John was in the shower, getting ready for a night with his ladies, when he received a priority notification. Since only Aron, Gaia, and Athena could ping him when his availability was registered as “do not disturb”, it was important enough for him to immediately check it. Thus, he stepped out of the shower, and without even drying off, he simply wrapped a towel around his waist and found the nearest chair he could drop his ass into and sat down.
He logged in to the simulation and called for his AI butler, Jotunn. “Catch me up on the situation,” he ordered.
[His Imperial Majesty erected a global shield. The information hasn’t been made widely public yet and it’s still classified pending testing. His order is for you to hold wargames and test the shield to failure in the simulation. As our VR game hasn’t been made public yet, we have no staff for our space navy, so the wargames will be between you and Athena with simulated crew....] Jotunn continued briefing John as he threw him a data packet containing the official orders with Nova’s signature on them.
They had already been authenticated and verified, and everything checked out. Even though the way the orders had been delivered assured their authenticity, protocol was still important and must be followed. Otherwise, Mnemosyne would throw an absolute hissy fit, and after experiencing one of those, nobody would want to suffer through another. That particular AI was so pedantic that she essentially redefined the word and her tongue was sharper than monomolecular scalpels!
John opened the official orders and carefully read through them line by line. Even though Jotunn was giving him a top-level briefing on them, that was still just a summary and the devil was often in the details.
After he finished reading, he said, “Okay. Call my planning staff. Just because the crews will all be simulated doesn’t mean the people at the top making the plans will be.”
He raised his head and looked up, then called for Athena to join him.
She chose to appear as though she had taken a Star Trek teleporter to John’s study. [You rang?] she asked. [And are you aware that you’re, umm... less than fully dressed?]
“Yes, I did, and yes, I am,” he replied. “Did you get the wargames order?”
[I did, yes. Shall we lay down the rules of engagement then?]
The pair, one human and one AI, spent the next several hours hashing out the boundaries for the simulated war game. John would be the first to defend while Athena attacked, then Athena would defend against John’s simulated invasion. As it was meant to stress test the shield to failure, both agreed to refrain from using saboteurs, quislings, and blockade runners. It would be a head-on spear vs shield battle for the first round.
For the second round, Athena would be joined by Nyx to use every possible means both fair and foul to bring down the shield, while John would be joined by the entire planning staff of ARES, including Poseidon and Aeolus, to defend. Then they would switch again, and John’s team would try to take down the shield while Athena and her partner Nyx would defend.
The two rounds of attack and defense should give a rather well-rounded overview of the planetary shield’s strength, as well as provide an excellent opportunity to train the human cadre at the top of ARES in space battles. If it weren’t for the training opportunity, Nova would have simply run the simulations herself and crunched the numbers.
The one complaint that John had was that the timing of the shield activation was rather out of place. He had been read in on and participated in plans to create VR “games” for people that would provide initial screening and training for space fleet candidates. He well knew Nova’s capabilities, and the sheer numerical strength of the shield had probably already been determined by her. The wargames were likely meant as a backup and to introduce an element of human creativity into the simulation that she simply couldn’t add herself.
So it would be best to add proper human crews to the game. But orders were orders, and John had been benched for so long that his hands were itchy anyway. He would raise the issue of properly crewing the ships for the games during the after action review.
But until then, he had a war to plan.
……
Two weeks later.
The awakened had finally calmed down after The Circle had faded and nothing bad had happened. Everyone on Earth was, understandably, a little bit gunshy, as so many things had happened since the founding of the empire. So anything out of the ordinary was first seen as a threat and met with panic and fear, and the empire’s silence about the appearance of the runic construct in the sky had done nothing to ameliorate that fear.
However, the empire had instead pushed news of the impending completion of the space elevator, and imperial citizens and noncitizens alike were now glued to their screens, watching as the tether crept the last few inches to the ground. Once it reached completion, it was met by a full battalion of GEMbots, who welded the woven carbon nanotubes to the waiting anchor point in the Olympus Minor caldera.
Soon, the operation was declared a success and the head of the imperial press agency, Olivia Foster, announced that they would begin taking reservations for facility rentals in the Olympus Minor waystation and Ceres Station. Reservations were first-come, first-served, so everyone from major theme parks and hotel chains to space-focused companies like the struggling SpaceX and Blue Origin rushed to reserve space in both ends of the tether.
Following close on the heels of the space elevator news was another piece of news that shocked people out of their complacency. Every imperial citizen in the top twenty cities of the pre-empire countries received a notification that the empire was hiring construction workers to build the new fortress cities.
The notification surprised them, as they thought the construction wouldn’t begin quite so soon, not to mention that they thought the construction would be completed by Hephaestus Heavy Industries without any outside labor. But when they considered it further, they realized it was a gesture from the empire that let them have some sweat equity in their new homes, as well as paid them to work on them instead of keeping everything flowing to the emperor’s pockets.
Economists immediately took to Pangea to praise the initiative, as with the consolidation of positions making quite a few jobs redundant, opening up jobs in a new sector—like construction—
would head the incipient unemployment crisis off at the pass and prevent the still-fragile economy from collapsing under its own weight before it could build a stable foundation.
