While the status of a living biomechanical organism was causing an increasingly widespread clamour among legal experts across the Alliance, something much more mundane and unexpected had caused a much bigger sensation on the planet below them.
The first city had just been completed, marking the total terraforming of the continent it was on and the completion of the atmospheric restructuring of the planet itself.
Some of the other continents still had a long way to go in terms of mineral deposits, plant life and biodiversity, but the areas where the Terraforming devices had identified modified objects consistent with ruins had all been marked and isolated from terraforming efforts, other than to remove obvious toxins from the soil and air.
What caught the entire Alliance's attention was a small thing that the Humans present, including General Tennant, who had just arrived on the planet to christen the new city, now officially the City of Santa Maria.
Once the final spires of the city were complete, and humans were transported from the Abraham Kepler, which was now in a docking bay near ground level inside the city of spires, an odd atmospheric phenomenon was created. Max recognized it from his past life. The movement of the citizens in the city would cause the spires to move ever so slightly, and resonance would form in the reflections of the crystals that made up the structures, creating images in the open air above the central park during certain times of the day.
He had seen what appeared to be flocks of birds and occasional other images, but he had never been there during the city's heyday when it was said that the images were truly magical, almost beyond what science could explain.
Science did explain it, though. The crystals of the city created a natural holographic emissions array, and the temperature imbalance between the outside and inside of the spires allowed them to give off enough energy to create the images using natural light when positioned exactly correctly by wind and the movement of the residents inside.
Today, what he saw was on that legendary scale, the image of a hundred-meter-long golden phoenix dipped and soared around the park for over a minute as the new Planetary Governor gave his speech welcoming the first residents to the planet.
It was all live streamed to the entire Alliance through no fewer than ten different social media channels in addition to the ship's own, each with its own measuring equipment, two of which had gone to the surface to record the speech up close, instead of dubbing that as an overlay of their orbital feed and saving the wear and tear of taking their vessels through the atmosphere.
Max was certain that General Tennant had given a rousing and touching speech to his shipload of settlers, but he hadn't been able to listen to it, as he was inundated by a flood of requests to stay aboard Terminus, and questions about the status of the planet as a Shrine World, blessed by energy beings from the ancient past, whose remnants might still linger there.
Trying to explain to everyone that it was an optical effect caused by the city itself required that he explain how he knew about the effects of the city and how he could have possibly calculated it since the original documentation of the theory had run to over a million gigabytes of mathematical calculations and the city had only been completed half a day ago.
The science-minded Alliance would not accept that he had seen that exact phenomenon in his past life, so Max had to propose it as a theory and try to lead them in the right direction so that they could prove it the same way that it had been proven before, but for now, superstition was winning the battle, and millions of wealthy Alliance citizens wanted the chance to vacation on a potentially blessed world.
The chances that it was really blessed and that the blessing would help them somehow might be one in a billion or lower, but if a billion came to see the Shrine World, who was to say that it wouldn't be your life that was suddenly changed for the better, right?
Plus, the city itself was an engineering masterpiece at the peak of human culture when he had first seen it, and here, among desolate stars and hostile aliens, it seemed even more majestic than he had thought possible when he had seen Nico's intention to make it a reality.
"Nico, get up and get dressed. Your dream city is making the entire Alliance believe in the supernatural." Max ordered, looking through the open door to where she was sprawled out in bed, clearly enjoying her additional sleep after he had been forced to work.
"That's why I rebuilt it. Don't you remember? We were there when the ghosts marched, and the world burned." She mumbled, still deep asleep.
Ghosts marched, and the world burned? Max dug deep through his memories until he finally found the incident that Nico was talking about. It was not the first battle for that planet or even the last. It had come exactly a year after the final battle for the planet on the summer solstice.
A ship carrying refugees off the world had a hidden structural flaw and exploded in flight, spreading nuclear fire through the upper atmosphere and clearing the clouds over the world for the first time in a year. The shattered remains of the city's crystals had lit up with images, looking like fleeing and panicking humans, which then faded as the last life left the world, and the city was forgotten among the rubble of war.
But Nico hadn't been there. He was certain of it. Her army had fled the world before the end of the final battle. Even Max had only come back that day because he had been en route to another location and had gotten a request to help transfer refugees.
Was this a sign that Nico's subconscious was remembering more of herself? She had completely forgotten who she was in that life, so things like saying that they had watched an event together simply didn't happen.
But if she did remember who she was in her past life and why she did the things she remembered doing, it might not be a good thing for the mental health of the current Nico.
pαпdα-ňᴏνêι·сóМ It was too stressful of a day for deep philosophical thought about reincarnation.
"Nico, get your cute butt out of bed and help me out here. The social media feed and booking requests are overloading the communications systems." Max shouted, finally rousing her from her slumber.
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