Chapter 3-3: Do Your Daily’s, the Grind is Eternal

In this day and age, it doesn’t matter what job or field of work you end up in; cybersecurity will be needed to protect not only the sensitive data your work may or may not have, but also the productivity of the field itself. I am certain you have all heard the saying, “If you have data inaccessible to the public, someone wants it.” 

And this is true. Mining entries for physical mines, SOPs for food handling, even the batch number for a shipment of transistors to check on how many defects were rejected before shipping out. It doesn't matter what it is, someone out there will pay a price to obtain it. That is why your skills will be in demand everywhere you look. And if your future boss ever says “We will buy an AI to do the work,” remember the company and look to their competitors. Easy promotion or performance review bump when you inevitably crack the security of the idiot who bought an AI. Unless it is a Protectorate AI, all human made models are good at is filtering phishing scams and maintaining databases.

-Quote from a lecture Samurai Black Log gave to MIT Cyber Security Specialists, 2054

Cody

Taking my last bite of Buddy’s cooking was always painful, even if this meal was intentionally mild. He did an outstanding job at making all foods taste addictive, yet my body was also saying how full it was, so it was probably a good thing that this was my last bite. Taking a breather to let my stomach settle, I leaned back in my Mesh pod and scrolled through the Tower social media feed while pretending my backlog of work didn’t exist.

It was something Alice and Morrigan set up for the residents, something akin to a community board to keep up with news and set up events. There were some fire meme lords, too, doing what they could to make people happy and keep us honest. I saw a few posts about the Ravens doing a food tour to the different floors, pictures from the hide-and-seek games the children hosted over the last few days, and a slightly concerning trend towards more animal-based modifications after the last FurCon, a knockoff FoxCon that FoxFire hosts yearly.

I mean, sure, people were free to be what they wanted to be, especially after we installed the gene editors in the floor clinics at the request of the Floor Managers. It was only concerning due to the subtle segregation conversations happening. 

Groups of catfolk were throwing memes around slandering dogfolk and vice versa, with some shade being thrown towards foxfolk. Monkey people were messing with birdfolk while the bird people shot back with basic memes too simple to be effective. And those who chose to grow horns were acting as though they held some sort of supremacy over those without.

The lizard folk had been able to stay out of it, but I was attributing that to the fact that Vic was a snake rather than people not having grievances against them. After all, when the owner of your home was a snake, you didn’t antagonize those who mimicked him.

I sighed and pinged Morrigan, who called me mere nanoseconds after.

“Heya, Cody!” she said with her typical cheer, her vibrant blue hair flowing around her comically oversized glasses, “Odd that you are calling me from your meat instead of your avatar, but whatever.”

I smirked at her and waved in front of my face, brushing off the topic. “Yeah, well, I’m taking a break from supervising the satellite’s reconstruction and reading reports. While I was scrolling socials, I came across a point of concern. Have you been keeping track of the Tower’s board?”

At that, she sighed hard, deflating in an overly dramatic way. “I have, and I have run a few sims with it. Based on all of mine and Outsider’s research, this is pretty limited to online banter only, as no physical altercations have occurred, let alone discussions of physical meet-ups. There are fewer than ten percent of the residents who added animal bits to their genes, and of them barely forty percent are participating in the meme wars, with all of them spread out around sixty-three floors. As far as I can tell, it will fade on its own in a couple of weeks. But based on your face right now, I take it that you think differently?”

I nodded groggily as I rubbed my eyes. “Unfortunately, humans are stupid. Jokes will eventually be taken too far, people will misinterpret them or take them seriously, and some kid, who is not in on the joke, will get offended because they didn’t realize it was a joke and retaliate.” 

I chuckled as I remembered a past job. “One of our contemporaries, a team that focused on social engineering rather than infiltration, used this tactic often to destabilize different corporations and stocks. The devastation left behind from what was supposed to be a meme war turned actual war is still very vivid in my mind.”

I sent her a list of now-defunct corporations and some dates and saw her face change in real time as she both discovered and read up on the incident reports on some archive site or another. The shifts were quite funny, going from curiosity to outrage to disgust to finally settling on some combination of exasperation and understanding. She nodded to herself as she leaned back into her chair.

“Yeah, okay. I will post a moderator message telling them to cool it with the race war memes.” She muttered.

“When you get the processing to spare, check and see who might be inflaming things or who started this mess. It might be external influences, or it might just be idiots, but I would rather be safer than sorry in this instance.” I explained as I chuckled at her post. 

We chatted for a bit longer before ending the call, satisfied that it was, indeed, a few idiots who were bored rather than a foreign element. I then spent another thirty minutes doing various stretches, checking my Mesh Pod for maintenance issues, and organizing my thoughts on what I should be doing next. 

The Gremlins had finally gotten to a point where they should be usable in actual high-stress operations, which was good, considering we had to deploy the Monster Box weeks earlier than intended. We had been relying on the Ephemeral Gravitas, Iron Bulls, and Ground Badgers to keep the peace, with the Steel Panthers having been relegated to T-Class subjects after a complete audit of their members had finished. 

Due to the reshuffling of personnel, retraining, and re-equipping, the PMCs were pulled too thin to be effective long term. Thankfully, the Goblin and Orc Companies were competent enough to pull their weight, even when pulled out of training a month early.

The Wyvern and Owlbear Company could have been deployed as well; however, we were limited by our material acquisition. I chuckled at that thought, followed by a sigh of frustration. Morrigan had to limit her mining of the Moon due to Paladin’s pressure, with him citing numerous treaties and contracts that laid claim to massive swaths of the moon, as well as to protect it from overmining. 

Which, I mean, fair, we needed the moon where it was to do moon things, so we obliged that request. Mining the moon was more of a short-term idea, anyway. Mining the asteroid belts was far better for longer-term use, and they were not under any treaties or claims from Earth. They were still a bit too far out for even the Multi-National Corporations to lay claim to, as by even the shortest estimate for asteroid mining was a year before any profits could be seen, and many boards balked at the initial loss the infrastructure required.

It did mean that the probe Baba Yaga and Morrigan sent to the asteroid belt at the beginning of all this was even more necessary to succeed if we wished to be as active in Arizona as we wished to be. The comparatively minute materials we were buying from mining companies, the waste from refineries, as well as the scrap from the Bestlé sites we obtained, explored, and then promptly destroyed, were enough for our day-to-day operations, but the military vehicles and carriers were throttled hard. A majority of the scrap went to the satellite reconstruction and retrofit, which was thankfully almost finished, but still.

As I reminded myself of the asteroid project, I plugged myself back into my pod and reopened my eyes to my Mesh office space. It was a nice space with multiple shelves of figurines, posters of my favorite Samurai, and my massive desk of floating monitors. The figurines were those I owned in reality, while the posters were closer to fan art that rotates hourly. Currently, the predominant Samurai was Emosyth Mordeath Noir in various outfits and poses.

As for my avatar, I had changed it recently from an old wizard to a young mage, forgoing the old beard and robe for a more stylized, modern interpretation of a mage’s robe. One more akin to a white suit with a hood.

I pulled up the telemetry data for the asteroid pod and was pleasantly surprised to see that it had made impact yesterday and was in the process of setting up a base. Baba Yaga estimated that the transport gate should be open in a few hours, which means that we could get back to full-scale production in a few days. 

A fascinating lesson in astro-geography Baba Yaga imparted onto me a while ago was that while the asteroid belt was relatively clustered compared to the surrounding solar system, the space between each asteroid was, on average, a hundred thousand kilometers, not accounting for the relative micro-dust between each one. And while there might not be any friction or terrain features in space to slow down travel time; that was still a lot of space to cover for mining purposes. The pod was set to land on an asteroid called Four Vesta, an asteroid with a diameter of around five hundred and five kilometers, and one of the biggest asteroids in the belt, accounting for about nine percent of the mass of the entire belt.

It was chosen to be the home base of our mining colony over Ceres, the actual largest asteroid, due to it being named after an ancient goddess of hearth and home. Baba Yaga might be a bit grumpy at times, but she had an eye for symbolism and special moments. 

I moved on to checking up on Harmony and the Niltmore hotel, seeing that she had no problems to report, other than another request for expansion due to how popular the hotel had become after my brother made his worldwide public debut. Celebrities, corporate ambassadors, traveling Samurai, even simple rich people were making nonstop bookings with their own motives. The celebrities and influencers were the most obvious about theirs, at least, wanting to capitalize on the downfall of Bestlé and Vic’s fame to pad their own. 

The rich people were the next simplest to understand, as the Niltmore Hotel had undergone some major renovations to become an extremely luxurious vacation destination at very reasonable prices, even for someone in middle management. The water park was basically at capacity every day, which was no surprise given Arizona’s relentless heat, and the holo-zoo was a close second. Morrigan plans to fill it with actual animals that could be pet safely due to the organic augs installed in them, but that plan was also put on pause due to production delays.

The Samurai were there because we offered cheap, safe rooms of high quality, something that attracted a number of the Cleaners who were constantly patrolling the lower wards, the plates, and the utility corridors below them. We also offered equipment maintenance services to those Samurai, as while I knew that they are a crafty bunch, they deserved the extra assistance for the vital work that they do to keep New Phoenix safe.

Finally, the corporate ambassadors were both obvious and mysterious about why they were here. All of them claimed to want to partner with Real Dreams Limited for one reason or another, but Roger mentioned that of the eighty-six ambassadors currently staying at the Niltmore, seven of them were genuine, while the rest were either spies, thieves, or saboteurs who were playing the game wrong. I left them to Roger to deal with, making sure Harmony was kept in the loop and keeping track of them.

Shaking my head in exasperation, I approved the spatial expansion with the work date being set to a week from now. The swarms would make sure there were no disruptions to daily operations, and they would finish things quickly once we had materials to spare once more.

I then checked on the Lower Six and the Customer Service Department, knowing that my help was not needed here, as Daliah had Roger at her beck and call for favors and the like. They had grown rapidly over the last couple of months, actively raiding brothels, taking over local gangs, and expanding their base of operations to the plate itself. Given Bubie’s proclivity for aggressive caution, I expected them to fully run the plate by Chinese New Year.

As I began to resign myself to my fate of satellite management after reading Roger’s request to mobilize his personal task force, I received a ping from Hex, my right hand of active cyber security we hired at Café Nobu Shite, requesting access to my office. I gave it, of course, even if she didn’t need it as she had the access key already, but I still appreciated the request. 

From the door on the far side walked in a young witch in a flowing dark brown dress with a leg window on the right cut up to her thigh, with ample cleavage hinted at under a necklace of wood and bones. She wore gloves of black lace that resembled spider webs up to her mid-biceps and wore a massive witch's hat decorated in small animal bones and feathers. Her long brown hair flowed to her mid-back while her full obsidian eyes glanced at my office before settling on me, a sly smirk playing at the corner of her ruby lips.

She strutted across the room before walking around my desk and leaning on it, looking down upon me while crossing her arms. “So, Cody. I thought I was being pretty direct with my attentions and intentions, yet even still you seemed dense to the point of active avoidance rather than naive ignorance. As such, after speaking to your siblings and getting their blessings, I have decided to be as direct as possible.” Hex leaned forward and placed a hand on my chin, gently making sure I could not look away. “Over the last two months, I have come to like you for more than your position and what your station can afford me, something I am certain you realized I was after. You have a strong moral compass that is rare in this era, have above-average looks that appeal to my tastes, and are able to hold actual intelligent debates with me where I don’t feel as though I am talking to a wall of garbage. Not to mention the fact that you actually listen to your employees when they have problems at work that you go out of your way to resolve. I want to be your lover, and if possible, something more later down the line.”

I could feel my face heat up at her very direct approach, especially as she had cut through to the heart of, well, me. I had been avoiding her advances pretty hard as a way to protect myself, as I was afraid that she, and by extension anyone who flirted with me, just wanted something from me that wasn’t me. I knew that she had a sickly older brother whom we could help, yet she never brought him up. I knew that she had quite the list of enemies that hounded her up until she started working for us. And I knew that she wanted the status that came with being attached to a Samurai’s family member, especially one so high-profile as Vic. 

Yet, she persisted, even going so far as to convince my siblings to give her a shot! I mean, Buddy, I could see being easy to win over, as he got hitched super quickly, and Vic had a pretty bad eye for people, but Roger? Jill? That would have taken actual, genuine effort to convince, and if Hex wasn’t lying, then….

“Well?” Hex asked, interrupting my slight panic attack. “Is there any way you can give me a chance?” 

I swallowed hard as I was unable to speak, simply giving her a nod. Her smile widened as she pushed off of the desk and straddled me, wrapping her arms around my neck. “Thank you, Cody. Now, why don’t I show you what I can bring to the table.”

With a few flicks of her wrist, the lights in my office dimmed as her dress melted off of her, leaving her hat and gloves untouched.