Chapter Twelve - The Taste of Boot

“Unlike any aesthetic of the past, transhumanism is a permanent one. You might outgrown your goth phase, you might decide one day that you don’t want to only wear pastels anymore, and maybe work will force you into an officecore look, but replacing your arms with tentacles is a far, far more permanent statement of aesthetic value, far more so than even something as semi-permanent as a tattoo.”

--Excerpt from Vagrant’s Future Fashion Blog

***

I hated this very much.

The moment Eric the bootlicker led me into the room, I knew I’d hate it, but I still respected the Family.

The organisation had been helpful in the past. They’d bankrolled PMCs to help, they had their own troops, and they were in contact with a multitude of samurai. A few of the samurai that I’d consider friends, or at least acquaintances were part of the group. Longbow, Deus Ex, a few others.

So I didn’t want to ruin the Family’s day by throwing a fit. They did good work.

But leading me into a boardroom, with one of those massive all-wood tables surrounded by expensive office chairs and with screens on the walls rotating through promotional crap? That was really, really pushing it.

The room was filled with half a dozen people wearing properly nice suits and nicer smiles. They asked me to sit down, buttered me up with compliments, and asked me if I wanted anything to drink.

When I cut through and started talking about my problem of the day, the sewers, they were all terribly attentive. I got a panoply of ‘hu-huhs’ and ‘go ons’ that rankled. It was like getting constantly splashed in the face with lukewarm water. Annoying, but not something that’d kill me. It just felt like I was wasting my time in a big way.

“So,” I said. “Can you help me?”

The yes-men and yes-women looked at each other, still smiling their empty smiles, then the next one whose turn it was to talk nodded. “Of course. The Family exists to help the samurai. If you deem this issue to be of vital importance in safeguarding humanity, then we’ll do everything we can to ensure that things get done in a timely manner.”

“Right,” I said. That's what I wanted to hear. Which was why it bothered me so damned much. “So what’s the plan here?”

“Well, first, we should have some people check out the situation below,” Yes Woman One said.

“And then reconvene with their findings. It’s only reasonable to know what kind of work needs to be done before we set out,” Yes Man Four said.

“We should hire some professionals. Perhaps set up a council to direct the efforts,” Yes Woman Two added. “Can’t have people not know what to do and where our attention will be best spent. You suggested that you might be able to deploy some samurai-grade equipment to help?”

“Yeah, a bit,” I said. I looked over the group, eyeing them one at a time. “How long do you think this will take?”

They looked between each other again, then collectively shrugged. “It’s impossible to tell,” Yes Man One said. “From your report, it seems like the infrastructure had been left unmaintained for a long time. It might take months to bring everything back to standard. As for patching things up more temporarily, it’s impossible to tell with so little data to work from. We’ll be sure to put every effort into repairing things, however.”

“Right,” I said. Not what I wanted to hear, exactly, but a perfectly reasonable and realistic answer.

So why was it rubbing me the wrong way?

The meeting ended with a flurry of handshakes and thank-yous and lots of back patting. I was left with a long list of items that the Family would ‘enjoy’ in order to help them accomplish what I’d asked them to.

Was that the catch? But the list was literally what I was willing to offer to begin with. A few hundred suits capable of functioning in the sewers, some tools from plumbing, a number of repair drones and their blueprints. Myalis tallied it up, and it added to nearly ten-thousand points, but that felt... low?

“Myalis,” I muttered as I left the boardroom. Eric was, of course, waiting for me just outside, but at that point I’d stopped caring much.

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Yes, Catherine?

“What was all that?”

From what I can tell, they are being, for the most part, honest.

“Most part?”

I suspect that any equipment you give them will be carefully observed and catalogued, and the moment it is no longer in use, it will be deconstructed and new patents will be drawn up. In light of that, it’s possible that in the long term, the Family might make more money from your involvement than it would cost them.

“For sewer maintenance tools?” I asked.

I’m aware you have no way of knowing this, but most Vanguard who purchase items either buy things to improve their quality of life, or items that allow them to better kill the Antithesis. Tools meant to be used by ordinary people are an uncommon purchase. It stands to reason that they’d be more valuable than a new weapons platform.

“Huh.” I said. That actually made some sense. And it made me feel better. Was that the only way they planned to screw me over? Probably not, but at least I knew of one of them. That was reassuring.

The only way to deal with a corp was to know how they’d fuck you over, or be prepared to mess them up in turn.

Being a samurai changed that a little, but not nearly as much as I might have thought before becoming one. It just gave me more tools to be the one doing the messing, it didn’t change the basic equation.

“Can you keep an eye on them?” I asked.

Certainly. Though some members of the organisation have already reached out to several plumbing companies within the region, it seems as if they’re attempting to hire independent gig-workers as well.

So, they were getting to work, and without all the jerking around I was expecting. “Okay... okay, cool,” I said.

Maybe I wouldn’t have to throw a fit after all. That was nice.

As I left the building, I couldn't help but feel a slight sense of disappointment. The meeting was professional, and their answers were technically correct, but there was something off. Maybe it was the dissonance between their fancy office and the grimy, failing infrastructure I had just seen. Or maybe it was the overly polite, corporate way they danced around the issues.

I paused outside of the building. The exit wasn’t so far from the edge, and on a whim I walked over to it. Eric didn’t follow. I imagined that he was sane enough not to want to stand on the very edge of a very long fall, not when there was little protecting us from the wind.

Looking down, I could see all of New Montreal, or maybe just this one half of it on this side of the building. I was tall enough here that few buildings pushed higher.

The city being this massive from up high put things into a weird perspective. The individual problems of the people below were minuscule, but at the same time, this was a massive place, and anything that I didn’t fix like the sewers would hurt millions.

Maybe that was it? The upper-echelon of the Family were detached from the rest of the city, living so high above it all. They didn’t see the grime and shit.

That was my world, though. They were in their clean suits, surrounded by glass and steel, talking about problems like they were numbers on a screen, while I was the one who would have to go down there, get my hands dirty, and deal with the issues at hand.

"Time to get back to the grind," I muttered to myself, looking one last time over the cityscape. My vacation was on hold until this got sorted out. I was eager to get back to work on my mech, eager to spend time with Lucy, but not so much that I’d just let things fall to the side and let the world go to shit for so many.

You still have an appointment with the Mayor tomorrow afternoon.

“I’ll be there. He needs to answer for why this wasn’t taken care of already,” I said. “In fact, I think I can trace a lot of the blame here back to his office.”

Let me look things over. The local government does have oversight over this sort of thing. Infrastructure maintenance is one of their primary duties.

“You do that,” I said. “I’m looking forward to my chat tomorrow. Bet there’s a whole lot to learn. And a lot to answer for.”

***