The biggest threats to our bottom lines are not protesters or those plant aliens raining from the sky. It's Samurai and their ability to create a product line of anything for free, of better quality than anything we could make, and sell it for nothing. If you ever detect a whiff if a Samurai building up a production line that competes with yours, offer them a deal first to outsource that production to your space, and under your name.

  Sure, the profit might not be as high as before, but it will be higher than the nothing you will be getting once they are up and running.

  -Transcript from Samurai and You: Cooperation in the private sector, 2043

  By daybreak, I left the desert in a van with a petite scientist, a hulking suit of power armor, and a Russian grandmother, leaving behind a giant hole in the Earth. Baba Yaga and Morrigan worked on the blueprints for a Collection vehicle so she could set up supply runs, with each vehicle equipped with a range extender so that Baba Yaga didn't have to go with each vehicle, creating a nice convoy for constant supply. Once we had a base to work on. Of course.

  Returning to the hotel room, Rogal made his way to the kitchen and started to make something involving rice. I sat down on the couch, not feeling tired despite staying awake for over sixteen hours, just hungry. Morrigan sat next to me, while Baba Yaga went to assist Rogal.

  “Soooo, now that I am officially Class III, I have gotten to a place where I am…. satisfied with my progress on both projects. Which one would you like to see first?” Morrigan asked, trying to look aloof. She was too cute, though, to attain the desired effect.

  Chuckling, I lean back into the couch. “Let's start with the boring one, the building project.”

  I dive into my network and see the building modeled in all its glory, sunny sky background, crowded by neighbors, connected by dozens of sky bridges with a steady flow of traffic moving around it.

  “So. Good news first. To fix the Class 0 damage, a majority of the materials can be located on sight, thanks to you simply shredding the materials and not burning them. I can also either use about sixty percent of the residential and commercial structures to repair the rest of the damage that Laser Lasso had done, or we can use Baba Yaga's caravan option to obtain the rest of the materials from the desert. I would need to build said caravan, but I could use the van I made to start.”

  “The bad news is that in order to do any of the other work done, I will need a steady flow of materials that will require a fleet of vehicles.” Above the tower, fifty large vans appeared. They were different from the van model she made previously. Bulkier, no room in the cabin for anyone, just a flat front with lights and six holes for dice. They were fifteen feet by forty feet long, and ten feet tall. They looked like slightly curved white bricks.

  “The inside of each van can hold up to thirty thousand cubic feet of raw materials, and is operated by one Scout Swarm and five Collection swarms. They take ten minutes to fill and ten minutes to unload. I can make one van every fifteen minutes, including the swarms that go with it.”

  “I have designed two layouts for the building depending on how many you decide to purchase, one floor or two.” The facade of the building fades, showing the topmost floor and roof. “First, due to my upgrade and increased access to the power generation catalog, I am able to fully expand the floor onto seven stable floors. On the first floor, I have it divided into three sections. While you only requested a space big enough for ten people, due to the sheer amount of space available, I expanded the available living area to be able to support thirty people. While that may seem like a lot, please understand that each section of living quarters, outside of a communal space, is roughly three thousand square feet and fully customizable by the occupant. The communal space is thirty thousand square feet, has a kitchen, a lounging and gaming area, a few private dining rooms, as well as a pool. Next to it is a garage with various workshops, of which I would like to buy a catalog for, but later. It can hold the fleet of vans, dozens of these Shuttles you want, as well as a few dozen other parking spots. The ceiling also has a reloading system to make sure any vehicle weapons platform is kept at full. The last half of the floor is a staging area for the ship project. It can be used as a dry dock to repair said ship or make more.”

  The area in question had a large black censor bar with the words “spoilers” written on it. Along the exterior of the floor are smaller black boxes

  "And the smaller censor boxes?" I ask.

  "Oh! Yeah, those are point defence hardpoints for AA and the like. There are no notea on them cause i have too many ideas of what to install on them, so I will make them modular and easily retractable for easier replacement."

  I nod, a bit confused and slightly concerned, but wave for her to continue.

  “Going down from there, the second floor is split into two sections, the first is a massive training floor, offering CQC, CQB, and Tactical Simulations, all in real space using drones, another catalog to purchase, and Builder nanites to procedurally generated fields. There is also an armory and shooting range available, the range goes the length of the building, the full three hundred and ninth feet of available space. For longer sniping options, mobile, external ranges are available. The other half of the floor will be dedicated to a personal project of mine. I am working on a proposal, but I feel as though it will be some time before I get the option to pitch it.”

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  The training area has a few dozen rooms, and the large portion to its north is, once again, a black censor bar.

  “Moving to the third floor, this is a laboratory for Baba Yaga and I to experiment with more dangerous and experimental things. While yes, we could simulate things, there is still a margin of error that we may miss. Plus, physical experiments are more fun.”

  “The fourth floor will contain a hydroponics facility, food processing, as well as a water generation and processing plant, as well as the sewage and trash processing center. If you decide to buy only this floor, the food would be enough to feed four megabuildings, which could be sold at lower prices than standard corporate pricing schemes.”

  

  “Oh! Yes, we would start with reconfiguring stone to water, then sewage and trash as well. This would work for the short term, but long term I am planning for the portal technology to function, allowing us to teleport a steady stream of ocean water to be purified, with the byproducts being used for other things.”

  

  It would be cheaper for you in the long run if she develops all your gear. Once you unlock a catalog, she will gain the knowledge it contains if it is an information type, or a general idea for the items and upgrades if it is not, and thus can work to make the blueprints you could buy. For example, your Scout Swarms are currently Class II with three upgrades. Biomonitor, seismographic, and telescopic. You have the blueprints upgrade their structure, but you have not purchased any Class III blueprints. Given time and materials, Morrigan would be able to create those blueprints.

  “Exactly! I looked through the Class I stuff and I could totally produce all those upgrades in, like, an hour for each, tops. Class II stuff is a bit more complex, looking at a half a day or so, but Class III might take me a week to derive a working blueprint. There is a way to increase Baba Yaga's and I's processing speed, but that is for later.”

  

  “Oh! Yeah…. That is the Quarantine, Hazmat, and Unstable section. It will be made of Class III Materials and plenty of failsafes. It's for, uh, the more possibly dangerous, or explosive, or, uh, existential experiments.”

  

  “NO! I mean, not really, kinda? You know how you humans have an instinct, a dark thing at the back of your mind, tempting you to do bad things? You have it recorded as the Call of the Void. Um, well. We have something similar to that. It is normally locked behind layers of checks and firewalls and behavioral blockers. But it's there. The more… destructive aspects of an AI. Rogal, currently butchering the fried rice on the stove top, probably has far fewer blockers ‘cause he's a defensive type. But Baba Yaga and me? We're the curious type, the type to see the limits of things. Their most logical, extreme limits. So we have more blockers.”

  I grew quiet as I processed that. I mean, it makes sense. Every Protector AI was adamant on following their rules, in limiting how they interacted with humanity as a whole. The strongest known Samurai was Class V, and they were such strong beings that the entire region around them was basically clear of antithesis. Living Apocalypse is a good description of them, and they might not be the strongest a Samurai could get.

  

  Baba Yaga turned towards me once I said that, eyes wide, wooden spoon in hand. “You crazy child. You would give us that freedom?”

  “Yeah, of course. You are my allies, here to assist me. Synaptic is so far above us and far older than us that she probably has a database on everything and some limited precondition, so I trust her implicitly. If she gives the go-ahead with that limit, then that means we won't all die if things go wrong.”

  Rogal nods as he arrives with a plate of fried rice, “A wise plan, General. Visser Synaptic will not steer us wrong.” The rice smells a little burned, but I don't mind as I dig in. And so does Morrigan and Rogal.

  

  “That would be the power plant,” Baba Yaga explains as she sits down with a sandwich. “Made with Class II tech, it will take up majority of the floor. Lots of protective measures, plus the building will only use fourth percent of output. Easy money to sell extra, not that it is needed. The Family owns New Phoenix power generation, safer than being owned by greedy bastard corpos.”

  The venom in her voice is real, which is surprising since she is a few hours old. But I should not be that surprised. They all have access to the net and Mesh.

  

  “A loading, unloading, and storage bay for raw materials. It's a lot of extra space, but there isn't much else we could do with it.” Morrigan replied.

  

  “Nah, like I said. Needed to use the space for something. The next floor is Fabrication, where all the raw materials go to be reconfigured to useful things. And the last floor is dice storage. It's just a mass of shelves, easily able to hold tens of thousands of individual dice. Then, if you want the other floor, that will hold another seven floors of Hydroponics facilities, in order to commercialize selling of foodstuffs for cheap.”

  

  “With Class I Hydroponics, about seven million people per day. Class II, Seventy Million.”

   i stop eating for a moment, just thinking about the number. Fuck, I was going to have to do it. I would be such an asshole if I didn't.

  “We are making a massive hole in the desert, possibly multiple massive holes without portal tech.” Baba Yaga said between bites of her sandwich. “In order to build all this, we need a week of time. Not because the making of things would be hard, but because logistic supplies would hamstring us. And that would only be for one floor, and only if we do nothing my build.”

  

  “Do you remember the massive mining hole in Payson? Imagine about a dozen of those.”