Editing KSGU:Volume 1 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 3===

The moment the vibration of the alarm clock woke him, Banagher Links thought <i>"I am so out of it today."</i>

As he turned the alarm off, he saw the time was 4:20 AM. After confirming the time, he stealthily got out of bed. It was still pitch black outside. He could barely see the contents two-man dorm room: the beds, desks, or dressers that were still covered in darkness. The only sounds Banagher could hear were the clock ticking away the seconds, and his roommate Takuya Irei snoring away on the other bed.

It was, of course, impossible for a room inhabited by two stinky guys to be anything resembling clean, as there would always be things like discarded clothing and empty food containers. However, there was still some order in the mess, and Banagher was able to grab his shirt and jeans without turning on the lights, and tiptoed his way to the bathroom. He quickly combed and washed himself, then looked at himself in the mirror above the sink.

He had dark brown eyes and the skin color of someone with Middle Eastern blood. His long hair was the same color as his eyes, and it was rather smooth even if he didn’t take care of it. Upon seeing that his 16-year-old boyish face was completely ordinary and nothing special, a disjointed feeling rose up in him. However, this feeling only persisted until he put on his coat.

It was the official jacket of the Anaheim Electronics Industrial College. The logo of the parent company, Anaheim Electronics, was sewn on the left side of the blue, fireproof materials. This jacket wasn’t fashionable enough that it could be worn outside shop classes, but Banagher had modified the extra one he bought and used it as casual wear. The main modification was on the collar; the crest of the Anaheim Electronics Industrial College, AEIC, looked like it had been removed. Of course, Banagher hadn’t removed it himself, rather a second-hand shop he was familiar with did the job for him.

Banagher finished putting on his clothing to help suppress the disjointed feeling. What replaced it was the realism of him being part of the large enterprise of Anaheim Electronics. Once he slapped his face to help keep himself awake, Banagher left the bathroom, checked that his roommate was still deep in dreamland, and began to move silently towards the room’s exit. On the way, however, he tripped over an object roughly the size of a basketball laying on the floor.

<Hello, Banagher. Hello, Banagher.>

The two circular disks on the ball-shaped body flapped out like ears as the impact from the kick activated the Haro unit, and made it speak in a loud, but monotonous voice. Banagher frantically tried to hold down the Haro as it moved around the floor. He soflty growled “Quiet, Haro!” But it was too late. Takuya, who had had the pillow covering his head, wriggled around his bed, and the moment his eyes met Banagher’s, he sat up.

“Damn it, Banagher!” Takuya roared out, “You don’t care about our agreement at all do you? We aren’t supposed to sneak out!”

His tea-colored hair was all messy, and he was so angry he had even forgotten to wipe away the drool from his mouth. Though the impression his roommate usually gave was something like an affectionate big brother, his popularity with the ladies would likely drop were they to see him like this. However, Banagher didn’t have time to think about popularity, and as he carried Haro out of the apartment, he asked: “Didn’t you set your clock five minutes fast, Takuya?” Banagher put Haro on the floor, and grabbed the sandwich he had bought yesterday. Haro was jumping energetically like a self-propelled ball, out through the automatic door that led to the hallway.

Banagher ran through the school campus that was linked to the dorm, down the stairs that linked the school atrium and the road, and arrived at an electric car station. The stations were managed by computers, and would automatically send vehicles to locations with the highest frequency of use. Anyone with an ID card could use them. Banagher took a bite from his sandwich as he got into the open, two-seat electric car. He inserted his ID card to into a slot on the dashboard, pressed the start button, grabbed the steering wheel, and stepped on the accelerator.

<Very improper, Banagher.>

Perhaps because Banagher was holding the steering wheel with the only one hand, the other held his sandwich, Haro had spoken up, flashing its optical sensors at the same time. Haro had a first-level artificial intelligence in its ball-shaped body and was supposed to be a toy robot marketed toward children. This normally wouldn’t be something belonging to a vocational student in the equivalent of high school, but Banagher had modified it, and carried it around like a pet.

The streets were quiet before dawn. Banagher swallowed the last of his sandwich and looked up through the windshield at the sky. Through the clouds scattered in the night sky, he could see numerous lights flickering. They looked like stars, but they weren’t. Those flickering lights were the lights from the windows of shops, factories, and skyscraper windows that stayed open throughout the night. It was the city lights that just so happened to be above Banagher. The carpet of lights was about 6000 meters above, and covered the entire sky in a gradual arc. In the gap between skyscrapers in front of him, Banagher could see the lights climb to the sky ahead of him. If anyone in those lights above were to look at the sky, the headlights of the electric car and the surrounding street lights would look like stars to them.

The artificial ground within the large cylinder of the space colony was covered with houses, office buildings, parks, and other important things that made up everyday society. The internal structure of almost all space colonies were like this. The cylinder that was 6.4 kilometers across would spin at a definite speed, creating a centrifugal force on the inside of the walls, creating artificial gravity equivalent to gravity on Earth. The constructed ground on the inside of the cylinder were on large areas 3.2 kilometers long and 1.6 kilometers wide. Big enough that from the inside the ground wouldn’t look like it curved with the wall of the colony. At most, the joints where the plates met would look a little slanted.

Day and night inside the space colony were created via the mirrors outside the cylinder itself, or by an artificial sun at the center, which also helped in adjusting the temperature and replicating the seasons. The time was set to Greenwich Mean Time, and the climate was set to emulate the Northern Hemisphere. Unless there were special issues for tourism, these basic settings were used for every space colonies. Thus, right now, on the 7th of April, at 4:30 AM, the residential area itself was neither too hot, nor too cold, and most of the colonies were still in middle of night. The billions of residents of those colonies were, just like the residents of this one, ‘Industrial 7’, were also waiting in the night for spring.

Banagher was one of those billions of people, and had been getting up before daylight for a while now, in order to get to the space dock to work. The work involved clearing junk away from the outside of space colonies. It was tough getting up early in the morning, but it wasn’t that bad, since Banagher could easily sleep through the general education periods in school. It was worth more to work three hours before lessons though, since three hours of the morning shift payed more than working five hours after school on the evening shift did.

Takuya worked at the same place as Banagher; the first one to clock in got a mini mobile suit that was better-suited for the kind of work they did, and their wages would increase based on their job performance. Thus, the two of them would race to see who would get out first. Though underhanded methods were considered poor form, everything else was fair game. So Banagher and Takuya were always thinking of ways to sneak out of their dorm without waking the other one. Right now, the chances of winning were about 50/50.

All that being said though, the two of them were still doing well in their studies. They were attending a vocational school where it was required for them to stay in the dorm, and their clothing and food were provided for them. The most they needed was some spending money. <i>"This is just a game,"</i> Banagher thought.

<i>”A game to shake off my roommate and getting a high capability mini mobile suit. A game to shake off studies, using work to get rid of boredom. Everyone else is the same. Enjoying the game of student’s relaxation and not facing that disjointedness…</i>

<Working all the time. Study some more.>

Babagher had no idea how Haro reached this realization that struck through him. “This is seperate from studying!” Banagher answered back, feeling that the robot had a very good read on him, “The vocational students here will all become employees of Anaheim. It’s not like it’s a bad thing to test out this mini mobile suit first.”

On the one hand, he wondered how he ended up making this kind of excuse, but on the other hand, he felt really satisfied by it. Banagher again felt that ‘disjointed’ feeling. This was a future he wouldn’t have even dared dream of a year ago, and as he looked forward to the twelve wonderful years ahead of him, he felt as if he were just drifting with the flow, and yet feeling a bit bad for walking on the path others had set in stone. However, there wasn’t anything else he really wanted to do. He would maintain his grades in the middle-high tier, party with others, and feel extremely out of place. The psychological reason behind this disjointed feeling had started when Banagher was very young, and had now became a bad habit.

The electric car moved through the colony’s residential area and into a heavy-industry zone set between two light-industrial areas. Banagher parked the electric car at a parking station near a convenience store and walked down to the nearby subway station. Thinking that Takuya might catch up to him if he kept letting himself get distracted, he left his stupid problems behind as his feet naturally quickened through the silent street.


Industrial 7 was one of the industrial space colonies Anaheim Electronics operated. Under the control of the Space Colonies Association, the management of facilities was completely controlled by Anaheim Electronics. Amongst the population of two million, more than half of them worked for Anaheim Electronics, or was directly related to someone who did. Of the remaining one million, half of them worked in enterprises related to Anaheim, or in underground companies, and those who were unrelated to Anaheim were mostly civil servants working with government administration, the police, or the fire department. The colony didn’t belong to any Side, and it didn’t have any form of self-government, so the Federation Army didn’t maintain a military presence. This space colony was basically Anaheim Electronics’ personal island.

After the One Year War, Anaheim Electronics began to recover and absorbed other, smaller companies, eventually becoming a large corporation that many people called the ‘Spoon of the Space Army’. The company grew so large, that supermarkets, fast food chains, and most other companies in any given commercial district would all bear the logo of Anaheim Electronics. There were movies sponsored by Anaheim Electronics, sports teams sponsored by Anaheim in away games, and people using AE credit cards to pay for all of these. Money would flow around within the corporation, forming a structure where the money was paid out, then taken back. However, none of it was ever forced, and it was all done such that the residents wouldn’t notice anything. This was the reason why Anaheim Electronics had become the world’s largest corporation. Banagher glanced at the posters outside the station, 80% of which were somehow related to the corporation, went through the turnstile, and onto the platform.

The whole of Industrial 7 was just like a factory. At all times there were people working. However, there was no real shift change, such as during morning peak hours. Therefore, on the subway, there was only a drunk, middle-aged man who had collapsed in his work clothes, and a woman who looked as if she worked in a night club, and whose thick make-up was coming off. She didn’t notice Banagher get on the train as she looked emotionlessly out the window. The smell of old perfume inside the train car reminded one of the smell of a hometown long ago given up on. Banagher saw a double-wide seat and quickly sat down.

The three layers of doors closed, and the train jerked slightly before moving from the platform into the tunnels leading to the outside of the space colony. It was called the subway, but subways in the space colonies didn’t run underground, but along rail tracks on the exposed outer walls of the space colony. In other words, the train was hanging on the tracks and transported outside the space colony—in outer space.

Soon after the train left the station, the air lock door at the end of the ramp was locked behind it. Then, the air lock door in front opened, and the train entered the vacuum of outer space. The sound of both movement and air-flow disappeared in the train, and an ear-stuffing silence filled the car. The train went through the air lock and glided across outer wall of the space colony.

As there was no air resistance, only a minimal amount of force was be required to move the train at high speed along the track. In a space colony, this was one of the most efficient modes of transport. It was the fastest way to get to the dock, faster than taking a cable car from the bottom of the colony, or even riding the elevator up in an electric car. Banagher also preferred to look at outer space from the train’s window, so this place had a sense of release other places couldn’t provide.

There were people who didn’t want to take the train for fear of motion sickness, though. To create a centrifugal force of 1g, the space colony had to make one rotation about every two minutes, which worked out to a rotational speed of more than 600 kilometers per hour. If it were to follow the movement of the rotation, the subway train would appear to continually move, and to a passenger, it would look like someone shaking the bottom of a toilet bowl full of stars at incredibly high speeds. Of course, as it was just a long rotation of more than 20 kilometers, it would merely look like the stars were constantly moving. However, if one weren’t careful, the mind would feel dizzy upon returning to the inside of the space colony, and. In the worst cases, it would cause severe a psychological problem, called Coriolis Syndrome: a common environment illness amongst the first generation of space migrants. However, to Banagher ,who had been born and raised in the space colonies, looking out from the window into outer space was like looking at an exhibition, something that was merely a little different from everyday life. Once outside the space colony, Banagher could clearly see the in-progress construction of Industrial 7.

Industrial 7 orbited in the shoal space at L1, between the Moon and Earth. It was shaped like a large oxygen tank, and the end undergoing construction was facing Earth. On the other side, the side that faced the moon, there was a covered settlement-building tool commonly known as “Wheels”. After construction was completed, the cylinder of the colony would be 30 kilometers long. Right now, though, only 18 kilometers were completed. In fact, Banagher remembered, there was a new plate arriving today.

The notice board at the dorm had a poster  saying “On 7 April, at 1:00 PM, there will be a new plate extension which will cause inconvenience…” and so on. This meant that there would be new artificial land added. The cylinder of Industrial 7 would be extended by another six kilometers. The space colonies were floating amongst the large amount of rubbish from the last war. No matter how much it expanded, the world Banagher lived in would be that size.

As Banagher thought about this, as his mind thought of that “disjointedness”, he saw something white flash past, outside the window.
[[Image:KSGU_008.jpg|thumb]]
It wasn’t a star. It let out several exhaust lights of blueish-white, going past in a diagonal manner and flying faster than the rotation of the space colony. It was only for a moment, and was far enough away that it looked only about the size of a small fingertip, but Banagher was sure that the afterimage looked human.

“A mobile suit…?”

It was completely different from a mini mobile suit, like the one Banagher used for work. It was a real mobile suit. It wasn’t just a complete duplicate of a human being’s dimensions, though. as Banagher saw a single horn which extended from the head. Industrial 7 didn’t have a factory that could create mobile suits, so it couldn’t be a new mobile suit field test. Was the army nearby?

For some reason, Banagher’s pulse started to race, and his palms began to sweat. The uncanny resemblance to a white horse—no, the impressive lone horn made it look not like a mere white horse, but like a mystical beast from legend. What was it called though...

At that moment, the “disjointed” world became apparent, and it seemed that something previously unseen had appeared before Banagher. However, he could find no way to describe this. Banagher put his face to the window, eagerly looking for the white machine. The nightclub-styled woman sitting behind him wasn’t moving, and the man in worker’s clothing was still snoring loudly.

The train reached one end of the space colony ,and turned down a corner. The front end of the colony looked like a sealed, round pressure tube. The train moved through the seal, and to the docking bay in the center. Banagher couldn’t find the white mobile suit and sat back. Outside the windshield, one could see the immense docking bay linking to several large buildings near the commercial area, and the sheer weight of the sight would make anyone gasp for breath. However, Banagher no longer cared about it. He merely felt the intense white afterimage in his eyes start to fade away, as his heart started to beat wildly for some reason.

This was how everything began.