Chapter Thirty-Eight - Eggs Burny Side Up

"With growing populations comes a growing need for housing. This need is answered in one of two ways. Mega projects, or Rapid-Fab Housing.

Mega projects offer the most bang for a developer's buck. Creating enclosed super structures where a corporation can control everything from police forces, to food sales, to climate control for its residents, ensuring a constant flow of revenue over the life of the structure.

Rapid Fab, surprisingly, costs significantly more as land around a mega city tends to go for a premium. The houses themselves can be built to code in under a week, or built without respecting code--for a small fine--in under a day, ensuring housing demands are met for thousands of middle-class citizens all at once."

--Except from Housing in the 21st Century, 2039

***

I was up and at'em early the next morning. Before noon, even.

The group had set up a small chat about the Big Gun project, one handled by our respective AIs. I think it was safe to say that it was about as safe as a chatroom could be, even considering the number of people in it.

I poked at the chatroom while Lucy made breakfast. This morning was a 'full English' which meant that I got to sit at the kitchen island, hair still damp from a warm shower, and watch as an apron (and unfortunately more clothes) clad Lucy went about handling three pans and two disasters at the same time.

"Holy shit, why do eggs cook so fast!" she grumbled as she moved a pan full of eggs over to a plate and tipped it over. Eggs slid off the non-stick surface and mostly landed on the plate. Half of them looked uncooked and runny. The other half were brown-turning-black on the edges.

I smiled into a mug of warm coffee as Lucy ran the other way, stirred a pot filled with beans--from the resistance, I suspected some were now permanently welded to the bottom, then she poked at some sausages in the other pan. They spat and hissed, but actually looked pretty good.

"You'll get a hang of it."

"I might hang someone, alright," Lucy muttered. "The site made this look easy! This is bullshit."

"Wasn't this like, the standard breakfast for a lot of places in the world?" I asked. "Eggs, sausage, toast, beans."

"Fuck! The toast!" Luy ran over to the far end of the counter, almost tripped--which had me sitting bolt upright in case I needed to move--then made it to the bread... thing. The box with the foldy top that bread goes in, for some reason. She popped it open, revealing two end-bits of bread and nothing else. "Fuck!"

"It's okay, we don't need toast," I said.

"But I want toast," Lucy whined. Actually whined. I hadn't heard her make such a pitiful noise in a while. The last time had definitely involved rope and had been a lot of fun.

"Myalis can--"

"Don't buy toast. I'm making breakfast!" Lucy said.

"What about bread?" I asked.

She considered it. "Okay, but get it pre-sliced, I don't have time for that."

Shrugging, I had a small discussion with Myalis about alien bread while Lucy continued to putter about the kitchen like a 1950s housewife with the vocabulary of a 1850s sailor. I was just happy that she was enjoying her new cooking hobby so much. Plus it was food. I never said no to food.

The group chat caught my attention again as it moved. A message from Gomorrah asking if Tankette needed help at the mess tent, then Princess apologising that she couldn't help on account of currently learning how to use a bulldozer?

There was a sub-channel, of course, for memes. Grasshopper was surprisingly active on there. I scrolled up and through about a hundred-odd photos of cats, dogs, strange reptiles, bears, birds, a few funny-looking fish. Most of them were 'cool animal fact' memes that probably belonged on some soccer mom's media feed, but some were just cute pictures.

Gros Baton was posting obscure French-Canadian memes that--even translated--made not one lick of sense. Kinda weird to see someone who lived in the same general area as the rest of us have such a wildly different meme culture.

Gomorrah had posted some more nerdy science-facts memes, and then Crackshot and Princess got into a bit of a meme war. He was surprisingly adept at it, but Princess and Knight were tag-teaming him into meme... submission?

Crackshot had set up his own sub-channel for dating advice. None of it was good at a glance, mostly because the people helping him there were Princess and Knight and Gomorrah. Gomorrah had a girlfriend, sure, but that wasn't thanks to her suave and wit, that was mostly because Franny had the stubbornness of a junkie who needed their next fix.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

I went back to the main channel and scrolled way back up to the start. Hedgehog had been pretty vocal early on, and then through the night. Mostly updates, logistics reports, and a few quick conversations with anyone awake about some detail or another. At some point he'd gone to sleep and the chat took a distinctly less professional tone.

I kinda liked the irreverence better, but it did make it a whole lot trickier to find anything important in all of the noise.

One of the AI, whose name I wasn't familiar with--Tankette's, maybe?-- kept a running update on the progress according to Major Tinwhistle, including an ETA counter which ticked up and down with how long the engineers thought it would take.

The ETA ticker updated every half hour in the chat, but it didn't always change by half an hour. There was definitely a downwards trend to the amount of time left until things were done, but there were skips and jumps and at some point around four AM the timer changed by two hours. The chat got lively around then, Knight asking what made that noise.

Turns out an automated loader had glitched out, the brakes failed and it rammed into a bulldozer at the stunning speed of seven kilometres an hour. But with the kind of mass they were dealing with, that still made a lot of noise and fucked up two vehicles that needed untangling.

Some poor fucks had to figure all of that out hours before the sun came up.

It seemed like a genuine accident, not malicious intent, and the subsequent ETA updates showed that things got back into line quickly enough.

"Looks like I'm gonna need to be there in an hour or so," I said.

"At the gun site?" Lucy asked without turning around. She was trying to flip an egg over with a spatula.

"Yeah. Seems like shit's actually getting done. At this rate we might be able to fire the thing today. Kinda wild, to be honest."

"That is impressively fast," Lucy said. "But I guess it's not that surprising. We've both seen megabuildings go up."

I nodded. Usually a new megabuilding took like, one or two years to be built? More or less. That sounded like a long time until you stood on the edge of the giant gap where the building would be one day, and a year later there was fifty floors of impossibly thick building in place. The rate those things went up at was kinda nuts. I always liked seeing the timelapses.

"The wall around the city went up fast too," I said.

"Simpler than a building, I guess," Lucy said. "Weren't the slabs for it pre-made? I remember hearing something like that."

"I guess?" I said. I didn't know for sure, and I honestly hadn't paid that much attention.

Lucy put something on a plate, then picked up a piece of toast, buttered it, and placed it down. She spun, a big, ridiculously proud smile on full display. "Speaking of pre-made, or rather, absolutely not pre-made, breakfast is ready!"

She set the plate down, and I caught a strong whiff of it. Freshly cooked eggs, slightly burned beans, buttered toast. My mouth watered. "Did I tell you that I love you today?" I asked.

"Only twice so far," Lucy said. "I could stand to hear it more."

I looked up, meeting her eyes. "I love you."

Lucy smiled, the image of self-satisfied smugness. "Damn right," she said.

"Not gonna say it back?" I asked as I picked up a fork and started to dig in.

"Bitch, I made you breakfast, ain't no 'I love you' stronger than that."

I laughed between bites, then savoured the meal while Lucy put the rest into some bowls and plates and set them on the counter. A few kittens had been spying on the kitchen for a while now, and they came over to grab what they could, like wild animals lurking around the back exit of a fast food joint.

Lucy eventually cornered Bargain and Nose and traded food for elbow grease, both of them agreeing--under penalty of slow, painful death if they went back on their word--to do the dishes in exchange for food.

It was a nice morning to what I suspected was going to be a nice day. Now I just had to see if Rac wanted to come along and then head out. If all went well, we'd be averting the end of the world by supper time.

***