The night was destined to be sleepless. With Alex dilating the time even more than Research Earth's one to three hundred and sixty-five, two whole days had passed before the sun rose over the horizon. Of course, after the intense session, Natasha needed some well-deserved rest, for which Alex took her to their bedroom and let her sleep comfortably.
With that, he left the house to pick Xialing up from her friend's house in a Porsche. She may not like him being too ostentatious about things, but she wasn't here to dissuade him right now.
Since she had now graduated and wanted neither a Master's degree nor a job, he decided to spend the year travelling with her and Natasha, exploring the beauty of his planet with his little family. What came after that was going to depend on what Natasha convinced Xialing to do over the following year.
…
On the other side of this planet, Gwen now had a competent person and his assistant supporting her projects. Calling Reed Richards extremely capable was more than an understatement. The man made invaluable contributions from the very day that Alex brought him to this planet. He and Ben had only been on this planet for a mere six months, yet their presence had accelerated the timeline of Gwen's Infinity Stone Radar by years.
Of course, it was lucky that Reed had already been researching a form of Cosmic Energy during his investigation of the cosmic cloud that gave the Fantastic Four their respective powers. That was a significant factor in the accelerated timeline of the Radar's creation.
Within another year and a half, translating to a day and a half in normal time, the Infinity Stone Radar would be completed, allowing Alex to start actively looking for Infinity Stone fragments throughout the universe.
Considering the impressive pace of their progress, Alex was confident that his vision of collecting Cosmic Energy from the masses wasn't too far off. Especially since the medium that he wanted to use was already widespread.
After more than a decade and a half in total, since he started controlling the two Earths, Gaia Bracelets had become the norm all over both planets. With Gaia's recent transformative update after Alex virtually broke down the variant of Ultron from Earth-Z and melded its most advanced aspects into her, the bracelets had become a natural part of everyone's lives, with a subprocess of Gaia serving as their virtual assistant on each bracelet. The best part was that Gaia was essentially Alex's subconscious now. The AI had its own thoughts and could do everything autonomously, but at its base, everything stemmed from Alex's thoughts and primary directives. While Ultron could go rogue due to its core model being unregulated, Gaia didn't have any concept of going rogue because it was a part of Alex. It could never go against the directives of his primary consciousness.
Of course, the changes that happened over the fifteen years weren't limited to Gaia Bracelets. Another important thing to happen was the introduction of a new system of currency that came in the form of Gaia Credits. While Alex had plans to eventually introduce a new currency when he established his empire, that would come once he fully took over Earth-Z and implemented his Abomination breeding plans to invade Gaia's planets.
For now, Gaia Credits were the norm all over the world. They essentially worked like a cryptocurrency, with no physical presence. Unlike most cryptocurrencies, however, Gaia Credits were highly regulated and handled by Gaia herself, leaving no room for foul play or loss of money. This heavy regulation and monitoring that Gaia did made corruption a hundred times more difficult for politicians who had their priorities incorrectly set.
While there was a lot of backlash initially from these very people, Alex had already dealt with such events when he'd initially introduced the Gaia Bracelets. In front of his ruthless and efficient means, all possibilities of resistance were curbed before they could actually affect anything. Being Gaia's controller, there was nothing in the world that was hidden from him, allowing him to curb any budding resistance efforts before they could gain any traction by simply cutting off their backers and funding. Of course, these things worked because of a simple reason. It was the rich and powerful class who didn't want their money tracked; the general populous was more than happy with such a currency that could be easily used almost everywhere without any problems.
Even the financial sector came through after some internal upheavals and was now perfectly dependent on Gaia Credits.
Since Gaia was the one facilitating all transactions—domestic or international, payment brokers became entirely obsolete. As for banks, their entire purpose became credit lines—loans, credit cards, and more, since people no longer needed to keep their money with banks. The Gaia Bracelets served as their secure wallets instead, keyed to their identity securely. The banks that were able to transition in time succeeded; the others could only shut down.
Then came the benefits of having such a central authority figure who, with a nigh-omnipotent AI serving as his subconscious, kept everything in line. Some things improved passively as systems that were already in place started working at their intended pace after minimizing corruption. The infrastructure and quality of life in most countries started drastically improving, the cessation of wars allowed certain resource-rich countries to flourish, and many other, smaller things that were too numerous to list.
Major crime practically disappeared as Gaia had more than enough ways to keep track of every individual human on the planet. Privacy be damned, even the most dangerous areas in the world became safe havens where people didn't need to lock their doors. Of course, Alex didn't actually let people know that Gaia had such a deep level of monitoring. He still left the minor criminals to the police. Only when it came to things that impacted Alex's bottom line would Gaia interfere and effectively take care of everything. As for Alex's bottom line? Ironically enough, it was murder. As long as criminals didn't kill anyone, they would be left to the authorities to be dealt with. If their actions led to the death of another person, then their judgment would be passed by Gaia swiftly and ruthlessly.
The reason Alex made murder his bottom line? It was directly related to his current priority regarding both planets' development.
Life expectancy and raw population numbers. If he wanted to fulfill his future vision to essentially use people's emotions to farm cosmic energy, he needed numbers. The larger the population, the better. With that in mind, he invested tens of millions of Gaia Credits to provide everyone in the world access to decent healthcare. Considering the conversion rate that he gave the Widows of ten thousand Dollars to one Gaia Credit, that equated to an investment of trillions of Dollars all over both Research and Farm Earths dedicated to healthcare over a period of two years.
On the other hand, he started releasing incentives to increase the population. Benefits such as better housing and subsidies for families with a larger number of kids, free education, and many other attractive benefits were gradually introduced to encourage higher birth rates.
While he could have focused solely on increasing the number of people, he also had to consider his plans for the future. When the invading forces from Earth-Z inevitably came to assault the world, he couldn't have people immediately lose hope. With prosperity, everyone would have something to fight for, not to mention they would naturally be able to put up a decent fight when the time came.
Naturally, with this kind of expenditure, Alex needed ways to recover his expenses just as quickly. That led to him releasing the anti-aging serum to the general public— the same one that he gave to the Widows. Of course, unlike the Widows, who only needed to pay a sort of nominal fee for it as a means of motivation, the public serum was priced at a flat million credits a pop with an efficacy of one year.
This single item made an insane amount of cash flow into Alex's hands from the top 1 percent of both planets, allowing him to not only freely fund his healthcare initiative, but even more.
Still, with Gaia's upgrade, everything got a lot more streamlined, and exponentially improved Alex's efficiency in managing things. The population for both planets had crossed the ten billion threshold, and the numbers were steadily increasing. As for housing, or the need for resources to sustain such a population, that was something he didn't need to worry too much about until they crossed a hundred billion per planet. The land resources were more than enough to sustain this many people as long as he was efficient about development and infrastructure and didn't waste time and resources in grudge matches with other politicians.
As for what came after the hundred billion mark, by then, Alex would have implemented the Earth-Z invasion plan. At that point, instead of having the number of people increase, his focus would shift to propelling the evolution of humanity as a whole, improving the quality of his subjects.
Gaia's upgrade had brought about a qualitative improvement in how things were managed in Gaia, but it wasn't limited to that. Gaia played a key role in another of Alex's major investments— The Gaia Penitentiary.
After more than a decade since its establishment, the number of occupants had gone up from its previous two thousand something to almost thirty thousand occupants. Not only that, the number of Qi Awakened occupants among them had already crossed a thousand, with more than a hundred of them giving him almost half a unit of Bioenergy every day individually. Unfortunately, that seemed to be a bottleneck point that no one had been able to breach just yet. Even the prisoner he'd invested most in, Silver Sable, hadn't crossed that threshold. Of course, that didn't mean that breaking through was impossible, simply that it would require more investment from Alex than it was worth. It was better to have a large number of prisoners providing him with half a unit as opposed to having ten or so who would give him maybe one or two units. Still, the numbers had grown staggeringly high in recent times.
Prisoner Farm — 29154
Mary Jane Watson - 0.5 EP/day
Silvija Sablinova | Silver Sable - 0.5 EP/day
Prisoners (27949) - 0.0001 EP/day
Qi Awakened (1203) - 0.05 EP/day to 0.5 EP/day
With this lineup, Alex was generating almost two hundred and fifty units of Bioenergy per day. Considering the time dilation factor of one day to one year, he was making over ninety thousand units every day outside. Regrettably, while these numbers sounded good, offsetting the backlash of using Infinity Stones practically consumed all of his Bioenergy every time. Still, the larger rate of Bioenergy generation allowed him to use the stones much more liberally as opposed to before.
Still, with such a large amount of Bioenergy being generated every day, he wasn't entirely hoarding it. Instead, he used it for its empowering qualities. The direct beneficiaries of that were the Widows, who had steadily grown significantly stronger while living on Earth-Z. Right now, even without his active enhancement, even the weakest of them had significantly greater base physical stats than Captain America. At least the MCU one, since that was the one with whom he'd had the most contact.
***
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