Sarah had been busy. One wall of the cafeteria now had a neatly organized census of residents, with groupings by level and by class, and room to grow; Sarah was busily updating it with the new arrivals. They were up to 128 people, apparently. There was a list of apartment assignments; with only forty-eight apartments available even after the mini-expansion, they were still packed in pretty tightly. There was even the beginnings of an org chart:

Zone Commander/Owner: Sir Karl Hausman

Head of Defense: Paul Goodman

Deputy Head: Chad Goodman

Falconer: Letisha Jones

Scouts: Terry Williams, Jim Bradbury, George Ritter, Letisha Jones, Christine Asher

Quartermaster: Jacob Cook

Larder: Ryan Finch

Treasurer: Maria Sanchez

Information/Intelligence: George Ritter

Head of Research: Cindy Waller

Jobs and Assignments: Sarah Jackson

Daycare Head: Bethany Ackerly

Head Cook: Patty Wilcox

Sheriff: Natalie McPhee

Deputy: Duncan Monroe

Crafters:

Bowyer: Abraham Jenkins

Carpenter: Madeleine Bourne

Tinker: Jacob Cook

Civil Engineers: Jacob Cook, Letisha Jones

Well, I guess people will know who to complain to, Karl mused. When I retired I thought I'd never have to be on another org chart. I guess bureaucracy survives even the apocalypse.

“HA!”

Terry appeared out of stealth before him, making him jump. “I am Ninja! Fail to hear my roar!”

“Promise?” Karl asked mildly, doing his best to mess with her by thwarting her desire for a reaction.

“You will never see your doom approaching!”

“Oh, good.”

She gave him an exasperated look and he grinned back at her. Then her face grew serious. “Really, Karl, thank you,” Terry added quietly. She waved a hand at her dark brown outfit. “It's been...scary sometimes, out there.” She gave him a hug, then pulled back with an impish grin. “You're the best honorary great-grandfather ever.”

“Great grandfather!? You brat!”

“I'm still going to point out to Mom and Dad how you weirdly keep buying me clothes, though.”

“Double brat!”

“Don't worry, I'll stay off your lawn!”

“Triple brat!”

“End of the inning! And the Red Sox take the field!” Terry scampered off.

Karl shook his head, grinning.

“Sir Karl?” George called. He turned and saw the scout beckoning from where he was standing near the Shop kiosk. He headed over, and George led him around a small alcove to a first floor office door he hadn't noticed before. They entered; inside was organized chaos.

Pieces of paper were taped up all over the walls. A large table with space for about ten chairs around it occupied the center of the room. The table was also half covered in papers and notebooks, and three people sat around it, each working with an alien tablet. Karl smiled after translating the Latin motto on one wall. “Inveniemus”—'We will find out.'

“Welcome to the Endurance Intelligence Agency,” George said with a grin. “Would you like your first briefing?”

Karl blinked. “I gave you the silver just a few hours ago and you've been out scouting and fighting with us. How did you do all this?”

“Well first, I've had some of the funds since around nine a.m., when your short-lived fortune came in, and Maria handed me the silvers and told me to get started. And second, a lot of what you see here and are about to learn is due to my head analyst here.” George waved a hand at Cindy Waller.

“Hello Sir Karl.” Cindy bowed a little. “Welcome. We started making more progress when you gave us more funds a few hours ago. Would you like to see what we've found out?” She was nearly hopping in place with excitement. It reminded Karl of Letisha when she first got her hands on an alien tablet.

“I would be delighted.”

George gestured at a chair and Karl sat down. Cindy took a deep breath and stood up straight. She looked for all the world like a schoolgirl about to give a book report. For all Karl knew, that was exactly what she had been doing a week before the System. The others paused in their work to watch and listen.

“Our mission is to provide you with information Endurance needs,” Cindy began as if reciting.

“First, information about how the System works and the new rules of the world: We have a tablet with the book on help on using help files in the System. I've been reading it a lot ever since I got my hands on it. Here's a summary of what I found about how the world works.

“Everything artificial outside of Safe Zones is going to decay in a matter of weeks to a natural state: metal will rust, plastic will disintegrate, buildings will collapse. Fancier things decay faster. Items carried into a Safe Zone will stop decaying but will not get fixed back up unless they are Systemized. An item can be Systemized by using a System token. The bigger and more advanced the object is, the higher the rank of System token needed. For example, Mr. Goodman Systemized two rifles using lesser tokens. Ammunition is for sale in the Shop.

“Systemizing changes an object to work with the System. This is usually an upgrade in how it works. Systemized items that are damaged will slowly repair and even clean themselves if left in a Safe Zone. There's a lot more about this but that's the basics.”

Karl nodded. That had been a good summary of things he had heard or suspected, with a few details he hadn't known before. “Thank you.”

“Next topic, metal. System metal is apparently a sort of generic metal that can be made of different things—different elements—but are all considered as equivalent. The System treats them the same so they all act the same. In effect, they are all the same under the new rules. So we can gather copper, iron, lead, or anything like that and it will all count as metal.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

“Construction and Expansion of Safe Zones requires metal. When an expansion is proposed to the System, any material already there can be used to fill the requirements. Any extra is deposited in stone blocks, metal ingots, or lumber in a specific place in the Safe Zone called the Supply. Any objects left in that location will be treated as raw materials for construction or expansion. Apparently when material gets processed, the mass gets cut in half, unless it is already blocks, ingots or lumber.

“Ingots can also be bought in the Shop, or constructed elsewhere and brought to the Supply. System ingots can be created using a melting process—I mean smelting process—or by using a recycler. Recyclers can be bought in the Shop.”

Karl found he was leaning forward. “How much is a recycler?”

Cindy looked down at her notes. “There are a bunch of different kinds, but the cheapest one is five gold.”

“How does it work?”

“Um, well, basically you put it next to anything you want to recycle and turn it on, and it eats it, and then spits out the correspondence number of blocks or ingots or whatever. But it's only 50% efficient, just like the Supply.”

“Corresponding,” George corrected.

“Right. Sorry!”

“It's okay, you're doing great,” George encouraged her quietly.

“So, you carry this recycler around, and it eats things and puts them in your inventory?”

“Uh, no, Sir Karl, it's more like you drive it and it loads itself up like a pickup truck, then you drive it back. Kind of a small backhoe.”

“And it can be a pile of any metal, and it will turn it into System metal ingots or units for use in expansion?”

“Um, it doesn't have to be metal.”

“What!?”

“I mean—no, I—I'm sorry, I said it wrong...”

Karl forced himself to outward calm. “I'm sorry, Cindy, I got a bit excited. Please continue, I am very interested. This is an excellent report so far.”

“Yes, Sir. Um, the recycler can eat anything: a car, a tree, a house, a boulder—anything. And it will spit out 50% of the stone that was there as blocks, and 50% of the metal in it as ingots, and 50% of the tree as wooden boards. So if a rock doesn't have any metal in it, it will just come out as stone blocks, but if a rock did have metal in it, like in a gold mine, it would sort it into blocks and ingots.”

“Like one of those recycling centers where you bring everything mixed together in one bin, and it sorts it all for you and processes it.” George put in.

“Can units be exchanged?” Karl wondered. “Could you trade in a block for an ingot?”

“Um, I don't think so, but you can buy and sell anything in the Shop, so maybe you could find someone and, um, trade three stone for two wood or whatever.”

Karl leaned back and blew air out his cheeks. “Wow. Excellent work. You just saved us a fortune. I was going to save up fifty gold and just buy all the metal if I had to. This is much better.”

“Thank you, Sir Karl.”

“Well, this is already a great report, Cindy. Did you find out anything on other topics?”

“Um, Mrs. Whittaker is looking up things about the aliens.” Karl glanced across the table, where a white-haired woman waved to him. “But there's a lot so we kind of need to sort it for you. Um, there are lots of planets, and always lots of planets being added to the System all the time, so it's not just Earth. We've got some names but we don't know what goes with what yet.”

Cindy swallowed. “I'm sorry we haven't got better for you yet.”

“That's fine. Anything to report on other topics?”

“Um, we subscribed to the Earth channel on the System entertainment network. Basically they're showing all our movies and books and stuff to whoever wants to see it. There's a section called Renowned and Notorious Humans of Earth. Miss Parker said I shouldn't watch the Notorious parts so I don't know what's in them, but I guess it's bad.”

The other woman across the table was thin and frowning. “I can show you the feed later if you really need to see it, Sir Karl, but it's not pleasant viewing at all.” Karl nodded.

Cindy cleared her throat. “In the Renowned section, there's a guy who looks sort of chinese, and a black woman somewhere like Africa, and there's Tabitha and Jo. That's all so far.”

Karl raised an eyebrow. “How do they look? I mean, how are they presented?”

Cindy shrugged. “It looks like they have cameras watching them all the time and making a movie where they play themselves. Like a, um, documentary. But they have versions with music and sound effects too, just like a movie. We can see you in some of them, Sir Karl, and other people from here, showing when you are all fighting together. But some of it is just them talking in private, or walking around. And whenever they start kissing the recording stops, except for one time when everybody was around and you were walking somewhere.”

“But they just got the second title yesterday...” Karl wondered what they were showing. He would have to watch those feeds himself, including the Notoriety section.

“Anyway, the only other topics are maps, and monsters near here.”

Karl belatedly remembered the maps he'd retrieved from his home. “What do you have on maps?”

“Basically that they are expensive.” Cindy sighed. “It seems like you can get any kind of map you want, but you have to keep paying silver to get each kind and each new area. And none of it is live and none of it shows monsters or nests. It's not like radar. It's more like old maps online.”

“Can you get a map of metal nearby?”

Cindy nodded proudly. She tapped at a pad on the table for a few moments, then showed it to him. As usual Karl had a hard time understanding what the pad was showing. “Are there bigger pads for sale?”

“YES!” Cindy shouted. “I want one! I want a big one for the table and a bigger one for the wall and we could do so muchwith them—” Cindy abruptly shut up and turned red.

Karl looked at George with a small smile. “Are you teaching her to write grant proposals?”

George grinned back. “I'll keep the idea in mind. Cindy, do your best with the pad for now. Explain the symbols to Sir Karl.”

“Yes, Mr. Ritter.” Cindy reached out and pointed. “These are cars I think, and these are houses, and these are railroad tracks, and these are power lines with the big towers. Brighter things have more metal. But you see here?” She pointed at one large faint rectangle. “That's where we are, only it doesn't show Endurance, it shows the old mill that used to be here.”

“Excellent work,” Karl said with feeling. “People can plan where to take the recycler with this. Do you have one that covers a wider area?”

Cindy frowned. “Um, we do, but we can't see things well if we zoom out so it's kind of useless.”

Karl pursed his lips. “I'm sorry, let me try a different way to ask that. Can you find places that have lots of metal all in one place?”

“They'd show up brighter,” George put in, “but I don't think we can search for those, can we?” He looked at Cindy, who shrugged.

“Jo had the idea of trying to find a smelter or some kind of processing center for metal.”

“We can look,” George said, “but don't get your hopes up for one being nearby. I don't know of one in the area. It will probably be faster and easier to go around eating all the cars nearby, at least in the near term.”

Karl nodded. “That makes sense, but look anyway. If the roads are going to decay, a road trip will be much easier sooner than later. Plus we don't know what comes after rare in the spawns starting up, so that's another reason long trips are better sooner.”

“Yes, Sir.” Cindy cleared her throat. “The last thing is monsters near here. I don't know anything about that.”

George stirred. “That's my department. I'm sorry, Sir Karl, but there hasn't been much chance for regular scouting.” He turned to Cindy. “What you can do, or ask someone else to, is to go around and ask everyone what they have already fought and where. We can construct a big map of that and look for patterns.”

Cindy looked a bit frightened. “I...need someone else to do that.”

“That's fine, Cindy, some people are better at analysis and some are better at field work. That's why we have a team,” George comforted her. “Sir Karl, I think that's all we have for you.”

“Well!” Karl clapped his hands together. “This has been a fantastic briefing. Thank you, all of you. I will probably stop by later to see the Earth Channel for myself. For now, I need to go shopping for a recycler!” He stood up to leave.

“One last thing, Sir Karl. You probably want to invest in an advanced tablet for yourself. You can use the Shop from one, access channels, and so forth.”

“What, no more waiting in line?” Karl grinned. “That is also useful intelligence! Thank you.” He shook George's hand and nodded to Cindy and the others. He was almost out the door before he realized what he wanted next. “Oh! The next project for System research is food production. Once we're big enough to house everyone, that's our next goal.”

“We're on it,” George replied. Karl nodded and left.

He wanted to go buy a recycler immediately, but Maria was the one holding most of his money and she wasn't in her office. He did have the three gold he'd looted from the hill trolls, though, so he decided to get that advanced pad. Hopefully he could figure it out. If not, he'd just have to ask someone for help.

We're bootstrapping, but it takes forever. Karl was impatient for growth. People would be less grumpy if they all had their own apartments. And Karl badly wanted to figure out food security. The grocery stores wouldn't last forever.

The shopping pad cost him ten silver. Then he spent a long time looking at recycler options before deciding on a version costing seven gold, which moved faster than the basic model, and which had several detachable wheeled pallets that could be loaded and sent back separately. He would have loved the version that teleported the products directly to Supply in Endurance, but if he had fifty gold to spare for that he'd just buy the damned expansion instead!

Besides, if Cindy's briefing was correct, materials would decay away completely in a matter of weeks, and then it would just be stone and wood around, which they already had in abundance. So this is a short term investment in rescuing metal before it decays to nothing. No sense in spending an excessive fortune on something that might be obsolete soon. Still worlds cheaper than buying all the metal from the Shop!