Chapter Nine – Useless Crap

Chapter Nine – Useless Crap

“People are impossibly fond of useless crap. Slap a number on it, call it collectible, and make it even moderately interesting, appealing, sexy, or cute, and you’ll trigger something real deep in that person’s mind.”

— Clown ‘Red Nose’ McFace, CEO of GimmeUrCred, Non-fungible Physical and Digital Collectible Crap Publishing Inc.

***

The City of New Montreal Sewage and Maintenance Headquarters wasn’t a standalone building. It was relatively rare for a corp to have an entire building all on its own.

Well, no, the really big corps owned downtown, but even they rented out sections of the megabuildings they held.

What I was getting at, is that the NMSM Headquarters was located at the base of one of the older buildings in the centre of the city. It was a big, boxy thing, brutalist nouveau, with a few balconies sticking out of the side for old school AA emplacements. Basically, one of those first mega building projects that had gone up way back in the late 20s or so and which was probably showing its age in a million ways within.

The seventh floor had been converted into a parking garage for hover cars at some point, so I drove my bike in and felt myself naturally trying to make myself smaller. The ceiling was way lower than it should have been, and the space was a disorganised mess.

I parked on the curb next to an elevator and my augs flagged an incoming fine from the building’s automatic parking system for the violation.

I hopped into the elevator, then sighed. It had one of those shitty old touch-screen button panels, with the looping advertisements. I’d have to time it so that I pressed the right floor between ads. “Can you punch in the right floor?” I asked.

I actually can’t. The elevator isn’t networked at all. It’s floor 1, in any case.

I shook my head, then stabbed a thumb against the screen after an ad for Molly’s Miracle Mugs, which were just a collection of mugs with some dog’s face on them, but they were collectible and had little cards that came with them, and I was sure this was exactly the kind of shit that Lucy would be into.

The elevator rumbled down, bumping along a bit more than it should have, and I was already having some pretty serious doubts about the ‘Maintenance’ part of the New Montreal Sewage and Maintenance group.

The doors opened up onto a plain corridor. A guy in a button-up was cursing at a vending machine. I slipped past him, following ceiling-mounted signs towards reception.

There, I found a room filled to capacity with random people. Old men, old women, some small families speaking in something other than English, lots of random folk. Too many to fit the seats in the relatively small reception area.

Button-up guy came up behind me, muttering while holding a can of soda to his head. “Hey,” I said. “You work here?”

“Not for long,” he said. He almost brushed past me, but I grabbed onto his shoulder, giving him pause. “I’m sorry, please take a ticket and wait. We’re doing what we can here.”

“Yeah, I see that. Look, I’m here to talk to whoever’s in charge.”

He shook his head. “That won’t work, half the Karen’s in the room tried that one already.”

He tried to move again, but I held him back, a bit harder, this time. “Give me a sec,” I said. “Myalis, can you send a nice message to everyone here’s augs, the people waiting? Tell them that I’m on the scene and that I’ll have the sewage thing fixed as soon as I can, and if I can’t, those responsible will be thrown off the roof by this evening.”

Certainly. Message sent.

My new pal blinked dumbly and lowered his soda as people gasped, then there was a small flood as first one, then more of them started to leave the reception area. Unfortunately, my entirely unplanned actions had entirely predictable consequences as every granny saw me and put two and two together.

“Yup, yeah, I’m sure, that’s nice. Sorry, coming through. No, I don’t do handshakes, or autographs. I don’t need to know about your nephew. I’m gay. No, not the niece either. Excuse me,” I went through a small litany of excuses and gestured for people to keep moving. Fortunately, there was some momentum and those behind were pushing those ahead, and soon enough I’d slipped into the reception room itself.

“Greetings,” an android said. It was one of those torso-only models, fixed into place behind a plexiglass wall to give people something to look at when they came in. “Please take a number and wait. A representative of the New Montreal Sewage and Maintenance organisation will be with you shortly.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“Uh-huh,” I said as I walked past it and to a side door. It had one of those biometric lock things. I barely glanced at it before Myalis had it open.

“Wait, wait,” button-up said. “You’re a samurai?”

“Yeah,” I said as I started through a carpeted corridor lined on both sides by offices. The place had an internal map, which I downloaded and opened in my augs. It was just a basic floorplan with the location of different member’s offices. And I realised that I had no idea how to deal with all of this. “Hey, didn’t I have an appointment here?” I asked.

“You did?” button-up asked.

You did.

“Can you tell your bosses that I’m here?” I asked him.