[E/D: the remainder of the missed chapters will be released late today or tomorrow.]

Since the foundation of the empire, We have taken pride in our track record of promises made, promises kept. And today, We are here to deliver on one another of those promises: Our thousandth fortress city. Aron stood at a podium addressing the public in one of the new fortress citys government squares, a space about as big as an American football stadium. The entire area was filled to the brim with citizens who had nothing but smiles on their faces as they listened to his address.

The people watching Arons address live would be among the first to finally receive keys to their new living spaces in the fortress city Aron was currently using as a venue for his speech. They had been anticipating the day they would finally become property owners in the empire ever since their interior designs had been approved.

Over the past six months, fortress city after fortress city had been coming online and filling with residents in an orderly fashion. There was something to be said for the organizational skills of AIs, after all.

The release of homes to those who had bought them, subsidized or not, had also been a great boost to the morale of the empire at large. Most of the new homeowners were of the millennial generation, and had been most afraid of never owning property of their own and always being subject to the whims of landlords. For them, it was a brilliant plan on the empires part and they were practically shouting with glee after receiving their own little piece of permanence.

For landlords, though, it was a different story. Often acting as mosquitos that suck the lifeblood of the population, their lifestyles relied entirely on forcing people to pay ever-increasing rental fees simply to keep roofs over their heads. As a class of citizen, they quite suddenlydespite the years of advance noticefound themselves without a ready source of income they could fleece from sheep that had nowhere else to go.

Not that anyone would miss them, of course; there wasnt a single person on the planet that would choose to rent when the option to own was available to them.

Due to the large number of cities coming online across the globe, Aron couldnt deliver a speech at each of them. For multiple reasons, the most impactful of which was that it would be impossible to deliver a thousand different speeches in a thousand different locations without having them all become repetitions of the same script. And anyone who knew anything at all about public speaking knew that, without the impact of relevant information tailored specifically to the audience, no speech would have a positive effect.

So Aron could only deliver addresses at milestone cities. The first to open, the hundredth, and so on, which led to todays address being delivered at the thousandth fortress city.

Thus, while his schedule was fairly relaxed, it was a different story for everyone else. The logistics behind moving billions of people together with their possessions was tens of times more complex than the last empire-wide movement, when they had gathered all imperial citizens in cubes around the globe for their initial medical treatments. For the entire six months, the swarm of ships flying hither and yon in the atmosphere practically blocked out the sun entirely!

But with the efforts of Nova and Gaia working together, everything had been proceeding on track in an efficient manner without any of the clusterfucks that would have been involved had the moves been done by mere humans.

After all, with each fortress city being built to accommodate more than a million inhabitants, billions of people had to be moved from their current homes to their new ones. And with Arons insistence that each city would be multicultural and blended, with inhabitants drawn randomly from across the globe (unless they specifically requested to be housed near their neighbors, relatives, and friends), the process of the move-ins themselves were as delicate as the finest clockmakers creations.

And with that, We hereby declare this fortress city officially open, Aron concluded as he cut a golden ribbon with comically oversized scissors. The citys official mayor aided him by holding half of the scissors as they snipped through the ribbon. Some traditions were timeless, and ribbon-cutting ceremonies were one of them.

The people in the audience wildly cheered as Aron shook the mayors hand and stepped down from the temporary stage that had been erected for his speech. He walked through the crowd, shaking hands and kissing babies, as the saying went, until he finally made it to the other end where he met with his two aegis shadows and began an unofficial tour of the rest of the city, leaving the mayor to handle the rest of the administrivia involved in opening the fortress cities.

Having walked for miles, he ended up in one of the many large playgrounds scattered throughout the city. He sat down to rest on one of the benches and a group of children ran up to him, showing no fear of the most powerful human in the species and chattering at him like a flock of magpies. They had seen him on TV and heard enough about him from their parents to know that he was powerful, but children have a strange idea of power and often mix it up with physical strength, something that Aron didnt appear to possess much of.

The media and most of his emperors aegis escort were quite a distance from him, at his personal request. The reporters were focused on his interaction with the children, while his aegis escort was busy maintaining a security perimeter around the edges of the park space.

Aron squatted down so that he was at eye level with the leader of the children and began, So, whats your drea

But before he could finish his question, his expression grew serious and he rose to his feet. The two emperors aegis near him, alerted by his behavior, were only half a heartbeat slower than him in turning on their combat mode, so to speak. Aegis teams, and especially the emperors aegis, were never entirely lax, but the current threat level had been deemed as minimal, so they were as relaxed as they ever were.

Protect the kids, Aron ordered his two close guards, then stepped away from the gaggle of children.