“Oh my god, that was so cringe,” Perry muttered to himself, his knees drawn up to his chest.

“It wasn’t that bad,” Nat said, patting him on the head.

“Idunno, he said his own name a lot, and T-posed while flying. Pretty cringe.” Heather said, nodding.

She caught Perry’s Look and shrugged. “I’m sure if I didn’t know you, I would be very impressed.”

Perry relaxed, releasing his legs and sighing. “You gotta say your own name multiple times when you’re trying to sell yourself to people. I understand that, but… next time, remind me that pretending to be a demigod in front of a bunch of ignorant savages leaves a bad taste.”

“Ignorant savages? They’re from the seventies.” Heather said.

“I stand by my statement,” Perry muttered. They didn’t even have internet. Hopefully the Industrial Tinkers would be burying the line for that under the tracks.

Knock knock! The door boomed as someone used the knocker to announce their presence.

“Come in!” Heather shouted with a mischievous glint in her eye.

Perry’s heart leapt into his throat and he reeled his head out of Natalie’s lap, racing to the throne in the middle of the reception area, skidding to a halt in the seat an instant before the man opening the door looked up at him.

Ronnie Coleson paused, frowning as Perry’s clothes fluttered to a halt, a gentle wind following in his wake. He glanced over to where Natalie was polishing one of Boomer’s components, then across the room to where Heather was perched in front of a stenographer’s typewriter, smiling sweetly.

“You finished the census?” Perry asked.

Click click clack click. Heather’s typewriter spurred to life as Perry prompted Ronnie, hopefully distracting him from thinking too deep about the sudden wind.

“Uh…Yeah, here you go,” he said, handing Perry a sheet of paper rife with data about the number of survivors and their demographics.

Perry compared it to the six other districts he’d had his men take roll call in.

Naturally he didn’t expect the numbers to be accurate, since people could easily board themselves up in their homes and apartments, playing dead to avoid the ‘enforcers’ from the newest gang. The numbers did give him an idea though.

The estimated attrition rate, even accounting for no-shows over the last six months had been just a hair over forty percent, a massive population implosion due to the sudden collapse of the infrastructure held up by the replicators, causing extreme violence and food scarcity. The closest figure for Chicago he could estimate was seven million people prior to The Event.

Now?

A bit over four million, and dropping.

That’s over three million dead. A horrifying disaster by any measure.

There were emaciated corpses slowly mummifying in a huge amount of homes. Predator megafauna were circling the city like sharks drawn to the smell of blood, picking off people as they fled the city in droves.

J.C. had only survived by virtue of beating the rush, and therefore the feeding frenzy.

Water was short. Basic sanitation was lacking. People we getting sick from dysentery from contaminated water.

Perry rubbed his temples in frustration at the thought that Professor Replica made his androids literally alive so they could suffer diseases same as everyone else…except for things that he enjoyed, like smoking.

Either make them completely human or get rid of disease completely. What the hell, man!? Perry thought, scowling.

“Is something wrong?” Ronnie asked, backing away from Perry’s throne.

Perry glanced back up at him.

4,200,000 times two pounds per day… eight point four million pounds of food…per day.

No wonder people are starving.

There were no less than sixteen gangs roaming Chicago, with an average of five thousand members apiece, who went out and got meat at great personal risk, in order to trade it for more ammunition and power.

Of course, not all of them were hunting all the time, but on average, each person had to bring back… one hundred and two pounds of meat per day. That was quite a bit. It wasn’t as though hunting had a one-hundred percent consistent success rate, either.

Not to mention, these hunting parties got together in large groups of a hundred or more to dig traps for the megafauna hunting the edges of the city. Oftentimes the traps were destroyed in the process too, because they didn’t have easy access to steel.

Decentralizing this process is the only way I can make it happen. I simply don’t have the resources to centralize it.

There’s also the lake…could make a dent. Why aren’t they fishing? Gotta be at least one rod for every three people…probably more in the suburbs near the lake.

Food wasn’t an issue Perry should directly solve. People wanted to get food. They were highly motivated, and hell, the majority of them wanted to feed others too, simply by human nature or simple greed.

Perry should give them the tools they needed to safely hunt megafauna, on the scale of eight million pounds per day.

That’s actually not including the fact that you only get 40-50% of a butchered animal in meat.

So double it again. Sixteen million pounds of megafauna per day.

Megafauna were about thirteen thousand pounds apiece. Sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller.

16,000,000 13,000 = 1230.7692 animals per day. Which meant Perry would need to provide about ten times that amount of weapons, and a thousand times that amount in ammunition.

The good news: there were actually that many dangerous predators stalking the edges of the city, picking off the gang members trying to hunt.

The bad news: Hunting them at that rate, the food wouldn’t last much longer than a couple weeks before the surroundings of Chicago were emptied of things to shoot, and they were right back at square one.

We need fishing too. At least long enough to get some fast-growing crops to ease up the burden. I see a lot of root vegetables and beans in the foreseeable future.

So our immediate priorities are: Food, Water, Sanitation. I can solve the first problem by giving people Paradox guns and armor, along with a method to transport their kills to distribution.

A huge amount of meat is being lost because the gangs have a bitch of a time moving the kill from the outskirts of the city to the center where they can sell it before it goes bad. Damn things weigh several tons and gasoline is non-renewable at this point.

The easiest way would be to borrow existing infrastructure. I.E. convert the rail system into electric refrigerated cars for moving huge amounts of meat.

It would be gross and bloody, but it would do what Perry needed it to do. They could design it to be easily washed out. Which brought him to water.

For the water, we’ll have to find some people who worked on the city water supply and get their pumps working again. This will probably entail a bit of maintenance and converting to self-powered electrical motors.

For the sanitation, we can use the massive amount of fat that’ll start coming in over the next couple months to make soap.

I could probably use my Spendthrift Perk to allow a couple teaspoons of sodium hydroxide to saponify a massive amount of animal fat. I’m sure I could find enough from a hardware store to supply the entire city long enough for the supply lines to restore themselves.

Perry did a little mental math and figured that his Spendthrift Perk allowed him to create chemical reactions full strength at approximately 1:50 dilution.

Okay, maybe more than one hardware store. It’s 4 million people.

Perry brought his attention back to Ronnie, who was still finishing his question, asking if something was wrong.

“Alright Ronnie. I need you and yours to get me this list of ingredients,” Perry said, jotting down his list of demands.

“And I need details on the rail system that loops around downtown.”

“The loop.” Ronnie supplied.

“Yeah, that. Get me the size and width of the rails, and if you could bring in one of the car’s motors, that would be awesome. Have our people canvass the city for people who worked in the public water system pre-‘Event’. ”

Ronnie nodded, glancing down at the list as Perry handed it to him.

“What’s sodium hydroxide?” he asked.

“Drain cleaner, although if you can get the pure stuff that would be better. I’ll take everything we can get, though.”

Spendthrift would remove the impurities.

“And how’s fishing nowadays?” Perry asked.

***In the lake***

The fish was a simple lake trout. It did not question its existence, nor think overmuch about the lack of blots that perched above on the edge of the world, nor how they might be related to the lumbering masses that drifted through the world, voraciously devouring each other.

No, it was a simple lake trout. It simply swam, looking for shiny moving things in the water, determining in a fraction of a second if they were small enough to eat, or big enough to run away from. Soon it would be time to breed.

When the shadow came overhead, the trout darted away by reflex, but it wasn’t quite fast enough. The creature above was too big.

An impact shook the world itself as the strangely glowing thing breached the surface of the world and impacted the bottom.

In an instant, a dim, mostly unused portion of the trout’s brain flared to life, registered heat.

It was too hot!

The trout tried to swim away, but it was all turned around, burying its head in the muck at the bottom of the world. The heat caught up in an instant, catching the fish in a roiling cloud of bubbling pain.

As the pain suffused the trout’s entire being, it continued trying to desperately escape, and some fundamental law of reality…slipped.

***Paradox***

“Yeah…that would make fishing difficult,” Perry muttered to himself, studying the dead pike floating on the steaming surface of the lake, about a hundred feet long and wide enough to play a nice game of pickleball on. It had dappled green skin and a long snout that would look silly were it not so brutally effective and lined with thousands of razor-sharp teeth, all facing inward to prevent prey from escaping.

“Pike will try to eat anything, on or under the water. Insects, small mammals, other fish, other pike, even. Their own babies…they’re not picky. They’re assholes of the fish world.” Ronnie explained. “With their current size, they see anything smaller than a cruise liner as a nice tasty beetle. It’s why there’s no one out on the water. The ‘eat everything’ attitude made ‘em real easy to hook; a fun sport fish…but their size has become a bit of a problem, and emptied the lake of anything bigger than a trout.”

“They edible?” Perry asked.

“Oh, hell yeah. Fillet around the bones and beer batter the strips of meat? It’s pretty damn good.”

“You guys tried to fish for ‘em?” Perry asked. there was over a hundred thousand pounds of meat out there. He couldn’t imagine they hadn’t tried anything.

“Yeah, some of the older folks attached a beetle up to some floats, welded a hook and some steel cable to the frame, attached it to a winch and tried fishing for ‘em.”

Perry frowned at Ronnie.

“Volkswagon.” Ronnie said as if that explained anything.

Perry continued frowning.

“It’s a brand of car…called a beetle? We thought it would work better as bait. Or maybe we still had a sense of humor about the situation.”

Never heard of that brand. Must be pre-Tide.

“Anyway, that’s where the winch used to be,” Ronnie said, pointing to a concrete dock that was partially ripped away. Just gone. “We lost a couple old salts when the dock collapsed. Fuckin’ pike’ll eat anything.”

“How much was the winch rated for?” Perry asked.

“As you can see, the winch held. The concrete on the other hand, not so much. After that, people just kinda gave up. We’d already gone through the effort of transporting the biggest winch we could find in the entire city, along with thousands of feet of cable, which took several dump trucks to move.”

“Anything smaller was guaranteed to break,” Perry mused, inhaling the humid air as they stood on the shore of the lake.

“Alright, I’ll see what I can do about the pike.” Perry said. Landing just one of those things would make a decent-sized dent in the food problem, and he had an idea to industrialize the process.

A grasshopper landed on a nearby blade of grass that gently swayed in the cool lake air.

A lake trout popped out of thin air and snapped up the bug before diving into the solid ground, sending ripples through the fabric of reality as it disappeared.

“That’s new,” Ronnie said.

“Yep,” Perry nodded.