The treatment of the mana drain victims had already begun, even before Aron had called the families of the patients into the amphitheater and explained what had happened, how it would be treated, and the expected outcomes. Basically, the process would require two weeks of Earth time, during which the patients would remain logged in to VR. And each apartment in the complex the families lived in was also equipped with extended stay medical pods, thus ensuring that the families could remain together for the duration of the treatment.
The best thing about it was that the families’ equipment would be maintained at the empire’s expense, as well as the standard fee that would normally be charged to the patients themselves.
The bigger concern, and one that Aron hadn’t mentioned to anyone outside of his inner circle, was that using the awakening pods would light another beacon for the incoming visitors. That said, it wasn’t like it mattered anymore. Humanity had already caught their attention, and they were already on their way.
Worrying about whether or not they were paying attention to the cradle of humanity was like locking the barn door to guard against thieves after the horses had already been stolen.
And it wasn’t even that big a concern, either. Aron had already enacted countermeasures to prevent other civilizations that could detect mana from finding Earth. The shield he had created had more than simple blocking capabilities; it could prevent energy leakage just as well as it could prevent physical passage, and much, much more. For instance, he could even set it to make Earth completely invisible, like a hole in space.
Sure, that would have some severe downsides, but when given a choice between bad and worse, bad would win every time. Bending light around the planet to provide optical invisibility would essentially blind everyone on the planet, but it would be better than having humanity wiped out by hostile marauders. And that was just one of the countermeasures he had included in the complex shield.
Blocking mana leakage was just one of the more simple functions it was capable of.
Currently, the shield was set to prohibit unauthorized entry and exit, as well as projecting a visual image of the planet that was designed to make it appear unattractive to visual observation. From outside, Earth currently looked like it was choked with smog and radioactive waste, causing the surface to be under a nuclear winter of epic proportions. Pit mines were everywhere, exploiting what few resources the apparently dying planet had to offer, and civilization looked like it was teetering on the brink of extinction.
Nova had built a dedicated quantum supercluster to creating and maintaining the backdrop, and Gaia had dedicated a full forty percent of her processing power to populating it with the most miserable people she could think of. Aron, for his part, was quite satisfied with the outcome, though he was uncertain how well it would perform when met with alien observers.
After all, the appearance of the planet and the “plight of humanity” on it wouldn’t match up if the observers were using old light as a reference. And since the change from prosperous industrialized society to basically hell on earth was instant, it could raise some eyebrows. Or whatever the equivalent facial expression on aliens was, anyway.
(Ed note: “Old light” is the light visible from light years away. For instance, if people were to use extremely high-powered telescopes to observe a planet in Alpha Centauri, which is a bit over 4 light years away, we would see the surface of the planet as it was four years ago. If you flip that around and have people from Alpha Centauri observing Earth, they would see Earth as it was in 2020, not as it currently is.)
He couldn’t hide the upcoming industrial revolution in the solar system, naturally, but he could at least make the planet itself look far more unattractive to at least some alien species. Hopefully, anyway. Plus, it would at least hide how fast humanity was adopting new technological advances even if a canny observer discovered the discrepancy in the before and after of it all.
With both the visual aspect and the energy leakage under control, all that remained was ensuring that communication discipline would be maintained, both on the surface of the planet and out in the solar system beyond its atmosphere. Thus, Aron decreed an empire-wide mandate that all communications would be through quantum communications, period.
He couldn’t do much about noncitizens, however, but by the simple expedient of setting the planetary defense shield to block every wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum except for visible light, communications immediately went down. And once that happened, Youssef Al-Mutairi, the Minister of the Exterior, went into action.
In a matter of weeks, the remnant governments on the planet had hammered out treaties with the empire that gave them access to quantum communications, which was a huge win for Operation Boiling Frog.
Aron was definitely not playing around with the security measures he had implemented to protect his empire, and the entire planet by extension. Once he gathered enough resources, he would even implement what he had named “Project Loki” throughout the entire solar system, blocking the accurate view from the heliopause.
Not to mention the spy prevention, just the shield itself would act as a very effective first line of defense against potentially hostile alien invasions. In preparation for the implementation, another quantum supercluster had been dedicated to creating the image of an interplanetary war and the resulting ruined solar system left behind, providing the Sol System with a thick protective barrier as well as camouflage that would make it uninteresting in the first place.
And the protection of the solar system would be thoroughly planned, leaving no loopholes for observers to discover that it was faked, unlike the loophole left in Earth itself’s coverage. Or rather, there would only be a single loophole, which was that if someone was already looking and had spotted the discrepancy where Earth went from a thriving planet to a dying one literally overnight, they would be suspicious of a system-wide war.
But the odds of that happening were slim, according to all of Nova’s calculations. The planet would have had to already be under observation in order for them to notice the discrepancy caused by Aron enabling the shield’s visual projection feature. And that would require the observing party to be in the right place at the right time and paying attention to the right thing moment by moment.
The odds of that happening were low enough, statistically, that Aron had decided it was worth the risk.
