474 Of Downloads and Backlashes
“No matter how many times I see it, I still can’t get used to this. Aron is an absolute miracle worker, there shouldn’t be a doubt in anyone’s mind of that,” Felix, the head of Hephaestus Heavy Industries, said as he watched the growing space elevator. Just the millions of GEMbots and constructor swarm queens on the surface was something he had a hard time wrapping his head around, let alone the unfathomable number that had to be working to hollow out such an enormous asteroid. And all of that with no human direction at all!
Not to mention that he was standing on the bridge of an honest-to-goodness spaceship, watching the construction progress in actual space, as he wanted to see the process with his own eyes. Sure, he could have watched it in the simulation, but there was just something... different, something... more, about watching it with his own two eyes in reality.
“But why’d you have to drag me out here with you?” Sarah complained in a joking tone. She was actually enjoying the tour.
“Well, you needed some fresh air,” Felix joked. The “fresh” air on any spaceship was recycled with every breath, so it was about as far from fresh as it was possible to be. “After all, you’ve been in virtual reality for so long we were going to have to build a pyramid to house your sarcophagus after your real body got turned into a mummy. And what better way to do that than to show you this?” He theatrically swept his arm from left to right, vaguely pointing at the ongoing construction work. The anchor cable had progressed a few millimeters further in the time it took the two friends to make that single, joking exchange.
“Fresh air, you say! ” Sarah said with a snort as she looked out into the solar system, which lacked any air at all. The only thing separating her from it was a thin layer of metal alloy that blocked the harsh environment’s attempts to murder everyone aboard the ship. It was too thin, if one were to ask her opinion; if she was going to spend time in space in reality, she would much prefer being separated by meters of heavy armor and shielding, thank you very much!
“So, what... you wanna go to the moon or something?” Felix scratched his nose, slightly embarrassed. But at least she got the joke, anyway.
“Well, since we’re already here, we might as well.” While she wasn’t a fan of being on spaceships, Sarah would actually enjoy going to the moon and tracing the footsteps left in the regolith by intrepid, brave humans of decades past.
“Astra, take us to the moon,” Felix said to the empty bridge. Fan of history that he was, he had named his personal ship the Ad Astra after a line from Publius Vergilius Maro’s Aeneid, "sic itur ad astra”, which translated to "thus one journeys to the stars”.
(Ed note: Publius Vergilius Maro is the proper name of the Roman poet and philosopher who wrote the Aeneid, a twelve-volume epic poem about Aeneas, a character from Homer’s Iliad. It's actually really good, if you can chew through the terrible translations out there and handle the archaic style.)
[Yes, sir,] the AI replied as the ship began accelerating out of Earth’s orbit on a course for the moon. Taking a cue from Felix’s character, Astra didn’t accelerate as fast as she could have, so as to give her master and best friend more time on his “date”.
Teddy grabbed her head and stiffened, then fell to the ground and rolled around in agony. It felt like her head was being sawn in half by someone using the saw blade on a swiss army knife! The pain lasted fifteen minutes and Aceso didn’t interfere at all, letting her feel it for the entire time and counting it as a lesson.
[What happened?] Aceso asked after putting Teddy back into a bed in the hall of healing. She knew perfectly well what had happened, but mentioning it, especially beforehand, would raise suspicions later when the awakeners got together and swapped stories of their awakenings. And what the empire was doing was already stretching the boundary of what could be explained, since those who had been awakened in a medical pod would have a far more facile command of their blessings than those that had naturally awakened without being under Aceso’s supervision during the process. And that couldn’t be explained away by a difference in the quality of care they received.
Similar events were happening in all of Aceso’s other instances as well. None of the people who had awakened in this first wave had been blessed with any mana affinity that was of a higher category than derived—like Teddy’s ice affinity, which was a combination of wind and water elemental affinities—so the “instincts” currently being downloaded into their minds... along with some minor tweaks here and there to ensure they didn’t notice they hadn’t immediately woken up with them. Those downloads only caused a relatively minor amount of pain.
That said, some of them were suffering two, or even three times as much, as not everyone only awakened one affinity. One poor person from Asia even had to be put back into a coma because he had awakened an affinity to all five of the classical elements—earth, water, fire, metal, and wood. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that he would be able to accept the knowledge being downloaded into his brain.
But regardless of how many affinities a person had awakened, all of the downloads were completed within a few hours, during which their bodies naturally replenished the mana they had expended in their initial experiments with calling the elements into physical form.
Teddy groaned as she sat back up after the pain passed. “I’m not sure what that was,” she grimaced, “but it felt like my head was being carved like a pumpkin. Any ideas?”
[From my initial observation, I think it was likely a backlash caused by expending all of the energy—let’s call it ‘mana’, for ease of conversation—that you managed to passively gather so far. So you probably shouldn’t do that again, at least until you’ve learned to gauge how much you have in your ‘mana tank’, so to speak.] Aceso played a recording of Teddy during her “backlash”, rolling around on the ground and screaming at the top of her lungs.
Aceso talked with Teddy for a while, letting her know that the empire would look poorly on anyone using their blessings to cause harm or wreak havoc. It would take some time before official policies were in place, at least until after everyone had awakened and determined exactly what blessing they had received, but the more issues that arose during that time, the harsher and more draconian the eventual laws would be. During that time, the empire hoped that the blessed would cooperate with researchers to determine ways to safely harness their new powers, as well as a classification system for them.
That was the very definition of a win-win deal for the blessed. Not only would they be able to safely learn how to use their blessings, they would also gain the right to have input into the eventual laws arising around them. On the empire’s side, they would have all of the data they needed to know how best to handle the newly blessed, as well as not having anyone run rampant with superpowers, causing major disasters so soon after they had just laid to rest the victims of the last globe-spanning disaster.
Thus, the blessed were given the option to sign an agreement that they would follow the guidelines they had been informed of, and that they would assume responsibility for all of their actions henceforth. The imperial government would assume no liability for any of their actions until the laws were enshrined in the imperial legal code. Should they choose not to sign the agreement, they would be free to remain in their medical pods until they either chose to sign it or the laws were passed, but they would have access to the public VR during that time; they weren’t prisoners, after all, merely safety risks.
Those who signed it, however, would be released home to their loved ones if they so chose. They were also offered the option of remaining in VR until the laws were enacted, just like those who refused to sign the agreement, in the cases where they didn’t have anywhere to go if they left. Those people would be offered a stipend to make their stay more enjoyable.
But whether they signed the agreement or not, they would be required to follow up with imperial researchers to learn how to safely use their new blessings. Should they ignore that requirement, nothing needed to be said and everything could be communicated with a meaningful look.
Minutes from the first person being released into the care of their family, the media got wind of the event. The first few blessed to be caught by the media leaving their cubes were so harassed by reporters shoving microphones and cameras in their faces that they were forced to return to the cube within seconds.
To counter the media, the staff from the cubes activated LEAs and printed bus-sized shuttles with gravity drives to escort the blessed and their families home, bypassing the ravenous reporters. Those who had been released to VR had alternate options available to them to combat harassment, and the beleaguered media companies soon faced another wave of firings as reporters who insisted on violating the privacy of unwilling interviewees had their press credentials pulled and their careers brought to a miserable end.
That said, the people who did accept the interviews were immediately raised to celebrity status the moment they revealed that they were among the blessed. Every word they spoke could be measured in gold and millions of people were watching them, watering the seeds of arrogance within them.
Blessed supremacy would definitely become a problem in the future.
