Crafter's Heart by Kris Schnee

Author:Kris Schnee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: unknown
Published: 2018-10-17T23:00:00+00:00

9. Grand Exposition

The next step began innocently enough. Sonia said, “Hey, Stan, can you look over the purchase orders for this week?” She used a bit of downtime at the restaurant to sit him down with digital paperwork about its internal operations. She even took control of the resident griffinbot to be with him in person.

Stan looked the forms over. Their ultra-tech transhuman facility bought a lot of tomato sauce, napkins and flour. Between mundane supplies like those and more disturbing things like disposable scalpel handles, there were multiple suppliers to work with. Often Sonia or somebody had to get on the phone about discounts or delays. Sonia wanted the “somebody” to be Stan. In particular, she told him to work on stockpiling certain items for hurricane season.

Sonia explained, “Ludo’s having me shift focus to the year’s big project: the Grand Exposition. It’ll be a showy fair on Cuba with robots and other ‘future’ stuff. There’s foot traffic to plan, employee placement, temp hiring, emergency plans, and partnership deals. It’ll be a glorious mess to set up.” She looked pleased by the prospect, if Stan could read the robot’s expression.

* * *

Stan tried this week to pay closer attention to the customers. “What brings you to Castor?” he asked various people. Or, “Do you work on Sargasso?” for people in that local dress style; he tried to peg other people as residents of the other districts too.

“Oh, I’m no tourist,” one old guy with a Hawaiian shirt said. “Haven’t been in here lately, but I do biofuel maintenance.” Some of the “farming” at Sargasso was about generating liquid fuel rather than food.

“Nice. I just talked with some tourists who said they were surprised there’s an actual town here and it’s not all casinos and mad science labs.”

The man said, “Yeah, we’re the ones who make this place work. The rest is icing. Not to say your place isn’t important too. The… clinic creeps me out, but I like having more restaurants around for variety.”

The same day a boy and his parents were devouring Cuban sandwiches, a complicated Florida recipe the new chef had put on the menu. They were chatting with a cartoon kangaroo on a screen like he was the boy’s own sister. “How do you know each other?” Stan asked delicately while refilling the humans’ sodas.

The kid had a big grin. “Sheila here helps me with my homework. I was doing bad in school and she set up a game about mining for me, with math and stuff in it.”

The roo thumped one big foot. “Joey worked hard and now he’s getting As.”

Stan said, “Congratulations.” He asked the parents, “If I may ask, why visit the Fun Zone instead of playing at home?”

The father laughed. “I asked that too. We’re just taking a side trip here while visiting Cuba, and my boy wanted to eat ‘someplace normal for once’. And then there’s the VR. We might come back for the Exposition when it opens.”

“Can we?” said the boy.

Another tourist later that day was a dour-looking businessman, intent on a laptop full of financial data.

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