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Chapter Nineteen - Hardware
“In the 80s and 90s people kind of assumed that the future would be cyborgs. We have early sci-fi and movies like Robocop to thank for that, I think. There’s something romantic about a person combining their weak flesh and powerful technology.
Unfortunately, romantic and realistic aren’t the same.”
--Techtransitionalism, a video essay, 2040
***
I sat on my bike, adjusted my helmet, then finally decided to look at where I’d be heading to.
I had a noon-time appointment with one Peter Silverbloom, a man that I’d met in person all of once and yet whom I still kind of just... trusted.
Peter was a bit of a weirdo, but he wasn’t a bad sort. In fact, it was the opposite. He struck me as very nice. Not a saint or anything, but maybe the closest thing to that in a shithole like New Montreal. His service record was basically nothing but volunteer and non-profit work, and not the hyper-corporatized sort that was flashy and self-serving, but actual get-your-hands-dirty work.
And I had an appointment with him in about half an hour.
“So, where are you, Mister Silverbloom,” I muttered.
I’m assuming that was a rhetorical?
“More or less,” I said. “Did he send his location for this meeting?”
Via email three days ago, then he sent three corrections since.
“Wow, he really can’t decide where to meet? Is there a common thread here? Should I be worried about traps or something?” I asked. My map app opened up and pins appeared in the locations that I assumed he wanted to meet in. They were all lower city spots, mostly close to the more urban parts of the city, but that was the only common thread that I could see at a glance.
Every location is a different non-profit. I dug into it out of curiosity, and it mostly seems as though Peter is just a busy man. His attention is constantly being diverted to issues with different groups within the city. He is quite good at putting out metaphorical fires.
“Huh. I guess that makes sense. This guy’s not gonna live long if he’s spending this much time chasing after problems. He won’t be able to fix every problem in New Montreal.” I turned my bike on and then gently rolled it off the side of the building. My flight drooped for a bit before I started to fly properly and then did a long, slow circle of our home.
His success rate at solving those problems is quite impressive, and his record suggests someone who is genuinely selfless. I’m happy to see you help him as it might help a lot of others.
“You know, he sounds like a pretty good candidate for being a samurai,” I said. I’d never done any charity work before, and I was a bit of a bitch. I also couldn’t picture Peter blowing up the mayor. He’d probably convince even that old asshole to be a better man. Or he’d try, at any rate.
He has a lot of the traits that we search for. He lacks some others.
I locked in the last location Peter had sent me into the bike’s auto-piloting system, then let it lead me around and out across the city. “I don’t know. He sounds like a nicer guy than me.”
Niceness is desirable. Peter Silverbloom is too nice. His desire to be diplomatic at all times would be a hindrance. There are other factors as well, though they might be difficult to explain because of your cultural background.
“My cultural background?” I repeated.
You are human. You value human qualities.
That was needlessly cryptic and a bit creepy. I decided to cut that line of discussion off, it wasn’t going anywhere except to make me feel bad about myself. Besides, comparing yourself to others was a great way to fuck up an otherwise nice day.
Still, the thought worried at me. Would Myalis be disappointed that she was stuck with my dumb ass if there were others out there that were so much better?
I swooped down to the lower levels, then slipped into a parking garage on the ground floor.
I could tell already that this place was a bit of a hole. The building was an older residential complex, long streaks of rust and grime clung onto the sides and the interior of the parking garage was filled with old beaters. Cars twice as old as me were crammed into the corners and it looked like a number of them were parts cars.
There was a camp at the back of the garage, a few containers set in a semi-circle that enclosed a few tents and lean-to shanties. A few ripped apart neon-signs were stacked in the middle with a fire-hazard nest of wires leading to them. It provided a surprisingly bright light for that corner, which let me see the folk hanging around there.
There were a lot of homeless people. Although... I supposed that they did have a home of sorts.
I got off my bike and started towards the back where there was an elevator. Peter was on the fifth floor according to what I’d gotten from him.
One of the locals called out to me, asking me if I wanted some puff for cheap. I wasn’t even sure what that drug was, but he raised a cheap inhaler my way, then took a hit from it himself and let out a giggle.
“Nice place,” I said as I slipped into the elevator and stabbed at the button for the fifth floor. I rubbed my finger off on my pants, the button was sticky.
The elevator’s stereo tried to play some ads, but someone had ripped the panel off and stabbed a screwdriver into it, so the noise was more of a gargling hiss that accompanied me until I made it to the floor I was heading to.
The place was... old. Old and not terribly maintained. Paint was peeling and the stainless half-wall panels were marred by thousands of scuff marks. Still, it was more or less clean. Someone had swept the place and mopped the floors, so even if the flooring was cracked and worn down, it was still clean... ish.
I checked the address Peter had sent and compared it to the imprint of some numbers left next to a doorway nearby. “Weird place,” I said.
As far as I can tell it’s mostly safe.
“Mostly?”
There’s a drug production facility two floors down that doesn’t meet even the loosest of safety standards, there are several dozen armed people on this floor, and hundreds more across the rest of the building, there are addicts and gang-affiliated people spread around you, but for the most part, the local threats are unlikely to be able or willing to harm you.
“Right, so mostly safe,” I said.
The place Peter wanted to meet me at was in the centre of the building. There was an open space where a bunch of corridors came and met in what might have been supposed to be a sort of ‘town square’ area. There were two automated fast food places, a couple of boarded up stores, a pawn shop, and to one side a place called Death Bread, which was apparently where we were supposed to meet.
I slipped into the entrance and took a look around. It was a bakery, of sorts. The food looked... actually, kind of decent. Next to all the prices--which were all in the low hundreds of credits, some even in the double-digits--were little plaques with expiration dates. Most of those were a few days ago.
A young woman came up to me, she had a smile, and no eyes. Her hand reached out to shake, and I realized that it was a skeletal prosthetic, one of those older cyborg arms. “You must be Catherine,” she said. The upper half of her face was a cavity with plastic skin and a trio of cybernetic eyes.
“Yeah, that’s me,” I said. “You don’t look like Peter, unless he had a serious makeover?”
She snorted. “Nah, Peter’s in the back dealing with something. I can tell him to drop it, if you want. It’s probably not that important?”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “So, you’re his... assistant?”
She shook her head a little. Her shirt’s neckline was just loose enough to reveal that her neck was reinforced. “No, I’m Laura. Friends call me See-Three. Peter called me over for a consult, of sorts, if you wanna borrow the corpo term. Nice arm, by the way.”
“Thanks. A consult, huh?”
Laura nodded. “He said you were donating a bunch of prosthetics. Don’t know where you’re getting them, or what sort they are, but I know my metal bits better than anyone else.”
“How’d Peter find you?”
“I work for a charity that fixes folks' cyberware for cheap. Poorly installed gear is a nightmare. Cheap gear is awful. Combine the two and you can make someone’s life not worth living real fast. Been there myself, so I try to help where I can.”
“That sounds like exactly what we need,” I said.
A door further into the bakery opened, and Peter came out. He saw me, then smiled. It was time to get to work, it looked like.
***
Some of my stories are on TopWebFiction!
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Voting makes Broccoli smile!
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Just wait for her to realize mc is one that blew off the mayors head.
How's her body odor? She might be See-three Pee-yeew. (C3PU)
"My dog has no nose!" "How does he smell?" "Awful!"
I still think she's not thinking, and Myalis isn't helping. She's flushing points down the toilet by producing multiple of items when she can produce one, feed it to her replicator, and just have to come up with feed stocks. Still expensive, but not _as_ expensive. Heck, get the city to agree to put in a set of hoses down to the sewer line(s) and water lines, and she'll kill a number of Model Ones with the same ballistic projectile. Pump in nasty stuff, heavily organic, but containing lots of long chain polymers, heavy metals, light metals, and industrial chemicals, and she'll drop out lots of feed stock bars and purified water back into the systems. She could at least supply her own building with clean water with no problem. Heck, replicating the fast food they like would be easy (although the taste would probably be different, without the tingle of industrial chemicals).
Add a dumbwaiter system (heavily secured) and drop prosthetics and food down to the clinic they're discussing adding much lower in the building. Feed and water everyone while they wait to get a hand-out... or foot.
I think I'd be sure to assign See Three the title of "Prosthetics Officer", myself.
Those replicators are a Protector issued machine (think they're called Protectors at least) and from the sounds of it, they've been doing this for hundreds of civilisations before they started doing it for humanity, with humanity having had their help for decades already. What makes you think they've allowed such a loophole to be exploited the way you are suggesting it will be?
I fully expect some limited 'buy a copy, scan it and mass produce duplicates' is allowed. But I have a strong suspicion that any Samurai who is convinced to try gaming the system the way you are suggesting is going to find out that either they have much stronger restrictions placed on their replicators from that point forth or are just denied the ability to do so and warned that there would be consequences if they tried again. All of this before touching on the way that the selection system for Samurai appears to select against folks who are liable to cause the large scale civilisational disruptive effect what you suggested is likely to result in in very short order. Hence why I said the Samurai would have to be convinced to try it, rather than thinking of it themselves.
In short, if you've thought of a way to game the points system, expect the Protectors to have already thought of it, worked out all the consequences of allowing it (in this case, infrastructural construction globally becoming controlled by a single Samurai and every Samurai in existence being bugged by corporations, governments and individuals to create their own global monopoly through one of the items they can buy being replicated destroying humanity's own industry) and then taken precautions to make sure the ones they don't want to happen have been blocked off. Then taken more precautions to make it so the Samurai are unlikely to push in a direction which will test the precautions, as a precaution which isn't being examined for loopholes is one that is a lot more secure.
They are smarter than us, at least on a civilisational basis, have better long term planning capabilities and experience, and actually know how the technology that is being used works from the most basic of fundamentals as they either designed it or observed someone designing it. The 'Samurai Game' works the way it does because they want it to, and anything that goes against it is likely to at best get a "congratulations for thinking of an exploit we never contemplated would actually be used. Now here's a bunch of points as a reward (if they're generous) and excuse us whilst we patch the system to fix said exploit".
@PyroHawk It's not gaming the points system - it was even pointed out by Myalis that it could be done (so the Protectors are aware of it) The difference here is that with a blueprint, she can create multiple ones of different sizes. The 'scan and print copies' does just that - copies. No size changes, no alterations. Useful for gardening tools, one-size-fits-all bio protection suits, and grenades, not so useful for armour, prosthetics, etc. There are likely also some materials that have to be purchased for the system, rather than scavenged, unless she gets ahold of abandoned stuff from other Samurai/Vanguards.
@Serkadion Okay, fair enough, if Myalis has said this specific way of gaming the system is allowed (wouldn't be shocked if I forgot a 'minor' detail like that considering how many stories I read) then that can happen. Which just brings us up to the second issue: how expensive do you think all the fabricators of the needed complexity to print out all the duplicates of the items over... We'll be generous and say two weeks, will be?
And no, duplicating the printers will not work because that is nearly guaranteed to send the cost of the fabricator needed through the roof so you can print out enough fabricators fast enough to make up for the slower initial set up time. Or put another way, is the time cost of being Point conservative going to mean that the Sewer Disaster occurs before the repairs Cat's cheaper efforts allows happen?
Sure, in the long run the 'Point conservative' method would absolutely reach the end point faster because she's able to produce more stuff. However Cat isn't trying to reach the end point of 'The Sewer is fixed' as fast as possible. She is trying to reach the mid-point of 'the sewer is functional' and that has an unknown but very close timer ticking away.
@PyroHawk The fabricator seems to actually be fast for simple items. I'd have to go back and look, but I think it was making more laser turrets in a day than they could deliver (at one point). Right now, Lucy is even using it to create food (the meat for the chili), so it's apparently able to multi-task. I suspect the main slowdown is volume of what it's making, more than complexity. So, turret takes up the whole thing, but four arms could be printed at once (This is just a guess). A simple (for this) bio-suit would probably be minutes, but fixing/duplicating Cat's armour would likely take a day.
Here, a lot of what the Family wanted is simple, because they want to be able to reverse engineer it, or because they wanted guaranteed quality. The reverse engineering stuff? They'd want more than one. So, buy one, copy it a few times, hand them over. They don't _need_ it that day. That also means the blueprint is in the machine for later (like for the grenade(s). Guaranteed quality? Produce what they need immediately, plus one, feed that in, and let it churn out the rest as they find people to need them.
Of course, this is assuming that they're 'one size' items, so duplicates would be fine. If they're getting X of size A, X of size B, and X of size C, then it gets more complicated. As I said before, the biggest restriction is that this isn't a blueprint. It's a copy. If you chunk in Cat's armour, you'll get Cat's armour out - which won't fit anyone but Cat. If you chunk in a grenade... Okay, that sounds strange, but say you scan in a grenade, you'll get a grenade out. Anyone can use a grenade, as long as it's not bio-locked or something. "Only Trooper Osborne gets to throw grenades. They're useless to anyone else."
I'm thinking "They want everything at one time, but they can't use everything at one time.", and you're thinking "They need it all right now!" - which is what they _want_, but not what they actually can _use_. My way saves points, maybe as much as a third?
So, how many points will Cat get for 'saving' the city from dehydration and sewage problems? I mean, apparently they give Samurai/Vanguard points not _just_ for killing Antithesis.