Shortly after we all were ready we got underway. In respect of the relatively low-key occasion, we had decided to use the van and the sedan. While the sedan was comparatively nice and well maintained, the van showed its age and the misuse of Frankel and his chuckleheads.

I had not realized that as I mostly used one of the skimmers, and if not almost always the sedan. But seeing it now, I noticed that the van looked downright shabby. I was pretty sure that with the industrial fabber no longer working 24/7 to satisfy the demand in cyberware, we could restore it to peak condition.

Heck, we could completely rebuild it, keeping only the VIN of the old one, but why bother? On the way to the park, I got online and bought a new one. I was sure the others could use the old one in one of their still infrequent bouts of merc-work, so I did not plan for its immediate disposal, but that was it.

And unlike the skimmer, the new van would be delivered the next day.

A short time later we arrived at the park, and when I got out of the car, I saw a throng of people already there. It took everything I had to not just get in the sedan again to stay away from all this.

I felt an assuring hand on my shoulder and had not to look to my side to know it was Kate, who had taken over as the voice of reason from Darren when he unsurprisingly lost most of his ability to read the situation, the emotions, and the people when he activated his mind blocker.

I swallowed the lump in my throat, took a deep breath, and together we walked toward the people congregating around some pseudo-wooden structure. I was pretty sure it was pseudo-wood instead of real wood as wood was essentially unaffordable. On the way, I got my first look at the newly revived park.

Unlike the farmland in the heart of the continent, and to a lesser extent the farming areas surrounding the big urban centers in the east, New York City had fortunately not been directly hit by soil-destroying bombs in the night of the falling stars.

As such many of the old parks, except those located in Manhattan, of course, were at least theoretically still viable. In practice, they had all been more or less turned into a wasteland in the months after the end of the great war. Desperate people tried to use the areas for food production, more often than not making a total hash out of it.

After the food replicators became prevalent those areas had mostly been left to grow wild again. Ben had used some of the money he had gained from tributes to have the park turned back into a park. It had a pond in its center, several trees, even if these were still mostly saplings, grassed areas, and bushes. Much greenery in other words.

It was already apparent that it would be a nice area in a few years. Ben had wisely chosen a mix of very fast-growing trees and slow-growing ones. The fast ones would be hard-pressed to remain alive for more than a couple of hundred years, while the slow ones would just begin to enter their prime at that point.

But for now, it was mostly grass with some bushes and quite a few saplings distributed throughout it.

As we got closer to the construct, I was able to identify it as what I believe is called a gazebo. You know these strange huts that had no walls, but just some columns that held up the roof above the raised floor. The adjacent flag pole flew the US flag, strangely it still sported the 79 stars that represented the 79 states that formed the USA of before the third civil war.

Well, maybe not quite that strange, after all, the US still laid claim to the 46 states it lost in this war.

And of course, they laid claim to the five states in the heartland that had been turned into an uninhabitable wasteland during the night of falling stars, not that anybody refuted that claim.

At a superficial estimate, I would say there were around 300 people present. Way more than I was comfortable with, to be honest, and considering our relatively early arrival, I suspected we could expect quite a few more in time as well.

The center of attention for all the people here was Ben, who was extolling the virtues of the United States, New York City, Queens, and his territory. Even I was captured by the speech, and I knew that a pretty big part of what he was telling the people was utter bull.

The US of A was a dystopian nightmare with a serious helping of ‘rules for thee, but not for me’ syndrome. NYC was either a slum or a playground for the corpies. And Queens was the slum. At least he was mostly right about his territory. The living conditions here had risen consistently since I had arrived. By now it was nearly on the level of the outskirts of Seattle.

But Ben being Ben, he managed to sell the story, despite the nation he was talking about being dead and gone since before the second civil war. People here were excited to be here. The free food did not hurt either.

I could infer from some of the excited conversations that people knew that Ben was providing ‘real’ food. Well, it was better than replicator fare, that was sure. In reality, I was strongly considering switching to the vat-meat myself. There was barely any difference between the real animal product and the copy, either in taste or texture, even to my taste.

And even then I was not quite sure that the difference was not only in my mind.

The others did not find any difference. For the spices, I could not find any difference at all. I would still need to buy some ingredients. Eggs for example, or grains and grain products. Milk as well. I had so far failed to recreate them. Not that I was working very hard on it, mind you.

Finally, Ben finished his speech, jumped down from the construct, and waded through the sea of adoring subjects. No, seriously, even I could see how he basked in the attention.

On a very philosophical level, I could even somewhat understand it. A tiny bit at least. Ben was a social animal. The undisputed Alpha of his pack, and his territory. It was good that he also was rather smart about it, or the people here would have suffered.

And still, he received several handshakes, a couple of claps on the shoulder, and quite a few hugs, before he managed to extricate himself from the throng, and gave a hug this time, to me.

I just then realized that I was shivering. Too many people, and way too many strangers. But his warm embrace calmed me down quite a lot. He kissed my forehead.

“Hey Kitten. You look beautiful today.”

These few words were strangely uplifting. Yes, I knew on a very intellectual level that I was not that bad looking. For Mongrels that is.

Unfortunately for me, the beauty standards of the Pure had a large helping of ‘big’ and ‘strong’ mixed in. The current Pure vision of female beauty would have been called a freak of a bodybuilder before the great war.

My rather diminutive stature on the other hand was seen as a birth defect by those that wanted to be friendly, and ugly by those that wanted to hurt me. Such during all my life I had been told I was ugly as sin, and that had left marks.

That explained why I couldn’t help myself and beamed up at Ben.

“Thank you. It was a bit of a struggle, but if you like it it was worth it.”

He chuckled for a moment.

“I know that I will kick my own ass about it, but you have to work hard to not look good. But today you look just a bit better than usual.”

Wait, was that a compliment? Or did he want to tell me that I should not have bothered? Fortunately, my confusion must have been visible, as he sighed.

“Don’t worry Kitten. The effort was not wasted. You are naturally good-looking, but if you put in the work you become beautiful. I appreciate you whenever I see you, but today you are shining.”

I still had a bit of trouble understanding what he was trying to say, but I could get that he was liking what he was seeing every day, but a bit more today. That was enough.

He pulled me a bit tighter into the hug and kissed me for a felt eternity, before letting go of me.

“As much as I would love to keep you in my arms right now, I have to make my rounds here, before we put the food on the grill.”

I was equally unhappy about him letting me go, but I understood all too well.

“Maybe you can tell me what we are having? I had not much luck finding out more than ‘traditionally American’.”

He chuckled again.

“Oh, that has to eat at you. But seriously, we will have burgers, hot dogs, some brats, potato salad, cole slaw, and such. The people I have had trained for this tried to get cheesesteaks working, but that was not very successful yet.”

Wait a minute, burgers? Hot dogs? My new tech could deliver meat, herbs, and vegetables in measured amounts, but rolls need cereals, and while technically I could create them, it was not in the mass necessary to make the rolls and buns for hot dogs and burgers.

I frowned a bit while I thought about it.

“How did you get the rolls? Or the buns? The vats and cloning chambers I’ve built for you can’t produce the cereals in sufficient amounts to make enough buns here. Heck, I still use the bought flour.”

He just grinned when he answered:

“Well, I was pondering if I should just buy the flour for the breadstuff. But in the end, the bread we use is traditionally rather bland, and a tad sweet anyway. So I had those made by the food replicators with a good helping of sugar and a few herbs mixed in.

You might taste a difference, but I bet you, nobody else will, even if they know the real thing.”

He gave another chuckle.

“I had a much harder time with the condiments and sauces. Quite a few of those need eggs. And those were expensive. By the way, can I implore you to hurry up and invent a way to mass-produce eggs? I’ve learned I like real eggs with the vat meat.”

What, did he now expect me to work… hm, if I, yes, that might work. I would have to clone a couple of full chickens first, but that would be no problem. But I would have to read up on how the whole process takes place in chickens, but with a couple of BOU, I would be probably able to observe the processes in situ.

A snort from Ben brought me out of my musings.

“Did you just now…?”

I tilted my head, still not quite in the there and then.

“Did I just now what?”

“Crack the problem with the eggs?”

I shrugged.

“Maybe. I have an idea, but can’t promise anything yet.”

He laughed out loud this time.

“Only you, Vivian, only you. But sadly, I’ll have to do my job. We will talk later. How about you meet a few of my loyal subjects?”

Before I could answer him, he turned around and went to another group of people. Why the heck did he want me to actually talk to people? After a few moments of watching him do his rounds, I sighed, shrugged, and did my best to get to know his people.

I’ll be honest upfront here, my best was not particularly impressive. I am the first to admit that I am rather awkward in social situations, but even with that pretext, my encounters seemed to be… off.

For some reason most of the people I tried to talk to behaved cold and some cases downright hostile essentially from the first word. Yes, I got it, I was a Pure, and for the last 200 years or so the Pure had been made responsible for anything and everything going wrong in the world by the spin doctors and demagogues all around.

But what happened here was going far beyond simple racism. I mean, one could be friendly and say I was used to adversity, but in Seattle, I knew at least why people snubbed me. In NYC? I had no clue.

Sure, most of them babbled something about a golddigger or a graverobber. Sometimes used both expressions. But seriously, what does that mean? Are there even still golddiggers? Most of that work is done by bots nowadays anyway.

And what the heck was a graverobber? For real, I had never heard that at all. In the end, I could only shrug confused, and move on.

It got a bit better when the crowd got younger. The closer I got to my chronological or even my biological age, the better it got. Mostly that is. A group of young women became so falsely friendly that even I realized that they were trying to lead me on. Interestingly they made up the upper echelon on looks.

It took me some time to realize that fact as the common denominator for all of them, and, to my shame, even longer to get the idea that these girls felt somehow threatened by my appearance.

To be fair, I did not place myself even near their group. While I was biologically roughly in the same ballpark, mentally and intellectually, we were in different worlds.

There was no way that I was even remotely interested in one of the males in the age group. Please, talk about vapid.

I would be surprised if I would find many people with a triple-digit IQ here. But unlike the older people, who I might be even able to have something resembling a discussion on the surface with, the youth group did not cut me out immediately.

The result was, that I was inundated with girls trying to inform me about the territory, from their perspective, and boys that, I guessed, wanted to impress me and flirt with me.

Normally I would have tried to drift toward the people I actually knew here, but a couple of the girls physically dragged me around and introduced me. I tried to extricate myself from this trap without affronting them, but my efforts were fruitless.

And it had to happen that I involuntarily exasperated a couple of the boys. Sorry, but it took me long enough to even recognize what they were doing, much less to decipher a way to dissuade them without snubbing them.

Finally, it was time to get some food. The group of girls was… aghast when I actually got a complete, big burger.

Again, it took me some time to notice their bewildered looks, but this time I was a bit faster to realize what they were baffled about.

At first, when I explained that as a Pure, I needed more than 5000 kilocalories a day, they quite frankly showed their envy, but when I explained further that I need more than 5k a day or starve and that with my small package I was either eating up to six hours a day or used some expensive very high-calorie food, just to get my needs, at least a few of them shut up and showed hints of a working brain.

Please, as if I would not love not to drink some super syrupy sodas all the time? Heck, even with full coke I did not come over 600 kcal per day. I routinely snacked on various sweets just to get the needed energy. And the fats… if I had to never eat artificial peanut butter again, it would be too soon.

I think I made it clear to them that to need so much food was not a blessing. Technically, to get what I needed, I would now still have to eat at least a hot dog and some potato salad, but my stomach was nixing that idea.

Finally, I managed to get away from these girls and more towards the people I actually interacted with regularly.

All of them insisted on not talking shop. Ugh, fine. I could talk about other things, you know. It was hard of course, but we finally found some inconsequential stuff we could all talk about. Sorry, but is it my fault that everything I see as fun and a hobby is work for them?

And the things they viewed as a hobby were completely uninteresting to me? Sure, I get that nobody of them wanted to talk about quantum physics. I am not that detached, give me some credit here.

But even videogames, something I had some residual connection with was not a topic that was in favor.

On the other hand, who cares what sports team beat their rivals, or which quarter defender or whatever was traded? I mean, come on, we live in a world that could be kindly described as post-apocalyptic.

Oh, and did I mention that humanity was slowly going extinct?

And of course, the fact that the teams were owned by the big corps, with the accompanying circumvention of rules, made it even more irrelevant. Regardless of what sport, the team owned by Ralcon or Enertech won, with the other the runner-up. Quelle surprise.

It did not help that Pures, as well as Mutants, were essentially excluded from any team sport. For an ‘unfair advantage’. Not that I would have cared either way, but at least I would have had a little bit of exposure growing up.

But somehow we all managed to have civil and shallow discussions.

Personally, I enjoyed the time I could spend with Ben the most. Yes, we saw each other in person almost every day, but… I could not explain it but it just felt right. Strangely enough, the folks so hostile toward me were super friendly when Ben was there as well.

Whatever, it was not my territory and I was not here for a popularity contest. As long as they let me live my life I was content.

Over the day, I sampled almost everything they offered in food. Some of it was quite good, and most was pretty decent.

And I managed to get around 80% of my needed calorie intake. So only 6 energy bars I would have to eat, yay.

It was a shame that the idiots in white had the ‘brilliant’ idea of improving us, but left us with the same old ineffective digestive system.

In the mid to late afternoon, I stumbled over an interesting discussion. A group of four middle-aged men was standing more or less in a circle when I walked past them and heard one of them say:

“No seriously, you’ve heard him, he said vat meat. I’ve looked a bit into it on my com, ya know. Isn’t the first time they made vat meat. Was something of a planet savior back in the time before the great war. Only for it to backfire badly. I didna understand what’s gone wrong, but it has to have been something…”

Another answered him:

“Nah, you know that Mr. Walker cares about us. He wouldn’t feed us shit that was bad for us. You have to be wrong.”

I still don’t know why I suddenly got the need to intervene, but somehow I could not let that stand.

“He is not wrong. Well, not completely.”

As one, they all turned toward me, and the one who had rebuked his pal raised an eyebrow, sneering a bit at me.

“And what do you know about such things, huh? You think Mr. Walker would feed us dangerous shit? Get real missy.”

I shrugged.

“No, the vat meat we got here is safe. Your buddy was right that it was tried before and was a disaster. You see, the meat vat is an off-shoot of the cloning process. And the cloning process they used then has some accumulating toxic byproducts. Made the vat meat poisonous over time.”

Another of the men snorted then.

“Yeah, sure. And that is the reason why all the cloned parts kill people and clones survive.”

“Not really. Unless one goes overboard with cloned parts it has no effect. But it accumulates. That is the reason why the rich don’t buy a new body every 30 or 40 years. There is a real hard upper limit of what they can get.

And most clones actually don’t get made with the cloning process. The embryo is created in the retort and then put into a gestation box, growing at normal speed. Only flash clones get the process. And they rarely last longer than a couple of years.”

The one who had argued that vat meat was bad tilted his head in a contemplating fashion.

“You say ‘used’ as if that was no longer the case.”

“Well, the new meat vats are an offshoot of my developing a better cloning process without the byproducts. And yes, I tested it. To be exact, you get worse food by eating stuff from the food replicators than what you get from the meat vats. Hmm… maybe that is the reason why the replicator stuff makes meat unpalatable…? I’ll have to look into it.”

The hostile one snorted again.

“Yeah, sure, you expect us to believe you just so?”

As the men all chuckled at that, I shrugged again.

“Well, you can ask anybody of Mr. Walker’s organization where they got the vats. That should clear it up nicely, wouldn’t you think?” With that parting shot, I turned around and looked for better company again.

When the day came to its end, and it became somewhat dark, Ben announced fireworks, and for the first half-hour of it, I was quite entertained.

During the first break, I asked one of the boys who had taken over the distribution of drinks for some soda.

What I got was a glass bottle with some yellow liquid. I could discern that it had some lemon in it, but there was some taste that I did not know. It was… honestly, I did not care for the taste, but it would be rude to simply throw away the soda, so I sipped on it for a bit.

While I watched the bright colored lights in the sky, a burning sensation came from my stomach, just before I felt as if my whole lower torso became a single big cramp, and I suddenly felt very, very sick.

Leaving behind a surprised Ben, I made my way to the toilets as fast as my cramping belly allowed, hoping against hope to keep myself from spilling the contents of my stomach all over the park. And wonder of wonder, I made it. That did not help the fact that I got a second review of nearly everything I’d eaten all afternoon.

That of course was the point where the headache set in. Not quite on the level of the curse, but oh boy, was my head ringing.

After I had emptied the contents of my upper digestive tract, still feeling rather sick, and just so keeping myself from groaning in pain, I managed to stagger the few steps to Ben, who had followed me to the portapotty.

“I’m sorry, but… I don’t feel so good right now. I think I have to go home. Fast.”

I could see his expression showing concern, on both of his faces, as I was seeing two of him.

Two of everything to be exact. Not that I could see all that much anyway, as my vision blurred and dimmed.

Then the world began to spin, and I tried to keep myself upright by holding on to Ben. Not quite successfully.

That was the last I remembered from that day.