I found myself surrounded by a winding queue of strangers inside a sparse, utilitarian com-crete building. Signs dotted the walls, each one in a grab bag of languages. Most notably — and unusual — the logo of Kingdom Husein was prominent. A Global Corporation, sure, but they were financiers. Old oil money, not commerce. I rarely saw their logos around the mega.

Better visual clues were absent, but the room smelled like airship fuel and the air crackled with residual ionization.

I had to be near a skyport. At least that much I could figure out.

The people around me didn't offer much insight as to the location. They looked tired, every one of them, though many wore expressions of cautious optimism — a half-mast smile, or hopeful eyes that couldn't stop shifting side to side as if waiting to spot a lurking predator.

Their clothing was almost a hundred years out of date by my guess. Natural fabrics, collars, and polymer zippers. Clothing made for practical use, not shine. Much of it showing days of grime and fraying seams.

Looking down at my own gear, I was no different. Well, I was different. Whatever skin wasn't covered by a ragged jacket and cargo pants was now two shades darker. My left hand was nearly covered with some kind of burn that had healed long ago, and my fingernails hadn't been cleaned in forever.

Then there was the lack of the ubiquitous neurocom overlay. Had I ever opened my eyes without seeing that?

Weird, but the pieces were coming together. This history lesson was some kind of time travel simulation, and inside of it, I was not Jakob Qadir.

Guess I had to stick around long enough to figure out who I was — and when this was happening. Maybe that was the challenge. The game, or whatever the hell Ojibwa was talking about.

I followed the lead of those around me — although that largely meant standing quietly between the linked stanchions that kept the long line in check. Minute by minute, those ahead of me peeled off from the queue and approached a row of three windows set into the wall.

First, a couple speaking what sounded like old-world French stepped up to a window.

Then an old man wearing a faded camouflage jacket. The way he carried himself told me he'd seen some shit.

The next group was an Asian family with two young daughters. The kids looked like they were ready to chew through their parents' wrists to get out of the line.

I could relate.

"Next! Let's keep it moving, friends!" a voice called out from an empty window. I twitched to life, realizing they were waiting on me.

Approaching the window, I got a better view of the man on the other side. He wore an old-style collared shirt bearing a single word stitched on the breast.

HOPE.

"How's your hand feeling, sir?" the man asked with a smile.

I held up my left, squinting at the burns that had long scarred over.

"No," he chuckled, "the other one. Where they implanted your NID chip in the other room."

My eyebrows shot up, and I swapped hands. The right bore a centimeter scar below the middle knuckle. I couldn't feel a thing, and it was fully healed. Seems like whatever time I'd been sent to, BioDyne had already invented DermaSeal.

"Feels…" My voice sounded aged and unfamiliar to my own ears. Which were, in fairness, not my own ears any more than the voice was. "Feels okay."

"Great! Just place it on that panel in front of you and I'll make sure it's functioning."

I laid my hand on a smooth, square panel inset in the com-crete wall. A green glow surrounded my fingers, and the man nodded his approval.

"Okay, Mister Fayed Qadir?"

My mouth fell open. That was my great-grandfather's name. My great-grandfather who had been born in Riyadh, like, a million years ago.

I stammered, shaking my head. "Uh. Yes, that's me."

"Don't be nervous, Mr. Qadir," the man said, chuckling. "You're safe now. The Collapse is just a bad memory in Hope Megacity, thank the Founders."

"Thank…the Founders?" I muttered.

"Mm hm," the man grunted absently, tapping away on his terminal screen.

A moment later, he looked up at me and smiled. "Good news, sir. You've already been given corporate placement, so you won't be assigned housing in the Quartering District. You'll be working for ClarkeTek, so when you leave this building, head through Arrival Plaza and find their recruitment office on the other side. They'll get you all squared away."

Who-tech? I'd never heard of the company. It certainly wasn't one of the Global Corporations — not in my time or any other.

"Uhm. Thanks," I said.

"My pleasure. Welcome to Hope, Mr. Qadir! Please follow the yellow line to the exit."

Looking down, I found a path painted along the floor — a series of arrows worn and scuffed from the thousands of footsteps that came before mine. Kicking off in that direction, I added my bootprints to the collage.

Beyond the exit, there was a large triangular plaza crowded with more people walking to or from the building. Huge digital billboards and static signs lined the plaza so tightly they may as well been walls. Whatever state the surrounding mega was currently in, I couldn't yet see.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

Though one thing was definately familiar. Between the screens and posters, seven tall banners fought against the light breeze. They bore the GC logos.

Each banner a different color, and each with a different Global Corporation. TaoCom, HighCastle, SevenArms, Greysen Security, BioDyne, Kingdom Husein, and — of course — Hanska Construction, the ones who put up the buildings. No sign of the Construct Corporation, though, which meant they must have always kept a low profile.

Directly ahead, the largest screen showed footage of a massive construction project in full swing. I recognized the focal point of the shot — Hanska Stadium. Only it was in mid-construction and surrounded by piles of dirt and bright yellow SkrivarCranes that printed and assembled everything from com-crete — Hanska's trademark composite concrete.

Normally, just wanting to know more would tell my neurocom to find the inevitable MiFi signal running in tandem with the billboard. Then I'd get some kind of augmented reality bonus content fed right into my NUI.

This guy didn't have a neurocom, though. It was something to get used to, but made sense in a 'simulated time travel' sort of way.

If I was in the middle of the Hope Population Project, the ten-million-soul mass arrival of the first Hope residents, neurocoms wouldn't have hit mass market yet. If I remembered my history, only kids under five or six years old would have them. Maybe some older teens would have beta versions, if they were from the test groups in China.

Everyone else, like great grandpa Fayed here, was too old to have the neural interface mesh implanted into their brains.

That meant no MetaNet. No LionEye. No DecentraBank wallets. No CNS editors or wetgear implants.

"Skitz," I whispered to myself. "How the hell does anything work?"

The giant screen caught my eye with a final flashing message. As the aerial view of future Hanska Stadium faded away, the words 'HOPE MEGACITY: IT'S TIME.' consumed the entire frame.

"It's Time?" I repeated to myself.

Another oddity. I'd never once heard that tagline associate with the mega. And for only being two words, it felt pretty damn ominous.

A shadow crept beside me, and I pulled my eyes from the huge display to see who'd joined me.

It was an older man — compared to the real Jakob, at least. Unlike most of the people I'd seen on this journey, he wore a white suit instead of tattered field wear. I absently smiled at the old-school cut and composition of his three-piece. Some kind of animal-based fabric, prolly. He even wore one of those colorful noose things that somehow stayed in fashion for hundreds of years.

"Wonderous, isn't it?" he said, staring into the wall of videos and posters like someone mesmerized by a fire.

I watched him for a moment. The man didn't flinch, his eyes locked on the looping vids.

"You should see it when it's finished," I said, still smiling in earnest.

He chuckled, finally breaking his thrall to the screen to meet my eyes. "I intend to, Mr. Qadir. I most certainly do."

The familiarity prompted me to give him a closer look. A Westerner for sure, with pale skin and wrinkles around a set of green eyes that I was certain had never witnessed a tragedy. That was unsettling, considering the time. The end of the Age of Collapse. Close to ten billion people had died within the last two decades.

Everyone had witnessed a tragedy.

"I'm sorry," I said, "but do I know you?"

The man stepped back and extended a hand. "I'm Arthur Mellencamp. Your new boss."

"Oh!" I grabbed his hand and shook it firmly before firing up my standard smirk. "Then I'm already behind on sucking up. I've heard a lot of great things about you, and I'm honored for this opportunity to work at…uh…Clockworks. Clock Tech?"

Mellencamp laughed openly, without a mote of self-consciousness, like a really old child. Forget NUI overlays — had I ever seen someone this carefree? Not likely.

"I like you already, Qadir!" he said, slapping my arm. "It's ClarkeTec. You've never heard of it, just like you've never heard of me. That's by design."

I pretended to wipe sweat from my forehead.

"You made quite a name for yourself in the Kingdom, my friend," Mellencamp continued. "Advancing the quantum computing world by leaps and bounds, even with the world falling down around your ears. No mean feat."

I strained to remember a relevant fact from my Pre-Collapse history class. "Someone had to, since most of the labs in the U.S. were abandoned. And the Euro Union is still busy fighting off the PAC invasion."

I guessed on that last bit.

Mellencamp raised his eyebrows, pressing his lips together. "Actually, most of the labs here were either looted or bombed."

"Here?" I asked. "Is Hope not a sovereign megacity-state yet?"

"No, no, no," he said, waving his hand. "Force of habit. I grew up in Boston, so everything 'from sea to shining sea' still feels like home. But this territory is indeed sovereign. Bought and paid for from Uncle Sam — and surrounded by so many of Commandant Greysen's mercenaries that we have nothing to worry about."

So he thought. I knew the Remnant United States would eventually try to take back the territory they'd sold to the Founders in a fit of mid-apocalypse desperation. I also knew that GreySec's private army ended the border war with hardly any casualties by offering the RUS soldiers a better way of life. That's when the old United States leadership ran back inside Mount Weather to hide and lick their wounds, while Greysen Security tripled its strategic footprint in about a week.

Although I couldn't for the life of me remember who 'Uncle Sam' was, the rest was all primary school history. For Mellencamp — if he were really here — the border war would be on his newsfeed in a couple of years.

"Mind if I ask what we do at ClarkeTec, sir?" I asked.

"Not at all!" he said, gesturing for me to walk with him. "I'll tell you on the way to our office."

With a smile and nod, I fell in beside him.

He wasted no time answering the question, backed with a flurry of excited hand gestures. "This megacity was created as a solution to so many problems, Qadir. The world has — excuse me for saying it — gone to shit, and it's just not safe for the few billion of us left on it."

"No argument here."

Mellencamp chuckled. "Right! And the Founders decided to build a new society on this very spot. A safe haven for the masses and the seed for a new, enlightened human race."

I recalled my recent exchange with Fike. "Why rebuild when you can redesign, right?"

"Exactly right. The Pre-Collapse world was a mixed bag of failed experiments. It was time to take what we'd learned and purpose-build something that works."

We reached a break in the wall at the plaza's edge. Mellencamp guided me through before raising his arms to embrace the newly-born Hope Megacity, still in its infancy.

The sight of it sent a shiver down my back. Hope's skyline was nothing like I'd known it during my actual life. Hundreds of tall buildings, and a couple of finished HEMAs looking both squat and dominant in their scale, but no Skypillars. No overcity of HighHold to house the elite, the bluebloods, the corporate giants.

It was all still being built, with dozens of yellow SkrivarCranes printing and stacking, creating massive, skeletal towers that swayed against guy wires that would later be removed. The scope of it all was more immense than I could have ever imagined it.

A city for a hundred million residents, assembled in less than a decade, and I was seeing it being born.

"Fallah," I gasped, struck otherwise motionless with awe. It was an Arabic word I'd heard my mother use a few times.

A word my great grandfather might have said at this moment, but not Jakob. Apparently, the simulation was also giving me a taste of the mind that would have been inside this borrowed body.

"You said it," Mellencamp chuckled. "The most ambitious project ever undertaken by our species."

He turned to me and put his hands on my shoulders. Waiting until I pried my eyes away from the view to look at him, he added, "And it's all for a single, greater purpose. Greater than even survival. Everything you see being built here is part of an intricate machine, an ecosystem to support an engine for human ascension."

I blinked a few times, then shook some clarity into my head. "Huh?"

"You asked what we'll be doing at ClarkeTec, no?" Mellencamp smiled. "Mister Qadir, we're building the engine."