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Chapter 590   Thoughts and Prayers

Though Aron and Rina were on their honeymoon, that didn’t mean the empire would cease functioning. Simply because the emperor was absent didn’t mean government employees could stop doing their jobs. And with the efficiency that had been baked into the very underpinnings of the empire, they always overdelivered on their promises.

The forced migration and colonization programs were no exception. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

The imperial space agency, in conjunction with the NIS and imperial police agency, had completely rounded up all of the noncitizens and sent them to the cubes for training. At the same time, the imperial immigration agency had sorted through the backlog of applications for the colonization program and was already well underway on transporting them to their training cubes as well. That said, there was a difference between a polite invitation and a late-night knock on the door.

Imperial citizens received polite invitations as well as arranged transports that, to a limited extent, were scheduled so as to accommodate their own schedules. It gave them time to say their farewells, not only to the people they would be leaving behind, but to the planet itself; they would never return, after all.

Noncitizens, on the other hand, weren’t given the same courtesy. They were given a date by which they must report to their nearest cube for processing, and informed in no uncertain terms that, should they fail to arrive on time, they would be treated as criminals and arrested. Though the timeline for their reporting was short—usually within a matter of hours, or days at most—those who chose to accept their fate would still receive at least some privileges, such as increased cargo space on the colony ships and the privilege to select the world they would end up on. In contrast, those treated as criminals would be allowed no cargo or colony selection. They would also face much harsher training programs that had almost no allowances for personal time or relaxation breaks.

However, they would only find out the details after being arrested. The language in the “invitations” was purposefully left vague and lacking in details.

And perhaps because of the vague threat—which was along the lines of someone using “or else” when speaking—an “underground railroad” of sorts sprang up among people who fancied themselves some kind of resistance, or freedom fighters. It made them difficult to capture, but once the NIS was involved, the underground railroad was rolled up within a matter of days. It could have been done even faster, but the nyxians wanted to ensure a 100% capture rate, so they took their time.

For the imperial citizens involved in the drama, their punishment depended on how willing their participation was. It ranged from minor fines for more mundane, or even incidental, violations and went all the way up to having their citizenship stripped from them. And for those who were stripped of citizenship, well... they joined the forced migration group whether they liked it or not. Furthermore, they did so as criminals.

And speaking of imperial citizens, those who regretted their impulsive signups and wanted to change their mind found themselves sorely disappointed. They would report for training as scheduled, or they would be given the same treatment as the people of the short-lived, ill-fated “resistance movement”. So those who had signed up in a fit of anger, means of protest, or for simple attention and bragging rights had discovered another long-held saying that held true: there is no cure for regret.

Another large group of citizens hadn’t signed up for the colonization effort, but when seeing how it was being implemented for remnants, couldn’t help but get their backs up. The collective memory of most of humanity still hadn’t let the horrors of concentration camps, internment camps, secret police, and other hallmarks of fascist states fade. Some of them, the less emotional ones, even attempted to sue the empire, only to be informed of how the empire handled that kind of thing.

Part of the imperial charter that Aron had drawn up years before with the aid of his inner circle and the higher-order AIs granted the Terran Empire what was known as sovereign immunity. In practice, that meant that the government would automatically be immune from criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits, though they, in the person of the empire or the head of the imperial judiciary, could waive that immunity and allow the trial to proceed. So, did they do that now?

Of course not.

The empire’s sovereign immunity and blithe continuance of what was seen as a pogrom against the “poor, disenfranchised remnants” generated another small group of imperial citizens who decided to demonstrate against it. They would livestream themselves mutilating their own body parts, chaining themselves to government buildings, epoxying themselves to streets, and there were even a few cases of self-immolation. Those who were less intense, but still upset, would hold prayer vigils, or even sit-in protests. One school district in particular had organized an offline sit-in where the students, their families, and teachers locked themselves in the school building and refused to leave in some so-called “solidarity” with the disenfranchised.

And of course, social media saw a flood of people changing their profile pictures in protest of the imperial government and offering their thoughts and prayers to the “victims”. For some reason, that particular knee-jerk reaction had proven difficult to overcome.

But the empire didn’t care. Those who chained themselves to buildings were arrested, stripped of citizenship, and sent to join the poor unfortunate souls they were protesting on behalf of. Those who caused actual damage, such as gluing themselves to roads or forcing maglevs to stop by standing in the middle of the maglev tracks, and so on, were first fined, then arrested and sent to join the forced migration. The only ones who escaped that fate were those who successfully managed to kill themselves in their misguided protesting; everyone else was simply rounded up and shown the proverbial door.

The ministry of the interior and the agencies under it had long grown used to practically every decision Aron made provoking some idiot or other, or even groups of them, to join in some crusade or other. As long as they weren’t damaging property, harming people, or inhibiting the function of people whose only crime was simply doing their jobs, they would be left alone. But the instant the protests crossed any of those lines, the imperial police would come down on them like the fist of an angry god.

One of the unintended, but very welcome, consequences of Aron’s forced migration and colonization programs was that it was acting as a very effective method of winnowing out those who hadn’t accepted the empire, or their positions within it, and forging a truly united culture that considered themselves humans first, imperial citizens second, and further distancing them from the divisions that kept the species fractured before the empire’s founding.

But no matter how high quality a steel ingot may be, it would never be anything more useful than a doorstop or paperweight without a skilled blacksmith repeatedly pounding it with a hammer.