Mr. Nice Guy

Once they dressed and had eaten, the girls all asked if they could go with him as they’d never actually been to an Earth city ... they’d only seen them on the Internet and in movies.

Mark said they could all go, but they had to wear their personal shields, which really was a moot point since everyone wore their belts all the time anyway, even Liyana, Gyges and Maren always wore their belts, which looked just like the standard Federation belts. This was going to be the first time they would be in public and outside of a Federation controlled area.

After a quick glance at the clock, he added, if they left right now, they could get some sight seeing in.

Soon they were all loaded into Mark’s truck. Solara sat in front with Mark as she was the tallest and that gave her more leg room, Liyana sat behind Mark, Rayven sat behind Solara and T’Soona was in the middle of the back seat.

It felt weird to be driving a truck, as he hadn’t had to drive anywhere since he had moved to the ranch. He definitely preferred the speed and efficiency of the shuttles. The drive to the city was uneventful, they saw some wildlife that were fortunately well back from the road. There was lots of conversation about how beautiful the countryside was, and how scenic the mountains looked from a distance.

Once they could see the city in the distance, they started commenting about the colour of the air due to the smog. Calgary usually doesn’t have noticeable smog, unless it happens to be a cool day with no breeze, and this was one of those days.

When they got into the city limits and off the main highways, the talk turned to the amount of traffic and how much space was wasted for roads and parking. Then once the traffic got heavier and the speeds were reduced, they commented on how much time was wasted in people’s lives just sitting in traffic.

It prompted Mark to ask, “What’s it was like on Atlanterra?”

Liyana looked depressed as she said, “Very different from this! This is just sad what you’ve done to your planet. We take care of our planets, you will see. With the exception of walking and a few manually powered transportation methods, no transportation touches the ground and there’s no pollution.

Mark asked, “We’re having a meeting regarding a building. What are buildings like on Atlanterra? What we build here should be similar to what is there.”

Liyana had a far away look in her eyes, “Our cities are much more compact and most of our cities you would barely see since we don’t have many buildings taller than the trees. The tall buildings are only in the city centres and business hubs.

Business hubs, so you know, are ocean born cities, meaning they float on the oceans, so they do not impact the ecosystem. They are the business and office hubs, many people work there, but no one actually lives there. Outside of the hubs, the tallest buildings on our planet are sports stadiums, and some apartment complexes, which are very much the centre of each community, but even they would be dwarfed by many of the buildings I see here.”

Mark nodded his head, “OK well that gives me something to think about anyway. I’ll definitely need to do some research on the network to see more of what the buildings are like.”

Since they were so early, Mark took them by some of the places he had lived, so they got to see the various communities, then eventually ended up at the main viewing area on the Southwest corner of the airport. They had grabbed some snacks, then sat and watched the planes landing and taking off. They asked him a variety of questions about how the airports worked and he tried to explain borders and border security.

After a while, Mark took them around to the West side of the city, where the 1988 Winter Olympic Games were held and then South to the Spruce Meadows equestrian centre. He even took them over to the building where he was detained by the men in black.

Of course, everywhere that they got out of the truck, people would stare at them and many asked if they could get a picture taken. Fortunately, they never encountered any idiots today.

Maybe people were starting to accept that aliens actually existed and that they may start seeing them more frequently?

When the time for the meeting was approaching, they started heading toward the skyscrapers, taking them past the Stampede grounds and into the downtown core and city hall.

After parking and then walking into city hall nearly a half an hour early for the meeting, the security immediately scrambled, but staff quickly assured them it was OK and they were directed to an empty meeting room to wait for the mayor and his staff.

Liyana looked sad, so Mark asked her, “What’s wrong?”

Liyana said, “I understand now why we need to have a building or hub in a city, I just hate the idea of supporting this type of infrastructure, it’s like I’m helping to encourage a bad habit.”

Mark acknowledged, “I know, I now feel the same way, but all we can do is work within their system to try and show the people that there is a better way.”

Mark then tried to cheer her up by saying, “Look on the bright side, what we build will not be polluting or damaging their system any further, and depending on whether we can find a building, to be demolished, or some contaminated site that needs to be reclaimed, we will actually be helping the planet a bit.”

Just then the mayor came in, joined by 3 other gentlemen. They introduced themselves and Mark introduced Liyana and the girls. The other gentlemen were from the city infrastructure, building permits and city planning departments. The mayor started out by welcoming them to the City of Calgary, and asked if Mark could outline the purpose of the meeting for the benefit of his colleagues.

Mark began, “Gentlemen, I’m looking to start up a few businesses to allow the city and its people to experience Federation technology, without actually giving the technology to you. I would like for the world headquarters to be here, since this has been my hometown for years and where I’m the most familiar. We currently only need one building to house all these businesses in, but what we are looking for is a site that you would like to have repaired or rebuilt.

Some place that has a building that needs to be demolished, or a site where the land is contaminated and needs to be reclaimed would be preferred. We are looking to construct our office building using Federation technology, which means we won’t need to connect into the electrical grid, the water, the sewer or any of that stuff. Probably communications only!”

The Mayor asked, “So why did you want to talk to me?”

Mark replied, “For a number of reasons actually ... First, everything we do is closely watched and scrutinized and could be cause for turmoil. We haven’t done anything to provoke problems, but there’s a lot of wackos out there that just can’t handle change, or things they can’t even begin to understand. If you don’t want the attention of us making this place our world headquarters, tell us now and we’ll find elsewhere to build ... but I think the attention would be good for the city, something that’s unique that nowhere else on the planet will have. Plus our close proximity, will also mean when we lease our technologies, Calgary will be the first to experience them.

Second, you’ve no doubt seen the videos, our building technology, which is 100% eco-friendly and has worked for hundreds of years on other planets, circumvents a lot of the primitive rules required for standard construction on this planet. Which is why we are looking for an eyesore, or spot of contention, that either the private sector or the government can’t, or doesn’t want to, foot the bill to take care of.”

One of the men looked concerned as he asked, “So you’re asking for a junk land title if we would turn our backs to the building codes you will blatantly disregard in the construction of your building. I suppose you won’t want to pay any property taxes either?”

Mark replied, “Actually, we will gladly pay property taxes. We just won’t pay for utilities like electricity, water, sewer, garbage, etc that we won’t be using. As for blatantly disregarding your building codes ... yes and no ... I’m willing to bet, our building standards far exceed your current codes, and you are welcome to inspect and check the building out prior to tenancy.”

The mayor laughed and said, “We’ve seen the video, your construction technology is definitely unique and interesting! As long as you’re not going into the construction business and it’s just going to be this one building, I think we can probably work out something. Now, on the phone, you said you would only be hiring local workers?”

Mark replied, “Yes, we will only be employing local workers, our Federation friends will work with us, but not from this location. They’ll be outsourced in a sense, just not to a location on Earth. There will likely often be extraterrestrial visitors in our building, but not stealing jobs from local citizens.”

The mayor asked, “So why do you want to start these businesses?”

Mark explained, “Well, if you’ve seen any of the videos so far, our laws dictate that we cannot give our technology to a planet that is not part of the Federation. By having private businesses that I own, being that I’m a Canadian citizen, as well as a citizen of the Atlantean Federation, I’m more or less allowing you utilize and reap the benefits of some of our technology, without actually giving it to you.”

The Mayor asked, “So what businesses are you going to start?”

Mark then outlined his business plans, “The first will be a bank of sorts. As trade and visitation grows between our civilizations, people will need a way to exchange currencies between Earth based currencies and Federation credits. So more or less it will just be a simple currency exchange until it grows into a bank.

The second business will be a transportation business. We are currently talking to the Federal government, about the possibility of using the airports as our shuttle pickup and drop off points to get people up to the embassy. Should we not be allowed to use the airports, we will use our own building as more or less a helicopter pad, similar to the tops of some buildings, unlike Earth-based aircraft and helicopters, our shuttles make less noise than a standard motor vehicle, so noise and flight paths don’t really pertain to us.

The third business will be a security business. We will contract assistance to help security guards and possibly even the police to do their jobs better and safer.

The fourth business will be an identification business. We aren’t sure how receptive people will be to this, but as more and more people visit the embassy or other planets, interest in it may grow. Imagine a world with no amber alerts, if all children or criminals were identified, we could locate a person anywhere within seconds!”

The Mayor asked, “How about your medical technology, I heard it can fix pretty much anything. I imagine a lot of people are going to come from around the world to get healed?”

Mark explained, “We expect that as well, but doing medical procedures on the planet would require us to physically locate our technology on the surface, which would conflict with the local healthcare system and impact jobs. By doing those procedures in orbit, beyond anyone’s sovereign space, we can reduce the conflict. It’s also not something we charge for, as all medical is free in the Federation. So we need to make it more difficult to access rather, than just having a place where people can line up to get healed.”

Mark felt the need to explain, “The technologies and delivery methods I’ve chosen, are ones that will not greatly impact the employment of others, for instance we will never start a construction, communication or medical business here and our transportation business will only be covering a niche that can’t be done efficiently or safely by any other provider on the planet, we will never offer local or international flights.”

The Mayor felt obliged to ask, “You’ve given us a lot to think about, how soon do you need us to make a decision on this?”

Mark replied with no hesitation, “Well, if you don’t want us to setup here, I would like to know as soon as possible, otherwise, I do plan on leaving the planet in the next week or so, so I’d like to have the ball rolling before I leave, as I don’t know how long I will be away. If you choose to allow us to build and give us a site, we could probably have a concept design to you within a day. Then if you approve the design, we could have the ground repaired and the building built inside of another day.”

The Mayor and the men with him, obviously were not used to working at such a fast pace, the Mayor looked at his counterparts and asked them what a reasonable response time for this request should be. The city planning guy said he already had a dozen or so properties in mind that were deemed contaminated. With that being said, the Mayor asked, “It’s Wednesday today, we’ll let you know by Friday with a yes or no, but can we have until next Wednesday to deliver the list of properties?”

Mark said, “Sure thing! Here is my card, if you need to contact me, please send me an email, phone’s don’t work very well around our technology and we’ve got an Internet link, so I can receive an email, even if I’m between galaxies.”

At that conclusion, everyone stood up and shook hands and said they would be in touch.

The drive back to the ranch was very subdued, as everyone seemed to be reflecting on what they had seen today and what had transpired in the meeting.

Eventually Mark said that he thought the city would probably welcome them to setup there. They agreed, so then the discussion got a little more lively, as they discussed what features the new office building should have.

Pretty much everyone agreed that the building should have a landing pad on top of it and some living quarters. Mark said it had to be wheelchair accessible and would need to have areas that were secured from public access. It would need to have underground parking for staff and a kitchen with a food synth and drink dispensers.

Then Mark suggested that it should probably have a communications array too. That would greatly increase the Internet gateway speed by having the primary link for the Federation network being in the city rather than the limited wireless broadband speeds out at the ranch. Liyana thought that Maren could probably set it up to allow the ranch to use the faster Internet in the city too.

The conversation did come up about how much money Mark had, and how much he thought it was going to cost to get the place setup, staff hired and started.

Mark told them how much he had, but said he had no idea of how much the land would cost, as property values varied greatly across the city. He doubted he would be able to afford anything near the downtown core.

He also decided that he should probably sell his truck and trailer, as that would give them some more seed money, and he didn’t think he would really ever be using them again.

Driving just seemed so slow and tedious compared to the relative speed and efficiency of the shuttles, which he was growing very accustomed to.

When they finally got back to the ranch, Liyana showed them some of the cities and architecture on Atlanterra. They looked similar to most Earth cities in their design, except the roads were walking or biking paths, with lots of trees and green spaces everywhere and very clean, which was very unlike most Earth cities.

The similarities to Earth cities, were that higher density housing and main sports venues were near the city centres, then moving to lower density housing and eventually estates further out.

Just like Liyana had said, almost everything looked like it was no more than 2 storeys high and you could easily see where the schools were as there was sports facilities there.

Each community seemed to have its own transit system that looked like it was some sort of elevated track train system except the cars separated and left the track. Then if you had to go out of your town or city you called a lift, which was like a shuttle except autonomous. It did appear that most people did in fact walk or bike everywhere and rickshaws seemed to be the common alternative to walking or public transit.

The day after the meeting, Mark was antsy, he knew having government involved would take time, even if it was at the municipal level.

The girls tried to keep him occupied and kept him down in the playroom for most of the day.

They got the email late Friday, saying the City of Calgary would welcome the opportunity to host their world headquarters, and on following Wednesday they provided a list of thirteen addresses that were deemed contaminated, most seemed to be old industrial sites, former landfill sites or former gas stations.

They had listed the prices of each of the properties, which were a lot lower than what Mark had expected, likely due to the sites being contaminated, and to sweeten the deal, they said if they cleaned up the site, they wouldn’t have to pay the title cost or property taxes until the first year of business, the only thing that needed to be paid immediately was the legal fees.

So they now had one year to generate enough income to pay the title and property taxes, which meant Mark’s money could be used for the currency exchange.

One site was just outside of the downtown core, it was an old concrete site where the soil was contaminated with creosote. It had been used as a car dealership parking lot for the past half century or so.

Mark asked Liyana and Solara, “How big of a deal is it going to be to reclaim these sites?”

Solara replied, “There is nothing to it really! We just define the coordinates of the boundary into a construx, and drop it with instructions to return the various layers of soil to a prime condition down to a certain depth, and then deactivate. It would probably take about a day. Why?”

Mark smiled, “I’m thinking about being a nice guy!”

Liyana looked at him skeptically, “You are already a nice guy, but what are you thinking?”

Mark explained, “They’ve identified these sites as ones that are problematic to get funding or resources to decontaminate them. We could help them, and the planet, by reclaiming all of these sites. It would give them a clear signal of our friendly intentions ... a Thank You gift of sorts.”

Liyana smiled and gave Mark a big kiss, “I like it, we would be doing a little bit more to help the planet.”

Mark was deep in thought for a minute, “I just came up with another business idea for helping save the planet, is it possible to scale up our molecular reconstruction process to an industrial scale? I’m thinking of reinventing landfills.”

Liyana asked with confusion on her face, “Reinventing landfills?”

Mark explained his vision, “Yes, they could dump their garbage and our system would more or less create piles of raw materials they could use for recycling. Piles of plastic pellets from any plastics, piles of glass pellets from any glass, piles of wood chips from any wood products, piles of ingots of the various metal types, etc. There would be almost no waste and anything that isn’t one of those materials, we can transform into something compostable. It wouldn’t impact jobs much, if at all, but they might get redefined a bit.”

Solara cracked her knuckles and grinned, “Sounds like a challenge! I like it! Obviously Calgary would be our test subject?”

Mark smiled, “Of course! So you’re dealing with a city of well over a million people and all their garbage. It’s going to need to be efficient as they probably deal with over a thousand trucks each day. My new goal, with our friends that have decided to take a chance on us, is to help them become the cleanest and safest city on the planet.

It will be a living demonstration of the benefits of our technology and in showing that we can truly help humanity recover from what they’ve done to this planet, but without interrupting their flawed way of life.

If Solara can figure it out, I’ll have to come up with a plan to deal with it. Obviously we can’t give our technology to non-federated planets, so we need a way we can maintain control over it somehow, to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

Maybe we’ll have to petition city hall to privatize the landfills, and we can take them over or something?”

Mark then thought out loud, “Although, if there’s any technology we could build and leave a non-federated planet as a token of good will, that would be it! Even if a planet does or doesn’t join the Federation, they would likely need something like this, at least as an intermediary step to help clean up their planet. It would just have to have a self destruct or safety that would prevent anyone from getting ahold of it to reverse engineer it ... why not?”

Solara went to work in her workshop in the basement, with her first priority to configure construx to reclaim the list of contaminated sites.

Everyone else decided to hang out in the courtyard for a while and relax, read, research or play games.

At lunch time, Solara said she was finished the soil reclaimer construx programs. She also had a rudimentary design for the recycling machine, including ideas for a self destruct, but she was just trying to work out scanning, so it could process and sort the garbage fast enough.

Mark messaged Maren asking her questions about the communications tower and whether it could go both ways. They could have a much higher speed Internet gateway, if they used a tower in the city versus the one out at the ranch, but maybe they could speed up the connection at the ranch by linking them into the city connection using the tower. He was planning to have the communications tower a big part of the building, he was looking for something iconic, yet functional and expandable.

After coming up with an idea of what he wanted, he started researching other Atlantean technologies they might be able to make use of. It turned out someone had already developed a recycling system similar to what he was thinking about, a few years ago, but the project was scrapped by the current monarchy, citing that it wasn’t needed on the federated planets and they were never going to give their technology to planets not part of the Federation.

Mark contacted the developer to speak with him about his invention, as he would like to use it on Earth. His recycler could process thousands of tonnes of material per hour and it used this hovering teleport type technology to sort non-organic material into piles and all organic material was conveyed elsewhere. He also had another version that more or less turned garbage into storage matter that could then be used to create raw materials on demand.

He informed Solara about his find, which now freed up her time to design the headquarters, which they drew out on a sheet of paper and the girls added a few extra features. Then Solara took the drawing and went down to her workshop to design it on the system. Within a few hours, she had it roughly developed and saved to a holocube.

They composed a response to the Mayor’s email, informing him that they would take the downtown site and, as an act of good faith, to decontaminate all of the sites on their list and that they had designed their office building. If he had time, they’d like to show him and the other planning guys their plan, which they unfortunately couldn’t send via computers due to compatibility issues.

The plan was to start the decontamination process at all of the sites, and be at the downtown site at 2PM to go over their plans, and the mayor and planners were welcome to show up if they wanted.

After supper, Solara pulled up the holocube and gave everyone the tour of the proposed headquarters. Everyone seemed to like the design with only a couple more modifications proposed to the exterior. They then had a group brainstorm around the design on the interior.

Once the brainstorm was done, Solara again retreated to her workshop to refine the design.

Mark awoke between Rayven and Annabelle, as was the norm. Good morning kisses were given, then dress, workout and breakfast. Then the kids got ready for school, while others did the chores. Rayven now helped with the chores almost every day and the horses were now comfortable around her. After chores, the girls and Mark loaded into the truck for the drive into the city.

Driving was just so slow and Mark said, “We need to get a shuttle down here to travel back and forth between the ranch and headquarters. Wasting over 2 hours driving each way is such a waste of time.”

Liyana suggested, “Maybe we could put in a lift system that only goes between the office and the ranch. It wouldn’t be as fast as a shuttle, but it would be significantly faster than driving, and we could cloak them.”

Once they reached the city, they followed a route that took them to each of the contaminated sites. At each site, Solara launched a drone, which hovered above the site to verify the borders and dimensions. She would then update her data pad with the actual readings from the drone and upload the program to the construx.

Then she would take the construx, walk to the edge of the site and throw it toward the middle like a grenade. They then proceeded to the next site and repeated the process.

They had all but two sites done before lunchtime, so Mark introduced them to McDonald’s, which they ate, but said they didn’t care for it. The girls then proceeded to console him, for having to live off that while he was in captivity.

After lunch, they finished the two remaining sites and it was about 1:45 when they showed up to the downtown site they wanted. Solara launched the drone, checked the program on the construx and threw it.

At 2PM the mayor showed up with two of the men from the meeting. They shook hands as they watched the site transform to a nicely manicured site with black topsoil, just like the other sites.

The mayor acknowledged the gesture to reclaim all the other sites, but said it was unnecessary as they would clean up their own messes.

Mark apologized, “Sorry, all the other sites have already been cleaned!”

The Mayor was all smiles as he said, “You people are efficient, and you’ve got a design for a new building on this site already?”

The one man seemed to be upset about being pulled out of his office and asked, “Why couldn’t you just send the plans via email like everyone else does?”

Mark replied, “It’s because your computers aren’t compatible with ours and wouldn’t be able to handle our data file.”

Mark then gestured to Solara to proceed with the holocube.

Solara took out her data pad and looked at it, as she walked toward the centre of the site, then placed the holocube on the ground and returned to the group.

Mark announced, “Gentlemen, here is our vision!”, as Solara activated the holocube, which generated a full scale version of their design.

All any of them said was, “Whoa!”

Mark smiled, as he said, “This is why we couldn’t send it to your computer.”

The grounds had waist high raised planter sections, complete with full sized juniper trees and small street lights between them to illuminate the parking lot. The parking lot had four entrances, since there was a one way road on both the north and south sides of the property. The parking lot was primarily west of the building, but also wrapped around the north side.

The parking area had spaces for around 250 vehicles, it was a basic surface lot with decent sized spaces, after all it used to be a car dealership. The parking lot directly in front of the north side of the building had 20 blue handicapped spots, they were extra wide and beside the ramp that followed the building curve, there was also a designated drop-off zone for taxis. There was underground parking off to the east side of the parking lot, which was the same size as the building and the north lot, but it would be used for staff and overnight parking only.

The office building itself was shaped like a big crescent, that was two levels high and had the communication array mounted on top in the middle of the crescent. The upper level was bigger than the bottom level, so the walls were angled inward toward the base. Unlike the antenna out at the ranch, this one had 3 swept arches that disguised the antenna. It kind of looked like the Space Needle in Seattle, except the legs had a much more pronounced sweep and didn’t arch back out at the top.

The middle 80% of the crescent, facing the river to the north, was a solid wall of transparent material.

The Mayor and his men were standing there staring at the hologram, when Elisha and Gerald came walking across the site.

The Mayor straightened his suit and acknowledged the news crew, then asked Mark, “Do you know anything about this?”

Mark shook his head no, “I’m as surprised as you are!”

Elisha overheard their conversation, so she explained, “This is as impromptu as it gets, we were actually on our way back from another location, when we saw this big building appear out of nowhere. I knew it had to be Atlantean, so we came ... If you build it they will come, as it were.”