11

The station was enormous, almost like a planetoid in itself.

For an hour, we had only explored levels twenty-four and twenty-five next to dock three, and both were empty, devoid of any buildings, structures, or machinery. It was like being in the middle of the ocean at night: the floor was like the calm sea in pitch darkness, the ceiling fifteen hundred feet up to a moonless sky, and the recessed ceiling lights twinkled like stars against a serene ocean’s reflection.

I could fit ten central parks in here. Then, ten times more on top of each other. At least we had Rachel’s truck. It’d be a bitch walking through it.

I imagined half of Los Angeles living here, with boardwalks, a thriving downtown, green spaces, artificial lakes, and a holographic sky lighting up the ceiling. Once I thought of it, Prime quickly confirmed that previous forerunners had built the center of their civilization on these stations. I half-expected a stowaway creature. Perhaps the last of the forerunner’s people managed to survive and built a small colony, but they did not stand a chance with the life support systems inactive. And that they had to fight a homicidal robot who used to be their ally, using their own arsenal against them. I shuddered to envision Prime grinding their cadavers for other purposes—another resource for the station.

This wasn’t just a regular station but one giant habitat, fitting multiple towns and cities stacked on top of one another. I pictured grand alien architectures that once dotted this space, millions of people once gracing its hull, their culture flourishing before Prime destroyed all of it, and the evidence of their vibrant lives forever erased. How many cultures did Prime eliminate, like scraping a begging tick off his body?

An enormous round pillar in the middle of the station connected all the levels. Inside were maze-like hallways and narrow passages, thousands of empty rooms in varying sizes, and a network of elevators to travel in between the levels. Prime told us he “renovated” the pillars to match our human size. Apparently, the former forerunner race was a bit taller and larger than us and, therefore, required bigger passages.

It took us almost an hour of driving through the open, dim darkness to reach the outer entrances of the pillars. By then, we grew tired of exploring and decided to head straight to level eighteen. We couldn’t fit the truck through the narrow passageways, so Rachel parked it on the side, and we all hopped off.

“You think my car’s gonna be fine staying out here?” Rachel tapped on the truck’s hood.

“If it gets destroyed, I’ll bring the nanites to repair it.”

“I can bring up your vehicle to level eighteen, Ms. Everett,” Prime said, and the drones moved closer.

“You’re not gonna, like, dent it, right?”

“We will be extra careful.”

Rachel grinned and gave me and Prime a thumbs ups. She followed us into the pillar’s hallway. “Sounds good enough for me. I don’t have to pay you, right?”

I shook my head, laughing. “Rachel, I got shot twice, and you dragged me across six blocks just to get the fuck out of an ambush. Yeah, I don’t think you have to pay anything. What are friends for?”

Rachel crossed her arms. “Well, if you put it that way, can I get something better than this truck? Preferably with the words space and ship with it?”

I patted her on the shoulder. “Once I make a draft of the safety manual. We can’t have joyrides around Earth’s orbit and end up crashing.”

Rachel shrugged. “Hey. I gotta ask.”

“This is quite a big house you got, Tony,” Amelia said, “Do you have room for guests?”

“I think there’s room for a hundred thousand guests.” And maybe more. Once I took care of the quartz, of course, and I built the residential areas. I doubted people would appreciate sleeping on bare, cold floors. After I took care of our current problem, it would be safe to colonize the solar system. Christ. I never imagined thinking that and making it possible the next day. All because of the technology I inherited. I didn’t even know if Station One would become a civilian station or entirely for military purposes.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it? Imagine countless alien civilizations once living here before us,” Amelia said excitedly. Her worries seemed to have lessened when she got off the ship. “Who knows what discoveries they might have found or how they utilized this station’s capabilities? Can you believe it? We are the first humans walking inside it.”

“And all of this is yours now,” Jason told me. “That’s one hell of an inheritance, my guy.”

“I’m not rubbing it in,” I said.

Amelia looked around, thinking. “Let’s see. If this has the same square footage for the next sixty—or seventy—levels, we can comfortably fit four hundred thousand people on Station One. Triple that if we wanted to urbanize and build high instead of wide. Or why not both? Then, we’d have to factor in the other stations, and all five could support almost eighteen million people,” she said. “If we’re going to stretch that and build additional infrastructure, we could feasibly double that population within twenty years.”

“How are we gonna feed thirty-six million people, Amelia?” Tom asked. “I don’t see any fertile soil back there.”

“And how will we convince many people to move up here?” Alonso asked.

“I haven’t gotten there yet, but I’m sure Prime knows a solution,” Amelia said. “And besides, it’s a fucking alien space station, Ruiz. Everyone wants to live here.” I could tell the thought exercise excited her. She was in her element. She studied engineering at USC, trying to become a civil engineer.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said. “What should I even do with all of this space? I studied political and military science, not civil engineering like you, Amelia.”

“Hey! What about me?” Jason asked.

“You can make a documentary about us?”

Jason thought about it for a moment, then nodded eagerly. “That’s actually not a bad idea! Let’s call it Space Chosen: an eight-part docuseries. It will be a must-see streaming event. Maybe we can get Netflix to stream it.”

Amelia scrunched up her nose and patted him on the back. “Babe, you made Tony sound like Space Jesus.”

“And why is it a TV series?” Ryan asked.

“For advertisements. Contracts. I’m sure Tony’s story and his ascension as the aliens’ emissary—”

“Uh, I wouldn’t call myself that—” I started.

“—But we can make a lot of money from it now that I have front-row seats to everything!” Jason continued. “You can’t beat a novelty like that! It also leaves room for future seasons, and I won’t get bogged down by limited runtimes, you know? With episodic installments, it means more people tune in because of word-of-mouth. And Netflix got 240 million subscribers, which means more people worldwide get to see our message with just a simple click of the play button.”

“You’re very optimistic we’d survive another fight with the quartz,” Freddie said.

“I didn’t believe we’d survive down there fighting only one of them, but look at us now. We’re probably the only humans who won a fight against the aliens.”

“The Chinese begged to differ.” I shook my head. God help me. “They kicked the alien ship out of Beijing, remember?”

“To be fair, I think that’s more because you were killing one of their own than a bunch of Chinese throwing pebbles at their shields,” Ryan said and animatedly pretended to shoot them through the dashboard.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“Have you seen the vids? They barely made it out alive,” Seth pointed out.

“Anyway, Let’s take this one thing at a time, guys,” I said, directing everyone’s focus to the command center. “I think we’re getting there.”

“One day at a time,” Tom reiterated. “We don’t know what the hell these quartz are, and the further we go in blind against them, our chances of never coming back shoot up. Then, you’ll say goodbye to your tv show, Jason, with everyone dead. Including you.”

Jason grinned. “Are you implying we should take one of them as a hostage? I’ll be the first filmmaker to capture the likeness of another sentient species! I’ll be a Wikipedia page by tomorrow.” He looked at me eagerly. “Tony, I call dibs to be in that room if you interrogate one of them. Preferably with a camera.”

Tom groaned, giving up on steering Jason away from his film pursuits. He gave me a look that read: journalists, am I right? Last month, Jason was dead set on becoming a war correspondent, using his experience as a former Marine to head on to the battlefield where the fighting was thickest. I guessed he would be one hell of a reporter with me as his subject.

“Yeah. Let’s look at it that way, I guess.” I turned and walked deeper into the hallway.

“Awesome,” Jason said, the idea already ingrained. Too late to pry it off him now.

I noticed something strange about these hallways. Though they were separated by bulkhead doors (to protect each section from depressurization and keep its rigidity), there were no doors to other rooms or chambers—a continuous blank wall on all sides toward the elevators. In between hallways were just empty spaces that Prime wanted me to build when the time was right. Construct an apartment. An office space. Storage. Anything. For now, the pillars remained a network of hallways.

We reached the elevator door, which looked more like a tramcar than a regular metal box with cables attached. It was a hybrid of an elevator and a monorail. It could fit at least sixty people. The nanites helped me understand the control panel inside the driver booth (where up and down were), and I started prepping it up for transport. For the first time in twelve thousand years, these things are moving again, I thought. This tramcar even had tracks that lead out of the pillar, leading wherever. I thought about using it as a railway transport across the station in the future.

Prime had already listed a blueprint of what I should do: Designate and build the command center, gain control of the station, start production of the battleships and all necessary materials and equipment, and deal with the unwanted visitors. Then what? Am I supposed to live in this empty, cold, dark place forever?

Like your predecessors, you can build your city using the forerunner hub.

Damn, robot. There was a reason why humans were gifted with the privacy of their thoughts, and having a 24/7 audience was tiresome. Now, I had to add constructing a city of things I had to do. I put that at the bottom of the list. It wasn’t important right now.

“Hey. Are you okay?” Amelia asked, her gaze narrowed. She must have realized I had grown quiet.

“Uh, yeah. I’m okay.”

She was about to say something else but held her tongue.

It’s hard to believe I was preparing for my test a few hours ago and worrying about my GPA dipping down a smidge. It seemed like that problem was a whole world away. Now, I’m building spaceships and command centers, and the robot wanted me to create more! And that was on top of fearing for my life. Prime’s brief recollection of the previous forerunners’ people and their grim fates echoed in my mind. I didn’t want to picture Earth in ruins and humanity dead. What about my family?

“My dad!” I shouted abruptly. The others shot me a concerned look, but I ignored them. “Prime, can you tell me about Samuel Segerstrom of Wilsonville, California? And can you tell me the status of Meredith Segerstrom and her sons, Daniel, and Isaac Bowers?”

“They are alive and well,” Prime said too quickly.

“What about my uncle, Nathan Segerstrom?”

Prime paused, searching his database. The last time I heard about my uncle, he was deployed to Syria four months ago. Unlike my lazy patriotic contribution to the military, my uncle was a Navy SEAL. Perhaps his Team was already sent to deal with the quartz. I’ve known those men and their families for quite a while now since they all live in Coronado, just a few hours south of LA. I used to visit my uncle’s house and had BBQ cookouts with them during spring break. I hoped nothing bad happened to him and his men.

“Unknown. I do not know the status of Nathaniel Segerstrom.”

I froze. Well, that’s a first. “Is…is he dead?”

“Unknown. I have not encountered the individual Nathaniel Segerstrom. Would you like me to search for him?”

“Yes, please. And do it quickly. Start in Syria. He told me that’s where he was going.”

“I will let you know once I find him.”

I pulled out my phone again and tried to call him, but it didn’t go through. “Damn. There’s no signal,” I told them.

Jason got up and looked around, not knowing where to face Prime, but he settled on the northwestern corner of the elevator and asked, “Prime? Can you tell me the status of Gloria Navarro, my brother, Connor, and his daughter, Mindy? They live in Saint Cloud, Minnesota.”

Ben quickly added, “And my family, too? Um, Francesca, Giani, Emma, and Dario Amendola. They live in East Harlem, New York.”

Another long wait. By this time, the elevator doors opened, but none of us stepped out, waiting for Prime’s response. Tom asked about his parents; Alonso, his mother; Rachel, her brothers and their families; and Freddie, about his sisters and grandmother. Everyone queried Prime to search for all the names listed.

“They are alive,” Prime said to each request.

Echoes of heavy sighs reverberated across the enclosed space. A burden lifted off our shoulders. Not a lot of people were so lucky.

“Do they have—?” But before the thought left my tongue, Prime had already answered.

“Samuel Segerstrom is viable for assessment, but it was aborted by the orders of the forerunner.”

Me? My heart skipped a beat. Did my father almost get killed by the spheres? I didn’t want to ask how close my father was to the slaughter or to imagine him in the pile of seven million bodies. And viable for an assessment? He was part of the forerunner pool to determine who inherited Prime and his technology. It made sense. We shared the same blood and DNA, after all.

Only Amelia held her tongue and walked out of the elevator.

I gently grabbed her arm. “Hey. Are you okay?” It was my turn to ask.

Amelia smiled. “My folks are fine. If they’re not, people who give a damn back home will let me know.”

I let her go. Jason gave me a reassuring smile. He, too, knew about Amelia’s history with her family. But I knew she was going to be okay. Ever since she rarely talked to Gaius and her brothers over the years, she felt better than ever before having that connection cut off.

Prime led us with the drones to the command center’s location, a colossal building constructed northeast of level eighteen, looking like a stout pyramid with a flat-square head rising about seven stories tall. Prime had been busy with the construction, liberally removing wall panels and exposing certain sections to outer space, but multiple force field barriers sealed those gaps. For a split second, I had the strong urge to leap off those gaps and “swim” through space. It was like craning your neck over the roof’s edge of the tallest skyscraper, a strong pull urging you to step off the platform before vertigo and nausea kicked in.

“We should have brought Rachel’s car up with us,” Tom said. He cocked his head toward the long walk to the building.

“Come on. It doesn’t look that bad. A little exercise wouldn’t hurt anybody,” Jason said. “We’ve been through worse in Oman.”

Tom chuckled. “How can I forget? You were the one complaining all the way.”

“Uh, not fair. I distinctly remembered that insurgents shot at us every ten minutes for the next ten miles on foot. This is heaven.” Jason pointed at the empty space and how there were no enemies abound.

“It looks like a metal palace straight out of Blade Runner,” Amelia gestured to the command center’s building. “Is that your new home now, Tony?”

I gave her a slight shrug. “I don’t know. I doubt Harrison Ford is gonna be in there, though.”

“The living quarters of the forerunner have not been constructed yet. It would be one of the priorities after the command center is complete,” Prime said.

When we got to the building, Prime told us to wait in what looked like the lobby (and a massive one) for a few hours while several sections of the building were still in development. I still had no idea where Prime pulled all these resources and materials. There must be a vast reserve somewhere on this station. After all, I had only explored barely one percent of it.

It was the waiting that bore me. I might only have a week to deal with these aliens before they decided to come back, but Time seemed to be feasting on my head-start, which was getting smaller and smaller by the hour. I wondered what the quartz was up to while I was playing Legos here.

I closed my eyes. Took a power nap. Told the others to wake me up in fifteen minutes.

Instead, I fell asleep for four hours, but Prime shook me awake. I was surprised that Ben didn’t wander off alone or try to take Amelia’s gun while I was out.

I need a good sleep, I thought. I didn’t particularly appreciate how I was getting paranoid—part of the job. I’m a sovereign now. What that meant was up to me, but I reckoned it would get more complicated from this point out.

“Is it complete?” I asked Prime.

“Yes, forerunner,” he answered. “The Command Center is ready for your orders. Which ones will you like to start with? I have a list of suggestions.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. The suggestions were good. At least I wouldn’t get lost. Is a Destroy All Hostile Aliens button part of that? I thought.

Again, Prime took it literally. He gave me six hundred suggestions in descending variants. He forced-fed it into my nanites, shocking my brain, and almost sent me back to sleep. Jesus Christ. I had to program him to spoon-feed me these things. I barely got these nanites for less than nine hours and feared it would give me a brain hemorrhage if I stretched out my abilities too far.

“The nanites will heal you,” Prime said. “It will not kill you with a brain hemorrhage. They will seal the leak in seven-point-three nanoseconds.”

“Oh, that’s where we differ, Prime,” I said. “You may not feel anything from your wires and all, but for me, it’s fucking uncomfortable when you’re wiggling inside my skull.”

“Specifications observed by the forerunner. I will adapt for your comfort.”

I nodded. “Thank you. Now, take me up to the Command Center. Let’s see what you built.”

It almost sounded like Prime was excited, even though he denied he wasn’t intelligent enough to have feelings, unlike an unshackled AI. “It will be an honor, forerunner. Come, come. This way.”