Getting to mom was easy enough with most people sitting down to eat on the inside although there was still some traffic moving through the wide walkway on the middle. As I sat down with the steaming bags of food mom perked up from whatever she was reading through on her display.
“Aw. You brought dinner Mal, thank you.” She said smiling. I wondered how she was coping with withdrawal by now but she was too good at hiding it from me.
“Yeah of course. You’re busy and we’re both hungry by now so I thought I’d grab something hot rather than more staries or whatever.” I said as I started unpacking, most of it ending up on mom’s bed as her’s had all the sauces and sprinkles.
We both started unfolding our boxes until we both had our hot, thick carbocrunch wraps filled with ground synth-meat bits and chunky garlic flavor sauce. Mom couldn’t help herself and started adding to hers with different sprinkles, sauces and oils before each bite.
After eating in silence for a while I ended up finishing mine first because I wasn’t putting together some sort of chemistry experiment with each bite. I took out a can of water to wash it down and remembered the workout at the gym, I’d need to get an actual water bottle and a towel or two when I headed back there tomorrow. If I had enough time after moving back into our home anyway.
Then I’d need a bag as well to carry stuff in. I might try covering my eyes during the routine as well, see if I can multi task my training but trying to pick out sounds while keeping up the rhythm of the workout, so I’d need something to use as a blindfold as well.
Probably get all that from the stockpile shop in the morning while we pick up the things missing from my room like new blankets and so on.
“Oh right. I picked up a letter for you from a messenger who came to the tent. You’re not in any more trouble are you?” Mom looking concerned while still taking big bites out of her meal.
“An actual letter? Damn, that must be Mrs. Marchand again. She’s the only one who’d get hold of me like that instead of leaving something on the grid for me to pick up, you know what she’s like spending money.” I said while cleaning crumbs off my tattered vest, another thing I should swap out while I’m at the store tomorrow. That money pile isn’t looking to last long.
“No, I don’t like it when you work with Mrs. Marchand. She doesn’t keep you safe enough.” Mom said while pausing her eating so she could frown at me.
“She keeps me as safe as she thinks I’m worth mom. The more jobs I finish properly, the better jobs she’ll give me. Better pay and more secure set ups. The jobs right now are sketchy because they are lowest price jobs for kids like me to do.” I explained. It didn’t sound good even to my ear but it did make sense.
“And if you don’t reach her standards for a moment in the job? I’ve known entire teams zeroed on her “escort” jobs.” Mom said taking a small angry bite from her food.
“I’m not taking those big jobs mom, the last time was literally a three hour walk in the dark with a silent guy carrying a rucksack. We didn’t even see anyone else or have to deal with any security.” I said, cleaning up the boxes and shoving them into the bag I’d brought.
“I know you’re going to go talk to her like always. Just make sure you keep yourself safe and don’t take the job if it looks like it’ll go wrong.” Mom said as she deflated in her seat a little.
“You know me mom, I don’t do risky stuff unless I have to and we might not be doing great right now but we’re far from desperate. I’ll take it carefully and watch what I agree to. It’s likely that Marchand hasn’t even got a job for me, it’s likely either checking if I’m still available with all the corpo junk going on around here or she wants to hear what’s going on from someone in the middle of the corpo junk.” I said reassuringly.
Mom knew I wasn’t going to ignore a letter from Marchand and knew I wasn’t going to avoid a job from her if I thought I could do it. Marchand jobs paid well and were generally safe but more important Marchand was the biggest fixer in the water district and one of the longest running in the city.
Not trying to make use of her reputation, connections and resources to build up my credibility and get bigger jobs that could get me and mom out of the gutter was stupid. I may as well just throw myself into the recycler now if I was going to run away from one of the only ways I had to make more of my life and maybe actually have a future that doesn’t end with a ganger gunning me down for some scrap parts.
“Well here it is then. You’re not going to her place until the morning though. I know we’re back in the apartment tomorrow but I’ll handle the move and documents myself. I don’t want you wandering over to her street in the night. Just go in the morning.” Mom said as she pulled a letter out from under her mattress.
Paper was a long gone thing in the world at large but with the collapse of wireless networks and physical delivery being the cheapest long range method to get information to people, especially among the poor.
Synthetic resin based papers filled the gap. People could write and print letters to each other onto paper that had never known a tree. Very useful given the rarity of those big plants out there in the world.
It was still somewhat expensive to use and delivery though, usually a middle-class thing. Upper class rich folk had special electronics for more secure information delivery. Really poor people like me and mom didn’t really send or receive letters even from family far away.
Running my thumb under the flap of the envelop and feeling the thin metal ribbon built into the flap snap as the glue came apart and the letter opened. You couldn’t repair the little wire easily, so it was normal to use them in most envelopes as a way to tell if the letter had been opened in transit.
The letter was a single sheet of paper with the characteristic handwriting of Mrs. Marchand with lots of exact curls and jointed letters. The contents of the letter was simple, a hello and how much she missed seeing me, her grandson, and wondering when I would visit her home next. Then how I got up to so much trouble when I was out of her sight and how she wanted to show me a new knitting project she had been working on and if I wanted she’d have some soft biscuits to enjoy next time I visited.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
It was a rather simple code to use but it wasn’t there to really throw off anyone serious about tracking her goings on. It was just for random people who might find the letter.
She was complaining that I hadn’t checked in for a while and wanted to know what was going on with events near me, likely the corpo convoy thing with Sanctum, and she had a job for me that paid well when I did come to see her soon. The “see her soon” heavily implied by her reaching out to me herself.
“Yeah mom, looks like I’ll need to go see her tomorrow. She wants to know what’s going on here and has a job for me.” I said, double checking for the letter for some more hidden code. I didn’t see anything else in the layout of the writing or the handwriting so it probably didn’t have anything else to it.
Mom finished eating her food and struggled to swallow the last big bite quickly so she could respond. After coughing a little she managed to.
“Make sure you grab a new shirt or vest or something before you get to her street, it’s bad enough you’re walking into her trouble without doing it wearing a hole filled vest that I bought you when you were six.” She said while cleaning up the crumbs and sprinkles left on the wrapper she placed on her lap.
“Yeah, I was going to head to the local stockpile with you tomorrow and grab some new things but I guess I’ll just head over early and sort myself out before I head over to Marchand.” I said, plucking at the holes in my vest.
We talked a little about what we needed to buy for the apartment the next day for a while, mostly just letting ourselves wind down before bed. The place started getting darker as different lights started going out in the tent and snoring started to fill it as time went on.
Finally mom lay down and started to sleep. I lay back on my own bed and decided to check in a few things with Sanctum before the business tomorrow.
Sanctum do you have any abilities I don’t know about yet. Like, you literally scorched me with electric or maybe nanite bites or something. And as far as I’m aware the big thing nanites can do is build things, that’s where nanites started after all and generally what they’re still known for outside of the whole Mercury thing.
The Mercury war wasn’t even a real war, it was the whole solar system’s worth of humanity trying to kill a rogue AI that had a few thousand tons of nanites churning away on Mercury turning it from a tiny planet of rock into a tiny ball of interplanetary artillery. It was meant to take Mercury and grind it down into a whole load of satellites that would form a dyson swarm around the sun for near infinite free power across the system.
Well that didn’t really work out. There was some sort of communication breakdown, some stuff ended up where it shouldn’t have been. Mistakes on mistakes and the AI eventually took offense to some comment and a whole thing happened over the course of a year where they tried to bring it back to Earth to have it discuss with the supposedly neutral in the matter Earth-bound AIs in a big diplomacy thing.
Even that messed up and then someone fired first or something happened, it’s all lost in the early rush of the war. But it resulted in the Mercury AI creating a little no-fly zone around Mercury for all human aligned vessels whatever that meant. This was respected for a little while, mostly so people could figure out what to do, but then it was discovered that the AI was building interplanetary kinetic bombardment cannons on the surface and in orbit around Mercury.
This is where the war started, humanity didn’t have a lot of interplanetary warships back then so they rallied nearly everything humanity at large had in space that could fire something and shoved it all at Mercury.
Still took years to finally end though and it left a lot of space in shambles from supply issues. A lot of people on stations died just because their food delivery ship was turned into a missile ship and sent to the front lines without them being told until it was too late.
In the end Mercury was turned into a barren rock all over again, the Mercury AI was killed off. Then Mercury was made into a no entry zone all over again as they didn’t want people poking around in the nanite dust and maybe causing some sort or post death programmed automatic reaction that could make it launch an attack on another planet.
[Sanctum is currently operating through three point one percent of it’s nanite mass and can operate acceptably with only point four percent of it’s mass. Over time Sanctum will collect excess materials from the User’s biological intake to restore nanite mass to full amount.]
[With appropriate mass; Sanctum does have additional functions available but they are mostly only active when User has the requisite cyberware. The strict programming and specific nanite interactions only allow for desired functions when needed cyberware and supporting infrastructure are detected within the User.]
[There are also several emergency procedures that are also available to Sanctum when User is at risk of death or a loss of function below acceptable standards. But the nanite mass costs of those are very high and can lead to permanent damage to the User in addition to being unavailable at the current mass level.]
[Sanctum has since installation constructed zero point three percent of total mass maximum.]
So you can do stuff when you’re fully built up but only if I already have expensive cyberware. No good for now then. We’ll just have to feed you up then so you can use the life saving stuff when you need to.
Do you have anything you need right now? Should I eat a bit of wire or something?
[User is not advised to eat industrial supplies. If the User wished to maximize nanite mass construction then they should seek out improved nutritional intake and overall fitness so that their body can devote more of it’s resources to nanite construction overall.]
We’re back to get healthy, get ripped and eat actual food again. I can’t really afford good food right now but I’ll do my best to get my body into a better condition, it’s gonna take a while though.
[User is currently ten years old, despite their current deficiencies the User has more than enough time to improve their biological, mental and cybernetic parameters to a high grade.]
Wait. Time? You have a time limit? What, you going to pop out of my ear once I turn eighteen or something?
[User is incorrect. There is a high probability that Sanctum will remain installed within the User for the rest of their lifespan. But to raise that lifespan to an acceptable level they will need to improve their survival capability above the current values that are influencing estimates. Biological fitness and lack of cyberware to compete with common dangers are the biggest factors at this moment.]
That’s good then. I was worried you were going to abandon me after I grew up like some sort of imaginary friend. It’d really suck to lose a nanite ball friend just because I grew taller.
[It is noted that the User is assigning personification to Sanctum but it is advised to avoid this. Sanctum is a multiform plurality that experiences time much differently than a human in addition to sharing no common perception abilities with humankind. This also includes a lack of instinctual behavior and emotions. The level of relatability is virtually nil and such relationships can have dangerous negative effects on human psyches.]
Yeah whatever Sanctum. I didn’t understand a lot of those words but you can play dumb all you like. I know you like hanging around with me.
I imagined Sanctum grumbling to itself as I drifted off to sleep. Grumbling to itselves? Grumbling to themselves-es? Grumbling amongst it’s selfs? Ah, whatever…