“Greetings everyone, I am Janet Meltzner, reporting like for SNN, the System News Network, here on Earth.” said a British brunette woman in her early thirties to the recording drone, posting it to the website of the SNN. Since the System showed up, most websites have been mirrored there, but their site was one of the first to be hosted exclusively by the System’s servers. “Today I have special guest star, which I’m sure all of you have heard of. He is the first human space colonist, entrepreneur, and mayor of two cities, Greg Summers. Thank you for joining us today, Mr. Summers.”
“Oh, please, call me Greg.” I said, broadcasting from my office in Anarchist Redoubt using a nearly identical drone to the one she was using.
“Very well, then, Greg. I understand that you are here to announce your latest philanthropic gesture. What can you tell us about that?”
“Well, while anyone in the world can connect to the System for information, allowing them to speak with anyone across the world regardless of language, it’s only really North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and parts of Africa that have assess to the material resources of the System. For example, in central and South America, there are only two System settlements registered to humans, Mexico City and Rio De Janeiro. In Africa, there are three, Cairo, Johannesburg, and Cape Cod. The people outside of those cities that live on those continents have no access to the Market, and therefore have no way to buy the supplies they need. They are essentially still living in a post apocalyptic world. And the areas where System Settlements do exist in the rest of the world are only really in major cities. Most small cities and towns also don’t have access, and have to travel to major cities if they want to trade with the System.”
“And this new charity of yours will change that?”
“Indeed. Through my System Registered Charity, Settlement Builders, I plan on donating Settlement Cores to people all across the globe, regardless of there location or politics. That will allow them access to all of the resources and technology of the System, which will let them live decent lives, regardless of where they are.” I would probably also provide them teleporters, miners, generators, and at least tier one nanite forges or some other manufacturing equipment, but for now getting them connected to the market so that they could start meeting their needs was the most important part. The Settlement core could draw enough power from hyperspace on its own to handle a few tons of trade per day, assuming it was with people nearby. And nothing was keeping them from connecting it to a normal generator and extending that amount.
“There seems to be a very vocal minority of people who think that you are only doing things for money, power, influence, or fame. What would you say to those people?”
“Do I want money? Yes. But money is merely a means to create a better life for myself and those close to me. Do I want power or influence? That really depends on what you mean by power and influence. I want people to listen to me when I make a suggestion, but I don’t want to force my will on anyone. That’s why I named my first settlement Anarchist Redoubt, because I don’t believe anyone should have the power to force you to do things their way. As for fame, I don’t really care if I’m famous. What I care about is spreading the ideas of mutual cooperation and freedom regardless of the other person’s race, religion, politics, sexuality, or any other factor. As long as you don’t harm me or those I care about, I shouldn’t do anything to harm you or yours.”
“And to those that would argue that the environment should be your main concern, that now that we have a way to fight climate change, through the use of System made Terraforming Modules, we should take the opportunity?”
“I believe that the point of environmentalism should be to preserve the environment so that it doesn’t negatively impact humanity. And now that the System and its technology can allow us to live almost anywhere, a two degree increase in global average temperature isn’t as big of a problem. That’s not to say that I have an issue with anyone attempting to fix the CO2 levels in the atmosphere as long as they don’t drive them too low, but let me show you something.” I accessed my inventory and pulled out something I prepared for this moment. “This is a generator orb. It is only four inches, or ten centimeters, across, but it can provide eight kilowatts of continuous, safe, and pollution free power for thousands of years. Or if you want something a bit more powerful and cheaper.” I sat down the Orb and another, much heavier object appeared in my hands. “This is a System built micro nuclear reactor. It is only the size of a soccer ball, or football for non-americans, but can produce up to forty kilowatts of electricity constantly as long as you have thorium or uranium to fuel it. And because the System can manage the fuel insertion and waste removal via nanites and small scale teleportation, nuclear waste doesn’t have to be managed. The System will gladly purchase all you produce in order to make portable nuclear batteries. While it isn’t smaller that five of those generators now, once you scale these up to the size a community or city might need the nuclear one becomes more energy dense. And these are so safe that there is no risk of radiation leaks from this reactor even if I dropped it from orbit.” They were made of alloys which were far stronger than anything humans would normally use, after all.
“The reason I bring those two objects up is because for years people have been fighting to shut down fossil fuel and coal plants to stop us from putting large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And these two devices can do that, while being even more convenient to use than a gas car, because only one of them needs fuel, even if it lasts so much longer than gas, and produce no CO2. The biggest problem with the environment now is that the plague didn’t just effect humans, it effected most animal life. We should be restoring the animal populations back to pre-plague levels rather than modifying the atmosphere to fix an issue that is already largely solved. And with Conservation cores we can produce clones of any species of animal that has existed on earth in the last one and a half million years.”
Janet nodded. “Well, that’s about all of the time we have today, thank you for coming on the show.”
“Thanks for having me.”
Janet started talking about the next guest she would have on to share their opinion on why I was wrong, and I was transferred to someone else in the news studio. “Thank you once again, Mr. Summers.” said the assistant. “I think the interview went really well.”
“No problems?”
“Well, you might have upset a few busybodies with your politics, and a few environmentalists when you said that climate change wasn’t really an issue any more, but the controversy should get everyone talking. Any idea where the first of your settlement cores will go? I’m actually from a small town near here and was hoping they could get one so my mom can use the Market.”
“Well, the first ones will go to mostly central and south America, and Africa, but once most of the people there have access, we’ll be backfilling smaller settlements around the world. I don’t know exactly where they will go. I had an AI create a map of the best places to put them for the most people to have the best access to the System based on population estimates. If you can give me the name, though, I can email you with an estimated date for the donation.”
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“Oh, sure.” she did so, and I sent it to the AI. I would be purchasing one hundred settlement cores from the System to start off, at one hundred thousand each, or ten million in total, as well as flying vehicles they could use to get to the remote sights from known teleporters, but once the lunar colonies were completely established I would be having the colonies make them as well as the other equipment I wished to donate.
The AI sent me back a response, and I sent it to her. Apparently her home town was at around thirteen thousand on the list, so they should take around six months to get one. That was mostly due to a shortage of workers, though, as the equipment wouldn’t be an issue in a few weeks, so if we could find delivery drivers to take the orbs to the towns in the area it would be delivered faster. Upon hearing this, the assistant volunteered to take the orb out there personally, so I sent her the application to volunteer to work for Settlement Builders. She could limit her contribution to a single delivery if she wanted, but I hoped she would be willing to cover most of the UK and Ireland for us, as we didn’t have any volunteers in that area yet.
After hanging up the call, I made another to Sam. She had left for LA a few days ago. Apparently, people had started to prospect for rare mineral deposits on the sea floor and she wanted to go out there and join them. After all, if you discovered a deposit, you could make 0.1% royalties on everything produced there by selling it to a mining company. While that didn’t sound like much, even something like silver could earn you thousands per month for the rest of your life, and something like Cobalt, Uranium, or a rare earth mine would earn you millions per year. Most of my money had come from the trace amounts of such metals that were present everywhere, but if she found a concentration she could have no more financial issues for hundreds of years until the deposit was mined out.
She was apparently about a kilometer deep at the moment, heading towards where she suspected a gold vein might be. Gold wasn’t the best value, but if they chose to mine it she would be able to pay me back in less than a year from the royalties. All I was receiving was an audio signal, as we were using the quantum entanglement orb network we had set up, basically just me, my stuff, and her at the moment. Hyperspace comms would work that deep under water, but recently claim jumpers had started popping up in LA and SF and there were rumors that they had figured out how to track hyperspace signals. So even if they couldn’t break the encryption on here signal, they would know exactly where she was if she sent out such a signal. While I couldn’t see her, the call was enough to verify that she was doing well.
Upon hearing about how Shackleton would be a tourist town, she had even suggested building an underwater settlement as a tourist destination. I agreed and provided her with a standard World System Core, agreeing to pay her 1% royalties on a valuable deposit if she set the settlement up beside it. As I didn’t actually own a mining company, the deposit would actually be owned by Dungeon Crafters, allowing them to theoretically build an underwater dungeon there, but in reality we would probably just farm large numbers of aquatic creatures near the settlement using their biology expertise to set it up.
Once the call was complete, I checked up on how things were going in town. There weren’t any major issues the other people in town couldn’t handle, so I decided to start a few more colonies. After all, you could never have enough places to stay. With the aid of the System, I had currently made basic food, water, and air free on the moon. I could make all food and drink free, including alcohol, and even add in housing if I wanted, but I recognized that supply and demand would still be an issue if I did. While the issue would show up somewhat with food and drink if I did that, they were still cheap. Housing, however, wasn’t. Even the most basic apartment in Sanctuary had around ten thousand zerka worth of materials invested into making it, and the high grade ones like my home, or I suppose Di’s home, as I was living in a basic unit, had over three hundred thousand. If I tried to make one of those for everyone, I would never have enough resources. And, while I could always make better, more expensive places to live, once they became available most people would want to upgrade. In short, while the resources you could mine had a limit, even if that limit was massive, human desire didn’t. Which was the only reason we still needed money.
Still, having more places for people to go, especially when there was an alien megacorp bent on conquering the planet, was a good thing. So far the GCA had only managed to conquer a handful of smaller cities and some towns of no more than a ten thousand. That still meant that anywhere from one to twenty million people were now forced employees of the corporation, but when you were living in a post-apocalyptic world, many people would prefer a return to the monotony of corporate work. And since it wasn’t that different than the lives they had before the plague, other than a bit more privilege being given to the management, and the occasional abuse of power, most people didn’t have much to complain about. Maybe I would set up a neutral city, and see if the GCA was willing to trade with it. That would give their subjects, not just the humans, an opportunity to see how the people of Earth lived outside the corporation. I suspected that the GCA knew that, though, and that if they did open trade with such a city, only their most loyal people would visit it.
I took the portal to Shackleton at a cost of one hundred and fifty zerka, a cost Shackleton and Gary had agreed to charge both ways. There I walked past the fountain and through the mall, taking the moving walkway to the spaceport. Now that Shackleton had reached a tier 6 nanite forge, the lower ones could all be put to making consumer goods, so all of the stores were full. No spacecraft were available yet, but if anyone really wanted one it could be ordered from the System on Earth and shipped here. Technically there would be a small fee for the energy used to ship it, but at such a short distance it only amounted to a few thousand zerka for a ship like Greg’s.
Before leaving, I sent the last four special World System Cores to Prometheus to hold on to and asked Shackleton for five more of each. A tier 3 nanite forge could make one every two days. A tier 4 could do so in a little less than ten hours, and the tier 5 could make one in two hours. So, I changed my order to 2, plus two hundred teleportation orbs, each of which could be made in a little over a minute. That would mean that my order would take about eight hours.
While I didn’t want to wait around that long, I knew I would need those for my trip. After all, I hoped to put one on Mars and one on Venus before returning to Earth. I suppose I could only travel to one of them, cutting down my wait time to four hours, but that would mean needing to return to Earth or Luna, specifically Shackleton, to resupply, and I didn’t want to have to do that. Maybe there was something I could do, though.
I contacted Prometheus. He had pressurized the lava tube he was in within a few days, and finished building a basic settlement with gravity about twelve hours ago. It only had basic food and a single cafeteria, but as it was meant as a place for souls to wake up in clones and get used to their new bodies before being sent to one of the Lunar colonies, it didn’t need to be anything fancy. He had built a Large Teleporter in case he needed to send more than one hundred people at once, so I would have no trouble traveling there from my ship, with its emergency teleportation orb.
I told Shackleton to send all of the things I had ordered to my ship’s cargo hold when they were ready, and teleported to Prometheus.
The first thing I noticed was that there was no style going into anything here. Prometheus had chosen function over form every time, with a room for its core protecting it from the future residents, and a wall separating the teleporter from the living area. In the other direction was all of the industry and storage that was being built. Prometheus had chosen that direction for the industry because it had larger deposits of rare minerals.
The living area was mostly just a single wide city street with moving sidewalks down the middle, overpasses every hundred meters, and huge numbers of basic apartment complexes down the side. Honestly, this was a pretty good design for a refugee camp as well. At the end of the road were several medical facilities and the cryogenics facilities to store over one thousand clones. Eventually this facility would be able to house over fifty thousand people and store over one hundred thousand clones, but Prometheus was still expanding.
I decided that I might as well be his first customer. After all, if I wanted to advertise this service, I would need to prove it worked. I hadn’t yet figured out a way to select which clone you returned to, as it seemed to be random, but having one here gave me another backup in case my first didn’t work. It only took five minutes for the automated facility to take the brain biopsy and a DNA sample to clone me from. I had it install the same implants I had now. Unfortunately, quantum entanglement communications only worked between two devices, so that would be different, but I could add it to the network later. For now, it would take two days or so for the clone to grow, as forcing it to grow faster without time dilation could cause defects, after which they could install the implants and connect it to Prometheus, as it was also part of the network. Eventually, I would need hub devices with faster communications between them, but for now this was good enough.
Like last time, it would take a few days before my soul fully reattached to my current body, but the trip to Mars would take that long, so it would be fine. I could just sleep through the trip, even if the dreams caused by a partially connected soul could be pretty trippy.
I teleported back to my ship and climbed into the bunk bed, going back to sleep.