"Alright, people," Anji said as she wipes the sweat from her brow. "Let's do this, one more time!"

She nodded to the ceiling of the Nova class battleship and music started to play. She turned back and faced the two hundred soldier droids made up of ten rows of ten columns as they started dancing. And Anji smiled.

3 days had passed since the Brykar requested her permission to build a city. She remembered feeling flabbergasted. It's not as if they are requesting her to do an office party, but they wanted a freaking city.

It wasn't so long ago when banks are rejecting her car loans much less her dream of getting a house loan. Nope, her job is deemed not stable enough and without collateral...

Now she owns 10 planets... and one of them is the freaking death star!

And people are asking her, (HER!) if they can build cities on her planet.

Sure why not! You can have two Tokyos and a New York, but if you say pretty please, then I'll even add in a Moscow!

With a sudden brilliant insight, she told them to wait a day then consult with "Mother" instead. She requested transport back to the artificial planet Aegis and to her surprised a Kavak transport ship drop from the sky in a matter of 2 minutes. She was transported to a waiting Nova-class Battleship in orbit who then whisked her away to back to Aegis. There inside the private garden of the old AI, is where she found Mother.

"Of course I am aware of the request, young elder," said "Mother."

Anji watched her balefully. "You are aware that what you just said is totally conflicting in every sense- oh never mind," Anji said with an exaggerated sigh.

"Mother" choose to ignore her statement. "The point is, young woman, is that important decision like this will continue to be routed to your decision one way or another because you are the boss."

Anji sighed, drained of any fight left in her. "I never asked for this... I am ill equipped to leed your people." Anji said, sitting down, then flopping on the well-manicured garden of "Mother." "I have no training as a leader. I am no general or a president to lead you guys. If you keep following me I will just lead you all to disaster."

"Mother" sighed then turned to the young woman again. Maybe because she is one of the very few entities in the universe who actually remembered encountering a human before, but she could see the frustration and fear in this young human and in her own way she wanted to wrapped her in a cocoon of protection, never letting her go. But she also knew that that will be the wrong way to nurture this child and it will be a shame for the entire universe if she is not unleashed and experience the vast galaxy out there.

"And despite all my years and stored knowledge in my cybernetic brain, I am far less equip to advise a god but here I am and doing so anyway. Do you know how we govern ourselves up until now? We do so by a committee, wherein the most prominent of our society and me will decide the major problems of the unity then put it in a vote. But before we do so, the decision must be checked with our last mission profile provided for us by the humans."

"Which is?" Anji asked intrigued despite herself.

"Did you know that all the M-class planet that you own now used to be populated with vast mega-cities. And I am talking about metropolises so vast that they spread over an entire continent, with skyscrapers that touched the tip of the sky and massive elevators chains that are actually connected to space infrastructures."

"What happened to them?"

"Our last orders are to dismantle every human infrastructure in the Eden system brick by brick, every fiber wire ions, energy gels and raw nanites. Every sewerage system, every underground installation, every man-made ship and space structures. Believe me when I say there are technological wonders in this area of space that other species have not even dream of, but we dismantled them all because that is what our master want us to do, thinking that the world is not ready for them yet and we the Brykar unity will have too much unfair advantages to the rest of the galaxy."

"Are you ... angry with their decision?" Anji asked.

Mother blinked. "What? of course not," she said with a laughed. The laugh was so gentle and genuine that it reassured Anji. "The Brykar were barely sentient at the time and so we barely care about the order and after close to several millennia of time to analyze and contemplate about it, we have concluded that what the elders did was the best decision at the time. This way, we grew along side by side with our neighbors and look at them, well at lease some of them, with a dispassionate respect. "

"It took us years but we eventually reach technological parity with the best of them, and then several centuries more, we received clear technological superiority among the other species. Now, even the most pessimistic AI analysis can tell you that we have achieved technological supremacy all over the galaxy and the gap is simply growing as years go by. Actually, we now have some proposal from our AI analysis that we slow down some of our own research, especially those with military components, and let others catch up or we risk becoming a threat to others."

"The point is we achieve greatness without the direct assistance of our parents. We did not borrow their tech and created our very own. We may not have reach human level of technology yet, but we are proud of what we accomplished on our own."

"And then there were the planets themselves."

Anji was surprised by the sudden change of topic. "What about them," She asked.

"Part of our problem when we are ordered to dismantle the structures on the planet, we are concerned about what will happen to the planet themselves if we do so. It was in our analysis that if we dismantle all of the infrastructures which were connected intimately with nature will kill the planet itself. But we have our orders. It took us 78 years, 4 months, 12 days and 16 hours to dismantle everything and destroy most of them by throwing them into our star. And our analysis was correct. Dirt and sand flew into the air and mixed with the atmosphere, drastically changing the weather pattern all around the planet and destroying the whole ecosystem. Then that same dirt and toxic fell back to the oceans and killed every lifeform in it, the rain became toxic and sunlight became harder to penetrate the sky. In less than 4 decades, we were guardians of dead planets."

"We wanted to terraform the planets but it will be a direct violation of our orders from the humans. So we did not touch them. But four hundred years later, a miracle happened. A new species of plant, nothing much actually, just a wild grass, blossomed in the hard dirt of Gaia. We were happy for a while until one of the ever present tornados in the planet ripped them up high in the sky and destroyed the mile wide area where the plant was starting to grow in. We were sad about it until we realized the tornado actually spread the seeds of that same grass far farther away and it only took another decade but those spread seeds began to grow then died then regrow again. the dead plants became moss, and to our utter amazement, new plants began to grow on top of them, then they died too and became good compost for the land and several cycles later, new more complex and diverse plants started growing everywhere. Eventually, the land was covered by forest and the murky ocean settled down and new planktons grew underwater as well. bacterias grew and more multi-cell organism began to thrive in the deepest part of the ocean. life was born! You have no idea what it is like watching new creatures emerged out of nowhere. Insects, amphibians, then small reptiles, And then finally there were mammals!. Before you arrived, we expected that humanoid species will come out after several centuries and that is how we will meet our new humans."

Anji stared at her for a long time. Being constantly in contact with subservient Brykar and constantly annoying her, it is easy to believe that she is surrounded by pre-program robots. But the Brykar Unity is so much more than that. To Anji's eyes, they were the true gods as they watch evolution unfold with their serene patience and benevolent acceptance.

But even then, something nag at the back of Anji's mind. Sure she is aware that they were dealing with hundreds if not thousands of years here but even then she felt that evolution was simply too fast for a planet this size. But she pushed the thought aside for another time to contemplate and concentrated at the current.

Mother turned to her and Anji saw the ancient eyes stared back at her with the fanatic eyes of a true believer. "Don't you see, we question your teachings and orders because our mind is still not at the same level as yours. What we see as illogical actually just means that we are not seeing further into the future like your people. And that same divine blood flows into your veins Anjanette Agayarri, and we will not question it no more."

Anji wanted to scream at her. Don't you see that my fellow humans were not thinking about you and your kind! They were simply being selfish as they always are and simply did not want others to take their technology and what happened to the planets were simply nature at work! There is no grand plan, this is nothing but a big cosmic joke.

I don't belong here, was the sudden thought that stab into her mind with the brutal truth.

I need to find my own people and find out where they go and how to get there.

And in order to do that, I need to find and contact the major species of this galaxy that the modern humans had interacted with so I can find clues about them.

In short, I need to get involve with the galactic politics. damn.

And just like that, a purposed bloomed in Anji's spirit.

Anji informed Mother of her intentions, and although there are minor misgivings, the Brykar Unity accepted the will of their leader. After a fast consensus with the other AIs, the best way to introduce Anji to the rest of the universe is by sending her to Unity 01.

After 2 days, all preparations were efficiently done and she was on her way to the massive space station. Of course, she also resolves the pending request for the cities. It turned out that Brykar wanted to create a city so they can blow it up.

"Cool!" Anji said sincerely, smiling at the consoles she used to talk to other AI's. This is the AI's who directly proposed the creation of the city, and Anji learned that they are the AI's responsible for military training and studies. "But why?"

"Our simulation program is light years ahead of the next competition but there are only so much we can learn from them since everything is base on calculation. For example, we know by calculation the blast radius of any of our weapon's explosive powers, and we can calculate what they will do in a specific surrounding. But there are too many variables unaccounted for to make the entire simulation not too realistic and far from the actual outcome."

Anji nodded. "And by doing it in far more realistic settings, you get better data. I understand. Fine, you get to build 2 cities in..." Anji turned to Mother. "What's the name of the smallest M-class planet?"

A dozen AI, including Mother, said, "Saphyra."

Anji nodded. She remembered reading that small Saphyra is almost an exact same size as earth. "Fine, I am allowing you to build 2 cities in Saphyra on two separate continents."

"May I ask why far apart? It is more efficient if we just build them side by side," An AI asked.

"Yes, but you also need to fight in different weather conditions and by putting the cities in different settings, you can make your soldiers fight in as much diverse weather condition as possible." Anji could almost feel the AI's taking notes in their excitement.

Then a thought came to Anji's mind and she smiled. "You know what, build me a third city. But this one is special. I want the third one built in Gaia and I want you to try and recreate the most modern city possible. As close to the modern human city that they left behind. In fact, I want you to try and recreate the capital city."

There was a massive hum in the garden chamber as the 2 dozen AI present in the room plus another 2 million indirect subordinates AIs lurking in the background begun to do the massive calculations to fulfill the elder's orders.

An AI spoke after a while. "Your command is possible and will be done in 2 months time. We have documented every single structure at the time before we dismantled it. given the change in topography and the loss science in some of them, there will be massive structural adjustments to be done but most of them will be simple analytical problems to be solved."

Anji was somewhat disappointed with the timetable given what she saw the two worker droid can do in a small amount of time, but when the AI explained the size and dimensions of the original capital, Anji gawked at them.

The human capital called Cylene had enough space to dump the whole of Europe, Russian Siberia, china, India, Mongolia, and the rest of southeast Asia combined and still, there is enough room in it to wiggle a few more football fields. The original megacity is the size of a continent.

"And aaah... what is the size of the two cities in Saphyra?" Anji asked quietly. The AI gave her the raw data. Given Anji's nanite-enhanced brain, she calculated the numbers and realize that each city they are proposing is the size of Texas. "I see..." she gulped. "Aaah, on second thought, maybe you can just make the size of the third city the same with the other two... for conformities sake," Anji said lamely.

"We understand," said an AI. Did Anji sense a bit of disappointment in their hum? "But we presume that you still want to put the latest technological advancement into it?"

"Yes, of course."

There was a quick analytical beep, then the AI said, "Consider it done."