Purely Business

Sam is a very busy man. He had been struggling the previous night trying to finish up some bug fixes to his newest project and had fallen asleep at 3 in the morning again, just like usual. It was the bi-hourly city train that woke him up with its shrieking whistle. Yawning deeply, Sam slowly dragged himself out of his comfortable sofa bed and trudged to the kitchen and prepared to brew himself some hot tea. As he waited for the water to boil, Sam pulled up his Mobili, a communication gizmo, and started scrolling through the daily news. It was completely normal. Nothing out of the ordinary, just another asteroid that was pulverized due to flying too close to his current planet, Sector 1020A, and some more news about scientists and astronauts attempting to discover even more Sectors. Each day was the same as the last. Protect current Sectors, and search for new ones that could be colonized. Day in, day out. Of course, most people at this point simply didn't care about this kind of news as it didn't really affect them either way. They were too busy with their lives, and simply had no time for such basic day to day things. Asteroids would constantly rain down in the sectors, and new sectors would continually be discovered and colonized. However, Sam couldn't simply ignore it. After all, this was his job. Sam was part of the engineering team that helped build the warp-pads which could access new Sectors. And with such an advanced piece of technology came tremendous risks. One faulty move and the passengers on the warp-pads could be teleported to a random Sector, or even worse, they could be sent to some remote position that was completely off of the Grid. There had been cases of missing colonizer teams due to faulty calculations. The Council, of course, had always denied such cases, but being on the engineering team, Sam, of course, knew that such a possibility was always present.

The Grid was the name of the space in which all the currently known Sectors were located. Scientists hypothesized that there was potentially an infinite amount of Sectors to be explored and each most likely had never seen before organisms that occupied them with different biological and chemical features and terrain. Sectors were simply the general name for the planets that Sectarians inhabited. It was decided long ago when Operation Sector launched that naming each new planet was too much of a pain and instead each new planet was simply given the generalized name 'Sector' followed by a numerical value. Sam currently had no real Sector that he could call home as his job constantly moved him around from Sector to Sector. Normally it was impossible for someone to visit more than a handful of Sectors as in order to do so they had to go through months of paperwork and background checks in order to obtain a Sector-pass. However, Sam's job gave him a Grid-pass and documents which were directly created by the Council which allowed Sam universal citizenship. This way, Sam could move freely from Sector to Sector without worrying about being stopped by inter-sectorial investigation crews.

The inter-sectorial investigation crew, or the IIC, was somewhat feared by the general public. Of course, if one hadn't done anything wrong, one shouldn't have to fear anything. However, rumors about the IIC were still relatively common. People detained by the IIC were never heard from again, and their family, if they had any, would usually disappear as well or would deny ever having another family member. This generally caused a lot of conspiracies. Many hypothesized that the detained Sectarians were simply eliminated while others believed that the Sectarians were actually being secretly drafted into a cult-like militaristic division. Sam, of course, knew the truth as he was part of the engineering team, and he helped organize the destination of the unfortunate souls. The destination of the Sectarians, however, was always kept top secret as the Council obviously didn't want too many people knowing about what they did and this information has even been kept a secret to people like Sam, who was simply given the coordinates and not the details. However, Sam still managed to find out where the Sectarians were sent to because unfortunately for the Council, they didn't manage to hide their tracks well enough. After doing a bit of research Sam realized that the Sectarians were being sent to places that were off of the Grid. These Sectarians were probably meant to act as test dummies by the scientific department and were used as a catalyst to their research. Either way, Sam didn't really care. It was simply part of his job, and really had no particular effect on him or his life.

Sam was pulled out of his thoughts by the shrieking of the kettle. Sam turned off his kettle and poured the steaming water into his cup, in which he had already prepared dried tea leaves. Sipping his hot tea, Sam turned his attention back to reading more headlines. There was some more news of rebel sectors turning against the Council, but these were pretty normal too. With a population of 357 billion Sectarians, there was bound to be at least a few sectors that decided to try to overthrow the Council. However, such rebellious Sectors always ended up in tragedy. Just another Sector wiped off the face of the Grid. Naturally, the Council always tried to cover up these destroyed Sectors with more lies. Perhaps this time it was an unseen asteroid or a nuclear reactor meltdown. But Sam knew. After all, he was part of the engineering team. And the engineering team was also the team in charge of destroying rebel Sectors. However, Sam never felt guilty. Afterall there were thousands of Sectors on the Grid and a couple of million lives being vanquished was pretty much nothing in the grand scheme of things. Also, these things didn't really bother Sam anyways, it was just part of the job after all. With such thoughts settled, Sam quickly got back to work again. He was, after all, a very busy man.