"There's nothing here…?" Aron muttered, completely confused.
After a few hours drive or so, he and Ethan had arrived at the location where the meteor should have made impact, but contrary to their expectations of a flattened forest, deep crater, and everything else that logically would have followed the impact of a meteorite — everything seemed all too… ordinary.
The forest was calm.
They stood near the edge of a pond under the faint rainfall, gazing at the reflection of the sky in it.
Even Ethan was stumped for words. In his years of experience, he hadn't encountered a situation like this.
"Perhaps the data was wrong… And it did burn up in the atmosphere after all. Damn faulty equipment again!" He muttered, prompting a nod of agreement from Aron nearby.
At first, they had departed from their monitoring station in excitement, thinking they were about to make a windfall, only to end up with nothing to show for it.
"We made that long drive for nothing…"
Not only did they get forced back to work in the middle of the night, but now they'd made a fifty mile journey for nothing.
"Well, at least it wasn't all worthless. At least we know now that the monitoring equipment is faulty. We can report it back to the higher ups for them to deal with, and call it a day. I'm heading back to the truck, got some sleep to catch up on." Ethan lamented.
Aron nodded half-heartedly, gazing deeply into the pond below him.
'Whatever, I better head back with Ethan.'
Aron turned around and followed behind Ethan, equally disappointed that they had found nothing.
***
By the time the government researchers had arrived at the scene, Ludo was already back in the safety of his own home.
He lived in a quaint little studio apartment in the middle of downtown Metro City, only big enough to accommodate a single person, which was just what Ludo liked about it.
Something big and flashy like a mansion or large house with lots of rooms and facilities really wasn't to his taste, and if he had such a thing to himself, it would just feel empty.
After all, a house like that really only worked for people who already had families of their own.
But Ludo couldn't afford anything like that on his paycheck anyway — his apartment's rent was already his biggest expenditure every month, and by a long shot.
He was happy with it though.
Sure, he loved the wilderness and all that nature had to offer, but that was in the context of a weekend getaway. If he was given the option of whether to live out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by an environment like the one he just came back from, or the middle of downtown in a big city like Metro City, he would choose the latter ten times out of ten.
The conveniences of living in the centre of such a place far outweighed the relaxing atmosphere of the wilderness to Ludo.
The only downside was that working an office job like he did in such an environment could be excruciatingly draining on the mentality, especially over long periods of time.
"I guess I won't have to worry about that for much longer though…" He muttered to himself, gleeful that he finally had an excuse to quit that god awful job of his!
As an HR manager at a mid-sized company, his life was rather dull.
And being in the HR department only made that experience even worse, as it often times had him involved in rather difficult situations such as firing people, and effectively acting as the big bosses' lapdog to deal with any rule breakers.
That was only on rare occasions though — most of the time he just processed boring stuff like employee training.
But that life was behind him now.
He quickly found his work phone that the company provided to him when he was hired, and called up his boss, the director of the HR department.
It was a weekday, so everybody would be at work as usual — especially considering Ludo had arrived back home in the early hours of the morning, just after 9am.
As expected, the call was picked up after it rang a few times.
"Ludo? I thought you were off work this week, what's with the sudden call?"
His boss was a rather dull old man, whose entire life basically revolved around the company.
Ludo didn't know as much as his other colleagues — since he couldn't give a damn about the personal lives of any of his co-workers, he did know that the director's wife divorced him for the very reason that he was a workaholic…
"Yeah, about that. I'll be quitting at the end of the week. After my PTO finishes. This is me putting in my notice." He responded plainly, hanging up before the director could even get a word in through his confusion.
His work phone continued to ring a few times before he decided to completely turn it off.
Speaking to anybody from work was at the bottom of his priority list right now. In fact, it was the last thing he wanted to do!
Inside his mind, his thoughts were already churning.
'It's not like I can suddenly announce to the world that I have a connection with a mysterious alien interstellar trading society and can get some technology from them — nor would I ever do so.'
He pulled out his laptop and started to note a few things down.
'I have to take things one step at a time. First thing's first — to set up my own tech company.'
He had no plans to become a middleman, selling and buying things like raw materials.
No, he had much higher aspirations, ones that reached the stars… pun intended.
Ludo suspected that the only way he could upgrade Earth's status, both in the eyes of the galaxy, and the Galactic Terminal, was if he integrated technology he'd purchased from the trading hub into the market on Earth through gradually releasing them as scientific breakthroughs under the guise of his own business venture.
For that, he was lucky that he just happened to live in the one place he could make that happen.
Metro City happened to be the most technologically advanced city in the country, so there was no shortage of such tech companies, and dozens were probably created and liquidated every day.
Besides, Ludo himself worked for one such company.
At college, he'd even achieved a master's degree in computer science, which is what earned him his position at his soon-to-be former workplace, despite his current position not being related at all to his starting position as a programmer.
With that, he started brainstorming a plan.