Chapter One - Feed the Machine

“The bigger they are, the more they’ll make fall.

Or something like that.

Look, I don’t exactly read a lot of books, alright?”

--Three Swipes, Comment about the unveiling of the Domus, 2052

***

“I’m heading home,” Gomorrah said.

I glanced over to her. “Just like that?”

She shrugged. “We’ll see each other in a few hours. The security around the church is tight, but it’s not tight enough to stop a full-on invasion. I have a few hundred points to spare.”

“That actually sounds like a decent idea,” I said. I glanced at the museum. The interior had been torn apart already, with workers crawling all around the inside moving junk into containers and others bringing in new materials. If I recalled correctly, the renovations would take a week or two.

I could probably speed that up, considerably.

The problem was that I could only do so for the topmost floor.

I stared around. The museum was the shortest building in sight. Only 13 floors tall. Most of the buildings around were twice that height, some more distant buildings were considerably taller than that.

“Cat?”

I spun around to face Gomorrah. “Sorry, head in the clouds,” I said. “I might do something similar here.”

“You’ll want to reinforce the floors below too,” Gomorrah said. “Keep that in mind.”

“Right,” I said.

She nodded, then awkwardly tapped me on the shoulder. “Well, I’ll be seeing you in a little while. Try not to be late.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, don’t worry. See you at the meeting.”

She nodded back, and took off towards the edge of the landing pad. The Fury showed up almost the moment she reached the edge, the door sliding open so that she could slip into the driver’s seat without having to miss a step. The car tipped away from the building, then shot off through the city.

“Myalis,” I said.

Yes?

“I don’t know where to begin.”

Hesitation doesn’t suit you. What are your current goals?

“I think we need to fortify the place. Make it so that the kittens and Lucy can stay here without being in any danger,” I said. The current renovations were all about making it livable. That was probably a mistake. They’d make the place nice, I was sure, but they wouldn’t make it alien-proof.

There are catalogues for such things. Though you run into two possible issues.

“And those are?” I asked.

Time is the first obstacle. If you want to fortify the location rapidly, then you will need to pay an equivalent number of points to obtain materials that require less time to install. For example, a low-cost construction drone could build a decent fortification out of plainly available materials. It would mix its own cements, construct its own reinforcements, and build a secure area over time with commercially available materials.

“But that’ll take time,” I said.

Several weeks, for a location as large as this one. A drone of the sort could be ordered to assist human workers, improving on their designs and building things faster.

“And your faster solution?” I asked.

A pre-built building could be purchased. In fact... this might be somewhat expensive, but if you tore apart the entire top floor of the building, you could purchase a new floor.

“Wait, like... the entire floor?”

You would need a construction drone to go over the anchoring points. But yes. It can be teleported in with nanometre precision. The same construction drone could be used to clear the top of the building, or at least assist the construction company on-location in doing the same, and afterwards it could work to reinforce the rest of the building.

“Huh,” I said. It would save a lot of time. And I was willing to bet that anything I ordered from a catalogue would look better and be tougher than anything the locals could build. “We’ll need to account for the gun emplacement above, and for a few other things, I guess. Wires and pipes and all that.”

That is true. I can draw up a blueprint for the contractors telling them what to leave in place and where.

I nodded. “How much would that cost?”

The construction drones would cost two hundred and fifty points per unit. You only need the one for now, though I would suggest purchasing a second and third soon. The actual floor will depend entirely on what features you want. On the lower end, a simple building made of unhardened materials would cost one thousand two hundred points. The upper end is nearly limitless.

“We’ll want something that covers the whole floor, with a landing pad and all. We need rooms for all the kittens, and a room for Lucy and I. Kitchen, bathrooms. You know, all that stuff. Uh, probably glass too? I don’t want a bunker, you know?” I said. I was really just tossing ideas out as they came to me.

A tab opened in my augs, and a mock-up for the top floor appeared, slowly spinning around. It was nice. A sharp slope, with long ledges next to the landing area, geometric lines cut into something that looked like metal plates, with a garden to one side and a second landing area near the roof next to the gun emplacement Longbow had left behind.

“That looks bigger than what we have now,” I said.

We can’t build down, so why not build up and out? This is all exterior architecture, without any furnishings on the inside. You will need to purchase those things yourself, though the fittings will all be in place.

“How much?” I asked.

Four thousand five-hundred.

“Will it be tough?” I asked.

Reinforced titanium walls, designed for warships, a type of lightweight concrete made to endure extreme wear and tear, and transparent panels made of realigned crystal matrices. The entire thing would be quite difficult to damage.

I started walking towards the head contractor. “Send the blueprint to Lucy, get her input on things. She’s got more of a head for that, and more time too. Tell her it’s important.” I flagged the older guy down and he jogged over, an eager smile on. At the same time, I sent a text to Raccoon, telling her to meet me in a few minutes.

The contractor’s head bobbed up and down as I explained things to him. He seemed a little worried, but eager to do whatever I told him to do, which was good enough for me.

Nearly the moment I was done with the guy, I got two texts. One from Raccoon, telling me she’d be up in a minute. The other was from Lucy. She wanted to know if things were alright.

I sent her a quick ‘things are okay, talk later’ while I stepped into the museum.

I paused and looked down at myself. My armour had changed to be an offensively bright yellow. “Uh,” I said.

You’re supposed to be wearing a high-visibility vest within the construction site. A helmet as well, but yours is of greater quality than OSHA-standard requires.

“So you made my armour turn yellow?” I asked.

It fits the requirements.

“It’s bulletproof,” I said.

Which also complies with security standards.

“Why do you even care about those?” I asked.

I don’t. I just wanted to paint a yellow cat on your back.

I sighed. Some things didn’t change. “You’re such a pain in the ass,” I said. I couldn’t help the bit of humour that snuck into my voice though. Myalis was probably trying to destress me a little.

The interior of the museum was a mess of torn-down walls, stacks of materials and piles of trash that hadn’t been picked up yet. The far end of the space wasn’t so bad though. I found some security cordon-tape blocking access to the room where Lucy and I had placed the matter reconfiguration machine.

It still sat pretty in the end of the armoury, big and shiny and... next to a row of stacked blocks?

I walked over to the blocks and knelt next to them. They were about ten centimetres long and two thick and wide, little rectangular blocks of different colours with letters engraved on their sides: Fe, Co, Cr. There were some little numbers too, but I glossed over those. Some of the blocks were clearly canisters too. Were those gasses?

It seems that Racoon has been busy.

“What are these?” I asked. The stacks were actually pretty large.

Elements. Purified and reconstituted into usable blocks for material printing. They’re one of the possible end results that the reconfiguration machine can produce. An easy way to store metals, essentially.

I stood up and took in all the stacks of blocks. Some were by far more common than others. How much time had Rac spent feeding the machine?

“Well, that’s something.”

***