I'm sorry this story was rushed. I should have thought it out more. Now I have a lone cityship vastly greater in carrying capacity to its younger future daughter Atlantis yet all the same weaker due to the relative youth of the race that built it. I've poorly explained the original conflict between two halves of the same society. I've spent the last week reading other authors' works in the hopes that through the process of osmosis I might glean something worthwhile.

Unfortunately, as it currently stands, though lacking in the usual enemies I risk the danger of turning this into stargate voyager all over again; I'm going to try to counter that in the following chapters.

Chapter 3 Flashbacks part A

"Ike! Get up! You're going to be late Man!" Tav shook him again, and Aikino groaned. "See if I ever try to get you up again!"

Pushing his friend and roommate away he forced himself to sit up, he looked at the clock in the wall and realized he only had fifteen minutes, he rushed into the bathroom confirmed the clothes he had set out the night before were still on the shelf pulled his pajamas off and jumped into the shower.

Turning on the water he let out a howl as a freezing cold stream rushed out of the shower head above him, "Seriously!" He yelled muttering to himself "why did I agree to bunk with this trickster", resetting the temperature control with one hand on the waterproof display; Tav could be heard laughing from the other room. The control changed to display that the temperature would be just a few degrees above body temperature, 'much better' he thought as he grabbed the soap and shampoo.

Rushing he managed to finish in just under three minutes, dressed in another three had his black hair dry, teeth brushed and rushed through the corridors, just in time to get to his yoga mat on the floor in advanced meditation, just ahead of his assigned mentor. He noticed Tav was already there barely restraining a grin.

"He that arises late must forever run to catch up" intoned the cryptic instructor from the doorway as she inspected his still wet hair.

Entering the room she greeted the rest of the group with her usual cryptic address. "How long is the tunnel if you cannot see the end." He suspected this had something to do with the near death experiences in the historical database relating to the light at the end of the tunnel that so many claimed to have seen before being revived.

She never told any of her novices her name; they all referred to her as maître. Without fail every eighth day she assembled their group to go over the meditations designed to allow them control over their internal systems. Such control would allow them to restrict blood flow to a vital artery in the event of losing a limb, or accelerate healing from minor injury. The younger the training started the better chance of success it had in those goals. Theoretically such control might even allow them to live longer, though there was no way of knowing for sure.

Meditation involved little actual meditation as the first half of the time was spent being shown breathing patterns and subtle rhythms that would help them ease into a meditative state. The maitre always signified the end of her initial group instruction with the cryptic continuation of her opening line, "You cannot tell the length of the tunnel until you see the exit." She admonished each of them the importance of continuing to practice the lesson once a day throughout the week for at least an hour. The second half of the lesson was the practical half as each apprentice was required to put what they had learned to practical demonstration before they would be allowed to slip off to their next lesson. Aikino wouldn't be one of the first to leave. But he wasn't one of the last. He happily noted to himself that Tav never left before him. The trickster had to run to catch up to the rest of the class as the teacher put it that morning.

Tav stayed for another reason. He needed to be able to setup a mental force field like the one that had saved him and the other four just years ago. He didn't know why. Nevertheless something propelled him forward. He felt that it would be needed someday soon, and he didn't know if he'd be able to do it without draining himself.

The rest of the day passed mostly without incident, one of the programming teachers scolded him for not paying attention his mind having drifted to the meditation instructor's words. "If you immediately identify the bulkhead is breached then the rupture was sealed a long time ago."

"I just finished asking the class which looping structure to use in this instance." he said pointing to the code on the overhead projector. Annoying given the ship had the capability of displaying three-dimensional holograms but some of the instructors insisted on using materials prepared decades earlier with older technology. I quickly looked at the code already written and the problem statement, and replied. "Since we are performing simple counting I would say a for loop with an if statement to watch for the condition specified to stop the loop." Tav personally would have preferred a nice recursive function but they hadn't covered those yet.

The teacher nodded and moved onto the rest of the lesson going over using loops to fill multidimensional arrays, and at least four other topics that Tav knew wouldn't be needed for most of the group.

Tav knew programming was probably his best subject. He just wished the teacher could handle actually teaching a little better. The developer program the class used was a decent tool, but the constant refinement and updating made the teacher uneasy because of the older problems with versions that always broke when updates came out. In reality if he had sat down and actually looked to understand why it did what it did he might have realized that it was doing exactly as it had been designed, keeping track of all the little details that would normally trip up programmers writing large programs in a less advanced editor.

The assignments ranged from fascinating to boring and back. Occasionally the difficulty of the assignment was due to its ambiguity, the problem being vague and open to interpretation. Tav loved to hate those assignments, because the ambiguity gave him creative license to do just about anything, which meant he had a chance of giving her exactly what she wanted or giving her an interesting solution that solved the requirements but not in the way she wanted.

He slipped out of his reverie just as the instructor was wrapping up the lesson and handing out the assignment something to do with magic squares, a mathematical concept involving a three by three grid numbered one through nine in which each row column and diagonal would then, when summed equal fifteen. Tav packed up his things, disengaged his portable storage from the school's computer returning control of the system to the schools operating system.

What was that the meditation instructor had said? He thought. If I immediately knew the bulkhead was breached then the ruptured was sealed long ago. If I can recognize the problem then the solution has been within my grasp for an even longer time. He doubted this was the only interpretation but for now it would suffice.

Aikino returned to the room before Tav did hoping he'd have a few minutes to plan his retaliation for the morning's cold shower, perhaps he could get the ships computer to selectively route Tav through secondary and tertiary corridors effectively giving him the scenic and longer route. They knew how to keep their pranks from getting in the way so they always insured that any tampering with ship systems only targeted each other and they programmed them to reverse the millisecond a city wide alert was issued. They also approved them through the commander of the city who laughingly approved most of them after review.

"Nice job with the shower Tav" Ike said not even looking up as Tav walked into the room. Aikino grudgingly admitted to himself that it was a bit impressive considering Tav had lived on a mostly agricultural world before being introduced to the cityship.

"Oh you liked that huh?"

"So, how did you manage to override the bio lock on personal settings?" He had a few pranks on some of the others he wished to try.

"Easily, convinced the computer that this…" he paused holding up a tablet that had biosensors continuing "...was the shower control then I used your hand to change the settings."

"High and low tech solution, shame it requires that the victim be asleep in the same room." He'd send a memo to the captain about getting some of the programs changed to make sure that the individual changing settings was indeed conscious before allowing them. Another reason their pranks were allowed to continue was they often brought to light security concerns that could be plugged once the prank was finished.