As the centuries passed, an increasing percentage of Earth's mass was converted into orbiting space colonies.
All available orbits were filled with satellites, circling the earth in vast concentric rings that eventually dwarfed Saturn's. The earth occupied the center of a thin disk half a million kilometers wide, a distorted plate made of countless separate habitats.
The circular space highways never intersected. The outlying orbits became offset for dynamic reasons.
The disk had a central plain with surrounding valleys and opposing hills, many complex indentations and bowls, a strangely mountainous landscape composed of a trillion satellites and space stations. A separate cloud of power stations floated closer to the sun.
The uneven disk thinned out towards the moon, where two smaller ripples orbited on either end.
The next wave of colonies was established around the solar Lagrange points, ahead and behind Earth. Some stations were larger than countries.

A civilization of this magnitude required total discipline. Authorized Entropy could not be exceeded. Any citizen who threatened the matrix was exiled.
The first Outpost Colonists were controlled with mind implants before being released to settle the asteroid belt. A trustworthy few eventually gained their independence. Over the centuries they spread out and converted a million tiny worlds into space stations and factories, mining the metal and carbon of the Third Frontier.

With a population approaching one quadrillion, the asteroid settlements eventually dwarfed the home planet in economic potential.
Earth realized it would have to specialize.

Earth's orbital disk became a command complex for policing the Solar system.
Trillions of duty officers spent their days reviewing incident reports, supervising distant functionaries, and looking for hidden trouble in the vast society they now controlled.
Near the center of the Solar System, Earth was months removed from most colonies, and its security forces were always outnumbered. It could take decades to complete a census.
Once again, something had to change. The miracle arrived just in time.

Earth's final population explosion was powered by the quantum reactor. In a few more centuries, the whole earth was disassembled and converted into an oval cloud of free-floating space habitats ten million kilometers long. The vast new swarm orbited a common center of mass.
The hereditary leadership chose this time to maximize its authority, before the asteroid colonies could similarly convert Mars and the moons of Jupiter.
This was their chance to permanently own mankind.
Striving to prevent a hero from being born, they inadvertently designed the greatest hero.



The best hard SF novel: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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