Greg’s POV:
The interview wasn’t quiet what I had expected. They had brought in another guest at the same time, former World’s richest man and tech company owner Velon Dusk. He was on in the previous segment explaining how he had sold all of the failed, defective, and unfinished batteries and materials at his Texas Mega Factory to earn a few million Zerka, and was using that to roll out the New Edison Alpha One, the first car from his company that would be powered by System batteries and an optional generator, giving your car over two thousand kilometers of range before needing to be recharged, or being self recharging if you purchase the generator. Of course, it only made eight kilowatts constantly, so if you drove it too much you would still need to recharge, but for most people that would be fine. Next year he planned to launch the Omega One, a flying luxury vehicle with AI piloting.
Because he also owned a space company, Space Xplorers, he was called onto the show to talk about how he would be working with space colonization. Essentially, the energy cost to open a portal to the moon was about three hundred zerka per person. It wasn’t a ridiculous amount if you treated it as a plane flight, but Velon intended to run a shuttle service from every major city and only charge one hundred zerka. If I did the math, while a basic passenger shuttle cost around five million, you could move fifty people on each trip, meaning that you could earn five thousand per trip. System ships used Generators for power, or could be recharged at any landing port from the settlement’s power, and would keep themselves repaired, so other than paying the flight crew there were no expenses. That meant that in less than two thousand trips you could pay for the ship and start earning pure profit. At eight hours each way, plus some layover, that’s maybe one round trip per day, at ten thousand for the trip if you can fill it on the way back. That’s one thousand days, or around three years to pay off the shuttle. Not a bad investment, but one I didn’t want to do. I would loan him the money to buy a few he wanted me to, though.
They called me the Post System richest man to compare me to him and when they got to me I stepped out of my ship onto the surface of Mars, revealing Mount Olympus behind me. Then I announced that I had started a colony there and would be opening it up for immigration once everything was ready to support the desired one million population. When asked why I wanted such a large colony, I told them about how humanity should have a major presence on another planet and Velon agreed. They asked him about the possibility of having shuttle flights to Mars and I could see his brain working as he said that he would look into it.
The math was similar to the math for the moon. It would cost between one thousand and two thousand zerka in power for each person to come to Mars depending on where the Earth and Mars were in orbit. With a tier 2 warp drive, which would increase the cost to six million, you could be at Mars in four hours to eight hours at most. That meant that you could run two flights per day instead of one much of the time. The costs would essentially be the same, though you would need more power to charge the ship. Even at two hundred per shuttle trip, you could pay it back in a little more that half the length of the lunar shuttle, or around a year and a half to two years. He will definitely jump at the chance to send a shuttle here once the colony is established.
About five minutes after the segment was over I got a call from Velon. He wanted to work together on the shuttle business. I told him about the better warp drive, which would make the day-and-a-half flight so much shorter, and he worked that into his calculations. He then proposed that he lease the ships from me. He knew that AR leased business equipment, as we had loaned equipment to several cities and a few businesses, and proposed that we lease him this equipment on the same terms, namely 0.2% per day. That would be 12k per day, and as long as he charged more than 150 zerka per trip or so he would still turn a profit. I knew that the city had over twenty million in precious metals sitting in the a warehouse from the dungeon, and thus could rent him three ships if he wanted, more if I had one of the Lunar colonies build the ships with their large nanite forges using AR’s minerals, but I couldn’t make such a huge decision on my own. This would require a city council decision. So I invited him to visit us in one week, giving me time to talk to the council about the deal.
After making sure that Olympus had built an Arch, I delivered a prefab ten meter diameter dome and a small teleporter to Brenda so that they could come to town at any time, in case they wanted to leave. The builder quickly set them up where Brenda told it to and connected them to the other domes she had already had it build. I told Brenda how to set travel restrictions later so tourists didn’t gather at the research station, then changed the AI’s name to Zeus. It was named after Mount Olympus, the home of the Greek gods. It made sense that the AI was named after the leader of those gods.
I spent the next few days scanning for underground caves and lava tubes. As Olympus was a dormant volcano it had several near the surface, and fewer deep in the ground, but I only wanted to use one of those for the main cloning facilities for the city. They were too obvious for anything secret. I sent a Large teleporter, capable of moving one thousand people at a time, to a tunnel around four kilometers deep, along with an outpost core. I named the outpost “Asphodel” and its AI “Hades”, trying to keep to the theme. I had instructed Zeus to look for opportunity to name outposts and districts after Greek gods that match the theme of the district or outpost. So far we had an industrial district named Hephaestus, a food production district named Demeter, a housing district named Hera, and a casino and entertainment district named Dionysus, which he suggested attaching a red light district to named Aphrodite. I wasn’t to sure about that suggestion, but I did rename the AIs for those districts after the deities they took after.
There was essentially an AI city council which oversaw the day to day operation of the city, and would bring their problems to the city council member for that district. I wasn’t sure how else the government would be structured, if the city had one, but the problems the AI faced should at least have human overseers to help make decisions.
After that I flew back to Earth. When I arrived six hours later I swung by Antarctic University to see how it was going. So far the main surface dome had been built and the underground parts were under construction. Di wasn’t there, though, so I flew back to AR.
After landing at around six thirty PM local time, I sent a message to all of the city council members asking them to meet me tomorrow morning in the city council chambers so that we could discuss something. I didn’t tell them what we would be discussing, but I did let them know that it could ensure a steady income for the city for years if not decades.
Di and I met up and went to New Orleans for super, then went home. Apparently our talk almost a week ago and tonight’s date had convinced her to let me come back home. The next morning, after having formally made up, we got ready and headed to the council.
Once the meeting started, I explained the offer the council. Velon Dusk wanted to rent passenger ships from them. I would let them use the tier 6 nanite forge at Shackleton, which could make the ships in a matter of hours. They would just have to provide all of the material. They could then rent the ships to Mr. Dusk to secure a source of income for the next several years. It would only cost them their mineral reserves. I was just bringing the offer to them because it was too big enough for me to handle on my own. I could host them out of Shackleton, and may rent them ships later but for now, they needed a home city on Earth and AR would make a good location for that.
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At the end of the week Velon teleported to town and, after a few locals told him how much they liked or disliked him, he came into city hall to meet with us. An hour later we had made a deal. First, he would lease the ships from the city for 12000 zerka per day per ship, payable on the first of every month. They would be the standard fifty person transport ships, but with warp drive mark twos. At least one ship would have to land in AR every day, and it would be charged standard landing, fueling, and recharge fees. If at any time he gets more than one month behind in payments, we have the right to repossess the ships. And we will also lease him landing pads at the rate of 0.2% of their cost per day should he need them.
Upon having our lawyers look over and signing the contract he asked that we provide him with ten landing pads and five ships for now. Our lawyer was actually a divorce attorney, not a business attorney, but they had dealt with enough prenups and divided assets to know their way around a contract. At six million per ship and one hundred thousand per standard landing pad, the costs came to a total of thirty one million zerka, meaning he will need to pay sixty two thousand per day. This is more than the budget of the City and they have twenty times our population.
Half a day later I contacted him to inform him that his five ships were on the landing pads of Shackleton, but if he sent his pilots here I would open the portal for them so they could go pick the ships up free of charge. The city had run out of Tantalum in the production of the ships, as it was used in far greater quantities than its proportional density on Earth’s surface, but Shackleton had enough excess from all of the digging it was doing that it was able to loan AR enough to finish the order on a promise to pay it back later. Luna had slightly higher densities of the element, but not high enough to keep up with the System’s demands.
The next day at noon ten pilots that had trained in System vehicles arrived and I took them to the moon to pick up their ships, each ship carrying two landing pads in its cargo hold, as that almost filled the cargo bays.
After that I took a trip to Antarctica. They had ten large teleporters, in case people wanted to teleport in from ten different places at once, and you would be directed to whichever one was open when you teleported in. There were only a few hundred people in town, mainly scientists and teachers who wanted to look the place over before deciding to stay here.
Two of those scientists were from Cern, and another from Fermilab, and they were discussing the possibility of building a several thousand kilometer diameter particle accelerator around the continent. It would use System particle cannon tech to get the initial particles up to 99.9% of the speed of light, then use other particle acceleration methods to push the speed even higher, hoping to push the energy of a particle into the peta electron volt range. At that level even the System documentation isn’t sure what will happen. Hyperspace travel, wormholes, and even the creation of kugelblitz singularities only require hundreds of tera electron volts, so no one bothered pushing the energy levels higher.
The teachers were from a huge variety of disciplines, for arts to sciences to mathematics to sociology to psychology to religion, and everything else you can imagine. As Souls and true magic were now a scientifically verified phenomenon, Di had even asked several spiritual leaders from around the world to come and demonstrate what was possible, essentially needing to prove that their abilities were legitimate before they would be hired here. Di had several System AI watching to guarantee that they weren’t faking it with the System, just in case. While most of them were found to either not have powers or to be using the System, a few were verified as having paranormal or supernatural abilities, and they would form the core of the new True Magic branch.
Classes here wouldn’t be structured like normal colleges. Classes would be taught on a subscription basis, kind of like exclusive YourTube videos. If you subscribed, then you could attend the classes live or discuss things with the instructors. One month after a class was over it would be available for free, to anyone that subscribes to any class, but you won’t be able to ask the teacher questions about it. Anyone can also submit lessons and, after they are verified, they will be placed on the site for others to watch them. All teachers, including those that just submitted videos, will have a donation account tied to their videos where people can give them money, and those that actually teach lessons here will be paid half the subscription fees for their classes, for a minimum of fifty per day. Di hoped that this would result in people learning about anything that interested them, and being able to afford it.
Anyone that wanted credit for classes or a diploma would need to pay to take the finals for the class. The fact that the System gave everyone photographic memories made memorization less important and the ability to apply lessons more important, so many classes would also require practical examinations.
The city would also have several weak Free Dungeons and several better paid dungeons, in case you wanted to go into them. They would serve as amusement parks, hopefully having enough variety, even including non-combat ones, so that you could hang with friends and/or test yourself. Like an amusement park, you would get credits for every monster you defeated, challenge beaten, or puzzle solved and could trade credits for System gear after earning it, like exchanging tickets at an arcade.
That, combined with all of the manufacturing and other facilities a city would need, including cloning facilities, would allow the city to fund itself or even be self sufficient.
As the first classes would start the first day of September, less than a month away, they would soon start accepting students. Di had been sending people to every human settlement in the world, including every place Settlement builders went, to invite them to go to the university, even going herself. She had even been to a few non-human settlements. For this reason, pretty much everyone would need the Translation skill with over a dozen languages loaded into it, and she had hired or would hire at least one language teacher for each language represented to teach English to those that came here.
After some discussion, she agreed to open up a branch school on Mars and Luna once they got to a quarter million people in a city. I already planned on naming the one on Mars Apollo.
Sam’s POV:
I walked along the floor of the ocean. At this point I was down too deep for anyone else to see me, but I could operate on my internal nuclear battery for years if I wanted. Which I didn’t. It was extremely boring down here, and I only occasionally saw any kind of life.
The Gold vein that I thought I had found wasn’t as good as I had hoped, so I sold it to a mining company and set off for deeper water. I was over a kilometer deep at this point and the only light came from my helmet. The only reason I still wore the suit is because I wasn’t sure my body could handle the pressure this far down. I had run out of food long ago, but as my body could repair itself with nanites, that wasn’t entirely necessary. I had only started eating to keep up the appearance that I was a normal human. Also for the taste.
Finally, I came upon what I was hoping to find. A Tantalite deposit. Tantalum was used it huge amounts to construct System technology, was a major material for the creation of nanites, and would probably be the last mineral the System on Earth had enough of. Furthermore, it was rare enough on other worlds that if Earth ever connected to the interplanetary trade network plenty of other worlds would want to buy it. The deposit likely contained gigagtons of material, so I took the World System Core out of my inventory and dropped it beside the deposit.
‘Greetings. You are not what I was expecting when I finally got set up. I was under the impression that the local sapient race had taken over the expansion of the System from the System.’
‘They have. I am setting this settlement up on behalf of Greg Summers, User 9573140892. The nearby deposit will be registered with a company he owns called Dungeon Builders.’
‘Ah, that makes sense. So, will I be given a name? Judging by his System records he always gives his settlements a name.’
‘Yes, you will be Atlantis.’
‘I was hoping for Poseidon, actually.’
‘Unfortunately, since I entered the ocean he has built a colony on the fourth planet in this System, at a location known as Olympus Mons, and is naming the AIs in charge of that city’s management after the Greek deities, so naming you that would cause confusion. I suppose you could be named Cthulhu, though.’
The Core paused for half a second as it read everything every written about that subject in its library. ‘That may cause many humans concern, but I do like it better than Atlantis. I will think about it.’
A week later that city of Rl’yeh had expanded enough to build a small pressurized area with a small teleporter and Samantha took the teleporter back to AR, deciding she needed a break.