Chapter Twenty-One – Babysitting the Nukes

Chapter Twenty-One – Babysitting the Nukes

“LF babysitter, 5 kids, no smokers, druggies, college dropouts, or filthy liberals.

$7/hr.”

Facemeta Marketplace post, 2027

***

“If you’re going to make me do your work for you, you’d better have some serious bribes lined up,” I said. “My schedule right now is filled to bursting.”

“So is everyone’s,” Deus Ex said. “But I can sympathize a little. I rarely have a day with fewer than eighteen hours of work time lined up in it. Sundays excepting, of course.”

I wanted to pinch the bridge of my nose. I also wanted to pinch Deus Ex’s chubby little cheeks, but if she didn’t have some sort of pain-regulating cyberware, then I’d eat my hat. I’d have to buy a hat first, but the point stood. “What even is the job?” I asked.

“There are half a dozen new samurai around New Montreal, which is a feat. We usually gain one or two a year, but the global incursion and the previous local incursion increased our numbers substantially. Before you there was Gomorrah, and before her Cause Player. There have been more since. Now, telling samurai what to do is a lost cause. We don’t take well to orders.”

“You don’t say.”

“Let me rephrase that. We don’t take well to orders unless they’re reasonable and backed with a big stick. In this situation we’re both in right now, I am both very reasonable and have a very big stick.”

Could I aim the Big Gun at Deus Ex’s station and get away with it?

“Right now, with my main body off-planet, the local samurai newbies don’t have any directions to work towards. That has, historically, caused issues.”

I perked up a little at that. “What kinds of issues?”

Deus Ex hummed. “Give someone lots of power, a complete detachment from responsibility, and the drive to act even if there’s no cause for them to act towards, and that person will find something to use their powers on. That usually means massive destabilization. We all hate the corps, but you can only blow up so many skyscrapers before it starts causing issues.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And we don’t want that?”

“No. The other problem is that new samurai tend to, briefly, believe that they’re immortal or untouchable. Just because higher-tier samurai tend to respond to threats to newbies with violence doesn’t mean that you’re all immune to bullets to the head. Having your death avenged won’t stop you from being dead in the first place.”

That… was fair. “Okay,” I said. “So… what do you want me to do about all of this?”

Deus Ex gestured vaguely off to one side. “Babysit.”

“No,” I said. “I’ve done that for most of my life, and it was for actual babies and kids. I’m not going to do it for adults.”

The little shit had the audacity to roll her eyes. “I meant that figuratively. Really, I just need you to check up on the newbies. Make a point of showing up where they are and make sure they’re not in too much trouble. Maybe direct them towards something constructive to do that won’t get them killed. I did the same for you.”

I blinked. “Wait! You sent me on a wild goose chase all across the city that second time we met,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said with a nod. “It kept you busy and working on something that was relatively low-level. Low-risk work that was still important and gave you valuable experience.”

I was very quickly developing a headache. If I actually thought about it… yeah, Deus had helped me. She’d put Lucy and the kittens up in that hotel we stayed at for a while before getting our house. She gave Gomorrah and I a few softball missions, and then told us about Mars before the news broke to everyone else.

Fuck, was Deus actually helpful?

“You’d be a lot easier to work with if you weren’t such a pain in the ass,” I said.

“You know, I’ve actually heard something similar before. Never saw the point in complaining about it. I get work done in a rapid and efficient manner. Your whinging changes nothing about that. Besides, what I’m asking you to do is good for you as well.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Yes. You’ll be forging alliances and friendships with local samurai who are close to your own rank. You’ve made friends with some that are… to put it lightly, above you. People like Grasshopper and Emoscythe. The cabal of newbies out there will eventually grow as well. It’s a little strange, but we as samurai tend to organize ourselves in little cliques that are more or less generational.”

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I sniffed. “You have a generation as well?”

“Yes,” she said. “Though… most of those from this region are dead. It’s only me and maybe four, five others now.”

“Oh,” I said.

Deus Ex blinked, and I got a ping on my Augs. When I opened it, I found a semi-transparent page appearing over my vision, the window floating a few feet ahead. It was a list.

Local Newbies That Need Babysitting