CHAPTER 518

SANCTUM’S END (V)

Eldon yawned lowly and stretched, rolling sideways and stumbling out of the bed. The first signs of the dawn perched through the curtained windows, barely giving him enough light to see where he was. Getting up, he glanced backward at the still-sleeping Alana, muffling his footsteps so he doesn't wake her, quickly making his way over to the kitchen.

The mornings were awfully cold and empty; sitting alone in the silent room gave way to many thoughts he didn’t want to have, which is why he usually tried hurrying up with his morning routine and leaving for work.

Today he wasn't going to the House of Cosmic Collection as he was temporarily being resigned to the Galactic Registry due to the shortage of manpower. It wouldn't be his first time, but he didn't like going there as it was generally filled with a rather arrogant lot who always ignored him. A job is a job, however, and he stepped out of the apartment with a sigh and the faintest determination.

The Transport waited from him right outside, but luckily he didn't have to pay for it as it was organized by his supervisor. It was still the cheapest kind, but it didn't matter; he never experienced luxury, to begin with, and had little to feel depressed about.

Though it was still early, there were still quite a few people either going to or returning from their jobs. The surrounding buildings which seemed to defy the heavens in their size, shape and make, used to be looked at as monuments worthy of devotion. He still remembered, as a kid, walking down the Roney Lane, the most popular stretch of land in the city, hosting the most important buildings. The high-rises were new, especially the tall ones, and nobody could help but stop and sigh in awe at them. Now? He didn't even notice them.

After a fifteen minutes long journey, he was dropped off in front of an egg-shaped building, laid horizontally on the side, curved perfectly. It was surrounded by a massive pool of water beaming a reflection of the building’s framework. It was a rather spectacular sight, though Eldon imagined the architects didn’t want to be known as the ones who designed the ‘egg building’, as their initial idea was the galaxy-shaped building.

Faintly chuckling at his own random thoughts, he made his way over the framed, steel bridge and through the automatic doors. Insides were immaculate, spreading out into a wide cone walled off by beautifully decorated motifs of the cosmos, over twenty elevators and two sets of stairwells spaced out to perfection. The reception desk was held up by six people dressed in the traditional white-spun satin. Flashing his badge at them, he was oriented to the leftmost stairwell as he didn't have enough clearance to use the elevators.

Sighing, he shook his head and began climbing -- at the very least it wasn’t eighteen floors, and he only had to climb three.

The third floor was gated in eight quarters, the one he was assigned to be in right to the left of the stairwell. It stretched into a quarter-circle shape, over fifty monitors hanging on the inside walls, the central part separated by walls, turned into a cubicle, while the rest of the desks were strewn about at random, some extruded from the walls and some from the floors.

He quickly spotted his supervisor, a slightly older woman, Reli. She was nearly as tall as him, bald-headed, her skin gleaming in the slight cyan -- a byproduct of the activity popular among the rich, Ice-dipping. Apparently, as far as Eldon heard at least, it kept the skin elastic and was immensely popular.

As she spotted him, she waved at him and smiled; despite the difference in their status, she was among the few that didn’t treat him as air, but instead as another person.

“You made it.” she said, smiling still, her green eyes -- hidden behind a pair of what Eldon considered to be hideous glasses, though he’d seen plenty of richer people wearing them -- glistening.

“Hm,” Eldon nodded. “Traffic was light.”

“That’s good,” she nodded. “I’m sorry to call you here, but they’re really short-staffed -- it’s just for today, don’t worry.”

“It’s fine,” he shrugged. “Work is work. What will I be doing?”

“Ah, it’s similar to the last time,” she explained. “You just have to go over the last week’s registry and remove the red flags.”

“Hm, alright,” he said, sitting down at the chair and pulling the screen down to his level; there were over 200,000 entries, which immediately caused him a headache. “Ugh, this... is gonna take a while...”

"You can just use the filters for the initial sweep," she said, sitting next to him and smiling apologetically. "For instance, if you type in 'lifeforms', you should be able to shave off a lot of entries as they're usually false flags." a

“Ah, alright, thanks,” Eldon nodded, quickly following the instructions; the interface of the program they used was still as messy as he remembered it being. It looked like something developed half a century ago; even the program at the Cosmic Collection wasn’t as bad. “Wasn’t today supposed to be your day off?” he asked her as he saw she had no intention of leaving just yet.

“... eh,” she shrugged helplessly. “If you get a call, you answer the call. It’s as simple as that.”

“... haah, I gotta say, I don’t envy you.” Eldon said, wondering how he’d react if he got a call on his day off that he was spending with Alana. He would have probably quit the job altogether -- damned be the consequences.

“Eh, I’m afraid I’m the dull type outside the work,” Reli said. “Hardly a hobby worth skipping the work for. What about you?”

“Hmm, I mostly spend them with Alana,” Eldon replied somewhat absentmindedly as he began filtering through the entries, deleting the red flags. “In a way, I guess, you could say she’s my hobby.”

“Ha ha, why wouldn’t she be? She’s adorable.”

“She really is. What about you?” he quizzed. “Ever thought about having kids?”

“Ah, to have kids, you have to find a guy who’ll tolerate your insane schedule first. And that’s proving to be... rather difficult, I must say.”

“Don’t be down at yourself,” he said, glancing at her with an encouraging smile. “You’re too good for that.”

“... thank you...”

Eldon withdrew from the conversation, not noticing Reli getting up and walking away strangely. He had too much work to go through and too little time. They didn't care about the process itself, after all, just the results; and if he wasn't finished by today, he wouldn't get paid the full amount.

Though the work was easy, as it was a two-button-clicks sort of an ordeal, it was also horrendously dull. He considered applying for it originally, but one of his good friends at the time had the foresight to warn him about just how boring the job is -- even more so than his current one. Mindlessly sifting through the horde of entries all made by the still-developing A.I. that can't differentiate between an actual new lifeform and a piece of greenish rock was all but interesting, so much so he found himself nodding off for a moment barely two hours in.

Snapping out of it, his gaze sharpened as he took a closer look at the entry he was about to delete; it was inputted three days ago, and A.I. assigned it to a low-priority pile. It was a low-resolution image roughly thirty light-years away depicting several dozen tiny dots of light. Usually, pictures like these weren't surprising; the phenomenon of clusters was well-recorded and not that uncommon, but something set him off about the picture.

Though the clusters were not uncommon, they were generally rather random; the distances between lights varied, their sizes varied, and their brightness -- that is, their distance -- varied greatly as well. This one, however, appeared eerily... orderly. Each dot was spaced out evenly, and the closer Eldon looked, the more auspicious it became.

Pulling the picture into the scanning interface, he inputted controls for scanning for a pattern and waited for a few seconds; he was right -- there was a pattern to them -- arrow-shaped one, largely used in the ancient military books. No way... he thought. He must have started seeing things of interest because he was too bored.

He ran the image through the scanner once again, but the results were the same. A.I., too, seemed somewhat alarmed by it as it scanned the image several times on its own. The low-priority suddenly turned to high-priority, which deemed the image worthy of several dozen more in-depth scans, which resulted in something even Eldon couldn’t predict -- Red Alert.

Alarms began blaring off throughout the building as people jumped in panic; he saw Reli walking over rapidly with a worried expression on her face.

“W-what’s wrong?!” she asked, sitting down next to him.

“I--I don’t...” he really didn’t know, despite the fact that the results on the screen were telling him -- A.I. overruled the manual usage of the long-range planetary scanners and automatically pointed them at the direction of the cluster, scanning repeatedly. The power usage went through the roof for a few minutes as it was taking spitfire images, most-likely in hopes of rendering one of a higher resolution. The results came in a few minutes later; Eldon didn’t even realize that over a dozen people joined Reli and him, standing around his station with worried and confused expressions.

The image rendered slowly on his screen; he, much like everyone else, shuddered. Depicted on the image were twenty-one figures flying in the arrow-shaped formation, each clad in resplendent, golden-white armor, wings of light at their backs.

"IMPOSSIBLE!!" several voices shouted out at the same time, and even Eldon nearly stumbled back out of his chair. What they were seeing was indeed impossible -- those were people, eerily similar to them, flying through space without a ship or a proper suit... people with wings of light on their backs... headed straight for Adur at insane speeds that even the planet's best fleet couldn't possibly hope to ever match.