| Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Omni Flash |
Today was the day of the launch. Ramses’ automators had constructed 121
million Outriders, and he was ready to let them go. Team Keshida had built
billion of modules for Project Stargate, but that was designed to spread to
every star system in the galaxy. That wasn’t necessary here. They only
needed enough to get to every region for now. They still hadn’t come up with
a specific reason for Operation Starframe, but perhaps something would come
up sometime in the next 108 years when the farthest ones settled at their
posts. They were obviously avoiding the stellar neighborhood, and every
system beyond that which was also colonized, or soon enough would be.
Ramses wasn’t sending the Outriders via rockets or launch loops. He was
teleporting them away, but using a very specific method. There were
different types of teleportation. Momentum was sometimes conserved and
sometimes not—depending on how you applied the pressure—but going the other
way by adding momentum? That was more difficult to pull off, though still
easier than having to include so much gravity in the calculations. This
allowed him to grant a boost to each Outrider, so it wouldn’t have to rely
solely on its own fuel, but also limited the amount of infrastructure he had
to build. He could dispatch hundreds of them at a time using this technique.
This would take a few days, but enough of them would go out today that he
could monitor the situation, and trust that it would continue to go
smoothly.
Mateo, Leona, and Olimpia were lying on a bed under a room-sized glass dome
on the moon. They were watching the Outriders disappear from their launch
pads. Each one gave off a burst of light. Ramses intentionally programmed
them to have different colors, so the visual was more spectacular. Their
little dome was projecting an augmented reality, which was zoomed into space
a little so they could see the exit bursts as well before the Outrider
entered reframe speeds, and disappeared entirely.
They were enjoying the quiet when Sanaa Karimi’s face suddenly appeared on
screen. “Can you see me now?”
“Sanaa, what’s wrong?” Leona asked.
“Nothing,” Sanaa replied, though the image quality was bad. She was
pixelating, echoing, and skipping. “Except for this connection. I was told
you had a pyramid.”
“We do. We had to chop off the top, though,” Leona replied. “It opened us up
to unwanted visitors.”
“Whatever. Look, The Superintendent reached out to me. He’s trying to write
today’s story, but nothing is coming to his mind. He knows that Operation
Starframe, or whatever, is happening today, but it doesn’t lead to anything
interesting. So he’s going to cut this short. He’s evidently really busy
working on something called...” She paused to check her notes on her tablet.
“...The Last Refuge. It’s eating up all of his time, and he thinks
that you will be fine without him for at least another week.”
“What does that mean for us?” Mateo questioned.
“He says you should talk with your daughter, but that the audience doesn’t
need to see it. It’s time for you to accept her choices so she can move past
her loneliness arc. The story can’t restart until then, and it’s boring
until it does. I’m bored with it already.” She looked upwards. “Anything
else, oh Wide One?” She waited. “Yeah, I did mean wise, sorry.” More
waiting. “Yeah, I’m sure you’re working very hard at your diet. Can I get
back to my life now?” One final pause. “Okay.” She looked back at the
camera. “Bye.”
They all sighed and went back to stargazing until Olimpia said, “ya know,
they killed God on Supernatural, and the world didn’t end.”
