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Chapter 582  To Infinity, and Beyond!

Aron had begun the meeting by giving his ideas on what should be done with the noncitizens, as Operation Boiling Frog wasn’t working nearly as well as he’d thought it would.

“But where can we send them?” Minister Rogers asked.

Eventually, all of Earth would be populated entirely by imperial citizens and government functionaries, so isolating the noncitizens on an island or something would just be kicking the proverbial can down the road. Sure, “future them” would have more options to deal with them, but Jeremy was of the firm opinion that curing a disease was much better than simply treating its symptoms.

“There’s a lot of moons in the solar system. Hell, Jupiter has 79 of them and we’re still discovering more that count as moons. And Saturn has even more! I mean, we could also just draft them into ARES and stick them on Mars, too. Our ‘retraining’ program is highly effective, after all. And that would even save us the cost of building a habitat for the ungrateful fuckers,” Minister Al-Mutairi suggested.

“But if you want my suggestion, I think we should go even farther afield. Even just having them in the solar system is a risk, ‘retraining’ or not. So I’m sure we could find a habitable planet out there somewhere that doesn’t have any sapient inhabitants on it already,” he continued.

Aron nodded in thought. He already knew of quite a lot of habitable, yet uninhabited planets in the Milky Way, and he was sure that was what Youssef was hinting at. The inner council members were among the very few who knew that the simulation covered the entire galaxy, not just Earth and Lab City. And Minister Al-Mutairi was very good at office politics; he had an absolute talent for giving people ideas while letting them think they were the ones that came up with them.

“If we pick a habitable star system—or even better, more than one so we can send them out with the minimum number of people to make a colony succeed—it should be very far away. That way it reduces the chances of them coming back and causing problems later... especially if we limit the tech we send them out with. Besides, they can be kept in stasis for the trip, that way it’ll just feel like the blink of an eye for them even if centuries pass in transit,” John agreed. He was all for limiting the size of the initial colonies as well; it would increase the number of generations the noncitizens would have to grow before they even had the numbers to start provoking an interstellar fight.

{There are other options, you know,} Nyx said. {Humankind has a long history of internment camps, where they rounded up so-called ‘undesirable’ elements of society and put them all in one area. Hitler had concentration camps for the Jews, America had internment camps for Japanese-Americans, Trump rounded up ‘illegal immigrants’ and put them in cages. Joe Arpaio’s tent cities, and so on.

{We could also just send in the LEAs and ARES to forcefully round them all up and stick them in pods to brainwash them into perfect little cogs in the imperial machine.

{And if none of that works for you, we could always just kill them all.}

The words coming out of the petite AI’s mouth brought goosebumps to the humans in the room. Nyx tended to the extreme to begin with, but “just kill them all” was a whole new level of crazy, even for her.

That said, all Nyx was doing was saying the quiet part out loud. Everyone else in the room had had the same idea at first. But they had all discarded it, recalling Aron’s stance on genocide in general and how fragile the underpinnings of the empire still were even to that day. Thus, nobody had suggested it in the first place.

{What... did I say something wrong?} Nyx asked, her head tilted to the side as if she was genuinely confused.

Aron gave Nyx the side-eye and pinched the bridge of his nose as he sighed, “Isolating them sounds fine on paper, but it wouldn’t work in reality. They’d just use it to gain the sympathy of citizens and cause different problems.

“And brainwashing would be entirely too obvious. People don’t change like that. They aren’t AIs who can just modify a segment of their code to exhibit different behaviors. So if the remnants just wake up one day as hardcore supporters of the empire, everyone would immediately jump to brainwashing as the cause. n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

“Plus, it would jeopardize far too many other things, as well as basically admit that we treat peoples’ memories, personalities, and thoughts the same way we treat hard drives on a computer. From then on, absolutely no one would trust the empire at all, since there would always be the question of whether or not we brainwashed them into believing in us in the back of their minds.

“Besides, I don’t want to needlessly kill people. Killing is reserved for only when it’s absolutely necessary as a last resort.”

{I was just giving you my ideas...} Nyx grumbled.

Everyone went silent as they considered Aron’s words, and the silence stretched on for a few minutes.

Youssef was the first to break it, saying, “And even if we completely put aside all of those arguments against treating them like that, there’s still an entirely logical reason to isolate them. We should make good use of them, and I see an opportunity in this situation.

“For the sake of argument, let’s say the incoming visitors are indeed hostile. Thus, we need to plan for the worst-case scenario, which is,” he nodded at John, “that the empire loses the fight against them. If we keep the remnants here, or even in the solar system, they’d be wiped out right along with us. Assuming we even kept them alive in the first place.

“You see, humanity is a bunch of eggs, and Earth is just one giant basket. Right now, all of our eggs are in that one basket, so if the visitors come in and blow it up, we lose everything. But by pushing our diaspora plans forward and sending out colonies to multiple destinations across the entire galaxy in generation ships, then humanity as a species will definitely survive.

“Will some of those colonies fail? Sure. Maybe a lot of them will, and maybe even most of them. But there’ll still be some that survive, and ensuring the survival of our species is the best posterity that any emperor could ever ask for.”

With that, everyone else in the room fell silent and looked at Aron. It was obvious that his council had come to a consensus on how to deal with the noncitizens.

Aron tapped his fingertip against the table in front of him as he thought, shifting plans and extrapolating possibilities. Eventually, his finger stopped tapping and he said, “Agreed. Let’s begin the diaspora.”

The meeting continued for a short while as the council put together a plan to “encourage” people to go out and colonize the stars. But one thing was certain: whether they wanted to or not, the remnants would definitely be among those boarding the first wave of colony ships.