Waiting for us when we returned to the lobby were eight others. Francis was sitting off by himself, watching the chatter of the others. He nodded to me as I entered, which drew the attention of the other seven to me. They ranged in ethnicities and ages, much like the rest of the refugees. The winds of fortune had shifted all of their lives in those moments that had led up to now, and each bore scars upon their psyche which were visible even to me.

“Hello everyone,” I said. “Welcome to the first meeting of the manufacturing team.” A small grin played over my features. “Now, I do have a lot of ideas of what we could do, but I’m not actually in charge here. Each of you can make your own decisions about what you do with your talents, but those decisions must be tempered with an understanding of the good of the community.”

A middle aged woman, grey at the temples, lined around her eyes, spoke first. “Well, I do want to thank you for taking us all in, we all feel a lot of gratitude for being allowed here. I’ll say what we’re all thinking, though,” she stood then and stepped towards me. “What’s this game you’re playing? What’s your angle?”

I frowned a touch before glancing over to Seren who simply nodded supportively. I resisted a sigh and turned back to the woman. “I think that we may have gotten off on the wrong foot. May I ask your name, ma’am?”

The woman straightened, and tilted her head so that she could look down at me despite being several inches shorter than me. “I’m Edith.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you Edith. I really want to get to know all of you, but you’re right, I should explain some things before we get started.” I looked from her to the other seven. Most of them looked at me with a sense of uncertainty, while Francis glared at Edith’s back. “The way that Chad treated you? That was wrong. The way that the world had treated you before integration? That was wrong.”

A heaviness hung in the air as even Francis turned to look at me. I continued. “But better things are possible.” I straightened up a bit more, finding a confidence in my spine that wasn’t mirrored in my guts. “It may have required the ending of the world to free us from the old world’s structures, but we are free to make something new, in a way that we were never able to before.

“Edith, you’ve asked what my angle is, it’s not a bad question, in truth. You see something that’s too good of a deal and you start looking for strings. That’s what we were all taught, from the way things used to be. From the way that society has taught us that we had to organize our living, that no one would ever give us a handout or even a hand-up.” I stepped forward and Edith took a step back in response. “We can do things differently here.”

Edith snorted. “That’s a lot of words to say not much.”

I let out that sigh and then flopped down onto a seat. “I’m not sure what I can say that would convince you that there’s no tricks here.” I couldn’t blame them, not really; looking at the situation from their perspective, being offered freedom and safety in equal measures without any strings attached seemed too good to be true. “Alright.” I sat back up straight. “Here’s the plan.

“I have work I need to do, and I’m going to go do that. I’m sure you all have things you’d like to do, or maybe you’d rather do nothing and continue to rest.” I ran my fingers through my hair, closing my eyes as I gathered up my confidence further. “If anyone asks you for help, if anyone needs something made, feel free to send them my way. But if you can build it with your own abilities, maybe consider helping them yourself. I’ll be here this time tomorrow if anyone wants to talk about their plans.”

Seren looked to me with a concerned expression and I shook my head. I mouthed the word “stay” to them, and then headed into the factory floor. There really was a lot of work that I needed to do, shifting materials from machine to machine, setting up processes and moving them forward, iterating on material after material, running through my resources as I struggled to make manifest the things that were needed for this place to survive and flourish.

There was a small part of me that felt a pang of anger at their refusal to listen to me, the inability of that group to understand that this was all for them. Yet, I knew it was more complicated than that, I understood that, and the labor wasn’t exactly exhausting. All I had to do was walk back and forth and do some inventory management; the system made it all so simple.

A part of me wondered how this all would work without the system but with erg, if the two could even be separated. With mundane technology, similar processes could be performed, but it would take a lot more time, a lot more specialized equipment, and a lot more programming of the machines. Here, all of that programming was stored in the schema, in the swirls of my brain. I rested my hand against one of the smelters, feeling its warmth beneath my fingers.

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The primary reason that I stepped away, though, was that I realized that they needed space. While the food producers had a clear connection between their labor and the survival of the group, the manufacturing team had a much murkier chain of effect. That lack of clarity amplified by the lingering trauma of their experiences meant that they would respond negatively to any apparent attempt to direct them. These were not unreasonable people, but they were dealing with an unreasonable situation.

So they needed an opportunity to rest, to recover, to find within themselves that understanding of their place in this new world. Being Chosen had forced me into a place, into a position within this world of ours, and had given me additional leverage to do the things that I needed to do in order to maintain that position. Tomorrow would be another day.

Hours passed as I worked on the factory floor, moving from the early afternoon to the beginning of evening. I walked to the north facing wall and pulled a switch, causing the wall segments along that side to rise like a garage door, curling and sliding up along the ceiling, opening onto the fresh air. For a moment, I was caught there, in the sudden beauty of the evening, the bright sky slowly becoming darker, the fresh scents on the wind, the joy of a day well spent.

My work was not yet done, though. I started by laying down three storage crates, evenly placed, along the northern edge of the factory floor. I aligned them so that they faced perpendicular from the original placement of the wall, and then hopped lightly on top of them. Each stood about two feet tall, but relied on similar inventory compression mechanisms as our in-built system, allowing them to hold far more than their size would suggest.

From that position, though, I could spot the nearest of the mines, set right against the wall. My gaze drew a line from that mine to the farthest left storage crate and in that line, I set into place a long conveyor belt. First, the holographic image of my desired placement appeared, then I locked it into place with a confirmation command. The conveyor sections disappeared from my inventory and deployed almost instantly, only the barest fraction of a delay, onto the desired path.

As the conveyor fully deployed, the two ends locking into place, it began to turn, pulling ore out of the mine and into the storage crate. The conveyor didn’t move with any high levels of speed, but it did move, and that inexorable movement was more than enough to get the component materials to where they needed. I would need to test efficiency eventually, but even this would rapidly increase my pace of labor.

The next mine required a bit more work to set up, as I had to jog a bit further out to get line of sight from that mine to the storage crate. Karla had already begun plotting out some beanstalks in my desired path so I lifted the conveyor’s path upwards, enough that it avoided getting in the way of the stalks and also kept the path to the northern side of the plots, to keep my conveyors from blocking the sunlight. Some support struts had to go down, but I was able to attach them to the wall rather than disrupt the work below. From there, it was a simple matter to complete the connection.

The third mine would be the hardest to do, as there was no way to get a complete line of sight between the crate and the mine. I started from the mine, heading out to the center of the crater, and start laying out the conveyor from there, sending support struts into the ground to allow the conveyor to not disrupt foot travel too much, with the struts spaced far enough apart to allow for ease of movement between them. As I worked, I noticed that I had gained a crowd who stared silently at the holographic displays that illuminated the slowly dimming sky.

I kept the end of the path in mind as I slowly walked over towards the crates, continuing to draw the path in the sky above me, before bringing it down back to the ground and curving it around the factory wall. Finally, I hit the end into the last storage crate and let it complete. I still had some conveyor segments left in my inventory, but not nearly enough for what I intended to do next. Fortunately, I had more than enough lumber to get a bunch more segments queued up.

As I was relaxing, a kid walked up to me, maybe seventeen years old, short, dark hair and eyes, a softness to their features that lent them an air of androgyny; they were dressed in threadbare overalls and a simple plaid shirt underneath. “Damn, that’s pretty impressive, sir.”

I turned and stared at them. “Don’t, just don’t, call me sir. I’m only like five years older than you.”

The kid laughed at that and offered a smirk. “I’m Terry. You got a minute to chat?”

“Uhh.” I took a moment to look at the timers on the machines. “Yeah, I got some time. What’s up?”

“So, I took your advice to heart during the big meeting,” Terry said. I had seen them there, though they hadn’t left much of an impression then. “Dropped my [Porter] path, I mostly was able to carry around heavy things but it was increasingly exhausting. Not A Fan.”

I was about to nod for them to continue when a crackle suddenly flared in my ear. “We got incoming,” Jen said. “Monsters, looks like the landbirds.”

“Landbirds?” Suddenly my memory went back to the thing that had attacked me on my way north, and driven me off the cliff. “How many?”

“Looks like a full pack, eight, maybe nine. I’m on the ground now, but I have the newbies with me, might be too much for me to fight them off and protect them.”

Artemis’ voice appeared, sharp in a way that I had never heard before. “On my way.”

“Same.” I instantly equipped my armor and fired the grapplespike at the top of the wall. I glanced over to Terry. “Sorry, we can chat tonight, once this is taken care of.”

I popped my wheels and surged forward, beginning the climb up the wall.