[b]World Trade Center, Manhattan[/b]

	The control room in the basement of the Twin Towers was cold, metallic, and grey. Computer consoles ringed a vaguely octagonal room and walkways stuck to the walls of the tall ceiling. It reminded Sandra of a missile silo, almost. In the middle of this silo was a pillar with a glowing green computer terminal. Wires and cables ringed the floor and were suspended from the ceiling: her mother had spent two years fixing up The Economist and never could get it all the way tidied up. Sandra didn’t touch most things: she was afraid of breaking him.

	She had put a small living room there for her conversations with him. A floral rug covered up the bare floor, letting Sandra walk around and take off her slippers without feeling the cold steel underneath her feet. A lone recliner with a coffee table topped by a vase of flowers reminded her of her own apartment in the tower. She tapped at her cup of coffee, listening to the quiet humming as The Economist thought through a question.

	“Indian Point, Indian Point,” he muttered. Sandra cocked her head.

	“What do you mean?” she asked.

	“Well there’s so much to it!” The Economist said quickly. “The fusion reactor could produce over a hundred-thousand megawatt-hours annually. It had a patented high density toroidal containment unit developed with secret government funding from WestTek.”

	“Did you just find their sales brochure?” Sandra responded dryly, stirring some sugar into her coffee.

	“Well yes,” admitted The Economist. “But there were no court cases filed for false advertising and the actual generation data appears fairly close to the advertisement, within five percent variance.”

	It was a lot of energy: New York City was running on fumes, its own grid unable to keep up with demand outside of localized fusion reactors. There was a power grid running throughout the city but only rarely could neighborhoods draw from a centralized source. Much of the city was an apocalyptic hack job, and much of that infrastructure was damaged after the war. There was a reason why some of the alleys and streets looked like spider webs of electrical wires. Maintenance was a pain in the ass and it was often easier to just hack in a new cable than replace an existing one.

	“Curious, when I look at where all the power is supposed to go there are things that don’t give a return value. And not because the information is restricted,” The Economist said.

	Sandra leaned back in her recliner. “What do you mean? There are things offline?”

	“Precisely. And mostly government things. City government tools and subroutines. Every department answered to one source.”

	“One source… Another AI?”

	The Economist scoffed, or at least attempted to. “I hope not. Nobody likes competition. I’ve been enjoying my little monopoly, you know. If the SEC were still around they’d fine us into oblivion! But the building plans for city hall have a bunch of secret tunnels and underground facilities like this place, I would not be surprised. I’m not convinced the military managed to shoot down all those incoming missiles by themselves. They needed coordination, and it wasn’t me.”

	Sandra nodded. “It would be worth a shot.”

	The Economist chuckled, its electronic laugh reverberating throughout the control room. The console’s screen seemed to brighten with his chuckling. “Well, you know, maybe someone can lighten the load over here. You know how much it isn’t my job running day to day operations? I’m a CEO, not middle management, baby!”

	Sandra was not amused. But she was used to him by now. She gestured around the room at the computational equipment scattered across the floor. “It may require some repairs. You know, like my mother had to do to you.”

	“Maybe not as much as you’d think!” The Economist replied with a wink of his computer monitor. “In 2073, New York City signed a contract with QuickFix! Repair Technologies. QFRT on the market, if you want to make some long plays on it. Not that I’ll divulge insider trading recommendations, that’d be illegal.”

	Another electronic wink. Sandra raised her eyebrow. He had never mentioned anything about automated repair systems before.

	“See, some of the city’s municipal repair bots had QuickFix software loaded into their subroutines. I’ll go ahead and print out their lot numbers for you so you can take it to the suits upstairs.”

	In the distance, a printer whirred and began churning out a document of data into a carboard box that Sandra had placed underneath its tray. The Economist had learned not to blurt random numbers at Sandra by now: an executive summary of his babbling was much better for the City Council.

	“If there is some sort of AI, and if that QuickFix contract had been executed… I only say ‘if’ because you and I both know how slow the… ehem… [i]public sector[/i] works… then these bots will automatically connect to the AI’s network and start executing repair subroutines. We’d have these bots working day and night down a patented civil defense repair and reconstruction priority task list to restore essential services and city functions. 24/7! And we don’t have to pay ‘em overtime like some union workers, we’ve got our own metal scabs right here in town, baby.”

	Sandra nodded, crossing her arms again. The City had been working on restoring what it could based off of old blueprints, but some of these systems were so degraded and damaged that they only caused bigger problems. If this software was really integrated into a government AI, the humans wouldn’t need to solve that problem.

	“So what’s the catch?” she asked. “You tell me all the time, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

	“Absolutely, my dear,” The Economist said. “Nobody works for free! Well, except me, because I’m a robot slave down here in a basement. Maybe I should take back what I said about unions.”

	“You know I never thought I’d see th-”

	“Just kidding!” The Economist laughed again. “Anyways, yes, Indian Point has power line connections all over the tri-state region. This includes almost a hundred factories and industrial facilities, dozens of towns, rail networks, and quite a few military installations. I actually have no idea what many of these places look like. I was only able to quickly gather data on close-by corporations and entities using NYPD counterespionage warrants in the hours before the war because everyone else was distracted. But out in the country? I wasn’t able to get that far – that’s why I’ve needed you to manually input data into me.”

	“We’d just be flying blind?”

	“Well, sort of. I am 65.67% certain that there are no hordes of killer robots out there. Maybe just one or two individual killer robots per county, but that’s not a lot when you have a laser gun from Brooklyn AA&E. But we may be giving our competitors an advantage. I would let the suits figure out if they want those Gunners up in Albany to have factories in their cute little trading port. I’ll print out everything I have!”

	The printer whirred again as document after document floated down into the cardboard box below it. Sandra looked over to watch it fill up slowly and methodically. “I still think they’ll do it,” she said.

	“Hell, I would do it if I were them. After all, risk is part of the market,” the AI said flatly. He chuckled again. “Well it’s been a good talk, Sandra. I’ll let you go figure this out.”

	Sandra stood up from her chair and set the empty coffee mug down on the table. She bid The Economist farewell and walked over to her cardboard box of documents that now had some heft to it. She sighed, picking up the information before trudging over to the waiting elevator. She remembered when her mother got too old to carry up The Economist’s printouts: teenaged Sandra would bear the load instead. She remembered getting bored waiting around while her mom talked about the very same things she quizzed The Economist on today. Sandra got into the elevator and pressed the button to shoot up into the tower proper. As the door closed and The Economist could no longer hear her, she laughed. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same: including that damned AI.