I sat still on the padded seat, my travel case held against my legs. The interior of the light rail car was quiet, everyone keeping to themselves as the car shook gently and whirred along. Nearly everybody had taken off their respirators, leaving them dangling around their necks. They didn’t need to wear them inside the filtered and pressurized rail car. I kept mine on because I liked having my face covered. For some reason, I always felt better when no one could see my face.

The music I was listening to was guitar this time, acoustic, and just as generic as the piano playlist. It was soothing, in a way. I hadn’t ridden the rail that often, but whenever I did, I found myself drifting off after a while. In the past, I’d been a kid out with my parents, but since I was alone, I had to keep myself awake. It was less that there was any present danger and more that I needed to keep alert.

One reason was that I needed to get off at the correct stop, and the other was that while I probably wasn’t in danger, surrounded by all these witnesses, there was very little stopping someone from snatching my things and running off at the first stop. Here, people minded their own business, and someone running past with a stolen item counted as someone else’s problem. I’d seen it happen before when I was younger.

If someone snatched my case, I’d have lost my most important physical possessions. Dad was already going to lose the deposit on the fabricated clothes since I was taking them from the Cylinder without returning them, but if they were stolen, I’d have nothing to show for it. Then I’d have to get a pair fabricated before I had access to the student stipend, and that would eat into the little money I had saved up for emergencies.

Did I feel guilty about leaving Dad with the bill? Not really. I needed a change of clothes, and it was his job to provide that for me. As Doctor Watanabe had reminded me many times, I was ‘still just a kid.’ Considering how much he drank after Mom- After what happened, he could have afforded clothes we actually owned if he’d kept his shit together. But he didn’t, so I spent the latter half of my childhood raising myself, stealing his credit card to buy groceries before he could spend his paychecks on synthetic booze.

Maybe it wasn’t fair to judge him solely based on the past like that. He’d been getting better, recently. He’d thrown out the alcohol and stopped buying more, but he was still struggling. He’d gotten himself fired from his previous job thanks to being passed out drunk during one too many shifts, and his new job didn’t pay enough to afford good food if we wanted to make rent.

None of that was my problem anymore, though. I was going to become one of Humanity’s defenders. A hero who helped people. I forced myself to stop thinking about my past and focused on the uninspired chord progressions filling my ears. I felt sure the song was repeating itself after a certain point, and not in an ‘artistic’ way.

I looked out the window at the scenery as it passed. It was mostly the same, tall buildings with the occasional green space in between, parks, and tiny plots of woodland. I tried to spot the park where my Mom had taken me as a kid, but I couldn’t seem to find it as the light rail whirred past the areas I was familiar with, and out into the unknown. More tall buildings, and then open air as we passed out of the city and over a lake. I glanced down at my communicator and checked the time. Only a little while longer until my stop.

I looked up and saw one of the Pillars come into view as the last building fell away to my right. The Pillars were colossal support struts full of elevators and service tunnels that stuck out from the brilliantly lit center axis of the Cylinder like the spokes of a wheel. That Pillar was my destination. I’d be riding the elevators down a long way, all the way to the Cylinder’s outer layer where the hangars were located. I checked my communicator again, found the hangar number and flight code, confirmed they hadn’t changed, and felt a surge of relief. No changes, delays, or cancellations. I wouldn’t have to go home.

The Pillar drew steadily closer, and I prepared myself to disembark, checking that everything I’d had in my pockets was still there. It was, which was a relief. I waited until the Pillar eclipsed nearly everything else, having swelled to fill my entire view out the window, and stood. Careful not to give anyone an opportunity to pick my pocket, I kept some distance between myself and the other passengers who also stood for this stop.

The rail car glided to a stop, making everyone who stood rock in place slightly, myself included. Everyone in the car slipped their respirators back on. Even if they weren’t leaving, the rail car was about to depressurize, allowing the outside air in. The doors slid open with a hiss, and people started filing out. I joined the crowd, careful to keep to the edge of the group, and made sure no one was behind me. I split off from the crowd as soon as I could.

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I noticed that this rail station was much nicer than the one near my house; cleaner and in better condition, despite the higher traffic. Well, I reasoned, probably because of the higher traffic. If fewer people used an area, fewer people complained when it got run down or dirty, and it got less attention and maintenance. The one downside I could think of was that my cheap fabbed shoes squeaked loudly against the clean tile.

The elevators were all located around an enormous column in the middle of the station, doors facing outwards. I wasn’t looking forward to a several-minute ride in a cramped box full of strangers, but there was no alternative. Not every level of the Pillar was connected by publicly accessible stairs for security reasons. Plus, I only had about an hour before the ship took off, with or without me.

I walked over to the elevator bank, picked the one nearest to me, and waited. It was going to be a long wait, and I felt uncomfortable having my back to the room the entire time. If I turned my back to the elevator, then it might open behind me, and there would be people inside, and I might not hear them approaching over the background hum of conversation. I decided to stand sideways, half facing the room. That way, I could glance behind me occasionally, and I’d be able to see almost everything.

It was a long wait. As I waited, a few people came to stand nearby, their respirators whirring softly, only audible because of how close they were. I stood there for nearly five minutes before the elevator I’d called stopped at this level. When it slid open with a soft hiss, a dozen or so people got off, and I slipped inside as soon as the way was clear and tapped the button for the level I needed. The other people waiting for the same elevator filed inside after me, and I was pressed in on from all sides by strangers.

I felt cornered during the long ride, and the only thing keeping me from panicking was that I had my back to the wall and that the door was still nearby. I could see everyone, and nothing could get behind me. I took steadying breaths as the elevator whirred. I had to focus on something else to keep my mind from wandering. This elevator was the biggest one I’d ever been on, almost as large as the light rail car, and shaped like a triangle with the tip cut off, the cut-off portion facing towards the central pillar.

If I had to guess, the mechanisms for moving the elevator and performing emergency stops were probably located in the central pillar so that all the elevators could run off as few wires and mechanical components as possible. Why construct a dozen different elevator shafts when you can build one shaft for a dozen elevators?

The AI-generated music in my ears had moved on to a new playlist, violin. I grimaced at the artificial sound. A lot of people couldn’t tell the difference, but it always sounded… wrong. Like it was whining and raspy, instead of smooth and fluid. I couldn’t take out my communicator here, there wasn’t enough room, so I just endured it. I made a note to switch to something classical once I could. I was sick of the AI stuff, and it had served its purpose.

Finally, the screen above the elevator’s door announced that it would be stopping at my level soon. I prepared to elbow through the crowd, but I was relieved that when the elevator stopped, most of the people between me and the door got off as well. I had never been so relieved to be under the harsh fluorescent lights of the outer layers.

I finally had some room to breathe again. I stopped, slipped my communicator out of my pocket, and picked out the playlist I’d made of my favorite Pre-Calamity Earth music. I hadn’t been in the mood for this specific playlist earlier, but now it felt right. As someone started singing about their ‘poker face,’ I started moving again.

I had to force myself to walk instead of jogging to the nearest moving sidewalk that pointed in the direction I needed to go. I was in no rush, I reminded myself. I still had plenty of time. The ride on the moving sidewalk was louder than the one near my house, and much more crowded. It made sense, this close to the hangars on the outer layers, that there would be more foot traffic. I still didn’t like it, and I clutched my case tighter as I waited for the ride to end.

People stepped on and off the sidewalk as storefronts and office spaces, many still with faded ‘for lease’ signs hanging on them, slipped past on either side. Another side effect of being this close to the spaceports. No one wanted to shop or work in this area, let alone live here, and I couldn’t blame them. Even before the recent economic downturn, this area hadn’t been great, with high crime and serious pollution problems. Now it was worse, and the storefronts weren’t worth the brick they were made of. Some people still lived here though. In the apartments above nearly every occupied storefront, there were lights on in the barred windows.

As the storefronts were replaced with blank concrete walls, I looked around. I hadn’t been here much as a kid, and when I was, it was mostly to welcome Mom back from- I forced myself to focus on the music filling my ears. The first of the hangars passed me on my right, and I checked above its blocky archway, my eyes finding a giant ‘A’ that had been stenciled on with white paint at some point in the distant past. My stop drew nearer as I passed B, then C. Mine was F, and I stepped off as it came up on my left. I approached, stepped under the archway and into the hangar, and got a glimpse of my future.

There, docked in berth four, was the Academy transport. Most of the ship was hidden by the deck, but I knew it must be large. Only the topmost portion peeked out, the rest of it was no doubt being inspected and serviced on the utility levels below. From here, I couldn’t make out many of the details, but I could tell it was an older model of Bireme, one of those ships that had two engines and weren’t heavy enough to be battleships, but too heavy to be ordinary transports.

Emblazoned across one of its hull plates was the Academy’s crest, a cicada made of a white diamond trailing two trapezoids from its bottom edges, one black and the other dark gray. I spotted some other people my age headed in that direction, too. Probably my future peers. I forced myself to stand tall and made my way across the deck toward the man standing outside the ship’s open door, my communicator in hand, ready to display my boarding pass.