We arrived at a platform in what looked like an inactive subway. They must not have gotten their trains up and running again since the blackout. Di grabbed my hand and we walked to the surface. The sun was starting to set and there we saw hundreds of people riding by on bicycles, and a few with older vehicles. There was even someone pulling a rickshaw and two horse drawn carriages. They either hadn’t gotten to the point where they could repair the newer vehicles, or had decided not to to keep the rustic appearance.
I considered downloading French into my translation skill, but decided against it. After all, it would only literally translate my words at level one, and that would just confuse them. We walked down the street for a few minutes before the scent of fresh bread and soup drew Di in. A man who was standing behind a lectern said something to me that I didn’t understand. I was about to tell him so, when Di spoke up. “Oui, puis-je avoir une table pour deux, s'il vous plaît?”
“I didn’t know you spoke french.” I said, as the man lead us to an outside table.
“Well, I haven’t had much use for it since college, but since the System I’ve been brushing up on it.”
The man handed us two menus. “Please order whenever you wish.” he said in a strong but understandable accent.
“Oh, you speak English.”
“But of course. We have many English customers. You are American, yes? I assume you just took the teleporter into the city?”
“Yes, I wanted to take her somewhere nice for lunch and Paris is famous for its cuisine.”
He nodded. “Then you may be interested to know that all of our food is imported from a town in America.”
I knew we had been exporting around half of our food to Paris, so I had to ask. “Would that town be called Anarchist Redoubt?”
“So you have heard of it? Yes. They have some of the cheapest, but highest quality food available on the market.”
“I’m actually the Mayor of Anarchist Redoubt, and she is on the town council.” I motioned to Di. “It’s good to get a review for our products in person.”
He seemed to study me for a second, no doubt using an inspection skill, then nodded. “I see. Then it is good to meet you mister mayor.” He bowed slightly. “If you don’t mind me asking, how are you producing such magnificent food? We are in the middle of winter. I thought we were going to have to import from Australia to get fresh produce, but you seem to be able to get it even in winter.”
“Oh, there is a device in the System Market called a “conservation core”. It was originally meant to balance ecosystems and aid in terraforming, but you can easily have it clone any non-sapient lifeform for you. It can even produce replacement limbs for amputees, which we made good use of after the last battle. Though the produce actually comes from an extension to the device that gives me fifty hectares of farmland to grow crops on.”
The man, who I now knew was name ‘Jacque LeBeau’ and belonged to the Faction ‘Independent City of Paris’, as I also used Inspection, nodded. “And how expensive is such a device. I cannot imagine that it would be cheap.”
“I believe I saw it available for two hundred and fifty thousand zerka, and the expansion is another one hundred thousand. I got lucky and found one just before the plague, so I didn’t have to buy it, just the upgrade.”
He nodded again. “So, it will be a while before I can buy one for my restaurant.”
“Well, I do know a few ways to earn money quickly, but they don’t have anything to do with food. I was, however, considering expanding the food production to include aquatic foods. Would you be interested in that?”
He seemed a bit more excited now. “But of course. Before the plague and the System, this restaurant was known for it’s lobster dishes. It is very difficult to get lobster now, so we mostly sell other things.”
“Then I should have at least one customer.” I said, and he nodded. “In that case, I’ll let Di order, as I can’t read the menu.” She smiled and ordered for us.
After lunch we wondered around town for another hour, checking out the early night life, before returning to town at two o’clock. I promised to meet her that night at the steakhouse in town, and checked my messages. Paul had sent me an inventory of all of the goods salvaged after the battle. Most of the things were basic military supplies like rations and four Composter orbs, essentially a downgraded Recycler that could only break down organic objects into fertilizer, which they were using in their latrines. They also had a Generator 2 to power all of the turrets, and the turrets themselves.
Paul had already had the turrets mounted on the walls of the mines, and had ordered the Nanite Forges in town to make more so that they could get them for half price. I should probably make the militia a nanite forge of its own. The rest of the hardware didn’t matter. I could have a Composter orb dropped into the septic tank at the mines, and at the hotels that I had all but forgotten about. In fact, I should probably get them a teleporter too. Other than that, I didn’t care what they did with the camp’s supplies. The only thing I really cared about were the two thousand plus Mark I Rail Pistols that all of the Grilk were equipped with. They and all of the military hardware were locked to the user when we got them, but Silan knew how to fix that situation.
He had sent the Core from the brains of the three Jotun to Fort Solinan. There they had an expert of theirs hack the devices to get the security codes for unlocking the hardware. To hack it like you normally would would take too long, so instead he tried to convince the AIs attached to the Cores that he was the rightful heir to their master’s inheritance. In Jotun culture the next of kin inherited everything, including the stored memories of the deceased. By convincing the AI that he was a Jotun cousin of theirs and that the rest of their family was dead, he got them to allow him access to the security codes and their accounts. He kept their money as his payment and turned the codes over to Silan, who gave them to Paul. Paul let his people use them to unlock all of the hardware, and we now had more pistols than we knew what to do with.
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I suggested that everyone who participated in the battle get a pistol on top of their monetary bonus, and that the militia keep the others to either sell or give to new recruits. Paul agreed and soon I received a notice that I was being sent a gift, a Mark 1 Rail Pistol. I quickly accepted and locked it to myself before placing it in my inventory.
Now that the loot had been handled I teleported myself down to Sactuary. I ordered another five autominers from the Market, and started digging a second layer to the base. This one would be for housing. People couldn’t live in a bunkhouse forever, so we would need a place to house them. There would be a section with large apartments with many rooms, for families or rich people, a section with medium sized apartments with several rooms, for couples and poorer families, and a section with many small apartments, for single people and poor people. Not that I suspected that the people would be that poor, as everyone that worked in this town made more that enough for a decent standard of living.
I set the one miner I started off with to start digging out an industrial area above the main level, and once it was large enough I moved the chemical factory up there, bought an extra one and told it to put in another series of rooms for Warehouse 3s. A warehouse three could take a 300 cubic meter area and expand it by a factor of one thousand, leaving us more than enough room for the goods Sanctuary would be producing. Sanctuary already had one each of the four main ones, but I hoped to expand things even further.
To that end, I had the Nanite Forge start producing a Nanite Forge 2, or as the System put it, a Nanite Forge (Medium). It would produce things five times as quickly as the small one, but would take twenty three days to finish. Once it was done I would have it produce a Conservation Core for Sanctuary. We barely had enough of some of the raw materials, but in the time it would take to make the Forge, I knew we would produce many times more than we would need.
For the next two weeks things continued normally for the town. With the city’s funds looking good, I purchased Bob another biome chamber which he was now using to produce seafood. This had doubled the weekly income of food money to the city to one hundred thousand. I hadn’t sold any of the raw materials that digging Sanctuary had produced, as I wanted to use them later with my new Nanite Forge, but I had spent some money on a new project.
Now that the Town was at almost 100% employment and we no longer got large amounts of immigrants from the City, I was looking for another way of expanding the workforce. For that reason I was looking for a new way to get workers. I briefly considered offering people in other countries jobs, but, as they would soon increase their living standard to something close to ours, like Paris had done, it didn’t make sense. So, I had purchased a robot from the system. It was a fairly basic model, at only ten thousand zerka, but could follow simple commands.
I had it follow me over to the gun store. While it had started out as a factory, and most of the employees still made weapons, the introduction of rail guns to the town had sparked an interest in more advanced weapons, something Philip was more that interested in capitalizing on, so he built a counter and started selling guns over the counter instead of just on the market.
“Hey, Philip.” I said as I walked in. “I brought something I want you to try out.” I motioned for the robot to come over and, when it didn’t understand, told it to step up to the counter. “I just bought this robot from the system and was wondering if you could let it work here for a little while to see if it could help with the labor shortage.”
“I guess I could start it on something basic.” I assigned Philip as its manager. “Ok, robot. Do you have a name?”
“I do not have a name at this time.” it said in a monotonous tone.
“Fine, I’m going to call you Robbie. I want you to start building Mark One Proton Beam Rifles. Send me a message after you’ve made one hundred of them.”
“Yes, sir” said Robbie and walked to the back, where a Factory on loan from the town was. There it ordered one hundred kits for the rifle.
“You aren’t going to charge me for this, are you?” asked Philip.
“No, this is a test to see if they can do a good enough job to fill basic roles. That will let the people move on to more important things.” Philip nodded and, after buying two more magazines for my rail pistol I left.
My efforts to improve Sanctuary had been pretty fruitful. I had finished furnishing one of the large apartments and Di and I would be moving in there tonight. There I would give her the suit and underarmor I had bought for her. The tailor had never worked with smart materials before, so it had taken them a while to learn enough about the material to properly work with it. Because of their work, however, I had learned something about the material. You could provide it with electricity to improve its toughness, so if you knew you were under attack it could be made even tougher.
The rest of the rooms would soon be furnished. I had offered to rent rooms to people at a rate of one thousand zerka per month for the nice rooms, two hundred and fifty per month for the medium rooms, and one hundred per month for the small rooms. I assumed most people would want the cheap rooms, but as even the lowest paid people in town earned four hundred per month everyone was going for the medium rooms. I only had people express interest in the small rooms due to an overall housing shortage, so I would need to produce more medium and large apartments.
All of the equipment in Sanctuary had been upgraded with a Quantum Communications orb, a device the size of a marble that could only send one or two text messages per second to its connected device, but it could do so no matter where the device was in the universe. This, combined with a Hyperspace Comms jammer which turned all hyperspace signals into noise after a few hundred meters meant that it was virtually impossible to find Sanctuary if we didn’t want it found, even if the people did have to use radio waves to communicate down here. The fact that the only way to enter of leave was through the city’s teleporter meant that it was essentially a gated community that could block anyone it wanted from entering. This drove up property values, though once we had installed the pools, sauna, and gym it will make the property even more in demand.
I made sure that everything was in place in the apartment, including the teleportation orb, in case she wanted to teleport directly here by relaying through the main teleporter, and went back to the surface. I really should try walking up the steps some time. It would drastically improve my Endurance. It would just take forever. Maybe I would start doing that tomorrow morning as my morning routine. After all, I could clean myself with a spell afterwards, and my clothes would be self-cleaning.
I had one more idea for improving the quality of life, the military, and making money, but I wanted someone I could trust to oversee the project. There was a device in the System called a Medical Factory. Not only could it produce Niirik and other performance enhancing hormones, but it could build custom gene tailoring products. As the System had the genetic code of every human that ever lived on file, it had a massive library of alternative genes to mix and match. The basic form of Gene tailoring would take any gene rated below Average and make it average. The intermediate would increase that to Good ranked genes, and the Expert one would improve the worst genes to Excellent rank. You could also pay extra for it to rent processing power from the System to run simulations which will test the gene’s interaction with each other. Sometimes those interactions would cause problems, like making the effective performance worse then expected, or giving you allergies. You could, of course, mix in genes from other races, but that would require far more passes to fix the bad interactions.
Once I was back on the surface I sent a message to Tim, offering him a job manning a clinic in Sanctuary, where he would most make drugs and gene therapies. He responded that, while genetics was always an interest he had no experience in the field. Still, earning a flat hundred zerka per day would be nice. He had recently started seeing a woman in the city and she wanted a family, so if things got more serious he would need a steady job. Having a nice apartment in a secured area would be good too.
That afternoon as I met Di outside the town’s steakhouse I got a message from Paul to check the international news. I pulled it up and found that several cities, including Paris, Berlin, London, Mexico City, Sydney, New York, Los Angeles, and Rio had come under simultaneous attack by the GCA, or at least armies of several thousand Grilk. Paul and Silan had even sent them advise on how to deal with the enemy. Paul informed me that we could send our forces in if we wanted, as all of their teleporters still seemed to be online, but we only had two hundred people and some military hardware. I told him that, if the scouts couldn’t find any enemies near the City or Town, I was fine with him offering mercenary services to one or more of the cities. A few minutes later, I was notified that a large group had been detected near the city, in the direction of the GCA settlement. Instead, Paul would be sending the entire miliary to the City’s main teleporter. They were essentially an ally, and were our neighbor, so we needed to protect them first.
“I’m sorry that I couldn’t do this somewhere special, but I need to give you something.” I pulled Di’s gifts from out of my inventory and handed them to her.
It took a few minutes for the troops to make it through the teleporter, and Paul went with them. I pulled out my flying disk and hoped onto it, and Di climbed on behind me. I sent a message to the manager of the restaurant that something had come up and I needed to cancel as I flew towards the mine to join the vehicle convoy that was headed towards the city.