It didn’t take that long for things to calm down after that. It only took a couple of weeks for all the refugees to return to their homes, and the city council stopped acting like complete asses. Things actually appeared to be returning to normal, which meant I could spend more time working on my personal projects and less time putting out fires.

  Instead, I could deal with the little things. Like making deliveries and checking on the neighborhood. Things that were a lot more chilled out than destroying armored columns and overthrowing the government.

  “Why do I have to do this?” I grumbled as I juggled the oversized box I was holding. I knew the door handle was there somewhere, I just couldn’t find it. After about a minute of flailing, Sharron stepped over and opened the door. Turns out the reason I couldn’t find the handle is that it was about half a foot higher than I had been blindly grasping. “Thanks,” I mumbled.

  “You promised to provide regular deliveries of medical supplies and augs to Leah every week," Sharron explained as she stepped out of the shelter and joined me on the street. “And it’s Wednesday.” She too had a box, but it didn’t even reach her chin, while the one I was carrying came right up to my nose. I made a mental note to make all the boxes smaller next time.

  “You want me to carry that for you, boss?” Bob asked behind me. I turned and shot the big bear a dirty look. He was carrying four boxes without any difficulty; I could at least manage one.

  “I’ve got it,” I hissed.

  “You know,” Sharron said, “If you’d told me a year ago that this area could be this clean and safe for people to live in, I would have thought you were insane,” Sharron quipped.

  “It wasn’t fucking easy,” I said, as I tried to get a better grip on my box. “Placing bears on every corner to dissuade anyone from doing anything stupid went a long way. Even with all the security, it still took three fucking months for both the gangs and the corps to stop trying to steal the fucking fabricators I dotted around. I can’t believe they were so persistent, despite the systems frying themselves the instant someone fucked with them, and the fact that the rabbits would arrive within a minute of an alarm.”

  “But you persisted, and now the entire district has access to all sorts of basic furniture, tools, and other things that improve the standard of living for the low cost of raw materials,” Sharron beamed.

  I saw a couple of local merchants wave at us as we passed. I considered waving back, but it was probably impossible with the box.

  It was widely known that the Shelter not only housed a couple of samurai, at least it did once I offered Sharron a floor in the tower, and it was also the source of all the bear security. That marked it as the safest place to do business in this corner of the undercity. It only took a couple of weeks for the side of the road opposite the shelter to become completely full of shops and stalls. The influx of cheap tools meant that a lot of people tried their hands at artisan crafts. Many of them failed, but one industry took off-- animal hoodies and bear plushies. Turns out, when people have to constantly stitch their families' only clothes back together every couple of days, they develop some decent sewing skills.

  I lent both the clothes and bears my seal of approval, and pretty soon they were selling so well that the brokers had to act as a middleman, exporting them to the city above. Within a couple of months, the corps even started selling knockoffs, so I had Nyx provide everyone with special tags that could be scanned and verify their authenticity as ‘Teddy’s Bears’. I was still a little salty that some corp would stoop so low to steal a product from fucking undercity residents. Not that I could even remember the name of that company after I revealed not only their tax evasion but also the fact they were using toxic materials to cut down their costs.

  I don’t know if they went out of business or just stopped making knockoffs. They got what they deserved either way.

  As we turned the corner, I noticed a couple of the Wall Runner girls chatting with a couple of people. The gangs were still around, at least the semi-benevolent ones. Most of them shifted into becoming small businesses and guilds.

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  Dante wasn’t stupid, and he used the little bit of experience the Neon Scorpions had with their private fabricator to shift into raw material trading. They started by compacting scrap into more pure and manageable ingots for a minor fee, then started importing a few other cheap raw materials people might want to use, like cloth and fabric, and now they were the go to place for materials.

  The Runners made use of both their skills and name to become the premiere couriers in the entire district, while the saints started setting up a couple of their buildings as small workshops, providing a place for particularly successful entrepreneurs to expand.

  Not all of the gangs adapted as well. Some became more social groups, while others disappeared entirely.

  As for the most hostile gangs, they really didn’t last long once I began rolling out my bears. They learned real quick how resilient my bears were against small arms and just how quick the rabbits would appear once they started a gunfight. Most of them shaped up or moved elsewhere after I confiscated most of their weapons and sent them to see Leah for the third or fourth time. When I ran into groups with learning disabilities, I sent Bob to make a house call. None of them fucked around in District Eleven after that.

  As we made our way down the last stretch, I finally caught sight of Leah’s clinic. She spent a lot more time installing my Class 0 augments these days than fixing broken bones and gunshots. Part of that had to do with the nanite injectors that I was fabricating for serious wounds. The other part was that the bears were exceptionally good at punishing people fucking around without breaking bones, like good boys.

  I put my back against Leah’s door and pushed, but it didn’t move. “Fucking door is stuck again,” I snapped. As I turned around to give it a kick, Sharron just pulled it open, looked at me, and rolled her eyes. “I knew that,” I snapped.

  As we stepped inside, I nodded to the kid and her mother sitting in the waiting room, along with the single bear Leah had finally allowed me to assign her as a guard. I recognized the tot from the school, which had been a complete pain in the ass to get running, but a huge success.

  Once the Beavers had finished constructing the tower, I had to invest in both hydroponics and food processing techs to provide the meal service for students, along with some new Frog models to keep them running. I thought some people would hesitate to send their kids to school, but it turned out providing a little oversight during the day, a couple high-quality meals, and some job training was a dream come true. I already had to expand the school once to make room for all the students.

  Issi, Jennifer, and Eddie were able to interact with kids for the first time ever, and Jane had volunteered to act as sort of a combination principal and career coach, which kept them all busy.

  The only one that wasn’t really that busy was me. I had a couple of chores to do each day and I patrolled the area, but I hadn’t had to fight the antithesis for close to a year. I was so stir-crazy that I’d sent Spooky off to the east in the Marsupial. Whenever he was close enough to an incursion, I made sure to have them pop in and offer a hand. I’d even remote in to give them direct commands, but those days were few and far between. The truth was, I was bored.

  As soon as we stepped into the back of the clinic, Leah glanced at me from behind her desk and raised an eyebrow. “Can you even see me over the top of that box?” the red-haired doctor asked. I was so used to seeing her running back and forth like someone’s life depended on it, which it did a year ago. Now she’d had a little time to herself and she appeared to have chilled out a little.

  “Fuck you!” I snapped. “Of course I can… as long as I’m holding it properly.”

  Sharron snickered a little, and Leah straight up burst out laughing. “You can put them back in the storeroom like usual, thanks.”

  I nodded, which knocked my box and almost caused me to drop it before I juggled it back safely. “How is the supply room working for you anyways?” I asked as I made my way across the room and waited for Sharron to get the door for me. “If there are any problems, I can send the beavers over to make changes.”

  Leah raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t your beavers still in the midst of renovating the entire district? Building by building, street by street?” she asked.

  “They’re only reinforcing the outer structure so the buildings don’t fall down and putting antithesis-proof glass in the windows,” I replied as I stepped into the back room. I carefully lifted my box up and placed it on the box in the middle of the room, satisfied with a job well done, at least until Bob added four more identical boxes next to it.

  “They’re also reinforcing the upper street levels and adding shelters under the buildings,” Sharron added.

  “My supply room is fine. I don’t know why you’d even consider pulling those Beavers of yours off essential repairs to work on my supply room,” Leah said without looking up from the tablet on her desk.

  “It’s a little crowded in there. You might need a little more room,” I replied casually.

  “That’s because I need about half the medicine that I did six months ago,” she said. “And you refuse to bring any less.”

  “That’s because in order to do that, Nyx would have to completely redo the matter reconfigurator’s schedule. It would take them hours to do that!” I told her.

  “No, it wouldn’t!” Nyx’s voice echoed out of the front room.

  Leah sighed and placed her head in her hands. “Teddy… Please get out of my office.”

  “Right. See you next week,” I said, waving lightly.

  “See you, Leah,” Sharron said as she followed me out, trying not to laugh at my antics.

  With that, my chores for the day were finished. Just another day in the undercity.

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