Cowboys and Aliens Ch. 25

"The belt is what saved me?"

"Yes, that was an invention Solara made, before the Atlanteans even came back to Earth. It's what has saved me from numerous assassination attempts."

"I always wondered how you survived those... everyone thinks you have superpowers."

Mark laughed, "Well, don't tell anyone my secret!"

"Your secret is safe with me, my King!" Then after a few seconds, "How did you know there would be an attempt?"

"I didn't! There's a lot of people, businesses and governments on this planet that rely on war, crime and chaos to control their citizens, stay in power and make money... pretty much everything we stand against. I have just adopted the idea that anywhere I go that isn't Atlantean controlled is a potential danger, and I try to make sure anyone with me is as protected as I can make them."

It was already dark by the time they returned to the palace, so they more or less went straight in to bed.

The next day, saw Dominic setup the Federation Bank, just off the southern path. He chose that direction since they had visited the Planning Office and had bought a plot of land that direction and had hired an architect to design their new home on it. So when he went to work, his trip would be more direct.

Since there had been so many transports arriving every day, Mark made a point to go out and visit the terminal everyday, just to see how things were going and to meet a few of the new arrivals.

When he arrived, there were two transports on the ground unloading passengers and the inside of the terminal was crazy busy. The security personnel were downstairs helping with crowd control and he found Major Thom trying to keep two passengers from fighting, but upon seeing Mark, they both calmed down and bowed.

Mark asked what the conflict was about and they both started talking at once. Mark held up his hand and said, "One at a time, you'll both get your chance to speak," as he pointed to one of the passengers.

"He claims I jumped the line in order to get preferential housing."

Mark pointed to the other guy and asked, "Is that true?" To which the man nodded affirmative.

Mark then shrugged his shoulders, shook his head and said, "There is no preferential housing, the residential section is a ring and every house is exactly the same since they are only temporary housing. Once you get your house assigned, the lifts will take you directly to it, so there's no place that's better or worse than any other and it gets assigned to you, you don't get to choose your temporarily accommodations. Just be patient as we have a lot of people to process."

The men apologized to each other and went their separate ways. Major Thom thanked for the assist and then told Mark there was two transports unloading now and there were three transports currently waiting in orbit.

After watching the chaos for a few minutes, Mark found Jenice and suggested, "Maybe instead of having them get in another line to get their housing assigned, after they've waited to go through security, it may be more efficient to have the house assigning people move down the line prior to security, since all the families should already be together. That way people only ever have to be in one queue."

She thought that was a good idea and soon an announcement was being made about the temporary housing and that they were making some adjustments to speed up the process.

That small change sped up the process immensely and they soon had the transports lifting off. Then the other three came down at the same time since they were slightly smaller. In the time that those three were processed, there were two more in orbit.

Atlantis now had a population of over 50,000 citizens, although many had not yet chosen a location, but the island was growing fast. Most townsites now had several residences, businesses, a restaurant or two, a communal meal pavilion and a school with sports fields.

That weekend, Jason was away at a hockey tournament, so Joe and Kat visited Atlantis to do some looking around, leaving Maria, Jorge and Sophia to run the ranch.

After viewing the locations Annabelle had scouted, they agreed that Annabelle had found them the best location in the Atlas region south of Mount Cleito and north of the Meteor Plateau. So, they bought the land and a few kilometres in each direction. Then met up with Solara, Meles and Lydia and went to a centauri architect in the Evenor delta area of the Mneseus region to do the design.

Solara used the log designs from the lodge as the basis for the new buildings and between Joe, Kat, Meles and Lydia, they designed the new ranch from the ground up. The next morning they got the plans transferred to a construx and by Sunday night the new ranch was born, but because it was now classified as an accommodation business, it was now listed in the lift directory and easy to get to.

They didn't go with the lodge idea, opting instead to go with a bunch of little single room cabins and 4 log barn homes for the 4 centaur couples, that were going to be living and working on the ranch, scattered amongst the abundant trees around a central cookhouse. Joe and Kat's home looked like a traditional log house with a wraparound covered porch. The house did have 3 bedrooms, but otherwise was pretty basic. They also had two riding arena's, one was outdoor and the other had a roof, but no walls.

Overall the new ranch was almost its own little town nestled amongst the tree, with nearly two dozen structures and many kilometres of fences for different pastures all with shelters and fresh water near the gates. They even built a little bridge over the stream.

Once the ranch was built, Kat took a bunch of pictures and went into the city, to meet with the breakfast club about building a website for the new ranch and to have the old website modified to link the two ranch websites together. Since they had recently rebuilt the ranch website during their stint at the ranch during the blizzard.

While that was being done, Mark decided to take everyone up to visit the factory on the moon. So Maren, Mark, Annabelle, Rayven, Solara, Laruun, Marta, Gyges, Athena and Gaderius went up to the tour the moon factory.

Mark was sitting up front with Maren and as they were skimming across the lunar surface toward the factory, Mark noticed some development near the Apollo 11 site.

Cricket informed him that was actually a private business that was taking his idea of moon tours to the next level as they had built a hotel close to the Apollo sites and there was a domed area in front of the hotel that went within about 5 metres of the actual site. Near the edge of the dome was a decent sized hotel with a large landing bay just along the edge, and a big Apollo 11 in white on the roof.

As they landed at the factory, they were greeted by 4 security staff, so no chance of having an orgy on the moon today. They took a look into the production corridor just off to the side and could see a plethora of drones moving parts around. It definitely did not look like a very people friendly environment.

As they exited the production facility, Mark looked around the perimeter and he could see a lot of blue numbers, which meant that many of the fabrication units were in use. Cricket informed him that it was primarily power cells, but there were a few other items as well. She also informed them that she had created some cargo containers the same size as the ones they commonly used to ship stuff around Earth.

Rather than taking the hover carts though, they all jumped towards the warehouse nearly half a kilometre away, reaching it after just a bit longer than it would've taken with the hover carts. Entering the warehouse they saw a number of flying forklift type drones moving pallets and pallet sized bins and containers to the appropriate shelves. It appeared they were manufacturing and storing the various power cells.

They returned to the landing bay and went through the transition tunnel into the office area. Everyone commented about the weird feeling going through the tunnel and feeling the gravity increase.

They talked to the security staff for a bit, asking how things were going and what had been decided for the shift rotations. They said they were one week on, two weeks off, which made Mark happy to hear as he then asked if they knew anything about the development near the Apollo 11 site at the southern end of the Sea of Tranquility. They didn't know much, other than that it was a business from Atlantis.

Mark thanked them for their time and told them to keep up the good work as they boarded the shuttle. As they were lifting off, Mark suggested that maybe they should drop in for a visit at the hotel. So a couple of minutes later, they were touching down in the landing bay of the Apollo 11 Hotel. There was another ship in the landing bay so Mark figured there should be someone around the place. As they exited the shuttle and walked into the hotel, they could feel that the facility had artificial gravity. The hotel itself was quite luxurious looking and there were two men sitting down at a table talking.

They recognized Mark and Annabelle immediately and welcomed the royal visit to their hotel. Mark apologized for dropping in unannounced, but then told him that he had been thinking about doing the same thing and that he was glad someone came up with the idea. So the men got everyone a drink and they explained their business.

They were former cargo pilots that had married and moved to Atlantis. Their new company was called 'Lunar Adventures', they had a couple of shuttle busses for people just wanting to get to the hotels on the moon, and they had also retrofitted their cargo ships to more or less be passenger ships with a large empty cargo bay.

All their ships could take 50 people at a time, but the former cargo ships also included stopping and letting people float around in zero gravity, for half an hour, before either continuing to a lunar hotel or returning to Atlantis. Then at the hotel they had a big dome that went close to the Apollo 11 lunar module, in fact you could see the site from the patio in front of the hotel. They hadn't wanted to disturb the site, so people could walk out and see the site for themselves, but they couldn't touch.

Similar to the factory, they had an organic park with a pond to help with the atmosphere inside the dome and artificial gravity inside the hotel itself.

Mark asked if they could go check out the site and the men said they would be honoured if they did.

When you're in a reduced gravity zone, you tend not to walk, although you easily could, you just make long bouncing steps, so a few bounces later and they were all standing beside the Apollo 11 lunar module. The guys had even made a point-of-interest board that had all the details about the Apollo 11 mission and landing site. It was nice to see that they were respecting someone else's history.

After watching the presentation at the information kiosk, the men said they had these at all the landing sites and at sites 15, 16 and 17 you could also see the lunar rover they left behind.

None of the hotels were overly huge with only 50 rooms each, but they were ornately decorated and had all sorts of souvenir items. But they all had the name of the landing zone on the roof, so it would be easier to locate the landing zones using telescopes from Earth.

Mark was sure those guys would be quite busy with their new business, as they thanked them for the impromptu tour. Then they boarded the shuttle and were soon back at the palace, just as Kat was returning from her meeting with the breakfast club.

Due to demand, the architectural firms had sped up their processes by simply reusing their previous designs and making minor adjustments specific for the lot it was going on. Due to a couple of conflicts though, they implemented the one week public display and feedback process. Cricket also upgraded the overhead views to be able to project the lot plan, so when people were looking at specific lots, the border of the lot was able to be seen.

This process carried on for the next couple of weeks with more and more people arriving daily. Most citizens were picking out their places within a couple of days, then getting a design put on a holocube and put on the lot for public display. Few citizens stayed in temporary housing for even two weeks.

At the end of the second week, Atlantis had a population of almost half a million citizens, scattered across now 121 municipalities, with pretty much every sort of business now on the island. Every townsite was getting established with businesses, schools, sports facilities and many were in the midst of holding elections for their first town council.

The section on the second ring, did in fact become an entertainment district. There ended up being over 20 bars, pubs and clubs that had opened up from the gold path around to the stadiums and arena. Not that you had to walk through that area to get to a game, but you could do some serious partying before or after the games.

It was kind of like an Atlantean version of Bourbon Street, which got Mark to thinking that maybe one of the two big celebrations each year would gain some planet-wide attention... like their own version of Mardi Gras?

The only two major celebrations in an Atlantean year were the summer and winter solstices. There was no Christmas, since they had left Earth long before the stories in the bible even existed, plus there was no such things as gods anyway, but they were likely going to start a Rebirth Day to celebrate the rebirth of Atlantis, since it would coincide approximately when the spring equinox happens. Although all the planets celebrated the two solstices, all of the events happened at different times for each planet due to their differing orbits.

Now that their currency was being traded, several airlines and cruise lines were adding flights and cruises to Atlantis, so many entrepreneurs were setting up hotels, resorts, golf courses and other tourist attractions for the impending influx of tourists.

Also since people were not staying in temporary housing as long as they had expected, they had re-zoned sections 9 through 3 of the outer ring to be hotels and other tourist type businesses, including golf courses, water slides, movie theatres, kayak rentals and there was also now an underwater path system similar to Atria in the aquatic rings.

Hundreds of merpeople had even immigrated to Atlantis and they requested to live in the water, so they were allowed to setup their houses in the outer aquatic ring and many also built houses in the shallower waters on the south-eastern side of the island.

With the continuing lack of wild life on the island, one of the attractions on the outer ring was a massive zoo that contained just about every type of animal on Earth, but also sections that contained animals from some of the other federated planets. The beauty of the zoo though, was that it was 100% holographic, which in all honesty actually made it better than most real zoos as the animals were always visible and doing something, plus it didn't require a lot of staff and the animals didn't need to be fed or cared for.

Another popular attraction was setup in the valley between Mount Lycabettus and Mount Hymettus, just north of Poseidon's Garden. It was called Survival Park and it was a glorified outdoor laser tag game park with some twists. When you were killed, either from getting shot by another player or from a field hazard you were paralyzed and the vest would immobilize your body and slowly lower you to the ground for one minute, then once you were back in the game you could shoot immediately, but you could not be shot or attacked for 30 seconds. The person that made the most points before the game ended, won. When the game ended, the vests immobilized you again and this time you floated back to the starting zone.

What made it really fun was the field hazards. The guys running it really got into some of the Earth movies, so they created all sorts of field hazards, all were holographic of course, but they looked real and could still kill you, virtually speaking. The field hazards would be chosen before the game started, you could have wild animals, dinosaurs, aliens and predators, giant spiders and snakes, zombies, terminators, they even had an adult theme with naked warrior tribes with spears. All hazards were worth points if you killed one, but a fellow player was always worth way more points than hazards. To start the games they used the same technology as the palace hover elevators, you stepped on a hover pad, got encased by a force field and then you got whisked away to a random starting position, but you couldn't step off the pad until the game started. The guns displayed your score, the countdown to game start or end and would also give you a warning after 5 minutes, when the field hazards were about to be activated.

While having a game like that on the island didn't really portray the Federation way of life, it was a private enterprise and the government didn't interfere with businesses, unless actual laws were being broken or it was damaging to the planet. This game just exemplifies the fact that watching violent movies and TV shows is everywhere and that's what people are learning and idolizing. At least in the Federation everyone realizes it's just a game, because you could never do that with a real weapon. Security would have you down before you could even pull the trigger.

The following Friday marked the first airline arrivals, so Mark spent the morning out at the airport overseeing how things went. Overall it went fairly smooth, the only issue was that they had to assign a few staff to teach the tourists how to use the lift system, so after the first plane had been processed they had a meeting and made a few changes.

One change they made was, despite the efficiencies gained by organizing the roof transit zone into the various regions, they did away with the regions and just gave everyone a free private lift from the terminal to their destination. They also had security ask the tourists where their reservation was and that location was set as their HOME location. Then they had to assign people to help them use lifts. That way when they got into the lift and couldn't figure out how it worked they would at least get to their resort from anywhere on the island. Even at the public transit stops, there was always an option called HOME that was available.

Another change was putting an INFO button on the lift calling pedestals and when pressed it would print a map of the island on one side and step-by-step instructions with pictures on how to use the public transit system. As Joe had said, 'Never underestimate the extent of human stupidity' or 'Common sense isn't as common as it should be'.

The weekend went well and no conflicts between citizens and tourists were reported anywhere. There must've been a lot of travel bloggers, reporters and travel agents on those first few flights, as the next week there were numerous reports all over the Internet about the wonders of Atlantis.

Every article mentioned the unique airport, spaceport, seaport design and that the port was where you would get your first experience with aliens, as many species worked at the terminal and that they all were very friendly and helpful. They then went into talking about the transit system being the best thing they had ever seen or used anywhere in the world.

After that the articles all went different directions, but the most mentioned topics were the scenery, the golden road, medical services, the temples, the Oracle, the zoo, the live aquarium complete with real mermaids and the numerous world class golf courses and sporting venues.

Several articles referenced the Survival Park and how it was like a mix of Hunger Games and Jurassic Park (they obviously had picked the dinosaur hazards) and that it was the most exhilarating game they had ever experienced.