17 - Criminality

“How much for this?” Maya asked holding up a piece of jewelry from her Treasure Heap. She had gone back to the truck to retrieve some valuables to see if Tender would be willing to purchase her ill gotten goods. So far riches were not pouring in.

“Ten credits,” Tender replied.

“How much for this,” Maya held up another piece.

“Ten credits.”

“How much is a credit?” Maya asked.

“One credit.”

“What can I buy with a credit?”

“Nothing here.”

“Y’know, historians generally use the cost of an average meal to determine the exchange rates between two different eras,” Maya stated.

“What’s that have to do with anything?”

“How much is an average meal?”

“We don’t sell food.”

“Well, like in general, y’know.”

“We don’t sell food. We only serve intoxicating consumables,” Tender replied.

“Okay, but like if you did sell food, how much would it cost?”

“I’m sorry, we don’t sell food. If people came here to eat, then I’d feel real bad for them.”

“Fine. Okay, what’s your cheapest beer?”

“We don’t sell beer?”

“Could this be actual hell?” Maya asked the ceiling.

“What’s that?” the AI asked.

“How much for an intoxicating beverage that would not be considered poison for my species?”

“Technically-“

“Jesus, just give me the price for booze!” Maya snapped.

“Ten credits.”

“Don’t be that kind of asshole,” Maya growled.

“No, the lowest costing beverage that falls into the intoxicating but not killing you range is ten credits. We only have a small selection that will appeal to your biology,” Tender said.

Maya slapped down a piece of looted jewelry and the AI scooped it up. A few moments later, a large glass mug plopped down before her and she could smell the alcohol wafting off of it.

“What the heck?” Maya looked at the mug. “Jesus, did you just dump a whole bottle of whiskey into this or what?”

When she had turned twenty one, at midnight, her friends had given her a Big Girl one liter stein of vodka and juice.She luckily hadn’t died from alcohol poisoning, but she had awakened with, at the time, the worst hangover ever. She had sworn off of vodka from then on and the smell haunted her dreams.

The mug was roughly a liter.Maya’s eyes watered as she inhaled the near visible fumes of alcohol coming out of the mug.

“It’s standard serving for level ten and higher,” Tender replied.

“Does having a higher level make you more alcohol tolerant?” Maya asked.

“It tends to reduce the effects of alcohol and other mind altering intoxicants. High Physical attributes tend to keep you from having a good time.”

“Where’s my discount?” Maya demanded.

The AI seemed to almost sigh and it waved its hand.

Monetary Transfer from Tender, PPP

1 Universal Credit

“I’m rich,” Maya smirked and took a sip from her mug. She coughed as it burned its way down into her soul. “Worth it.”

***

“Do you normally just buy random jewelry from strangers?” Maya asked as she and Tender finished up their little business exchange. Looting the Hangy of items had seemed like a profitable exercise, but it turned out that most of the items she had were worthless. The bartender AI refused the trades for anything she had taken from the Hangy and only purchased the jewelry.

“Did you steal these?” the AI asked.

“Does it matter?”

“No.System Rules apply on Open Worlds. You have it on yourself, you own it. If you want to keep it, you make sure to keep it,” the AI stated.

“Sounds like a real friendly place,” Maya took another sip from her mug.

The burning sensation, the dizzying fumes, and the godawful taste weren’t that bad. She thought she was getting used to it.A friend from before, Ronny, had thought of himself as an inventor of cocktails, but all he had ever produced were horrid mixtures. As it had been free booze, no one declined to finish their drinks.Compared to Ronny’s creations, this was ambrosia.

“What do you got to sell?” Maya asked.

“Intoxicants.”

“No knowledge cubes, tools, and supplies?” Maya asked.

“Go to a general store,” the AI replied.

“Weapons?”

“Go to a weapon store.”

“Got services? Like a shower I can rent?”

“Shower? Why would we have a shower?”

“I don’t know, a hard day of apparently monster hunting on Haltor?” Maya said.

“No. We have no showers you can rent.”

“Great.” Maya sighed and drummed her fingers on the bartop. She glanced around again and shuddered at the dead bodies still piled around the place. The naked waitress was standing terrifyingly still in a corner, a smile plastered on her face. The needle like teeth adding to the terror she exuded.

“I need to talk to your manager,” Maya said.

“Tommoth has not made an appearance in three days,” the AI replied.

“Yeah, but he’s got an office right? Take me to it.”

“I cannot.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“I am built into this station and lack mobility,” the AI replied.

Maya leaned over the bar and stared at the machine. It was built into the bar, a small track held its body up and allowed it to move from side to side and its long arms allowed it to reach all the shelves laden with booze.It was disconcerting to see the top fleshy half of Tender and then the lower mechanical half.

Also, it seemed Tender didn’t clean up his area very well.

“Oh, damn. I’m sorry,” Maya said. “Just point me the way.”

The AI jerked its thumb over its shoulder and Maya saw a hall with the sign “Pleasure Rooms” labeling it.

“Pleasure rooms?” Maya asked.

“Go beyond it, you’ll see another sign,” the AI replied.

Maya nodded and took another sip of her drink. It burned and she took a breath. This is a new experience, Maya thought. Drinking while surrounded by the dead and speaking to a machine.Hopefully, no bad karma for doing so.

She wobbled as she marched toward the Pleasure Rooms, after only a few sips she was already feeling the beverage’s effects.She held her mug tightly and walked into the hallway.

The Pleasure Room turned out to be a couple of circular rooms that seemed to be filled with some kind of electronics. Maya looked at them for a moment, seeing wires and machinery clogging up the room. She shrugged and continued forward.Everyone had their kinks.

She arrived to a door labeled “Manager”. Like all futuristic doors she had seen, there was no knob. Instead, there was a panel to the side of the door that one would hit and it would open. Maya hit the panel and it gave a beep, but nothing else. She hit it again. Nothing.

“You gotta work for things,” Maya muttered as she looked down at the door panel before her. It read ‘Locked’.

She sipped her drink and got to work.

The problem with the Hangy was that it lacked power. Every door she had seen were futuristic sliding doors with electronic locks on them. Now, without power they were near impossible to unlock. But that didn’t mean the lock picking knowledge Maya had gained from the shady doctor wasn’t useful.

Maya pulled the cover off the panel and exposed the components. It was weird, she realized, the difference between the knowledge she had and what she looked down at was about twenty thousand years, but they were nearly identical. She pulled out a component, a slim translucent crystal, and saw that it had the same part numbers that had been downloaded into her head.

Two different species in two different universes creating the same part and using the same part numbers, now that was not possible.More questions she needed answering. But the identical components made her job easier.

Maya peered at the component and re-slotted it, moving a few other components to cause an error in the locking mechanism. What she was doing, she knew, was a simple thing. The doors weren’t meant to keep out high leveled spies or thieves. It was a low grade, Tier 1 locking mechanism.

On the panel, Maya depressed three buttons simultaneously.That was a force reset for the mechanism. The door gave another beep and when she depressed the button again, it slid open.The weakness of this type of low grade lock was that when it was forced to reset, it would disable the locking mechanism, thereby allowing entry.

Maya wrinkled her nose as a new smell assaulted her.

Tommoth was dead.

***

Tommoth the Manager was dead, but he went out with style. Maya was surprised to see that Tommoth had company and they had died in the midst of ‘enjoying’ one another’s company.

The door lead to a office, a desk, floating display windows from a computer, cabinets, a sofa, soft lighting, and garish, probably pornographic imagery on the walls.They were all of alien creatures in various states of ‘sprawling’. Maya shuddered and continued toward a second door that lead into his personal living quarters.

The stench of death was strong in the room and she found Tommoth and his companion. The living quarters was fairly sparse. A large king sized bed, closet, another room that seemed to be a bathroom and a kitchenette. It looked like someone’s studio apartment.

Maya provided the couple with some dignity, by setting a sheet upon their bodies and looked around the room. There was an atmosphere control panel and she activated it. The buttons were easy to intuit, and she had the room begin venting the smell. Like the rest of the dance club, it was soon smelling of insense and cleanish air. Maya wondered if the incense smell was pleasing to the aliens here. To her it was a bit too spicy.

“I don’t know what to say,” Maya said standing at the foot of the bed. “I feel bad for you all dying. But this club will keep me alive for a bit longer. I only have two weeks before I’m out of everything. So, thanks.”

Maya exited from the living section of the room and returned to the office. The desk held a computer terminal and displayed images of the interior and exterior of the dance club in the floating windows. Maya sat down in a comfortable chair and began scanning the displays.

What she looked at was what she would describe as legitimately sci-fi. The screens before her were floating windows that she could interact with. It was the type of holographic technology she’d always seen in science fiction movies, but made real. Maya played for a moment, just randomly touching the floating windows. They might be holographic, but she could feel resistance when she touched them.After a few minutes of playing around, Maya got back to business.

She was thankful that she had the language module installed, because she knew she would never have understood anything that was spoken or written. Maya scanned the computers and found files and files of business information. Even with future technology, spreadsheets were still a thing.

She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she felt she needed to dig through the stuff for something. That niggling feeling of importance was pushing her forward. She opened a video log made by Tommoth and set it to play, as she continued searching through his files.

Tommoth was a humanoid creature. Tall and lithe, he had red eyes and blue skin with black stripes. He also dressed nicely in what was probably his species equivalent of a three piece suit. It was navy blue with spiraling white patterns.

“We’ve got the structure down,” Tommorth began his log, “This place is worst than we thought. Damn Open Worlds are always filled with the dregs, looking for easy kills.Its the usual core world scraps that think they’ll gain a Tier by hunting mana mutations.” Tommoth laughed. Maya realized she didn’t like the guy. He seemed like an asshole. The arrogance and disdain that flickered across his haughty face. He ran a sleazy club on a shitty world and still felt as if he were better than his customers.

Maya knew her way around a business report and raised an eyebrow in surprise at how many universal credits the place was pulling in. She had a fellow student who had inherited a bar from herparents. Maya had taken the opportunity to grill the girl about the finances of running a bar. It was not a money making machine.She looked at Tommoth’s records and was surprised to see how much in the black he was. The guy was making money hand over fist.

Tender had already implied, well more than implied, outright stated, that Tommoth was willing to buy illegal rogue AI parts. That probably meant he was not what one would call being into legitimate business practices.

It was a bit depressing, Maya thought, that the aliens she had come across were criminals. So much for the great transfer of knowledge when aliens finally came to Earth. This was no Vulcan spaceship helping to bring in a golden age. Just a guy buying illegal stuff on a low Tiered backwater world.

Maya didn’t know how long she was digging through his reports, but she suddenly found herself awake and in the possession of a pretty bad hangover. She looked at the culprit of the hangover and saw that the mug she had been sipping on was half full. She had fallen ‘asleep’ in the office chair going over the records.

Maya had learned quite a few things before she had fallen ‘asleep’. One was that Tommoth was a a criminal. Two Tommoth was laundering money. Three Tommoth had an impressive porn collection. And four, Tommoth had pretty lax security measures for his private information, there were no passwords, no sci-fi locks to disable to get to any of the information on his terminal.

She felt a little miffed by the whole thing. It was one thing to be a criminal, it was another thing to be a stupid criminal. Maya didn’t know how the laws worked in Tommoth’s universe, but anybody with half a brain could have waltzed through his entire terminal and immediately seen what he had been up to. Especially with someone called the Sword of the Universe supposedly deeming all rogue AIs as a menace to their existence and ordering the destruction of them utterly.

Nursing her aching head, Maya groaned as she got to her feet. The room was a comfortable temperature and the smell had all but abated. She walked into the living quarters again, still a bit unsettled by the snuggling corpses and entered the washroom she had seen.

Thankfully Tommoth was humanoid in most of the ways that Maya was, so the facilities were compatible. She immediately found the shower that produced actual hot water. Maya luxuriated under the stream and nearly cried from the sheer joy of it. A week with only a rag and a bottle of water didn’t have the same appeal as a hot shower.

The Redenno Deployable Structure that was the base of the Pleasure Pub was an interesting creation. As Tender had stated, it was a mobile structure that was deployed into low infrastructure worlds. She had found the information on Tommoth’s terminal and had perused it before ‘exhaustion’ had overtaken her.

The pub had almost everything she would need to survive. There was a small mana core that powered the entire structure, there were water recyclers, and even some fabricators to manufacture alcohol using local organics. Parts would be a problem long term, but Maya figured she’d find a way to overcome that problem.

After the refreshing shower, Maya re-entered the living quarters. Trying not to feel as if the eyes of the dead were watching her, Maya dug through Tommoth’s closet. The manager was taller than she was, but had narrow shoulders and long arms. Maya managed to cobble together an outfit, discarding her makeshift clothing.

Shoes were still an issue as Tommoth didn’t wear any. The manager’s feet ended in sharp claws. His partner wore what Maya could only describe as stripper heels. So barefoot and feeling very much better, Maya returned to the office.

Tommoth’s entire computer system, that held all his records and could communicate with every bit of the structure, was a small red box the size of a cigarette pack. Maya scooped it up and put it into the pocket of the vest she wore.She had discovered she could summon the display windows from the terminal as long as she carried the computer with her. It wasn’t heavy, so Maya kept it.

It was through the continuous playing of Tommoth’s logs that Maya had learned one of the petty criminal’s secrets. It also lessened her opinion of the man. What kind of dumb ass was he? Maya could only shake her head.

Dimensional Inventories appeared to be a System Ability. Something that only the System could bestow on someone.Tommoth had stated that smuggling would be far easier if the System had awarded him a Dimensional Inventory, otherwise they had to resort to lesser dimensional storage containers. Maya had brought up that information and discovered through another video where Tommoth was hiding his dimensional storage. It was under a deck panel in the office.

The container was a one cubic foot block of heavy plastic looking material. She read the label on it:

Grazoni Heavy Dimensional Storage Unit - low grade, Tier 2

5 universal standard metric ton limit.

More information followed and Maya read through it quickly. It was the first Tier 2 item she had seen. Nothing she had seen in the rainbow sky hellscape was beyond Tier 1. She turned the box over in her hands and shrugged. It didn’t seem overly special, box wise.

Maya stared at the box for several more minutes before sighing loudly. She had seen what Tommoth had done to open the storage device, it was a palmprint locked item. She glanced toward the door to the living quarters.

Tommoth had stubby claws on his hands, but the palm was filled with swirls and patterns that made it look like a fingerprint.Maya briefly wondered what she was doing, using a dead man’s hand to open up his secret stash of whatever. There was an audible click and a new window appeared from the computer.

Tommo’s Box of Goodies, Stop Looking If You’re Not Me… Hahahaha

“Jesus,” Maya muttered dropping the dead man’s hand. A moment later as she looked into the dimensional storage’s inventory, she spoke again. “Jeeeesus.”