Pushing back into the unknown, Justine found her return trip sadly took more time. Mainly because every few feet, her companions would find some dilapidated, somewhat interesting piece of crap to linger over. And at each one, they had to take the time to revive it by performing that disgusting version of mechanical CPR.

  “Why do you keep doing that?” She would ask at the outset of every cyber punk resuscitation. “Those things are probably full of space germs.”

  “Well, excuse me.” Foster found her sudden fear of germs to be quite hilarious. “If I had known we’d be dealing with something akin to the Andromeda Strain on this little trip, my packing list would have changed.”

  “Are you ever going to let that go?”

  “I’ll let you know once we’ve survived this little expedition and are back on Earth.”

  Justine scowled at his remark but did little to marshal her troops forward. Instead, she let them stop at every dusty desk they came across. These delays were compounded even further by the appearance of a cluster of medium-sized, self-contained office cubicles. At nearly thirty feet across and twenty feet wide, these abandoned repositories held a bevy of devices Joseph would soon describe as three-dimensional printers.

  “What the heck is that?” Foster pointed to the first of a series of L-shaped contraptions. Pressed up against the wall of one of these cubicles, these machines had a large computer screen attached to the short side of the L and a conveyor belt built into the top of the long side. “It looks like the world’s least aerodynamic treadmill.”

  “No, sir.” Joseph sprinted over to the first device and pressed on the screen with his index finger. As he did, two tiny status bars appeared in white. “These are part printers.”

  “A part printer?” For the first time since they began their slow walk along the path of ultimate boredom, something interested her. “What’s a part printer?”

  “Imagine an automotive warehouse stuffed to the gills with all kinds of parts, Agent Rushing.”

  “Ok.”

  “Well,” Joseph touched another part of the screen, and a series of menus popped into existence. Immediately, Foster took out his camera and began taking pictures of the strange language. “Now imagine that everything in that warehouse was reproduceable by this little machine.”

  “Wait a minute.” Justine said, half-jokingly/half completely serious. “Are you saying that this thing can reproduce car parts?”

  “No, Agent Rushing. I doubt this machine knows what a car is.” He could tell she was partially joking, but that didn’t stop him from finishing his analogy. “But what it can do is reproduce anything stored within it’s built in storage banks.”

  “You mean like a replicator?”

  “No,” Joseph’s left eye began to twitch like he might be having a stroke. “Not like a replicator.”

  “Really,” Justine looked at the deputy for a long second before shrugging her shoulders and smirking from ear to ear. She knew her references were really bugging the shit out of him. “Because it sounds like a replicator.”

  “No...” Joseph began to argue but stopped short of repeating his previous statement. After all, he didn’t really want to lie. “Fine, Agent Rushing. Yes. These machines are kind of like a replicator. Only they don’t materialize stuff out of thin air. They use a tri-molecule polymer to synthesize a wide variety of materials and components.”

  “Can it make tea?”

  “I swear to all that is holy.” Joseph’s face took on a purposefully menacing look. “If your next words are ‘Earl Gray’...”

  Justine rocked back on her heels, took in the deputy’s demeanor and found his attempt at intimidation quite non-intimidating. So, with a smile spread across her face, she responded to his thinly veiled threat by saying the next two words very slowly, “Earl Grey.”

  “Foster,” Joseph was practically frothing at the mouth. “Please tell her to stop making Star Trek references.”

  “Joseph,” Foster politely pushed the deputy to the side as he continued taking photograph after photograph of the screen’s various menus. “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I prefer to be on the giving end of her brand of justice. Not the receiving.”

  “Unbelievable.” Joseph threw his hands up in the air in defeat. “This whole thing is unbelievable.”

  “We’re on an alien space station that’s hovering over a black hole, Joseph.” Justine turned away from the two men and started walking toward the cubicle’s exit. “And my Star Trek references are what you find unbelievable? Very strange.”

  “Hey,” Foster grabbed the man by his shoulder before he could say anything else. “Let that go and look at this.” He pointed to the screen. “Are there any more available menus?”

  Joseph stopped trying to follow her, looked at the top of the screen and shook his head. “I can’t read the words in the menus. But that symbol at the top usually denotes the last section of the parts database.

  “Perfect,” Foster toggled through a couple of screens on his upgraded phone until he found an app labeled ‘DECODE’. Without another word, he pressed the icon, and the phone instantly began the process of translating the menus into English. “It should only take a couple of minutes to finish.”

  “Awesome,” the deputy began to stomp around in the small circle. “I can’t wait.”

  “Hey,” Ignoring the alien’s temper tantrum, he looked back at Joseph with expectant eyes. “Can we make something with this thing?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He cycled back to the start screen and those two white status bars.

  “See,” he pointed to the bar that was completely filled in. “This readout says the machine has full power.” Then, he pointed to the second status bar and frowned. “This one calculates the remaining polymer stores. As you can see, it’s empty.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Shit,” Foster cursed himself. “Still, there’s a lot more cubicles.”

  Discouraged but not beat, he moved away from that machine and began checking the others in the cubicle. To his dismay, none of the machines seemed to have any polymer stores left to utilize. So, he left that cubicle and went to another one. Same thing. He went to another one. Also, the same thing.

  Finally, after about thirty minutes of searching every cubicle in sight, he finally found a printer that had the tiniest amount of polymer stores still intact. Excitedly, he turned to Joseph and asked, “How many things could we print?”

  “It depends on what you want to make.” Joseph looked down at the minuscule amount of bar filled in and sighed. “Maybe something about a couple feet long, but the internal components would have to be pretty simple.”

  “A couple feet long,” Foster started before trailing off in thought.

  Knowing what the earthling’s next question would be, he brought up a new screen. “Again, I don’t know what the language means, but these are the items available for production given the amount of polymer left.”

  “That’s...” Foster looked at the screen and slowly counted the number of items. “Not a lot of things. What is that... 23 parts?”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers, Foster.”

  Knowing that saying all too well, he took one more picture and activated the decoding program one more time. After a minute, the phone spat out a translated list of items and their corresponding subgenres. Immediately, one item stood out among the others.

  “What’s a Chronos Pacification Device?”

  “Enough of the sightseeing, guys.”

  Before the deputy had a second to respond to his question, Justine ushered them out of the cubicle and herded them deeper into the level like a pair of wayward sheep. Soon, all three of them stood before a massive wall of silvery metal that reached toward the sky.

  “Finally,” Justine huffed, pointing toward the 8-ball which now hovered inches away from the cavernous ceiling high above them. “This was what I wanted you to look at.”

  Squinting in the darkness, Foster craned his head skyward and slowly took in the oddly placed sight. Mind racing, his eye line began to race vertically with the solid metal wall. Higher than anything they’d run into yet, this mammoth partition ascended so high that the light from the orb barely reached the ground. “Just how big is it?”

  Joseph, happy to have something other than non-functional desks and empty printers to gawk at, moved off along the expansive wall trying to locate a corner. But after a straight minute of walking, there didn’t seem like there was one. “Whatever it is, it’s really fucking big!”

  “That’s why I wanted your attention earlier.” Justine pointed to an entire section of the ceiling that seemingly curved back in on itself before it could meet the wall. “Is it just me or does this thing look like it’s built directly into the ceiling?”

  “Maybe.” He said, cupping his hands over his eyes like they were a pair of binoculars. “Let’s find out.”

  Seeing the tablet begin to fire up, Justine backtracked over to him. After the usual cycling of emitters, the 8-ball’s high-definition cameras began to stream video that was almost instantly converted into a large holographic image. The first thing they saw was an up-close view of the massive gray wall.

  “That’s not what we want to see,” he stated loudly before grabbing control of the image with his free hand.

  Since every square inch of the orb was lined with high-definition surveillance equipment, Foster didn’t have to adjust the 8-ball’s position to change the perspective of the image. All he had to do was manipulate the hologram until they had an unobstructed view of the ceiling.

  “Looks like whoever ran this station cut directly into the subflooring above to allow… whatever this thing is to be built right into the ceiling.”

  The right-hand side of the projection contained a group of icons that represented the orb’s various scanning modes. Foster pressed the one second to the bottom and the familiar high-pitched squeal blasted out into the darkness above. “This should give us a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”

  “What about Hoover?” She was also growing a little bit concerned by the A.I.’s absence. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.” Foster’s facial features became slightly askew as he forced out a passive smile. He pointed to a blinking dot on the tablet’s actual screen. “But see this status light?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That means he’s still running correctly.”

  “So, he’s ignoring you?” Justine’s expression was one of disbelief.

  “Beat’s me,” Foster said curtly. “But I’m sure he has a good reason to ignore me.”

  “I’m sure he does.”

  “He better.” His tone was part warning, part plea.

  But before she could delve deeper, the holographic image morphed from a high-definition video to a crude wire frame model of the entire room. And the first thing that smacked them in the face was the image of the wall. Only it wasn’t a wall. No, it was just one side of a massive box.

  Then, the mysterious chalkboard rematerialized as Foster drew a circle around the entire thing. Once he did, the familiar ghostly calculations began to work themselves out to the tune of two hundred and fifty feet wide by two hundred and fifty feet tall.

  About twice as tall as the largest industrial warehouse on Earth, the structure’s height was even more impressive because it didn’t just run through one upper subfloor, but two.

  “Are those beds?” Justine asked as Foster zoomed in on the contents of the first upper subfloor.

  “Looks like it.” Foster switched the feed from the sonar view back to the standard camera image. Aided by the fiber optics, a vista of rows and rows of raised partitions topped with something that looked like mattresses came into focus. “Do you guys have beds over here, Joseph?”

  “Of course there are beds over here, Foster.” He sounded resentful at the implication that aliens didn’t require sleep, or for that matter, a need to be comfortable. But he could completely understand why someone would be curious about the subject. “But my species doesn’t use such things for sleeping, if you know what I mean?”

  “I can’t believe you just said that, Joseph.” Justine pretended to gag.

  Foster, on the other hand, thought all of this was extremely interesting and funny at the same time. “You saw all those pictures above the fireplace, didn’t you?”

  “Unfortunately…” Justine remembered the five different kids with four different mothers.

  “Hey,” The deputy sounded a little hurt as he said, “when you’re on a two-year timeline, Agent Rushing, there’s not a lot of room for foreplay.”

  “Really?” She snuck a glance back at Foster’s gleeful face before staring back at Joseph’s smug one. “That must make for a lot of awkward mornings.”

  “Not really,” the deputy stuttered out an awkward reply. “My species knows the score.”

  “Really?” Sensing that the deputy was both hiding something and had more to say on the subject, Justine waited for him to continue. But for some unknown reason, the disguised alien left whatever was bothering him unsaid.

  “Ok... moving on.” Satisfied that the upper floors were devoid of movement, Foster readjusted the view until only the mysterious box was front and center. “The box appears to be made of solid metal, or whatever passes for metal over here.”

  A quick tap of the top icon signaled for the 8-ball to whir slightly on its x-axis and begin scanning the object with its proprietary x-ray feature. After a minute, the scan finished with no results. Next up was the portable MRI package, but that too delivered nothing informative.

  Finally, Foster scanned the structure with a powerful infrared camera and again came up wanting. Having exhausted all the 8-ball’s tricks, he reluctantly declared. “Whatever it is, it’s sealed up tight.”

  Unhindered by the PDS’s failings, Joseph stepped toward the silver wall and pressed his ear up against its cold surface. Initially, he could only hear a low humming sound coming from somewhere deep inside the cube. This was quickly followed by what sounded very much like water rushing through iron pipes.

  “Book 22.” He scratched the wall with his fingernail. “This stuff is commonly known to my people as Trenenite.”

  When Joseph removed his finger, a small indention remained visible on the surface for a second before quickly filling back in. “We use this stuff to line large ship reactors. Trenenite is great at maintaining its programmed shape, is extremely malleable and can shield out almost any type of radiation.”

  He rapped hard on the wall with a closed fist to gauge its thickness. “Lead has nothing on this shit.” Suddenly, the low hum became a deafening roar.

  “Stop that for Christ’s sake!” Hoover screamed over their earpieces so loudly that each one of them shuddered involuntarily. “Do you idiots want to blow up the universe?”