Earth. The Blue Marble. Gaia. Tierra. Tellus. Whatever it was called, the slightly oblate planet was vast. It had a surface area of 509,600,000 kilometers and a circumference of 40,075. Terrans approximated that drilling through the planet to the other side would be a 6,371 kilometer journey. Not too terrible, all things considered. A simple plane ride from Anchorage, Alaska to Miami, Florida would cover that distance. But for a species that could create jets to overcome gravity to travel 6,371 kilometers, it was a little disappointing that nineteen kilometers was the deepest humans had ever dug on their home planet. Put into perspective, they’d barely left Anchorage. It was pathetic.

It seemed that humans, lacking wings, were too preoccupied with flight to care about digging, Kledraxxil, who had wings, mused to themself. The silver-handed, leathery-scaled, zero-eyed, six-eared, androgynous, dark orange plumexion stood about waist height of the average human. The plumexions were diggers by nature. Their planet had a hostile environment on the surface, but plenty of porous caverns to take refuge. Having no light, the plumexions had no eyes, instead relying on ultrasonic echolocation to navigate the caverns they called home thousands of years ago. This obsession with digging got them to figure out how to drill straight through the planet’s core, and keep a passage for travel. It was wisdom the plumexions had only recently imparted onto humanity.

For Damien, Kledraxxil’s trainee currently giving the stop cord a hearty yank, it took longer for him to comprehend this meager spelunking jaunt. Not because the numbers didn’t make sense, but because the world having a unified government, and all road signs using nanobot ink that let roads become more adaptable, and having lived with aliens for nearly thirty years still wasn’t enough to convince Americans to adopt the Metric system (for any Americans who are confused, that depth is approximately 69,120 NFL-regulation footballs lined up longwise).

The two were currently on an articulated bus right in the middle of Rio de Janeiro. The vehicle was packed with various humans of all shapes and sizes and all walks of life patiently waiting for their destination to arrive. It wasn’t too cramped, but for someone of Kledraxxil’s size and being the only non-human on the train, they were afraid of being trampled by lethargic Brazilian commuters that hadn’t quite gotten their coffee.

Damien Ernesto, the late middle-aged man, was admiring the streets of the coastal city that had so drastically changed since he last lived there in his early childhood before moving to the US. Outside, cyclists and e-scooter users mingled in a bikeway while crowds of pedestrians of all shapes and sizes negotiated their position on the widened sidewalks.

The single car lane to the back of the alien commuter was packed with lost drivers from the countryside, trying to pay attention to the road while glancing at their GPS displays to try and find out where the hell they were and why space aliens were there. In their defense, there was a pretty sudden jump in diversity once you entered Rio. It had become the main destination for anyone doing business offworld, given the spaceport on an island close by. If something was coming to South America from space, chances were it was coming through Rio.

Amidst all the bustle, the backdrop of the city was also diverse. Buildings that had been abandoned for nearly a decade stood as a reminder of the world that used to be, now sparsely populated by offices and the occasional group of flunkies using a room as a meet-up spot. But new buildings sprang up to replace the old collapsed ones, ones built with building customs and architectures from all across the stars, melding into a beautiful hodge-podge of a city. But the inhabitants of the city hadn’t really changed quite as much as the cityscape they inhabited.

Even after thirty years of having aliens walking among them—long enough to have non-human adults who were born and grew up on Earth—the notion was still awkward to native Terrans. Some older commuters gave strange looks to Kledraxxil before sheepishly going back to whatever they were doing before, seemingly aware their gazing was disrespectful. There was a weird mongoose-looking guy called a Kiesh with an overabundance of cybernetics that got on earlier, but got off right at the next stop. The plumexion had sort of gotten used to heads turning wherever they went, but it was always disheartening whenever it happened.

In a world still ninety-four percent humans, it was tough being that six percent that everyone looked at weird. The six percent that had to constantly validate their sapience in front of the others. The six percent that constantly needed footstools and umbrellas and whatnot. The six percent that the other ninety-four bombarded trivial questions such as “how do you see without eyes” or “what do you eat” or “what color is your blood”—questions that could just as easily be asked into the interrogator’s smart device.

Fury brewed in Kledraxxil’s gut as they remembered the first time they lost a job when a co-worker constantly questioned them to the point they freaked out and ranted. Hopefully, their new job with an extraterrestrial company would have a more open-minded culture. Their job was to train new CORE operators. The prospective trainees would go through training and simulated runs before operating a real CORE train for the first time. That’s what brought Kledraxxil to Damien.

The bus entered a fenced area that walled off outsiders from the tunnel the bus was entering while the rest of the road climbed a hill. After the lights switched on inside the cab, the driver let the automatic steering guide the bus through the narrow subterranean corridor for a good thirty seconds before approaching Kledraxxil and Damiens’ destination.

“Next stop,” an electronic voice announced in Portuguese, “Rio CORE station. Doors to my left.”

“Puertas a mi izquierda” a deeper voice repeated in Spanish.

And for anyone else who didn’t get the message, lights positioned above the left-side doors blinked, as well as an ultrasonic buzzer for people like Kledraxxil.

The bus lurched to a halt and gave a satisfying hiss while the doors opened outward and separated. Cool underground air rushed into the interior while the man and the plumexion walked off the train alongside several other passengers.

The two navigated to an escalator on the right side of the station platform while Kledraxxil watched the doors reunite before merging back flush with the bus’ body, the bus leaving behind a small crowd riding the escalator.

Kledraxxil stood close to their pale-skinned coworker. They stood at the height of a ten-year-old human. The taboo of not talking on the bus had fallen away and voices started clamoring in varied conversations.

After descending the escalator for what felt like minutes, the commuters were greeted by a large room packed with people. It reminded Damien of an airport mixed with a train station. That’s sort of what it was, to be fair. Emblazoned on a carpet at the foot of the escalator was a fancy logo that read CORE.

Once out of the path of the escalator, the pair stuck close to the wall to walk past the crowd of humans and aliens on their way to the employee room. From Damien’s view, he could pick out a few of the newcomers. A tall reptilian person with feathers along their spine like a mane—a gonsh if the human’s memory was correct—was tapping away at a console to find their way to a destination. A family of salamander-like folk (arglips? The name had two consonants jammed together that didn’t make sense), likely offworld tourists, were making their way towards the exit of the station.

“Wow,” Damien whispered. “It’s been what? Five years now?”

“Mhm,” Kledraxxil grunted.

“To think decades ago, you had to get a passport to go anywhere outside your country, had to get on a plane, and wait forever,” Damien reminisced for a time he was not that old enough to remember. “and then spend ten to twenty hours cooped up in a tiny thing with hot garbage seating. It’s now just a two hour journey to most destinations.”

Kledraxxil nodded. “It’s quite astounding you people never thought it would be faster to reach a destination by going through the planet. Don’t you know about the Hypotenuse Rule?”

“No? Is it called something different here?”

“Probably.”

“Who knew the solution to transportation would be a glorified subway?” Damien quipped.

The Cross-Oceanic Rapid Express was indeed a very advanced alien subway. Invented by the plumexions on their home planet where it was called “kimle gklis,” the concept of a vacuum-sealed, magnetic-levitation, and magnetically propelled train in a tunnel dug straight through the planet’s core had existed and was gradually perfected over several thousand years. Each train could average nearly 3,200km/h, while the magnets gave a smooth and quiet ride.

It was built when the former Galactic Federation of Solir had arrived on Earth. The grand opening of the transport system was met with loads of protests and praise, a symbol representing the aliens’ influence on Earth. Ask anyone alive during first contact what they think about the CORE, and they’ll give you a response that is either very positive or very negative.

Not that Damien was there to form an opinion on the CORE. He was one of the first to join the military to fight an empire called Omaris—only to be a pencil-pusher managing some factory assembling bombs on some mining planet so backwater it wasn’t even given a proper name, only called Bulikro 58 D. He spent long, laborious hours beneath an artificial dome standing in for the atmosphere Buliddy (a popular colloquialism) didn’t have screwing robot arms that fell off back on. The natural circadian rhythm he had grown up with was obliterated by a 57-shva orbital cycle. Damien wasn’t even sure he remembered how long a shva was anymore.

The last few years during the human’s stint offworld were both an instant and an eternity. His memories snapped back to the moment his cradle planet was declared to be destroyed by Omaris. He remembered surrendering that factory to a civilian mob of GFS and Omaris species who then proceeded to blow up the factory. He remembered being escorted to a planet called Zeir 5, spending months in a cramped cell, being stood for trial, being declared not guilty, then being sent to Gorvtrask and working his now-aching bones in a settlement before fifteen years, later finally being able to return to Earth after the DOVE mission’s success.

Needless to say, Damien was sick of space, sick of being overworked, and sick of spending three fifths of his life among people who rarely, if ever, looked like him. But Damien was also broke upon returning to Earth. He spent a few years in the US going from job to job, then to Argentina doing much the same, and finally, with three years until he turned 60 and could retire on Social Security, he took up this job.

The two arrived at a door labeled AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Kledraxxil presented a key card to the doorknob, which gave a cheerful series of bleeps in response. The latch clicked open and Damien yanked it open, letting him and his alien mentor pass through the portal.

Behind the door was a standard employee room, complete with a small kitchenette, electronic lockers, a few couches, and a TV reading “ATTENTION ALL EMPLOYEES: A MISSING CHILD HAS BEEN REPORTED. LAST REPORTED LOCATION: LONDON CORE TERMINAL.” This room was mostly for security staff, but also served as a place for operators to store what they needed.

The room was empty, much to the relief of Kledraxxil. Nobody to bombard them with questions or to call them a “kobold” (whatever that was).

“So, one final check,” said Kledraxxil. “You have the key card?”

“Yup,” Damien responded without really thinking about the question, after which he confirmed by feeling his jean pockets.

“Are you usually this impulsive?” the plumexion asked before interrupting themself with “okay, and your manual?”

“Uhhh… yeah?” Damien ignored the insult. By this point, he was used to his species being talked down upon.

The two put their belongings in electronic lockers before heading to a passageway under the main walkway labeled “To CORE Stations.”

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“All right,” huffed Kledraxxil before walking down the staircase. “Come on.”

The narrow hallway screamed “secret passageway” despite it being well-lit and clearly labeled a pathway. Back in the airport days, they’d have to walk through this thing called “security,” which required you to and your luggage to be prodded and poked several different ways. Fortunately, detectors became much, much more advanced, imported from a high-tech planet called Osgnia. It was much faster than having to wait in line.

A singular security guard sat at a desk at the end of the hall and monitored the checkpoint. When they walked through with nothing questionable, she simply pressed a button to slide open the set of doors blocking the two, and then she waved them through. Air whistled through the opening, ruffling Kledraxxil’s ears like a dog leaning out of a car—if the dog was entirely reliant on hearing and didn’t enjoy the sensation.

They and Damien found themselves in another dimly-lit hallway, this time much bigger. Smothered footsteps and muffled conversation seeped through the ceiling. The bodies were much more sparse down here—typically two to three people were in sight at all times.

“Left or right?” Damien asked.

“It’s a circle, so it shouldn’t matter too much, but, we’re going, ummm… left.”

While the sound of Damien’s shoes didn’t interfere with Kledraxxil’s hearing, they were loud and obnoxious. Why couldn’t humans just go barefoot like most of the other species? In fact, the shuffling of cloth was also annoying now Kledraxxil thought about it.

“Damien?” Kledraxxil asked. “Is there a point to your foot armor?”

“Foot armor?” Damien repeated in a confuzzled tone. “And our feet are sensitive. They get sore and hurt pretty easily. Especially on rough terrain. Also, it’s not armor, it’s called ‘shoes.’”

“You have pretty well described armor, pal.”

The human rolled his eyes in frustration. Kledraxxil was joking, but their tone didn’t convey it. Tone was one of those things that’s universally shared within a species regardless of language. High tones mean you’re being cutesy, low tones mean you’re being angry (or cutesy). A shift up at the end of a sentence indicated a question, and a shift down indicated a statement. None of this mattered when talking to aliens. Plumexions had a different set of tonal cues that clashed with humans.’ The 124-year-old Kledraxxil spent most of their life on a different planet, and came to Earth for very… extreme reasons. Even though they spoke fluent English and Portuguese and had lived on Earth for their entire life past 2048, having spent three-fifths of your expected lifespan among your own kin made for great and lingering culture shock.

Underneath an overhang to the right of the pair were large protrusions in the wall, about as wide as the length of a short RV. Each of these juts was uniform in width and in the distance between each other. Each also possesses a set of double doors on the right side of the wall. The particular set directly ahead was open, showing another pair of doors connected by a rubber lip sealing the small sliver of space between the sets from the vacuum inside the tunnel. Each of these protrusions housed the tail end of a CORE train docked at a station. Two humans in uniform vests (the only thing uniform about them) took suitcases, carts, and packages off of a conveyor belt that descended from above and arranged them into the cargo compartment of the train, bound for Bangkok; as said by an LED dot matrix board.

“How are your kids doing?” one asked through strained breath while shoving a large cart into the train car.

“They’re doing fine,” replied the other. “I got a day’s worth of math to work on with my eldest. She’s struggling with long division.”

“Don’t we all?” the first joked. “Since the all clear to come back home, I don’t know what we’re going to do over the summer, my family and I. Isadora keeps saying we should go to the Amazon, but it’s too hot in the summer.”

“Man, you live in an urban heat dome after climate change!”

The two laughed a bit more before calming down. “But seriously, they expect it to reach fifty over the summer,” the second continued, handing his counterpart a leather briefcase.

“Fifty!? Man, I thought Omaris did us a favor by sending us back to the stone age!” the second sarcastically remarked.

The worker in the cargo hold stopped for a moment. A pause hung over the two as Kledraxxil and Damien walked past.

“I lost my family because of that,” the first said in a hushed tone only Kledraxxil could pick up from their distance. “Please don’t joke about it.”

“Sorry. I’m very sorry.”

The two continued their work wordlessly as our two continued their journey down the hall.

“What train are we taking?” asked Damien.

For all the grandstanding about impulsiveness Kledraxxil gave to Damien, they were shocked that they made such a tiny error in the aspect of not actually informing their trainee what they were doing. Kledraxxil tapped a band on their wrist and repeated the question in a language they understood as Erusatalien. It was the only language the device understood. After a beep and a good twenty seconds of convening while the lackluster FTL DataLink did its thing—its thing being contacting a data center on far-off planet in the rim called Gisaak, the Gissakian server phoning back to Earth to get the CORE timetable, the Terran server sending the timetable back to the Gissakian server through a proxy on nucleus planet Gorvtrask (for marketing and analytics), and finally back to Kledraxil’s wristband—they got a response back.

“London,” they said. “It’ll take around two-and-a-half hours to get there from Rio.”

“London.” Damien repeated. “In two-and-a-half hours.”

“Yup. And it’s coming up right now.”

Off in the distance, Damien could barely make out the union jack on a nano-ink board. He hastened his pace before stopping in confusion.

“Wait, how do you know that? You’re blind!”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t learn my way around,” the blind reptilian said in a clearly annoyed tone. “Or count. The dock to the right of the doors is dock one, and it goes clockwise to thirty. Ours is twenty-five. It’s a matter of counting backwards. You eyed-idiots are spoiled, aren’t you?”

Damien’s expression turned to one of discontent. “Kledraxxil, I don’t understand why you’re so—” Thirty-two years in the workforce told him not to finish that sentence.

“So what?” Kledraxxil snapped.

“Snappy,” huffed Damien.

The plumexion made “eye” contact using the earholes embedded in their snout. The uncanniness of the plumexion’s face emulating a familiar expression made Damien do a double-take. It was a technique Kledraxxil taught themself to do after a café worker had commented on how cute they were and how much she wanted to meet a plumexion, and it hadn’t failed them yet, though his other employed tactic, storming out the door while emitting a screech nearing the top-end of the human hearing spectrum, was not an option in this context.

“Let’s go and get this over with,” they growled.

Damien decided now was not the best time to retort. He had several insults queued up in his brain of varying potency, like “ridge-reader,” “sightless dingus,” “bats if they were four feet tall and grumpy all the time,” and “blind kobold.” He learned from his time offworld to keep those inside his head, maybe write them down on his smartphone.

Facing the protrusion with the door for the cargo hold and turning right will show you another set of double doors. Kledraxxil went to these doors and waved a key card in front of them. With grating squeaks, the doors parted to a narrow hall just wide enough for four humans side-by-side. Picture the unholy abomination that would be a subway station in Tokyo combined with the width and aesthetics of an airport jetway. This is a CORE boarding platform. To the left, sets of doors sealed off just like the ones in the cargo hold were lined up in uniform distance. To the right, various ads in Portuguese for colleges, houses, and whatever other things the nano-ink signboards’ contextual ad algorithms were serving up to locals leaving the city—and for good measure—an English-language Tesco’s ad with scannable coupons for people on their way home. A single elevator was set immediately to the right of the doors, while a stairwell found itself ending in the latter fifth of the platform.

CORE trains are bi-directional by nature, sporting two driver cabs on either side of the train. Older incarnations of the vacuum-tube maglev system, including the original kimle gklis, were unidirectional. You’d think a train that had no windows, operated entirely underground, and relied on automated systems to travel most of the way would have no need for bidirectionalism, but as it turns out, intuition doesn’t quite work with humans and other non-subterrainians the way plumexions expected.

The first kimle gklis, built on colony world Osaichaim, in its maiden voyage, had a lexinpol operator who forgot which direction she was facing and drove the train straight into a wall, breaking the seal and launching the train all the way to its destination in record time (so long as you didn’t mind the taste of concrete and steel mingling with your skull once you arrive).

Since the incident, bidirectional cabs have been installed on all future versions of the kimle gklis, where the side facing the wall is entirely disabled. For good measure, all trains can also magnetize to the walls to slow down. It’s still a very unpleasant experience being thrown about inside a screeching metal worm and having to wait hours for a rescue, but it’s better than getting crushed.

This bi-directional design also makes it so there’s two cargo holds, one for loading and another for unloading. They naturally switch when you arrive.

This is all to say that Damien and Kledraxxil had to walk to the end of the platform to get to the cab before going through the open doors on the far side. Immediately to the left of the driver cab were rows and rows of little rooms for the people who wanted to pay extra. These coaches had a beautiful light wood finish to them. Inside each room were two couches that doubled as beds with a table in between. Above each couch was a pull-down Murphy-style top bunk. In place of a window, there was a screen that you could throw anything onto, be it a game, a movie, or even your own device with the provided cables. Down the train would be a small diner area, and beyond that would be the economy seating; rows of booths squeezed together as compactly as possible. The screens were replaced by a glass table that functioned as a touchscreen, and a holoprojector.

The CORE train overall was a melting pot of different technologies from different species across the galaxy, all set into every crevice of the train. Like Earth, the capitol world of the Galactic Council, it melded all the gadgets together into an well-orchestrated machine. Well, actually, the CORE was as well put together as a machine to withstand the extreme temperatures could be, and I’d like to apologize to it and the engineers behind it for comparing their coordination to that of the Galactic Council.

“Not my first time,” said Damien in awe. He turned to Kledraxxil, who wasn’t angry. Rather, their attention was focused on a distant sound. They could barely make it out as audible words:

“Mom? Dad? Anyone? Who is it?”

It sounded like it was coming from the back of the train. And in English.

“Hold on Damien,” Kledraxxil ordered. “I think someone’s in the train.”

Kledraxxil took off flying down the narrow passageway. They weaved past a right turn where the suites ended and economy began, threaded the space between the dining stand’s ceiling and counter, and finally back into the suite rooms on the other side. The nimble plumexion let their instincts take the wheel, honed over the thousands of years their species lived in caves on a planet with a cooled-off core.

They turned back upright and opened their wings to the fullest extent, catching the air to slow down, grabbing the key in their utility belt and shoving it into the keyhole. The voice inside screamed in fear, causing the plumexion to stumble back in shock.

“I’m not doing anything to you,” reassured Kledraxxil in as soft a voice as they could muster.

“Wh-who are you!?” the voice quivered back.

Kledraxxil approached the door and turned the key again. “My name is Kledraxxil,” they said.

“That’s not Mom or Dad’s name!” objected the youthful voice.

“I’m not your mom,” Kledraxxil clarified.

“You’re not Dad either!”

“Correct.”

“So who are you?”

“I’m the train operator.”

“Like a conductor?”

Kledraxxil’s translator wasn’t on, so there was nothing filling them in on this foreign word. They work by injecting meaning directly into your brain, but only when you have similar words to compare a foreign word against, gaslighting you into understanding a language. It’s really obnoxious during a conversation in a language you understand to constantly have a computer in your brain telling you what you already know, which is why they turned theirs off.

“Uhh… yeah,” they lied. “Anyways, I’m coming in.”

They grabbed the latch and gave it a tug. Sitting in the operator chair was a young human girl.