Neural Space

I'm Adrian's dream, he was standing in front of a huge golden gate. At the top of the gate was a placard with strange characters written on it.

The characters aren't understandable to human beings but somehow Adrian could understand the characters meant "Welcome to Gelet, Aava's neural commercial capital city."

Adrian breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank God. I thought I died and came to heaven."

But then he paused and read the placard again, this time focusing on the word "Neural". He thought for a while, then shrugged and proceeded towards the gate.

Adrian walked through the gate and what he saw was marvelling. Floating buildings, AI powered bots flying from building to building carrying various packages.

But he noticed something. Even with all the buildings and technology, he didn't see one single person or any living thing. He just saw AI bots flying in and out of buildings and that was it.

He tried walked into the city and almost suddenly lost his footing. At that moment, he realized he was on a cliff. Thanks to his wings, he carefully glided back to the cliff and admired the looks of the neural city.

Meanwhile;

Planet Aava's Neural Monitoring Space Station. 2,000,000,000 light years from Earth.

"Come on Narah. Won't you like to go in a date? I've been asking since we got stationed to this sh*thole space station to watch the neural space that's been empty for centuries." Greene, a buff humanoid, kept pestering his co-worker to go out with him while she was heading to the control room to check on the controls.

"Yes, Greene. I know we've been coworkers working on this space station for donkey years and the neural space has been empty for a long time, but anything could happen. Remember, the Aava neural space holds most secrets belonging to our species. So in order to keep such things hidden properly, we must dedicate our full time and concentration..." She said while tapping on a computer screen. "...not pestering fellow co-workers for some date that will just end up in unwarranted copulation." She concluded while looking him square in the eye with her crystal blue eyes.

For a moment, Greene was stupefied.

"What does that even mean?" He said, while unbelievably staring at her.

"It means no." Narah said casually, giving the computer screen a final tap and exiting the control room via the door behind Greene.

Narah got to the space station's control deck and took her seat. Greene got to his seat beside Narah few minutes later and took his seat.

"You'll go out with me soon, Narah. I'm assuring you of that."

"Whatever. Just turn on the neural space radar." Narah said indifferently.

"Is that really necessary? That place has been empty for ages. No one will even know if we did it not. It won't even be possible for the higher-ups to even know if we turned on the radar or not." Greene replied.

"You're right. It's not necessary. But sorry to say this, but it's mandatory. That's why it's called procedure, Greene. Now turn on the radar before I alert Theta of this misconduct." Narah said authoritatively without even raising her voice or changing her facial expression.

Greene stared at her and looked away momentarily. "Every damn time." He said under his breath.

He always hated when Narah threatened to call Theta, who happened to be the elder-director of the space station's affairs and his elder sister.

He heaved a little sigh and looked at the retinal scanner above his monitor. When the indicator on the retinal scanner blinked green, he closed his eyes, causing the slit on his forehead to open, revealing a third eye hidden in his forehead. The retinal scanner pointed a laser light at the third eye and after about ten seconds the computer voiced out an announcement.

"Access granted. Good morning, Greene. What would you like to do today?"

"Normal routine, Rosa." Greene said.

"Affirmative. Running neural space diagnostics." The AI-Powered computer replied.

After a few seconds, an alarm began sounding in the control room, startling Greene and Narah alike.

"Rosa, what's going on?" Narah asked the AI computer.

"Apologies, Narah. Apologies, Greene. It seems there's an occupant in the neural space."

An occupant in the neural space?

The last time there was a person in the Aava neural space was about five hundred thousand years ago during the great interstellar expansion. The last of the original Aava,the winged humanoid beings, cut all connections with the planet so they could go farther into the blackness of space to further expand their species and occupy distant habitant planets.

This happened five hundred thousand ago. And since then, the neural space had been empty. None of the original Aava sent any messages back since they left the planet to expand.

"Run diagnostics on the occupant." Greene ordered.

Immediately, the alarm stopped while Rosa brought a picture of an unknown humanoid being and broadcasted its statistics. If Nancy saw the image, she'll know that it's Adrian Alexander.

Name: Unknown.

Species: Unknown.

Galaxy of Origin: Unknown.

All other anatomy and physiology stats were intact.

"What?"

There were only two ways to get into the neural space. One was through sleep, which was the way the original Aava visited the space regularly before their disappearance.

The second way was through specific sleeping pods developed by a company called AavaNeural for the Neural Monitoring Space Station. That way, anyone of the staffs could visit the neural space by simply sleeping in it.

But there's a person of unknown origin currently walking in the neural space like he owns the place.

The realization of that alone was scary.

"He looks like one of the original Aava. But his blood has red plasma and those of the Aava are green. He even has wings. This doesn't check out." Narah said, obviously confused.

"Narah, there's obviously an intruder in the neural space. We should go down there and interrogate this creature to know where it comes from and how it was able to get access."

"Let's stay a bit more, Greene. I'm sure it'll just take a while before Rosa deciphers its origin location. I'll just be a minute."

"Narah, look at the screen. Rosa is an AI with an unlimited supply of intergalactic knowledge. Yet she couldn't figure out the origin of this intruder. Not even his species or home galaxy. What makes you think you can?"

These words hit home. Rosa has the knowledge about planets that are within a ten-million light year range from planet Aava and yet she couldn't find Adrian's origin. What could she do?

"I'll be in my sleeping pod." Greene said and left the bridge, headed to his sleeping pod in a specific room that had thousands of sleeping pods.

Drawing a deep breath, Narah stood up and followed.