"Max I'm going to need you to send out a message to everyone," I said.

"Who is everyone?" she asked as I unclenched my hands and shifted my stance wider, more to move than because I needed to shift my weight.

"Everyone," I said with some frustration. Then I let out a long sigh.

"Everyone that's working for Helios and everyone who is living in the building." I wasn't exactly sure when 'Helios' became a thing, or if it even was a real or legal entity. Maybe I was just transferring credits through Max, or maybe there was a company, I didn't know the details, and frankly I didn't care.

"What's the message?" she asked.

I'd calmed enough that I realized it was foolish to simply pick up the megaphone and ramble my rage to everyone simply because I could.

"Let's hold off on it. Give me the print queue. Inform the garbage men, loaders, and sorters I want plastic. All the plastic we've got and separated I want it in the filth pool. Message the laborers and get them down here."

I was shifting work gloves, wide brimmed hats, and reflective vests to the top of the queue as well as pallets of bottled water, and pallets of the larger plastic water cubes.

"Tell the car thieves or whatever we were calling them I want flat bed trucks, box trucks, anything that can haul pallets of water."

"There are some in the parking garage," Max said.

"What?"

"Sara was setting aside vehicles that could be used for logistical-"

"Good," I said cutting Max off, "Get them and drivers lined up."

I bumped a recharging station up the queue to start printing next. Then I added the cables needed to wire it directly to the printer to the queue.

"Mock me up an overhead filling station, piping and pumps to fill water tanks on trucks, tanker trucks, or the like from above," I said to Max as I worked.

"Almost all current technology in use is pump filled from below," she informed me.

"Do that then, but I want to be able to put in multiple lanes, modular, ability to scale up, that sort of thing."

The mock up she showed me looked like a pit stop for race cars with different bays and hoses that could be connected as well as charging the super-caps that powered the hover vehicles or the electric ground vehicles.

"Get me connected to Operators," I said. I paused then added, "Non-emergency."

A moment later I added, "Are there any Samurai still in the area?"

"Fire Fist is still in the city," Max said.

Fire Fist was the latest name of Ninja Girl, who had cycled through several names.

"Patch me through to her please."

"Hello?" a voice asked.

"Hello," I said quickly, "I'm, umm," I once again didn't know what name to give. Calling myself 'The Taxman' seemed foolish, yet it seemed to be how Samurai referred to themselves.

"The Taxman," I said.

"Yeah," she said and I realized her AI would have informed her of that.

"I need help."

It was a simple sentence, but I could feel the emotion try to break out of me as I said it. I was on the edge again. I'd been there a few times in my life. Mostly it was when innocent people were shit on by the legal system or their abusers escaped both justice and the law. Sometimes it was purely selfish depression, but mostly it was brought on by not being able to help.

I saw it all in that moment, even as Fire Fist spoke to me. I didn't hear the words.

"People are dying," I said cutting off her words.

"Cooking in the sun and dying of dehydration."

The power station popped into existence and I placed it on the map matching the proposed pitstop design Max had mocked up. I pushed it to the top of the fork truck drivers' queue even as the men moved pallet after pallet of larger water cubes as they appeared in groups of pallets. I'd removed the speed restrictions from the printer so it was filling the designated teleportation space faster than they could remove them.

Next came the cabling and wiring to run between the massive breaker panel that was yet to be printed and the charging station.

"I need help at the refugee camps. I'm working on providing water but we will need to distribute it and the first truck that shows up with water will have them rioting to get it."

She was speaking again but I was pushing things around the queues. I needed power first to get everything charged up. You couldn't move water if-

There was a blinking red indicator outside the barricades for a moment then it was gone. I shifted to a camera that showed the potential threat. All Bright PMC soldiers were arguing with the driver of the fuel tanker who was reversing past the red line painted on the ground.

"All Bright Command," I said to Max trusting she'd connect me to whomever was in charge.

"I'm going to need all the trucks and vehicles you have that can move cargo. Drivers, and guards. I'll outfit them with non-lethal weapons and crowd control gasses. No one on the water delivery crews are to have lethal weapons. If you need armed escorts we- can-" I slowed as I was thinking.

"We can sort that out later," I added.

"Max, get our drones over the city, start mapping out where you see groups of people."

"Operators," I said trusting Max once again to connect me with the correct people, "I've got people in refugee camps dying from the heat. I'm scrambling to get water to them. I need Mylar tents and all the other stuff I can't think of right now. Get me a list. Prioritize it. I'll have armed escorts and labor to deliver it but it should be deployable by the refugees."

"Yes, Samurai," a chorus of tens or hundreds of voices in various accents said, each overlapping the others.

I felt a wave of something. Pride. Power. Something. It passed through me.

"Sara update?" I asked. There was a pause, no doubt she was busy, I should have sent it in a message she could respond to, instead of putting her on the spot.

"Electricians are headed down to wire up the pit stops, I've got another hundred laborers gearing up and heading down. I've got drivers separated out as well as the plumbers and-"

"Sounds good, sorry to cut you off," I said muting the connection. The city map was populating with various dots.

The refugee camps at least had charities trying to help. The dots I looked at were small groups of people trying to survive. Some were in the rubble of buildings or huddled in make shift camps directly on the street. I saw a lot of weapons and desperate people.

"Operators. I need care packages designed. Should have a small solar panel. Radio to receive from the emergency Samurai channel. Non-powered water filters, collapsible water jugs, food bars, what ever people need. Guns with non-lethal ammo and pepper spray or whatever. I want trucks to deliver care packages and leave them for whomever gets them."

I realized half way through I was probably hamstringing them by telling them what they needed. They might include what I requested instead of what was best simply because I requested it on the fly with no forethought or evaluation.

I shifted back to the printer after receiving a report from an different set of Operators that the water throughput wasn't going to be large enough. They were now proposing a small water tank at each pit stop area to avoid the situation were all active pit stops would be drawing water from the same pipe.

I was in the menus for a while before a priority message from Greg popped up. I took the list of parts he provided and pushed it to the fourth slot in the queue.

Simple collapsible Mylar tents with aluminum metal structure were provided by the Operators in various sizes. Max reworked the metal portions in steel, a metal we had in abundance, and then we began printing. The ten-foot by ten-foot tents began popping up around me as I realized I'd failed to give even my own workers adequate shade and rest space.

The electricians were still wiring up the massive breaker panel. It felt like they'd been working on it forever but there were enough of them that there was no more room to work.

I switched over the designs for the care packages.

In the mere ten or fifteen minutes they had the idea to work over, they'd already outdone anything I could come up with.

Everything was broken up into backpacks for easier carrying. There were solar panels but the small modular kinds as well as simple phones that could access a variety of net works on a multitude of frequencies and protocols. There was a single backpack that was more large plastic brick with straps than a backpack.

As I read about it my eyebrows lifted.

Of course.

Helios tower was the tallest thing for miles around. The plastic bricks would allow an ad-hoc network to be set up with high-bandwidth data connection if there was line-of-sight to the top of Helios tower.

Already Operators were making up a software package to help survivors map places, request resources, sell salvage by requesting a pick up, or access the feeds and data networks.

I put the bulky and heavy transmitters I'd need to put on the tower into the print queue.

Several resources went red on the list that popped up and I dropped the number from the maximum forty-five Max said the roof could support, until all of the resource numbers in red dropped off the list and the list disappeared.

Twenty-two. Once the printer built up reserves of the minerals or elements we were low on, whatever they were, I'd print the other eighteen. I had Max send the information to Sara and Greg. They could sort out the human resources to actually hook everything up.

I informed the Operators I would install the transmitters on the tower and then left them to continue working the care packages.

The fuel tanker was just now coming to a rest. I spent some time cycling through the cameras I had access to. The men chopping the cars had stopped, or rather changed tactics. Their cutting torches had removed almost everything behind the driver's seat on several vehicles. The roof, backseat, and trunk were gone. Further away men were welding floor grates printed to be used in Helios tower as temporary flooring, to the vehicles, making a sort of flatbed.

The electricians were unrolling thick electrical cables onto thick plastic mesh that kept it off the hot roadway. Other men followed wrapping the cables in highly reflective Mylar sheeting and securing it with plastic ties.

One of the pit stops was already wired up with one of the larger tow trucks charging.

Men pulling pallet jacks were hauling pallets by hand toward the pit stops while the fork trucks continued to clear the teleport areas of newly printed water cubes stacked on pallets.

Other men were carrying the heavy cubes one in each hand in a long line to load up one of the flat bed hover cars. They were clearly experimenting with weight, distribution, and how to secure the load.

Smaller tanks were printing but we didn't have enough people to move them and once again the bottle neck wasn't the printer but our ability to keep the-

Red flashed behind me, or appeared to as a way to warn me. My screen dropped away and a location was put up as well as a visual. It took me far longer than it should have to understand what I was seeing and where it was.

I only had to turn around and jog. The panic and screaming was just beginning to spread.

"Max, will the Class Two nano-regenerative save him?"

"It's possible," she said as I came to a stop.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"Buy it."

"Light," I said calmly enough though I was looking at the man's insides. He was panicking, trying to shove his insides back in.

"Hold his arms!" I barked and bodies appeared. Hands and arms did my bidding and the man was restrained.

I connected the nano suite up and then reached into his middle where I could see blood gushing out of some sort of artery or vein that had to be running up his back, but from the inside.

"Should I hold this closed?"

"Yes," Max confirmed.

Three other spots were highlighted in my vision.

"I need hands!" I shouted, never even looking up.

"Pinch this closed. And here. And I've got this. Hold them closed as best you can."

The man was done screaming. He'd either passed out from the lack of blood or shock or both.

Were you meant to put his legs up?

"Do we keep holding these?" I asked.

"The longer they are held the less work the nanites have to do," Max said.

"Keep holding," I told the hands holding the other injuries.

Max instructed me to put the guts hanging out back inside a moment later. There was a sort of 3D projected guide to follow, though I wasn't sure if that was projected over him, off my closed helmet's mask, or in my head. It was minutes later when the wounds began to close with a truly massive amount of scar tissue.

"Keep your right hand there," Max said, "everyone else can let go."

Forty seconds later I was allowed to pull my hand back, the wound had pretty much closed around it by that point.

"He will need large amounts of water, food, and rest," Max said.

"Don't we have-" I began, but my shout was cut off when I spotted the medics I was screaming about waiting to approach.

They had a stretcher and two large bags of equipment hanging from their shoulders.

"If you have a medical plan to follow send it to them," I said to Max.

I saw both flinch for a moment then go glossy eyed as they read over whatever information was being provided to them.

Then they approached as I pushed up and took a step back.

I pulled up the video.

I watched it several times.

Bad timing because everyone was rushed. They were rushed because I was printing too fast and they had to clear the teleport areas.

One fork truck was setting down a large wooden crate. The laborer was jogging past him and moved near the crate. Another fork truck, one who had seen neither the man on foot or the other fork truck dropping off a crate, was backing up in a tight arc. His forks came around, at first pinning the man to the crate. In that same motion the pin turned deadly as the forks swept through the man's middle, barely missing his spine but pinching and then cutting through him, his guts, and his back, and damaging the crate, before the driver, who had been looking behind him to make sure he wasn't going to run over anyone in that direction, turned around to see what had happened.

Max had picked up on it quickly. I was there only six seconds after he hit the ground.

"Where is the driver?" I asked.

Max highlighted the man standing in the crowd. He looked damn near dead himself.

I walked over to him and he didn't seem to take notice of me until I was almost directly on top of him. He flinched and pulled away from me, but didn't run.

"Max open a channel up to everyone please."

She didn't have to do it but there was a sort of audio cue that she was ready a moment later.

"We've had a terrible accident that could have cost a man his life. He is going to be fine. This happened because everyone is rushing, and they are rushing because I am rushing. Let's slow everything down. We can't help people if we are dead. If you need to rest or you're off shift, then please rest. We have to work safely."

There was another cue that she'd stopped broadcasting.

I popped my helmet off and instantly felt the baking sun.

"Travis," I said, "He's going to be fine."

"I never saw him," he said, "I'm sober-" he added as if I would think he wasn't. I began to wonder but stopped. I'd seen him looking behind his equipment as he backed up. I didn't have to look for an excuse to not blame myself.

"You got family or friends?" I asked.

"My wife's sister and her kids are staying with me," he said slowly.

I looked at the man standing next to him.

"Can you get him to them and see he gets some rest."

I turned away even as the man put his arm over the driver's shoulders.

A hundred wasted points.

I fucking hated myself for thinking it. It was like those moments when I considered switching careers. I could defend corpo scum and make credits, then donate those credits to other lawyers that helped out the people who couldn't afford lawyers, but who desperately needed them. It always ate at me that I was a good enough lawyer to make money defending shit-heads, and might be able to do more good by taking their money and putting it to better use than I might be able to doing good works with my own hands.

A message from Sara showed me she had selected and approved several variations of the care packages. I put one in the printer and bumped it to the top. It was a pallet looking thing on wheels.

I glanced over the design and began to dig into it. I stopped myself with a sigh only part of the way through. Not my job. I had to remind myself I couldn't do everything. Give a task and trust that it would be done. I took a moment and went over my work loads. I pushed the vending machine elevators to Operators, and mess hall menu items to Sara, and medical check ups to Paula. Then I added a note to Sara about squash and securing a supplier. I pushed some of my concerns about the sewer to Mr. Wu and mentally cordoned off an area within my four blocks for soil. Right now the printer could reduce things to organic waste but because of the nature of the printer nothing living made it through. I'd need to buy soil, worms, whatever else, then mix all this waste dirt in with it. It had nutrients and bio mass but nothing alive to continue breaking it down.

For now I added the zone to the heavy machine operator's data set. There were already places to separate out things before they went into the filth pond, now we'd start a place to put some of the waste that was building up and just being put back into the pond or down stream in the sewers.

Long runs of Mylar covered electrical cables ran from the massive breaker, where electricians were still working hooking up the next bundle of cables to the various areas of the pit stops. Water tanks were being carried out to the pit stops and plumbers or laborers were hooking up metal piping on long straight runs and rubber quick-connect piping for angled turns.

The first care package was being loaded up on a hacked hovercar-made-flatbed even as a huge petrol burning truck with an All Bright logo rolled into one of the pit stops.

I glanced at the print queue and saw everything had stopped.

I once again felt like an utter idiot.

"Max," I asked already knowing the answer, "Can the printer work on a tier two blueprint in it's idle time, or work on multiple blueprints at once?"

"Yes."

I let out a long sigh before I spoke.

"When there is no room to print more pallets work on the Class One Nano-Regenerative Suites. The inhaler variant and the injection variant in equal measures."

"Both variants at the same time or alternating?"

"Will it slow it to work on them at the same time?"

What followed was a crash course in complex printer gibberish that I had to have Max break down over and over until I stopped trying to understand and instead gave her several scenarios. She told me how long each scenario would take and how it would affect other printing.

"Keep fifteen percent of the- whatever the smallest or the precision stuff on the nano-regens all the time. Cycle the rest back when not needed on the larger stuff."

The printer needed the precise bits to build other printers or nanite related stuff, or the precursors to tier two or three related stuff.

"Keep five more percent on the fusion reactor parts that need it."

That was the most frustrating part. I could have been printing nano-suites and the important bits of the fusion reactor while the printer dealt with the big objects that didn't really need precision like plastic water bottles. Basically it printed a printer internally to make the plastic. Once that was built the precise bits could do other stuff when that printer made the plastic and the much larger, but still super microscopic bits, assembled all the plastic bottles and all that.

"Can we mess with the dosage size?" I asked Max when the idea came to me. Why print a whole inhaler which would take roughly two hours, if you could print a smaller size and doctors could use only what was needed.

There was another complex discussion which resulted in half, and third sized dosages but I decided we wouldn't print smaller than that as it required too much on the medic's side. Much better to hit someone with a nano-regen and move on to someone else than have to apply to the wound directly and all the other stuff required with smaller dosages.

I had Max compile the data regarding dosage size and how they could be used and pushed that to Paula who was still dealing with the make shift hospital and the medics.

She sent me back a picture. I knew what it was before Max displayed it, but I looked and smiled anyway.

It was something she'd made quickly years ago. She'd pulled her shirt down expositing her massive breasts and taken a picture. Then she'd edited it so her flesh was hidden behind large poorly drawn cartoony breasts. A little speech bubble was drawn coming out of her mouth that said, "Thanks!"

An hour later, combing over suggestions from Operators I was struck dumb again.

Sometimes it felt like the most obvious things were beyond me. Some idea were so simple and yet I was sure if I was locked in a room for days or months I wouldn't come up with them. And yet when exposed to them it was obvious just how good of ideas they were.

We started printing IV bags of medicine, saline, O-negative blood, and a list of drugs the medics and Paula provided. Many of which we had to toss into the printer to break down and make clones of.

The chemical data in the drugs was passed to the Operator network where verified Doctors and Chemists went over the break down of ingredients in the solutions and were able to refine the printing process by tossing out the waste, inert stuff, and other things the printer didn't need to to print but that were present in the sample that was cloned. I shunted off another ten percent of the printer's resources to work on a printer that would make insulin.

Operators pushed several requests to me from the Refugee camps. First was the need for lockable bathrooms. Women were being raped at the latrine pits and the open sewage was going to make people sick.

I had a knee jerk reaction and informed the charities in charge I was sending over every PMC resource. Moments later they begged me not to. Any sort of 'Peace-Keeping' force would simply lead to violence. Lockable bathrooms on trailers, lots of lights, the pepper-spray bottles already being delivered were needed, not men with guns looking to punish rapists.

That was hard to stomach. There was little I could do to stop the evils of human nature without putting everyone in prison style restrictions. I had Max personally do facial recognition on the video or still pictures captured by victims or witnesses when the assailant was not covering their face. I spent an additional twenty-three points on a DNA sampler that could be used to process any rape-kits.

I upped the number of pepper spray kits, cameras, and lights.

Then it was back to the minute by minute decision making. I don't want to say I forgot what was said, but it wasn't something I was dealing with and I did put it out of my mind..

I was informed several hours later, that Sorrow's Vengeance, the latest name of our local name-switching-Samurai, had captured, castrated, and then hung several men positively identified as rapists in the refugee camp. Four hours after that the next rape victim was found. Strangled.

There were a lot of discussions about this, many of which I was informed of. They were not saying the victim was killed because the Samurai had hung the other men, but when death was a possibility of getting caught people did more to avoid that. Including shooting the victim in the head and then turning her over to shoot and destroy the data port and data storage augs at the back of her neck.

Sorrow's Vengeance changed her name again by the time I contacted her. Now she went simply by Vengeance. She was ignoring everyone else's attempts to contact her. So I was recruited to do so as she would have a much more difficult time ignoring me.

"What?" she snapped at me.

"You are killing children," I said flatly. I'd hoped to shock her into listening.

"These rapist are young men at best. One was grayed haired and I don't give a-"

"Children," I whispered calmly.

"What?"

"Your actions are killing children," I said again.

"What the fuck you talking about!" she said. This time perhaps willing to listen.

"You are breaking up the gangs. Even the ones that aren't forcing women into prostitution are fleeing. This leaves innocents with no protection from a group of three or four men. The charities are begging you to stop. Now I'm telling you to stop."

"Or else what?" she asked.

I sighed.

"Or I'll stop SAVING LIVES!" I screamed, "To deal with a childish Samurai who can't seem to deal with reality! You could help, but instead you rampage! Your rampaging makes you FEEL GOOD, but it does little to help people."

"They fucking raped a woman in front of her child! Did you see that? The seven year old saw her mother gutted!"

"Jessica Bimms," I said sadly. I didn't even need Max to produce the name for me. I'd seen the pictures from the men who had stumbled upon the after math. Men had raped and then gutted the mother while another man held the child down. The kid tried to save her mother, but the woman bled out. The child wasn't talking. At all.

"And you've have me stop hunting them?" she asked.

"Oh no," I said seriously, "We hunt them down to the last. But I would have you change how you hunt them. Help us place lights and cameras and expand the safe areas. Help us pipe water in and sewage out so there is no need to leave the safe areas. Help us spread pictures and names and track implants and pings. By all means, when we find them, kill them. But you are making it worse for the people who remain. Do you know how many hundreds of people have fled the refugee camp now that rumors say a Samurai is killing men she thinks are rapists?"

"Only those who were rapists!" she insisted.

"And the rapist twists the facts, or the rumors mutate and change on their own, and people still flee. You think they are fleeing into the city where it's safe? Where all the model sevens are dead, or the water isn't poisoned? You think there are no rapists in the city?"

"AAAHHHH!!!!" she screamed. Max muted it and adjusted the volume but I could hear the echo of my own impotent rage in it. I likely had decades more experience with life than she did. She was given this power so young and then to be confronted with its limits must be hard.

"Are you still there?" I asked.

"I'm here," she said, "but I don't know what to do."

"Maggie are you there?"

"I'm here," Maggie said.

Max had helped me find her among the Operators and built a small team to support her.

"Vengeance, if you're willing I've got an Operator I'd like to connect you with. You know what they are?"

"Like handlers in the spy movies? They are the guys in the vans that tell you what to do so you can focus on the action happening in front of you."

My mouth actually hung open for a moment. That was a far more accurate description of what they did than anything I could have put together.

"Yup," I said quickly, having paused too long, "They'll help you interface with the charities running the refugee camp and put you where you can do the most good. They will answer questions and-" I almost said, 'talk things out' but I felt like that would be pushing it so I finished with, "all that stuff."

"Maggie, I'm connecting you with Vengeance."

"Hello, Samurai," the older woman said, "How can we help."

"I guess I fucking deliver water or turn lights on or whatever?"

"There are requests for help with-" I left the conversation.

Maggie was a trauma psychiatrist, focusing on battered women and rape victims. Hopefully she'd be able to help Vengeance.

I yawned.

"Max get me another pill."

"As you asked, this is pill ten."

"Fuck," I said. That seemed like too many.

"Do I have a bed?"

"Paula had Greg create a small private room for you to sleep in. Would you like me to inform her to get it ready? She has made repeated attempts to contact you regarding rest."

I looked around. The pit stops were working. Vehicles were charging or refueling as tanks were filled or pallets of water were loaded. The water shortage we ran into in the sewer an hour ago was resolved as Mr. Wu's men blocked off other passages diverting waste and water under us.

I saw Sara approaching. Her suit and helmet were just as opaque as mine.

"Max tells me you are open to the idea of natural sleep and that I should help convince you to go to bed," Sara said.

"Let that sink in," she continued as she leaned forward. She was speaking to me over a coms channel no one else could listen to, but her body language indicated the next bit was secret or revealing.

"A Protector AI, perhaps the most advanced intelligence in the universe is suggesting sleep, suggesting mind you because she cannot order you. I though can. Go. To. Bed."

"You can order me?" I asked.

"It's not the sleep you need," Sara said.

"What?"

"It's not the sleep. You can pop pills or change your biology if you wanted. It's the moments of quiet. The time to reflect. The time to relax or at least the time to not be directly stressed. I promise you that if there are lives at stake I will wake you, but please, you are not so far from human that you don't need rest."

"Max give Sara full control of the printer. Then help her with the interface please."

"That is not possible."

"What?"

"Certain restrictions are in place on Class Three or higher technology that limit the usage to only those who earned the tokens to unlock them."

"She can't print at all?"

"She can print everything you've already printed, almost all tier one technology, limited tier two, and a very short list of tier three technology."

"What tier one tech isn't she allowed to print?"

"Nerve gas, nuclear weapons, seismic-"

"Oh," I said with a laugh that cut Max off. "Let her print what she is allowed to print then. I'm off to bed. You can let Paula know she's won."