Chapter Ten – Marketing Your Way Home
byChapter Ten – Marketing Your Way Home
“Work sucks.
A lot of people say it, but it’s not true. Work itself isn’t awful. It can be satisfying; it can be something you look forward to. Working with others you enjoy, creating something that will go down in history, becoming better and earning enough to live a comfortable life. There are a lot of reasons why work can be an enjoyable, fulfilling activity.
The problem is that in order to create work like that the entire system needs to be willing to take big steps and make big sacrifices. Those cut into a company’s profits, and a company only exists to generate profits.
So yeah, work doesn’t suck, but yours probably does.”
–Precision Headhunter Co. CEO, teleconference on the joys of work, 2024
***
I crashed into Lucy and pulled her to me.
My worries crashed into her too, like a freight-train barrelling down a slope at full speed, then meeting the face of a mountain.
She grabbed me closer, returning the hug even as I buried my face in the big mess that was her poofy hair. “I love you too,” she said. As far as greetings went, it was just about perfect.
“Mhmm,” I agreed. I pulled back enough to press my lips to hers. It wasn’t a sexy kind of kiss though, just contact, a reply, I guess.
Look, I was never good with the romance stuff.
“So, uh,” I said. “The museum’s a house now.”
Lucy laughed. “Is it? You picked the giant cat shape, right?”
“It’s kind of iconic,” I said.
“Ironic, more like,” she shot back before spinning out of my grasp. A few of the kittens were milling around. The Twins were in the kitchen space, barely visible over the island, and a few others were in the living room, a movie blaring on the big screen.
“Do you have a lot of things to pack away?” I asked. “The kittens?”
“A few things,” she said. “You want to move us over?”
“Right away,” I confirmed.
Her eyebrows shot up. “Really?”
“Yeah. There’s aliens on the edge of the city already. I don’t know if there are enough soldiers between them and us for me to be comfortable. The museum… ex-museum’s probably safer than the hotel. Or it will be soon enough.”
Lucy nodded. “I’ll wrangle the kittens. It shouldn’t be too hard, you know how kittens are when you show them a new box. We didn’t come here with much.”
“You’re saying we won’t strip the entire place for everything it’s got?” I asked.
Lucy tapped her lower lip. “Do you think we can leave with the bed? And should I tell the kittens to leave anything that’s nailed down?”
“I want the TV,” Nose shouted from the living room. The little shit was listening in, huh?
“We can’t sneak the TV out,” I called back. “It won’t fit in any bag… also, we don’t have bags to begin with.”
“I’ll call the staff,” Lucy said. “I’m pretty sure they have a sort of lost and found with old luggage we can take.”
“They’ll probably be happy to see the back of us,” I said.
Lucy shook her head. “Oh no, no way. They’ve been using you for advertising since you got here. Bet the mid-lister management types are going to cry when we leave.”
“Seriously?” I asked.
She shrugged. “They’ve been tasteful about it. They don’t name you but it’s like, really obvious it’s you. Plus their media feeds have been linking over to some paparazzi sorts that did take pictures of you. You know, hashtag, StrayCatWasHere.”
“Oh fuck me,” I muttered. I squeezed the bridge of my nose while shaking my head. In the end though, it didn’t really matter much. Corpos would corpo. “Well, whatever.”
“You know, we could use that to our advantage,” Lucy said.
“How?”
She gestured around the room. “This place is furnished. Ours isn’t. Not much, anyway. We need beds, and a few appliances, entertainment stuff, tables, chairs, couches. You know, house stuff. The hotel happens to have a lot of that stuff.”
“Alright, so we steal it all on the way out?”
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