It took a bit more than six hours to fully quell the chaos, as the empire had been forced to focus most of its forces on angry awakeners at the beginning. The “Hero Academies” had yet to produce a graduating class, after all, which meant that non-awakened ARES members and reaper teams had borne the brunt of the awakeners’ ire. Even those noncitizens that’d taken the empire’s crash course on how to handle their new blessings had proven useless; some of them joined in the protesting, while the rest refused to aid either side.

At the end of the day, they were still in the group that was to be forcibly relocated, so that much, at least, was understandable. Aron could only thank who, or whatever, was watching over humanity for not having all of them join in the chaos and considered their noninterference a blessing. Even one noncitizen awakener going rogue could end up turning into another Hassan Event, and having millions of them doing that at the same time would almost definitely end poorly for humanity at large, much less the fledgling Terran Empire.

But thanks in large part to pappies, and in a much smaller part to headbags, the casualty count among the deployed ARES troopers had been kept relatively low, even in the face of rioting awakeners. Still, the non-awakeners had caused plenty of trouble while the rioting awakeners were being put down and transported to the cubes ahead of schedule. They, at least, would be segregated from the non-awakeners and the nonviolent awakeners and wouldn’t get a chance to interact with anyone else before they woke up on their destination planets.The prevailing opinion among them was that training, no matter how harsh and spartan, would be much better than the alternative. The Hole still had plenty of space for inmates, and forced migration also sounded like a much better, not to mention more humane, option than being drafted into prison battalions and sent directly to the front line of any conflict humanity found itself in. Even though, being awakeners, they would have an advantage in warfare, a life of constant battle interspersed with long stretches of stasis and training, sounded like a hellish existence to face.

Either way, once the awakeners had been arrested and transported to the nearest cubes, Aron, not to mention the rest of humanity at large, could wash their hands of them. Besides, it wasn’t like more training would hurt them at all. In fact, it would even be good for them... especially since they were being put into the “Hero Program” track and would be subtly influenced by the training program that had been designed by the imperial blessings agency. And Nyx. Nyx had had a pretty big part to play in the training program designed to turn angry awakeners into heroes.

When she had approached the head of the agency, she’d laid out a convincing argument based on the long, long history of intelligence agencies and brainwashing. Thus, she set to her task with barely disguised glee, or at least a close approximation of that emotion; though she was still the most humanlike of any of Aron’s higher-order AIs, there was still a thin barrier between her emulating emotions and actually feeling them.

As for the remaining noncitizens who were arrested during the protest, they were also put into pods. They formed a second segregated group that would also not be allowed to mingle with regular colonists and those who caused very little, if any, chaos during the protest. But again, it wasn’t like more training would hurt them; on the contrary, it would help them quite a bit. It had always been a truism that ignorance breeds violence, and those who were being arrested during the protests upheld that in spades. Thus, the training they were about to undergo became the equivalent of the Job Corps program that the pre-

lightsnοvεl empire United States used to run, where they would offer on-lightsnovelthe-job training programs for people, then assist them with job placement upon graduating.

The imperial citizens who were arrested during the protests were detained pending trial. Though the likeliest option for them was to join the forced emigration, they would still be given their day in court to present a defense as to why they should remain on Earth, should they so choose. To streamline the trials, they were all given an option when they were first arrested: either “voluntarily” join the colonization effort, or be held in prison cells until their trial date, which could be as long as three months down the road.

Needless to say, most of them chose to join the exodus. At least there, they would have a hand in shaping their world and its social structure, unlike Earth. It hit home for some people watching from the sidelines as they realized that most of the citizens’ anger was based in never having had the ability to determine anything for themselves.

Even in the US, which had touted itself as a haven of democracy, the people had only ever been given the illusion of choice. Every election turned into the same thing—it was like voting for cold turds on a paper plate or dried-up boogers on a silver platter. In the end, the people’s voice had never mattered.

Still, the wave of arrests didn’t mean that the protests had ended. Hundreds of millions of people were still protesting around the globe. But they were paying close attention to strictly following the guidelines and laws that not only allowed them to protest, but gave them guidelines on how to do so effectively. Not that they were difficult to follow, really; they pretty much boiled down to “don’t hurt people, don’t break things, don’t demolish buildings, and don’t start fires”. Thus, the imperial police agency was mainly relegated to controlling the crowd to prevent trampling and such, or pulling people out of the mobs when they fainted.

Thus, although the number of protesters may have seemed alarming in a vacuum, the damage caused by them was actually minimal, not to mention mostly accidental.

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