Aron had been both silent and absent from the public eye over the past week, causing the citizens of the empire to be somewhat confused. They were accustomed to every move of their leaders being endlessly shown and debated in the media as an assurance that they were working hard for their constituents. It was one of the main ways they kept their name in the public consciousness, ensuring their reelection for many election cycles to come.

But Arons absence turned that convention on his head, as those who were now fully committed to the empire after having benefited from it in one way or another had the opposite concern; they were worried that he would be, if anything, too present in their day-to-day lives. So his disappearance and subsequent absence had reassured, instead of worried them.

On this particular day, though, he had once again shown himself. At least to those who could see him, anyway, as he was hovering high in the atmosphere over a tall, wide structure in the ocean. Stretching twenty kilometers tall and more than thirty in diameter at the widest point, a narrow spire rose from a stepped circular basin that constantly pumped seawater in from the bottom and through the steps to the top, where it was sprayed back into the water in a glistening, rainbow-coated 360-degree waterfall. And on the spire itself, enormous vents were open, sucking air in through them with an audible howling sound that could be heard from miles away. The air that was sucked in by the vents dotting the side of the spire was blown out the gaping hole at the top.

The tower that Aron was hovering high above was but one of the many atmospheric scrubbers that had been printed over the past week. The design had been drafted, revised, and finally approved in the simulation, and they had begun their operations just hours before. Thus Arons visit, as he was curious to see them in action in reality, having held himself back from checking them out in the simulation both to save time and preserve the sense of awe he currently felt.

He was single-handedly reversing global warming and the rising sea level.

He flickered and rocketed off in another direction, flying so fast that he left a series of afterimages behind as he hurtled through the air faster than any human being had any right to travel. Then he spotted his destination in the distance and slowed to a stop, then freefell through the air like a skydiver until he was only two thousand feet above the oceans surface. He came to a stop there and stood in the air, looking below and slightly in front of him at an oddly shaped floating... thing.

It looked like a weird cross between a lobster and a factory conveyor belt, and it floated along the oceans surface, following currents when they would take it where it needed to go, and using its engines when it had to shift to new currents to follow. It was a surface scow, and it was designed to collect, recycle, and store the garbage floating on the surface of the ocean. The garbage below the oceans surface would be handled by the scrubber towers, which would naturally take it in with the seawater and recycle it into printer blocks that it would store for later collection. But the surface scow, though a venerable design, was perfect for collecting the enormous floating garbage islands on the surface without harming the fish swimming below them, as long as one didnt count depriving them of their homes as harm.

Between the atmospheric scrubber towers and the surface scows, the environment would see a vast improvement beginning in a few months and culminating with a complete reversal within the next four years. Especially when combined with the green technologies Aron would be introducing to the world, like controlled fusion, which would completely eliminate humanitys reliance on fossil fuels.

Another thing that had been built over the past week was the quantum internet network. The atmospheric scrubbers werent only present in the ocean; they had also been built in strategic locations on every continent as well. But due to the debris issue, the bottom kilometer of the ground-based atmospheric scrubbers, as well as the kilometers-deep subbasement and stabilization foundation, had been repurposed as enormous quantum repeaters that relied on quantum teleportation to provide fast and free internet to the citizens of the empire. All they required was their citizen ID and they were free to enjoy every service the government offered, including the quantum internet.

Behind the scenes, the repeaters also contained the quantum superclusters that ran the public side of the VR simulation. After all, a 2:1 time dilation factor combined with the much, much smaller simulated area required vastly fewer servers than the simulation that Arons inner circle had access to. Nova had been directing autonomous atomic printers for years, building quantum superclusters below the seafloor and, like every good supervillain, an enormous supercluster and secret base complex deep beneath the Antarctic Icecap.

Perhaps Aron shouldnt have allowed her to access certain movies and books when he was doing her initial AI training after all.

Still, the towers would be sufficient for the task of maintaining the public access VR and internet services long into the future, with an estimated soft cap of twelve billion concurrent users before they began lagging due to server congestion. And considering that people were already showing signs of escapism and spending more time in virtual reality than they were in meatspace, it would be a long, long time before that twelve billion soft cap was met.

......

After Aron finished inspecting his atmospheric and oceanic scrubbers, he turned his attention to the debris field in low earth orbit. A few weeks prior, he had launched a series of autonomous atomic printers that had been busily collecting and recycling the debris, breaking it down into its constituent atoms, reassembling them into convenient blocks, and sending them to the Lagrange points for long-term storage.

How long until space is clean of all the debris? he asked as he zoomed in on one of the printers.

Panoptes appeared next to him and answered, [Itll be about nine to thirteen days for the collection to be completed. Theres still some variance, since we need to gather everything, down to the smallest micron-width shrapnel before we can consider the cleanup completed. And the smaller the debris, the wider the variance in its orbit.]

Then we should begin preparations for the next phase, Aron mused, a distant look in his eyes.