Chapter 8.1- All of Infinity

“There’s only one option then. The way you speak about the Nova Empire, they sound like really scary and powerful people.” Ovette was the one who began speaking. Fully stepping into the role she was beginning to assume as general spokesperson for her people, Her voice, soft and strong rang across the silence in the room that had built up over time, crashing through it and not being found wanting. The voice of a Queen? Not yet. But maybe with time.

“And you’re strong. We know you’re strong, but not strong enough to take down dozens of planets by yourself, are you?” The question was meant to be rhetorical but something about the look on my face must have given her the answer.

“Really? Surely you gest” She said to a shake of my head. I could probably take out the entire Nova Empire if given the time and if I decided not to do anything else with my time. Sure, it would take years. Maybe even decades of effort if I wasn’t smart about it and if they had the forewarning and time to implement the absolute best tactics. The bit of Zod in me had already run the simulations.

“I’d win. I’d win eventually. It would take a lot of time, and most of you wouldn’t survive to tell the tale, but if it was us v the Nova Empire, we’d win” I said, assuring her and the rest of them. She was the only one who looked shocked, the rest of them didn’t quite grasp what exactly I was speaking of. She’d spent just as much time with me on the Dark Aster with Kamori as she had outside of it helping her people prepare for the shift, so she was the only one who truly understood the scale of the Nova Empire and the kind of shit they could do with the proper motivation.

“Alright then. We’ll make that plan Z.” I stifled the chuckle that nearly built in me at that phrase. I’d said it once as a joke and now she used it everytime she could. Most often in the wrong context, but maybe not so much this time.

“But this Collector. He’s a single man, is he not?”

“I would hesitate to call him a man, but yes.”

“Then we just beat him up and take all his stuff” Drax declared from besides her, reminding me that while Ovette was the genius of the family, that didn’t mean Drax couldn’t have his moments where they both thought on the same wavelength.

“It will have consequences. The Collector is old. Older than most things in the universe. In that time, he’s made a lot of friends in high places. “

“Then we beat them up and take their stuff too” Ovette replied, hand on her husband’s. The smile that built on my face was unstoppable as I looked at them and then turned to the rest of the council who were nodding along with them.

“To Knowhere we go then” I declared.

“Where?” Drax asked.

“Knowhere” I replied.

“But shouldn’t we really be going somewhere?” He asked, looking at me as if I’d grown a second head.

“We are” I said, seeing where this was going but having all the fun in the world.

“Then where?”
“Knowhere” I said. Now, Ovette was doubled over laughing as the confusion on Drax’s face got worse and worse.

The other councillors were just staring between us. Some of them had already begun whispering to each other about how I was surely mad.

“I told you he was insane. Just look at the ship he intends to fit us all into. That thing can’t even take two thousand and he wants millions of us in there? He’s a mad man and he’s doomed us all with him.” One of them whispered to another, making my smile grow even more. I could just imagine the looks on their faces when they finally entered the ship. The space warping tech was just the kind of shit that would shut up all my detractors in one swoop and have them all hanging onto every single word I said and taking it as gospel truth.

“Knowhere is a place, Drax. It’s the head of the dead celestial Kal-El was speaking about” She said, letting him understand and taking the confusion of his face only to replace it wih embarrasment as he realised that I’d been having fun with his confusion.

XXXXXXXXX

“It’s time to begin boarding the ship” I told the gathered crowd of Kylosians as they were about to begin moving their things in and claiming rooms in the ship that would be their home for the  ext few weeks as we travelled from one end of the galaxy to the other. The ship had already plottedc the course to Knowhere and estimates were that it would take anything from one to two weeks to get there. They weren’t precise as even I didn’t know the effects that the repulsor tech would have in space travel. Right now, estimates were made using the very best traditional thrusters.

But I was practically certain that repulsor tech would blow those numbers out of the water. I was with Kamori as she walked in, and the look on the girl’s face was perfect. Her mouth dropped as the ship she’d been enterring for weeks was suddenly very different on the inside. We walked down the very expanded hallway. And began passing the doors. The doors were practically crammed next to each other to conserve space and limit the amount of expansion I’d had to do on the ship itself. The rooms, however, were practically houses.

One for every member of the species had proven impractical so instead we had one for every community of which there were at least a couple hundred with several of the villages being made of multiple communities in truth. When we finally got to the one that belonged to Kamori’s family, we enterred and were met with another hallway. I watched carefully as the girl passed through the doorway. Moving from the spacially expanded doorway to the dedicated pocket dimension that contained each family’s homes. I’d tested all the doors myself and had run over a thousand simulations and was 99% sure no one would feel any ill effects beyond a shift in the air from moving between the two spaces. But still, I worried.

Watching her enter with no change at all did a lot to alleviate those fears. Drax and Ovette’s home was the first door in the new side hallway and we enterred it immediately to find ourselves in what was essentially a penthouse apartment from earth. Their room was quite a bit nicer than the others, but still none of the rooms were bad. I’d made billions of nanobots in my foundry and set them on harvesting the greater part of Kylos’ neighbouring asteriods and moons for raw materials that ended up being used in the making of these rooms and the ships changes. Some was stored for the future but it would really be good if whatever planet we got from the Collector had the necessary resources for our use.

She had her mouth wide open in shock as she beheld the high tech facilities. “Welcome, Kamori” The Virtual Assistant I’d included in every apartment spoke out when she walked even deeper into it. The VA was my solution to the Kylosians being unable to adapt to their suddenly futuristic and techniologically advanced surroundings. The goal? To get them as used to tech as I could before we got to the new planet so they’d be capable of living on their own. I had no idea what they’d do with their time in an environment that would essentially be post-scarcity because of how good my tech was, but I couldn’t wait to find out. Art, Science, Engineering, there were no limits to what people could achieve with the right education and I knew the Kylosains weren’t stupid. Just that with the exception of Ovette, they were all just incredibly blunt. It was a quirk of their personalities that I’d grown to love.

“Woahhhhh” Kamori screamed as a virtual screen appeared on the wall and began cycling through different kids games for her to play. She was the first one in what would be millions. I had no hope for the present generation of Kylosians. But Kamori’s generation and the one after them? They would be something special. She ran forwards to play the games, not even realising that they were all educational in nature and would have her learning one thing or the other.

This kind of manipulation wouldn’t have sat right with me in my old life, but with the knowledge, training and experience, of both Jor-El and Zod himself, I could easily divorce my emotions from my logic. This was for the greater good at the end of the day.

Besides, whatever negative feelings I had about the whole thing washed away when I saw her playing with the virutal building blocks. She had a smile so bright on her face that it practically drowned the one she’d had when we’d been hunting together. This was where children belonged. Doing things like this.

Speaking of children, I backed out of the room and returned to my control centre where I continued working on the syllabus for the school I’d eventually be building for the Kylosian children when the time came.

“What are you doing?” A voice asked from behind me. Ovette. I’d heard her enter the ship a few minutes ago and split up from her husband as he went to take the rest of their things into their room while she came to perform her duties as the Kylosian spokesperson.

“I’m making a curriculum for a school.”
“A what for a what?” She instantly asked, with a shake of her head. Of course she wouldn’t know what thsoe words meants. The universal translator I used must have translated them into something else if it couldn’t find the word for it in their native language.

“A curriculum. It’s like the list of topics that are taught in a school and how they are taught, subtopics and all that. A school is something from my old planet. It was a place children went to learn.” I said, in explanation.

“Children? What happened to their parents?” She asked, looking at me like the very notion of children being sent somewhere else to learn was a preposterous idea. #

“Well, ideally, their parents would send them there to get the best kind of education so they’d be even smarter than them.” I said, watching her churn through the idea in her head. Ovette wasn’t just a genius when compared to her fellow Kylosians. She was quite a bit smarter than a lot of humans I’d met.

“But who teaches them? How do the parents trust others to teach their children the right things and in the right way?” She asked, eager to learn but still not sold on the idea. Something about the mother in her probably reeled at the thought of leaving her daughter’s education in someone else’s hands.

“Teachers. They go to school to train and learn how to teach the children, so beacause they’ve learned how to do it, the parents just have to trust in them to teach their children the right things in the right way. Besides, not all of the children’s education is left for the teachers. Things like the difference between right and wrong, morality, and all that are generally left for the parents. Instead, teachers focus on more technical skills like reading, writing, mathematics and all that.” I said, explaining to her and watching her tilt her head.

“We don’t have any teachers” She finally said after considering the idea and bieng satisfied with my explanation. Or at least being unable to find any flaws or questions in it.

“That’s a problem, isn’t it?”

A/N; First part of the chapter. As usual, kindly ignore the typos.