Coldsnap: The Billionaire Alpha's Fated Pregnant Princess (GL)-Chapter 392 - [C] Numbers Don’t Lie, But The Inferences Do Haunt

Chapter 392: Chapter 392 - [C] Numbers Don’t Lie, But The Inferences Do Haunt

***[POV: Data Witch!]***

The coffee I was brought had gone cold hours ago, but I kept drinking it anyway. He means well, but Luca never has been able to make a good cup. He can’t exactly go out to the place we used to order from, either.

"Bitter. Is he rationing the sugar for me as well? Do I not get special treatment?"

Seven of the lowest energy monitors I could find formed an arc around my command station. What used to be the executive office had become Crisis Management Central for the remaining government.

Each screen told a different story of the same ongoing catastrophe. Monitor One has been cycling drone feeds, some automated and some piloted by trained volunteers. All of them ordered by grid sectors for overwatch.

The city looked exceptionally peaceful from above. Crystalline white with the impurities of dark concrete and asphalt looking less like something being covered and more like ugly growths.

With angry puffs of smoke and fire coming out of homes and buildings. Like those old artsy movies about the early industrial era, where coal smoke seemed to be streaming out of every chimney.

All that sort of frozen beauty marred easily by the feed I don’t like to look at. Which shows the great black scar that I really don’t want to think about.

Wolves and hunters crawled the streets in distinct pairs for locating survivors. What I’ve heard from reports so far from them working together is that the silence was what made it all the more horrifying.

Though for me, nothing is ever silent or quiet - or finished. At least those in ’authority’ over the humans have decided to keep out of this office. It only took me threatening to make creative use of their floor’s ventilation system.

"Well... I’m human too, but the mayor and entourage certainly aren’t the ones I would have voted for if I’d actually gone out to vote two years ago. At least the Princess just claimed her authority over me and then smartly ran off on her own so she wouldn’t have to deal with all this."

Monitor two displayed the | Survivor’s Wisdom Terminal |’s... modified interface. On top of other duties, I spent two weeks getting used to Citra’s weird magical-tech gift. Learning to integrate it with Lunarizon’s current Lodestone systems.

And another two weeks tweaking that in-house virtual intelligence and data management paradigm in order to make better *human* sense of the real-time information. Habitability ratings now painted the aggregate map of the metro area in zones of red, yellow, and the precious few spots of green.

Those early weeks still held predictive apocalypse data, but now that was gone. Leaving only the current reality assessment. According to the rescue teams, it was terrifyingly good at telling me which neighborhoods were salvageable and could hold people in need... and which were lost causes.

Including the big red zone running through the suburbs, looking like a still-frame of a firearm’s muzzle flash. The black scar caused by the worst fire in the city’s history that wrecked the whole Elkhorn Plat and some scattered surrounding houses.

"Poor pets. The people, too, but think of all the pets... I’m really going to have a hard time treating the child coming with them as anything other than the Best Boy, aren’t I? Will I be trusted to walk him..."

The third day of the blizzard was about when the damage on screen happened. From up high here, outside in the whiteout... that whole direction turned an orangeish pink quickly as 47MPH sustained winds sent blowtorch lances of burning gas and tossed hot embers onto other dry homes.

The only thing that stopped further spreading was luck, it seems. We’re still not sure what set the first blaze, but we do suspect it was fueled by the natural gas pipes they refused to drain: because ’people would need them for heat’.

Idiots. I warned them what was going to happen if accidents began accumulating. Yuck, this coffee really is terrible. One final drain and grimace so he doesn’t look disheartened when he comes back by.

"...If. He hasn’t had much time for me lately. Other than checking in on where to send his people next." 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Last I gave him was another thankless task. I don’t even want to think about the number of crashes from people driving in snow, the number who just got stuck and froze trying to wait it out... chances are that one in every three cars out there on the street are metal tombs.

But someone has to check them one by one.

My eyes drift to the third monitor, which tracked our quantifiable resources. Everything that was already being brought in to store away by what is essentially our ’approved looters’ - I guess we decided to call them ’pickers’ - was being scanned by barcode.

And then run through a borrowed and modified inventory management software to identify the SKU. Gathering things for the survivors already camping in the massive underground of the tower was important, because our self-sufficiency is not at all ready for *any* number of survivors.

Grocery distribution warehouses were first up - and big box stores. High quantity sources that can be loaded on sleds and pulled through the icy streets. The good news was we had housing capacity and enough food stores to last so long as nothing goes wrong.

The bad news was the structural reason why. The numbers didn’t care about my feelings, which was probably why I liked them. Even if it was tallying the mortality rate of fellow Vossdenians.

Vossdenites?

"Maybe I should ask the mayor..."

...

[ Total Metro Population: 108,595 (Last Census) ]

[ City Proper: 88,123 ]

[ Lodestone Calculated Dead: 47,500 (87% Reliability) ]

[ Failed Wellness Checks: 6,000-8,000 (Ongoing) ]

[ Current Survivor Estimate: ~52,000-62,000 (Unreliable) ]

[ Lunarizon Organized Shelter Headcount: 41,000+ (92% Reliability ]

...

The vulnerable, Elderly and Infant and Medically Needy, made up good chunk of those in our control. Because we knew they would be the quickest to die, we worked with the city council to get them moved just in case.

Unfortunately, that required a lot of red tape and disbelief that we wanted to hold them underground in what looked like pop-up Quarantine Camp for an indefinite period. A large portion of the calculated dead is still... the very old and very young.

And the healthiest still outside would probably prefer to displace them from our safety, to make the boiler warmed undercroft their own safety.

Even I didn’t think it would get this bad, for this long, despite the term Apocalypse. So it’s hard to get genuinely angry at the people responsible for holding things up. Our proof was also minimal, but boss’s word was enough to get me to move mountains.

"Not enough for other bureaucrats though. The very definition of that work is to make mountains - of paperwork. And everyone knows they will not move them if they do not need to, or unless you’ve filed the right form into the mountain five desks away."

We don’t exactly need proof we are right any longer. The issue now becomes maintaining a sense of authority in the vacuum. Providing vital needs and triage to the situation, in the way only the full werewolves can.

Roughly 11k to 21k scattered survivors is a lot - and not all of them are happy to be found. Kyrie wanted them labeled as ’Refusers’. Preppers, mountain men types, and people who’d rather take their chances alone than join the start of our frostpunk, dystopian corporate fiefdom.

Some would make it, I’m sure. Most wouldn’t. A lot of them would get stupid and steal or attack what we are trying to build, according to Lodestone estimations.

And that’s not even counting the other packs in the region, who might see the big, Statement Piece white tower and the humans scurrying around it as not a place of peace... but a target for war.

"Is the stew good? You look like you’re enjoying it."

Hearing boss lady flirting over the headset is calming. I’m glad I didn’t shut it down or take it from my ears. Even if they probably deserve a bit of privacy.

But what fan of a couple would stop eavesdropping after our CEO said she loved her to her face? I choked on my last energy drink at the time - and certainly wasn’t going to miss the next event.

Unless she starts moaning.

Then I’m out.

I do have some lines.