The Monster of Destiny-X45

It was 0500 hours, starclock time, when Luke awoke to the ear-piercing sounds of his automated alarm system. The crystal screen on his left bedroom wall presented him with his task list for the day. The man stood up, tapped the screen to acknowledge the message, and began to get dressed for work. A brown eye glared in the mirror, at scraggly, shoulder-length brown hair. “I'll need to chop that again soon,” he muttered. Nevertheless, there wasn't time for that at the moment. He needed to run diagnostics on the air control, communications, and camera systems before his guardian arrived.

Luke lived in the bowels of Destiny station, a large station on one of the major space trading routes between the beta and gamma sectors. He was in charge of maintenance and repair of almost all of the most crucial systems in the gigantic machine.

At 0700 hours, the diagnostics were finished, and he had found a minor bug in the subspace communication system. A solar flare from a star outside of the Mutara nebula was causing major static from that direction. “Damn, I will need to map this and determine how to compensate for the signal,” he muttered. At 0800 hours, the computer was mapping the interference, and the station shopkeepers were opening their booths. The bars wouldn't be open for a few more hours, but Luke enjoyed watching the people. He could see and hear almost any part of the station he wished on the live security footage. Before he fully realized it, the young man found himself daydreaming about what it would be like to live there, and to actually meet the people whom he secretly watched, day after day.