Chapter One – Feed the Machine

Chapter One – Feed the Machine

“The bigger they are, the more they’ll make fall.

Look, I don’t exactly read a lot of books, alright?”

–Three Swipes, Comment about the unveiling of the Domus, 2052

***

“I’m heading home,” Gomorrah said.

I glanced over to her. “Just like that?”

She shrugged. “We’ll see each other in a few hours. The security around the church is tight, but it’s not tight enough to stop a full-on invasion. I have a few hundred points to spare.”

“That actually sounds like a decent idea,” I said. I glanced at the museum. The interior had been torn apart already, with workers crawling all around the inside moving junk into containers and others bringing in new materials. If I recalled correctly, the renovations would take a week or two.

I could probably speed that up, considerably.

The problem was that I could only do so for the topmost floor.

I stared around. The museum was the shortest building in sight. Only 13 floors tall. Most of the buildings around were twice that height, some more distant buildings were considerably taller than that.

“Cat?”

I spun around to face Gomorrah. “Sorry, head in the clouds,” I said. “I might do something similar here.”

“You’ll want to reinforce the floors below too,” Gomorrah said. “Keep that in mind.”

“Right,” I said.

She nodded, then awkwardly tapped me on the shoulder. “Well, I’ll be seeing you in a little while. Try not to be late.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, don’t worry. See you at the meeting.”

She nodded back, and took off towards the edge of the landing pad. The Fury showed up almost the moment she reached the edge, the door sliding open so that she could slip into the driver’s seat without having to miss a step. The car tipped away from the building, then shot off through the city.

“Myalis,” I said.

Yes?

“I don’t know where to begin.”

Hesitation doesn’t suit you. What are your current goals?

“I think we need to fortify the place. Make it so that the kittens and Lucy can stay here without being in any danger,” I said. The current renovations were all about making it livable. That was probably a mistake. They’d make the place nice, I was sure, but they wouldn’t make it alien-proof.

There are catalogues for such things. Though you run into two possible issues.

“And those are?” I asked.

Time is the first obstacle. If you want to fortify the location rapidly, then you will need to pay an equivalent number of points to obtain materials that require less time to install. For example, a low-cost construction drone could build a decent fortification out of plainly available materials. It would mix its own cements, construct its own reinforcements, and build a secure area over time with commercially available materials.

“But that’ll take time,” I said.

Several weeks, for a location as large as this one. A drone of the sort could be ordered to assist human workers, improving on their designs and building things faster.

“And your faster solution?” I asked.

A pre-built building could be purchased. In fact… this might be somewhat expensive, but if you tore apart the entire top floor of the building, you could purchase a new floor.

“Wait, like… the entire floor?”

You would need a construction drone to go over the anchoring points. But yes. It can be teleported in with nanometre precision. The same construction drone could be used to clear the top of the building, or at least assist the construction company on-location in doing the same, and afterwards it could work to reinforce the rest of the building.