Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Thirty-Two - Happily Ever After Tomorrow

"Marriage rates have been on a constant downturn for the past forty years. There was a mild uptick in the hyper-conservative push of the mid 2020s, but after that, rates continued to plummet.

It's entirely possible that by the 2050s, marriage as an industry will have completely collapsed. I don't see this as a good investment."

--Wed-co Investors Meeting, 2048

***

There was something inexplicably comfortable about being in bed next to Lucy. Not fucking, just... laying there, with a few pillows stuffed behind me so that I was partially sitting up, blanket up to my armpits and attention on screens that my Augs were projecting before me.

Lucy was just close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off of her. She was reading from a tablet that was resting length-wise on that little pinch of tummy she had that I loved to fondle.

Resting the way she was, with her neck all bent, and her chin doubled by the weird posture, with her hair tucked into this ugly-ass beige bonnet thing that kept it from being all flat when she woke up... she was pretty.

"Is there something on my face?" Lucy asked without really looking away from her screen.

"Nah," I muttered. It was enough to deflect her for now.

Shy had left almost as soon as I got home, but she promised that we'd go visit Gros Baton together the day after tomorrow, so I'd at least have some company for that.

Nya, in the meantime, was resting on one of the couches when I arrived. Lucy had tucked her in with a few blankets and told the kittens to shut the fuck up and let her sleep. Nya slept curled up in a small ball, and seemed to have the habit of biting the end of her tail as she slept.

It might have been cute if she wasn't a full grown woman.

I'd have to figure out what to do with her in the morning. She couldn't just come to every one of my classes, right? Besides, I had the next day off from school, so after dropping Lucy off, I had planned on getting into some trouble.

Not literally, but from the little bit of experience I had as a samurai already, and from all the rumours I'd heard about them that turned out to be true, I knew that samurai tended to get into...adventurous situations a lot.

So, the question was more about what kind of trouble I could get into and out of without disrupting the rest of my shit.

Or I could stay home, refuse to wear anything more complex than boxers and a t-shirt, and just chill and watch TV all day?

Tempting...

But no. There was, I guess, a sort of pressure to do stuff. I was given a lot of power, and just using it to sit back and do fuck-all wasn't cool.

I was pretty sure that was what Deus Ex did, and she turned out to be a little devil gremlin, so I didn't want to go down that path.

I wasn't a hero-worshipper. I guess at some point early on I figured out that if I didn't bootstrap myself out of the shithole, no one was gonna do it for it. There was a minimum that people would do to help each other, and that minimum was often also the maximum. It isn't profitable to help others.

When I lost my parents and my arm and the one eye... yeah, that was a good moment to wake up to learn that shit wasn't fair, that the world wasn't a nice place, and that I had to focus on getting mine.

Lucy changed that a lot. She'd opened me up, been kind without needing

Real fairy-tale shit.

Or as close to it as someone could get.

"Wanna get married?" I asked.

"Sure," Lucy said.

"'Kay," I said with a nod.

That was settled then. I felt a sudden flurry in my gut, and it took me a moment to realize that I wasn't passing gas, it was just... butterflies. I smiled a little, then shook my head and refocused. I had a day to play.

So... the sewer thing was pretty much handled. Deus' babysitting job was getting done, bit by bit. Maybe I could check in on Rac? I hadn't seen her in a couple of days. She was a tough girl, and was probably fine.

Yeah, I'd look into that in the morning, then maybe do some tinkering in the evening.

That left the entire middle of the day. I continued to surf through shit on my augs when I noticed something. I had one screen that was scrolling through nothing but local New Montreal news articles, the condensed sort that were usually not much more than a headline and a picture.

Gangs of New Montreal Rising Up!

I blinked, then opened the page up. The article was some AI slop regurgitation of someone else's slop. Every layer was like peeling back an onion made of paywalls. "Fuckin' hell," I muttered. "Myalis, can we cut to the middle of this?"

I suppose. But seeing you try to find the little Xs on ads is funny.

I rolled my eyes, but when I refocused the paywalls were gone, and Myalis had linked me straight to the original article and also the research that had created it. It was, surprisingly, mostly done by a group of three students from CIAL.

They'd been following the various gangs of New Montreal for a couple of years now, with new students picking up where others left off. Some were, from what I could tell, people that lived in the neighbourhoods that those gangs occupied. Others were just doing it as part of some long term anthropology and advertising study funded by the school.

In any case, the summary that Myalis gave was pretty good... probably a little too good, actually. I think she might have touched it up for comprehension.

The main article was a bit shittier. Some media-type had picked up a lot of that data, looked at recent trends from the last two weeks or so, then continued the lines where they left off and called it 'speculation.'

Basically, the gangs of New Montreal were getting uppity, and there were three big factors in that.

First, a lot of corps had fired a fuckload of people in the last one or two weeks. Emergency downsizing, plants shutting down because global logistics shat the bed when aliens invaded all over all at once, and some had been hit hard by that incursion just before the global one.

A lot of people being fired all at once was a big factor in the rise of gang numbers, which I supposed made sense.

If I had the choice between honest work that paid well and dishonest work that paid the same, I'd lean towards the honest. But between dishonest and an empty stomach? Yeah, that was an easy choice.

The second big factor was the incursion pulling manpower to the edges of the city. More police, more PMCs, fewer guards.

Right now, a cop in New Montreal made an okay lower-middle class living. A corporate guard made a smidge less. A well-trained corporate sec person made a lot more than either. But joining a PMC company? Right now, the rates were stupid high, and the training was being accelerated like mad to replenish numbers, and that wasn't just in New Montreal but across the world.

If someone had the balls to travel just a few hours south to Mega City New York, they could get a solid six hundred more credits an hour on top of an already respectable pay just because they needed the manpower more.

Telling most cops and guards--who often had the training and equipment for the job already--that they could earn a year's pay in three months working for a smaller PMC drained a hefty chunk of the city's enforcement workers.

And no enforcement meant more wiggle room for the gangs.

And the last big factor was that right now, people were in a rebellious mood, and a few of the bigger gangs were painting themselves up as exactly that.

It wasn't too hard to spin-doctor smuggling and knocking heads and protection rackets as just part of the job of a big old revolution. And if it didn't pan out to anything? Well, the people joining now would be locked in already.

I groaned and shut the screens down. I'd have to talk to someone way smarter than me about all of this.

But hey... maybe I had a lead already? I'd be at the school tomorrow to drop Lucy off anyway so why not poke at the students who wrote that first article?

Yeah, that was an idea.

***