Chapter Forty-Eight – A Date

Chapter Forty-Eight – A Date

“Pick your Battles.”

–Bloodsuck 2027

***

I wanted to do something nice for Lucy. Not for any reason in particular, it was always…

I’d had a dream once, while scrolling through my media feeds and looking at videos of some celebrities living the high life. People with a lot of money and a lot of fame, just doing things and probably not realizing that there were people like me, so, so far below them wishing they were in their shoes.

It was a stupid sort of day-dream at the time. A ‘what if I could go to that kind of place?’ or ‘what if I pulled up somewhere in that kind of supercar?’ Idle fantasies to forget that life was shit, if just for a moment.

Life wasn’t so shit anymore though.

“Ready to go home?” I asked Lucy.

She turned, coat swirling around her, and for a moment clinging to her sides and hips in a way that made my heart skip. “Aren’t we home here?” she asked with the kind of dimply smile she always had when she was being cheesy.

I looked past her and to the museum, our home. “Yeah, but not yet,” I said. I wouldn’t say something like ‘wherever you are is home.’ She’d poke me and call me sappy.

“Alright. Do you know if the kittens are alright?”

I blinked a few times, navigating through the menus in my augs until I found the status screens for my new cat-mecha. They were all green, and the preview windows that showed me what the robots were seeing revealed glimpses of the kittens in the penthouse, playing games and being lazy little shits. “They’re fine,” I said. “C’mon, food!”

“Food!” Lucy agreed with a cheer. She brought her arms up and made a familiar grabby gesture. With a roll of my eyes I turned around and didn’t protest when she jumped onto my back.

“You’re not twelve anymore, you know,” I said as I grabbed her under the knees and pulled her up.

“I refuse to believe that,” Lucy said. “I am eternally youthful and adorable.”

I laughed as I carried her out the front of the museum.

Our ride, the Charon Limo-Taxi, was still waiting for us on the roof. It was a bit of a pain getting up there with Lucy weighing me down, especially since she kept complaining about my back-mounted guns digging into her stomach. Not that that was enough to get her to let go, of course.

“Alright, now get off,” I said as I stopped next to the taxi.

“Not gonna tuck me in?” she asked as she leaned her chin onto my head.

“Nope, but I might drop your skinny ass.”

She mock-gasped. “My ass isn’t skinny, it’s perfect and plump and all that is right in the world.”

We got in the back seat, and I gestured for Lucy to give me a minute. “Just need to check something real fast,” I said. “Here, play with Myalis.” I placed Myalis’ little drone on Lucy’s lap.

“Are you using super-advanced alien technology to distract me?” Lucy asked.

“Yes,” I said.

I flicked through my augs and found a text box to write in. “M. I want to bring Lucy somewhere nice.”

I see. What sort of place are you thinking?

Glancing at Lucy from the corner of my eye, I held back a smile. “Someplace with good food,” I wrote. “Something fancy.”

Understood. There are a few reservation-only places in the region, all within half an hour’s driving distance from your current location. Cross-referencing reviews, and dismissing those that were paid-for or solicited, then eliminating places with menus that wouldn’t agree with either of you leaves you with four options. Might I suggest La Maison des Rois?

I nodded. “Sounds good,” I said aloud. “Okay, we’re heading out now. What do you want to grab for the kittens?”

“Oh, we should go to one of those nice places, the ones that give you a little toy with your meal. You know, Choking Hazard or something?”

I nodded. That was a favourite of some of the kittens, though mostly for the ads. We couldn’t exactly afford that kind of food ourselves. “Sounds good,” I said.

Leaning back, I listened to Lucy prattle on about this and that while the taxi took off and led us out of the incursion-zone and back into the flows of traffic around New Montreal. We climbed higher and higher, into the nicer, faster lanes usually reserved for people a dozen tax brackets above normal folk.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

We started arguing over how to decorate the house. I was almost more keen on low-tech, old school decor. Nice and square and simple, but Lucy liked things curvier. If I let her have it her way, the place would be colourful and bubbly. It would still look great, because Lucy had an eye for that kind of thing, but it was really not my style. “What if we invite some samurai over?” I asked. “It’ll look like a kid’s place.”