Nebel picked himself off of the floor and decided to go find Luke… he wanted to get out of here! Nebel leaves the bathroom and starts walking back up the hall, returning to the laboratories hub, since it was like a spoke and wheel design without the wheel he was actually heading to the center and the exit at the same time…

At the lobby he asks the attendant he had talked to earlier and gets the room number for Luke’s doctor. Walking into the medical science wing, Nebel walks past a few small rooms with large containers located against their back walls.

Medical science, which was only in its infancy when the immortal was first born had advanced at an immense rate and was now nearly unrecognizable to the stumbling steps that a doctor was forced to take in an earlier era. All diseases were detected by the system and if they already had a cure that didn’t require surgery a prescription would arrive the following day at the persons home address.

In the case of an unknown disease or a disease that required surgery, the patient would be called to the laboratory or clinic that existed in their city of residence. Thanks to this system the number of patients had dropped to just accident victims, plastic surgery patients and these special cases and the number of hospitals had declined as a result.

In the case of surgery the patient would be placed in a capsule that contained short lived medical nano machines that would directly follow the doctor’s orders to the letter. They would repair the damage or perform the alteration before closing before leaving the body or terminating their function depending on the situation.

So if the surgery wasn’t on the surface and didn’t require something to be removed from the body a hole wouldn’t even have to be made in the first place. This helped lower possible complications and reduced chances of infection.

Nebel finds the right room nearly at the end of the wing and knocks on the door. The door opens a slit and an unfamiliar face looks out. “Are you Nebel?” the man asks

“Yes I am. Can I come in?” Nebel answers and asks in a polite tone.

“No you cannot! Doctor patient confidentialty won’t permit it. Just walking in here will tell you what my patients condition is!” the doctor says in a hurry. “Now I have to go… wait in the cafeteria!”

The doctor closes the door and Nebel hears him take the two steps and sit down. He shrugs his shoulders and walks to the cafeteria. At the cafeteria, Nebel orders a coffee and picks an empty table by one of the windows… outside he sees Maria and Maya… he sighs and drops backwards, trust fall style, the sensors on the floor activate and he stops falling in a perfect sitting position, he floats slowly higher until he reaches the point where his legs are at a perfect ninety degree angle at the knee and he feels it stop.

He normally disliked air chairs since they were like sitting on a fan but many public places used them thanks to their indestructibility, even though people can’t purposefully destroy on a massive scale, the maker didn’t seem to care about a few chairs so vandalism was still an issue... even if it was a smaller one and so businesses prefer the air chair.

While he was sitting watching Maria and Maya looking at him he remembers the windows and signs…

“ahh, damn perverts…”

He didn’t bother to move but instead switches his view to the cafeteria itself. Around the room doctors were floating on their own air chairs enjoying their breaks, a coffee and maybe a meal. Luckily this was the only wing in which he didn’t know anyone so he got a nice quiet time to think about things.

The injection that the demi gods had given him was pretty weird, he felt more energetic since they gave it to him and a little more aware… but he also had ravenous hunger and the arm they had injected it in felt itchy.

It was also strange they used a syringe at all but maybe they just used it since it was faster then throwing him in a capsule for direct introduction.

After thirty minutes or so he gets bored and decides to look out the window again. The afternoon view from the laboratories was beautiful if you could ignore a certain pair of perverts… the view contained the entire city that had been built in the center of what used to be called Africa. The lush gardens and silent forests that surrounded the city could be seen as well as power plant mk 1 that rose off to one side and the water treatment system that rejuvenated Africa.

The greatest achievement of the immortal was said to be the system but Nebel thought that was wrong. For ten years the immortal had labored at building its own dream and in the early years of the third decade of the twenty first century the first building had been finished. The immortal had started its plan.

After only a few months it had gathered a million of Africa’s residents and the speed of the plan reached new heights. In only a year the plan was deemed a self running success by the immortal itself and it went off to build the Asian and South American ones.

What the Immortal had built was a partially self sufficient Arcology. Unlike fictional ones it wasn’t a closed system and unlike the ones imagined before its construction it wasn’t built to protect the ecosystem but was instead designed to promote the creation of a comfortable one for human kind. All three arcs were built with direct harnessing of natural power sources in mind such as thermal, solar, hydro and wind. As well as the geological location of metals and other minor resources that were required for their expansion.

After a few years the immortal started getting flak from religious groups about playing god and from the U.N. since the current governments of the world were scared. The areas where the immortal had built the three arcs no longer resemble their old selves at the least, the governments had all but disappeared and the company of the immortal had absorbed their functions.

The populace couldn’t be happier; their lives had been completely improved over their old ones, they had food, water, electricity and medicine. They all had jobs and their children were being taught many discipline as well as the maintenance and expansion the arcs. So they didn’t even care about the fact that their democracies… if they had one to begin with… was now just a representative to the immortals company. They even…

“Nebel!” Nebel his thoughts interrupted looks around for the unfamiliar voice and sees Luke leaning on an IV stand in his normal clothes.

“Hey Luke what’s with your voice?” Nebel asks him.

“It’s part of my treatment, I’ll tell you about it later.” He says in a slightly high voice. “Can we go home now?”

“Sure…”

Nebel helps Luke walk through the halls back to the hub and out to his car. The time of mandatory wheel chairs was long past and if a patient really needed them the doctors would just leave them in a tube until they didn’t. After helping Luke get in, Nebel walks to his side and gets in. he drives them towards their house and asks Luke. “Why do you have an IV?”

Luke looks over at Nebel and answers after a moment. “The first part of my treatment is done, now I just have to take my medicine for a few months and my days of hospital visits will be behind me.”

“Ah, ok…” Nebel smiles with the corner of his mouth Luke can see “Just ask me for anything I can help you with and I’ll do it. Were the guys of our family and we have to support each other!”

“That’s not true…” Luke says and blushes.

“Well ya true… there is my father but he’s rarely around…” Nebel laughs a bit.

Luke mutters a response but Nebel only hears snipits and when he looks over Luke is fast asleep.

“That…’s n… …I… ean…”

The rest of the drive Nebel sits in silence and admires the city that changed the world.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

“Please don’t make me do it…” she thinks as she looks at the strong proud men standing before her.

“We refuse to surrender!” the man in the center says to her.

“We will never do something like that!” Another says.

She turns and looks around the room, other than these six older men and one woman, many a person is standing in the room with them, in their hands are sashes and they are one by one throwing them on the floor, s they do so they have defeated looks and sad eyes...

“Please I beg of you! Don’t resist!” She thinks once more. She didn’t want to do it… but she knew she had to… for the world!

“I’m giving you until three!” the woman’s cold voice echoes in the room. “Three!” the man with the word Britain on his sash, throws it down and backs away… “Two!” the man with USA on his sash throws it down and leaves quickly.

The last five people stand and stare at the woman in defiance “We won’t bow to you!” the only woman among them says…

“One…” the woman trails off and looks at the slowly emptying room and sees a few people waiting for the result…

“Forgive me… people of the world… and you five the most I would prefer to congratulate you and have you join me but I have no choice.” She thinks to herself as she slashes her arm from left to right in front of the five courageous individuals. The four men and the one woman drop to the ground dead, the four men had ruptured eyes, while the woman was untouched except for a nose bleed…

“AHhhhhh!” Bö wakes up and screams at the highest volume and pitch she could muster. Mitchell runs in and starts to calm her down with a hug, her bed is soaked in sweat and her skin feels cold and clammy to her touch…

The nightmares again… every year she had at least one, they were all bad and some were very vivid but that had been the worst one yet.

After school she had jumped on her bed and started to have her afternoon nap but the nightmare ruined it… she felt worn out and sad… “Those poor people…” she mutters into Mitchell’s chest, her nap had gone to waste.

From experience she knew she had to do something so she wouldn’t dwell on her dream. “thank you one-chan…” she says to Mitchell “I’ll be fine now.” Mitchel smile down at her and gives her a kiss on her cheek, before leaving the room. Bö picks up her VR gear straps it on and says activate.

Inside her virtual space, hundreds of stuffed animals litter the floor and a large bed sits off to one side with even more of them. Bo walks over to the bed and touches a small book held by the biggest bear in the room and gets sucked into it, there she writes about her dream before leaving her diary and going to the CAIFELIT corner.

Touching the small pile of books stacked there, the room burns away into darkness and a rope ladder falls from the darkness, climbing the ladder she comes out of a small hole in the ground right where she had last logged out, the hole closes beneath her and she starts to stroll towards the city.

Nebel reaches the house and helps Luke out of the car and into the house. Inside the house Mitchell comes over to them and helps Nebel take Luke to Luke’s room. After Nebel and Mitchell ask Luke if he needs anything repeatedly with Luke saying only “I’m fine.” Or “I’ll be ok.” They leave and Mitchell motions him over to Bö’s room.

“Bö had a nightmare and woke up screaming.” Mitchell tells him “Should we be worried?”

“Sadly no.” Nebel says starting the prepared excuse for just this kind of situation. “The Nightmares are normal for a girl with her past.” He look her in the eye, trusting in his drama classes and normally never lies image and says “Before my parents adopted Bö she witnessed a massive car accident.”

A car accident had actually happened in the area she was listed to have lived when she lived there and since their parents had never asked about her past this lie was fine, there was no way to actually find out. “She has nightmares about the people she saw die.”

“All we can do is comfort her.” Nebel says to Mitchell who calms down and says she will make sure bo’s ok before running off to her room.

Bö herself had been told by Nebel about this planned out lie so there shouldn’t be any problem…. Well that is unless Bö feels like telling her… this could be bad. Nebel runs to his room and practically jumps straight into virtual reality when he rolls into his bed.