The following day I was scrolling through the Market checking up on the offers I had placed on there. I had mentioned that we would soon come under attack by a group of aliens known as the “Galactic Commerce Alliance” and that, for that reason, we wanted to purchase military hardware and would be temporarily putting a hold on all gun and bullet exports. We would, however, begin selling those as well as other equipment once we were producing an excess.
Many more cities had System Settlements in them now, including the city proper, as I had sold a Nanite Core made Settlement Core to the city council a few days ago in exchange for the town and its citizens not having to pay taxes there, and several people had sent me listings of different military surplus they had salvaged, everything from camouflage, to night vision goggles, to humvees, APCs, and one tank. No guns, however, other than a few vintage ones, as there was a shortage on the market. A man in Dubai told me that he had an M1 Abrams tank that was left behind the last time the US military left the middle east, and was offering to sell it to me for sixty thousand zerka. I countered last night by offering him the Shelby Mustang we still had in storage and ten thousand. He hadn’t responded yet.
I bought most of the military hardware that was offered to me, buying the camouflage from LA, DC, and NYC, so that it would all be US military style. All of this hardware cost the city another one hundred and ninety five thousand zerka, but we would now be well equipped. I transferred all of the equipment to the militia, under the control of Paul.
The town’s funds were now dangerously low, though, at barely over ten thousand zerka. I wouldn’t be able to expand the industry by much after this. The only improvement to our financial situation would come from the additional fifty thousand per week that we received for our food exports. Hopefully I could further expand the industry soon.
I left the building, telling Joyce to send me a message if anyone wanted to talk to me, and took a walk around town. The wooded area near the office building where my office was had been completely stripped of trees. The place now exclusively processed trees sent to us by Fort Solinan. “Hey, Mayor.” said the manager of the office building, seeing me outside the building. “Mind if I ask you something really quick?”
“Sure, Judy. What is it?”
“We’ve had a lot of people moving into the building and I was wondering if there was any way to make moving easier.”
“Need me to see if anyone in town has trucks they can loan out?”
“Actually, I was thinking of something a little bit different. I saw Tom putting an electric guitar and Amp in the warehouse once, and was wondering if you can let all of the other people do that too.”
“Oh, that. Well, Tony, Tom, Di, and the first ten people to join the town received a cubic meter of storage space in the warehouse. The day we took in a thousand people, though, I was too busy to give them space, and haven’t thought of it since. Now we don’t have enough space to do that.”
“But I saw Olivia doing it too.”
“Oh, that’s a bit different. Lawrence owns a warehouse, which he used to store all of the merchandise his store had when the town was set up. He and Olivia can access that warehouse, and because it is within the town, can send anything from their location in town to their warehouse and send anything from their warehouse to their location. It just uses their mana to transfer the items if they are out of the working range of their warehouse.”
“Would it be possible to give the people storage space now, then?”
“If we can find a large building for it, I suppose so. Just tell me where you want it, and I can buy a Warehouse 2 and have Gary give everyone in town a free cubic meter, and let them rent more if they need it. Say, a zerka per cubic meter per month. The building should be as close to a 200 cubic meter building as possible. Assuming eight foot ceilings, that’s 883 square feet of floor space.”
“So, if we find a warehouse that’s at least that size, you’ll set it up?”
“Sure. Though if it’s much bigger than that I can’t use it due to safety concerns.”
“In that case, we’ll try to find an 800 or 850 square foot warehouse.”
I nodded and continued my walk. I visited several of the businesses around town. There were many specialized stores, now. We had an extra tailor, many stores, a car/equipment dealer, and even a hair salon. No doctors or dentists. There are two ex nurses who want to become midwives, but as no one in town was more than five months pregnant due to both the mother and child having to survive the plague for a woman to still be pregnant, they were currently setting broken bones and bandaging wounds so that they healed faster. Most of the businesses, however, were factories of some sort, as we had many there were several religious officials, but no religious buildings yet. Those of us that were religious generally took the teleporter to the city to attend services. Unsurprisingly, as most of our citizens had come here from St. Nicholas’s Outpost, Catholicism was the most common religious affiliation.
I swung by Lawrence’s to see how he was going with his flea market idea, which he swore was more of a county fair, then decided to walk behind the building to visit some of the businesses back their. I had heard that several warehouses, a city Road Department garage, a junk yard, and a storage company that had eight storage buildings with eight rental sections each had been claimed back there. The group of salvagers that had claimed the storage yard were planning on turning it into sixty four small living areas by replacing the garage door with a wall and renting them out.
I saw a man laying behind the PriceCO building. He was too still, though. I went over to him and bumped him with my foot. He didn’t respond. “Sir?” I asked. No response. ‘Hey Vera, can you ask his nanites if he’s ok?’
‘I can try.’ she paused for a few seconds. ‘They are reporting that he has no heartbeat and minimal brain and organ function. They are maintaining nutrient and oxygen levels, as well as cycling the blood, but technically he’s dead from heart failure.’
‘Heart attack? I thought his nanites would unclog any arteries that were blocked.’
‘It wasn’t caused by a blockage. The nanites can only tell me this because he is dead, but he has extremely high levels of methamphetamine in his blood stream.’
‘He overdosed? I thought we got over the drug issues when we solved the homelessness and poverty.’
‘Obviously not. A few percent of the population still use recreationally, but they usually stick to the safer options.’
I sighed. ‘I assume the nanites are already trying to revive him?’
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‘Yes, he’ll probably be revived in around thirty hours.’
‘In that case, any idea where we can put him until he’s back? Does he have an apartment?’
‘Lives in the dorms. As fast as we are growing, only about ten percent of the population live anywhere else.’
‘Great.’ I sent Simon a message. ‘Hey, quick question, what do we do with corpses?’
‘You mean actual corpses or the kind that come back in a few days? Because I think you’ve just been stuffing the first kind into the warehouse so Bob can turn them into fertilizer.’
‘Second kind. A guy OD’d on meth behind the PriceCO. It will be thirty hours before he is back up, and I’d rather not put him in the dorms until he comes back.’
‘We don’t actually have a place for him, as far as I know.’
‘Do you have a jail yet?’ Maybe I could dump him in a cell for the next day.
‘Not really. Haven’t really needed one yet, as I’ve been fixing most of the legal issues and violent encounters by talking to people. No drug laws, and assaults and even murder are just financial issues as the person will come back. Would be nice to have a place to put people who are a flight risk or who committed assaults with psychological damages, as those don’t automatically heal, but for now the last type is only one single sexual assault case, and it was stopped before it went too far by the people in the area beating the perp to death.’
‘In that case, I’ll contact the two midwives. They have the only building that can be called a hospital. It isn’t really a morgue, but leaving him in one of their beds is the best we can do for now.’
I briefly considered transferring the guy to the warehouse to make moving him easier, but I wasn’t sure how his nanites would respond to that. Vera assured me that they would continue to work, and that they could repair any damage the warehouse’s spacial dilation field did to him, but I didn’t want to take the chance. I threw him over my shoulder and carried him over to the dentist’s office they had taken over as a store front.
There was one man getting his leg and a ribs set, as he had gotten hit by a truck from not looking while crossing the street, but I waited until he left, giving me a strange look at having a dead man over my shoulder. People were getting really reckless now that they were functionally immortal, I observed.
“Hello, mayor. What can we help you with?”
“Mind if I store this guy here for the next thirty hours? He OD’d on Meth and I need a place to leave him until he wakes up.”
“We have some beds in the back, but they are mostly used as an exam tables. I guess we can rent you one of the exam rooms.”
“That will be great. We really need to build a morgue to send dead people to, especially with the invasion coming, but I didn’t know where else to leave him.”
“That’s actually a good idea. There is a liquor store behind us that has already been cleared out but not claimed. I’ll start filling it with hospital beds and using it as a storage place for anyone that is awaiting revival. Maybe I can charge per day?”
“Sounds like a plan. What do I owe you for the room?”
“Five Zerka will cover it.” I transferred her the money and she showed me to a room that was decorated with cartoon animals. This probably used to be the children’s room. I dumped the man on the bed and left, asking her to send me a notice when the Revival area was done, so I could have Gary teleport any dead body there after verifying that they would revive. That would keep the place from having corpses in the streets during the battle.
I spent the rest of the day checking in on all of the businesses in the town, and took the teleporter over to the mines. The wall was going well. They had already built both gates, with large chain link fence gates which could be pushed out of the way, and even a meter tall concrete barrier that could be lifted in response to an incoming vehicle to block the lower half of the gate. I didn’t feel like that would be sufficient against an invading army, but they had decided on that instead of an old style portcullis. Maybe we could upgrade it with a metal barrier at some point.
The back of what wall they had completed had a walkway a meter below the top, which could be accessed from ladders placed every twenty meters. They had even laid out places for guard towers. They were hoping to have the wall done in a little over a week, and would then move on to the town to work there, but didn’t think they could have the guard tower finished before the attack. Instead, they would just have the militia patrol the wall and have the outpost AI watch the scanning devices they installed in the top of the walls for any animal or artificial movement in the area, including sapient animals.
As I was looking over the sensor network, which had a range of one hundred to a thousand meters depending on how many buildings and trees were in its field, I noticed that the logging team and around a dozen River Alfs were out there clearing trees to extend the range. They had finished the palisade wall at Fort Solinan yesterday, and apparently the logging crew had hired some of them to chop down trees here. They had also, apparently, taught the River Alfs to use chainsaws and yell “timber” when a tree was about to fall.
A few minutes later Paul returned with the troops. He had taken them on a run in full gear all the way to Fort Solinan and back, and they were exhausted. Most of them collapsed on the ground as soon as they got within the walls, not even bothering to remove their backpacks and other gear. Apparently Paul had gotten the gear just before they were ready to leave and given full sets of equipment to everyone. “You know, just because you can’t technically work them to death anymore doesn’t mean you should try.”
Paul shrugged. “I only have a few days or a week to get their physical stats and recovery as high as possible. Most of them are already good shots and decent in hand-to-hand, but the better their physical condition the better they will do in the battle.”
“Any of them have any sort of defensive power?”
“A few, but most are sticking to armor.”
I nodded. “In that case, if any of them have the ability to take on another un-adapted power, I can give them one.” Without the Detection field the virtual armor skill might not work as well as mine, but it will be able to get enough data from their own senses to work on slower attacks. Though, as this battle will be using guns, that’s probably not the best. I should probably make a new defensive power. Maybe one that worked like actual armor?
“I’ll tell them.” Paul said, and went to talk to the men. We had around two hundred troops, so he had lieutenants to pass on messages, but he chose to address them himself.
While he was talking to them, I started a new program. I told a million nanites to start gathering carbon from the CO2 in my blood and using it to construct a web of carbon nanotube wires under the top layer of dead skin, as that was one of the strongest materials humans had discovered, and being there wouldn’t risk harming the body’s functions. Dormant nanites in the body would automatically recharge and gather carbon, using their energy to construct the upgrade, but not exceeding the user’s nexus energy regeneration, so that they wouldn’t exhaust their other nanites. The carbon gathering process would even boost oxygen levels in the blood as it would leave behind O2 molecules. I saved the program as “Warrior’s Armor”.
When over one hundred and fifty of the men came over, I started sending the program to them as well. “Wait, a new skill at level 4?” one of them asked, surprised.
‘The skill level is based on the material the nanites are constructing, so it can’t really be degraded by the fact that they aren’t adapted to the power.’ Vera informed me. ‘They will still need to adapt to the power, though.’
I relayed that information to the men, as well as how the power worked, and they seemed pleased.
I said goodbye and went to the shooting range. Olivia had stacked trees near a section of the rock that wasn’t being mined, and thirty people were lined up throwing spells from a distance of thirty meters. Most of them were hitting their target, and every time a lightning bolt, fire bolt, or some other attack hit the logs chunks of wood were being blown out. “Looks like your training is going well.” I said to Olivia.
“Oh, hey, Greg. Yeah, we should be ready by the time the enemy gets here. I’m working on their range here. We’ll back up five meters every time we have to add a set of logs to the pile. Hopefully they will be able to reliably hit a human sized target at a hundred meters by the time the enemy gets here, though we probably won’t be past fifty for most of them, so we’ll have to rely on area of effect spells.”
“Hey, Mayor.” one of a mages, a sixteen year old boy, called out. “You think you can show us how good mana bullet can get?” Several of the others agreed.
“Fine, just step back at least ten meters, or you could blow out your eardrums.” I stepped up to their lines and quickly ordered some nanites to cover the hole in my ear and try and drain as much vibration from the air that hit them as possible.
Everyone else backed up, and I held my palm towards the target. I would only use two points of mana this time, as when I used five last time I almost destroyed my hand. I suppose another benefit of the Warrior’s Armor would be that I would be more resistant to the blowback from using this power. Not knowing if anyone was listening, and not being able to hear them myself, I called out and told them that I was ready. I gave them a few seconds to plug their ears, then gathered the nanites into my palm. I targeted the center of the stack of trees and activated Mana Bullet. I heard a cracking sound as some of the sonic boom managed to get through my Hearing Protection, and the stack of logs exploded. Mostly it was just trees flying around, but I did notice that their was a considerable amount of rock dust.
“So, how was it?” I asked everyone, turning around. Several of them were wincing in pain and several more were messing with their ears, trying to get the ringing to stop or to get their hearing back. I didn’t expect that to happen. I had Vera send the Hearing Protection skill to all of them and all of the soldiers, who could leave it sitting in their mailbox if they didn’t want it, then waited for everyone to have their hearing back. “So, how was it?”
“Loud.” said the sixteen year old. “But also pretty cool.” He ran off towards where the logs used to be stacked and the rest of us followed.
Two of the logs had a piece missing from the center of it, as I had turned it into splinters. The other trees had been blow away from the force of the log exploding. There was also a thirty centimeter crater in the wall behind where the logs were, which is probably why there was rock dust in the air.
“Yeah, I would like us to learn to do that, but it seems a bit like overkill for now.”
“Yeah, that only cost me two mana, but I can see why you wouldn’t want to use it every day.”
The trainees were surprised at how little mana it used, but I didn’t interfere. I used the warehouse to quickly restack all of the logs, replacing the ones that were too damaged with others that the logging crew had left nearby, and watched for a few minutes before leaving.