Chapter Thirteen - Long Day

“Keep in mind that different vegetables need to be cooked differently. Organic vegetables are somewhat more fragile, and yet preferred by many. They need to be boiled, sauteed, baked or otherwise cooked before being cut and prepared for serving. Synthetic vegetables usually come pre-cooked at the right consistency and are pre-cut and ready to serve or mix into a larger recipe.”

--Footnote in Home Cooking 2044

***

I walked into our bedroom, shuffled over to the bed while shucking off my coat, then did a half-spin and fell back-first onto the bed.

“Long day?” Lucy asked.

“Yeah,” I said to the ceiling. “I had to deal with people.”

“Aww, poor kitty cat,” Lucy crooned. She moved over the surface of the bed, and soon I found her sitting just above me, soft pyjama-clad thighs on either side of my head. Her face hovered over mine, upside-down from my skewed perspective as she started to press her fingers into and through my hair. “Wanna talk about it?” she asked.

I let out a sigh, part frustration, part relaxation as she pressed into my scalp in just the right way. “I headed out to see about the sewers,” I started.

“Mhm, you’d mentioned it.”

“Yeah. figured they were kinda fucky, but didn’t know how fucky they were, you know?” I said. “There’s this corp called the... New Montreal Sewage Maintenance... something or other. I can’t remember their name.”

“That’s a terrible name for a corp,” Lucy said. “You’d think they’d go with Sewageco, or something banal like Green Solutions.”

I chuckled. “Yeah. I think it was city-operated for a while, then it went private. At least, that’s the impression I was getting. They’re the ones who are actually supposed to be taking care of the sewage and water and all that.”

“Maybe Brown Solutions, then?” she asked.

I laughed. “Yeah, maybe. Got there and all the C-suite suits had run off. Myalis nabbed their bank accounts, but they’re still off. I don’t have the time or energy to chase after them. I swear, people are such... urgh.”

“They probably had a good thing going. Skim off the taxes people pay for maintenance, maybe keep some corps properly connected to the water lines for a little extra on the side.”

I nodded. “Yeah, the usual shit. It’s not even imaginative. It’s almost insulting how predictable it all is. I mean, come on, are we in a capitalist hellscape or a kleptocracy? Someone should teach these people to stick to their lanes.”

Lucy leaned way forwards and pressed a kiss on my forehead. “It’s okay. Did you find a way to fix things?”

“Not really, no. Got the employees back on task, promised them some support, then ran to the Family. The non-samurai part of the Family’s weird, by the way. Too many smiles, too much... enthusiasm. It creeped me right out.”

“Bad vibes?”

“Weird vibes,” I said. “I think they’ll actually try though, which is nice. If they don’t, then I’ll have to be disappointed at them.”

“Disappointed at them?” Lucy repeated.

“Mhm, I’ve got all this stealth crap and rarely use it. Bet I can scare the smiles right off their faces if I apply myself a little. But I’m on vacation. I’m not supposed to be working this hard.”

“Did you just want to sleep it off?” Lucy asked.

I groaned, then with a monumental show of effort, sat myself up. “I’m going to go play outside,” I said.

Lucy snorted. “You mean work on your mech? Go on, you are still on vacation. I’ll prep you something to eat.”

“You’ll cook?” I asked. Lucy had never cook-cooked anything before. Not unless it went in the microwave or came in a box. Making mac and cheese counted as cooking, I supposed, but that almost felt like a cop-out. She’d arranged different ordered foods together into a proper meal once or twice, but that was about the extent of it.

Her cheeks flushed, almost unnoticeably. “I want to learn. You’re just going to have to suffer through my culinary experimentation.”

“Whatever you say, chef Lucy,” I replied as I finally got to my feet. I decided to leave my coat on the floor. It was a bit heavy for mechanical work. Though... maybe it was raining outside? I wasn’t so sure. In any case, I now had a good reason to build up an appetite. “So what’s on the menu today?”

“I’m not going to start with anything complicated,” Lucy said. “I ordered some fish, and I have broccoli, and brown rice. Can’t really mess that up, I think.”

That did sound nice, I supposed. It wasn’t a burger, but I’d probably eaten enough junk food my entire life that I’d ruined my own taste for proper, real food. It wouldn’t hurt to step back and eat something mildly healthy for once.

Which reminded me. “Have you seen Rac?”

Lucy nodded. “She popped by for a few hours. Dumped some things in the printer room, then grabbed some food and ran off again. I think she’s back to gathering stuff for the fabricator.”

“Did she tell you that?” I asked.

“No, but she changed from her going out clothes to her picking up trash clothes,” Lucy said. “I think she’s trying to keep her work clothes clean. Or at least, clean-er.”

I hadn’t noticed that myself. It made sense, of course, Rac looked like she wanted her merc friends to think highly of her, and that meant not being dressed in rags. Especially if she really did have a thing for that Garter guy. Of course, Lucy would notice that kind of thing.

“Let me know if she comes back. I just want to check up on her,” I said, then a thought crossed my mind. “Have any of the other kittens been getting up to anything?”

“Not really,” Lucy said. “Some of them are cheating on their lessons, the ones Miss Grasshopper signed them up for, but I figure learning how to cheat’s a good skill too. But otherwise, they’re mostly just chilling. Daniel’s probably the only one who might move out. He’s been finding odd jobs to do on the Mesh, and he left a couple of times to meet some online friends, and to walk around. Junior and Katalina are talking about finding work and living the high life, but I think they also like mooching off you, so don’t expect them to just disappear.”

That was nice to hear. I worried, sometimes. Just a little bit though. “I’ll be tinkering,” I said.

“Have fun!”

I didn’t find a jacket to wear out into the New Montreal drizzle covering the balcony out front, but a shitty raincoat was only a couple of points from Myalis. I still worried when I bought it though. I was determined to fix the sewers at some point, and I was willing to splurge about ten-thousand points into it.

I’d started my vacation with just shy of forty-thousand points. I’d splurged here and there, spending some on stuff at home, on tools and drones and more security and some upgrades for the kittens.

Current Points: 33,451

That was a good nest-egg. And I was seriously considering burning a third of it away.

Fortunately, I was still gaining points. A dozen or so a day, even. Myalis said that it was mostly people using gear I’d given them scoring some kills. Enough and I’d earn a few points as recompense. So as long as the cleanup continued around Burlington, I’d earn a tidy little amount. Emphasis on little.

Stepping out into the rain, I walked across to my mech, then stretched out my back. “Right, where was I?” I wondered aloud. Myalis must have caught on that it wasn’t an honest question because her only reply was to bring up some schematics on my hud, a list of things left to take apart.

The repair drone woke up and floated over, ready to assist.

There was a lot to do, still, but for the most part the work wasn’t so complicated that I couldn’t think. It was nice to get lost in it, trying to undo a puzzle that was impossibly complex and which I had no hope of understanding in full, but where I could figure out little pieces of it, where I could tell what was broken and what needed replacing.

It sounded like an ass-pull metaphor for what was going on with New Montreal as a whole. The city was broken. Not so much so that it wasn’t functional still, but the break would spread and the problems would only get worse.

I tackled the things on the list one at a time, and for the moment, I was mostly just ripping parts out and tossing them aside or handing them to the repair drone who floated them over to a bin.

Maybe I could squeeze that into my metaphor too?

“Cat!” Lucy called from the entrance. “Supper’s ready! Come eat while it’s still hot!”

Now... how would that part fit in? Was Lucy and her supper the samurai, or was she... wait, no, I was overthinking this. “Right, I’m coming!” I called back.

***