Chapter Forty-Five - Mall Day

“Malls were an interesting idea before the turn of the century. A place where stores could be jammed in and where people could gather. They nearly became an artefact of a more peaceful time.

Terrorist attacks, a few plagues, the increasing digitalization of marketplaces, and the rising cost of physical marketplaces nearly killed the entire idea of a mall.

Nearly.

Now malls still exist, but more as a grand experience where those with more money than sense can be surrounded and cuddled in consumerist bliss, at least until they run out of cash to spend.”

--Excerpts from The Past Today - a Look at the Artefacts of Old America, 2055

***

Lucy, Rac and I arrived at the museum sometime before ten, which I figured was pretty good, considering how lazy Lucy and I could be if we wanted.

We showed Rac the matter recombobulator in what would be my armoury, and the girl practically worshipped the machine. Its ability to turn useless trash into samurai-grade stuff was like a small religious revelation to her.

When I told her that my job for her was basically to collect trash and chuck it in the machine to make stuff with, she immediately took off and said she would take care of it.

Honestly, I was a bit worried, but I had Myalis track her, and she was mostly making the rounds of all the nearest dumpsters looking for preem refuse.

Lucy and I had a quick conversation with the contractor when he finally showed up. It ended with the man shooting down some of Lucy’s more outrageous ideas before we settled on a plan for the renovations that was a bit more reasonable.

Once I dropped some cash for a deposit and warned the man about Rac and the very dangerous machine guarded by a few more-dangerous mecha cats, Lucy and I found ourselves with a heap of time at our disposal.

“Now what?” Lucy asked. We were sitting on the edge of our floor’s parking space, that overhang at the very top of the building where cars could come in to unload passengers into the more ostentatious entrance to the museum.

“I have... a couple of things to do,” I said.

“So I should go home?” Lucy asked.

I frowned. “I think you can come along for the first one? I need to meet this guy called Jeff Burringham. He’s a politician.”

“Oh, yuck,” Lucy said. “Think you’ll find him getting blown?”

“I doubt it, but it’s not impossible,” I said. “He has the afternoon penciled for clothes shopping. So I thought it would be nice and natural to show up at whatever shop he’s at to say hello and talk about stuff.”

“Oh, an ambush,” Lucy said. “You don’t think it’s going to be dangerous?”

“I mean, if he’s not an idiot he’ll have a couple of guards, at least, but nah, I think it should be relatively safe. You still have that gun I gave you?”

Lucy nodded and tapped a hand against her ribs. She had a dangerous glint in her eyes. “I’m armed and ready,” she said.

I snorted. “I hope you don’t need to use it, but you know. In case?” I didn’t expect her to be able to fight off any real amount of resistance, but maybe knowing that she was armed would be enough to discourage some level of fuckery. “Myalis, can you call us a ride over?” I asked.

Certainly.

I leaned to the side and wrapped an arm around Lucy’s shoulders. She let out a happy sigh and leaned right back into me. I sat there, eyes closed, until the whine of a hovercar approaching ended the moment.

Our ride wasn’t anything special. An auto-taxi that parked with the precision of a bot. I helped Lucy in, then sat next to her in the back. The area around our new home was still underpopulated. There were fewer cars around than just about anywhere else in New Montreal.

Still, there was plenty of strange traffic. PMCs moved by in force, and there was a constant patrol of different police units on the outskirts of the incursion-impacted area. A constant stream of dump trucks were moving out of the area too, loaded with cargos of scrapped materials headed for parts unknown. Not nearly as many trucks with new materials coming in though.

“I wonder if the city’s going to recover,” I muttered.

“Yeah, it will,” Lucy said. “Folk around here are like cockroaches, but in a good way. We’ll tough through it.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“If it helps,” Myalis’ voice came through the car’s speaker, cutting off a constant drone of background advertising that I’d barely really noticed. “The city is likely to recover. The incursion that hit New Montreal was one of the softest to hit any major city in several years. The death toll was also relatively low. Likely owing to some public planning, the presence of shelters and vaults, and because of the rapid response of local vanguard.”

“Huh,” I said. “I didn’t think the shelters we had were worth jack shit.”

“The shelters provided more than just physical protection, as little protection as they did. They were a gathering place for civilians and a method to keep people calm. In a situation like an incursion the tendency for humans to panic and the various ways in which said panic feeds into itself, can cause more harm than whatever triggered the initial response.”

“Like distracting the kittens just before some inspector sort showed up,” Lucy said.

I nodded along. It made some sense, I supposed.

Our flight across the city soon moved past the more damaged sections and towards the north end, where the older parts of the city were, and where the highrises tended to take on a more artistic approach to cramping a lot of space up vertically.

We dipped out of the flow of traffic and dove down towards one building in particular. It looked like a tall pyramid, four sided and covered in darkened glass. Our taxi dove past the entire building on a winding path that took us past the four dozen floors of the pyramid and towards an opening near the ground floor.

The taxi stopped in front of an unloading area and I opened the door and reached back to help Lucy out.

The air thrummed with ventilated air and the smell of running cars stank the place up.

The entrance was a series of revolving doors that people were funneling into in two and threes while others exited and milled around, waiting for their rides or venturing deeper into the bowels of the parking garage.

Lucy entwined her fingers with mine and we ran up to the back of the line.

The people here skewed towards the younger, so much so that Lucy and I were about average. Teens in little cliques, some college students, plenty of upper-middle class ‘daddy’s money’ vibes going around.

I glanced over to Lucy, who grinned back.

The lines moved in towards the doors, and I noticed a ping on my augs. The mall trying to connect to me to send me some maps and about a terabyte of ads mixed in with malware. Myalis was likely having a great time tearing whatever system had sent that apart.

We crossed through the revolving doorway and stepped into a smaller lobby area. Cement half-walls with security behind them, automated guns tucked away in large stainless crates, and rows of metal detectors that mall-goers were stepping through one at a time before being accosted by a guard that checked their temperatures and papers before letting them in. All to the tune of some shitty jingles played on crackly speakers.

“So much for this place looking fancy,” I muttered.

“There’s a no guns allowed sign there,” Lucy said, pointing to a large plastic board over the security stations.

“That’s cute,” I said. “Myalis, can you make us less conspicuous?”

Actually attempting subterfuge? How strange.

When our time came to pass through the metal detectors they came back clean, and when the guard checked our IDs by tagging our augs, we came back with nothing but flying colours. I noticed one of the guards staring at the very obvious sword hooked to a loop of my pants, but he didn’t comment.

“So much for all that security,” Lucy said as she leaned against me again.

“Yeah, well, fancy samurai tech trumps half-assed mall security,” I said.

“And if they caught on anyway?” Lucy asked.

“Then fancy samurai weaponry trumps mall security’s tasers,” I said. “This whole samurai gig is a bit like cheating.”

“A bit?” Lucy asked.

I smiled, a bit sheepish. “Alright, so a lot.”

The entrance led up a slight incline and around a corner, then into the centre of the pyramid.

It was hollow, with a great big pillar filled with elevators in its centre and all the floors of the mall ringing around the middle in ever tightening circles.

“Right, now we just need to figure out where the fancy fucker is,” I said.

***