Chapter Seven – Spring Cleaning

Chapter Seven – Spring Cleaning

“The Baby Ice Initiative is a new childcare policy wherein parents can bring their children to one of our secure facilities where they’ll be given toys and training and an early education in order to turn them into productive members of society!”

–The Baby Ice Initiative, webpage, 2034

***

After sending Lucy off to school early the next morning, I found myself very much tempted to call everything off and to just go back to bed.

Bed soft and warm. World cold and hard.

But no. I could only excuse so much laziness in myself, and there was some shit I had to get done. The first of that was looking over my messages. Nothing from Crisis Mode, so I had no idea if she’d received my reply at all, but that was okay.

The others… I’d gotten a confirmation from Princess and Knight, and one from Shy, as well as a few negative responses. I wasn’t surprised by those, but they still disappointed a little.

Tankette said that she and her husband were preparing to move, so they were quite busy and she wouldn’t be able to attend, not for a few days. Gros Baton had something. Grasshopper sent me… a three-page long email, telling me about her day, her week, a few stories, some advice about… investment? I had to start scanning through it before I found her polite refusal at the bottom, but she wished me and the others well and said that she was going to cheer us on.

From anyone else, I’d have taken that with a grain of salt, but I believed it when it came from her.

Cause Player–who was a long-shot–said that he was busy, and Sam-O-Ray hadn’t replied at all, nor had Crackshot.

There was one surprise in the bunch. Hedgehog said that he’d be at my place by 0600 tomorrow.

So, the away team was going to be myself, Gomorrah, Shy, Princess and Knight, and then Hedgehog.

Five samurai and a plus-one. Not a ton, but also enough potential firepower to pucker-up the assholes of just about anyone that wanted to stop us.

“Hey, Myalis, think you can do me a favour?” I asked.

I feel like that’s all I do.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Can you grab the information we have on Quebec so far and like… package it up for me? Something easy to read through? Like a quick summary thing. Then send it to Gom and Shy and Princess, Knight and Hedgehog. Just want to keep them all on the same page, more or less, you know?”

I think I see what you mean. Yes, I can compile something like that, though there isn’t much to work with.

“That’s fine,” I said. It would at least set a baseline for the others.

I wandered around the house, looking for clean-enough clothes to put on, then I sighed and found myself distracted by the mess. We really needed a cleaning bot or something. That’s what the rich folk had, right? Wasn’t I rich enough, yet?

For the next forty minutes, I picked up dishes all over and chucked them into the dishwasher, then I picked dirty clothes off the floor and tossed it all into the washing machine in one large batch. If shit got messed up in there, then that was someone else’s problem.

“Daniel! You’re in charge of putting the clothes in the dryer!” I shouted.

“Don’t wanna!” he shouted back.

I paused for a moment. “If you don’t, I’m hanging you off the side of the building and I won’t pick you back up for a few days.”

That would do it.