I woke up and went to the kitchen. The power was out again. It had been intermittent since the device burnout a few days ago, and even though the landlord had survived he was having trouble getting a generator powerful enough to deal with the power outages.
Thankfully I had a gas stove and the gas was still working. I lit the stove with a match and started some water boiling. The emergency rations I had bought had a lot of oatmeal in it, so I had been eating that for breakfast for the last few days.
Now that the National Guard and military had been called in I no longer needed to go out and stop rioters and looters, so I had been helping Father Smith at the soup kitchen. There were still plenty of looters in the city, but they tended to stick to the places whose owners had died, and thus the law wouldn’t do anything to stop them.
After eating my oatmeal and having a glass of powdered milk I threw an MRE into my backpack along with the first aid kit and set out. I waved at Keith as I left the front door. He and some of the others had stacked up concrete blocks from a nearby construction sight near the entrance to keep unwanted people out and were keeping at least one person on watch near the front door at all times.
The price of gasoline had went up to $20 per gallon now that the resupply trucks couldn’t be guaranteed, so I decided to walk to the church. The streets on the way had shops set up on the sides, festival tents with folding tables covered in wares. As I walked by one of them Vera spoke to me. ‘Hey, look over there.’
A salvager, maybe sixteen years old, was showing a black sphere the size of his head to the vendor. “I’m telling you, it’s special. When I touch it I hear some sort of static in my head.”
The vendor touched it. “That’s not happening to me. As far as I can tell, it’s just a fancy art project.” The kid tried to protest, but the man held up his hand. “Look. I told you. It’s just a decorative object to me. So, I can only offer twenty dollars.”
“That’s it? It’s got to be worth more. How about fifty?”
“Sorry, kid. That’s the best I can do.”
I walked over and ran Assessment on the orb.
The kid turned around, and the vendor looked surprised. “How much you offering?” the kid asked.
“How does two hundred sound?” I asked.
The kid looked excited. “Sounds great.” I nodded, and handed him two one hundred dollar bills. The kid thanked me, handed me the orb, and ran off.
“Hey, you can’t come steal my business like that.” The vendor said as I placed the orb in my backpack.
“It didn’t look like he wanted to sell to you, but here.” I handed him $100. “That should cover any profit you might have made off of the object.”
The man looked at the bill, shrugged, and put it in his pocket. “Fair enough. So, care to buy anything?” He motioned to his table. It was mostly electronic devices. I briefly considered buying Vera a cell phone to play games on, as I was currently using the old phone with a cracked screen that I had been letting her use, but decided not to.
“I’ll think about it.” I said. The man nodded and I continued to the church.
There I helped the Father, who was now allowing me to call him Jacob, and Paul get the food ready for the lunch rush. With most of the grocery stores having been looted by now and the food people had in their homes starting to run out, more people were coming to the church’s soup kitchen every day. We were trying to find sources of food for the people, but what food was around was being hoarded by people who were afraid of running out. I guess I counted as one of those people, as I had several months worth of food at home, but at least I was helping out.
When the timer dinged I pulled the bread rolls out of the oven and put more in. I had been on bread-making duty all day yesterday and was getting good at it. A few hours and over a thousand rolls later the lunch rush ended and I was able to take a break. Once we had cleaned up enough, the nun left to refill the generator and I had a chance to talk to the other two. “Hey Jacob, Paul. I bought something this morning that I think the two of you need to see.” I grabbed my backpack out of the locker behind the kitchen and pulled out the orb.
“That’s System tech.” said Paul in surprise. “It looks different than Bob, though.”
I nodded. “The description calls it a Settlement Core. I haven’t talked to it yet, though, so I don’t know what it can do. You guy’s want to help me figure that out?”
They nodded, and I had Vera connect the three of us. I would have invited Wan as well, but after the device outage he sent me a message that he had been recalled to LA, and I hadn’t seen or heard from him since. After that, Vera and Bob joined the conversation. Normally that would be a bit weird, but we were about to talk to a new System AI, so I wanted the two that I knew to be there to help out.
Once all of us were connected, I touched the sphere.
‘Hello, 327. My name is Greg. I’m a human and I bought you a few hours ago.’
‘That is fine, Mr. Greg. How might I be of service?’
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
‘I assume you don’t have a name? In that case, I’ll name you “Gary.” I assume you can talk to the other people in this conversation.’
‘Yes, I am detecting two other people as well as two System AIs connected to me. Will I be assisting them as well?’
‘It depends. What is your purpose?’
For some reason I felt like Gary was amused by that question. ‘I thought my designation would make that obvious. I am a device created by the system to facilitate the creation of settlements by sapient beings. To that end I can interface with other system devices like this Conservation Core and direct them to perform in a way that helps the settlement. I assumed that’s why you introduced me to the AI that governs one.’
‘No, I just thought that Bob would be able to help in this conversation. You’re saying that you could direct him to help the settlement?’
‘That would be nice.’ said Bob. ‘I haven’t had anything to do recently, and my cloning pods are empty. It would be nice to have a job.’
‘I would be happy to manage ‘Bob’ as you call the Conservation Core, but to do more than my most basic functions I would need to be set up in an area where you wished to build a settlement.’
‘In that case.’ said Paul, ‘we should set up in the outskirts of the city. All of the salvagers are moving into the city proper, which is resulting in a lot of abandoned buildings out there. I’ve been traveling around that area and can go try and scout a location if you want.’
‘What about the PriceCo?’ asked Jacob. ‘It is beside a shopping center and a gas station, and it would probably have most of the things we need to set up a settlement.’
‘We’ll need to talk to the manager. He seemed fiercely protective of his stuff the last time we went. If he wants to join us, though, we can probably work something out.’
Paul nodded. ‘That’s one of the best locations I can think of too, at least if you want to have all of the basics on hand. If Greg’s ok with it, I can talk to the guy tomorrow.’
The Nun walked back inside so I put Gary back in my backpack. “That was an interesting object.” she remarked.
“I bought it off a salvager this morning. Makes a pretty cool conversation piece.”
She shook her head. “To think you could be thinking about art at a time like this.”
“Well, people need a distraction. Speaking of which, I’ll go make sure that the TVs I set up are all still working.” I grabbed one of the leftover rolls from the basket in the corner and walked to the gym. The soup kitchen was set up in a large metal building with a gym. Most of the basketball court was covered in folding tables and chairs, but at the far wall there were two projection TVs that we had managed to buy off of salvagers. I had hooked DVD players up to both of them and there was a cabinet full of movies in the middle. Last night we had run two movie marathons, one on each screen, to keep the people busy until midnight. There was a limit to what we could run, as the church limited us to PG or below, but one was based on a famous Western actor and the other was a popular sci-fi franchise.
We had been running the projectors this morning before the lunch rush, but the right one had stopped working. I fiddled with the wires and restarted the device. Eventually I figured out that someone had gotten cheese powder off of some potato chips on one of the disks and then loaded it into the DVD player. I had to clean the head of the player and the disk to get it to work again. Once I was done, the children ran back over and sat down to watch whatever cartoon that was.
I didn’t really pay attention though. I had to finish eating my bread and a few things from my MRE before I had to start getting ready for the dinner rush. In the mean time, I had Gary brief me on the functions I could expect to have in a settlement.
Once the dinner rush was over, I told Jacob and Paul that I might be a little late getting here tomorrow. I would be heading out to PriceCo and seeing if the man would be willing to let us build there.
The next day I drove over. The parking lot was mostly empty, and I only saw a few people walking around the area, the main group being a Salvager team that was looting the shopping center. I parked near the front door and went to talk to the manager that was sitting out front. “How’s it going?” I held out my hand and introduced myself. He shook it and gave me his name as well. “Lawrence”.
“Not bad, I guess. You come here to shop?”
“Not exactly.” He griped his gun tighter when I said that so I held up my hands. “I don’t mean I’m going to rob you. I came here to try and work out a deal with you. See, I was considering setting of a settlement here. I would bring in people from town to salvage all of the stuff in the area, and it would become a sort of Salvager trade hub. This would be a great place to set up at. We have the abandoned gas station next door, and the shopping center. And your place could sell us whatever we need but can’t salvage. I just need your permission to set up here in the parking lot.”
“You want to build a Salvager town here?” he asked, then looked like he was thinking about it. “Honestly, I was starting to wonder what I was going to do. My employees have abandoned me, so it’s just me and my daughter running the place. Business has slowed to a crawl, now that there are so many places you can loot if you want to get something. We have plenty of things left to sell, but no one is coming by to buy them. Why spend money when you can spend a few minutes digging through an abandoned building?”
“So, you’d be willing to work with us?”
“If you can bring customers back, then sure I would be. It doesn’t matter how much stuff I have if I can’t sell it. I’d be happy to handle the town’s business. Or to just do business with its people.”
“In that case, I’ll come by tonight to start setting up. Might send some folks by with some stuff in the mean time.” We shook on it. There was no point in exchanging phone numbers as the network was down. I sent Jacob and Paul a message that I had worked out a deal. It was almost 9AM, so I knew I would have to get to the soup kitchen if I wanted to be there on time.
I swung by the apartment and talked to Keith. I asked him to bring a storage shed from the local home improvement store to the PriceCO parking lot, as well as any RVs or new trailer homes he could find. If I was going to build a town here we would need a place to live. I told him to just tell the manager that I had asked him to drop them off, then come back about 8PM. I then handed him ten thousand dollars to pay his employees and told him we would work out the rest later. Keith seemed more than happy to help me out as he got someone else to take his place out front.
I got back to the soup kitchen a bit after they started, and threw my stuff in the locker before getting started. “Sorry about that.” I said for the Nun’s benefit. “I had to talk to someone about setting up a settlement in the outskirts, and arrange for a few mobile homes to be brought out, so we would have a place to sleep.”
“Why would you want to do that?” asked Mary as she added the stack of potatoes she had cut to the large pot of stew.
“Everyone’s life was messed up by this apocalypse.” I responded, kneading a large bowl of dough. “We need to establish communities so all of the people that lost all or most of their families can have a place to go. So, I’m going to build a salvager community out in the outskirts. There the Salvagers can work together to build something they can call their own.”
“I guess I understand.” she said. “Too many people here seem lost. We can try to help them out, but we can only do so much. Not everyone finds the same comfort in the Church as I do.” I nodded, and that seemed to be the end of the conversation.
That night I went out to the parking lot. There Keith had placed a storage shed and surrounded it with four trailers. Around those were parked six RVs. I went over and greeted Keith, who had built a fire pit in front of one of the trailers. “Looks nice.” I said. “Mind giving me the tour?” He nodded and then lead me around the buildings. None of the trailers were furnished, but he had set them up properly. Apparently one of his buddies used to set them up for a living.
When we were done I thanked him and gave him an extra 10k. “I need to get them set up for people to live in them now. Any chance you can help me with that too?”
Keith had no problem with that, so I told him to follow me and went over to the manager. “Hey, Lawrence. We need furnishings for those mobile homes. Any chance you could give us a deal on that?”
“Honestly, I can’t really sell any of the home furnishing stuff. I’ll sell it to you cheap.” After a bit of negotiation and an hour of shopping I handed Lawrence ten thousand dollars for all of the furniture the buildings would need, including microwaves and coffee makers, as well as two large generators. Those I put beside the storage shed and ran the electricity through the building to all of the trailers and mobile homes.
I also built a special box and placed it in the middle of the shed. That box held Gary. I ran a large power cable from each generator to him and taped them onto his surface with duct tape. ‘Why are you doing that?’ he asked, and I explained that it was only temporary until I could build a proper place to put him. He had explained to me that he could absorb energy from many sources, including light, heat difference, radiation, and electricity. This would be the easiest way for him to absorb the electricity from the generators. He could then use that electricity to absorb nanites from the environment and control them to do things in the area.
Once everything was ready, I ordered Gary to not overtax the generators and powered them on. I cranked them up and the buildings lit up. ‘Ah, that feels good.’ said Gary. ‘I am finally receiving energy, albeit not that much.’
‘How much can you receive?’ I asked in surprise.
‘At least a gigawatt.’ he answered. ‘I haven’t calculated it. But at least this is enough to get started.’