Chapter Forty-Nine – Peter

Chapter Forty-Nine – Peter

“Certain companies discovered that they could extract greater revenue from their clients in the form of services as opposed to products. Adobe pioneered some of this in the software market, but many other companies followed suit.

Essentially, by turning a buy-and-sell economy into a rent-and-blackmail one, a company can earn much greater profits, though at the expense of losing the occasional client, and putting their CEOs at higher risk of sudden life termination events.”

–A Guide to Modern Business, 2034

***

After Lucy and I met with Burringham, we had one last chore to take care of. Peter Silverbloom.

According to Myalis–who I just assumed was right about this kind of thing–Peter was currently working out of some building on the edges of the more residential part of New Montreal, insofar as the city could really be divided into parts so cleanly.

Lucy and I left the clothes store, one of the butlers promising us that her dress would be on our doorstep by the morning, and my wallet feeling a tiny fraction lighter (though the price of Lucy’s dress had me reeling a bit, it was the most expensive thing I’d ever bought, house aside). We dropped back down to the ground floor of the building, then hopped into a taxi.

“So, who’s this dude?” Lucy asked.

“Apparently he’s some bigshot volunteer sort of guy. He might be able to help us with the whole Sewer Dragons thing.”

“I guess they can’t stay at Gomorrah’s place forever.”

“They can’t,” I agreed. “And they shouldn’t be left the way they are. All prosthetic’d up, I mean. They at least deserve to have proper replacements for all of their limbs and shit.” Which would be wildly expensive. I’d looked into artificial limbs before, what with my arm being missing for… most of my life really.

The cheaper ones cost half a year’s rent in a shack, and that was for a simple, three-jointed arm that didn’t have any servos or complex mechanical parts, just cheap Taiwanese plastics and a few recycled metal joints.

Something that could move and articulate simply was a whole lot more expensive, and one of those fancy better-than-flesh models cost as much as a brand new car, and that was without the brain implants needed to run it, the constant software updates, and the other little expenses that came with it.

Most of those weren’t even properly sold, they were rented to people.

Basically, it would be a bitch and a half to get enough arms and legs and other shit to outfit as many as Gomorrah and I had pulled from the sewers.

It actually made what Doc Hack did a little impressive, in retrospect. No less fucked up, but still impressive. He cobbled together prosthetics from what looked like nothing, maybe with a few aftermarket parts jammed in here and there. And by all accounts, they worked. The Sewer Dragons were able to move and fight. Probably not as well as someone running off of their human 1.0 hardware, but they were better suited to life in the sewers than a normie.

“What’re you thinking about?” Lucy asked.

“Just… stuff. How do you think this guy can help us anyway?”

“Don’t you know that?” Lucy asked. She leaned into my side, her hands idly tugging at the fingers on my prosthetic arm.

“Not really. Been light on the details so far.”

Lucy shrugged. “If he can help because he’s like, a nice guy who really does want to help, then we should probably just be nice.”

I chuckled. “Sure,” I said. I made a mental note not to be a bitch.

The taxi nosed down and soon we were slipping lower into the city until we merged with the traffic on ground level. The taxi pulled up to the sidewalk almost immediately.

“We’re pretty low,” Lucy said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Myalis, can we get directions from here?”

Certainly.

“Oh, that is convenient,” Lucy said. “Myalis, you’re like the best maps software ever.”