imperial citizens all over the world. But much to the dismay of those who had waived their rights and privileges and chosen not to register for imperial citizenship, the purchase of the shiny new gadgets was restricted to those with imperial IDs. Unbeknownst to them, it was just another method devised by Nyx to narrow the field she and her nyxians would have to investigate to find the remaining cultists, who were still a threat despite cell after cell being identified and taken down.
Although the economy news was heartening, at least to those who were paying attention to it—like Herschel Rothschild and other members of the former “elite” class—most people simply took their increased quality of life in stride. The vast majority of humanity had no interest in the economy, nor did they know about the secret war between the empire and the cult. But they definitely cared about the “Three Percenters”, those who were still lying unconscious in medical pods around the world, receiving their blessings.
