Chapter 518 Wargames and Reservations
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! The initial posting of this chapter occurred via noovelllbbin
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. ……
Two weeks later. magic
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.