After I get everyone to leave the immediate area, I go down into the bunker by myself. My only light source is the faint glow of the core, leaving me fumbling through the dark.
I'm all alone as I enter the main chamber, or so I think at first.
“Who goes there?”
“Doug?”
“Jack?”
I strain my eyes, but I can't make out anything. Not until Doug comes closer, where the core's dim light makes the outline of his body visible.
“What are you still doing here?” I ask. “I ordered everyone out.”
“It's my bunker, you can't order me out,” Doug retorts.
That's fair enough. I should've talked to him first before deciding to install the core here, so I do it now. I show Doug the core so he can read the description, then I tell him what's going to happen.
“Nope,” he says decisively. “Take it somewhere else.”
I try to reason with him, but he's vehemently against the idea. This is his property, his house, and his bunker. The core would destroy them all, and understandably enough, he wants to keep them.
I contemplate taking the core somewhere else like Doug suggests, but that carries its own set of problems. The apartment buildings also have owners, and I doubt they'd give up their property either.
As for the police station, I have to face the facts behind my decision. It's a selfish thing, the station would remind me of Pops every time I'd go there. If it were up to me — which it soon might be — I'd have the place torn down.
“How about this,” I offer a compromise. “I'll try to get a council going, and I'll get you a seat on it. I can't promise you'll get to keep the bunker, it'll be a public structure if I understand things right, but you'll have a say in how the bunker grows. Deal?”
Doug contemplates the offer, rubbing his chin as he falls deep in thought. I'm sure he can see the advantages, he's bound to have a tactical mind and plenty foresight seeing as he built this place.
“Promise me a room in the bunker and we have a deal,” he says after a long moment.
“We can arrange that.”
Doug and I shake on it, and I give him half an hour to gather whatever he has left in the house. I don't know if the transformation process after installing the core is instantaneous or not, and I don't want to risk it. He rushes upstairs, leaving me alone in the darkness.
I sit cross legged on the floor, turning the core every which way to fill the time. Doug returns only ten minutes later, carrying a small cardboard box.
“Not much left upstairs,” he grumbles. “They took most of my furniture, my clothes, my supplies.”
I nod, not commenting on it.
Doug sighs. “At least they left my photo albums behind.”
“Doug.”
“Right, right.”
He gets going, and I wait another ten minutes or so for good measure. When I'm sure he’s far enough away, I prompt the core with a mental command.
Suitable site detected: Doug's Doomsday Bunker.
Do you wish to install the Bastion Core here?
“Yes.”
As soon as the words leave my lips, blue mist condenses out of the air. It lights up the chamber, forming a structure in the middle of the room. Two metallic pillars grow out of the floor and ceiling, and where they meet in the middle, thin strands of metal leave them to weave together into a cage.
I wait until the process is over and most of the mist dissipates. A bit of it gets left behind, forming a phantom image of the core in the cage. The real core, still in my hands, starts vibrating.
I know what I have to do, so I step closer and deposit the core in the cage.
Quest completed: Install the Core.
A tab called Bastion Management appears in my interface as the core starts spinning in the cage. I open it to check it out, and my vision blooms with dozens of notifications. With a sigh, I start going through them one by one.
----------------------------------------
Half an hour later, I'm finally done setting everything up. I never expected just how much logic goes into running a settlement, but there's plenty. I have to pick a form of governance, instate a tax code, set up laws and regulations.
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With some fiddling, I get the system to postpone any non-critical decisions. Most of the notifications vanish, leaving only a handful of them that I have to decide on right away.
Please select a form of governance from the following list.
I look through it for a while, finding anything from democracy to various forms of dictatorships. Democracy would be a no-brainer under normal circumstances, but I don't think it would cut it now. Pops and William were right about one thing: we need a single leader in charge that can make decisions fast.
Waiting for a council to come to a consensus during a siege would get us all killed.
The list is a few hundred entries long, so I eliminate a lot of them with various filters. I examine what's left, but I don't really like any of the options. They each have some merits, but they also have plenty drawbacks.
The one I like best is called elective autocracy. People vote a leader into power, then said leader has near complete authority over the proceedings in the settlement. The position doesn't carry any term or time limits, which means that it's a life long commitment. The leader can step down willingly at any point, but most importantly, he can also be voted out by the people.
It's a good start, but I can still see ways for someone to abuse this. I don't even trust that kind of power in my own hands, let alone in someone else's, so I keep looking.
As I near the end of the list, I see the final line.
Create a custom form of governance.
Warning: This feature is only recommended for experienced users.
I disregard the warning and pick it anyway. The system walks me through a long and boring set-up process, and after some prodding, I manage to use elective autocracy as a base. I add a few more checks and balances, like the people being able to propose new laws and vote on them, and after I examine my work a few times, I give the go-ahead.
Form of governance created: Hybrid Elective Autocracy.
I also have to decide on a tax code, which brings another long list of options with it. The US tax code is present, and I contemplate picking it. People are already familiar with it, so why not?
But when I open it to read the details, I find a bureaucratic mess. It's too complicated to keep track of and enforce, so I back out and keep searching. Something called the standard galactic tax code catches my eye with its simplicity, it's a flat 10% tax on all transactions.
I pick that, and for the laws, I choose the old US code that we'll be able to modify later.
Set-up complete!
Do you wish to save the current options as a template for future Bastions?
I raise an eyebrow, but I pick yes. Once done, the system warns me to leave the marked area. I make my way out of the bunker and the basement, finding a crowd waiting outside. They're a few hundred feet away from the house, behind a line of red light drawn on the ground.
I go to join them, and as soon as I step past the line, Doug's house explodes.
“What the hell?!” Doug yells from within the crowd.
Everyone backs away, some people screaming in the chaos. I pull out the crowbar, readying myself to block the chunks of debris flying towards us.
But something is wrong. The explosion seems to proceed in slow motion as pieces of the house, the bunker, and the ground around it rise up in the air. They climb into the sky, steadily slowing down until they freeze in place.
I relax as the core, the only structure left behind in a deep crater, extends tendrils of cyan energy towards the fragments of debris. They connect one by one, forming an intricate web hundreds of feet tall and wide.
The chunks of debris melt and reform, and we all watch in awe for minutes on end as the core turns the ruins into a structure one piece at a time. Everyone stops what they're doing, approaching the line to witness the transformation.
Mike appears next to me at some point, mesmerized by the spectacle.
“It looks a bit like your skills,” I say.
“Yeah, just…kicked up a few orders of magnitude.”
I turn to look at him, and by the expression on his face, I can figure out what he's thinking. The skills we've been getting have certainly been impressive by old world standards, but the capabilities of the core are something else. Would he be able to perform similar feats if he leveled up enough? Will he one day be able to spawn entire buildings with the snap of a finger?
I have no answers, so I settle for silence until the core is done. It takes the better half of an hour, but by the end, the crater is filled and a new building occupies the place where Doug's house used to be.
It's circular, about three stories tall and a little over three hundred feet wide. The windowless walls are a mishmash of wood, stone, and brickwork, but they look sturdy. A flat roof caps the structure, with a few misshapen spikes poking out here and there.
The building only has a single entrance as far as I can see. A handful of stone stairs lead up to a set of metal double doors, with a lightbulb illuminating the landing and its immediate surroundings. The sight of working electricity gives me pause for a long moment.
I shake off the shock and forcibly kick myself into gear.
“Doug! William!”
The two approach me from the crowd, and I don't waste any more time as I start giving out orders.
“We need that place mapped out, I want to know about every last nook and cranny. Doug, you're in charge of that. William, give him a few men to help him out.”
The two get to it with no complaints, walking off side by side as they discuss the task and how to best tackle it. I pull up the settlement management tab and, with some apprehension, I set up the vote for the leader position.
The process gets divided into two parts. During the first part, people will be able to nominate others for the role. The more nominations someone gets, the better their chances to move to the second part. Five contestants will reach that far, where a majority vote will pick one of them for the role.
I also make it so that people can't nominate themselves, and I give the nominees the ability to drop out of the race if they wish.
With the rules settled, I trigger the voting. The next moment, I get a new notification.
Notice: A vote has been triggered to choose a new leader for the Stelver Bastion! Please read the rules carefully before casting your vote!
By the reactions of everyone around me, I figure they got the notification as well. A lot of people stop what they're doing, staring blankly into space.
The notification goes into detail about the rules as well, but I don't read them. I set the damn thing up, I know what it says. So, after I acknowledge that I read the rules of the vote by ticking a box at the bottom of the notification, I send it away into the folder.
People try to stop me to ask what’s going on as I walk back to Mike and Mom, but I shrug them off, telling them to follow the instructions in the notification and cast their vote. Mike gives me a weird stare when I reach them, clearly confused as well, but I shake my head to stop him from bombarding me with questions as well.
He doesn’t seem to like it, but he drops it for now. We pry Mom off of Pops’s body together, Mike takes him in his arms again, and we leave the safe zone.