Chapter 3-6: Daily Office Life

What my job entails? If you were to ask me a month into it, I would have told you it was about ordering squads around to maintain barricades and how to organize rescuees. I would have told you that it was about the rhythmic thump of artillery and the smell of gunpowder and napalm and the scent of burning chlorophyll. Now? It's about the unending tide of paperwork, of meetings and contracts, and of fake smiles of fake humans. While the pay is good, it's a major exercise in patience and finding shit to keep you sane. I took up boxing to stay in shape, and now I use it as stress relief.

-From an interview with the Company Commander of the PMC Iron Bulls, 2055

Victor

After Morrigan had left my office with her metaphorical tail between her legs, something I was all but certain was a dramatic act of hers, I leaned back in my egg chair and let my tail unwind as I stretched. It was a wonderfully strange feeling, like my torso just kept going and blended with my toes. Shifting was also a different kind of nice and weird, as my nerves and muscles were literally unwound from where they were stored. The chemical sedatives being removed and nerves waking up in the span of the blink of an eye was odd, but it didn’t last, so it was negligible.

I had finished most of my work for the day, the dozens of reports and production queue priorities taking me a few hours, and was now watching Roger and his personal squad of goons infiltrate a corporate office through a Raven. The office was in the process of being abandoned, with files being deleted and every bit of usable tech being loaded into boxes to be taken elsewhere. What security remained on-site was not enough to deter Roger, let alone slow him down. Had I known he was going, I would have asked him to take my body double as insurance, as I really needed the practice in a live-fire situation.

As Roger entered the panic room for the executives and began the process of acting like a two-bit villain, monologuing all the way, I turned my attention away from him and towards one of the dozen games my sub-minds were working on. It was Jason’s idea, actually, to help me offload the immediate attention drain of running multiple things simultaneously, something he and a few of his brothers-in-intel specced into, as it helped them keep an eye on things. It helped me feel a lot less tired and get even more done in my day, to the point that I still had a couple of hours before the “end of my shift,” so to speak. I tried my best not to spy on my family or the residents of the Tower, but at times like this, when I had a good sixty percent of my available, nonemergency processing power unused? It became very hard not to.

I knew Cari was in back-to-back meetings, and Cody was in the Mesh, and that Buddy was making something amazing for dinner, and even that Jill just had her legs blow up beneath her, thus the sad Morrigan earlier, but that was as far as I wanted to snoop. So, I turned towards one of the sims Synaptic made for me.

It was a replica of the Bestlé HQ raid, just with no tampering of the defenses ahead of time and them on alert and mustered. I had all of my available troops from the Monster Box and my commanders with their current upgrades and training, so I thought things would have been a bit difficult but altogether easy. I was very wrong.

The siege had been going on for four hours, and I had yet to breach the walls surrounding the HQ at all. I had lost around twenty-three percent of my troops, not to mention the extreme amount of EMC swirling around the battlefield made it difficult for my swarms to do anything more than set up defenses. I tried tunneling under the kilometer-long no-man's-land, yet that was met with oscillating frequency seismic shakers that made tunneling nearly impossible. I tried super-sonic missiles to outspeed their anti-air defenses, yet their satellite above shot them down via lasers.

It was infuriating, really, how effective they were at defending against me, and it was even more infuriating how effective the satellite was at foiling my attempts. I knew that its sensor array was worm shit for anything outside of Northern Europe, yet it worked just well enough for defense. Their weapons were extremely accurate, and the shielding was far stronger than what Roger and the others had encountered in their assault, yet I also knew that was because they underestimated the power of the shuttles and didn’t activate them at full strength.

This last attempt had me trying to halo drop pods from the Pandora that was currently engaging the BEST satellite in orbit, yet they shattered upon the shields. I gave up after that, with the lesson being I got very lucky that Maniac was willing to work with us.

<Synaptic, how the fuck did Bestlé have the capabilities to defend against a full-on assault from a Tier Three Samurai? That just seems way too unlikely.>

I felt a bit more of Synaptic’s attention shift to me, causing me to smile slightly. Due to the sheer amount of mental augments I had, I had developed an ability to determine when digital “eyes” were on me. Whether they were cameras or digital avatars, if they were looking at me, I could tell. Yet Synaptic was always there, always watching not just me, but the rest of the Tower as well. She felt like a true Leviathan in the deep, reaching out a single hair at the end of a tendril to interact with a world that would shatter if she exerted a little bit more force.

There has been a lot of Vanguard in your world, Victor. And many of them have access to catalogs that would counter you directly, or vice versa. And the number of Vanguard who died, leaving behind all their equipment and technology, is not low in the slightest. Bestlé was not an anomaly in the grand scheme of things, as the various so-called multinational corporations of your world are of a similar strength to what I would describe as near interstellar powers in other worlds under the Protectorate that take part in the Vanguard Project. They have most certainly scavenged hundreds of Vanguard battlefields and death sites to harvest as much as they could, if not hunted them directly for their technology, which is, unfortunately, a common occurrence in the universe. While many companies on your world attempt to reverse engineer Vanguard technologies with middling success, the multinationals have far better resources at their disposal and have monopolized the best technology available to non-Vanguard. Don’t get complacent, dear child of mine, as your strength is not overwhelming enough to ignore such considerations. Once you reach Tier Five, we can have a different conversation.

As her direct attention faded, I took her lesson to heart. Tier Three was, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of a well-organized full company of mechanized infantry. While it was strong enough to ignore the vast majority of threats on Earth, like gangs and mid-level corporations, I was not invincible, and this sim just proved it.

I would tackle them again a different day, but for now, I received a new request from Captain Steelwell, the new captain of the Pandora. He wanted to do a field patrol out to the west, near the border of Old California. He wanted to do a few more easy combat runs before the journey to Japan that would happen, hopefully, before November. The emergency deployment the other day had had shown him how unprepared the crew currently was and he wanted to drill them hard for a bit.

I checked The Family Store, my access having never been revoked despite Paladin’s whining, and looked up the antithesis sightings out that way. While the Mad Pack had taken a number of Samurai to grow in power a few months ago and had been continuously active in the space between cities since, thinning out the number of hives in the Arizona territory, sightings had been increasing across the board lately, which was a concerning trend.

I planned a route going from the old Prescott Valley that would take them through the old resort town of Quartzsite, then south to where Yuma once existed, giving them an operational range of twenty miles. That would hit the majority of the sightings in that area, and it should cover both surface and underground hives, giving them experience with both the heavy armaments as well as combat experience for the drop troops. I also stationed Leman and his pack with them as a just in case, scheduling them to leave in two days.

That entire action from opening the request to sending the flight plan took five seconds in real time. Sands, this job Morrigan had thrust upon me was boring. It was interesting for the first few weeks, as I was learning all about the different fields the PMC touched upon. From food and weapon logistics to squad size and patrol routes, to the more esoteric engineering manuals that corresponded to the various vehicles, generators, and augments that the troops used, it was a fascinating deep dive that kept me occupied for a while. And while I would not consider myself an expert as of now, I would say that I knew enough about each aspect of the Tower and the Monster Box to know when Morrigan was bullshitting me to get new catalogs that she didn’t need.

I glanced at the clock on my augs and groaned internally, seeing that I still had two hours before my self-set schedule said that I could be done with my workday. Well, barring any emergencies, of course. After that was another two hours before the weekly family dinner, an event that I had come to look forward to. It did mean that both Alice and Jeane, her father, would be there, as it was the one event that Jeane would allow her to go to during her grounding. He would have to attend as her chaperone, of course, to make sure she didn’t cause any additional trouble.

Well, that was the official reason he gave, at least. We all knew that the real reason he was here was because he was possibly the worst cook imaginable and that, while his AI may not let him starve, if he could save on points, he would.

As I inevitably turned towards the Niltmore employee’s break room to play a few rounds of Samurai Rush with them, something that was both an event many looked forward to while others cursed my existence about, I noticed that I was already playing seven games as the antithesis. This brain augment was a bit fucky when I thought about it, yet it didn’t feel wrong. They were still me, not even separate entities or copies, just compartmented portions of my current processing power, akin to my swarms. I could recall the details of each subportion at will; their feelings, decisions, and reasonings were also mine, just more subconscious.

I was currently playing against five groups I was not terribly familiar with who were doing mildly well, although they had requested easier matches. Probably to test new builds, as I had gotten a lot of old Samurai data from Bestlé that were related to catalogs that were not in the game at the time. After a surprisingly smooth meeting with a Nimbletaiment rep, we managed to create a content patch to add another hundred or so catalogs for people to play with. We even received a nice check for it.

The other two groups were playing against me at my “Try Hard” level and doing fairly decent, centered around a theme of poison, acid, and noms, as well as blades, bombs, and lightning. I saw that the former team had made quite a bit of progress in dismantling my hive yet had stalled at my custom guardians just outside the main chamber, while the latter were about to reach a point where they could begin their assault. I smirked when I saw who was in that group and decided to up the difficulty in petty revenge.

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Bubie

We had finally gotten our build online by the time we finished evacuating the NPCs from the field, our objective turning to the long-awaited “Assault the Hive.” Gladus’s power armor thumped beside me, while Anne, Samuel, and Iris hopped down from their perches after confirming that all the Saint’s eyes had been destroyed.

We had attempted this difficulty a dozen or so times so far, refining our tech and builds each time, trying to min-max our combat potential to deal with the Saint’s guardians. They changed every time, specifically built to counter whatever team composition and gimmick we came up with, yet this time was different. The recent patch had added some game-changing tech to the available pool of toys, with one of them being comparable to Heracles' racial catalog.

As we dashed towards the location of the entrance of the hive dungeon, ready to finally beat the Saint at his bullshit game, a notification sounded.

Due to the presence of Tier IV Catalogs, at the request of the Antithesis Player, some restrictions have been lifted. May the Protectors have mercy on you.

The moment I saw the notification, I knew Victor had pulled some shit, as this was most certainly not a thing that was supposed to happen. I heard Gladus about to say something over the comms when the ground in front of us exploded in a whirl of tentacles, teeth, and pure darkness. We barely had time to activate our life-saving teleport tools before the area was engulfed in a cocoon of death.

“Motherfucker, are you really going to be the jealous boyfriend right now?!” I shouted, knowing damn well that he could hear me. “All I said was that Opal looked good in that outfit and that she was toned as hell!”

As we began to dodge the floor teeth in an effort to regain our bearings, a strange model one flew overhead. It had an enlarged throat sack thing and a large beak, so I assumed it might be a dive bomber or a spitter of some kind and got ready to avoid it. Yet, when it opened its mouth, my voice came out instead.

“Damn, Opal. You look great in that. I wouldn’t mind seeing what’s underneath later.”

“Fucker.” I mumbled under my breath as I could feel the eyes of my teammates pierce into me. They quickly decided that this game was a loss and fell into the tentacles, leaving me to fend for myself as the thing attached to them fully breached the surface. I didn’t last longer than a minute without support, yet I wished I didn’t return to the game’s lobby, as I was certain I would receive an earful from my team. Oh well, I would make it up to them tonight.