Chapter Sixty-Nine – Nice

Chapter Sixty-Nine – Nice

“I’m proud to announce my re-election in the last emergency mayoral elections. New Montreal is facing a number of hardships, and I promise I’ll be there to address them as best I can. You have nothing to worry about while Dupont is here!”

–Mayor Dupont’s post-election speech, New Montreal, 2057

***

“Is this the last one? Please tell me this is the last one,” I said as I swiped to the side and looked at a new form. It was a small wall of text, without even little drawings to make sense of the corporatese and legal gobbledygook that filled the form from top to bottom.

“Cat, you’re barely doing any of the work yourself, don’t complain so much,” Lucy said.

Lucy, Franny and I were in Lucy’s office space, working through the tedious process of making sure nothing imploded the moment Lucy and I weren’t here watching over things.

Jennifer the sexbot was coming in and out periodically, carrying some actual paper documentation for Lucy to look over. She was also answering calls and filling out a constant stream of emails with auto-generated replies.

The transition was going to be… tricky.

Basically, Lucy was transferring power to a governing body composed of some dozen members that she thought wouldn’t fuck everything up immediately. The Kittens were still, nominally, under Lucy’s control, but if she wasn’t going to be right there sitting on top of it, then someone had to make the minute-to-minute choices.

I wasn’t sure if electing Jennifer as the leader was a fantastic idea or not, but Lucy seemed tickled by the idea, and I hadn’t come this far by telling her no.

In any case, the more forms I skimmed through, the more I was impressed by all the shit Lucy pulled. She had taken a bunch of volunteers, gave them a purpose, encouraged them to work together for their own interests, then somehow turned them into a passable fighting force with a generous hierarchy, decent pay, and enough momentum that I suspected that the Burlington branch of the Kittens wouldn’t be the only one.

“Did I ever tell you that you’re scary?” I murmured to Lucy.

She grinned, big and proud. “No, you haven’t. But I’ll take it.”

“I’m not sure about scary, but this is pretty impressive,” Franny said. She tossed a small tablet computer onto one of the desks. “When’d you find time to set all of this up while also doing… well, everything else?”

“Oh, I cheated,” Lucy said with a nod. “The trick isn’t just being good enough that you can do everything yourself. It’s finding people to do parts of it for you, then sweeping in and correcting them afterwards. There’s an entire out-of-work city’s worth of people to pick from, so I just had Myalis help me find people that were actually competent, then I asked them nicely to do the stuff they’re good at.”

“So, the same as asking the kittens back home to do different chores based on how old they are and how many limbs they have,” I said with a nod.

Franny looked between us, then shook her head. “We didn’t have the same sort of upbringing at all,” she said.

“Aren’t you an orphan too?” Lucy asked.

“No, actually. Still have parents. They’re corpo, some middle-upper sorts. They tossed me to the nunnery because you can get a kid raised there for relatively cheap, and there’s a lot of other ex-nun-raised girls who have gone on to do really well in business.”

“I don’t see the relation between being a good nun and being good at business,” I said.

Franny grinned. “The way the old nuns put it, it’s all about self-discipline and that kind of nonsense. I think it’s mostly that you learn how to be underhanded while looking earnest, but what do I know? I’m not exactly a shining example of what they want. Delilah, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of girl they try to produce.”

“She is a little uptight,” I said with a good natured grin.

Franny chuckled. “Yeah. Exactly. Now imagine her in one of those corpo outfits instead of looking like a nun, and you’ve got a complete picture.”

“I’m sure we’d all love to spend time thinking of Gomorrah in a pencil skirt,” Lucy said. “But we can do that later! We’re almost done here.”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I laughed, signed off on the final form without really reading it too well, then sat down on Lucy’s desk. “What’s next?”

Lucy looked around her office, then blinked a few times, eyes twitching in that telltale way that meant she was looking at screens I couldn’t see. “I think… that we’re pretty much done here,” Lucy said.

I felt myself tense up for a moment before it all kind of just… washed away. I wasn’t expecting it, but I supposed that for the last couple of days I’d been running on lots of stress. Now things were, more or less, over.