My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible - Chapter 540 Staffs Living Quarters

Chapter 540  Staffs Living Quarters

The airlocks opened in sequence along the main hallway, each one releasing a small group into the same long white corridor.

The hallway was wide — wide enough that five people could walk side by side without brushing shoulders — and it stretched in both directions further than felt reasonable for something built into the lunar surface.

The ceiling was high and the light came from everywhere and nowhere, the same sourceless illumination they had seen from orbit, steady and clean and without the warmth of any light source they could name.

Three men in dark suits were already standing there when the first groups emerged.

One stepped forward.

“Welcome to Lunar Base Sanctuary,” he said. “I’ll take you to your quarters and walk you through the areas you’ll have access to during your stay. Follow me.”

He turned without waiting for a response and the group of staff followed.

The hallway ran long enough that several of the staff had time to study it properly as they walked. The walls were smooth and unbroken except for occasional recessed panels whose function wasn’t immediately clear.

The floor was a slightly darker material than the walls, the transition between surfaces subtle enough that it took a moment to notice. There were no windows. There was no natural light. And yet nothing about the space felt enclosed in the way that underground facilities felt enclosed. The scale was too large for that. The ceiling too high. The proportions too generous.

They reached the end of the hallway.

A wall. Clean, featureless, identical to every other section of wall they had passed. The lead figure didn’t slow. He walked toward it and a moment before it should have become a problem, the wall parted — not sliding to one side but separating cleanly down the center, each half moving back into the wall itself, revealing an opening that was larger than anyone had expected.

An elevator.

They stepped in when gestured, thirty-six staff and the Synths behind them, and the space absorbed them without difficulty. Several people had tensed slightly as the last of them entered, anticipating the particular discomfort of too many people in too small a space.

The discomfort didn’t arrive. The elevator was large enough that they stood comfortably, bags at feet, with room between them.

The doors closed without sound.

They waited for the sensation of movement — the slight drop in the stomach, the pressure change, the vibration through the floor that every elevator produced. It didn’t come. Nobody pressed anything. There were no buttons on the walls, no floor indicator above the doors, no panel of any kind. Just smooth walls and steady light and the thirty-six of them standing in silence.

Then the doors opened.

Another white hallway. Different from the first — narrower, the ceiling lower, the proportions more residential than corridor. The numbering was the first thing that they noticed: clean figures above specific sections of the wall, evenly spaced, each one paired with a flush panel set into the surface at approximately hand height.

The lead figure stopped and turned to face them.

“Each of you was given a number in your acceptance email,” he said. “Find the matching number on the wall. When you find it, place your hand on the panel beside it.”

They dispersed along the hallway, checking numbers, moving with the focus of people given a concrete task after a long period of having nothing concrete to do.

The first to find his number was a data analyst from Johannesburg. He stood in front of the panel for a moment, hand raised, then pressed his palm flat against the surface.

His name appeared on the panel in clean text. A single prompt followed: Confirm registration.

He pressed confirm.

A brief pause. Then a second prompt: Biometric registered. Access granted.

The wall beside the panel moved. It drew back into itself the way the elevator doors had, the material receding smoothly until the opening was fully revealed — and beyond it was darkness.

He stood at the threshold and looked into it.

Then the darkness resolved.

The lights came up slowly, not all at once but in a rising sequence that gave the eye time to adjust and the mind time to follow, and what they revealed stopped him where he stood.

The room was large. Not large in the way that hotel rooms were described as large but genuinely, uncomplicatedly large. The ceiling was higher than he’d expected, the proportions generous in a way that immediately removed the sense of being contained.

The floor was a warm material, slightly yielding underfoot, that he couldn’t identify but which felt nothing like the corridor outside. The walls were a neutral color, not quite white, not quite grey, with a texture that absorbed the light rather than reflecting it.

The bed was against the far wall, low and wide, with a frame that sat close to the floor and bedding that was clearly not standard linen.

To the left, a desk ran the full length of one wall. The surface was clean and dark, and inset into it at intervals were panels whose purpose wasn’t immediately obvioue.

 Above the desk, the wall was unbroken — no screen, no display — and then, as the analyst stood watching, a section of it shifted, the surface becoming transparent, and he realized he was looking through it at a view that he had not expected.

The room looked out, not at the lunar surface, but at the interior of the base itself — a vast enclosed common space visible through the transparent wall, lit in the same warm-white as everything else, large enough that the far side of it was visible only in its broad shapes. Green was visible from here. Actual green. Plants, or something that functioned as plants, running along the lower level of the common space in a density that he hadn’t anticipated.

He turned back to the room.

There was a seating area — two chairs and a low surface between them, the material of the chairs something dark and soft. A door to the left of the desk led to a bathroom, and he stepped to the threshold of it and looked in and stood there for a moment.

The bathroom was the size of his living room at home.

The fixtures were clean and simple and clearly functional, but the proportions were extravagant by any measure he was familiar with. A shower enclosure large enough that the concept of cramped couldn’t be applied to it. A basin in a clean dark stone-like material that he didn’t recognize. Towels folded on a rail that were thick in a way that suggested the material had been selected rather than sourced.

He walked back into the main room and stood in the center of it and turned slowly, looking at each wall in sequence.

Around him, through the open doorways along the residential hallway, the others were doing the same.

The physical therapist from Toronto had both hands pressed flat against the transparent wall, looking through it at the common space and the green below.

The expression on her face was the same one she had worn outside JFK before she stepped onto the platform, disbelief.

The head chef had walked directly to the desk and was examining the inset panels with professional attention, already calculating something. He pressed one. A display unfurled above the desk surface, a menu of options in clean text, and he leaned forward and read it with focus.

The translator stood in the center of her room with her bag still over her shoulder, not having put it down yet, looking at the ceiling. She lowered her gaze slowly, taking in the room in sections, and when she reached the transparent wall and saw the common space and the green she stood still for a long time.

Then she set her bag down..

Down the hallway, a nurse sat on the edge of his bed and pressed his palms against the surface of it, testing the give, the way people tested things they were trying to make real through physical contact. He sat there for a moment. Then he lay back, fully clothed, bag beside him on the floor, and looked at the ceiling.

The ceiling was high and neutral and lit with the same sourceless light as everything else in the base.

He closed his eyes.

He opened them again immediately, because closing them felt like waste.

The lead Synth appeared at the entrance to the residential hallway and spoke in a voice that reached everyone clearly without being raised.

“Orientation begins in two hours in the common area. Meals are available now. You have time to settle.”

It turned and walked back toward the elevator, leaving them to it.

The hallway was quiet. The doors to the individual quarters stood open along both sides, warm light spilling from each one into the corridor, the sounds of thirty-six people encountering their rooms for the first time a mix of silence and small involuntary sounds and one short laugh from somewhere near the far end that nobody could trace to a specific person.

The data analyst from Johannesburg was still standing in the center of his room.

He picked up his bag and set it on the desk.

Then he walked to the transparent wall and looked out at the common space and the green below and the high ceiling of the base above it, and he stayed there until it was time to go to orientation.