The repercussions stirred up by this operation were far greater than the tsunami it had triggered along the coastline. The chain reaction caused by several events erupting at once had nearly set the entire Earth ablaze.
First, photographs of Mars City sparked widespread public discussion. On this Earth's universe, the existence of aliens was not particularly shocking, but aliens being so close to them—and having watched them all along—was genuinely terrifying.
On a cosmic scale, Mars and Earth were close enough to practically hug and gnaw on each other. Even humans with such backward technology could find ways to fling things at Mars. For any civilization capable of leaving its surface, one press on the accelerator could easily result in a rear-end collision. Calling them neighbors was not quite accurate; they were more like roommates sharing an apartment. Roommates at least had doors between them, but there was no barrier whatsoever between Earth and Mars.
Such excessive proximity alone was enough to make humanity panic, not to mention that Martian civilization appeared far more advanced than them, had visited Earth thousands of years ago, and still had many people hidden among humanity. That fact alone had already caused widespread anxiety.
Then, a space station built by the Martians was quietly launched into low Earth orbit. This meant Martian infiltration was even more terrifying than they had imagined.
Most people did not know Victor existed, and even those who did knew little about his ability to create things out of thin air. Therefore, in their minds, building such a space station required an extraordinarily complex industrial chain. That meant that much of the upper management along that chain might have been infiltrated.
The aerospace industry had always been the culmination of industry itself, encompassing Materials Science, engineering, dynamics, mathematics, physics, astronomy—almost