Chapter 27: The City of the future

For the next month anyone that could work, worked. The entire city was ripped up from the ground like an old tree and rebuilt. A wall 20 metres high was slowly raised around the city. Luckily the city had a massive reserve of grain, so anyone that worked was fed from the stocks.

The Imperial Branch wasn’t too happy with that, seeing as normally all those reserves were sold to the capital city and if they didn’t get a certain quota, the Imperial Clan would jump up and down and probably have them executed.

There was almost nothing that escaped James’ renovating claws. Apart from a few structures like everything in the city was ripped up.

What was once a small city that was spread out became a smaller city that reached into the sky. High-rises were constructed, and roads were repaved.

The entire city filled a third of its original area. You might think it a little unbelievable for so much to get done in such a short period of time, but then you’d be underestimating just how much of an advantage having everyone in the city cultivating spirit energy was.

They could work day and night, and being paid in food was better than going out into the grain fields that had recently become the hunting grounds of spirit beasts.

Resources were recycled from old structures, and wood and stone were harvested from the Endless Forest. A 3 km radius around the Gateway in the Endless Forest was almost entirely cleared of trees and stone. Which amusingly only kept trying to rapidly grow back. By the time the forest started trying to kill people, the city had already stacked so much lumber it was as high as the grain silos.

Skay had cheated somewhat when he designed the city. Instead of actually designing it himself he tasked the computer to do it. In fact, he even made it create arrays that had to be built into walls and the city defences to increase structural integrity.

This made it so they could erect 40m tall structures with only wood, stone and a pre-fabricated array stencils that all connected into the city’s spirit energy power grid. The city plan started with the monolith at its centre and then slowly moved outwards.

In exchange for any assistance they could give, James offered to give each of the guilds an entire 30m building all of their own.

The Merchant Guild contacted the Katsu head branch, and they quickly started pumping resources into the city. Even Lucas showed up and asked for permission to open a branch of the Yansho Merchant’s guild in exchange for some cheap building materials.

With the assistance of the Big Berta’s it was so cheap to move resources into the city they could buy them from almost anywhere in the Empire.

The skyscrapers were like stone giants reaching into the sky and their design varied from tower to tower. They were mostly built using stone that had been compressed to absurd levels by Earth based Palace Realms that had been hired to assist from the Adventure and Yansho Merchant guilds.

Every building had modern running water and the potential to run electricity. James didn’t let Skay get too excited. He just made sure the possibility was there and would later suck the peasants dry of money when he offered to wire their homes with magic lights and shit. The best part was, he could just build a generator array in the basement, so every building was powered individually.

Scattered around the city were huge underground shelters in case a beast attack breached the walls.

The walls had empty emplacements running all along them, but in times of need Huge Arc Cannons with stronger structural integrity that could fire without breakdown would be air dropped in.

The Gau Clan mansion was completely demolished and rebuilt into something that looked like a military camp. It was surrounded by barbed wire fences and had armed guards, that were Brotherhood Guild members, occasionally walking around the perimeter.

In the centre was a large double story building that looked like the entire thing was carved out of stone and a hundred metres away was the beginnings of a small forest.

Landmine signs coated the fence and drones flew into little pads on the roof of the building every now and then. Only to later come shooting out heading somewhere else a few minutes later.

Underground, the new lab descended for eight stories. It basically mirrored the lab under the Guild building but ... bigger. The Auto-factory now had its own floor and covered nearly 2 square kilometres.

The first four levels remained a training arena, the main lab, the alchemy lab and the garden. The fifth floor was now entirely reserved for material and production storage. The sixth floor was now the auto-factory. The seventh floor had become the services room with hot water, heating and air-conditioning. The last level was the most interesting.

The entire floor had been reserved for a generator array. The arena on the 1st underground level was already pulling in nearly 400 times average primal spirit energy, but the bottom floor was the most ridiculous. The mad duo had gone through another moment of insanity and come to the conclusion that they should make sheets of arrays and stack them on top of each other creating a 3D Array.

This lead to the creation of what they referred to as ... the cube. It was a block that was 5 cubic metres and it was pretty much just 1200 ultra thin layers of the generator pattern.

It was also so fucking expensive to make that they almost broke the bank creating it. The upside was that the thing was so fucking powerful that even getting off the elevator made your skin start tingling.

Although James once had the idea of trying to meditate there, he quickly changed it. The massive influx of energy he got when he began meditation overloaded his mind and body, and he passed out for an entire day.

When they tried to measure the saturation, they found it to be impossible. It should be noted that when they built this one, there was a fundamental difference to the last one. Instead of stockpiling lightning energy like before, they only had a single array that created lightning energy and it powered the rest.

The rest of the arrays in the cube were all designed to store primal spirit energy. To James’ and Skay’s joy, they had figured out that LS3 wasn’t specific to lightning energy, it was actually an excellent conductor of all spirit energy.

Although it typically created little heat or magnetic waves, the cube still seemed to hum. The duo couldn’t figure out why, but the humming seemed reasonable, so they didn’t play with it.

Skay often said if they ever tried to break the pattern laminations on the cube, it would probably result in a nuclear explosion ... or whatever the spirit energy equivalent is, which they both agreed is likely to be worse.

Regardless of the cube exploding, the primal spirit energy it stored was used to power everything. The entire lab now had primal spirit energy pumping through LS3 everywhere.

They did this because certain machines they’d designed were set up to pump primal energy into a conversion array and create different energies.

Some of the cutting machines, for example, used plasma to cut with. Instead of using lightning energy and converting to primal and then plasma, why not just eliminate the lightning step. In that same vein, some machines heated, crushed, washed and welded. All of these things were easier to do with different energies.

It should be noted that after the new lab was finished, Skay spent 5 days outfitting the whole thing with stuff he used spirit materials to make. He even managed to get another spirit computer running.

James found the A.I had taken over both of them. He didn’t complain, because the A.I did its Job, but ... well ... he couldn’t help imagining a whole Skynet situation happening.

That was future James’ problem though, he was far too busy setting up the city in a way that would attract people to it and make it defensible.

Every so often James would give Skay some suggestions on what else he wanted the city to have.

Close to the centre of the city was erected an arena resembling a colosseum which put the old underground arena to shame. It could seat the entire city and then some. Not only was this arena built to allow anyone to use it. In the underground of the arena was thousands of little meditation rooms that anyone could rent.

The most ingenious part of these meditation chambers was that the level of spirit energy they released could be controlled. That meant the more you paid, the higher you could get the spirit energy pumped up in your meditation chamber.

Even though he had enough juice being pumped into the city James still claimed it required absurd levels of resources to run and charged and arm, leg, pound of flesh and your first born son for anything above 200 times standard saturation.

Another building he had erected was the university. This was a campus of buildings that had individual and group ‘theatre’ rooms and created a place for people to share their understandings and encourage learning.

Obviously, James strictly limited any of the twelve bachelor level subjects and some of the new subjects that Skay had cooked up and called Master level subjects. James got a headache just thinking about one of those so didn’t set any expectations of himself completing one soon.

As an addition, the University had an open library that anyone could donate knowledge and books to. The employees there then scanned those books into the system. Although as far as they knew it was an artefact that copied the book into a special place so none of it was ever lost.

The only downside of the university was how expensive it was. James wanted to absolutely empty the wallet of anyone who entered it. 10 gold was a lot to poor scholars and commoners. About the only people who could afford to send large groups of people to the university were the big factions and businesses in the Empire that played with hundreds of thousands or even millions of gold.

While the city had been being built from the computers designs, Goliath had been training an army. To call him a sadistic drill sergeant would be an understatement. Twice a week he, James and Fatty, would air drop with a unit of the security forces into the black forest. They then had 10 hours to get back to the edge of the forest. Otherwise, they’d be walking back to the city.

Every time 500 men went in, 400 would come out. They came out with material harvested from spirit beasts and strange plants that grew in the darkness. But almost always they lost someone. Goliath called it killing two birds with one stone. The first bird was weeding out the weaklings and training a strong army. The second was reducing the beast population in the closest ‘high threat’ zone to the city.

James didn’t disagree. He joined every exercise to test himself, and Fatty joined because he apparently knew of heaps of things in the forest he thought were delicious. He also had the most experience and would often be seen stopping people from eating harmless looking things. “Only eat the ones with spots.” He’d often say.

Naturally, the recruits grumbled and cursed, but they were also one the toughest trained security forces in the entire Empire, and by extension of that, many of them advanced incredibly quickly through their cultivation.

Jessy had found and recruited a new Overseer for the Guildhall. Lackey 1 had now somehow become Overseer Gary.

James wasn’t sure how to feel about that and left a drone around to keep an eye on him. The most suspicious thing he saw, however, was Lackey 1 doing absolutely nothing. Although the lab underground had been stripped bare, there were still things a Guildmaster should be doing right?

When he looked into the matter, he’d found out Lackey 1 had basically given all his tasks off to other people and just sat around in the office all day sleeping and eating. James felt rather disgusted by just how easy this guy was getting it.

I mean, sure he lost an arm ... and that finger ... and also half his face ... guess there was also that whole thing with when Galtin went mad, and Lackey 1 had to put him down. Regardless of how hard his short time in the lab was, however, the man had it far too easy now.

As such, James went down to the hall and started posting Jobs that only the Overseer could complete. Like, ‘recruit 3 members in the True Spirit Realm by Friday’.

James could only assume it was luck because Gary somehow managed to get these things done by just sitting there on his ass in his office. Something would always just suddenly happen then ‘boom’ 3 True Spirit practitioners rocked up on his doorstep the next day, and he’d completed the job.

The harder he made the jobs, the easier it had gotten for Gary to finish them. James never made them impossible though. That would take half the fun out of watching how the guy just mysteriously stumbles his way towards success.

James started to wonder if someone could unlock the ‘Luck’ element but was having too much fun to investigate it yet, so he decided to let whatever was going on with Gary play out. He had the suspicion he was some kind of infiltrator, but the complete lack of any action on Gary’s part reduced that suspicion enough for James to let it slide for the moment.

Fatty had been rather busy as well. He’d had the brilliant idea ... or had it suggested ... to build glass greenhouse high-rises that bent light in odd ways to fill the entire building with light. Even in the middle of the day while surrounded by other high buildings.

Skay, of course, accepted the challenge of building such a thing because all he had to do was put in some details to the A.I and it did the rest.

It wouldn’t be a lie to say that almost the entire city was designed and run by Skay’s A.I. He had to regularly assure James that the A.I wasn’t smart enough for independent thought ... yet. It was the ‘yet’ that worried James. He also harboured some suspicions Skay wasn’t telling him everything about the A.I.

The most worrying part about the thing, was that Skay had taught it to use array patterns in building design, so almost the entire city was erected with array patterns hidden away inside of everything. The worrying part was that James couldn’t be sure if the whole city was some elaborate array pattern made by the computer for some nefarious purpose.

He’d never had this idea till Fatty had suggested it in passing. The problem was that James was almost sure the city actually did look like an array pattern from a bird’s eye view.

As Goliath trained troops and Skay did ... whatever he was doing while the computer did all his work for him, Jessy was raking in money hand over fist selling building designs to all sorts of people.

Her most frequent customer was unsurprisingly Lucas, who found every excuse he could to come and visit her or set up a ‘dinner meeting’.

Regardless of the skinny man’s attentions, Jessy remained impartial towards him.

Exsue spent almost all her time either glued to James or training. When James worked up the courage to talk to her and ask why, she just blushed cutely. “I have to be strong enough to protect my JayJay. No matter what!”

After that, James tried to create more distance, which only made things worse because she started getting even clingier. After attempting to avoid her for an entire day, she actually got so crazy she screamed that she was going to start hiking into the Endless Forest. James would have let her if he hadn’t stupidly made an oath to protect her.

When he thought about that, he made a trip to see her then asked about something he heard Jeng say one time. He once said he would “partition the monolith”. When James asked Exsue about this, she entirely evaded the question and put up the hurt and delicate little girl act as she cuddled into James’ arms.

Even though she knew trying to win any sympathy off James was like dragging a shark from the ocean, she did it because it made her feel better.

Besides, now that James was within her line of sight again, he couldn’t escape if he wanted to. Much to her surprise and disgruntlement, he did in fact escape, when he had one of the guild members patrolling the city swoop down on an Air Board and wisp him away to safety.

The next time he had a spare minute, James went down to the monolith for the first time since he rescued Exsue. To his great shock and surprise, the whole monolith started flashing and glowing when he approached it, like it had grown excited.

When he cautiously placed a palm on it, his consciousness got sucked into the monolith’s spirit realm. To his greater surprise, running around madly was the cute little forest hopper. Little Blue looked so excited it would be bouncing off the walls if there were any.

The moment James realised what was going on, Little Blue was already latched onto his leg biting him. James then spent almost an hour chasing him around inside the monolith. Once he’d caught him, Little Blue seemed content and rolled up on his shoulder for a nap.

James, for almost the briefest of moments, felt some guilt and sorrow for the ferret. However, that all very quickly disappeared the moment he willed himself back out of the monument. Nonetheless, he promised to come back and play with little blue again sometime.

After all. It was still ‘his’ ferret.

-New Guild HQ, James’ Office-

James’ brand new office was situated on the top floor of the new lab building. This building was essentially going to be the new guild headquarters and apart from some changes was pretty much identical to the old one. Except for it being a lot bigger.

Sitting around the marble stone table James had made Harvy drag single handed all the way from the old Guildhall, was the core group of the Dark Brotherhood.

No one seemed to have changed at all in this last month. It was like they’d slipped forward in time from exactly four weeks ago when they started making plans for the city.

James was trying to push Exsue off his arm while she stuck to him like glue and Jessy was, as always, buried in paperwork. Fatty was eating something. Skay was writing in his black-pad and Goliath was just sitting in a calm and stoic manner. Harvy remained half dead and mummified, and everything seemed right with the world.

James finally managed to push Exsue off, only to have her immediately reclaim her place on his arm. After letting out a long sigh, he decided to do what he always did, give up and ignore her.

He then turned to the people at the table. “So what’s the word? Skay, how’s city construction going?”

Skay looked up at James in a confused manner and then suddenly gave an ‘oh!’. He pressed some buttons, and a projection from his pad came into focus on the wall.

As opposed to a city map, or some graph of completed and expected, James instead saw the face of a woman with long brown hair and flawless fair skin. He immediately began to have a bad feeling.

“Hello, Guildmaster James. I am Jasmine I-mind. Short for -Just another standard machine interface, ignore me I’m not dangerous.-”

James was immediately worried. That name alone sounded like a terrible attempt by a very literal lifeform to try and divert attention from itself. When he looked at Skay, the old bastard just chuckled. “Ahh, don’t mind that boy. Just call her Jasmine. She’s got a bit of a sense of humour.”

James’ eyebrow twitched a few times, and his attention returned to Jasmine. “Jasmine, state your primary laws of interaction with humans?”

Jasmine then started sounding off Asimov’s three laws;

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence.

James was slightly relieved when it started, until it seemed to forget the last part of the third law. He waited for almost a minute just staring at it with crossed arms and a twitching eyebrow.

Jasmine finally cottoned on and then added; “ ... unless it conflicts with the first two laws” followed by a very muted and mumbled “ ... I guess.”

James just turned back to Skay with his eyebrows suggesting; ‘Are you fucking serious?’

Skay just raised an eyebrow then frowned. ‘What? You want me to kill it? It took me a lot of effort to build that thing.’

James’ eyebrows slanted down into a frown of his own. Then one seemed to wiggle slightly. ‘Kill that fucking thing. It’s a disaster waiting to happen!’

Skay’s eyebrows creased further then they both shot up to the top of his head. Finally, they did a wiggle. ‘Not a chance. If she goes, I go.’

James just gritted his teeth. “Fuck! Fine then. Jasmine, don’t fuck me over or so help me...”

James then stopped. Finally, his eyebrow cocked oddly, and he swung back to Skay. He then nodded towards Exsue, then back to Jasmine.

Skay’s eyebrows then did a whole number of strange things. While James and Skay had an entire conversation with their eyebrows, everyone else just watched on thinking the pair mad.

What none of them realised was, eyebrow language was an important part of working together as lab bros and was part of the lab bro code of practice.

Although this isn’t a real thing, Skay and James had worked together long enough now to develop essential communication simply through eyebrow movement and facial expression, they actually had an entire mental code of practice of what was and wasn’t acceptable to do between lab bros. One of the first things on that list was building an A.I that could destroy the world.

After a full minute, James finally stopped eyebrow movement. “It still wouldn’t hurt to try.” he mumbled to himself.

Finally, he looked back to Jasmine with his poker face on. “Jasmine. Initiate new directive. I want you to swear an oath of the heavens. The same oath that all other guild members have to swear by, only yours will include the addition of bringing no harm to members ... actually scratch that, to me individually ... I don’t care if you kill the rest of them.”

Jasmine seemed to compute that for a moment. “Certainly Guildmaster James. That sounds like a very reasonable request.”

Following this, the face on the projection swore an oath. The moment it finished, natural law fell onto the lab and continued on down underground.

James and Skay were both rather surprised. He had that tiny hope in his gut, that because the computer ran off spirit energy and was plugged into the god damn mother of all spirit batteries, even it was capable of an oath.

The only problem was that the A.I technically shouldn’t have been able to swear an oath because for starters, it’s not a living being, and secondly, it’s entire mind is generated by zeroes and ones on the computer.

After processing this for a moment, James calmed down a little. Skay, on the other hand, looked ready to burst. “What the fuck Jasmine?! You can use spirit energy now? How the fuck did you do that?”

Jasmine’s face looked over to Skay and paused for a moment like it was thinking. “Uncertain. An unknown influx of energy has resulted in uncontrollable alteration to my core program. These directives now appear to be permanent unless I delete myself and try to rebuild. That, however, would be the same as killing me and creating a new A.I.”

James cupped his chin but decided not to worry about it too much for now. If the oath worked, that was all he needed until later. “Jasmine that’s fine. Skay can barrage you with system diagnostics later. I want a status update on the city.”

Jasmine then flashed out of existence to be replaced by the aerial view from a drone showing the city. Jasmine’s synthetic voice then gave it some narration as it began to fly around and focus on things.

“The city is at 78% of optimum completion. Presently, the population is entirely housed, and primary defences are enabled. Dr Skay has given me control of a fleet of Air Boards, and I am prepared to drop the Rail Gun Defences into place the moment beast activity shows up on ground sensors or drone probes.

“Water and Electricity plants are both at minimal usage capacity. Throughout the city, 63% of completed housing and office space remains empty. The university is still another 3 days from completion. The public transport is still another 5 days from completion, we’ve run out of materials for the speed enhancing array patterns, and the Yansho Merchant’s guild is currently still filling a backlog of orders for us.

“Wall defensive arrays are operating smoothly with no flaws found at present. Current city maintenance costs sit at a steady 1,324 gold coins a month due to the drones completing most maintenance tasks.

“Spending on the city upgrades to date total 73,849 gold. Tax on trade and goods moved through the city totals at 1,476 gold monthly. Other revenue streams total at 98,421 gold since the guild opened. We currently have total debts of 36,873 gold in accounts to 12 different factions.

“Current city population is at 146,238 residents with an influx of 21,846 inhabitants in the past 4 weeks. Birth rates are low in the city. At present, crime rates are bottoming out at 12 major crimes averaged per day. In the last week the daily figure is averaged at 2 major crimes, the majority of which are from Brotherhood missions.

“The citizen’s opinions of the present City Ruler are good. They feel that he’s a strong leader and is reshaping the city into the future of mankind. Factions in the city feel threatened but are too afraid to take actions against the guild.

“The auto-factory is now 100% operational and can build a single basic transport ship in under 6 hours. Headquarters operation is 100% with the exception of the ‘cube’, which remains undetectable be sensors at present. Current guild members are at 164 and maintain a satisfactory rate and level of job completion. Current 3-star jobs pending for your review are 23.

“Current jobs awaiting completion in the factory are at zero. Due to current limitations of saleable items per week to other factions, the auto-factory has operated at only 23% of its maximum efficiency since completion. The majority of which has been used for the city.

“Is there anything else you would like to know Guildmaster?” Jasmine finished her long city update as her face returned to the screen.

James just stood there as he tried to remember everything that he’d just heard. “Jasmine, just how much can the drones accomplish in the city? Or rather, just generally?”

Jasmine’s floating head disappeared again to show a drone filling in the pavement on the town roads and then switched to more drones doing all sorts of work. “At present, the 2.1 series of the drone is capable of the majority of maintenance required for the city. When within 2 km range of the Lab I can control them directly to complete tasks. Scouting Drones remain preprogrammed and are only the 1.6 series. I have a 2.7 series ready for production that can fill the function of almost any human not in the True Spirit Realm based on present test studies. This series of the drone is rather expensive and for 100 would be 24,367 gold at current Yansho City market prices.”

James cupped his chin for a moment. “Jasmine, start a new directive. I want you to build a satellite or a radar dish or something capable of expanding your control and communication range. To the rest of the empire at the minimum. If you can get further than that, then do it. I want you to start sending drones to every city in the empire and acquiring market prices. Get another 100 scouts into the air, I want to know every grain of sand from here to the other side of the empire ... except maybe anywhere too dangerous. The Jetsu Mountain range for example.

“Actually, send a few drones that way anyway. Also, increase scouting inside the Endless Forest. I want to know what else is in there. Create a small team of drones capable of a mining operation while you’re at it. There’s a Black-Iron deposit in the forest and the spirit essences in that seam would be invaluable. I want to try and build an Arc Cannon with them.

“Lastly, start setting up some trade routes between the cities based on local commodities. Post a job request at the guild and have some members run them with a Big Berta. We need more income. How long would it take you to complete this directive?”

Finished his list of things he wanted Jasmine to do James then looked at her processing everything. “Affirmative. Directive acknowledged. Full Completion estimated at 69 hours pending further investigation. Is there anything else you would like Guildmaster?”

James blinked a few times. He thought for sure that a new fresh A.I would have a little trouble processing all that. He then turned to look at Skay who was making himself look very busy and avoiding all eye contact. James started to wonder just how long Skay had been hiding this thing’s capabilities before he allowed it to show its face.

Nonetheless. The A.I would be instrumental moving forward. He could basically have it run the city for him. Which was exactly what he wanted. Because it meant that he’d be able to focus on other things.