A Day in the Life Of, pt. 2 and 3
Part 2: ...a freelance investigator.
I'm Ronan Moriarty, Private Eye. That's a name you can trust, right? I sure hope so, because I'm the one writing all this.
That particular day, I'd awoken late, and with a hangover. This isn't normal; I do tend to sleep in a bit because my profession makes me a little bit of a night owl, but the night before had been special circumstances. It's not every day your best friend gets married, y'know?
Anyway, one big chalky lozenge dissolved in a cup of water later and the hangover was on its way out the door. I sent another cup of water to help chase it out, and had my house's autochef make me some oatmeal with chunks of apple and caramel and walnut added in. I put on my excomp and got to reading my mail and notifications while I was waiting. In a technical sense, an excomp refers to any external computing device, but most people (myself included) use the term to refer to something you wear and take with you. It's a little clunkier than having an Embie -- for instance, I have to re-calibrate it to my hand gestures, eye blinking and such each morning -- but as a hacker, I like not having a direct path into my skull for any malicious data packet that might want to take it. I've seen what arbitrary code execution can do to a person's brain, and believe me, it's not pretty. Does it cost more? Yeah. Especially when you factor in all the stuff I need because I don't have an entertainment device in my head, like earphones or a viewscreen. But the peace of mind is worth it, at least to me.
Another thing I did during the ten or so minutes it took for my oatmeal to cook was run a quick at-home checkup using my HomeDoc. A HomeDoc is a device that keeps tabs on your health in various ways to find problems before they get too big to handle. This is usually a feature of the house that checks you once a day at a time of the end user's choosing. EvoVersys had been experimenting with models built into people's Embies, but that was quickly driving everyone insane and so they'd recently turned that 'feature' off. I myself have a terrible model of HomeDoc that I keep using because the good models all share data, which is something I am paranoid about ( I shall make you a new one, mi amigo. --A.A. ). But it's enough to tell me the really important things, like that my liver function was within acceptable parameters despite the night I'd had, and that I hadn't gotten enough sleep yet. That might not sound useful, and I *felt* rested, but I knew that this diagnosis usually means I keep going like everything's fine until about one past noon, at which point I'm dead on my feet.
But soon enough I had my breakfast, and I decided to use the time I had to get a little work done while I was eating it. I was a very busy private eye, but there's two kinds of 'busy' for us; one is the kind where we actually have to go out and talk to people and ask questions, sometimes without people realizing we were asking. I'm okay at that, but I'm better at the other kind, which is where I use a creative distribution of hardware and software across the city to gather information on subjects that my clients are curious about. Depending on how you do it this can be extremely illegal, but there was a warrant involved in this one. I checked my data feeds, found nothing particularly interesting, and went to check various news sources instead. Even if it's not as good as an Embie, my excomp is plenty good enough that I could read news feeds while doing some morning exercises - mostly some calisthenics like pushups or pullups, but I also did the jog I do every morning, which takes me across the block I live in, past the C11 park, past another block of housing, around the D11 park, and then back. It's about five kilometers all said and done. I like this route because the parks are more to my taste than the ones in other directions from my home.
I once asked Maintenance why they have so many parks all over the place, and the unit I'd asked looked at me for about half a minute before just saying "humans like parks", which I couldn't really argue with. I feel like there's more to it than that, but not enough to really push it.
Anyway, after getting back home I took a shower, got into my work clothes (business casual plus a trench coat, because branding is important), and fell asleep composing a sarcastic comment on a news article that wouldn't have been that good even if I'd finished it.
I was snoring two hours later when a song from my excomp jolted me awake. The song was 'Taking Care of Business', meaning that it was job-related. Looking at the prompt, I got excited; I'd been sitting on this job for almost a year, now. If I'm honest, I feel a little guilty billing hours just to monitor a tap, but my employer felt it was worth continuing to pay me for, and the customer is always right when it involves giving me money.
A little background; EvoVersys had kicked Maintenance out of their district once they'd become the DeFacto government of the place, because it's hard for people to trust Maintenance with... well, anything, really. On the one hand, they are absolutely trustworthy by any objective measure; they are painstakingly scrupulous with people's data, even when they would obviously rather not be, and they are slavishly meticulous in the construction and upkeep of infrastructure. On the other hand, they behave like weird, jittery, uncomfortably friendly stalkers so it's hard to treat them with the respect that they honestly deserve. The end result is that EvoVersys thought it was guaranteeing its data security by kicking them out, but this was completely backwards. Maintenance sweeps all data channels it maintains for bugs and taps once a week, and they are very thorough. E.V. only looks when they notice something is wrong, which meant that as long as the data junctions I'd tapped kept working up to snuff, they wouldn't find the taps. I performed weekly maintenance on the junctions; they were the only ones in the district that hadn't had any problems during the last year, so if I ever had to stop being an investigator I could always go into I.T., I guess.
There are a lot of companies that get up to a lot of shady business on this planet - it's hard to find one that's completely clean, really. But there's objects with a shadow, and then there's seriously dark corporations like EvoVersys, usually run by high-functioning obsessive-compulsive lunatics that want to control everything around them because they can't get a grip on what goes on in their own head. E.V. was up to some wicked things, everyone knew it, but the government doesn't act without solid proof ...well, unless they think Mad Science is involved. The stuff happening at E.V. didn't provably live up to the standard, at least not yet; it was insane, and it definitely involved scientific research, but it wasn't likely to warp the laws of reality, no matter how much the C.E.O. wanted to do just that.
One of the theories about what was going on at E.V. was that they had at least one department full of people that they kept on a constant feed of psychotropic drugs to keep them from thinking much about what they did without diminishing their ability to do it. It wasn't really possible to know what kind of work they did, mind you, because you couldn't ask them about it; they didn't know. That was the point. If you ask me, whatever they were doing could probably be performed just as well, if not better, by an E.I. (Expert Intelligence system - a computer that isn't person-smart or self aware, but is really good at one or two types of tasks that you can just have it doing 24/7). But the heads at EvoVersys were biotech monomaniacs with a god complex, and so they wanted biotech solutions to all of their problems, especially if this meant controlling people. I honestly considered myself lucky that their efforts to make computer networks out of neural tissue had gone as badly as they did, given that I don't know how to hack neurons.
Chasing this theory had become a priority with my employer. Not only were the people in this department likely working to maintain cover on some nefarious dealings, but if we could prove what was being done to them that would be a crime in and of itself, one that M4Gov would get involved in. They let a lot of corps and district governments get away with a lot of malfeasance, because the underlying principle has always been that the people get what they deserve from the government they pick. But if you can make the case that voters are being chemically induced to vote a certain way, even if it's just people on the company payroll, then the government gets a big bull's-eye painted on it. My employer believed there were no fewer than a dozen different kinds of human experimentation going on at EvoVersys, most of which were subtle but some of which were not (and there had definitely been a notable rise in horrific, psychotic mutants wreaking havoc in the last few years), but this one would be the easiest to prove, he figured. Not because it was obvious, but because all anyone had to do was forget their meds for a day or two.
Well, that and survive.
The tap I'd set up had found a collection of the tags I'd had it looking for; an employee's medical scan had shown a neurochemical irregularity - I don't know much about that, but my employer does and he gave me a list of terms to look for, and this one was on it. Later his coworker had noted that he was a little off, and then his manager had confirmed that he was acting strangely. That was the three dots connected I needed to start acting, and I had to be fast because I knew what was coming next. Poor Bob had gotten himself in trouble.
I put a call out to everyone I knew who was decent in a fight that might be able to get here on short notice, also pinging my employer on this case because I didn't know what assets he had in the area. I specified that we probably had 20 minutes to save this guy, and sure enough, while I was putting the call out the order was put in to have poor Bob killed.
I assigned one of my E.I.s to keep an eye on Bob's web traffic and saw him getting a route to an ice cream place in the next district over. Not very far away, mind you, and I could also see the cleaning crew following him in their van, because they were being scrupulous about keeping their boss up to date over a channel they thought was secure.
I updated the people I was talking to on the situation, seeing if anyone was close to the place and willing and able to save a guy's life for pay and brownie points. I got a lot of interested people, but the only ones who were closer than me were some youngsters who attend classes at the Academy for the Mystic Arts, Lieutenant Tyro and Miho Smith. Lieutenant offered to bring her brother Sergeant, and they're both competent street samurai, with Sergeant being a known specialist in bodyguarding, so that was perfect. Miho's a technomage who dislikes violence, and normally isn't the sort I would depend on for this sort of work, but she said she could bring her terrifying miko friend to provide healing and help in the defense, and that put me much more at ease. Miho's friend Kano wasn't actually in the area right then, but Transport Via Plants meant that wasn't much of an issue, especially not with a park right across the street from Bob's destination.
I got up and headed out myself; I wouldn't be there in time to help against the cleaners, probably, but I was now fairly confident that Bob would be safe in the hands of the posse gathering to protect him, and I did want to be in on his debriefing.
Part 3: ...a small business owner.
Since we're all converging on the ice cream shop now, let's take a moment to focus in on its proprietress. We are calling her Veronica because that's not her name. While it's possible someone might be able to figure out who she is from details about her life, there's enough parks with enough ice cream parlors right next to them within 15 minutes of EvoVersys HQ that I don't think it's a big concern, especially given that she doesn't really figure into this story in a motivating way. I am, however, covering my bases on this. If you spot a discrepancy that you want the unaltered version of, let me know.
Veronica starts her day to the laughter of her daughter. Her husband works out of their home (when he's working) and her daughter is just shy of being old enough to enroll in school, so he takes care of her in the morning until about ten, which is when Veronica typically gets up. Right now the husband (call him Lucky) is playing with the daughter (call her Dora). She gets up and joins in for a bit before having coffee and some breakfast, this being leftovers from what her husband cooked this morning. Both Lucky and Veronica like to cook, and their kitchen has an expansive layout with two ovens and six burners on the stove range, at the expense of having no autochef. She eats light in the mornings on days that she works, because she can't resist nibbling during the day, and has an easy time bringing new menu items to keep things interesting whenever she gets tired of the usual.
Veronica's home and place of business is the same building, a freestanding, irregular three-story edifice with a big round double door as the front entrance and lots of big wooden-slat windows that open and can be propped up to form a sort of veranda around the shop, which is mostly done when large parties are expected. It had lot of oddly shaped windows and a stone, wood and stucco facade over the usual reinforced concrete Maintenance builds most everything out of. The district of Lamplighter, where Veronica and her family live, was all done in clear genre fiction motifs, and Maintenance had built this part of it with a bit of a whimsical fairy-tale storybook look to it. The open air shopping mall at the center of the block is even done up to look like a big fancy castle. The Maintenance robots like to do different areas in different architectural styles (because even ancient artificial intelligence networks need hobbies, I guess), and this neighborhood's style lends itself well to artsy craftsy types. It also works very well for the ice cream parlor on the bottom floor, which opens at eleven to catch the lunch crowd (the shop also offers cold cut sandwiches and other foods that don't require much in the way of heating). Veronica can take it easy in the mornings because her commute is as simple as walking downstairs, and on most days Dora joins her to help. Veronica also has some part-time workers who help during the lunch and dinner rushes, but she handles the shop solo the rest of the day.
Today's lunch crowd is pretty sizeable, because the weather is especially nice today. It's usually humid, this close to the coast, but not today, and so people flock to places with outdoor eating like Veronica's little shop. They actually run out of muenster at one point, but Veronica sees it coming far enough ahead to order more of that and some other things that they start running low on, and so it was only about two minutes after they ran out that a truck pulled up in the alley to one side of the shop to unload fresh meats and cheeses. Also if you like roast beef, this place has the best. I need to get the name of their supplier.
Things quiet down after the lunch rush, and everyone gets to tidying up. Dora helps, but she's not good at cleaning because she is five years old. In spite of this the restaurant is cleaned up in plenty of time and the slow afternoon trickle of people coming in for ice cream, usually from the park, begins. During this time the register is left to the part-timers wile Veronica spends some time teaching Dora some basic math and language skills she'll need to know when she starts school next season. Dora is quite clever for her age, and Veronica relays this to her husband over her Embie, asking him to look into whether they should enroll her in higher-level classes once she starts school to make sure she isn't bored. Several hours pass like this.
It's about four o'clock when Bob shows up, which is good for a number of reasons, the big one being that him having left work before rush hour means that there won't be many bystanders. Veronica takes his order, because the part timers are just clocking out and Dora isn't allowed to work the order counter because she is five years old. Bob is happy to see Veronica again, and Veronica has a good enough memory that she remembers both him and his usual order from back when - rocky road with M&Ms, walnuts and Oreo crumbles, which Bob calls 'Even Rockier Road'. Bob is moved by the fact that she remembers him and takes a double helping of Even Rockier Road because at this moment in time he is a man with desperate needs. This is in large part because of the fact that his brain's stress response is working overtime after being muted for several years. His brain is going over his life and pointing out all the things that he really should have been distressed, angered, or terrified by, and a brain doing that kind of activity demands fuel. He chats with Veronica while she makes the ice cream for him. He's clearly nervous and jittery and this doesn't escape the notice of Veronica, although she stays cool, reasoning that sometimes people have bad days and they don't need someone making it worse for them. Dora also notices and asks her mom about it, and she gets much the same answer, so she's very polite when she brings him some napkins and a cup of water to go with the glorious mess of sticky carbohydrates that Bob has sat down with.
Bob's order took up the last of the Rocky Road in that tub - Veronica actually gave him two and a half scoops because she thinks she's had days like Bob is having, although she is, fortunately for her, wrong about that. She has just seated the new tub when a tall, lovely woman with a blonde pixie cut and a loose, frumpy jersey comes up to her at the counter and puts an e-film in front of her. The blonde smiles nervously and asks her to sign it quickly, and even says 'please'. She seems nervous and is clearly trying to be friendly and reassuring but isn't very good at it. Veronica frowns and looks at the thin page of carbon paper, clear with glowing blue-green writing on it. It is titled "Adventurer Insurance Reimbursement Agreement" and is undersigned by Angelos Solutions. Veronica blanks on this for a moment, then her eyes widen and she looks up and around her shop; aside from Bob there are four new customers, including the blonde girl. Three of them have the look of people who were trying to hide all the armor and weapons they were toting just out of sight... and the fourth is wearing miko robes, making zero effort to hide what she is about. Veronica quickly presses her thumb to the e-film, leaving a glowing print after her Embie signs the document for her through the induction interface in her hand. After that, the blonde starts saying that she should probably go hide, but Veronica is way ahead of her. She grabs a few mementos decorating the store, things she considers irreplaceable, and goes in the back, up the stairs to their home, telling her daughter to join her quickly and not to ask questions. Her daughter notices how worried her mother is and hurries to join her in the back room, but she asks questions anyways because she is five years old.
Bob, meanwhile, fails to notice any of this because he is very deep in eating his ice cream and watching "The Throneroom". He started watching it hoping for something to distract him from reprocessing the last several years of his life all at once, but he is getting something a bit different instead. Regardless of who The Queen is talking to in the show, it feels like her words are pointed right at him, that they directly address things he's trying to understand, often adding important context that helps him make sense of events from the last several years of his life, and he doesn't stop to think about how strange this is until she looks right at him and says "Bob, get under the table and trust the man with the sandwich board." Bob turns to see a van opening up to let out four men with janitor outfits and guns, and a large young man with a big sandwich board is getting between the gunmen and himself, and that's when he takes what's left of his rocky road and gets under the table.
Part 4
I'm Ronan Moriarty, Private Eye. That's a name you can trust, right? I sure hope so, because I'm the one writing all this.
That particular day, I'd awoken late, and with a hangover. This isn't normal; I do tend to sleep in a bit because my profession makes me a little bit of a night owl, but the night before had been special circumstances. It's not every day your best friend gets married, y'know?
Anyway, one big chalky lozenge dissolved in a cup of water later and the hangover was on its way out the door. I sent another cup of water to help chase it out, and had my house's autochef make me some oatmeal with chunks of apple and caramel and walnut added in. I put on my excomp and got to reading my mail and notifications while I was waiting. In a technical sense, an excomp refers to any external computing device, but most people (myself included) use the term to refer to something you wear and take with you. It's a little clunkier than having an Embie -- for instance, I have to re-calibrate it to my hand gestures, eye blinking and such each morning -- but as a hacker, I like not having a direct path into my skull for any malicious data packet that might want to take it. I've seen what arbitrary code execution can do to a person's brain, and believe me, it's not pretty. Does it cost more? Yeah. Especially when you factor in all the stuff I need because I don't have an entertainment device in my head, like earphones or a viewscreen. But the peace of mind is worth it, at least to me.
Another thing I did during the ten or so minutes it took for my oatmeal to cook was run a quick at-home checkup using my HomeDoc. A HomeDoc is a device that keeps tabs on your health in various ways to find problems before they get too big to handle. This is usually a feature of the house that checks you once a day at a time of the end user's choosing. EvoVersys had been experimenting with models built into people's Embies, but that was quickly driving everyone insane and so they'd recently turned that 'feature' off. I myself have a terrible model of HomeDoc that I keep using because the good models all share data, which is something I am paranoid about ( I shall make you a new one, mi amigo. --A.A. ). But it's enough to tell me the really important things, like that my liver function was within acceptable parameters despite the night I'd had, and that I hadn't gotten enough sleep yet. That might not sound useful, and I *felt* rested, but I knew that this diagnosis usually means I keep going like everything's fine until about one past noon, at which point I'm dead on my feet.
But soon enough I had my breakfast, and I decided to use the time I had to get a little work done while I was eating it. I was a very busy private eye, but there's two kinds of 'busy' for us; one is the kind where we actually have to go out and talk to people and ask questions, sometimes without people realizing we were asking. I'm okay at that, but I'm better at the other kind, which is where I use a creative distribution of hardware and software across the city to gather information on subjects that my clients are curious about. Depending on how you do it this can be extremely illegal, but there was a warrant involved in this one. I checked my data feeds, found nothing particularly interesting, and went to check various news sources instead. Even if it's not as good as an Embie, my excomp is plenty good enough that I could read news feeds while doing some morning exercises - mostly some calisthenics like pushups or pullups, but I also did the jog I do every morning, which takes me across the block I live in, past the C11 park, past another block of housing, around the D11 park, and then back. It's about five kilometers all said and done. I like this route because the parks are more to my taste than the ones in other directions from my home.
I once asked Maintenance why they have so many parks all over the place, and the unit I'd asked looked at me for about half a minute before just saying "humans like parks", which I couldn't really argue with. I feel like there's more to it than that, but not enough to really push it.
Anyway, after getting back home I took a shower, got into my work clothes (business casual plus a trench coat, because branding is important), and fell asleep composing a sarcastic comment on a news article that wouldn't have been that good even if I'd finished it.
I was snoring two hours later when a song from my excomp jolted me awake. The song was 'Taking Care of Business', meaning that it was job-related. Looking at the prompt, I got excited; I'd been sitting on this job for almost a year, now. If I'm honest, I feel a little guilty billing hours just to monitor a tap, but my employer felt it was worth continuing to pay me for, and the customer is always right when it involves giving me money.
A little background; EvoVersys had kicked Maintenance out of their district once they'd become the DeFacto government of the place, because it's hard for people to trust Maintenance with... well, anything, really. On the one hand, they are absolutely trustworthy by any objective measure; they are painstakingly scrupulous with people's data, even when they would obviously rather not be, and they are slavishly meticulous in the construction and upkeep of infrastructure. On the other hand, they behave like weird, jittery, uncomfortably friendly stalkers so it's hard to treat them with the respect that they honestly deserve. The end result is that EvoVersys thought it was guaranteeing its data security by kicking them out, but this was completely backwards. Maintenance sweeps all data channels it maintains for bugs and taps once a week, and they are very thorough. E.V. only looks when they notice something is wrong, which meant that as long as the data junctions I'd tapped kept working up to snuff, they wouldn't find the taps. I performed weekly maintenance on the junctions; they were the only ones in the district that hadn't had any problems during the last year, so if I ever had to stop being an investigator I could always go into I.T., I guess.
There are a lot of companies that get up to a lot of shady business on this planet - it's hard to find one that's completely clean, really. But there's objects with a shadow, and then there's seriously dark corporations like EvoVersys, usually run by high-functioning obsessive-compulsive lunatics that want to control everything around them because they can't get a grip on what goes on in their own head. E.V. was up to some wicked things, everyone knew it, but the government doesn't act without solid proof ...well, unless they think Mad Science is involved. The stuff happening at E.V. didn't provably live up to the standard, at least not yet; it was insane, and it definitely involved scientific research, but it wasn't likely to warp the laws of reality, no matter how much the C.E.O. wanted to do just that.
One of the theories about what was going on at E.V. was that they had at least one department full of people that they kept on a constant feed of psychotropic drugs to keep them from thinking much about what they did without diminishing their ability to do it. It wasn't really possible to know what kind of work they did, mind you, because you couldn't ask them about it; they didn't know. That was the point. If you ask me, whatever they were doing could probably be performed just as well, if not better, by an E.I. (Expert Intelligence system - a computer that isn't person-smart or self aware, but is really good at one or two types of tasks that you can just have it doing 24/7). But the heads at EvoVersys were biotech monomaniacs with a god complex, and so they wanted biotech solutions to all of their problems, especially if this meant controlling people. I honestly considered myself lucky that their efforts to make computer networks out of neural tissue had gone as badly as they did, given that I don't know how to hack neurons.
Chasing this theory had become a priority with my employer. Not only were the people in this department likely working to maintain cover on some nefarious dealings, but if we could prove what was being done to them that would be a crime in and of itself, one that M4Gov would get involved in. They let a lot of corps and district governments get away with a lot of malfeasance, because the underlying principle has always been that the people get what they deserve from the government they pick. But if you can make the case that voters are being chemically induced to vote a certain way, even if it's just people on the company payroll, then the government gets a big bull's-eye painted on it. My employer believed there were no fewer than a dozen different kinds of human experimentation going on at EvoVersys, most of which were subtle but some of which were not (and there had definitely been a notable rise in horrific, psychotic mutants wreaking havoc in the last few years), but this one would be the easiest to prove, he figured. Not because it was obvious, but because all anyone had to do was forget their meds for a day or two.
Well, that and survive.
The tap I'd set up had found a collection of the tags I'd had it looking for; an employee's medical scan had shown a neurochemical irregularity - I don't know much about that, but my employer does and he gave me a list of terms to look for, and this one was on it. Later his coworker had noted that he was a little off, and then his manager had confirmed that he was acting strangely. That was the three dots connected I needed to start acting, and I had to be fast because I knew what was coming next. Poor Bob had gotten himself in trouble.
I put a call out to everyone I knew who was decent in a fight that might be able to get here on short notice, also pinging my employer on this case because I didn't know what assets he had in the area. I specified that we probably had 20 minutes to save this guy, and sure enough, while I was putting the call out the order was put in to have poor Bob killed.
I assigned one of my E.I.s to keep an eye on Bob's web traffic and saw him getting a route to an ice cream place in the next district over. Not very far away, mind you, and I could also see the cleaning crew following him in their van, because they were being scrupulous about keeping their boss up to date over a channel they thought was secure.
I updated the people I was talking to on the situation, seeing if anyone was close to the place and willing and able to save a guy's life for pay and brownie points. I got a lot of interested people, but the only ones who were closer than me were some youngsters who attend classes at the Academy for the Mystic Arts, Lieutenant Tyro and Miho Smith. Lieutenant offered to bring her brother Sergeant, and they're both competent street samurai, with Sergeant being a known specialist in bodyguarding, so that was perfect. Miho's a technomage who dislikes violence, and normally isn't the sort I would depend on for this sort of work, but she said she could bring her terrifying miko friend to provide healing and help in the defense, and that put me much more at ease. Miho's friend Kano wasn't actually in the area right then, but Transport Via Plants meant that wasn't much of an issue, especially not with a park right across the street from Bob's destination.
I got up and headed out myself; I wouldn't be there in time to help against the cleaners, probably, but I was now fairly confident that Bob would be safe in the hands of the posse gathering to protect him, and I did want to be in on his debriefing.
Part 3: ...a small business owner.
Since we're all converging on the ice cream shop now, let's take a moment to focus in on its proprietress. We are calling her Veronica because that's not her name. While it's possible someone might be able to figure out who she is from details about her life, there's enough parks with enough ice cream parlors right next to them within 15 minutes of EvoVersys HQ that I don't think it's a big concern, especially given that she doesn't really figure into this story in a motivating way. I am, however, covering my bases on this. If you spot a discrepancy that you want the unaltered version of, let me know.
Veronica starts her day to the laughter of her daughter. Her husband works out of their home (when he's working) and her daughter is just shy of being old enough to enroll in school, so he takes care of her in the morning until about ten, which is when Veronica typically gets up. Right now the husband (call him Lucky) is playing with the daughter (call her Dora). She gets up and joins in for a bit before having coffee and some breakfast, this being leftovers from what her husband cooked this morning. Both Lucky and Veronica like to cook, and their kitchen has an expansive layout with two ovens and six burners on the stove range, at the expense of having no autochef. She eats light in the mornings on days that she works, because she can't resist nibbling during the day, and has an easy time bringing new menu items to keep things interesting whenever she gets tired of the usual.
Veronica's home and place of business is the same building, a freestanding, irregular three-story edifice with a big round double door as the front entrance and lots of big wooden-slat windows that open and can be propped up to form a sort of veranda around the shop, which is mostly done when large parties are expected. It had lot of oddly shaped windows and a stone, wood and stucco facade over the usual reinforced concrete Maintenance builds most everything out of. The district of Lamplighter, where Veronica and her family live, was all done in clear genre fiction motifs, and Maintenance had built this part of it with a bit of a whimsical fairy-tale storybook look to it. The open air shopping mall at the center of the block is even done up to look like a big fancy castle. The Maintenance robots like to do different areas in different architectural styles (because even ancient artificial intelligence networks need hobbies, I guess), and this neighborhood's style lends itself well to artsy craftsy types. It also works very well for the ice cream parlor on the bottom floor, which opens at eleven to catch the lunch crowd (the shop also offers cold cut sandwiches and other foods that don't require much in the way of heating). Veronica can take it easy in the mornings because her commute is as simple as walking downstairs, and on most days Dora joins her to help. Veronica also has some part-time workers who help during the lunch and dinner rushes, but she handles the shop solo the rest of the day.
Today's lunch crowd is pretty sizeable, because the weather is especially nice today. It's usually humid, this close to the coast, but not today, and so people flock to places with outdoor eating like Veronica's little shop. They actually run out of muenster at one point, but Veronica sees it coming far enough ahead to order more of that and some other things that they start running low on, and so it was only about two minutes after they ran out that a truck pulled up in the alley to one side of the shop to unload fresh meats and cheeses. Also if you like roast beef, this place has the best. I need to get the name of their supplier.
Things quiet down after the lunch rush, and everyone gets to tidying up. Dora helps, but she's not good at cleaning because she is five years old. In spite of this the restaurant is cleaned up in plenty of time and the slow afternoon trickle of people coming in for ice cream, usually from the park, begins. During this time the register is left to the part-timers wile Veronica spends some time teaching Dora some basic math and language skills she'll need to know when she starts school next season. Dora is quite clever for her age, and Veronica relays this to her husband over her Embie, asking him to look into whether they should enroll her in higher-level classes once she starts school to make sure she isn't bored. Several hours pass like this.
It's about four o'clock when Bob shows up, which is good for a number of reasons, the big one being that him having left work before rush hour means that there won't be many bystanders. Veronica takes his order, because the part timers are just clocking out and Dora isn't allowed to work the order counter because she is five years old. Bob is happy to see Veronica again, and Veronica has a good enough memory that she remembers both him and his usual order from back when - rocky road with M&Ms, walnuts and Oreo crumbles, which Bob calls 'Even Rockier Road'. Bob is moved by the fact that she remembers him and takes a double helping of Even Rockier Road because at this moment in time he is a man with desperate needs. This is in large part because of the fact that his brain's stress response is working overtime after being muted for several years. His brain is going over his life and pointing out all the things that he really should have been distressed, angered, or terrified by, and a brain doing that kind of activity demands fuel. He chats with Veronica while she makes the ice cream for him. He's clearly nervous and jittery and this doesn't escape the notice of Veronica, although she stays cool, reasoning that sometimes people have bad days and they don't need someone making it worse for them. Dora also notices and asks her mom about it, and she gets much the same answer, so she's very polite when she brings him some napkins and a cup of water to go with the glorious mess of sticky carbohydrates that Bob has sat down with.
Bob's order took up the last of the Rocky Road in that tub - Veronica actually gave him two and a half scoops because she thinks she's had days like Bob is having, although she is, fortunately for her, wrong about that. She has just seated the new tub when a tall, lovely woman with a blonde pixie cut and a loose, frumpy jersey comes up to her at the counter and puts an e-film in front of her. The blonde smiles nervously and asks her to sign it quickly, and even says 'please'. She seems nervous and is clearly trying to be friendly and reassuring but isn't very good at it. Veronica frowns and looks at the thin page of carbon paper, clear with glowing blue-green writing on it. It is titled "Adventurer Insurance Reimbursement Agreement" and is undersigned by Angelos Solutions. Veronica blanks on this for a moment, then her eyes widen and she looks up and around her shop; aside from Bob there are four new customers, including the blonde girl. Three of them have the look of people who were trying to hide all the armor and weapons they were toting just out of sight... and the fourth is wearing miko robes, making zero effort to hide what she is about. Veronica quickly presses her thumb to the e-film, leaving a glowing print after her Embie signs the document for her through the induction interface in her hand. After that, the blonde starts saying that she should probably go hide, but Veronica is way ahead of her. She grabs a few mementos decorating the store, things she considers irreplaceable, and goes in the back, up the stairs to their home, telling her daughter to join her quickly and not to ask questions. Her daughter notices how worried her mother is and hurries to join her in the back room, but she asks questions anyways because she is five years old.
Bob, meanwhile, fails to notice any of this because he is very deep in eating his ice cream and watching "The Throneroom". He started watching it hoping for something to distract him from reprocessing the last several years of his life all at once, but he is getting something a bit different instead. Regardless of who The Queen is talking to in the show, it feels like her words are pointed right at him, that they directly address things he's trying to understand, often adding important context that helps him make sense of events from the last several years of his life, and he doesn't stop to think about how strange this is until she looks right at him and says "Bob, get under the table and trust the man with the sandwich board." Bob turns to see a van opening up to let out four men with janitor outfits and guns, and a large young man with a big sandwich board is getting between the gunmen and himself, and that's when he takes what's left of his rocky road and gets under the table.
Part 4
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