One Last System

"Is everyone ready?" Alice asked, sitting in the usual place she would take as Daniel's personal secretary.

Not a single voice replied to her question. Instead, a set of small boxes on the screen of her tablet turned green.

A small smile appeared on the girl's lips, a smile she quickly wiped off her lips.

"Daniel," Alice then said, raising her voice just a bit to make it reach her boss a bit further down the secondary bridge.

"Yes, Alice?" Daniel asked, standing in his usual spot even though, save for the two of them, there was no one else on the deck for him to command.

"Everyone's ready," Alice announced while putting her pad down on a modern-looking desk that she sat behind.

"Then you may green light his descent," Daniel said, refusing to move his head even an inch.

Daniel put more precautions for the coming visit in place than he did when the war erupted. Even the time when he organized this entire caravan ended up with a smaller focus on perfect control over the surrounding areas and impeccable defense of the site they were in.

For the coming meeting, Daniel put all stops aside. He didn't hold back on technology, pulling out even the items, that while stashed on his hovers, remained two or even three generations above what the conglomerate was officially allowed to use.

"I'm approving the descend," Alice announced a short moment later.

All at once, all the screens within the deck lit up. All the equipment that Daniel deployed just for his occasion connected to the hive mind of the headquarters, ushering into the brainpower of the quasi-quantum computer when it came to all the calculations they had to make.

Automated turrets started to target every single inch of the entire sky. Thrity clouds of drones dispersed over the greatest area they could cover before losing cohesion within their units.

All kinds of automated vehicles and sentries booted up, quickly turning the excavation area into the most fortified patch of land on the face of the entire planet.

"Still, I gotta ask," Alice muttered once she was done with all the steps of the procedure that had to be completed manually. "Is all of this really necessary?"

Alice raised her eyes at her boss and refused to move them away even when the silence continued to prolong.

"This will be the first time in over a hundred years for the two of us to meet," Daniel, just like the girl expected, replied after a long while. "First, I don't know whether he changed or not. And if he did, I have no idea by what degree."

Daniel shook his head.

"A hundred years seem like a mere instant for people with a lifespan like ours… but it's a hundred years nevertheless."

Daniel hung his head to the back and released a long, heavy sigh.

"Just look at how the world has changed over the last century. And if the entire world can change by such a massive degree…" Daniel put in a short pause before finally turning his head slightly to the side and giving Alice a sideways look.

"Then just how much could a single person change in the same period of time?"

The chat was cut when the tracking camera finally locked on the target, assisting its descent from the low earth's orbit towards the part of the sky fully controlled by Daniel's forces.

Daniel's old friend and student came to inspect the digging site within the most modern piece of aircraft that the world had produced so far.

Said aircraft belonged to the seventh cycle of development, falling behind by one of two generations when compared to Daniel's official strength.

And yet, when taking all the technological ace cards Daniel hid all over the place, his former student's plane simply paled in comparison.

'There are certain things in life that change,' Daniel thought, watching how the aircraft descended through the layer of clouds before moving down and down, all the way to the point where it hovered directly above the ground.

The pilot of the aircraft clearly knew what he was doing. He used the moment of hovering just above the ground to lower the wheels of the air vehicle onto the ground before softly putting his machine down.

'That's one hell of a flying experience,' Daniel thought, watching with all his focus as a small group of people vacated the airship before allowing it to rise from the ground.

The pilot then pressed the power of his engines to its maximum, bolting off to the distance at an acceleration that bordered what a normal human could survive.

'And so he landed,' Daniel thought, watching on his screen how the group was instantly taken over by his own security forces.

Soon, the visitors got escorted to the nearby hover of the older generation. The vehicle then carried all of them over to Daniel's private vehicle before finally completing the transfer of the valuable guests.

'I wonder how he brought with himself,' Daniel thought, patiently waiting while observing the progress of his guests through one of the many screens littered all over the secondary deck of his hover.

Soon enough, though, the answer to this question revealed itself to his eyes as the group passed by several sets of turns of corridors only to arrive at the doorstep of Daniel's secondary deck.

"Daniel," the leader of the visitors muttered the second he stepped upon the deck and took a look around only for his eyes to suddenly stop moving when he noticed Daniel's back.

The man himself turned around while still refusing to leave his usual position.

"Patric…," Daniel said in a low voice, unable to react with as much joy and excitement as he had planned to.

'This visit has no logical reason,' Daniel thought in the meantime, right as he entered a contest of stares with some of the friends that his former disciple brought over.

Then, both of the men suddenly started laughing before they each left their spot and rushed towards each other.

"Damn, brother!" Daniel muttered right as he fell into the hug of the only person in the entire world that had a more or less full grasp over his character. "It's been way too long since the last time we met!"