Chapter Forty-Nine - Peter

“Certain companies discovered that they could extract greater revenue from their clients in the form of services as opposed to products. Adobe pioneered some of this in the software market, but many other companies followed suit.

To oversimplify the matter: a company would provide the client with a rented, un-owned version of whatever software the client needed in order to operate. That means that at any time the company owning the software can pull it away from their clients. Algorithms were pioneered that allowed the service provider to do just that at the most optimal time so that their clients would more easily surrender additional money in the form of fee payments and service costs.

Essentially, by turning a buy-and-sell economy into a rent-and-blackmail one, a company can earn much greater profits, though at the expense of losing the occasional client, and putting their CEOs at higher risk of sudden life termination events.”

--A Guide to Modern Business, 2034

***

After Lucy and I met with Burringham, we had one last chore to take care of. Peter Silverbloom.

According to Myalis--who I just assumed was right about this kind of thing--Peter was currently working out of some building on the edges of the more residential part of New Montreal, insofar as the city could really be divided into parts so cleanly.

Lucy and I left the clothes store, one of the butlers promising us that her dress would be on our doorstep by the morning, and my wallet feeling a tiny fraction lighter (though the price of Lucy’s dress had me reeling a bit, it was the most expensive thing I’d ever bought, house aside). We dropped back down to the ground floor of the building, then hopped into a taxi.

“So, who’s this dude?” Lucy asked.

“Apparently he’s some bigshot volunteer sort of guy. He might be able to help us with the whole Sewer Dragons thing.”

“I guess they can’t stay at Gomorrah’s place forever.”

“They can’t,” I agreed. “And they shouldn’t be left the way they are. All prosthetic’d up, I mean. They at least deserve to have proper replacements for all of their limbs and shit.” Which would be wildly expensive. I’d looked into artificial limbs before, what with my arm being missing for... most of my life really.

The cheaper ones cost half a year’s rent in a shack, and that was for a simple, three-jointed arm that didn’t have any servos or complex mechanical parts, just cheap Taiwanese plastics and a few recycled metal joints.

Something that could move and articulate simply was a whole lot more expensive, and one of those fancy better-than-flesh models cost as much as a brand new car, and that was without the brain implants needed to run it, the constant software updates, and the other little expenses that came with it.

Most of those weren’t even properly sold, they were rented to people.

Basically, it would be a bitch and a half to get enough arms and legs and other shit to outfit as many as Gomorrah and I had pulled from the sewers.

It actually made what Doc Hack did a little impressive, in retrospect. No less fucked up, but still impressive. He cobbled together prosthetics from what looked like nothing, maybe with a few aftermarket parts jammed in here and there. And by all accounts, they worked. The Sewer Dragons were able to move and fight. Probably not as well as someone running off of their human 1.0 hardware, but they were better suited to life in the sewers than a normie.

“What’re you thinking about?” Lucy asked.

“Just... stuff. How do you think this guy can help us anyway?”

“Don’t you know that?” Lucy asked. She leaned into my side, her hands idly tugging at the fingers on my prosthetic arm.

“Not really. Been light on the details so far.”

Lucy shrugged. “If he can help because he’s like, a nice guy who really does want to help, then we should probably just be nice.”

I chuckled. “Sure,” I said. I made a mental note not to be a bitch.

The taxi nosed down and soon we were slipping lower into the city until we merged with the traffic on ground level. The taxi pulled up to the sidewalk almost immediately.

“We’re pretty low,” Lucy said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Myalis, can we get directions from here?”

Certainly.

“Oh, that is convenient,” Lucy said. “Myalis, you’re like the best maps software ever.”

I imagined that Myalis had interpreted ‘we’ as meaning the two of us. Good enough for me. The map pointed up into the side entrance of one of the nearest buildings, a residential megabuilding, some one hundred and fifty floors worth of shoebox apartments, only broken up by a few chain stores. Someone could live their entire life in a place like this without ever stepping outside to see that this one was set in a row of a dozen identical buildings.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“Come on,” I said, hand reaching out towards Lucy who grabbed on.

We slid into the building, and I couldn’t help but notice the graffiti scratched into the paint-proof walls. Tight corridors branched out almost immediately into a maze of passages cut through by the main lane we were on. We moved in deeper with the confidence of two people that didn’t care to be fucked with, and no one seemed eager to test us.

I did notice some hoodlum looking fucks in tracksuits and with e-cigs loitering on a corner, but they chose not to interrupt us as we moved past.

Maybe it was the jackets? Or the obvious gear under them.

Or the sword?

I chose to believe that it was the very big, very samurai-looking sword hanging by my hip. No one wanted to fuck with someone cocky enough to bring a sword to a gun fight.

We stepped into a little elevator whose interior was entirely tagged with stickers and posters for all sorts of shit. Pandemic warnings about an outbreak in this building a year ago had mustaches drawn on the faces of the corpo-art mascots and there were brand stickers covering the entirety of the button panel.

The elevator pinged my augs to ask me which floor to go to, and it tried to dump about twelve viruses into my augs at the same time. Myalis gave me a little tally in the corner of my vision of the infections she ripped apart and the number of nanoseconds it took her to do so, like a really weird scoreboard in a shooter.

The elevator buckled and we started to rise.

“Nice place,” Lucy said.

“Very,” I agreed. It was actually kind of homey. The decor reminded me a lot of the orphanage, that strange kind of aesthetic that was straddling the line between trash, trashy, and grunge. There was an art to making shit look good.

The speakers crackled as we arrived, and Lucy and I got off on a floor with a higher ceiling and more room to walk around in. It looked like Peter was staying on one of the mall floors, where all the stores and clinics and such were stuffed away. Fake tiles lined the floors, broken up in some places, and there were vending machines shoved against every wall that could fit one, little jingles competing to be the most annoying.

The map pointed us around the elevator back, and down a wide road that stretched out through the building, across a bridge, and into the next building over. There were even a few electric carts parked along the road or driving around with some overweight people behind the wheel.

“At least it smells better here.,” Lucy commented.

There were a few street vendors gathered around, some still being operated by people instead of androids. McVendors still like having zit-faced teens behind the counters.

“Thirsty?” I asked.

“Just for you,” Lucy said.

I snorted as I bumped shoulders with her. “It should be... right there,” I said as I compared the map to what I was seeing. Peter, as it turned out, was in an old storefront that had been converted into a tax office of sorts. The old fixtures for whatever sign was there before were still visible over the entrance. The current name was some incomprehensible jumble of letters.

Lucy and I walked in. The entrance had a big conference table, with some mismatched chairs around it, to the side were a few cubicle walls, mostly there to split off the desks in that part of the room from the rest of the area. A huge printer at the back had a FUCKED sign taped to it and a smaller printer buzzing atop it.

The only thing that looked less than ten years old was the coffee machine in one corner. Somehow it still shined like it was new and was sitting on what looked like a throne as if it was revered by the people working here.

“Oh, hey?” a twenty-something girl asked. She looked like she was told to dress in office chic but couldn’t be arsed to go the whole way and had stuck to wearing a nice blouse tucked into sweatpants. “What’s up?”

“Uh,” I said.

“If you’re here for help with your taxes, then you need an appointment. If child protection stole your kid, then we can get you in touch with the right people. If you want to rob us, then fuck off, we barely have a grand between the twenty of us, and if you’re looking for some other sort of help, well then it depends but we might be able to help.”

“I was looking for Peter, Peter Silverbloom,” I said.

One of her eyebrows rose and she tugged a pack of gum out of a pocket. “What for? You government? Corpo?”

“I’m a samurai, so neither.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, entirely dismissing what I’d said.

I frowned while Lucy started to giggle next to me.

***