“You can leave the boards in the car and we will head to the museum on foot.” Uncle Lu suggested, calling for the limousine driver to grab their new hoverboards and then wait near the museum for them to come back out.
There were a number of shops along the strip between the shop and the museum, all catering to either tourists or the working citizens that lived in the area, so a short walk was the normal tourist thing to do if they were headed to the museum.
The city layout was strange to Max, since the street map signs were all three-dimensional, showing the elevators and traffic exits that led between layers of the dome.
The skies above him were all holographic since they were on an inside layer, but the dome was designed to send light from the perimeter through the entire level, reducing the need for additional lighting and giving the city a more natural feeling.
It felt like the densest of megacities and a nature preserve at the same time, with the way they planted trees and shrubs along the sidewalks. It was beautiful, but everything about it still felt somehow wrong to Max.
The feeling was a lot like Nico’s fake smile. The feeling that Comor was trying too hard to make the synthetic feel organic..
The tourists around him didn’t seem to have noticed though, so Max wondered if he was being overly sensitive about his surroundings, too attuned to danger to appreciate the little things.
“This block gives me the creeps,” Nico whispered and Uncle Lu nodded in agreement.
“Me too, but not many would notice it. All the plants are modified for better growth in the dome environment, and they don’t feel right.” The scientist explained.
The museum was right in front of them now, and they joined the queue to enter, tapping their wrist devices to check in.
For the soldiers and the scientist, this was perfectly natural, they did it at every building and secure area when they were on duty, but many of the civilians were having issues with the concept of a visitor log, including a pink-haired couple who were shouting at the automated gate, trying to get the staff to let them in without identification.
That clearly wasn’t going to happen, and they were holding up an entire file of visitors, but today that was someone else’s problem, so Max just smiled at their idiocy and kept walking.
The first exhibit they reached was a complex history of humans on Comor. The colonists who had settled here sent their ship away and made up an ancestral tale to tell their children, wanting to make a clean break from the old Solaris System and all the high technology they thought was taking over their lives.
They had kept many of the technological comforts though, and in under a thousand years the high-tech society their ancestors had tried to eliminate had made a full comeback and they were preparing to terraform the other planets in the system.
However, they didn’t have a full history and believed the story of the settlers that they had always been here. In their minds, this was the first step for humanity into space and the initial expansion of the species.
The cultural shock when they first met with an Independent Trader who had picked up their activity and wanted to add them to his trade route was therefore society-altering.
Not only did they learn that they weren’t alone, they learned that their entire history was false. The system spent a century undergoing an unstable cultural revolution, ending in the movement that reshaped society into the elevated cities and resorts for foreign visitors that it is to this day.
The most interesting part to Max was the history of cultures they had interacted with over the centuries. Many of them had been single planet cultures of nonhuman species that were now extinct, having fallen to the violent nature of the galaxy’s other inhabitants.
Max noticed Nico smiling at one particular entry, a violent and semi-sentient species that could traverse space in biological ships made of excreted resin, propelled by an Innate Talent of the species for creating a low-level Warp Field. They were not from this galaxy and had traveled here fleeing from something terrible in their home galaxy.
They weren’t in the top tier of invasive threats with the Insectoid Klem who inhabited the Northwestern regions of the galaxy, or the living metal Scourge, they were more on par with invasive pests.
They had been eliminated by coincidence, the region they were passing through was at war and both sides thought they were weapons made by the enemy.
“They’re almost cute, in a hairless cat sort of way,” Max said, looking at the hologram.
“They weren’t airways hairless, they used to be very fluffy,” Nico answered. There was a brief image in her mind of a cat-like species with powerful mandible pincers blinking in and out of reality as they moved around a forest.
The sight triggered something in Max’s memory, he once had one as a pet, and he remembered petting one of the fluffy creatures. That was a new memory, but he still couldn’t recall exactly where they, or he came from.
The last portions of his past life’s memory seemed to have taken severe damage during the transition, but most of them no longer held much importance to Max. This was his life now, and it was a good one. There was no need to dwell on the past.
“Along here you’ll see the recovered species wing of the museum. These are all species native to Comor that were saved from extinction and now roam wild on the planet. Rest assured, all the large predators have tracking collars and are kept away from tourist areas.” Uncle Lu informed them proudly, leading Max and Nico away from the sentient species and into the local fauna wing.
Most of the animals on Comor were of six-legged designs. For some, the third set of limbs was a pair of wings, but it was rare to see an animal with only two sets of limbs in this section of the museum.
There also didn’t appear to be any reptiles, but Max was holding out hope for the later parts of the indigenous animals’ portion of the museum. After all, no planet full of six-legged animals would be complete without that iconic mythical creature, the Dragon.
Max had never heard of them in this lifetime, but he had memories of the giant flying creatures in his past life, so they must exist somewhere.
Max was in for a disappointment though, the planet had very few egg-laying species and no reptiles at all, though the wide variety of other flying creatures made up for most of the lack.
They even had a flying canine and a four-armed minotaur, though the data said that it was no smarter than common livestock, outclassed in the intellect department by almost all primates.
“Maybe we need to take a wilderness tour. I want to pet the flying puppy.” Nico whispered, making everyone around her laugh.
“You know those holograms are true to scale, right? It’s got a wingspan of over ten meters and it eats meat. I don’t think they’ll be easy to find.” Max pointed out, but Nico only shrugged, unconcerned with the prospect of a large animal trying to eat her.
Next was the greenhouse, showcasing many of the unique and interesting forms of plant life in Comor, and then the human culture exhibit. By the time they finished the loop both Max and Uncle Lu were ready to sit down for lunch and relax. The museum had to be larger than the academy, Max decided, and they had visited every inch of it.