The Station Had Been Imagined First....

Thousand+ Words a Day for Dec. 5, 2025

The station had been imagined first as a mere scientific research and communication facility, and was commissioned and constructed 184 years ago on that premise. It had operated in that capacity for a decade or two, then when it was sold in 2060, the Chinese immediately started an expansion project, installing enhanced living quarters and food production facilities, rigging it to spin for artificial gravity, and introducing a number of other poorly understood secret modifications.

When the Forty-Eight Minute War came in 2114, the 77 spaces on the station went to the highest bidder--upwards of $8 billion a bed--and a cottage industry occupied with resupplying and maintaining the station developed, operating from the aerodrome north of Adelaide, Australia.

Over the next 155 years, the station evolved, its capacity expanded, and its population grew. In 2177, the stations decaying structure and increasingly insupportable demand for resources was rescued by the arrival of the Etch-ny, an alien insectoid race from Rigel IV. The Etch-ny repaired and expanded the station, installed a powerplant that accessed a mysterious energy source across a fourth spatial dimension, and enclosed the entire station in a pressurizable shell--all in exchange for the landing of their large food animal herd on the mostly deserted continent of Africa and the housing of the four Etch-ny royal families on a special area on the station.

Our story opens sixty years after the arrival of the Etch-ny. Africa is a fully occupied Etch-ny province, with only a token human presence of about 1,000 people in the diplomatic compound at what was the city of Harare, Zimbabwe. Approximately 1,000,000 other humans are scattered across the planet in the remains of what were once the great capitals of the world: Paris, New York City, Taiwan, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City. This, and the 300,000 people onboard the station constitute the human race as the Sun rises over the Saraha desert on October 14, 2137.

Just outside the crumbling remains of what had once been the great and ancient city of Cairo, a group of Etch-ny seniors huddled on top of the Pyramid of Krafre. One of the seniors was designated as The Emperor's Counter. The others were present in support roles only--one served as the Emperor's Observer, one as Protocol Guide and Guard, and one as Captain of the Shedding. F'Melth, the Counter, was molting, and this process has to be strictly monitored, with whatever bits and pieces of F'Melth's exoskeleton that detached carefully destroyed to avoid any potential thinning of the F' bloodline.

The F' weren't royal, of course--if they had been, they would not be on the planet's surface--but they were an important family, a family with connections to the Y'. And the Y' most certainly were royal.

"Do you see the rising cloud there?" the Observer asked in the strange clicking language of the Etch-ny. He pointed to the west, where the Sun was setting.

F'Melth ignored him, and the Captain of the Shed was busy examining one of F'Melth's peeling patches of exoskeleton, so the Guard spoke. "That star. I can't see anything in that direction."

"There is dust there, rising above the surface."

"It is an arm of Herd Yawt," the Captain of the Shedding said. He wasn't looking to the west; his attention was still focused on the Counter's peeling patch. "Herd Yawt was out of place yesterday and haven't been retrieved."

"Herd Yawt?" the Observer repeated with alarm. "They wouldn't be this far north."

"Shouldn't be, but they are," the Captain answered. "There was a notice on the boards about it."

"Notice? There was no Yawt notice," the Observer said.

"I saw a notice," the Guard chimed in. "I saw it. I didn't read it, though."

"Didn't read it?" the Observer repeated dully.

"No, I didn't read it." Looking up, he saw that the Counter has rotated around and was staring at him. "Well? It's not my job to read notices," he clicked plaintively.

"Listen!" the Counter said softly. "Do you hear it?" The others fell silent and listened. "There is a movement. Sixty of the herd, or perhaps sixty-one, to the south and a little east. Moving."

"I don't hear them," the Guard answered first. "Are you sure it's so many?"

"I hear them," the Observer said. He stepped away from the others and descended a few rows downward on the south side of the pyramid. "Yes, yes, I hear them. Moving north."

The Captain followed the Observer, who was continuing to descend the pyramid, his eyes fixed to the south. "Yes, I hear them too." He unfurled his wings, started beating them, and hovered a few meters above the row he was on; he was about even with the Counter and the Guard, who were still on top. "Come. We can turn them to the west to join the others."

The Observer was already airborne; the Captain put away the wooden probe he had been using to assess the ripeness of the patch of molt and lifted off. As Protocol demanded, the Counter was the last to arise; he would be the first to alight, in the unlikely case that the four of them would be descending low enough to alight on any of the ruined buildings or can't trees in the area. They almost certainly would not.

As they fought the stiff breeze to move south, above them, the station flashed past, plainly visible in the darkening sky. The activities of the small group would not have been of any interest to controllers on the station; herd control generally would be left to ground-based units. Had it been, however, the technology needed to visualize the group and to distinguish them one from another and also from the many millions of Etch-ny on the continent was abundantly available. Each Etch-ny on the surface carried an implanted identification module, interrogatable from the ground or orbit, and each could be identified by its unique smell if another Etch-ny were close enough--say, within a hundred meters or so.