When Alex brought Laura out of his ‹Inventory›, she was greeted by the empty, yet calm remains of the Bastion.
“What happened there?” she asked him. “I felt like I was about to die.”
“An opportunistic nobody thought that it was a good idea to try and ambush us after we just took care of Ultron,” he said casually. “So? Motorcycle road trip, huh? That doesn’t sound like too bad of an idea.”
“Great,” Laura nodded. “Where are we going to go, though? Where exactly is the base of the X-Men if it’s not on this continent?”
“They are in Colombia,” Alex said. “So we’ll only be able to go up to Panama before requiring alternative transportation.”
“Good enough,” she nodded. “It’s a road trip. We’ll take a fuckton of breaks in the middle. So that the drive takes at least a week.”
“If you want the kinds of breaks I’m thinking about, make that a month. Every break that you are thinking of is going to last us a whole day. New York to Panama is a three-day drive if we don’t stop for a single moment.”
“This isn’t New York.”
“It’s close enough,” Alex said. “I landed barely a hundred miles from the Bastion. And I always land in Central Park.”
“Damn… I guess we’re taking a month then,” she said. “I don’t just want to go there abruptly. I’m not completely ready yet.”
“I’d say that you’ll never be completely ready, but hey, we’ve had that conversation more times than I’d like to count,” he said. “I guess we’re going on a long road trip.”
“It’ll be fun, we can sightsee.”
“There are no sights left in your world to see anymore. It’s all a flat, barren land like this place. Don’t worry, though, I’m considering terraforming this planet and bringing back the liveliness.”
“Great, you’ll be like a shepherd growing grass for the sheep that he rears only to eventually butcher them,” Laura said.
…
As Alex and Laura began their long road trip, the Widows also received new directives to split up and bring some important personnel from their current settlement to a new location, which was going to be where the Prime Bastion of North America was to be established. They were going to bring people to what used to be the previous nest of the ‹Eldrich Leader Class› abomination. For now, the people would be moved into their original base, but they were now going to start construction on their new home from today.
At this time, Alex had already brought Yelena here, and she looked at the horrific scene with an expression of slight distaste.
“Are you sure we want to build the new settlement on top of this blood?”
“Yeah, sure. Consider it mineral-rich rich fertile soil. In a few years or so, this whole place will become a thriving ecosystem in its entirety. The citizens won’t have to eat processed abomination meat anymore.”
“Eat what?” She looked at him with horrified eyes. “What are you talking about? The food we use all comes from my Earth. Tony Stark pays for all of it. Right? This is horrifying…not to mention cannibalistic.”
“Oh, not our settlement,” he said. “The other one. The Bastion. They used to eat abomination meat to sustain themselves because it was practically impossible to grow anything despite their technology.”
“But you told me about all those things there… coffee shops…sodas…capitalism… They couldn’t have come out of nowhere,” Yelena said. “Why would they resort to cannibalism in that case?”
“Ultron, Yelena,” Alex said. “You remember Sokovia? An entire city that flew up in the air and was about to destroy all humanity on your planet as you knew it. These people were being managed by that Ultron. It did its best to emulate elements of human society by any means possible. After scouring the Bastion’s and Ultron’s data, I understood that it was all a lie that was told to the citizens. Coffee grounds were just ground-up abomination bones with flavouring that people gobbled up because they didn’t know any better. It’s the same with every other resource that they supposedly had.”
“That’s so messed up…”
“Ultron…is a flawed being,” Alex said. “It is an artificial intelligence, yes, but also more. It doesn’t possess the first thing that characterizes what we consider to be an artificial intelligence, which is absolute control over its emotions. It’s emotional and acts upon those emotions more times than not. The worst part is that Ultron usually believes that it is doing the right thing, despite doing it in the most twisted way imaginable. It wanted to protect humanity, and it did. Even though that protection came in the form of mind-fucking lies and downright cannibalism.”
“Well, it’s going to be good for them since they now get to live under another similarly worse leader who will treat them essentially like cattle.”
“That is the fate of the weak,” Alex said. “I think you might be able to understand that. If the strong do not have a conscience, the weak are the ones who suffer. They are lucky that I am not needlessly cruel. I’m considering simply reducing the life expectancy of these people to sixty years of age, at which point they spontaneously turn into abominations. That way, they won’t have to deal with constant and endless wars.”
“It’s like the difference between jumping over a cliff or jumping into a pit filled with scorpions.”
“I don’t know about you, but I’d choose the cliff. At least it’s an easy death.” Alex said.
“That was the point of my words. The age thing is like a cliff. You still die, but it’s not as depressing as having people you care about be eaten and turned into zombies right in front of you.”
“Anyway, we’ll have enough time to debate on the moral quandary this poses,” he said. “I want your input to help me get a framework in mind for this place. The architects should be arriving soon, and I want to have something to discuss with them.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“I was thinking that the center of the city could be an elevated docking station for the Sanctuary. Instead of me or Gaia having to take action to bring the Widows to the ground, we will make a tall tower that has a similar oomph factor.”
“Oomph factor?” Yelena repeated with an amused expression.
“You get my point. It will maintain the prestige of the widows in the hearts of the people and make them seem like the higher-status individuals that they are. I think it’s a solid idea. And it’s all that I have. Except for a huge wall similar to the one around Tony Stark’s Bastion, around the perimeter. That’s also important. Everything in the center is up for discussion.”
Yelana shook her head at him, yet didn’t seem disappointed. It was as if she’d expected that this was all he’d thought of.
“What about the parks? Schools? Universities? Homes? Hell, normal training dojos? Are we not going to give any of those things to these people? Even Ultron gave them that stuff.”
“Of course, we’re going to be building those,” Alex nodded. “I want my Prime Bastion to be big enough to house at least a population of a hundred million people eventually. That’s the only way that the number of the Abominations would be able to increase substantially enough. We will need these things to make the people here thrive, for that vision to come true. I just don’t care where they go. That’s why I didn’t mention it.”
Yelena sighed and crossed her arms. “Since you want this place to be that big, we will need to divide the city into different districts. The area around the docking station of our flying fortress—The Sanctuary,” she corrected herself, “should be divided into four main districts for the time being. Each with its own schools, a community college, preferably a university as well, for those who want to go into more advanced studies. Make each central district large enough to house two hundred thousand people. Once eight hundred thousand people are housed, we can move on to the rest—can I get a pen and paper?”
Alex created a whole drafting table for Yelena with all the tools she might need to design his new city’s foundational structure.
“So here, here, here, and here,” she created four sections around a central circle. “These will be the central districts. Each of them gets marketplaces, schools, colleges, universities, the whole nine yards. Next, defensive lines,” she drew four corridors that led from each central district to the outer walls. “These four places are going to be assigned to the military forces. Protectors. Everything to do with their local abomination-fighting forces is going to be done in these four corridors. These will make the mobilization of military forces much easier in case of an Abomination attack. The remaining areas will be divided into tier two districts and farmlands, depending on what you want to do. If you want such an insanely large population and include farmlands, we will need to significantly optimize residency and spacing for the city. Either that, or your Prime Bastion has to be as large as Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois combined. Those are the five states around us. If we want to build a wall around such a large area…”
“That…sounds like a plan,” Alex nodded. “I have all the resources in multiple worlds at my disposal, Yelena. A thriving population means more people growing old and crossing the age of sixty. Hence, I will have more abominations. The Prime Bastion will have a population of hundreds of millions of people in the next century. Of course, such a wall isn’t feasible for now. So instead, we will simply build a wall around the four districts that you have planned and eventually build outward from here. Now that there are no abominations of insane proportions on this continent, I can accelerate time here even further, such that a single day would be equivalent to a whole year in here. In a decade or so, our trainees will all mature, and we will be able to expand our forces. That’s when we will move on to conquer South America in a similar fashion. And unlike this time, the Widows will be the ones to kill the ‹Eldrich Leader Class› Abomination overlord of that continent…”
At some point in Alex’s monologue, Yelena had started tuning out his voice and was instead focusing on enhancing her design so that she could have something concrete to talk to the architects about. After all, Alex would be disappearing the moment they neared, leaving everything to her to manage.