Chapter Forty-One – Recreational Urban Warfare

Chapter Forty-One – Recreational Urban Warfare

Anon: “Sunrise Technologies… the Future, Today!”

Anon: “Our in-house AI is a fucking moron.”

–Sunrise Technology, Discussion Chat, 2055

***

“What the fuck are we supposed to do about this?” I asked.

Chonker the remote controlled cat had managed to spring up and onto one of the workbenches. Its head scanned left to right, so I got a nice panoramic picture of the entire space. There was a lot of tech here. Nothing too big. Mostly it looked like discarded guns, some small containers, lots of medical stuff, I noted, as well as gun mags, loose ammo, healing inhalers, filtration devices.

Basically a lot of small quickly discarded crap. I had left some of that kind of crap here and there myself, and I guessed that I wouldn’t mind someone picking it up and trying to figure out how it worked.

The table next to one of my prosthetics had what looked like a quadrupedal turret drone. It was a big bulky thing, with armoured legs and a twin-barrelled gun in its centre. The entire thing was partially melted from the front, and it looked like it had lost a fight with one of the freakier sorts of antithesis.

There’s another of your drones here. And Atyacus found a flying scout drone that belonged to Gomorrah here as well.

Myalis highlighted a couple of the cubicles at the back in red. It looked like they were filled to the brim with scrap.

“It looks like a lot of junk,” Gomorrah said. With her mask on, it was impossible to tell if she was looking at me or at what Chonker was capturing for us, but I assumed we were looking at the same thing.

“Yeah, but it’s samurai junk,” I said. “Probably worth a small fortune to the right collector. I don’t know if I should be angry about them reverse-engineering some of this stuff or not,” I said.

It wasn’t all bad, obviously. Lots of modern tech was based on shit that samurai had bought and distributed. Tech had to improve, and being able to steal from other, more advanced tech was probably the cheapest, easiest way to improve things.

The concerning part was the weird secrecy of this place. And the fact that they’d stolen my shit to disassemble it. “Myalis, is samurai gear tagged? Like, can you tell who bought what?”

Yes, of course. There are serial sequences encoded onto most items.

“Like a serial number?” I asked.

Somewhat more complex, but for the purposes of keeping things simple, yes.

“Alright, so can you look at that junk and tell what belongs to who?”

Certainly. Though my awareness doesn’t necessarily allow me to communicate that information to you.

Right, our AI had a whole thing about privacy going on. At least between samurai. Myalis didn’t seem to do more than pass lip-service when it came to the privacy of anyone else.

I can confirm the presence of four items that are yours. Three from Gomorrah. That is, not counting the prosthetics.

“Looks like one surveillance drone I used… well before we met, and two tanks of fuel for my flame throwers,” Gomorrah said. “Some of these things I used a while ago. I don’t know what I’d even do with them now.”

“If it was just samurai trash, I don’t think I’d have any sort of problem with this whole operation,” I said. “Can you figure out who this is?”

Sunrise Technologies.

I blinked. That name was eerily familiar. “Wait… aren’t those the fucks who tried to kidnap Katallina?”

“They did kidnap her,” Gomorrah said. “We un-kidnapped her. Isn’t she still staying at your place?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What the fuck, I though I’d ruined that company?”

You emptied their accounts. It seems as if that didn’t really do much. It was clear that they were a company designed to take the fall for others already, and it seems as if that purpose continues here.

“And I bet that figuring out who actually owns them is going to be a nightmare,” I said. I rubbed at my face. “Right. I’m calling the Family about this. Some of the shit in there is theirs, right?”