"Friends will help us deal with it all. Moving on, moving on."

"They could have picked a worse subset of humanity to kidnap-slash-save. A better one, too. But college kids... Relatively independent, young, probably smarter than average and at least somewhat driven..."

He chuckles at her comment on friends. "Yeah, I'm kinda encouraged by the selection. There is one other criteria the aliens might have had in mind, we're around the age people start to have kids at. Maybe we're a little younger, but still. And Carl, the medical guy, says that there's a large section on prenatal care in his training."

"Why am I not surprised? It's not like being stuck in a new world and seeing Earth destroyed puts people in the mood to become parents, or anything."

"Yeah, I wasn't really planning to become a parent, the idea doesn't particularly thrill me. I'm hoping that with this absurd medical technology they've got some better solution than trying to rebuild our species the old-fashioned way. I think it might be better to die off than to organize some sort of breeding program."

"It's not a binary choice between forced procreation and dying out, just saying. There's probably people around who will want kids instead of not, given the choice, a year down the line. I might even be one. Haven't thought about it in this new context, but I decided I wanted kids eventually back home."

"Right, I default to thinking really long term on some matters. I was talking about ensuring a viable gene pool in the long run."

"...I don't know too much about that. And it seems like the kind of thing stupidly advanced technology can remedy?"

"Huh, that's a good point. I don't remember why inbreeding is actually a bad thing, maybe it can be solved with advanced medicine."

"I'll make sure to ask Carl. He keeps saying he's not a doctor, but if he's reading prenatal care stuff they might be saying something about that."

"Yeah that makes a lot of sense."

She makes idle chit-chat about things she's noticed or learned about the complex, or about rest of the interplanetary refugees the rest of the way to the skybridge

He responds in kind. "Probably makes sense to leave the bikes outside the store." He says doing just that.

"Yep."

They walk back to the skybridge and one twenty character code later they're in the lounge. Zahn tries the obvious first step in setting up a dictionary attack. "Interface assign code SUNRISEHORSEVECTORAT to this elevator."

A smooth female voice answers him. "Unable to comply custom codes cannot be assigned at this time."

"Well, the only way to find the code for Earth is to enter it on a keyboard. There's something like ten to the thirty-first codes though. I'm not sure how practical it is to just start entering some."

"Has Nick come back yet? I bet he'd have ideas..."

"He hasn't come into the lounge while I was waiting for you."

In a moment of rather sevendipious timing, her phone rings.

"Hi Nick, we were just talking about you."

"Oh really? Well, tell the wall door to open for me, will you? I managed to find a garage. Well, sort of. Got a lot of potentially useful stuff to haul in. Phones for all and then some, to start."

"Cool, Interface open garden door three, that should work. Do you need help?"

"Most of it will wait just outside the wall. Also, there is some rather unfriendly-looking vegetation if you go far enough. I threw some dirt and it lashed out with miniature tentacles and ate it. And I turned right around muttering 'nope nope nope'. So. Add that to the warning list."

"That's an oversight on my part, will do. See you soon."

There's the sound of him moving things around in the background. "Any progress on the elevators?"

"Good news, Zahn's reactivated the one in the lounge. Bad news, the naive dictionary attack idea won't work."

"Hm. The only other fast-ish thing to try is going off patterns, but they seemed pretty random to me."