Stray Cat Strut - Volume Eight - Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty -

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I should pick up smoking.

All the cool old movies had protagonists that would smoke a cigarette in bed after some big sexual conquest, right? Sure, they were in proper beds, not a cot shoved into the corner of a tiny living space, and they weren’t usually doing any sort of conquesting while in a moving vehicle, but I felt like the principle of it stood.

“You’re thinking something silly,” Lucy said. She reached over and poked my cheek. “I can tell.”

“No I’m not,” I said.

She poked me some more. “You are. I can tell.” Lucy sat up while smiling, then shivered before reaching over to drape her school uniform’s coat over herself. “Okay. I’m going home. I need a shower and the Kittens have probably gotten into some sort of trouble. You can’t trust Daniel to take care of them so this long without something slipping past him.”

“Yeah, fair,” I said. I sighed, then started to look for the armour I’d been wearing before. It was spread out across much of the floor at the moment. Groaning, I decided to give up on the idea. I was home anyway, right?

So I picked up the gear and piled it up more or less neatly so that I could carry it out. I wanted a shower too, actually. I got dressed anyway, then picked up the armour and headed out.

And that’s the state I was in when I ran into Deus Ex.

I blinked, then blinked again as I took her in. Deus Ex was standing in the parking garage, arms crossed and looking mightily unimpressed. She was in an all-white set of armour, plates over white cloth, with a screen on her inner arm and a few ports here and there, and floating next to her were a pair of guns longer than my bike with a bore large enough to fit my head into.

“Stray Cat,” she said. 

“Deus,” I replied. “Didn’t expect you to show up in person.” I shuffled past her, bringing my armour to the garage in the back where I dropped it all onto a workbench. 

“I’m not,” she said as she followed.

I half-turned to eye her. “You’re not? Fancy hologram?”

“No, this is a clone body,” she said. “I left a few of the older models on Earth when I left with my station.”

“Right,” I said. Fuck she could be creepy when she wanted to be, huh? I was basically talking to a puppet, then. Or was it something more complicated than just a puppet? I glanced over at her from the corner of my eye. Deus Ex looked like a precocious young teenager. Chubby cheeks, four-foot-something, no chest. She looked like she was someone’s bratty little sister.

I was pretty sure she was at least half a decade older than me. 

“So, how’d things end up on Mars? I haven’t been paying it as much attention as I probably should.”

Deus Ex stepped into the workshop, eyes trailing over all the tools and the half-disassembled mecha leg in the middle. “Not too poorly. But I can’t say it went well, either. We lost a dozen goos samurai. Some of them were in the top ten or so most powerful of us. The loss is going to take a while to recover from.”

“Oh. Shit,” I said. 

“It needed to be done,” she said simply. “And it has been. Mars’ surface has been turned into glass. The first half metre of topsoil or so, at least. There are a few areas where we need to punch much deeper to root out some hives, and even though we’re done, we’re still monitoring the planet for any potential antithesis growths. They will show up. It’s almost impossible to eradicate an infection fully.”

“Almost impossible?” I asked.

“We don’t want to toss Mars into the sun, so we're doing what we can,” Deus Ex said. “I think that the Protector AI tend to oversell humanity, or any race’s, ability to actually defeat the antithesis. They’re far too persistent to be removed.”

“That’s fucked,” I said.

She shrugged. “It is what it is. That does mean that we’ll never run out of work. Ideally, in a few centuries, we’ll be able to just sit back and only venture out to slap down any little surges as they show up. I think that’s how it is for some other civilisations that had a similar program to ours.”

I rubbed at my chin, then turned and hopped up onto a workbench. “So, other than the loredumping about unimportant shit, why’d you come over?”

“I caught up with what you’ve been up to this past week,” she said.

“Okay. Bit creepy, but go on,” I said.

“When I first met you, I gave it fifty-fifty odds that you wouldn’t make it through the first day, let alone your first week. And somehow, mostly thanks to making capable friends, you managed. And then you continued to make more capable friends who carried you through.”

I frowned. “Some of that was on my own merit, right?” I asked.

“Now you seem to be forging ties with other groups while building up your own,” she continued, entirely ignoring my question. “I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose. I don’t think you do much on purpose, really.”

“Hey now.”

“But you’re... charismatic in an animalistic way. I think that’s genuinely useful. You encourage others to act, either by example or via spite, and I think that there’s a genuine space for a samurai with that kind of skill set in the world, especially right now.”

I shook my head. “Dues, what are you on about?” I asked. “You didn’t come all the way here from Mars to give me an insult sandwich, did you?”

Deus Ex pouted, which made her look about... what, fifteen years younger? “No. I came to ask you a favour of sorts, one which will help you as well.”

“Uh-huh,” I said as I crossed my arms. “Go on.”

“There are a number of responsibilities shared amongst the higher tier samurai of any given region. It’s a way to keep each other accountable. I happen to be the samurai in charge of New Montreal as a whole.”

“Wait, seriously?” I asked.

“Someone has to be.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t expecting it to be you,” I said.

Deus Ex stared, her expression flat. “I’m probably in the top thousand or so samurai on Earth Near the bottom of that, certainly, but still. There are more than a hundred mega cities on Earth, and most samurai don’t care to be the representative of any of them.”

I supposed that kind of made sense. “So New Montreal is important?”

She snorted. “Deus no,” she said. “We’re barely tickling the definition of mega city here, not compared to plenty of other places. New Montreal is only important because we’re north of Mega New York and a few other east-coast actual mega cities. We serve as a wall for the antithesis coming in from the north. We barely produce anything here.”

“Okay,” I said. Felt a little mean to hear of my home talked about that way, but she was probably not wrong. “Didn’t know there was such a hierarchy going on.”

“It’s nothing official. I think one in ten samurai actually care. But for those of us that do, it’s a neat way to keep things organized and functional. In any case, one of the duties of as a city representative is caring for and elevating new samurai. I usually make a point of meeting any up-and-comers, so that they at least know to reach out to me if something happens.”

I nodded slowly. “And that’s it?”

“No... I’ve been somewhat neglecting part of my duties while off-world. Fortunately... hmm, how do I put this.” She pinched her chin between forefinger and thumb. “I always put one-hundred percent effort into everything I do.”

“Okay.”

“Unless there’s any logical way for me to avoid having to do something by foisting the work onto someone else. In which case, I will always do that.”

“That doesn’t sound like one-hundred percent,” I said.

Deus Ex shrugged. “I’m only one girl. I can only be in thirty-six places at once.”

I squinted at her. Was she fucking with me?

“Anyway, I’m here to foist some work off onto you.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“You don’t seem to understand the current disparity in abilities when it comes to either of our capabilities with regards to refusing work,” she said.

It took me a moment to untangle that. “Are you saying that you’re better at being lazy than I am?”

“Like an amateur next to a master,” she agreed.

“I’m not doing whatever it is you want,” I said.

“I made sure to schedule things around your little school outings,” she said. “Because I’m nice like that.”

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