Chapter Fifty-Six – A Great Idea

Chapter Fifty-Six – A Great Idea

“There’s charity, and then there’s Samurai charity. And the latter’s always interesting to see at work.

It sometimes even works out!”

— Simon “Battleax” Critical, head of e-magazine The Critical Skeptic, 69th issue January 2045

***

“This is a stupid fucking idea,” I said.

Lucy grinned, then reached up and pinched my cheek. “It’ll be fine,” she said. “We’ll handle most of it. You go out there and talk to your cooks, and I’ll get everything ready and set up, yeah?”

I wanted to grumble and complain more, but time was wasting. It was approaching ten in the morning, and I didn’t want to put things off any more than I needed to, so I left the Kittens HQ and headed to the escalators leading to the mall’s ground floor.

The protests were being stalled out at the moment. The truth was–as far as I could tell–that people who wanted to protest needed a serious push to get moving, and my actions so far had deflated some of the reasons why they were going to make a mess of things.

That meant that for things to take off, they’d need an even bigger push, and I was doing what I could to basically chop their legs out from under them by placating the masses.

If it worked, then the few hours I’d spent on it would be worth it.

The ground floor of the mall had a crowd gathering on it, some eighty or so people, and squeezed into one side by a few kitten volunteers. Not the sort in the suits with the cool guns, but normal volunteers in normal clothes. The only thing marking them as kittens were the cat-ears they wore on their heads and their Aug’s IFF pinging them as such.

I’d spent a chunk of points (only a couple thousand, but it still stung) and bought two organic reprocessing machines. They were down here too, being guarded by both the kittens and some militia folk.

Right now, they were constantly generating the same crap. Some sort of bread, a sort of faux-meat patty, and some sort of vegetable… disk thing. Basically, we were making burgers.

Lucy had somehow already sourced a fuckload of aluminium foil to wrap them all in, and now all we needed was people to cook enough to feed a city.

They technically had all of the nutritional crap a person needed to survive, and each burger was packed with about three hundred or so calories. They weren’t going to taste great, I didn’t think, but while the city lacked in food, we didn’t lack in condiments.

That only covered part of our food needs, of course. Hell, it was a drop in the bucket. But it was also free food that tasted bland enough that most people would want to source their food from elsewhere. And while they were busy doing that, they wouldn’t be screaming and yelling in the streets and messing my shit up.

The second part of my awesome plan… well, that’d come later. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

I took a deep breath, fitted my helmet on properly, then stepped off the last step of the escalator. I already had eyes on me. I could feel them. The sixty… no, there were a few new ones rushing in at the last minute, so it was probably closer to seventy now, folks in the penned off area ranged from young to old, to fresh-faced pure humans, to a few that had more chrome than skin.

I stopped before them, and I was happy to see that I didn’t need to catch their attention or anything. “Alright,” I said, pitching my voice up so that they could all hear. “You folk all answered Myalis’ direct message, I hope?”

There were nods and yesses and a few ‘who the fuck is that?’s from the group. Good enough.