Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

I idly start building some furniture for my replica campus. Solid things like desks, chairs, and tables are easy. Upholstery is hard, like the carpets, so I just put solid shapes in where couches and beds should be. I’m surprised at the number and variety of beds in the original campus’s Residence. Some of them are huge enough to sleep a dozen. And so many giant bathtubs that push up on the threshold of what I’d call a hot tub.

Old pervert.

I shudder. It’s not the first time that my hyper-awareness of everything has brought awkwardness with it. It’s a lot of work to give everyone around me a decent level of privacy. The default settings that the implant came with are uncomfortably invasive. I’ve got it set up now so that bathrooms and bedrooms automatically clear themselves of bots if anyone is inside. Which reminds me, I should hook my upgraded sibs up with my settings changes. I don’t think they want to be creepy any more than I do. I make a task to remember that and link it to Evan, Louise, and Andrea’s entries in my database.

I wonder what Chad did. Did he just keep his cloud size low enough that it wasn’t an issue? Did he do what I did? Or does he just snoop on everyone all the time? I didn’t see a lot of his bots all over when he was still here, so I suspect that it was the first, but then I think of how he was always eyeing the younger nannies. Maybe it was the creepy option.

Back to the spreadsheets. I think we can get to a sustainable financial state pretty quickly once Father is dead. A huge amount of the Institute’s operating expenses are payouts to the mothers for each new child. That cost swamps everything else we’re paying for. The next highest expense is the legal team. Digging into the line items in that billing, most of the work they do is the contracts and NDAs for the prospective mothers. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that buying children, even your own children, isn’t cheap. The maintenance of the campus, staff costs, development team, and support staff are all relatively affordable compared to paying for Father’s sex drive and its consequences. So, getting rid of Father should give us a great shortcut toward getting us solvent.

Obviously I can’t pitch that to him as the solution, so I spend the rest of the day coming up with complex pricing schemes for combinations of services and products that look like they could potentially work. It won’t be long now before I’ll be able to drop that busywork.