Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 2.1

2.1

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The days vanished in what felt like the blink of an eye, and all too soon I found myself having reached the end of my time limit.

It was now the tenth of January. Night City predicted an overcast, sand-blasted, and humid day. It was a very inauspicious start to my business in this city, but quite frankly, it wasn’t that different to most days, and so I didn’t take it personally.

Much.

It was eight in the morning, and I found myself walking around the building one last time, checking every single part of it with my own eyes. It was wholly unnecessary, as I’d already had my drones scan every single millimetre of the entire structure, but still...

I wanted to do it for myself.

From the outside, it was perfect. The walls had come out exactly as I’d imagined them, and they looked great. The pillar columns dividing them, excellent. The Chozo script that ran up and down them was visually appealing even without the ability to understand the language... Which, of course, extended only to myself.

I stopped at the front, and eyed both of the entrances. The office entrance was roughly where it had been before, but it was now much taller. It was currently closed, but it employed the exact same plasma barrier to separate the interior from the exterior, for exactly the same reason, too. The entire building had filtered, clean air, each room capable of achieving their own atmosphere if it was desired.

To be honest, I kind of expected that to be an attraction all of its own. There were literally bars in this city where the main gimmick was that the air didn’t smell like trash, and my system achieved vastly more than just that.

There were technically two doors, now, the right side closer to the warehouse an entrance into the building, and the left side closer to the street an exit. The setup wasn’t that different to most grocery stores, the entrance was a simple one-way passage, and the exit took you right past the registers.

It wouldn’t be that difficult to get out, but any would-be thieves would quickly find themselves regretting it.

New to the building, however, was another entrance along what had been the main depot wall. It was right next to the wall of the former office, and provided access to the interior. Go in, and on the immediate right was the clinic, where I would likely end up spending a decent amount of my time. Go down the hallway, and you’d find a locked door and a passage to the left. For the latter, it led to the restrooms. For the former, it led to the rest of the hallway. Behind it and on the right was a storage area, currently unused, and only a storage area because I didn’t yet know what I wanted to do with that space.

Further down the hallway on the left was a room that was basically a staff lounge, though, of course, I was the only staff and I already had all that stuff set up downstairs, so it was pretty bare at the moment.

At the end of the hallway were two things. One was an elevator, going both upwards and downwards. The second was a door on the right, leading to a stairwell that did the same thing, though that stairwell also had another exit on the other side of the room, which lead to the back access, a garage door big enough for most vehicles, and a floor lift that would move anything on it between the middle and lower areas.

The room underneath it was my workshop. I knew myself well enough to know that I would be making my own vehicle eventually, so this was just future-proofing.

I turned to the former office, and sent a mental command. The doors opened, the thin plasma barrier briefly roiling as the physical barriers slid so close.

I walked inside.

The former office now extended a decent ways into the former main depot, about half again longer as it was wide. The entrance immediately gave way to several aisles, extending towards but stopping before actually reaching the back wall. The first few aisles were simple things, average everyday items, boxes of cereal that didn’t need to be refrigerated, and other things like that.

Most of the food was at the opposite side of the entrance, closer to the registers. Those aisles were different, instead of simple racks of storage they were wrapped in plasma barriers and held at different temperatures.

Some of it was frozen, most of it wasn’t.

I walked over, sending a few more commands through the network.

Machinery within the aisle shifted, slightly, and the food within rotated, the oldest stock pulled back and taken underground, where it would be recycled into its base materials and used to recultivate more of the same, but fresher. Dropped in its place was another packet, in this case a slice of beef steak, which was simple, unadorned, and marked with ‘Cultured Meat’, and a sticker that told everyone exactly what was in it.

No obfuscation. No eye-catching boxes that lied. Just the product, the information, and a very reasonable price.

I nodded, and then continued to the registers.

And there, waiting for me, were the robots that would be handling all of it.

I had gone through several different designs before I finally came across one that I liked, and was actually appropriate for the job. The first one had been alike to a Chozo in form, which was brought about entirely because of that side of me’s familiarity with the design without any actual consideration for my circumstances. The second had been a blocky robot, but I’d given up on that fairly quickly as well. The third, fourth, and fifth had been rejected for various reasons, and now the sixth stood ready.

The end result was a nice little thing. Humanoid, a little on the tall side, relatively thin, a face with a lower half that was a sculpt in the vague shape of a mouth and nose and an upper half that was a visor to display stylised eyes, smooth white plating that made up the limbs and torso, a vaguely feminine shape because Humans may as well have been hardwired to receive that better, all finished up with a degree of combat capacity that would make most people in the city shit themselves if they knew about it. I called them Autonnels.

One had nice blue eyes. The other had sharp red ones. Neither were sentient or sapient, but they did have a really long and really complex decision tree, though, and enough randomness that most wouldn’t run against the edges of them unless they were trying to do it on purpose.

Blue was the ‘nice’ one. Red was more acerbic.

“Hello boss!” Blue saluted, her eyes shifting into little curves. Her voice, though obviously synthetic, was cheerful and upbeat, and would remain so even if she was committing ultraviolence.

“Boss.” Red huffed, arms crossing over her chest, head turning away in the most stereotypical tsundere pose that I’d been able to think of when I’d created her programming.

They were working exactly as intended, in other words. Excellent.

I gave them a nod as I stepped past them, and they went right back to a different idle pose.

The door closed behind me, and I turned left, towards the main building.

Much like the now-Bodega section, it too had a plasma barrier to separate the interior and exterior. I had done the exact same thing for every single entrance to the building, for pretty much exactly the same reason.

The outside smelled bad, and if I didn’t have to deal with it, I wasn’t going to.

The door shifted open as I approached, and then closed behind me as I continued. Immediately on my right was the clinic, and I ducked my head in for just a bit to look over the place.

Clean and sterile, exactly as I’d intended and exactly as I left it. It was also rather more obviously high-tech than most would be, though I’d made sure to keep the usage of space efficient, and the machines stayed out of the way of everything else.

I pulled back, and the door shut behind me.

I moved straight down to the passage that was blocking the rest of the hallway, for the moment ignoring the branch towards the restrooms as I already knew they were perfectly clean. The passage, just like everything else, opened for me as I approached, and then closed behind me.

The storeroom on the right was still empty, and remained just as utterly blank now as it had been when I’d designed it. The staffroom was similar, relatively bare and undecorated, though it had at least the bones of something useful. As such, I ignored the both of them, and simply went straight for the elevator.

The trip was brief, a moment of acceleration and then deceleration, and then the doors opened again.

Green greeted me as I stepped out onto the roof. Rows and rows of plants stretched out across the rooftop, so thick with life and saturated with colour that nobody would have believed that only a few days ago, nothing but barren concrete had been up on the rooftop.

The plants hung in their aeroponics systems, supported by trellises and stakes. Vines wrapped upwards around them in criss-crossing patterns, some of them already beginning to grow fruit. On the layer below, there were other plants, with more typical roots, though they too were suspended in their supports.

Ultraviolet lamps provided plenty of light for them to grow, modulated for maximum effect at the moment. Pumps and sprays spritzed out a nutrient-dense spray, right now at quite a considerable pace, but I had them programmed to slow down when the construction crew came and the tarp was taken away. Regardless, it still left the air tasting different, rich.

Downstairs, it had been fresh, but clear. Up here, there was moisture, coolness, and a vague breeze that seemingly originated from nowhere. It felt like autumn, a real autumn, too, the likes of which hadn’t been seen this far west since before the Collapse.

I took a moment to breathe it in. It was probably the closest I was going to get to nature for a very long time, after all.

I hummed, moving forwards. Small holographic displays appeared as I moved past the rows of plants, detailing their status, their health. There were alerts set up for if anything went wrong, but it was still nice to just have the information.

A drone floated past, about the same size as an Autgent, but not nearly as advanced. Its much greater simplicity afforded it a purity of purpose- and vastly, vastly larger supplies of them, too. There were a hundred of them currently floating around, monitoring the plants constantly, making sure that no problems developed. A pulse laser hung ready, small, weak, but still strong enough to wipe out any vermin that would eventually try to get into my plants.

The rooftop was protected by its own plasma barrier, but it wasn’t a planar barrier like any of the entrances. Instead, it was a.. vaguely rounded half-cylinder, and while the emitters and field generators were much stronger than the entrances, the shape reduced efficiency significantly regardless. Vermin had a way of getting into things. Vermin was downright notorious for it.

I wasn’t just talking about insects, molluscs, and animals there, either.

I stopped as I reached the center of the rooftop. Unlike the rest of the rooftop, this particular spot had a big, wide, circular container full of dark, rich, and loamy soil. The plant that was currently growing inside of it seemed much too small for the amount of space allocated, but given a couple months, it would come to fit.

Visually, it looked somewhat like an Oak tree. In truth, however, despite the resemblance, it was actually a completely new organism, built from the ground up for this particular situation.

It was growing well. All it needed was time and care.

Good.

An alert rang out from an Autgent, and I glanced at it as it emerged from my robes. It projected a screen, and I read the message that had been sent to me.

The construction crew was on their way. I would be completely open by ten in the morning.

I sent a confirmation that I would be present back, and then closed out of that particular chat.

My next step was composing a message of my own. After all, I had noted down a number for precisely this purpose.

My garden would be my primary advertisement to the city.

The ravings of my customers would be the other.