The worn booth seat dug into him. He idly browsed through a Stem City pamphlet to kill time. There were pictures of wide, open streets with neon signs, lucrative concerts, and tasty food. All sorts of aliens of all shapes and sizes mingled in the streets. It didn't look too different from home. The only difference is that these people looked happy to walk storefront-to-storefront.
He sighed. Oh, to work in a competitive, free market. It must be a joy.
"Hey," The younger man across from him spoke up. The older man jumped. Their yellow eyes met.
The office worker didn't recognize the stranger. In fact, he didn't even see the other man sit down.
Scratching his head and putting down the pamphlet, he responded hesitantly, "...Yes?"
"You ever been here before? Stem Island?"
The first man shook his head and said, "Nope. Haven't heard about this place besides when the accoutants and tech geeks mention it during lunch hour."
On the rare occasion during LAWCORP HQ lunch hours that the overqualified engineers and business majors came out from their mancaves and mingled with the marketing grunts, Stem City was ill-mentioned. When they did, it was always in a vague fashion, like it was an open secret to those who knew.
The younger man exhaled out of his snout and gazed out the small window to his left. The office worker followed along. The train they were on bumped about as the huge mushroom stem it was riding atop traveled over dirt hills.
The view turned from unintelligible forestry to vast, dirt-covered plains. Off in the distance, two tiny, unremarkable settlements could be seen on the horizon, and even further than that was the sprawling silhouette of the massive jungle.
"I don't get it; they call this a city?" The first question.
"The city is coming up here; this is just the countryside," the other replies. In both of their humble opinions, it was a pretty lifeless and barren landscape.
Turning away from the boring rural landscape, the office worker turned his attention back to the stranger. With a suspicious look, he inquired, "Do I know you from somewhere?"
"Nope. Name's Je. Nice to meet ya, Ted."
Shocked for a moment that the man somehow already knew who he was, it didn't take long for his brain to remember that he was wearing his LAWCORP uniform and accompanying nametag.
Laughing awkwardly, the businessman relaxed and extended out his hand across the booth table, "Nice to meet you, Je. Is it normal for you to strike up conversations on the rail like this?"
Je reciprocated with the friendly handshake, "I travel alone a lot. Gets boring."
Chuckling in response, Ted furrowed his brow and idly agreed.
The two sat in silence, both of them facing back out into the wilderness. Off in the distance, past the far-off forestry, they could see a spiraling green wormhole identical to the one that their very train originally ran through.
He tried to remember what the men in Research And Development called the technology. Supernatural? Stupendous? One or the other.
Je picked up Ted's discarded pamphlet and started browsing through it himself. "You ever listen to a Gwino song?"
"No, who's she? What's her stuff like?"
The younger man rolled his eyes and bent his antenna, "Some stupid robot woman, they get to have concerts around these parts."
"Know if she's local or not?"
Je shrugged. "No clue. What I do know is that some people are crazy for synthesized voices, but I prefer the real deal."
Ted agreed. He preferred hard work and dedication and accepted no substitutes. "I gotta agree there; it's-"
Both of the aliens jumped down the aisle, and one of the train's metallic enforcers belted in a crude voice, "CONTRABAND SUSPECTED. SHOW YOUR BAG'S CONTENTS."
A bipedal rodent's tail swished nervously side-to-side as they dug their claw into their purse in front of the Lawmen. Sweat dripped down their hairy brows as the neon blue visor of the mass produced peacekeeper stared lifelessly at them.
Several other passengers stared in suspense. Ted's heart pounded against his chest. He held his breath. He hated those things.
"YOU ARE CLEAR. CONTINUE TO YOUR DESTINATION."
Both Ted and the suspected criminal let out silent sighs of relief as the Lawman stepped back to his position against the wall.
Je looked at Ted, then the Lawman, then back at Ted. He gestured towards his senior's uniform and said, "You work at LAWCORP, right?"
The middle-aged man really, really wishes he didn't. He had a family he would've liked to stay at home with, but again, a contract was a contract.
"Yeah, I do," he replied. "Not a proud job, but somebody has to do the grunt work of marketing so the security industry gets its pay, right?"
"Not like they need more advertising, dude. The whole galaxy and their moms have some sort of arrangement with Stem City, but to think that Lawcorp has their own buckets of bolts out here on the Nexus rails? Your damn company's reach is crazy."
Ted sighed. He couldn't exactly disagree; his job felt pretty pointless from time-to-time. Days without proactive purpose, staring at a computer screen, wasting his life away all because some jerkface CEO on the other side of the spiral galaxy is at happy hour with a coalition senator.
He wouldn't admit it to anybody, but he was convinced his life sucked.
"Psst, hey," Je pointed out the window.
Through the cramped window, they finally could see it: Stem City's imposing figure. A huge blue mushroom cap covered the city's center in shade, with thousands of neon signs lighting up the dark skyline. Massive fungal stems wrapped around the skyscrapers, overflowing past the titanic walls and digging into the rural land outside. They spotted an adjacant Stemrail train or two riding atop the parrallel stems.
The jungle and plains they had ridden through simply couldn't compare to the technological leap demonstrated. Ted's mouth hung open in shock.
"This is where our tax dollars go, buddy," Je joked. "In exchange for letting people and cargo ride through here, the native bastards are taking cuts at everything and building themselves up higher and higher."
The businessman's eyes watched several departing trains head off towards the wormholes past the strange land's jungle. He knew the galaxy was big, but to think that he had barely heard of Stem City up until this point... It seemed unrealistic.
"How the hell did these people even figure out wormholes?" Ted questioned himself aloud.
It was not rhetorical in the slightest; he was genuinely confused. It followed no rules of the theories of evolution. It was all dirt and wilderness on the way here; there was no infrastructure or terraforming to be seen besides the dark-age wood shacks they had passed by earlier. How could such a scientifically primitive civilization manage to cobble together a one-of-a-kind technology such as galactic wormholes?
"What, do I look like a historian? I'm sure you can find the answer in some dusty metro-world library if you dig hard enough." Je's yellow eyes look past the city and into the pitch-black sky that infinitely surrounded the lone floating island that Stem City lay upon. "All I'm certain of is the fact that this place creeps me out."
The rattling train slowed down as they began approaching the Nexus. The expressionless Lawmen positioned at either end of the car tightened the grips on their batons. Ted and Je had their view of the city skyline consumed by a tight steel tunnel. Artifcal yellow light crept through the iron bars of the window and covered their faces.
A compressed clip of Gwino rang out across the entire train as it began to slow. "Hello, STEMRAIL-#09! Welcome to Stem City! Please stay patient as Nexus engineers load cargo aboard!"
Ted sighed. He hoped this pitstop didn't take too long.