Embers After Flames, Chapter 12.8 (Patreon)

12.8

+++

By the time I was wrapping things up with the Vascular Plant and starting to move on to the next step, Flatwell had finished wrapping up his side of things, too.

The formalities had been completed. The RLF was officially no more. The planet now had an actual, legitimate government, formed via the vote of the planetary population. By all appearances, that government was now expanding rapidly, engaging in massive recruitment of civilians and formation of departments.

The truth wasn’t even that different, it was just formalizing what had previously existed barely hidden under the surface from the PCA.

Still, now that it had actually been formalized, it was time for two things to happen.

First, Flatwell, with his ‘new’ position of being officially responsible and empowered to do what he’d already been doing, promptly wrote a letter of address to the Space UN.

Well, technically, it was called the Assembly of the Nations of the Civilized Collective, but that was much more unwieldy.

In that letter, Flatwell announced the continuation of official governance upon Rubicon, officially telling everybody that the planet was still both significantly populated and organised, and had not been reduced to a decivilized state via sudden and unexpected stellar destruction.

He then made absolutely god-damned certain that nobody in the Space UN was going to be in a position to do anything about this information simply by adding one additional statement: that the people of Rubicon had taken on and ultimately taken down a Rogue AI that had vastly exceeded its remit.

Yes, he was referring to the Enforcement System, and yes, he did provide the full evidence to prove it.

This was the political equivalent of tossing a flash bomb into the room before you closed the door.

The Assembly reacted with all the grace and respect that one could expect from a bunch of politicians making up the political body of a few thousand nations.

That circus immediately and totally lost its shit. Accusations went flying, counter-accusations were lobbied, and the thin veneer of civility collapsed entirely. Forty-something years of ammunition had just been made very public, and with a single effort, Flatwell handily broke the Assembly into four-five warring partners that were going to be too busy screeching at each other and deflecting blame to bother us in the immediate future.

With that particular can kicked down the road, the next bombshell was delivered much more carefully- mostly because this one was directed at Rubicon.

It was time for the public reveal.

There was actually already a surprisingly large amount of people who knew about the whole ‘Coral Consciousnesses’ thing. Everybody with the fifth stage of C6 Augments, for one, and then pretty much the entirety of the upper echelons of the RLF on top of that.

The announcement came out in the form of a public address, made in the middle of the day, and delivered by none other than Dolmayan himself. His speech had been entirely unprepared, but that hadn’t mattered one bit because Dolmayan had always spoken from the heart more than anything else. That was precisely why he was so charismatic.

The actual content of his speech, however, had been quite amusing.

He had, for one, simply straight up acknowledged that the nature of ‘Coral Mysticism’ was itself a deflection. “The word ‘mysticism’ implies a lack of science, of beliefs born without roots in reality.” He had claimed, before immediately following it with the actual truth.

“For decades, the PCA had sat directly on top of the largest Coral colony of this world. The decision to hide the truth of the Coral was made solely so that the PCA would not try to do something drastic, that it would not try to destroy a grand wonder of the universe in its unfeeling obedience to its precepts.” He’d explained. “All else was true. The Coral was with us!”

There were plenty of people who had been taken by surprise by this announcement. While many of the RLF’s originals had joined up out of genuine belief in Dolmayan’s preaching, the more time that had progressed, the more people there had been who had joined because the RLF was successful. A lot of these people had thought themselves too smart to fall for such an obvious cult, believing that Coral Mysticism was, in fact, nothing but mysticism, a belief that existed for the sake of morale and purpose.

Most of them took it pretty well, to be honest. A few didn’t, and refused to believe until the full scientific evidence had been provided, which had in fact been provided publicly at the exact same time Dolmayan had gone live.

For the ones who had believed, though? Oh, the vindication was just so sweet.

Our introductions came shortly, and that was the point where a significant amount of the population came to the realization that we were already known.

Right up at the top of that list was my name. The ever mysterious ‘Grandmother’, never met in person but vouched for by the entirety of the RLF’s leadership, providing continuous support for almost every level of the RLF, and even for a great deal of the Civilian Zones on top of that. As for my children?

Ayre, Ezra and Levi? All three of them had contributed to the engineering workshops, producing scores of improvements for the RLF’s MTs and the civilian’s machines. Mateo, Lyla, and Ava? Every software library in use had their names marked down in tens of thousands of contributions. Eta and Asher? Those two had their names on fully half of the food-related systems on the planet, written as proof of quality.

Seria? Anybody who’d worked with Dolmayan for long enough would eventually hear about how much he appreciated her.

The local nets were practically exploding with how much activity they gained on that day...

The funny thing is, the truth in the end changed little. All it was was just a bit of new context, appreciated by some and not cared about by others.

The only thing of real importance that did change was something that Flatwell pushed for. He wanted there to be a position in the government reserved for us, claiming that anything less than that would be wholly insufficient for recognizing the existence of not only a non-Human sapient species, but also a group that had been friends and allies for longer. It was a request that there was little trouble granting for precisely that reason.

And so, we now had official recognition. The entire planet now knew that when the RLF had claimed that the Coral was with them, they had been telling the complete truth.

We would have a voice on Rubicon forevermore.

...

It was a satisfying thing. I wasn’t really keen on the politics of it, but we’d taken another step closer to that goal I’d been seeking all this time. Symbiosis no longer seemed like something that would take place in shadowed corners, with the world passing by unknowingly.

Now it was real. Public. Out in the open, with the provisions set in place for it.

It was worth it.

...

I’d just have to see how long it takes to feel real.

+++

“How is it that, of all fucking things, I’m running low on platinum?”

The reconstruction was proceeding well. After I had gotten the Vascular Plant raised into the stratosphere, I had immediately shifted gears to producing what I’d need to extract the other supplies of Coral on the planet.

This was the kind of thing that was, unfortunately, much easier said than done. While the vast majority of the planetary Coral supply was present inside the Ice Field, the rest of it was still quite large. Recovering it wasn’t a simple matter of sending out some helicopters and putting it all in tanks, it was going to require drilling, processing, and scraping every last organism in the colonies in order to make sure I got it all.

I was especially not looking forward to getting what was left of Watchpoint Delta’s vein. Most of it had been launched into the air when the colony had Surged, but not all of it. Since the rest of it was underwater... Yeah. Complications.

I had to get it soon, too, because every moment that passed was a moment where the veins grew larger and ever more populated.

So, in order to handle that entire thing, I needed industry beyond just what the Xylem could provide, and resources that didn’t rely on simply salvaging every wreck in the Ice Field.

This, fortunately, was something I’d already planned for.

I had a total of four massive storage vessels for Coral. One was inside the Vascular Plant, serving to host the Coral that was calling the Firestorms home. The other three had sat pretty inside the city.

I had always intended to put them to use, of course. There was a lot of Coral in them, and it would have been a waste to let it go unused.

I spent the next two weeks preparing to move them out of the city. That was how long it took to prepare the facilities to receive them. Now that they were moving out of the protective umbrella of Institute City, they had become both a risk and a target.

The new facilities had to mitigate any risk, or the danger would mean nothing would be worth it whatsoever.

To do that, I simply further compartmentalized the Coral, splitting the larger chambers in hundreds, thousands, of even smaller ones. The new cells were resilient things, wrapped in quadruple layers of vac and pressure barriers. This expanded the amount of space taken up significantly, but also provided resilience towards burning Coral, and that was the whole point of this; preventing cascading Coral burns.

A cell burning wouldn’t trigger any of its neighbors. A dozen cells burning wouldn’t trigger the neighbors. The damage wouldn’t be kind, but it would be a hell of a lot better than all the cells having their Coral supplies burning.

I had doubled up on safety measures by ensuring that the cells were built above a long, tubular chamber, from which I could trigger a Coral burn on purpose. The trick there was simple, however; the chamber could open at the top, and the Coral would therefore be launched outwards safely... if one could call getting shotgunned into space under the power of its own burn ‘safe’, anyway.

The important part was that the process would scatter it significantly and prevent another cascade because it simply wouldn’t be dense enough to burn properly.

The facilities themselves came together perfectly fine. I’d then built support infrastructure around all of them, in preparation for the next task.

At which point, I’d run into the problem I was currently facing.

“Platinum?” Flatwell asked, kindly lending his ear to my bitching.

“Platinum.” I scoffed. “Apparently, every single easily-accessed deposit has been snapped up already, and the amount that I can pull out of wrecks just isn’t enough.”

“It’s blocking progress?” He asked.

“Well, I have alternatives, it’s just that if I had the platinum on hand, I could save myself a lot of time and effort replacing it all later.” I sighed. “I’m preparing a superscale Stellarator. With the energy supply of Coral on hand, I’ll be able to use it to achieve an industrially-relevent scale of nucleosynthesis... buuuuuuuut-”

“You want platinum for the Stellarator.” He said, amused. “Aren’t Catch-22s lovely?”

“It’s just downright annoying.” I sighed. “To get more platinum on Rubicon, I’ll have to spend an age digging truly deep, or build the Stellarator with subpar materials and then replace it once I can synthesise enough of it. The first will take longer than the latter, unfortunately.”

“Are those really your only options?” He asked. “Surely, a bit of asteroid mining could get you a supply in relatively short order.”

“The subpar materials would finish first... Though, a shipload back would let me get started immediately rather than wait for it to synthesize, so it would shave a week or two off, yes... But do you know the problem with that?” I asked. “It’s people. I’ve checked the schedules, and we’re already pushing ourselves to the limit on our highly skilled labour. That means waiting until after the Stellarator is built to get the crew, or sending an automated ship.”

“Quite the dilemma." He agreed, though I could still read the amusement from him. “And why the reluctance on an automated ship?”

“Control.” I sighed. “There’s no way to maintain Contact over those kinds of distances. That means I can’t use Coral to make things easy. I’ll need to build another OS.”

“Aaaaah.” He smirked. “I see now. You’re bored of that.”

“Yes, I am. It’s dull compared to the much more entertaining things I’m normally doing on Rubicon...” I sighed again. “But we’re going to need space infrastructure eventually, so why not start now?”

“That’s the spirit.” He encouraged me. “Think of it as something you won’t have to do later.”

“Oh, if only that meant I wouldn’t have to do anything with it later...”

But, unfortunately, he was right.

And so, I knuckled down and got to it.

The leftover hulls of a few dozen PCA Warships and half of a broken Grid’s guts went into financing the next project. I didn’t need particularly large ships, just ships that could carry an appropriately pure supply of resources back. That meant local mining and refining, both of which were very much solved issues in this day and age.

By the time the Xylem had finished fabricating them, I had finished replacing their OS with something that hadn’t already been jailbroken for decades. A quick test in a simulated environment showed no issues, so I decided to trust my work and send them on their way. Their target was a moderately sized asteroid out in the belt, which old surveys had informed me was very rich in platinum, and which PCA surveys agreed with. Chances are that it would get towed into orbit one day, but that was for later.

As the light of a trio of plasma thruster assemblies flew away from the world, I was still left with plenty to do.

Alas, the work never ends.