Chapter Twenty-Nine – Un-convent-ional Interior Design

Chapter Twenty-Nine – Un-convent-ional Interior Design

“Eye-linked augmentations, Augs, are a necessary part of life in 2050s. Almost everything uses touchless interfaces, most of which require some sort of Aug in order to interface with it.

When it works, it means that someone can interact with the world around them without ever doing any more than glancing at it!”

–Augworld, digital magazine, 2051

***

Franny turned to the side so that she could stare at the elevator panel without a stack of boxes blocking her vision. Some Aug-mented reality stuff was useful, and some of it was downright stupidly designed, the elevator’s button panel was probably one of the latter.

“Okay, so, Delilah’s planning on breaking down a lot of the floors between the two, uh, floors that we’re building on.”

“That makes sense, I guess,” I said. “I can’t remember what the two levels were before.”

“Offices, mostly,” Franny said. “There was one small factory space in the northern end of the floor that already covers both levels, and there’s a salon too. The rest is all offices, call centres, server rooms. That kind of stuff.”

I nodded along. The elevator arrived soon enough, and we stepped in. The ride down wasn’t much longer, a floor hummed past, then we stopped at the next one down and Franny led the way into… not much of anything, really.

The space had a few different offices in it, but now the walls between the different parts of the floor were torn down. At glance, it looked like the walls were maybe fifteen centimetres thick, with room for cabling and such between them. The walls themselves were stacked to one side, four-by-eight panels that bolted onto the girders that supported the building.

The flooring was even the same across different offices. Basically, it was like each office was a macro-cubical for whichever company owned them, with smaller cubicles for the poor fucks working for them within.

Now everything was stacked up to one side, a heap of walls and cubicles and desks. “What are you going to do with all of that?” I asked.

“Sell it,” Franny said with a shrug. She carried her boxes over to a small pile, away from the disassembled walls and cubicles. “The church is helping with that. Only took a day to find someone interested, but they’ll only be around to pick it all up tomorrow.”

“I guess there’s a market for this kind of stuff?”

“Right now? Yeah. Lots of damaged buildings, and I think those wall panels are like some sort of universal fit. The desks and cubicles are just desks and cubicles. Someone will want them.”

I set down the box I was carrying next to the pile. “Makes sense,” I said. “So, want to show me around? I’m kinda curious, though I guess there’s not much to show for it yet.”

“Yeah, sure,” Franny said. “Plus it’ll get me away from Datamaria for a bit. She’s… a lot. Ethergrace is nice though, she didn’t sleep through the ‘don’t be a judgemental bitch’ lessons the way Datamaria did.”

I snorted. I wasn’t involved with anything religious enough to be able to comment on it, but I had the impression that there was a lot of drama behind closed doors. “She was a bit much. Weird to see her immediately turn nice when she found out I was a samurai.”

“They’re all like that,” Franny said. “We’re taught that samurai are saints, one step down from the damned pope. Plus, you know, samurai are celebrities already. You’re getting pretty popular too.”

“Am I?” I asked. “I don’t pay too much attention to it.”

“Yeah. You were behind Delilah for a while, until, you know, you shot the mayor in a livestream. Now you’re two thousand points ahead.” Franny shook her head. “I was sure Delilah would break the top ten-k before you.”

I blinked, then made a note to look at my popularity rankings. I didn’t have the time or inclination to obsess over that kind of shit, but I was also pretty curious.

“Anyway! This is the lower floor, where we’ll have most of the ‘outward facing’ stuff. That’s what Delilah calls it,” Franny said. She pointed to one end of the room. “That’ll be where the chapel is. Just a little one, mostly to make it so the old bats back home don’t get their dusty old panties in a knot.”