Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Fifty-One - Adamantium Toenails

"Sassy? No, my AI is nice and polite? He's like an old-timey butler.

What? No, my AI is like a little sister I've never had.

What do you mean a butler and little sister? Mine gives me shit all the time!"

--Overheard conversation between three Samurai, 2025

***

I woke up to a kick.

It was weird, because I'd once been pretty used to waking up to kicks, but I hadn't felt one in a while. Lucy's deteriorating condition often led to weird twitches. She said they hurt when she was awake but she didn't feel them while sleeping.

Instead, I was the one to feel them as she rammed her sharp little toe-nails into my shins and calves.

It had been a while, though. Maybe the kicking wasn't medical at all and Lucy was just lying to cover up her habit of moving in her sleep? We used to sleep in the tiny, narrow beds at the orphanage. They were only barely large enough for one adult, so any movement was hard to miss.

I grumbled as I came awake and turned around. Blinking, I made out Lucy's form in the dark with my cybernetic eye.

She was sleeping at a forty-five degree angle across the bed. Blankets thrown off her upper body and face drooling into a pillow she was hugging.

I grinned. She looked like absolute crap, which is why I took a picture and sent it to her. It would be a surprise when she woke up and checked her messages.

Reaching down, I rubbed at my calf where she'd dug her nails in. "Dammit, Lucy," I muttered. She'd never drawn blood, but I swore it was a near thing. I checked the time and was horrified to discover that it was only eight in the morning. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓

Holy crap, I was waking up at a reasonable time? I wasn't even tired enough to fall back asleep. I rubbed at my face, then popped open my media feeds for a quick scroll-through.

Lucy and I had been using the same old app for like, ten years now. It was a free version of an aggregator for various media accounts. It picked the juiciest gossip, news, propaganda, and advertising and shoved it all into one stream of easy-to-scroll slop. These kinds of aggregators usually had a monthly subscription fee, or you had to endure ads every so often, but this one was a beta version Lucy had found on some sketchy site that was a hundred generations behind.

As long as we didn't update it, we were fine. It was a right pain in the ass to stop it from updating though, but I'd long ago gotten into the habit of opening it through my augs, closing the update prompt, then opening the downloader that downloaded the next update and shutting that down manually.

Still faster than looking at a single video ad.

The news this morning was the usual. Political scandals, corporate scandals, celebrity drama. I watched a video of a cat pushing a brick off the side of a building where it landed on some pedestrian's head. I'd seen that same video ten years ago, but the damned thing was reposted like clockwork.

Some of the reposts were older than me, posted over and over again by attention-farming bots. I was ten minutes into the mindless scrolling when I passed some news about a few Brazilian samurai who'd blown up some statue or something that had been turned into a nest. They'd replaced it but the locals weren't happy with the new one. My attention wandered to the corner of my vision.

I had the time displayed up there, and under that, Myalis was keeping my point tally up.

"Holy fuck!"

I bounced out of the bed, suddenly on my feet as a shock of adrenaline zipped through me.

I was expecting this reaction, and yet it's still amusing to see.

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"Myalis, what the fuck?" I asked.

I had forty thousand points banked. Forty-K and change, but at that number the chump change didn't matter as much.

The earnings are from the Big Gun's shots taken over night. In the last ten hours the gun has fired eleven times. I can get you a full breakdown of the points earned, but for the most part it comes from killing a small number of higher-tier antithesis. The value was, of course, split unevenly amongst the Vanguard participating in the project, with major deductions for the distance between said Vanguard and the actual successful eliminations.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"That's a ridiculous number of points, still." I said.

It's what you earned.

I scratched my neck. "What I earned my ass," I muttered. I'd sweat blood and tears to make a tenth as many points before. And now I'd earned this many while sleeping.

Is this how rich people felt?

Fuck, the game really was rigged.

"Cat? What's going on?" Lucy asked.

"Huh, oh, sorry I didn't mean to wake you," I said. "You can go back to sleep."

Lucy yawned wide. "What's wrong?"

"Technically, nothing."

"Technically?" she repeated. She was fully awake now. Though she was still hugging her drool pillow. How often were we supposed to change bed sheets and pillowcases and shit like that? Once a month or so?

"The Big Gun's been firing all night, and since I helped build a bit of it, I'm... I guess entitled to a percent of the points it makes killing aliens," I said as I sat back down on the edge of the bed. "And I just woke up to a fuckload more points than I had last night."

"Oh... isn't that a good thing?"

"I guess? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a good thing. No doubt about it." I shrugged. "I just don't know what to do with all that. It's too much."

"Aww, you don't need to feel pressured to spend it," Lucy said. "You can earmark a chunk as savings, and then pour the rest into your projects?"

"My projects?" I asked.

"Well, you've been spending less time on your new mechanics hobby. Maybe you can buy a garage that's got better tools and such. There's the printer, it's really good, but I think it's maybe too slow for everything we're loading it with. I think we wanted to make the house safer too?"

"Right," I said. She wasn't wrong. "And my gear could use an upgrade overall," I muttered.

Do keep in mind that your current windfall won't last forever. Once Phobos is eliminated the current influx of points will stop.

Right, that was another good point. I hadn't checked on the status of the moon. For all I knew the thing was riddled with holes and all the big aliens on it were long dead. I kinda doubted it, but it wasn't impossible.

"Urgh, I think I have a shift watching over the Big Gun. I can't remember when it was, but I think I'm supposed to show up around noon."

Lucy shifted in bed, then stretched. The blankets slid down, exposing some of her stomach that wasn't covered by her silky PJs. "That's hours away, you know?"

"Uh-huh," I said.

"I'm sure I could tempt you to spend that time well," she said.

"Uh-huh."

"By eating a proper breakfast for once." Lucy kipped up, or tried, she ended up mostly flopping around very unsexily until she rolled off the far end of the bed. "I wanna make this egg recipe I saw last night! Eggs benedict! They look really good."

I pouted, but I was rather hungry. "Urgh, fine," I said.

Lucy laughed at my plight, at least until I ran up behind her and caught her by the hips. Her laugh turned into a squeal, but she wasn't leaving this room before I had time to kiss her silly.

A few minutes later, Lucy was off to try some more experimental stuff in the kitchen and I hopped into the shower. "Myalis," I said as I rubbed shampoo over my scalp under a sheet of warm water.

Yes, Catherine?

"I need a few good ideas on what to spend those points on. I'm thinking it's time for a few upgrades. Not physical stuff, though." The skin change had been pretty big already, and the new hair too. Anything more was probably pushing it for the moment.

I'm certain I can think of a few options. You might want to revisit your catalogue list. They're generally an expensive but worthwhile long-term investment.

"Because I can buy more kinds of shit with them?" I asked.

I wouldn't use such faecal terminology, but essentially, yes. They widen the breadth of items you can purchase. That only makes you more capable and flexible, and overlapping catalogues do reduce the cost of some items.

That was an idea. I had a few of those tokens sitting around too. Maybe dipping into the higher tier catalogues wasn't a bad move either.

"Alright," I said as I shut the shower off. "Yeah. I think that I can work with that. List away, Myalis."

***