Krue Nex’s Guide to Civil Engineering

Everyone filed into the command center to discuss the Beacon plan.

The Beacon was housed onsite at Kennedy, but nowhere near the command center. It had been decommissioned and sealed but not removed.

The room was silent as they waited for NASA to call in.

“I’m sorry to hear about Shepard,” NASA said once the line opened. “The Beacon isn’t synced yet.”

Silence followed.

“Proceeding under your silent protest,” NASA said.

“If Florida acclimates cleanly,” Cyber said, “the merge with North Dakota should cause less damage because it will be fresh in their RAM.”

“And the Supermassive?” NASA asked. “How long before we Beacon for it?”

“One week following the Florida and North Dakota merge,” Cyber replied. “That should give three Collectives enough time to synchronize.”

Krue leaned forward. “Transit time?”

“Minutes. It reconfigures gravitational coherence along established nodes. Distance isn’t a factor once alignment is reached.”

Their eyes shifted to Scott.

“Beacon Florida at dawn,” he said. “North Dakota, the following day.”

NASA didn’t object, but there was a long enough pause where it made the room tense. “As in tomorrow morning dawn?”

“Yes.” Scott was not in the mood to be questioned. “We’re as prepared as we’re going to be at this point.”

He turned to Cyber. “Set up the speaker grid far enough from the domes. This won’t be like the last merge. We have time now.”

Krue exchanged a brief look with Cyber. They’d already run the simulations on what to expect during a merge: sound, pressure shifts, triple-strikes, and synchronization windows.

“Has the Collective noticed additional parasites like with your retention pond trial?” NASA asked.

Silence.

“Please tell me the Collective has seen something,” NASA pressed.

“We just need more eyes on it,” Scott muttered.

NASA exhaled. “Your speakers had better work. You’re about to have three-hundred-thousand units merging.”

“Just initiate the Beacon,” Scott said. “That’s all we need right now.”

“Understood,” NASA replied. The Beacon countdown flashed onto their screens.

Kyng glanced up. “You need to dust off any manuals over there? You sure you got this?”

Tension was high.

“I know how to read coordinates,” NASA said flatly. “So do satellites.”

“Just checking,” Kyng said.

“I’ve always wanted to visit NASA,” Krue said.

“Say another word,” the NASA Chief replied, “and I’ll blame you in the incident report, Nex.”

NASA used legacy NORAD-style orbital software because it was math-driven, non-autonomous systems that predated AI entirely. They hadn’t been state-of-the-art in over a century. That was the point.

For the first time in decades, NASA powered the isolated facility that housed the Beacon. Diesel and natural gas generators sputtered to life. Voltage fluctuated for several moments until it stabilized. Power hadn’t been routed to this facility in decades.

Breakers were flipped in a rusted electrical panel:

Tracking Radar

Beacon Control Console

Communications Uplink

Cooling Systems

Monitors

An engineer pulled sheets off the ancient, radiation-hardened computer monitors from 2002 that ran the last version of orbital prediction software. No one in the command center had ever been inside the facility.

By 2227, NASA was running at a bare minimum. Just enough to not trigger the Collectives as they managed satellites.

The lights flickered several times. The fans began to rattle, and the systems hummed.

A loud beep was heard.

“What the hell was that?” an engineer said.

The other engineer craned his neck. “BIOS. If it boots in under ten minutes, we know it’s not Cold War vintage.”

“It was built for the Cold War,” the Chief said. “That was a simpler threat.”

CRT monitors warmed up, and a green-on-black terminal appeared, and the screens lit in unison.

“Slow but indestructible,” the Chief said. He leaned over the desk to look at the screen. There was no mouse. No GUI. Nothing but raw commands and math.

He exhaled. “That’s...unfortunate.”

“NASA Translation: Fuck,” Krue said into the comms.

The engineers snorted, but the Chief was not amused.

“Let’s bring the radar dish back online,” the Chief said. “It needs to be calibrated manually.”

His team groaned.

“Come on, Guys. Look alive,” the Chief muttered.

Motors groaned, bearings squealed from lack of lubrication, and the dish shuddered as it rotated.

They sifted through the manual on calibrations, and found a grease-penciled calibration chart, a printed list of known star positions, and then the joystick.

The radar screen showed a circular sweep.

Static.

Ghost blips.

Then a faint, real blip.

“Since nothing is too reliable, get out the optical tracking backup.”

“You mean a telescope,” his engineer said.

“Yes.” The Chief sighed as he rubbed his eyes. “At least give me visual confirmation.”

A grainy starfield appeared on the desktop from the CCD camera feed.

“Got it,” his engineer said after nearly 10 minutes. Another engineer looked through the telescope to confirm it as well.

“I’ve always wanted to go to that museum to see that good ole’ satellite-tracking unit,” Krue said. “Optical, manual, stubbornly reliable. Refuses to learn new tricks—like management.”

“Shut up. The satellite can hear you, and I’m not about to calibrate its tears,” an engineer said.

“We’re logging that objection.”

“You’re treating this like a lab experiment, Nex,” the Chief said.

“Says the Chief whose last Beacon test predates living memory,” Krue said.

Silence.

“Noted,” the Chief said. “Logged as a mutual concern.”

An engineer powered up the Beacon. He had never seen it before; not many of them had.

The interface was analog. A rising needle showed power output, a bar graph for signal stability, and a dot-matrix printer logging system messages.

The printer spits out:

BEACON STATUS: STANDBY

COIL TEMPERATURE: NOMINAL

SIGNAL PATH: OPEN

“What’s your status?” Krue asked NASA.

“We are synchronizing the Beacon with the satellite,” the Chief said. “Just waiting for the satellite to enter the acquisition arc.”

The orbital software counts down:

T-300 seconds to horizon rise

T-120 seconds

“Our radar is confirming the position,” the Chief said to Krue.

The blip grew stronger, and the dish auto-corrected in tiny jerks.

The engineer on the telescope confirmed the orientation. “Satellite is turning,” he said.

The Chief Engineer begins to count down to Beacon activation.

T-minus 60: Beacon power at 40%

T-minus 45: Satellite telemetry lock intermittent

T-minus 30: Signal path aligned

T-minus 15: Cooling stable.

T-minus 10: All stations ‘go’

The room went silent.

The lights dimmed, and the generator groaned.

The Beacon required a lot of power, but there was enough. A deep, resonant hum rolled through the facility, low enough to be felt more than heard.

The signal strength needle slammed upward, hard enough to strike the stop.

The printer spits out:

BEACON ACTIVE

SIGNAL LOCK: 12%

SIGNAL LOCK: 27%

SIGNAL LOCK: 41%

The radar showed the satellite reacting. The blip shifted, and it was turning toward the Beacon.

“Signal lock is degrading,” the Chief said.

“Expected,” Cyber replied unprompted, making the Chief grit his teeth.

There was a pause.

“What’s the telescope saying?” the Chief asked one of his engineers.

NASA could hear Krue snickering in the comms.

“I bet that’s everyone’s favorite museum display,” Krue said, and the Chief grumbled.

“The thrusters fired,” an engineer said.

The anticipation between New York and NASA was palpable.

“Alright,” the Chief said, sighing. “Synchronization Lock confirmed.”

Scott, Krue, and the Chief Engineers stood under the main Safeway. It had a darkened skylight that would allow them to see the Collectives merging. It sat over an abandoned transit hub so they could get to the reinforced concrete below in case the merge cracked the windows.

Everyone was nervous.

“Florida was tapped,” NASA said. “The Collective’s pattern shifted. It’s on its way.”

NASA switched their displays to external feeds. No one at Kennedy had ever seen a Collective merge live.

The New York Collective murmuration began to ripple because it wasn’t identifying the noise of another Collective.

“They know,” Kyng said. “Look at the way they’re acting. They feel it coming.”

They put on ear protection per Krue’s recommendation, aside from Backhand Bishop. A deep subsonic tone rippled through the Safeway.

The satellite view wavered as if something heavy had passed through the air without shape.

Their ears popped as pressure built from every direction at once.

Cyber turned on a 15-hertz bass pulse. “They detected the resonance drift.”

The glass wall at the far end of the Safeway began to thrum as if it were alive. It raised the hair on the back of Krue’s neck.

“This is going to be worse than Staten Island,” Krue said.

The Florida Collective announced itself by force. Both Collectives locked.

They struck at 100mph.

The collision caused pressure to ripple outward as water surged and ocean levels rose.

By the time it reached the city moments later, a concussive inward crush drove breath from lungs. Consoles shook. Lights flared, dimmed, then stabilized as emergency dampeners kicked in.

Then, just as abruptly, the murmuration stabilized, the pressure eased, and the metal echoes died down.

“They synced,” Krue breathed, voice unsteady. “They merged.”

“Let’s put that in the ‘lessons learned’ pile… preemptively,” the NASA Chief muttered.

The Collective settled into the city as a constant subsonic presence, something alive and continuous, now embedded in the urban grid. New York and NASA tracked its movement in silence. Sunlight caught on tens of thousands of drifting metallic units, glinting when the murmuration thinned and thickened.

Anyone who encountered a Collective like this without context would never mistake it for a predator. It didn’t circle above the skyline. It flowed through the streets.

Hunting.

A faint red lattice pulsed within the mass. Units exchanged data—their machine learning constant. Krue watched it and wondered what intelligence they were giving each other.

“Looks like smoke,” NASA said.

“It’s not overhead,” Cyber said. “It’s ground-level. In the streets.”

Scott leaned forward. “Closer to the ground means higher resolution. They’ll pick up movement faster.”

“Right now, it looks like it’s mapping the city,” Cyber said.

Kyng scrutinized the feed. “A lot of pauses,” he said. “Like it’s stopping to think. Probably a new generation of Bugs.”

The Collective drifted slowly and deliberately.

“Looks like a personality change,” Krue said. “Or preference.”

“If they’re moving low like this, they might’ve learned about the retention ponds,” Cyber said.

Scott didn’t look away from the signal. “We’ve entered the “watch and learn” phase, Gentlemen.”

“This introduces more failure points than it resolves,” NASA said. “And you want us to do this again tomorrow morning? With the North Dakota Collective?”

“What could possibly go wrong?” Scott said.

NASA didn’t understand sarcasm a majority of the time, so they named off everything that could have possibly gone wrong.

“We’ve effectively weaponized uncertainty.”

“Chief,” Krue said, “be comfortable with being uncomfortable.”

“I love the confidence. Not the math, but the confidence.”

Krue Nex's Guide to Civil Engineering

AI controls the surface. Analog becomes the weapon.

After global catastrophic climate change drove civilization underground, predatory AI ensured it stayed there. Now, after generations without daylight, the underground metropolis is crumbling under civil unrest. Citizens demand access to the surface.

The mayor gives them a tunnel. It is the worst mistake in the city's history.

Only elite engineers are trained to protect the city’s life-support systems above ground. Among them is Krue Nex, a legendary SpecOps Engineer turned professor and the only human known to survive direct sunlight. Haunted by an operation that wiped out his entire unit, he battles crushing guilt, severe trauma, and a secret opioid addiction.

To save the city, Krue is forced back into service. Digital networks have failed. AI has adapted. Parasites are spreading. The engineers' final gamble rests on NASA's retired analog satellite network; technology so old that AI never learned how to control it.

As parasites burrow into the underground city and AI tightens its grip on the surface, the city's last hope rests on engineers willing to unleash the lesser of two evils.