Chapter Fifty-Six - A Great Idea

“There's charity, and then there’s Samurai charity. And the latter's always interesting to see at work.

You can never tell if they’re doing it out of empathy for others, or if they’re just tired of society being trash and decided to fix things on their own.

It sometimes even works out!”

-- Simon “Battleax” Critical, head of e-magazine The Critical Skeptic, 69th issue January 2045

***

“This is a stupid fucking idea,” I said.

Lucy grinned, then reached up and pinched my cheek. “It’ll be fine,” she said. “We’ll handle most of it. You go out there and talk to your cooks, and I’ll get everything ready and set up, yeah?”

I wanted to grumble and complain more, but time was wasting. It was approaching ten in the morning, and I didn’t want to put things off any more than I needed to, so I left the Kittens HQ and headed to the escalators leading to the mall’s ground floor.

The protests were being stalled out at the moment. The truth was--as far as I could tell--that people who wanted to protest needed a serious push to get moving, and my actions so far had deflated some of the reasons why they were going to make a mess of things.

That meant that for things to take off, they’d need an even bigger push, and I was doing what I could to basically chop their legs out from under them by placating the masses.

If it worked, then the few hours I’d spent on it would be worth it.

The ground floor of the mall had a crowd gathering on it, some eighty or so people, and squeezed into one side by a few kitten volunteers. Not the sort in the suits with the cool guns, but normal volunteers in normal clothes. The only thing marking them as kittens were the cat-ears they wore on their heads and their Aug’s IFF pinging them as such.

I’d spent a chunk of points (only a couple thousand, but it still stung) and bought two organic reprocessing machines. They were down here too, being guarded by both the kittens and some militia folk.

Right now, they were constantly generating the same crap. Some sort of bread, a sort of faux-meat patty, and some sort of vegetable... disk thing. Basically, we were making burgers.

Lucy had somehow already sourced a fuckload of aluminium foil to wrap them all in, and now all we needed was people to cook enough to feed a city.

They technically had all of the nutritional crap a person needed to survive, and each burger was packed with about three hundred or so calories. They weren’t going to taste great, I didn’t think, but while the city lacked in food, we didn’t lack in condiments.

That only covered part of our food needs, of course. Hell, it was a drop in the bucket. But it was also free food that tasted bland enough that most people would want to source their food from elsewhere. And while they were busy doing that, they wouldn’t be screaming and yelling in the streets and messing my shit up.

The second part of my awesome plan... well, that’d come later. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

I took a deep breath, fitted my helmet on properly, then stepped off the last step of the escalator. I already had eyes on me. I could feel them. The sixty... no, there were a few new ones rushing in at the last minute, so it was probably closer to seventy now, folks in the penned off area ranged from young to old, to fresh-faced pure humans, to a few that had more chrome than skin.

I stopped before them, and I was happy to see that I didn’t need to catch their attention or anything. “Alright,” I said, pitching my voice up so that they could all hear. “You folk all answered Myalis’ direct message, I hope?”

There were nods and yesses and a few ‘who the fuck is that?’s from the group. Good enough.

“Alright, let me explain what’s up. We’re looking for cooks. Later on today, we’ll be looking for delivery boys and girls. The city’s food supply’s predictably fucked, so we’re doing what we can to keep people fed. That means setting up a quick and dirty business. We’ll be paying you all minimum wage, because fuck if I know where I’ll get the money to pay the lot of you. But it comes with a few bonuses. For one, passes to get you to and from work, as many shitty burgers you could want, and, uh...”

I sent a quick text to Myalis. What the fuck can I offer these people?

Protector-grade equipment is always popular. How about something simple and useful for their specific career?

“And you’ll get a samurai-tech spatula,” I said. Spatulas were useful, right? “Hell, you can get your name engraved on it and everything. Really fancy alien shit.”

I predict about two points per spatula, assuming you merely want something that’s at the peak of what material sciences can produce. Though, you might need a minor Cooking Implements catalogue.

That seemed to win them over satisfyingly. One guy raised his flesh arm. His other arm was this huge metal contraption with a bulging biceps and three smaller arms sticking out from that. They seemed to end in different tools, which was neat. “Shoot,” I said.

“Name’s Cook,” he said. “Was wondering what you wanted us to be making.”

I nodded. A fair question. “Follow me,” I said before spinning on my heel and walking across the floor. They followed, and I pitched my voice up so that they could hear me. At some point, Myalis must have grabbed onto the mall’s stereo system, because my voice was coming from those too. “So, I bought this big fancy alien machine that turns this super cheap organic pulp crap into actual edible food. It’s not free point-wise, but it’s pretty damned cheap. What it makes is what you’ll be cooking. We’ve taken over a few industrial kitchens across the city. The idea is to give people a meal they can order for free and get delivered at home. It’ll keep people alive while we get rid of the last of the aliens.”

I walked into one of the bigger restaurants in the mall’s kitchen, chosen because it had some space. It didn’t have space for seventy-plus nosey cooks, but there was nothing but a half wall separating the kitchen from the outside, so they could still see well enough, even if there was some elbowing to be near the front.

With an eye roll, I turned on the camera in my augmented eye and then sent everyone in the vicinity the code to be able to piggyback with their own augs.

Simple enough thing to do, but extremely stupid. It was pissing all over every cybersecurity standard ever to let people into your augs like that, but I’d be impressed if they got anything past Myalis.

Now that they could all see, I focused on the stuff we’d made already. There were a few cardboard boxes full of ingredients. Lucy had some younger volunteers loading up the fabricators already.

“This is bread,” I said as I pulled out a round, flat bun and placed it on a stainless steel counter. “This is some sort of fake-meat patty. And this is a veggie patty.” I slapped the other two onto the table.

“Not exactly fine dining,” Cook said. He was near the front and didn’t look impressed.

I shrugged. “It’s food. Hell, it’s even somewhat healthy, even if it tastes like cardboard. Just... add some fucking ketchup. Hell... let’s sell the condiments while making the burgers free. We’ll use the money to pay you guys.”

Man, this business shit was easy.

“How many of these Stray Cat Burgers do you think you’ll be selling?” Cook asked.

“However many people there are in Burlington, times three meals a day, uh, a lot?” I said. “I’m working on something else to help calm the needy down, and we do have proper food coming in. This is a stopgap, to make it so that no one ends up starving while we set things up. I don’t want hungry kids on the streets. No point in beating back the aliens while people die behind the front lines because they can’t get bread.”

That seemed to make sense to everyone involved. The cooks didn’t seem overly happy that they weren’t making anything special, but hey, they had work while most people had nothing to do but sit on their thumbs.

“Jessica will be down in a minute or two to give everyone their assignments,” I said. “If you’re interested, stick around. And, uh, tell Jessica what you want engraved on your spatulas. You’re doing the city a service, or something.” I nodded, then exited out the back without another word, because I didn’t owe anyone any amount of small talk.

Now, for the second part.

I was dreading it already.

***