Chapter Forty-Six – Impeccable Mathematics

“You want to distract an entire forum of people for a few hours? Mention a samurai’s weapons, then point out some random detail.

Just be sure to be somewhat wrong about it.

Hours of pleasure, guaranteed.”

–Anonymous commentator, 2021

***

“Okay,” I said. “So, two-ninety… whatever,” I said.

Jessica nodded.

“Now, we need to factor in a couple of things,” I said. “Whomever buys this place needs to renovate it. A whole lot. Not to mention cleaning the place up.”

“That’s factored into the price,” she said.

“I doubt it,” I said. “You know, I almost bled out over here? Hell, I used flesh eating nanite grenades in there.”

The realtor blanched. “Pardon?”

“They’re designed to melt flesh so that the antithesis can’t use it anymore,” I said. “The nanomachines don’t last that long, don’t worry, but you’ll still need specialists to clean up.”

“I will make note of it,” Jessica said.

“Now, there are two other things you should tell your clients. One, they’re on the hook for fucking up Longbow’s gun. Two, Deus Ex had to come over here for stuff, and she’s a vindictive little bitch. Like seriously, just yesterday, she gave a couple dozen people cancer because it was faster than poking at them herself.”

Jessica nodded slowly.

I leaned back, then hummed. “How much can you bring the price down by?” I asked. I’d done my share of negotiating for stuff before. I wasn’t great at it, but I could manage in a pinch. Buying stuff from a street vendor wasn’t quite the same as buying anything worth hundreds of millions, but I figured some of it would crossover.

Jessica looked straight past me for a moment. “We could, if we lower our expectations, and convince some of our clients to make a smaller profit, lower the price of the building all the way down to two hundred and seventy-five million.”

I snorted. “That’s barely a discount.”

“It’s a significant drop in price. My clients will barely make any profit at that rate.”

I shuffled a little. “I’ll give you one hundred million,” I said.

“That’s a solid no,” Jessica said. “I can’t drop the price by that much.”

I gestured for her to wait. “Calm down, I can spice it up a little,” I said before turning to Myalis. “Hey, which one of my catalogues has the most valuable stuff? That is, if I were to sell it on an open market?”

Myalis’ little drone bobbed up and down. “That depends, the market is somewhat fickle. Though I can generally make some predictions.”

Notably, your Cyber Warfare tier one, Medical Utilities tier one, Stealth Technologies tier one and finally your Sunwatcher Technologies tier two catalogues all have the items that could sell for a good amount of credits.

I nodded along. “Yeah, I can imagine. Hey, Jessica, do any of your clients own any biotech firms? Or weapons… manufacturing… things? Hell, do any of them want to live longer?”

Jessica perked up a little. “Do you intend to trade blueprints for the building?”

“That… could be an option,” I said. I had seven thousand or so points, but I didn’t want to spend them all here. If I valued the building at about two-hundred million, and only wanted to spend… say, five thousand of those points, then I’d need to make sure each point was worth…

I opened up a calculator app and plugged in the numbers with a few twitches of my eye. Forty-thousand credits per point. That was… a lot.

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“Myalis, can you put together a list of blueprints to sell? Assume that each point is worth… about fifty thousand credits, alright?”

“Of course,” Myalis said.

That would actually be significantly above the credit-per-point value usually used by Vanguards.

I nodded. “Send that over to Jessica here. Let’s see if her clients will bite, yeah?”

I opened a text app and started writing to Myalis. ‘Maybe, but how many samurai have things available this way?