All of that planning took a lot out of me, so I collapsed in bed and went to sleep without eating. When I woke up at about five in the morning I noticed a System message.
There were a few people moving around, but none of them seemed out of place. I did see one group of people heading towards the gym. It was the only shopping center business I left relatively untouched, and also had some of the few showers that the people in the dorms could use. These people probably got up before sunrise so that they wouldn’t have to wait in line. I should fix that.
I opened up a notepad in my head, a useful function Vera had once shown me, and started taking notes of things that I would need to have the construction team do. I didn’t technically need to do so to remember the list, as everyone on the System had a photographic memory due to it backing up your memories, but if I made a list I could send the file to others. “Build more showers/toilets” went to the top of the list. With the number of things that needed to be built, we would need to greatly expand the construction crew.
I sent out a bulk message to everyone that was signed up as a citizen that we needed construction crew to modify, build, and upgrade the buildings around us. I offered 20 zerka per day to beginners, 30 or 40 if you had some experience, depending on how much, and 50 if you were a team leader. Those rates would be my standard pay rates for now, so I updated the ones for the other employees as well. Tony and Tom had negotiated to be paid in cash, so I would have to talk to them to see if they would rather continue to be paid in cash or if they wanted the standard Team Leader pay. Di became a team leader, though I wasn’t sure what to call her position. Maybe I would put her in charge of educating people on the use of the System as well, and she could lead the educators? If nothing else, we could make her morale officer. I sent her a message offering her the position of instructor.
As for myself, it seemed a little weird to give myself a paycheck when I could control the entire city’s finances and had bought most of the things in the city using my personal finances. For now, though, I gave myself a pay rate of 100 zerka per day, and would stick to using the city’s funds to buy everything for the city rather than my own funds.
I also created a virtual bulletin board that Greg would have his nanites holographically display around town, and could be accessed by anyone that was a registered citizen. On that I posted the Construction Team recruitment, the new pay rates, and a job offer looking for people to clear the trees around the area. I might turn that into an actual lumber industry once I learned a bit more about System devices that could make boards and plywood. I also added a suggestion and a complaint box. If I was going to be mayor, I needed to hear what my people had to say.
By the time I was done with that I had finished the bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits and orange juice I had bought at the restaurant and threw away my trash. The bacon had come from one of the clones pigs, the eggs, cheese, and orange juice were from the refrigerated food I bought from Lawrence, and the biscuit was from the Kitchen in town. Apparently, Jacob had decided to try and raise money by allowing it to make food and sell it anytime the kitchen was closed, so the manager of the restaurant had it make many dishes and send them to us. After all, we had sold them all of the flour that Lawrence had so if we wanted to make fresh food using flour we needed them.
The town’s finances were looking pretty good now, which allowed me to do this wave of expansion. We had gotten 62,837 zerka from scraping cars and another 13,678 from Market sales. And that was after I deducted the pay of all of our employees from the Market sales. The sales of guns were really picking up, which greatly contributed to our profits. With that kind of money coming in, I could afford to hire more people. The cars sales amount was a one time thing, but much of the Market was from things we could repeat, so I wasn’t sure how much we could afford to do long term. I would just have to watch things and make adjustments.
As everyone got up, I got a response from Di. She agreed to help educate people, and suggested that she come by my place to discuss the curriculum. I really needed an office where we could hold meetings, but it wasn’t a priority. Maybe I will take over the penthouse office of one of the office buildings across the street.
The meeting went pretty well. We decided to encourage everyone to pick up the Inventory skill, as it was so useful. We would ask Olivia if she could teach the people that wanted to learn magic-like skills, and Di would deal with the more down-to-earth skills and questions like how to use certain features, like the library function of the interface window. I had discovered it a few weeks ago. Every book, video, and song humans ever produced is on there, including educational materials. It even has an encyclopedia which puts a certain wiki website to shame. You could also add alien information if you wanted, though it wasn’t added by default.
By ten o’clock I had over 100 people who wanted to join the construction teams, and another fifty that wanted to work on the trees. I had Tony come by and split up the construction crews into different tasks. After talking with him a bit through messages, he was up to date on all of the improvements I wanted to do, so he assigned a team to start turning one of the stores into a bath house and a team to start converting the office building into apartments. I went with the second team to clear out the office and, after we dealt with a few corpses and three zombies, and stored everything in the warehouse including the corpses, the place was cleaned out enough for them to start.
As the wood cutting crew would be working nearby I decided to turn the new warehouse into a storage place for their materials. There was a device in the Market known as a Bulk Warehouse. It only allowed you to store up to ten different types of items, stacking them instead of keeping every item separate like the normal warehouse. In exchange it could take a larger area, 200 cubic meters like the Warehouse 2 instead of the 100 cubic meters of the Warehouse 1, and expand it by a factor of 20, instead of 10 like the Warehouse 1. This meant that the Bulk Warehouse would store four times as much as the standard Warehouse, but was only good for bulk materials. I also bought a Lumber Yard at 2500 zerka, as it could process the trees into various shapes and materials like sawdust, wood chips, and bark. I set it up to automatically take the trees and turn them into properly dried two by fours. They were all eight feet long for now, as I wanted to save the storage slots. I then assigned the leader of the lumber team to be the manager of the Lumber Yard and Bulk Warehouse.
I had the Recycler break down the computers from the office building, including the server bank, but didn’t sell the materials. We might be able to use them to make things in the future, but if we don’t need them I can always sell them when we need money.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Back at town I expanded Gary’s field to 500 meters, which covered the entire shopping center and much of the office area and wooded area across the road. As I knew that salvagers had checked the cars in that parking lot already, I ordered the Recycler to break down those cars and store the materials. I would make those materials available to the craftsmen once I knew that they had a use for them.
As it was already after noon I went to the restaurant and checked the suggestion box. Most of them were asking for baths, toilets, or private rooms. A few people wanted jobs of a specific kind. While we didn’t need people to produce things, I suppose we could use some more craftsmen.
The first one would be a tailors office. Our clothing supplies were good, but people would probably want new things before long. If nothing else, when the spring got here they would want lighter clothing than is available for salvage.
I checked with the System and realized that there was a Tailor’s station, which could do everything from weaving cloth to sewing the clothing for you. It could even work with leather, rubber, and other materials, which would allow it to make shoes and simple clothing. It might be a bit more than we needed, but they were cheap at only 2500 zerka each. I bought two, then took them to the production room. After I was done, I posted a note looking for five people to make clothing, shoes, and simple armor.
I noticed that the gunsmith, Philip, had hired four other people, who were all assembling guns of various types. As a designated manager and Team Leader he had the power to do so, so it wouldn’t be a big deal. I verified that they were all added to the official employ list. Two of them weren’t fully part of the System, but even the level 1 connection let you store zerka in your brain Node, which meant that they could automatically be paid.
There were a few other jobs I could set up, but I would probably need to think about what they should be. Maybe I could ask our Alf friends what would be needed?
I quickly walked down to the last of the shopping center stores and cleared it out. It had a functional soda machine in front of it, so I checked the warehouse. We had two other working ones, and three broken ones. I set the two working ones up, one near the production store and one near the trailers. I went over to Lawrence’s store and bought some sodas, then ordered Gary to restock all of the soda machines. The sodas disappeared into the warehouse.
It was only then that I realized a problem. The machines could still take cash, but everything else in town was sold for Zerka. ‘Gary, is there any way to alter the soda machines so that they take Zerka?’
‘Yes, it is quite simple.’ He informed me of a device that could produce an electric charge in response to the amount of zerka paid. It was generally used to make devices change their function based on how much you paid, but could also be used to activate a device if a specific amount was paid. It was only rarely used, as it only mattered to technological societies that made technology outside the System.
They were only five zerka each, so I bought three and brought up the schematic for the machine’s electronics. I figured out which circuit needed to be activated to tell it that a proper payment had been made, and set one device per machine up to do that when half a zerka had been paid. Charging fractional zerka wasn’t common, and the System priced everything in full zerka, but it was possible.
Not knowing what else to do for the day, I went to my RV and pulled up the library. My class meant that I needed to understand how powers worked to get the most out of them and level them up the fastest, so I asked Vera to pull up scientific papers on expanding space. Maybe I could level up my Inventory directly by rewriting the way it works?
Several hours later, after leveling up my Physics and Quantum Physics multiple times due to all of the papers I had to cross-reference, I finally finished the paper. It was complicated, but at least I knew the basic theory behind it. Now I just needed to figure out how the nanites could manipulate that theory to create the effect.
I just wouldn’t do it now. That much learning had my brain hurting. I just wanted to eat something and go to sleep. With the Market Screen skill I could technically access the restaurant from here and just bring in whatever I wanted, but as it was rush hour there doing so would delay other people from getting their food.
Instead I connected to the Kitchen. I couldn’t have them make me anything, as they were also in a rush over there, but their market terminal could sell me anything in their food storage, including soup that they made yesterday and had stored. I bought a bowl worth, plus a bread roll. Knowing that the food would fall on the floor if I just brought it over, the System let me delay its arrival as I took out a bowl from a cabinet. Once I was done, I set the bowl on a table and told the Market Screen to put the food there. Suddenly there was a distortion and the bowl was filled with pork stew and a roll appeared beside the bowl. I stepped out of my RV long enough to buy a soda from the nearest machine and went back inside. It was a simple meal, but it worked, and only cost two zerka.
After finishing I went to bed. It had been a long day.
For the next week the settlement continued to run without major modification. I made an adjustment to the way settlement owned businesses worked, letting them keep half the sales and the city take the other half. This meant that they had to cover their own expenses and pay their own employees. Because the construction teams were only working for the city and not selling to the public, I sent them 4000 zerka per day to cover expenses and expand. This change made the city’s daily income lower to five thousand the first day, but steadily climb to ten thousand by the end of the week. If it could stay at that level we would be able to expand rapidly.
Di and Olivia’s classes were going well. We had 67 children in the settlement who attended System classes along with around 150 adults in the morning. After lunch the adults would go to try to gather salvage or do some other work and the two of them would help the children find educational material in the System Library that interested them or that formed the basics of what they needed to know. Di had hired two women from the System classes to help with the children as well, one who used to homeschool her kids and one who was a middle school teacher. They got a budget of 500 zerka per day, and by the way Di kept visiting the various unused buildings within the settlement I suspected that she was considering using it by having the Construction crew build her a schoolhouse.
While I spent the week reading various scientific papers, many of them from the aliens that created the Sapient Empowerment System to try and wrap my head around how all of the System tech worked, I did occasionally take time out to walk around town and talk to people. Because I treated Bob and Gary as employees, rather than just tools, I even checked in with them to see if they had any ideas on how to improve things. Gary suggested that we build some sort of mass transit to St. Nicholas’s Outpost, which in System terms meant teleportation. A teleportation orb would allow us to move people, and would cut the energy cost of moving goods between two of them by two to five times depending on how advanced the one we bought was. A teleport pad, however, could cut the cost to one tenth of the standard cost, making it approximately one tenth of a Ko per kilogram per kilometer. With a standard power generator that would allow 500 people per day to use it. I really wanted more to be able to use it, though, so I would need a Generator Orb 2, with would produce ten times the power and therefore be able to move 5000 people per day. The main problem with that idea was cost. A teleporter pad cost 50 thousand zerka and a generator 2 cost 25 thousand. As a result, we wouldn’t have the money to build one at both ends for another week, and would then exhaust the treasury.
Bob suggested that I by him upgrades. I didn’t know he could have them, but there were three good options. I could buy more cloning pods at 5k, and grow more animals. The seven pig carcasses that I put on the market were all sold in three days, two to the settlement in Beijing, three to the settlement in Paris, one to a new settlement in Mexico City, and one to a settlement 27 kilometers north of us named “Solinan Bascabana” that was built in the national forest reserve. I assume that was our Alf friends. Buying more pods would let us produce one extra pig every four days and increase our profit. I could also buy a Plant Pod, which would produce a comparable mass of plant products every day. The third option was called a “Biome Chamber”. It was a one million cubic meter pocket where Bob could build an entire balanced biome to preserve all of the species in it in harmony. It also cost 100 thousand zerka.
I bought one more cloning pod, bringing him up to a total of five, and five Plant Pods. It cost 30 thousand zerka to do that, but would greatly increase our food security. The last cloning pod was set to grow a cow every five days instead of a pig every four, in order to diversify our food. I also had him grow the skin for them, then remove it and send it to the Food Warehouse along with the meat. Because the new demands on it caused it to fill up too quickly, I expanded the food warehouse into the two nearby offices in the back of the restaurant. I would have the construction crew wall off part of the kitchen later and expand it further later, but for now they had other work to do.
I bought a device called a “Tanning Station” for one thousand zerka that could only tan hides of animals and gave it to the clothing team. They could use it to make leather out of the cow and pig hides Bob was producing, and use that leather instead of hoping we salvaged some.