Gathering evidence and contacting the prior plaintiffs would take several more days. The award ceremony was this afternoon.
Jude checked the time on his wrist. The watch face featured Peppa Pig in a cheerful pose. It read 1:03 PM.
"What time does the Stagg ceremony start?"
"Three o'clock," Satsuki answered instantly.
"Two hours. Let's set up first, then I'll cook something for Yomogi." He swung onto the motorcycle.
"Long live the boss, meow!"
The Stagg Industries headquarters was a glass cube — or rather, something that had decided it was a glass cube and then changed its mind partway through. The surface was faceted at irregular angles, neither symmetrical nor organic, the kind of design that looked expensive and vaguely confrontational. It caught the afternoon light and distributed it unevenly across the surrounding block.
"I'm going to guess Stagg didn't design this either," Jude said as they pulled into the alley beside the building.
"Correct. The architect is plaintiff number forty-seven."
"At some point it stops being opportunism and becomes a lifestyle."
Yomogi dropped from his perch atop the helmet and did a quick visual sweep of the alley. "No one around, boss, meow."
Jude reached into his jacket and produced what appeared to be a sheet of thick wallpaper, roughly the size of a door. He pressed it flat against the brick. The paper sensed the surface immediately — it spread and adhered on its own, smoothing out against the wall until it lay perfectly flush.
The pattern on it was a door. Two meters high, one meter wide, rendered in fine woodgrain detail with a bright metal handle. It looked, with some conviction, like an actual door.
Jude reached out and turned the handle.
The door opened.
"Satsuki. Coming in?"
"I haven't finished my drink."
"Leave part of yourself out here on watch, then."
Yomogi went through first, clearing the frame in a single leap. Jude followed. Satsuki rolled in last — and as she crossed the threshold, one of her handlebars detached and dropped to the alley floor behind her. The door closed.
The handlebar lay in the alley for a few seconds. Then it began to dissolve — not dramatically, but quietly, breaking apart into a fine particulate that spread across the pavement, climbed the wall, and distributed itself across the surface of the wallpaper in a layer less than a fifth of a millimeter thick. The particles shifted color and texture until they were indistinguishable from the surrounding brick.
From the outside: a wall. From the inside: the reason Jude had abandoned the warehouse idea entirely.
[Wallpaper Room (Small Apartment, Residential Configuration)]Price: 300,000 Asset Points
Don't let the price fool you. This is a product of Doraemon's interstellar colonization era, when spatial resources had long ceased to be scarce. The majority of the cost is in the space-folding technology, not the materials. Comes standard with basic furniture and appliances. Energy supply is billed separately — or bring your own.
The interior was approximately the size of a modest city apartment — a hundred square meters, roughly — with a kitchen, bathroom, living room, and bedroom, all furnished and functional. Refrigerator, stove, water heater, air conditioner. No television, which Jude had made peace with.
Satsuki looked around with the particular expression of someone seeing a place for the first time after hearing about it for weeks.
"It's adequate," she said.
"High praise." Jude glanced at the surveillance feed on his phone — the alley outside, empty, the nanobot layer already invisible. "I seriously suspect the original inventors built this for a nuclear war contingency."
"Boss, you promised food, meow."
Jude looked at Yomogi — the cat's large, bright eyes, the expression of strategic innocence — and without a word, picked him up by the scruff and deposited him directly into the kitchen.
"Practice. You know the arrangement."
"This isn't what we agreed on, meow—"
"Go."
Yomogi made a face that communicated genuine grievance, then picked up the spatula and went to the refrigerator with the resigned dignity of someone doing the right thing under protest.
Jude opened the System shop's storage and pulled out a cube-shaped container — transparent, non-terrestrial material, smooth to the touch, about the size of a large thermos. It glowed faintly purple from the liquid inside. He had opinions about the color. The vehicle had different opinions about the color.
"It's purple," Jude said.
"It's pink," Satsuki said, already shifting forms.
The motorcycle configuration folded away — wheels retracting, chassis redistributing, limbs extending — and what stood in the living room was a humanoid figure, compact and angular, her chassis marked with the same blue-pink-purple trim as the motorcycle, her eyes lit and very focused on the container in Jude's hand.
She took it. Popped the lid. Tipped it back.
The sound she made was aggressively enthusiastic.
"Slowly," Jude said.
She did not slow down.
Tons, tons, tons—
"You drink like a sailor."
"This is—" she lowered the container briefly to breathe, which she didn't technically need to do, "—a year's worth of energy. Do you know how long it's been since I had a proper charge? Three months on gasoline and solar trickle-feed, Jude. Three months."
"You seemed functional."
"I was rationing."
She finished the container in one more pull and stood for a moment with the empty vessel in both hands, looking satisfied in a way that crossed the line into glazed.
"A full block keeps you running for a year minimum," Jude said. "The last time I bought you one, you fell over. I'm starting to detect a pattern."
"We don't call it 'falling over,'" Satsuki said, with the careful dignity of someone whose speech had begun to drift slightly off-center. "We call it—" She hiccupped. A small shower of sparks came off her left shoulder. "Overcharge-induced temporary neural circuit interruption."
"I call it being drunk."
"Hiccup—"
She lay down on the floor with the deliberate slowness of someone who had decided lying down was actually a reasonable choice. Within seconds, her vocoder had settled into something rhythmic and soft, and small arcs of electricity were jumping between her fingers at irregular intervals.
Jude looked at her for a moment.
"Every time," he said.
He stepped over her, retrieved the empty container and the solar-charged battery from her vehicle configuration, and fed both into the small machine positioned against the living room wall.
[Single-Person Energy Block Synthesizer (Earth-Modified)]Price: 200,000 Asset Points
Compatible input: chemical energy, electrical energy, thermal energy, solar energy, and most Earth-native energy forms. Output: concentrated Cybertronian-grade high-energy liquid. Universally compatible with most electronic systems. Includes one high-efficiency solar rechargeable battery.
The machine hummed to life. The conversion process was silent and steady — Earth-sourced power going in, purple liquid coming out, slow and precise, filling the new container to about a tenth capacity before Jude closed the lid and set it aside for later.
From the kitchen, the sounds of Yomogi attempting to cook something continued, accompanied by occasional meows of either concentration or quiet suffering.
On the floor, Satsuki snored softly, sparking.
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