Chapter 590 Thoughts and Prayers

Chapter 590 Thoughts and Prayers

A month later.

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.

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.

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.