For Rent

Chapter 4: Repairs and Caliphs

When they wake up the following day, Karine orders two bots to build the final unit in the contract for the swamp village, a second multigenerational home.

"It didn't cross my mind until now, but how do we know that we're building housing units that comply with the local building code?" Karine asks him. "Getting out of debt, and getting me off-world, yes, but not at the price of the residents' safety!"

"The HCP administration doesn't approve blueprints if they don't comply with the building code" Billerica answers her in a low voice.

"So what made the residents of this world reluctant to build housing up until the HCP was announced? You make it sound like the population is growing faster than housing starts! If so, I really hope that the HCP will be enough to get housing starts more in line with the population growth rate!"

I know what this means, if that's the case: as unoccupied housing rates drop, it makes an upward pressure on prices... and that's without any increase in speculation that happens when prices increase steadily. However, I wonder if the problem comes, on this horror world, from speculative investment or from something that made construction unappealing in some way, Karine reflects on what could have led to their predicament.

While the second multigenerational home was being built, Billerica bid on HCP contracts, and he wouldn't hear about it for a while. Upon completion of that particular unit, the contract was deemed fulfilled and he'd then make a reimbursement claim for the actual expenses incurred in building the six units, in excess of the seed money.

"Woohoo! We got another contract for building a neighborhood! However, I believe you're using your mind too much, and yet don't go around thinking that all projects will go as smoothly as this one!" the Taladuan warns her.

"I might need to relax all right, but what's available to us that will allow us to do so?" Karine asks him.

"We're in the swamp, some distance away from everything, and it's dangerous outside. So I may as well introduce you to our movies"

"Just deactivate the universal translation module please... I won't understand anything but that's okay"

"The movie starts in three, two, one..."

And the movie starts with the Taladuan version of what a colleague of her insolvency office on Earth called hancky-pancky scenes, with what feels like little to no setup to her. Did the producers of this movie just pick up a script based on how little setup is required to get to what they deem to be the "good" parts? Karine is then hit by a desire to scream.

"Eeeek!" she screams as her heartbeat accelerates and her face turns red. "That's too... hancky-pancky" her head then spins as her headaches mount.

However, with the universal translation module turned off, Billerica doesn't understand what makes her want to scream, only that she's screaming at what feels like bad scenes to her. Is she screaming because the movie is scary or because scenes are poorly executed? Or do humans have different tastes in movies vs us? I won't pretend to know how their tastes differ from ours, Billerica, unsettled by his coworker's apparent unease, starts raising questions that he feels he won't get answers to just yet.

That's not working... this movie isn't getting me to relax! Hancky-pancky scenes are doing me in today! Karine, reeling in from the dizzying pace at which the movie gets to that hancky-pancky scene, is left wondering how Taladuans actually live through relationships. Especially since some Taladuan filmmaker deems what she calls a hancky-pancky scene a "good" part worth rushing the plot for. Or what their filmmaking conventions are. On top of that, it reminds me far too much of some of the most graphic sex scenes in some bankrupt indie studio's unfinished game. Sometimes, as a licensed insolvency trustee, I needed to play builds of unfinished games by insolvent companies to determine whether bankruptcy really is the way to go.