Chapter 11.1- All of Infinity in the Palm of my Hands

“New Kylos is ahead on the polls again, Kal” AIKO’s voice rang in through the speakers and I resisted the urge to facepalm. I was bent over on the work desk as I tried to manually change a few of the transistors on one of my latest projects. It had been roughly six months since these planets had become mine, and looking around this one , it was almost impossible to tell that it’d been uninhabited until only about three months ago. The world engines were something else. Sure, I had the schematics in my head and I knew what they were capable of, but seeing was believing.  I’d made the machines buy cannibalising a good portion of the _Dark Aster_ since I was giving it away, either way. So it was from the remains of the less than fully operational ship that we watched the devices float off into space before breaching the planet’s weak atmosphere, head to the predetermined points, and blast off powerful beams of changing light. It had taken days for the process to begin, but when it was all done, the scans and my vision showed me results beyond my wildest dreams. 

The first planet to be terraformed wasn’t this one. It couldn’t have been. If we needed to build homes, and all the other good things, which we did. Then the first thing we had to secure was our manufacturing base. That wasn’t this planet either. The planet, _Piji_, Greek for source was quite literally going to be the source of everything. It was the largest planet, the one closest to the sun, and also the one with the most already existing potential for raw materials. In fact, all the raw materials seeded into the planet by the World Engine were already present in some earlier form or the other, all except one at least. The main fruit of the excursion to Knowhere. _Vibranium_, Knowhere had a shit ton of the stuff deep in its crust. So deep that it must have been unsafe to mine, or n to even known to the inhabitants, but that didn’t matter to enhanced Kryptonian scanners. We had the chemical composition, the base elements and arrangement, and the World Engine did the rest. IUt had seeded a planet of Vibranium for me. Needless to say, I’d laughed. A full blown supervillain laugh. Carina had been understandably unnerved, but Ovette had decided to take her out of my presence for that period, lest she reported to her master that I was an insane man who just laughed after staring into space for a while. 

With planet 1 done and dusted, I now had to come up with the rest of the plan. Vibranium and all the ores I’d sought to create had gone off without a hitch. Now, all I had to do was manufacturing. Considering most of it would be done by nanobots, all I needed was a planet or planetoid dedicated to their production. A whole planet just for printing out nanobots was a tad unrealistic by every margin, so I decided to use the moon of Piji for the plan. This way, the nanobots would be within range of the raw materials they needed and that was going to be huge boon for their production. That was why I called over a screen to myself and inputed a few orders. AIKo was nowhere near Kelex when it came to parallel processing or multitasking so I’d been forced to take over most of the directions for the Nanobots already on the ship. It was child’s play to turn them into mining equipment as I went on and spent weeks mining Piji of iron ore and vibranium. Foundry, Piji’s moon, had taken the better part of a month to complete to my specifications but once it was done, I was practically printing robots made from vibranium and designed to work with the miracle bio-metal- hybrid substance. Even weeks of study wasn’t sufficient for me to say one way or the other what exactly the substance was and what it wasn’t. Or even where its limits lay. It could do practically everything, and that was a scary thought. After I’d figured out manufacturing as it stood, it made sense to prepare the second planet for inhabitation and now three months later, this is where we stood. 

The World Engine had been able to place the seeds for life and all the things we needed, but it was only careful monitoring and building with nanobots that turned this place into the vision of paradise it was. We lived on the largest, and only city of the small planet. The planets in my system were small. Even Piji, the largest was still quite a bit smaller than the Earth had been. This planet, about the size of Mercury, was the second closest to the Sun the system called home and it was still on the larger size when compared to the rest of the system. The city was a metropolis, a city of the future. Filled with skyscrapers that reached out to touch the clouds while greenery covered the majority of the floor. 

Everywhere one walked, there was some form of greenery or the other. The Kylosians would have much preferred to live in a similar manner as they did on Kylos, but I wasn’t really giving them much of a choice on the matter. Being spread out like that could cause problems. But here? With one single population centre? Keeping ahead of things was easy enough. Skyscrapers and apartment buildings were the majority of the buildings, but every here and there we had small standalone structures. Most of them were empty as I was waiting for the Kylosians to somehow figure out business and begin selling stuff in the would-be stores. There was already a coffee shop run by AIKO as a sort of proof of concept. I was going to have to figure out things like currency, the economy, and how exactly the society would function eventually. 

But for now there was a bigger problem. The name of the planet. Ovette had rightly pointed out that the Kylosian populace were beginning to feel like their views and opinions weren’t being taken into account, and as a benevolent king, I’d decided to nip that kind of thinking in the bud. How? A poll of course, giving them the right to vote over the name of the planet. ‘New Kylos’ had quickly surged to the top, but after spreading some subtle propaganda (in the form of bedtime stories about the Dune universe from AIKO to the Kylosian children), I’d been able to snatch first place for a small bit with my preferred choice, Arrakis, but that was quickly losing ground. Fuck Democracy, man. Arrakis would have been such a cool name. And also a reference no one else would have been able to get. 

A/N; Heading to bed now. Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate). Have a lovely one, and don’t forget to do something nice. I, Santa, will be watching.