Compared to the solar system, the Altair System was still far too young.

Its stars burned fiercely, its orbits were unsteady, and its skies were filled with the restless debris of creation — a newborn stellar nursery still wreathed in chaos. Even now, dust and shattered rock swirled through space like drifting embers, colliding, fusing, and breaking apart again.

When the solar system had first formed, it too had passed through such a violent, uncertain age. In fact, this early turmoil was not an accident of nature, but an essential process — a cosmic crucible where countless impacts sculpted planets from clouds of gas and rock.

Without those collisions, Earth and the other great worlds would never have taken shape.

That era of violent bombardment had lasted for hundreds of millions of years and left deep scars on every planetary surface. Later generations of humans, sifting through lunar craters and Martian basins, had named it the Late Heavy Bombardment — a term that could never fully convey the scale of destruction it described.

Back then, asteroids as large as mountains had struck the planets daily, oceans of lava boiled under alien skies, and the air itself shimmered with the glow of molten metal. It was chaos — yet from that chaos, order had slowly emerged.

Over the course of eons, gravity and time worked hand in hand. Massive planets like Jupiter and Earth gradually swept their orbits clean, swallowing or scattering the smaller fragments that shared their paths.

Some fragments remained trapped in the gravitational embrace of these giants, gathering to form belts — the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune. Others were cast into the dark fringes of the solar system, becoming the Oort Cloud and Scattered Disc.

Only after this long purification did the solar system settle into the quiet rhythm that allowed life to arise.

The Altair System, by contrast, was still trapped in its infancy. It would need hundreds of millions of years to reach the same stability that the solar system enjoyed — perhaps even longer.

Tom did not have that kind of time.

He could not wait for natural order to take its course.

To him, time was as valuable as matter itself — and both were limited.

If the heavens refused to settle, he would force them to.

After a moment of deep thought, Tom's mind formed a new plan — vast in scale, daring in ambition, and precise in its purpose.

The SkyNet Plan.

It would be the largest artificial environmental project ever conceived — an attempt to stabilize an entire star system through controlled automation.

Relying on the industrial foundation he had painstakingly built on Altair A1, Tom immediately mobilized his clones and machines. Hundreds of millions of workers, both organic and mechanical, received orders simultaneously across the entire planetary surface.

Deep mines roared to life. Conveyor belts the size of highways carried ore to distant factories. Rail networks stretched across continents, their tracks glowing under the reflection of Altair's harsh white light.

In the biological processing complexes, vats the size of stadiums refined sugar, oil, and biopolymers from vast cloned vegetation fields. These organic materials, once used to sustain biological life, now served another purpose — to feed machines.

The whole industrial web pulsed like a living organism.

At its center, Hestia AI operated with perfect coordination, optimizing every energy flow, every transport route, every machine cycle. Under her direction, a strange new object began rolling off the assembly lines.

It was small — a metallic cube about half a meter wide, its edges smooth and precise, its surface polished to a dim, gunmetal sheen. Despite its size, it weighed nearly three hundred kilograms.

One side bore articulated claws that could fold, extend, and reshape to grip rock or metal of any kind. The opposite side contained a compact ion thruster, its nozzle faintly shimmering with blue-white plasma light.

Each unit was powered by an isotope battery — simple but long-lasting. By Tom's standards, the technology was primitive, almost crude. But that was exactly what he wanted.

Simplicity meant scalability. Scalability meant control.

He did not need elegance — he needed numbers.

And numbers, he could produce.

Even with his industrial system still in its infancy, two dedicated assembly plants were enough to produce ten thousand of these cubes every single day.

Raw components thundered into the factories aboard heavy trains. Automated cranes transferred materials into precision molds. Assembly lines stretched for kilometers, lined with robotic arms welding, cutting, and sealing in perfect synchrony.

Clones, acting as supervisors, monitored machine status and corrected malfunctions. Hestia AI oversaw the entire process, optimizing output efficiency in real time.

Soon, the cubes streamed off the lines like a river of silver — the first wave of what would become an interstellar swarm.

The first ten thousand were completed within days. Tom immediately ordered their deployment.

Dozens of aerospace carriers ascended from Altair A1's surface, engines blazing. They carried their metallic cargo into orbit, where a massive space dock — the first orbital base of the SkyNet Plan — awaited them.

There, robotic arms unloaded the units and placed them on automated fueling lines. Each cube received propellant refills, isotope cells, and firmware synchronization.

Once operational, command authority was transferred to Goku AI, a specialized combat and coordination intelligence Tom had designed for distributed systems.

Across the Altair System, thousands of detection satellites had already been deployed. They scanned the void relentlessly, tracking the trajectories of asteroids, comets, and debris fragments — tens of millions of them, large and small.

Their data streamed into Goku AI's network.

Within seconds, the AI mapped every potential threat — any object on course to collide with Altair A1 or the surrounding installations. Then, without hesitation, it issued commands.

A hum rippled across space.

The cubes responded instantly.

They ignited their thrusters in unison, streaking away from the orbital base like a glittering storm of fireflies. Trails of ion light cut across the darkness as thousands of them dispersed in perfect formation, each bound for its assigned target.

Upon reaching their designated asteroids, the cubes extended their claws, anchoring themselves to the rocky surfaces. Once attached, they began to fire their thrusters, exerting steady, precise thrust over days and weeks to alter the trajectories of the asteroids.

Smaller objects were easy — a single cube could push one aside effortlessly. Larger ones required coordination.

In those cases, Goku AI assembled multiple units into swarms.

They would orbit their targets, scan them with radar and lidar, calculate exact mass and composition, determine attachment points, and distribute thrust vectors accordingly.

Then they would ignite in perfect synchrony, hundreds of small ion engines burning faintly against the backdrop of stars, nudging colossal bodies by millimeters per second — just enough to prevent impact months or years later.

It was like a cosmic ballet, choreographed entirely by machine logic.

Under this system, the young Altair System began to change.

Every day, over ten thousand new units joined the swarm. Each week, a new orbital dock was completed. And above Altair A1, a faint metallic halo began to form — not natural, but artificial, a glittering web that spread wider and wider with each passing month.

The SkyNet Plan was more than defense. It was the foundation for a controlled evolution of an entire star system — the transformation of chaos into order by human will.

But even this vast mechanism was only the beginning.

The swarm, the orbital bases, and Goku AI's coordination system — these were only the first half.

Because the SkyNet Plan still had one more component.

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