5.13

Rittan took hold of the [Hanging Shade] and pulled it upwards, hooking it up and leaving the tent open. Kalter and Haiko remained by the entrance watching as Rittan placed his oversized cutting board down by the door and pulled the [Mitikos] up beside it.

Once August had settled the fire, he began removing all of the skewers he’d shaved down during his free time. He handed them out the door to Rittan, who began threading the meat onto them and handing them off to Kalter.

“To discover and engineer all of this—shelter, warmth, food, and water,” Haiko observed, peering into the hut for a moment. “You have certainly made the best of a bad situation.”

“Survival is a good motivator,” August offered, holding a hand out towards Kalter. “I’ll cook them if you want—I can do about four at a time.”

Kalter handed them off to him without another word, and he set about holding them over the fire, two in each hand. There was enough meat for several skewers each this time, but unlike the Voithos, he didn’t have six arms to put to the task. Haiko took the next set of meat skewers from Kalter and stooped to enter the hut.

August dropped his gaze to the fire after catching an eyeful of skin. Clothing, that’s exactly what he was going to do tonight as soon as they were finished eating. Haiko sat directly across from him on the other side of the fire, further restricting where he was safely allowed to look. She held her own meat skewers over the fire, copying his own actions and slowly turning them over.

“We are becoming quite adept at these tasks,” Rittan said easily, breaking the relative silence.

“Standing around and holding skewers isn’t exactly hard work,” Kalter murmured.

“Yet it is a pivotal part of the process,” Rittan said, smiling. “If our supply chain breaks down, these skewers may never find their way into our stomachs.”

“Thank you for your service, pet,” Haiko said coyly.

“These skewers are going to find their way into your stomachs, alright,” Kalter muttered, “But not the way you think.”

August blew an amused breath out of his nose at the threat.

“Alas, that would be a waste,” Rittan said, “I think that is enough, yes?”

There was a round of affirmatives before Rittan went about lifting the remains of the [Mitikos] and carrying them down towards the water. August heard it land in the shallows with a splash, roughly where Neptune had taken to patroling—better for him to eat it than to leave it outside of their hut to attract more monsters.

Rittan returned in short order, and then, with Kalter, the two entered the hut. Three Voithos and one human were as close to the limit of space the [A-Frame Hut] had, and he was glad they’d already made a second one.

“When we’re done, I’ll make a second fire for the other hut,” August murmured, checking the skewers.

“Yes—four of us seems to be the limit here,” Rittan said, eyeing the inner roof. “Perhaps we can create a much larger sleeping area in the future.”

“If we made an actual house out of wood or something, like a log cabin,” August murmured, “Give everyone a chance for some actual privacy and their own room.”

“A room each?” Haiko wondered. “How generous.”

August tilted his head at the strange comment, unsure how to take it. Her tone was curious, but the chosen words felt almost passive-aggressive.

“I mean, if we manage to stay alive long enough, we’d eventually get to the point where you could just have a house to yourself,” August said, furrowing his brow. “It’s just a matter of getting there.”

Kalter and Haiko shared a glance, and then Rittan spoke up.

“My assignment meant that I had a room to myself, but that is an unusual situation for most Voithos,” Rittan said, warming his hands on the fire. “There was a single designated sleeping quarter on each finger—a single large room with a few hundred beds present.”

“A finger is like a city, right?” August wondered.

“A finger is a platform attached to the main structure of Hekaton,” Haiko corrected, “There are multiple cities on each finger.”

“Okay, multiple cities,” August nodded, scaling his mental map of Hekaton upwards. “We kind of had a similar sleeping situation for the military called barracks. But it was like fifty people or something like that. Outside of that, most people lived in a house, apartment or building—either alone or with their families.”

“That is the situation in which Gaians traditionally live,” Haiko nodded, “Where do you allow your servants to live?”

August just shook his head at the question.

“Humans haven’t had servants for almost two hundred years, although that isn’t exactly what they were called,” August said, watching the fire. “It was more or less outlawed across the world.”

“How strange,” Haiko murmured, eyebrows raised.

August’s checked the skewers again and found them more or less cooked. He handed one of them to each of the Voithos and kept the final one for himself. The meat was just as chewy as it had been the first time, but the taste was enough to make it worth the effort.

“Humans aren’t exactly in the business of making new races either,” August admitted, “As far as I’m aware, we are currently investigating artificial intelligence, self-learning, and robotics, but we’re decades off anything like building a machine race like the one that Rittan mentioned—closer to a century even.”

“An identical language and appearance, but asymmetrical technological advancement,” Haiko said curiously. “What about creating biological races?”

“I doubt anything like that would even happen at all,” August admitted. “I’m honestly not sure which is more difficult on a technical level, but we’d never make it past the ethical concerns in the first place.”