Chapter Twenty-Nine - Un-convent-ional Interior Design

“Eye-linked augmentations, Augs, are a necessary part of life in 2050s. Almost everything uses touchless interfaces, most of which require some sort of Aug in order to interface with it.

When it works, it means that someone can interact with the world around them without ever doing any more than glancing at it!”

--Augworld, digital magazine, 2051

***

Franny turned to the side so that she could stare at the elevator panel without a stack of boxes blocking her vision. Some Aug-mented reality stuff was useful, and some of it was downright stupidly designed, the elevator’s button panel was probably one of the latter.

“Okay, so, Delilah’s planning on breaking down a lot of the floors between the two, uh, floors that we’re building on.”

“That makes sense, I guess,” I said. “I can’t remember what the two levels were before.”

“Offices, mostly,” Franny said. “There was one small factory space in the northern end of the floor that already covers both levels, and there’s a salon too. The rest is all offices, call centres, server rooms. That kind of stuff.”

I nodded along. The elevator arrived soon enough, and we stepped in. The ride down wasn’t much longer, a floor hummed past, then we stopped at the next one down and Franny led the way into... not much of anything, really.

The space had a few different offices in it, but now the walls between the different parts of the floor were torn down. At glance, it looked like the walls were maybe fifteen centimetres thick, with room for cabling and such between them. The walls themselves were stacked to one side, four-by-eight panels that bolted onto the girders that supported the building.

The flooring was even the same across different offices. Basically, it was like each office was a macro-cubical for whichever company owned them, with smaller cubicles for the poor fucks working for them within.

Now everything was stacked up to one side, a heap of walls and cubicles and desks. “What are you going to do with all of that?” I asked.

“Sell it,” Franny said with a shrug. She carried her boxes over to a small pile, away from the disassembled walls and cubicles. “The church is helping with that. Only took a day to find someone interested, but they’ll only be around to pick it all up tomorrow.”

“I guess there’s a market for this kind of stuff?”

“Right now? Yeah. Lots of damaged buildings, and I think those wall panels are like some sort of universal fit. The desks and cubicles are just desks and cubicles. Someone will want them.”

I set down the box I was carrying next to the pile. “Makes sense,” I said. “So, want to show me around? I’m kinda curious, though I guess there’s not much to show for it yet.”

“Yeah, sure,” Franny said. “Plus it’ll get me away from Datamaria for a bit. She’s... a lot. Ethergrace is nice though, she didn’t sleep through the ‘don’t be a judgemental bitch’ lessons the way Datamaria did.”

I snorted. I wasn’t involved with anything religious enough to be able to comment on it, but I had the impression that there was a lot of drama behind closed doors. “She was a bit much. Weird to see her immediately turn nice when she found out I was a samurai.”

“They’re all like that,” Franny said. “We’re taught that samurai are saints, one step down from the damned pope. Plus, you know, samurai are celebrities already. You’re getting pretty popular too.”

“Am I?” I asked. “I don’t pay too much attention to it.”

“Yeah. You were behind Delilah for a while, until, you know, you shot the mayor in a livestream. Now you’re two thousand points ahead.” Franny shook her head. “I was sure Delilah would break the top ten-k before you.”

I blinked, then made a note to look at my popularity rankings. I didn’t have the time or inclination to obsess over that kind of shit, but I was also pretty curious.

“Anyway! This is the lower floor, where we’ll have most of the ‘outward facing’ stuff. That’s what Delilah calls it,” Franny said. She pointed to one end of the room. “That’ll be where the chapel is. Just a little one, mostly to make it so the old bats back home don’t get their dusty old panties in a knot.”

“Alright,” I said. I wouldn’t want a chapel in my place, but Delilah would do as she pleased.

“That part over there, without the windows? That’s the factory part. It was one of those 3d printer places. You’d order shit up online and they’d make and ship it.”

“Oh, nice,” I said. “Is the stuff still there?”

Franny shook her head. “Nah, all gone. The company that owns it picked it up a bit ago. I guess the machines are worth enough to move them around to a new place. Anyway, it’s a big, empty room with reinforced parts. Delilah wants to install the lift for her car there. Like a mini-interior garage.”

“That’s cool,” I said.

“So, chapel there, garage there. I guess we can have like, a lobby space or something here. And I guess offices or something there? There’s a lot more room than we need, honestly.” Franny walked over to one of the staircases, and I followed her. “I think we’ll block these off. I don’t really like the idea of someone being able to walk right through. The elevators can continue, I guess. We might want better security on those.”

“I’ll talk to Gomorrah about it,” I said. “But yeah, it makes sense. Better cameras, a scanner maybe? Something dangerous in case someone we don’t like comes in. I can definitely shove some bombs in there.”

Franny gave me a very flat look. “I’m alright with living in the same building as you, Cat, but not if you’re going to bomb the place.”

“I didn’t say I’d set it off. Besides, I have some bombs that wouldn’t take the building down. And you’re one to talk, your girlfriend lights shit on fire on the regular.”

Franny’s cheeks warmed up, which was blatantly obvious with the smattering of freckles across her nose. “Whatever,” she said as she continued to stomp her way up the stairs. “So, this is the living floor.”

I followed her up and into the next floor. This one was only half cleared, but there was something at work on the rest of it. I stopped to stare. It was a robot of some sort, set on a wide wheel base with six small rubbery wheels. It had a large boxy frame with several articulated arms coming out of it with tools on their ends.

The robot was taking apart one of those wall panels, one of the arms had a drill on the end, but the thing was moving at a snail’s pace. The arm with the drill slowly, slowly moved up to a corner piece, then carefully slotted the drill in place before spinning a screw out of place. Then it moved down, and dropped the screw into a small receptacle before moving onto the next, all at the same pace.

“What’s that thing?” I asked.

“It’s some sort of car maintenance drone,” Franny said. “I don’t think we named it. It does oil changes and stuff on the Fury. Not that I think it’s ever really been used for that much? Mostly, we used it to change lightbulbs and do maintenance at the church. We brought it over, and it’s been disassembling things.”

“Huh,” I said. Well, that made some sense. Gomorrah probably had a few catalogues that it could have come from. Judging by the unfanciness of it, and its speed, it was probably even relatively cheap. A couple of hundred points or something. “I guess I could use my repair drone for the same kind of thing. Maybe when I’m not using it.”

“Delilah wants to reinforce the entire building. But that’ll take a while.”

I nodded and looked around. Most of the floor was cleared out, and it felt surprisingly cavernous and empty. There was a lot of room in here for stuff. “What are you going to be putting in here?”

Franny turned and started pointing. “Kitchen, living room, then guest bedrooms. There should be two bathrooms. One near the dining room there, and another in the master bedroom. Plus there’s two more downstairs. It’s actually kind of a lot. Delilah’s place has half as many square feet as we have back home, but back home houses something like a hundred nuns.”

“It’s a lot of room,” I agreed. “So... do you have a bedroom, or are you going to be... sharing?”

Franny swallowed, then looked away. “So, that’s the garage part. I think we’ll have access to it from this floor. And the outer walls will be changed out. That’ll be a big job, I think. Delilah might just have them all stripped out, then order in new ones fit into place already. They need to be tough, and also fireproof. In fact, the whole place will be, especially around the armoury.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said.

“A-anyway, this is where the kitchen will be.”

“You said that already Franny!”

***