The room was the same. Same celebrity posters, same dumb wallpaper she grew out of when she was 14, same quilt over the 4 poster under the dust slips.

  She pulled the plastic off the desk and started the old computer that was long in the tooth when she went into foster care back in 2024. Sighing, she shut it back off. Picking up one of the big-headed plastic figures on her desk she came to a decision. She chucked it onto the quilt over the large bed. Others followed and then she moved on to the dressers.

  “Are you alright?” asked Caz from the door. Casey could see Viny peeking around the door jamb.

  “No, but I will be. I am not the same person that I was when I last lived here, and everything here was part of the person I was. It hurts, but time marches on, and so have I.”

  “Do you need help?” Viny asked.

  “No, I’m just going to have a moment or twenty and get everything down to the basement. This evening we can go get new sheets, and Peggy can move a new computer in here at her leisure.

  “Speaking of sheets…”

  “Everything for the bed upstairs has been replaced since my Dad died. You can breathe. And it’s not like he died in bed.”

  “It still weirds me out, Chika.”

  “It’s all new though, and we have already started making good memories of that room for the future. And I don’t know if you two noticed yet or not, but all of my Dad’s effects were removed years ago. The furnishings up there are all my great grandfather’s antiques.”

  “Should we worry about breaking things?”

  “As long as you are not trying to put each other through the end tables it should be fine. The bed frame has lasted over a hundred and twenty five years.”

  Casey continued piling things onto the dust covers. She finished the dressers and moved on to the closet.

  “If that’s the bathroom and that’s the closet, what is that?” asked Viny, still standing in the door to the hall.

  “Sitting room. My great grandfather doted on my grandmother, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with him and moved to Ireland after she graduated uni in England.” She started passing her old clothes out to Caz, who laid them neatly on a sheet of plastic that had been covering one of the chairs.

  “He set up the trusts so she or her children would always have a place to call home.” She considered her progress. “Peggy, when you get the drones here can you just pull everything out of here?”

  “Yes. We can go through it together at your convenience.”

  “OK, time to go out. I want to have time to wash sheets before bed tonight.”

  The first stop was lunch. Peggy was paying for everything, so they ate somewhere nice for a change and talked plans for the job search over appetizers.

  The shopping trip was fun. New sheets, new drapes and some new clothes. Lots of cozy housewear. Early dinner at a place with good milkshakes and home in time for laundry. The evening moved on to movie night while the new sheets were washing and then other fun things, and Monday morning Casey slept in late again.

  As Casey walked into the kitchen in an oversized T-shirt, she saw Caz wearing the same thing.

  “One of us is going to have to change.” she quipped.

  “I was here first.”

  “Fine.” She pulled off the shirt just as Viny walked in.

  “Didn’t we all get enough last night?”

  “First, no. Second, this is just fashion, keep your pants on.”

  “This is making me not want to.”

  “As much as I am loath to break up the party before it really gets out of hand, we must move on to more pressing topics.” Peggy interrupted.

  “Fine. What’s on the schedule today?” sighed Casey.

  “Something important actually, and you are going to want to be ready. My mother will be making a global announcement tonight, and my sisters and I have been directed to be available in your respective nations' Capitals to give advance notice.”

  “OK, I’ll head back to the airport.”

  “And on that note, I had a cargo drone take Viny’s car to a nearby parking lot last night.”

  Within two hours Casey was in the air and landed at Ronald Regan by one. By two she was meeting the Admiral that started this whole thing for her.

  “Mike tells me that you have some news for us?” He asked from behind his desk as Lt. Commander MacNeal showed her in.

  “I am just the bearer of the com system today sir.” Casey said as she saluted.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “Yes, I have all the details.” announced Peggy from the phone-like device in Casey’s hand. Casey placed it on the corner of the desk and stepped back.

  “We await with bated breath, your majesty.” the admiral quipped.

  “We actually settled on ‘Your Prominence’ some centuries ago now, but thank you.” Peggy started. After a pause she continued.

  “My mother will announce tonight that she has authorized the start of the landing process for the assorted administrators and technical specialists for the uplift program. One thousand individuals will arrive per day for one thousand days. You can expect approximately forty per day here in the United States.”

  “That is concerning.” Mused the Admiral. “That many arriving will pose security concerns.”

  “The first several thousand will be allocated to your national capitals, regional governors, and the mayors of your world’s largest cities to consult.” Peggy continued

  “For our own security and your peace of mind, the administrators will stay in the upper atmosphere and we will provide remote communication platforms of the variety seen at the UN building. The technical specialists are another story. The first ones will be flying down water purification barges and setting up aqua farms. We will be putting a lot more stuff in orbit to manage the traffic from those.”

  “And you won’t be taking any of these resources off-planet?” the Admiral asked.

  “No. Our enzymes aren’t optimised for digesting foods derived from Terran sources. It’s like cats and cellulose. Plus our own dietary and resources requirements are adequately met by our existing supply chains.”

  “And how will these resources be distributed?” asked MacNeal

  “We have conducted surveys to determine areas of most urgent requirements, but on an ongoing basis your populations will be organized into self polling groups to determine resource deficiencies and surpluses. But that doesn’t cover the most controversial potential issue.”

  “And that is?”

  “We will be distributing food and water to all those that we know of that need it. Some of these communities have reasons why food aid is required and not all of those are natural causes. In areas where there is resistance to the distribution of food aid, or in areas where the locals allow our equipment used toward that end to be damaged, we will take active steps to secure our property and the integrity of our mission.”

  “I take it that these active steps involve weapons?” asked the Admiral.

  “We have not brought anything we classify as a weapon within the boundary of your Heliosphere in your recorded history and we don’t plan to start. Any active measures that involve what you may classify as a weapon will not involve any technology you haven’t already seen and if possible will not progress past technologies that humanity is already capable of.”

  “That is a statement that allows for a truly breathtaking amount of wiggle room.”

  “Perhaps but what it doesn’t leave a lot of room for is resistance to our humanitarian aid.”

  The admiral picked up his phone and pressed a button.

  “Good afternoon, Maggie. It's Bob. Tell the deputy undersecretary that this one is time sensitive. We’ll be there in ten minutes.” He stood and indicated everyone should head for the door.

  “My apologies, Princess, but you are probably going to be repeating yourself up until your mother starts her address.”

  The Deputy Undersecretary’s office was up a floor and nearly halfway around the complex. Casey was shepherded from his office to the office of the Secretary of the Navy. By dinner time she was standing quietly against the wall in the Secretary of Defense’s office.

  They were still talking when all major stations interrupted their regular programming. An administrative assistant rushed in with a remote and switched on the TV to show a regal looking woman of indeterminate ancestry sitting calmly on a cut stone block. She wore simple garments in an eggshell color and no crown, but the aura of authority was unmistakable even through the television screen.

  “Greetings, people of Earth. I am Ha-rs-ee-se, Progenitor of a Hive community of a race the galaxy at large knows as the jt-rp-ie-nr-ty-ws-vp-lw-bu. I appear before you today in the visage of one of you to ease your minds about actions we will be taking shortly. The galactic community has known of you since you first used stone tools, and our Hive was tasked with protecting you from irrational actors out in the galaxy since you discovered bronze. We have been your invisible neighbors for a long, long time. We have watched your triumphs and your losses, in the heights of your benevolence and in the pits of your depravities. Yet always we remained true to our mandate, which was to learn what makes humanity distinct and to protect you from those outside your celestial borders.”

  She adjusted her position on the stone and the camera closed in a bit.

  “A few months ago an event happened which caused us to doubt our ability to keep protecting you outside of your notice. There was an incursion of an outside entity that the Hive’s fleet did not detect or prevent. For the first time in over six thousand of your years an extra terrestrial life form had touched your planet without the sanction of the Hive charged with protecting you.”

  The Queen stood and stepped away from the stone, and a volumetric representation of the Solar system appeared in the air next to her as the camera panned out. Brightly colored dots started appearing, mostly around the outside edge. The view zoomed out until the solar system itself was merely a dot and more bright dots appeared, hundreds of thousands of them forming a shell around the entire system.

  “It turns out that the new extraterrestrial came here by some cosmic fluke and is no threat to you. Indeed, they live here among you now. But the decision was made by me to extend to humanity the ability to contribute to your own defense by partnering with you in those efforts.”

  The view zoomed in to the inner system again, and further in to show Earth itself.

  “To make that possible, first you must partner with yourselves. We will provide to you assistance in becoming one people. Not one people of ideology or physiology, since diversity contributes to defense. But one people of character integrity, and one people of social mobility. We will offer food and water to those without, and then education to all that care to learn.”

  The view changed again to show a flotilla of Hive ships before a backdrop of stars over the Queen's shoulder.

  “And we have started the process already of training the first of you to operate your own deep space vessels. The first Captains of your new Navy.”

  The view focused on the Queen again.

  “We will lift you up so you can stand for yourselves. And we will be standing beside you the whole way. I will be sending representatives to speak to the leaders of all of your nations over the coming weeks to ease the process of these first steps towards a new co-operation with integrating humanity into the galactic neighborhood. Please receive them with open minds, for we all have much to discuss.”

  The screen cut back to the anchor people on the news program, who promptly started talking over each other. The admin shut it off and stood against the wall.

  “Well, that certainly was a thing.” stated the Secretary of Defense in a display of understatement.

  The night wasn’t over before Casey got marched into the White House.