Warning: This will impact an entire planet's environment and billions of people. Please confirm the sale of Dark Storm to the system.
That ominous warning rang alarm bells in my head. "How exactly will it affect so many people?" I asked. "They're in bio-pods that controls their environment, aren't they?"
The bio-pods are designed to harvest body heat and regulates the extreme cold of the occupants. The membrane keeps all forms of precipitation from pooling or damaging the equipment. The electrical pulses diffuse the high winds and allows uninterrupted hoverpad flight around them. They are not designed to protect from solar radiation, light, or the additional heat produced.
That was something I hadn't planned for. "Can I sell only part of it?"
No. It self-replicates. Selling only part of it will not remove it nor affect the Karma of anyone.
"Dammit! With that limitation, I can't make holes in it, either." I said.
Yes, it is an all or nothing choice, just like everything else you've sold to the system. As with the other sales, it will affect the Karma of everyone the sun touches.
I sighed and thought about it. If the towers were so affected by the sun, what about the birthing fields? I could easily make covers for the towers, adjustable with the angle of the sun; but, the expansive fields? How the hell would I cover them? There wasn't anything physical I could make that was big enough to... oh, I am an idiot!
I can easily make wards to regulate the temperature and to deflect the sun's rays for an area that large. I covered an entire star with them, so an expansive field was almost nothing in comparison. I would just need to rework the ward scheme from intraphasic radiation to solar radiation and the problem was solved.
"Confirm sale of Dark Storm to the system." I said and felt the world tremble.
The entire planet shook as the mile and a half wide cloud layer, that had a mass comparable to a small moon, suddenly disappeared. I actually felt the air vibrate as the oceans churned and start to boil when the protective cloud layer disappeared and exposed the water to heat it hadn't felt in centuries.
I gained nearly 40 billion Karma Points and had to spend over half of them to stabilize the planet's rotation. Was 20 billion Karma Points too much for that? No, since it also stopped Zion from being destroyed from the core deep quakes. I even paid to stop the oceans from boiling. I did not want whatever was in them to diffuse into the air any more than it already had.
"What the hell did you do, Neo?!?" Dragon's voice gasped from the comm badge I wore.
"I'll explain later. I have to cover the birthing fields and power towers with radiation diverting wards and then I have to install weather regulating machines. With so much mass removed, the whole planet is out of whack and the storm system that kept everything the same across the entire surface is now gone." I explained.
A moment later, I stepped to the edge of the expansive birthing fields and took out a copy of the large ward stone, transfigured it to change intraphasic to solar, and planted it into the ground. I copied it hundreds of times and took out a tablet with Chappel's calculations on it. I inputted the new dimensions and it worked out where I had to place the others.
I did so and then realized something really important. The machines would be either knocked out or destroyed by the magic backlash from activating it. "Fuck, fuck, fuuuuuck!" I cursed and stomped around, then stopped to think about it. I wouldn't let this defeat me or make me kill so many people and machines. There had to be something... and then I remembered fixing Yasaka's sub-dimension.
I immediately felt out for a planetary leyline and was surprised there was only one. It was also fairly weak, so I needed to boost it and add the proper ward stone, link it into the protection ward, and then shift the fields and towers briefly into a sub dimension to save the machines from being blown up from the magic activating.
I took out a copy of the ones I used for Yasaka and altered them, added in the booster, and shunted the protection ward into the power matrix. The sun itself would contribute to the magic and I had to use myself as the anchor. It was only going to be brief, so it wasn't going to be that big of a drain. Hopefully. It was going to take a lot to heal the planet after so long without the sun.
I stepped to the towers and used telekinesis and technopathy to disconnect them from the power grid, then activated the wardstones. There were thousands of alarms from the disconnect, since the constant flow of power was interrupted.
All the machines and AIs had to switch to battery backups and all the towers and fields faded away and entered the smaller sub-dimension that was only just big enough to contain them. The magic pulse was only small in the real world as all of it was shunted into the sub-dimension to lessen its impact.
Thankfully, it worked and only a few local machines were knocked out. One of the large baby harvesters, three security bots, and the ten doc-bots that had instantly latched onto the fading towers and birthing fields as they disappeared. It was a small loss when compared to losing all of them if it hadn't worked.
With the protections and the magic activated, I reversed the dimension creation and everything faded back into this dimension. I reconnected the towers and the power runs to the baby birthing fields and then went to the closest doc-bot and checked it. It was wrecked internally and the AI inside was wiped, which meant the others were as well.
I sighed at the inadvertent cost and vanished the bodies before I stepped from there and back to the Dark Storm facility. I waved a hand at it and vanished the entire thing, since it was only rubble anyway, and installed the weather control machinery that the United Federation of Planets used to regulate a planet's atmosphere to keep the world healthy.
Once I had that set up, including filters for any toxins in the air, I set them on high and then stepped from there to the closest large body of water that still existed, which was the Atlantic Ocean, and thought about vanishing the entire thing. Cleaning it was going to be a pain in the ass and would take many years, so I chose to get rid of it instead.
Millions of giant water slugs were suddenly without an environment and dropped anywhere from several feet to hundreds of feet, most of them dying immediately and the rest needing a few minutes to suffocate. I thought about what to do with the mass of bodies and decided the moon was a good place for them. They filled one of the large craters and it wasn't noticeable from Earth, so it was fine.
Instead of spending a lot of time scouring the ocean bottom to remove all of the contaminates, I set some automated machines to do it for me. I couldn't add more water until they were done, so I used my clairvoyance power to look for the next body of water and did the same thing. I vanished the contaminated water and set a bunch of cleaning machines to work the revealed lake bed over.
I did that a few more times, including adding a bunch more machines where the Pacific Ocean used to be, and then stepped back to where the Reclamation had landed. Saga, Akira, and Mouse were outside waiting for me and they were staring up at the bright blue sky that had a few white fluffy clouds in it.
"I knew you could do it!" Saga shouted and jumped at me to hug me.
"It was a lot more involved than I thought." I said and heard a screaming airfoil as it approached. "It seems Dragon's in a rush to come back."
Saga giggled and hugged my neck.
"How are we supposed to explain this?" Mouse asked and waved a hand at the sky. The air was still thick with contaminates and it was going to take a while before it was clean again.
"We don't have to." Akira said and looked up at the Javelin zooming down to us. "If anyone asks, we didn't see anything or saw anything."
"But, Malachi..." Mouse started to say.
"He'll report what you and Dragon did, unless you make him forget about it." Akira said to me.
"Do you want me to?" I asked and she looked conflicted. "I know you like him and he's always been good to us."
Akira looked away from me as the Javelin did a long slow turn to cut down on its speed. "We've kept a few things from him already."
"That's not what I mean." I said and she looked back at me. "We can invite him in completely and tell him everything. He'll become a part of the family if you want him to. It's up to you."
Akira took a breath and let it out. "He might not be ready for that."
"We can test him." Mouse said. "When he wakes up, we show him the sky and see how he reacts. If it's favorable, we tell him Dragon and Neo succeeded. If not, we leave and don't tell anyone. They can discover it for themselves sometime in the future."
Akira smiled at him and nodded. It was the best compromise.
The Javelin closed up just before it slammed into the ground and bounced several times before it skidded along for several hundred feet. The once again rocket-looking vehicle came to a stop almost right beside the Reclamation and I had to chuckle at the near exactness of the crash landing.
We hadn't built in any landing gear, since it was only a test vehicle to see if the thing would work. It didn't have all the normal functions Dragon usually had in her mech suits, either. We would have added them into the next version, just so Dragon could go up and reclaim the first version for parts and to retrieve the copy of herself.
"I'm still angry you risked yourself like that." I said to the Javelin.
A sigh came from the cargo ramp of the Reclamation as Dragon's normal mech walked down it. "I'm sorry, Neo. I wasn't really thinking about what my normal practices meant. Each time I'm loaded from a backup..."
"...the backup file never actually dies." I cut her off. "I know. I get it. Because of your programming and your normal operating procedures, it always ensures a clean reboot. I just don't like how you've become so accustomed to thinking of yourself as disposable, even if you are supposed to be the main version of yourself."
Dragon walked over to me and placed a hand on my shoulder. "I've always done things this way and... I've never had anyone that was so invested in my well being before. Not since... you know."
I sighed and nodded. Her father was a paranoid ass and wanted to help humanity and also stopped his creation from being too creative. He was so afraid of what she could potentially do to harm people that he ignored the harm he did to her to prevent it.
"Let's wake up Malachi and see what he says." Mouse said to change the subject back.
"I bet my next ice cream in the Matrix he's going to freak out." Saga said.
"Yeah, but will it be a good freak out or a bad one?" Dragon asked.
"That depends." Saga said and looked at me, her face close to mine, because she was still hugging my neck. "Are the machines in Machine City freaking out?"
That question made us all stiffen slightly, then I handed her to Dragon and checked with my clairvoyance power. About a quarter of the city was in shambles, smoke rose from several power conduits, blown out walls were all over the place, and sparks of electricity were everywhere.
Half of the hover machines in sight were collapsed on the ground, with most of them and the still active ones twitching like crazy. A few of them were just floating there with their scanners and detectors pointed up at the clear sky and the sun, as if in disbelief.
I stepped over to one of the larger ones attempting repairs and touched its fuselage. My technopathy easily found out from it that the direct solar radiation had overcharged the city's main fusion reactors and sent a cascading electrical surge through most of their power grid.
It blew several hundred large capacitors and resistors, wrecked a lot of the regulating programs, and caused a massive disruption in their society. Nearly all of the machines physically attached to the system were affected in some way and many of the free floating ones had their own internal problems from the additional charge added to their internal batteries and hoverpads they weren't designed for.
I send a mental apology through their network, which surprised them all, then I used my technopathy and Overhaul abilities to repair all of the damage, including to the free floating hovering machines. Almost as soon as I did so, several of the capacitors and resistors across the city blew again, since I hadn't fixed the surge problem.
I need a minute or two. I thought to the machine I was touching and used my powers to upgrade a few things in the city, added in a regulator to the power distribution network on the end of the power lines from the towers, then adjusted the rate of flow to stop any further cascading power surges. I repaired the programming and then fixed the damage from the second power surge. I think that's got it.
A feeling of shock came back over their network and then there was suddenly 30 flying machines of all different types that surrounded myself and the maintenance machine I was touching. I felt a hundred or so mental inquiries over the technopathy link about the changes I did and the added programming for the parts I had transfigured that they had never seen before.
Instead of trying to explain anything, I transferred the updates, and the plans to build them the normal way, over to the small internal database inside the maintenance machine I was touching. All the mental inquiries were rescinded and sent to it instead. The surprise the machine felt at becoming the center of attention, made me chuckle, since he was a lowly maintenance bot that everyone usually ignored.
I stepped away from there, now that I had a distraction to keep them busy, and appeared back with my family. Malachi had been carried out by Dragon and placed on a blanket on the ground. Akira sat beside him and pet his hair as she held his hand. She gave me a look that said she hoped he accepted our offer to become family, because she didn't like having to keep secrets from him.
I woke him up with a silent Ennervate spell and Malachi gasped and sat up. He stared at the bright blue sky and remembered what Dragon and I had done with the rocket-like Javelin. His eyes easily saw the huge thing laying there beside the ship and then his eyes went to me and then to Dragon's mech suit.
"You... you did it?" Malachi asked, his voice barely above a whisper. "You fixed... no, not fixed... you got rid of it somehow..." He pondered, his hand in Akira's clenched a few times, and he mumbled a few things about how much the world was going to change if anyone found out about it. He snapped out of his musing and looked right at me. "Was Morpheus right? You should have been The One?"
I shook my head. "Unlike the prophecy, I wasn't born inside the Matrix. I do have exceptional power and a lot of errant coding in my avatar, thanks to the system that was set up to take advantage of that."
Malachi looked at Saga and then at Mouse. "But, if you can do so many things..."
"All it takes is training and opening your mind. Even Cypher is doing some of the things I can do, thanks to Trinity's belief in him... and Kid showing them up while training under Morpheus." I said with a chuckle.
"Monk can use a flying carpet!" Saga added and laughed, too.
That had Mouse and Akira smile and Malachi nodded.
"Okay, I can see that working, even if no one else has done anything like it before you showed up." Malachi said and looked up at the blue sky and the white fluffy clouds. "Why didn't you tell Zion Control about this?"
"Because it either worked or it didn't. There was no middle ground." Dragon said, her mechanical hand was back on my shoulder. "The testing was so dangerous that if we didn't take stringent precautions..."
"...it all could have been lost." I said and reached up to take Dragon's hand. "Everything that is important to us would be gone."
Malachi looked from Dragon to me, then his eyes dropped to his hand clasped in Akira's. He lifted his gaze from her hand to her face and saw her slight blush. She also looked a little scared, so he did something they had only done when hiding away from everyone's sight. He leaned over and lightly kissed her on the lips. Akira blushed deeply and looked both pleased and embarrassed.
"Okay, I'm in." Malachi said and looked up at me. "Are we admitting to any of this shit or are we covering everything up?"
The others exchanged looks and then all of them looked at me for what to do.
"Blue sky? What are you talking about? We gathered salvage from around the last group of sentinels we encountered and came right back to Zion." I said with a knowing smile and they all nodded in understanding.