- Pronouns
- She/Her
Would a 'Basalisk Hack' from Eclipse Phase be able to kill Zion?
Skitterdoc 2077
- Thread starter SpiraSpira
- Start date
- Crossover
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
How would you lay your hands on one for an Entity? I'm pretty sure one based on 'human' (or human-derived) neural structures will not work.
Or, was that, in effect, what the 'Abaddon' Entity did to the Thinker? And the Warrior got some effect, indirectly, and that's why he's dying, slowly?
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True Metal Power
Lisa: The Hintful
- Location
- Russia
Cauldron has a corpse of an Entity. If they grant her full access, she may figure out something.
Fellow Human
Verified Roado Rolla
Wait...if you brainwash Jack and then have him brainwash Scion into suicide, it's gg.
Jack: Hey Scion, you suck! You're the biggest sucker who ever sucked, kill yourself air breather.
Scion cries and stops existing.
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Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Yeah, but Cyber-Taylor doesn't have an 'Eclipse Phase' background. I'm told you might need to look to someone who calls herself 'Lily' for that. So, some form of 'Black ICE'?
I suspect she really, really, doesn't want to get on Cauldron's radar. We don't know whether or not she is 'pathable' by Contessa/Fortuna. Seeing as she is 'being' Worm-Taylor, unless and until she drops enough clues (pity about those darts...) she's likely 'safe'. Even if the world-group isn't.
For 'Basilisk Hack' you might want to check out Langford's 'BLIT' (1988; also, following stories). They're more recently found in Stross's Laundry-verse, which isn't a nice place...
(Start namedrop. Both Langford and Stross are well-worth chatting to. Upside of attending science fiction cons... End namedrop.)
Tricky seeing as Jack got a little wasped... (See recent author post.) But, no Bonesaw, so no SH9, nor SH9k, that's got to be good.
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I'm that girl! I've got some questions for you.
We picked up Ruslan and Jean five blocks away. I just slowed to a stop in front of an alley, and they hopped into the open sliding door of his van, and I accelerated smoothly, leaving Santo Domingo behind. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I said much more mildly than I was thinking, "That was a clusterfuck, guys."
It was even worse than the Scav den assault! Perhaps I shouldn't be doing any more gigs with these people.
Both Jean and Ruslan laughed awkwardly, with Ruslan even rubbing the back of his neck, embarrassed, before saying, "Yeah, it was kind of bad. But who would have expected 6th Street to show up?"
Kiwi turned around from the passenger seat to glower, "Me, but only looking at things in retrospect. Ever since we got out of there, I have been researching. The NCPD is now reporting a large-scale gang war, with the area affected including both the Diablos and the Demonios territory. The Diablos weren't fighting back tonight; they hoped to just annihilate the attack, then counter-attack tomorrow," Kiwi paused so she could shake her head, "I think 6th Street rolled them both up."
That sounded about right to me. The way I saw the 6th Street combatants approaching from the south didn't speak to me of an opportunistic attack; it spoke of preparation. I wonder if any of the patients I treated were still alive or if they all got a coup de grâce after 6th Street took over the Diablos' headquarters. It didn't really matter, I supposed. All the people I treated would have lived, even if a couple would have needed new limbs, and that's enough for my professional pride.
I didn't know much about 6th Street, but at least they pretended to be the good guys, which neither small gang actually did.
"Did we lose any equipment?" asked Jean, curious, and when I looked at him in the rearview mirror, I gasped, "You're shot!" I exclaimed.
He shrugged, holding up his arm that had a bunch of bandages wrapped around his forearm, "I mean, a little, mon." But then he reached down and grabbed something I hadn't noticed and held it up. It was two cybernetic arms tied together with some duct tape, "But I took these from the guy who did it, ya? I've been meaning to see about replacing these 'ganic arms, anyway. Don't worry; I'm headed to the Ripper first thing."
I just blinked at him and pulled the van over the road, and ordered, "Ruslan, you drive." After getting in the back with the dumb man who might have been Jamaican or might have been Haitian, I spent a few minutes examining his wound before rebandaging it and making him take a huff of a combination of anti-inflammatory and antibiotic from an inhaler I pulled out of one of my bags. I wouldn't bother wasting any MaxDoc, a general nanomed-based trauma medicine made and sold by Trauma Team, if he was actually going to have the arm replaced, "Don't carry anything with this arm. Your ulna is fractured, but you're a gonk, and you probably haven't noticed yet."
"Ahh... that explains why it hurts so much," he said genially.
I rolled my eyes and said amusedly, as a joke, "If you want anything for the pain, all I have is heroin."
"Hmm... I mean, a little heroin never hurt anyone. If a dirt, a dirt, ya?" he asked philosophically and, in my opinion, incorrectly. I stared at him for a moment. However, it was his body, but I wasn't about to enable intravenous drug use in the back of a van, so instead, I fished out another inhaler. I had dissolved measured doses of heroin in saline after figuring out its purity based on my first patient. Some of that I loaded in syringes, but this was set in an inhaler, along with a bit of topical anti-inflammatory that would make it easier on the mucosal tissues.
I handed it to him and said, "One puff per three hours." Then I frowned and readjusted based on his mass, "Make that two puffs, I suppose." There was quite a lot of drug in there, but it was a measured dose now. I emptied a majority of the heroin packets into a pot with some boiling saline in order to achieve some measure of sterility for the product before introducing it into the bodies of my patients earlier. Most I loaded into bags of saline in order to provide long-term pain relief, but some I drew up into syringes and also this inhaler.
He nodded and used the inhaler twice. Absorption by the mucal membranes was a pretty fast route of administration, so he should be fine in a few minutes. It was also a dose calibrated so he wouldn't get really snowed, which I felt might lower the abuse potential, "Thanks, Madison. Hey, Rus, you want some?"
I stopped myself from shrieking by force of will but instead said quite firmly, "Not while driving. Not when you have to drive within four hours. Not recreationally!" Although perhaps that last was too much to hope for. Most edgerunners abused some sort of narcotics, and some of the possibilities made heroin look like vitamins. After my outburst, I spent the rest of the time Ruslan was driving, looking over the two arms that Jean had brought with him, finally deciding that they were alright. It probably wasn't the first implant Jean had ripped out of a person, I guessed.
As we stopped, Ruslan said, "Got paid from the fixer; here's everyone's cut." And with that, he transferred me six thousand eddies. Not bad for a single day's work, to be honest, although it wasn't worth all the risks we had gone through. It would probably have been worth it if everything had gone as intended, though. With that, Ruslan and Jean hopped out of the van, grabbing their gear.
Kiwi jumped in the driver's seat, shaking her head a bit at the conduct of the two men. She glanced back at me, "Thanks, by the way. You might have saved my life in there."
I shrugged but then nodded, "Maybe. Maybe you wouldn't have stayed back at their HQ if I wasn't there to watch your back, though. It's kind of silly to be overly retrospective about things." I told her the last, even though I mostly ignored my own advice because it was different in my case.
As she pulled into my Megabuilding's parking garage, I asked her, "Do you mind helping me carry my loot upstairs?" She nodded, and we both got out of the van, loaded down pretty well. It might take two trips.
It did. On our second trip, the old granny that I buy noodles from that runs a shop across my own place saw us and smiled, waving. She pulled me over to the side and asked me conspiratorially, "Ah, Taylor-san. Atarashī kanojo desuka?"
I wasn't even close to fluent, nor even conversational even, but I knew some words, "kanojo" being one of them, even without the auto-translate on my optics. "No!" I replied heatedly at the old lady, who started laughing, chortling even.
"You live right next to one of the nicest brothels in the city, Madison! Or do you want me to call you Taylor here? Have you ever gone in?" she asked, either not noticing or understanding the old lady or ignoring her.
I grumbled, "Taylor is fine. And yes, but not as a customer. I've done some medical checkups for the dolls. It's quite classy inside, I guess." Then I unlocked the door, and we both stepped into my clinic area. She didn't really get a good look before, but now she does, "Shit, almost looks like you're a Ripperdoc, Taylor."
"I get that a lot, but I don't have the expertise or credentials to do that," I half-lied, "But I do operate a little walk-in clinic here on my days off. Regular maladies, occasionally a gunshot or knife wound, or misconfigured implant. Minor stuff like that."
She grinned and picked up a vibrantly coloured foam sword, taking a couple of swings, "What treatments use this? Stress relief?"
Oh, that was David's "wheapon." I bought it for him. He could say weapon, but he stressed the H-sound a lot. When Gloria asked what it was, he brandished it and said, "It is my wheapon, mom!"
The little gremlin had started going to kindergarten, apparently, this year. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. Public school was not going to help that little boy. I had given him a number of general cognitive tests, designed as games I had played with him, and he was close to three sigma above the mean as far as I could tell, at least for his developmental stages.
When I thought about a number of general cognition and IQ tests I had seen both in the Bay and here, my mental sense was disdainful, so I was a bit sceptical that they were accurate enough to be relied upon except for the most coarse of deductions, but I thought the way I had tested David was a bit better, even if I didn't feel it had the resolution or precision to apply a numerical "IQ" value to.
His developmental stages were a lot more cut and dried, though. Not only could little David count to a hundred and do basic arithmetic, including multiplying small numbers, but he could read slowly, so he was already ahead of the average public school kid four, maybe five years his senior. Not only that, he understood conditional hypotheses such as: "If you hadn't eaten breakfast earlier, how would you feel right now?"
Most five-year-olds, from her medical sense, which included developmental stages and disorders, would not understand the question. David, however, did and, after scrunching his face up, replied, "I would be hungry!"
As such, I was worried that public school would tend to harm his development. He would be an anomaly, a nail that would be hammered down all the harder for sticking out. It was that way even back in Brockton bay, but the Night City semi-privatised education system was even worse.
I mentioned all this to Gloria, and she told me she wanted to send him to a Corporate school. Although Militech ran its own school system, most corporations were subscribers to an education Corporation to send their dependants to. Despite being the same corporation that ran the "public schools," their private for-profit Corporate schools really did have a pretty good reputation.
However, NC Med Ambulance was not a subscriber, so Gloria would have to fund his tuition out of pocket. David was smart, perhaps even smart enough for a Corporation to notice him in ten years or so, as they did troll the public school system for likely candidates to invest in, but they wouldn't pay the tuition of a five-year-old, which would probably be at least fifteen thousand eurodollars a year.
Although Gloria was making fairly good money both picking up extra shifts in my "clinic" as well as continuing her Scav-operation. Apparently, she found a new partner that was open to assisting her, just like I had done. Perhaps she would be able to fund his tuition herself next year? I would be replacing some of my standard clinical equipment with the stolen goods I had, so perhaps she would be interested in purchasing my old kit. I would give her a good deal on them, maybe let her pay them off over six months to a year or so.
"It's the wheapon of a little boy. Son of an EMT that I used to work with, she works shifts in this clinic when I am on duty at Trauma Team," I tell her the truth, which gets a grin and another couple of swipes with the sword.
Before she got up to leave, I told her, "Not sure how many more gigs I intend to take with you guys if they're all going to be like this."
She grimaced and nodded, "They've been inching up my personal risk matrix as well, although the dosh has gotten a little bit better too." She sighed, "It's not to the point where I am thinking of breaking up the little team we have, but I might have thought differently if I had to exfiltrate that gang trap-house by myself."
I nodded. It was really more of a trap-building, though, I wanted to say. "I might have a job for you guys soon. With me as the client. I'm looking for someone, and when I find them, I want to ask them some questions." My eyes shifted to the half-built brain scanner on my workbench. It would work a fair bit better than the one they put my head in, at least how I thought that it worked. What was good for the gander was good for the goose, right?
At first, my power didn't want to help me a lot with it. I got the idea that I needed to perform more research on the human brain, but I had managed to find a broken twenty-year-old military fMRI machine designed for on-the-battlefield diagnosis. This machine was interesting because it had a "secret" secondary mode that functioned as a primitive version of these scanners intended for battlefield interrogations. This secret was well known, so a number of the devices were on the private market and I had found this broken one in an electronics store. My power was a lot more willing to help me repair and upgrade this device. I even got a sense of interest as I disassembled it.
I was starting to think my power was... not myself. I got the feeling of it as an excited dog as I took the machine to bits, but other times I got the feeling of boredom if I was helping someone with a rash. I didn't know if this was normal and parahumans just didn't talk about it or if I was an outlier. Perhaps powers worked differently on this planet, too.
Her eyebrows rose, "Like a black bag job?"
I nodded, "Yes, precisely. We'll need to wear disguises... well, except me. But I intend to drug them, so hopefully, the guy won't remember a thing, anyway." The Trauma Team intel guys told me they found a number of amnesiac drugs on site when I was rescued, although they wouldn't let me keep them nor even tell me what chemicals they were.
Still, I had considered similar ways to do the same thing, and I was pretty sure I had a way to chemically disconnect a person's short-term memory from their long-term memory temporarily. That would mean that nothing would be stored in their long-term memory, and they would forget everything after a few hours but wouldn't really notice they were impaired at all unless the questioning lasted for hours and they forgot how they got there.
It wasn't Armless I wanted to question, either. I didn't take him as the team leader, but if I could find Armless' actual identity, I could hire Kiwi on the side to help me find anyone connected to him.
"You're a bleeding heart. Usually, people ensure the people they interrogate don't talk about it by throwing them in the marina with concrete shoes," Kiwi said amusedly, and I got the feeling she wouldn't particularly mind such a mission. I was already very confident that neither Ruslan nor Jean would care.
I snorted. Maybe I was, but also doing exactly as they had done to me or intended to do to me, and that had a sort of moral symmetry to it, in the biblical eye-for-an-eye sense at least. I didn't tell her that, though, since I didn't want any more people to know about my incident. Plus, there was another important factor.
"It'll be better if he doesn't go missing afterwards," I said quietly, still a little afraid of that ninja man. If the mercenaries he hired suddenly vanished a month or so after he hired them, perhaps he wouldn't care, but perhaps he would investigate it? Who knew? But if the mercenary he hired had a hangover and woke up in a seedy brothel with a headache, well, that was just a regular day for a lot of mercs. The merc himself might not even realise anything untoward happened. That was exactly the sort of thing I couldn't do by myself at all, but a small team of edgerunners could easily accomplish it.
I wasn't even sure what I would find or if anything I found would be useful. Right now, it was more for the revenge more than anything, which I understood wasn't really a rational reason to pursue and kidnap someone, not to mention spending a lot of money to do it. But sometimes, you couldn't be rational. I was done allowing bullies to do something to me with no response at all.
They had kidnapped me and invaded the privacy of my mind so I would do the same thing. That was pretty much all there was to it, when it came down to it. Maybe I would find a way to trace the ninja, but maybe not. I honestly wasn't really sure I wanted to track him down in the first place. Our first meeting didn't go that well, and I got the impression he was playing pattycake with me, not taking me seriously at all.
"Alright, well, you can call me when you 'find the guy'," she said, grinning as I showed her to the door. I nodded, and after she left, I glanced around.
Well, I should unpack everything, inventory what I was keeping and change it out with my old equipment; then maybe I'd open the clinic to see if there was anyone amongst the masses of people in the Megabuilding that needed my services. Usually, I would get a text asking for an appointment, but I sometimes had walk-ups too.
First, though, I grabbed David's wheapon and threw it in my living room.
My first real ping on the fly-o-meter came a week in and in Watson. I noticed a very large grouping of several thousand flies at a guarded corporate campus. I couldn't get inside. The campus was for a large Japanese medical research Corporation, which was made up of a number of Japanese corps banding together for this new venture in Night City.
They were all small corporations if you took them individually, but they formed together into a rough keiretsu that intended to take advantage of the market in Night City since the eight-hundred-pound gorilla known as Arasaka was not around.
I doubted very much that he lived there, so he must have a job there, which tracked when I saw flies swarming one of the guard shacks. I frowned, watching through binoculars as a man in a one-piece worker's outfit sprayed chemicals in and around the guard shack. I would stop placing as many flies here.
I had a vector on the streets of how my target approached his workplace, and that could be useful. I'd drive down that direction and place some more flies well away from this campus.
"Hai, I'd like to move onto the next topic, if that is okay," a middle-aged man of European descent said in Japanese in a small conference room, glancing around at four other people there.
The leader nodded, "Ah, the plague of insects. Dozo."
"Hai. We received complaints about an unusual attack of swarming insects by our security people a couple of days ago. At first, we just called the exterminators, as bugs and Night City are not exactly unusual," the first man said, getting slight smiles from his compatriots.
The leader nodded and indicated he should continue.
"Well, we probably would never have known if not for my subordinate, who is something of an..." he paused, searching for a word and then finally settling on the English, "dipterologist. It is his hobby. That is the study of insects, specifically flies. When the man told me I had to cancel my one o'clock to hear something about flies... well," he shook his head ruefully, slowly.
He then nodded and continued, but not before setting what looked like a small jam jar on the table, with air holes poked in the tin top, "Apparently, this is the intruder. One of the few survivors. My subordinate at first thought it was a brand new species of fly, so he was quite interested, but quickly felt that instead, it was an artificial construct."
The leader nodded, looking both interested and concerned, "Interesting."
"Yes, quite. Anyway, he had captured a few of the survivors that made their way into the main campus and had one of the lab techs sequence their genomes. They are all definitely modified house flies. Moreover, they are all sterile clones. Identical. Also, our machines could not decode the extraneous portions of its genome," the man concluded, sitting with his hands on his lap.
The leader was a scientist himself, although it had been years since he actually had time for it. Still, his eyebrows rose, "An obfuscated genome? Is this an espionage or sabotage attempt, then, with a novel chimaera?" His thoughts went to Arasaka, as their group was kind of stepping on its toes by trying to profit due to their lack of presence rather than playing nice and subserviently like most of the "competition" did in Japan.
The man that had given the briefing nodded, "Hai, we think so. Although with so few survivors -- the spray those exterminators use is really, really effective -- we can't precisely figure out why they were so interested in the campus or why they didn't penetrate deeper sooner."
The leader hummed, glanced around and came to a decision. One small jam jar would be getting a private plane ride back to Japan, where they collectively had a lot more resources and equipment. Sadly, these attempts at studying the contents would not go any better despite the expense, and eventually, the Fly Swarm of '64 would go into the annals as one of the Seven Mysteries of the Night City Biomed Campus.
It took me one more week and many thousands of total flies to 'find the guy.' Longer than I was expecting, by far, and long enough that my first generation was getting close to the end of their natural lifespan. I hadn't bothered trying to devise longer-living flies; that sounded like potentially a longer project in the first place because a number of the fly's limits were mechanical ones, and already the flies the FlyHive made were slightly different than one would expect, with a larger head and more area for the homing organ.
I wouldn't need Kiwi's help at first to find this first man's identity, either. He lived in a small apartment building, and its security was not the greatest. I had already used my exceptional beauty, grace and invisibility to penetrate into the small manager's office while my mark was at work and the manager was out. His computer system hadn't been updated since the time of the red skies, probably, so it was easy to hack even with my meagre skills.
"Albert? Who names their child Albert?" I mused as I perused the information on each tenant and homed in on my target after watching video recordings of the man going to and from his apartment. It was definitely the right guy, as he had been missing an arm until about a week ago. I wonder why it took him so long to get a replacement, but it didn't particularly matter.
Sneaking out of the office and out of the building, I casually gave a small pump-style aerosoliser a few squeezes on and around the door. It was a deactivation pheromone, which would cause rapid programmed apoptosis in the flies. I didn't need them anymore, and Mr Armess might have already noticed he was popular with them. If any came around the building and entered through the front door at least, they would quickly die.
I had his data now, but I would call Kiwi in to assist me in finding his comrades. All I could really do was pay background investigation sites myself, and I figured Kiwi might have more sources.
"He has a part-time job as a security guard in Watson, but most of his money comes from the fact that he's a regular member of a local merc team. I don't know them, and I'd say they're at least one tier above the boys and us as far as their reputation and the types of jobs they receive," Kiwi told me straight up over the phone a day later.
I said firmly, "My target is the leader of the mercenary team."
"That's Gabriel Blaze... I wonder if that is his real name... yeah, it looks like it. Kind of unusual sounds like a gimmick name," Kiwi told me, amused.
I nodded, "Well, that's him, then. Do I need to tell Ruslan about wanting to hire you guys?"
She shook her head on the vidcall, "Nah. I'll talk to him and get back to you with a friends and family price. I'm guessing it will be between ten and fifteen thousand total, depending on how long we need to watch him and how we plan on taking him." She paused and then asked, "You said you had some sort of drug to make him forget. Do you think you could provide an anaesthetic similar to that grenade? Maybe like in darts or something to add to a drink or meal? Taking people alive and uninjured is a real pain."
I clucked my tongue and nodded, "Possibly. You'll have to give me a list of his implants ahead of time, so I can dose one that will actually take him down. Also, I don't know anything about darts." I was pretty sure I could make one that would knock him out pretty much regardless, but I wanted to indicate my abilities were more modest.
"I can bring you an example, and don't worry -- we'll definitely have his deets. Otherwise, we won't pull the trigger on the op if he is a total unknown," Kiwi said brightly.
Almost two weeks of off-and-on observations, mostly using cameras and analysed by automated tools, and the three of them had an operations plan, and I had timed it for my next hitch of five days off. I got a fairly good deal on the price I was paying because the surveillance didn't need to be in person, and they could take other gigs while waiting for the perfect time to strike on mine.
It was pretty simple; I had to admit. Originally they wanted to use a dart, like Kiwi had intimated, but they discovered an excellent opportunity after observing him for several days. He had a pretty set schedule on fridays and the weekends. He would get a burrito from his favourite place, and then each time, he would get a lemonade-flavoured carbonated drink at this one specific vending machine.
Instead of darting him, Kiwi hacked the vending machine. We had to take out all of the Diet Nicola Classic from its hopper, replacing it with one specially prepared drugged lemonade. Then, when he paid, he approached the vending machine, and Kiwi would reprogram it to dispense the drugged beverage to him.
So, here I was, sitting in the passenger seat of Ruslan's van while Kiwi was in the driver's seat. "He's approaching the vending machine as usual. Change! He got the special lemonade." With that, she put the van into gear to slowly creep forward, following along at a side street.
"Man, he can eat a burrito fast. He's gulped the lemonade," Ruslan said, then a few moments later, he yelled, "Come quick, he's about to keel over! That shit acts fast!" I nodded. It definitely did act a lot faster than most sedative drugs a person swallowed had a right to do.
Kiwi put the pedal to the metal and drove a full block before squealing to a halt, Ruslan and Jean dragging an unconscious man into the back of the van. Man, I always thought his van looked like it should have a "Free Candy" sign on the side, but this was really making it obvious. Also, that worked a lot simpler than I thought. I guessed not everything with these guys was a cluster fuck, just most things.
We drove to, amusingly enough, the same building they had interrogated me at. Nobody had taken down the faraday cage, and I felt it would be necessary. Plus, nobody looked at us weirdly for dragging a man into an abandoned building in Japantown.
Since I was going to be in the cage with him, I wasn't being as polite. He was shackled hand and feet with what would have been low-level Brute-level restraints back in Brockton Bay, along with the brain-scanning helmet that I had got working a couple of weeks ago. It began working right away. I couldn't download this man's memories, or anything, although that sounded like a pretty cool idea. But it didn't need the same interaction that the device used on me did.
Kiwi spent some time hacking his operating system thoroughly to disable it temporarily. It wouldn't do for him to trigger a contingency to begin transmitting right after we finished, record the entire interrogation, or even just take some notes on the Note app about what happened. He had a pair of Kiroshi Mk1s, so after she finished hacking his operating system, I casually disabled all user input with them with a small tool. He would be able to see but not use any of the Kiroshi-specific apps. He wouldn't even be able to move his eyeballs; he'd have to move his whole head to change what he was looking at.
Before he woke up, I also injected him with the tinkertech memory disconnector. It was unsure how much he would remember when he woke up. He might have forgotten everything since he woke up, or he might remember leaving his apartment. It depended on how much he has already put in his long-term memory as of right now.
"It's a shame he needs to be awake," Kiwi said as she watched me finish setting up by putting a set of headphones on him as well as carefully opening his eyelids so that he could stare at a screen. People often thought that when you slept, your visual senses were turned off, but this wasn't exactly the case. It would be sufficient for the brain scanner to run through the self-tests and get a sufficient baseline. Known sounds and visuals were piped into his ears and eyes, and the helmet used that to do most of the work.
I glanced at her. It was a shame that he had to be awake. I thought about it and couldn't think of any way that would work. Perhaps in subsequent versions.
After about five minutes, I took his headphones off and said, "Alright, I'm going to wake him up." They nodded and made sure all of their disguises were on, even if he couldn't turn in their direction.
Humming, I forced an inhaler into his mouth and triggered a puff. This was an antiagonist to the anaesthetic I used and had a half-life of about fifteen minutes, so I wouldn't be able to put this guy back to sleep for probably a little over a half hour or longer.
Stepping back, I sat in the same comfortable chair they had put me in. He got the metal one and was chained to the side of the cage. He glanced around groggily for a moment before saying, "What... the fuck... you're that girl."
"I'm that girl!" I agreed in a forced cheery tone. "You might or might not recognise what you have on your head, but you know what they say, right? What is good for the gander is good for the goose? I have some questions for you."
I paused, waiting to see if he would keel over dead or something. I didn't think he was anything but a mercenary, but from everything I've been told and the assumptions I have made, I felt that the standard "defence" to an interrogation under brain scan was an automated suicide implant.
Not only to prevent secrets from getting out, but I thought that the current state of the art in terrible things a person can be made to do against their will favoured, at present, conditioning over the capability to detect it right away, so it was possible to make double-agents with sufficient mental "coercion." I didn't want to know what was involved with that, but my medical sense gave me an idea anyway. Still, I thought that there likely was a degradation of utility on such prepared people, anyway, so I doubted they were useful for anything but sabotage or assassinations.
As such, for real intelligence assets, which I was pretty sure this man was not, I didn't think they would have ever repatriated him after an enemy like me got him in my clutches for an extended period of time. As if reading my mind, he did not keel over, which proved he was just a regular merc, as far as I was concerned, and instead shook his head and said, "Fuck, he's going to kill me and then you for sure."
Grinning, I pounced, "Who is he?" and got a lot of data from that question. The one part my system didn't have as well as the other was I had to pick all the questions and word associations myself. I was pretty sure that the blonde ninja was given a tree to work down with every word I had said, probably using some kind of weak artificial intelligence, which wasn't my forte at all.
Still, I was clever enough to make my own, I felt. He glared at me and refused to answer, but that just made things easier, "Me. Girl. Client. Ninja. Gigs. Speculation. Who hired you to help kidnap me?"
After that, I went through a list of prepared questions I had already thought up. I didn't really need to run through word associations to get the information I wanted, but I might towards the end.
"Who do you think hired you to help kidnap me?"
"What do you know about the person that hired you to help kidnap me?"
"What do you know about me?"
"How much were you paid?"
"What were the past jobs this person hired you for?"
"Do you have any speculation as to the motives of this person for any of these jobs, including the one where you kidnapped me?"
"What about any conversations with this person?"
I was getting some information which I could review on my optics, but it was only enough for me to know I was on the right track. I kept asking him questions for over a half hour, then shifted to word associations both about the ninja and as well as any other secrets he might have, which I could review later. There was no reason not to wring this man out like a sponge, after all. It was likely what would have happened to her.
I stood there, trying to think if I had forgotten anything to ask but shook my head. I nodded to Ruslan, who took out a dart gun with one of the darts we never had actually needed. May as well get some use out of it. It turned out I could make them easily because they were almost exactly like small little hypodermic needles. Ruslan didn't waste time and shot the mercenary captain in the neck like he was an angry gorilla at the zoo.
A second of shocked realisation and expression, along with an attempt to reach up to grab the dart of his neck. That was all it took before he slumped back in the uncomfortable metal chair. Still, I gave him a few minutes before I approached, "Alright, let's get these restraints off of him. Kiwi, double-check his system to make sure he wasn't able to re-enable it or take any kind of notes. Search him again for any electronic devices. Then we'll take him somewhere more interesting where he can wake up. If we're lucky, he will think he got drunk or high. If not, well... he still won't know what the hell happened."
I thought it was silly that the first thing the man said was that "he" would kill him, as she thought it was incredibly unlikely anyone would ever find out anything untoward happened in the first place.
They dropped me off back at the Megabuilding when we were finished, Ruslan commenting with a grin that this was the smoothest job they'd had in some time. Of course, it was; I had planned it!
After I got back to my apartment, I stripped off, letting clothes and underthings fall to the floor and took a long, hot shower. Then I crawled into bed under my heated duvet and sighed.
I felt better, and then again, I didn't. My revenge as pretty mild as Night City went, but it still didn't really feel very good now that it was over with, but at least I might learn something interesting, but perhaps not. This guy had the feeling of what Alt-Dad would probably have called a cut-out.
It was even worse than the Scav den assault! Perhaps I shouldn't be doing any more gigs with these people.
Both Jean and Ruslan laughed awkwardly, with Ruslan even rubbing the back of his neck, embarrassed, before saying, "Yeah, it was kind of bad. But who would have expected 6th Street to show up?"
Kiwi turned around from the passenger seat to glower, "Me, but only looking at things in retrospect. Ever since we got out of there, I have been researching. The NCPD is now reporting a large-scale gang war, with the area affected including both the Diablos and the Demonios territory. The Diablos weren't fighting back tonight; they hoped to just annihilate the attack, then counter-attack tomorrow," Kiwi paused so she could shake her head, "I think 6th Street rolled them both up."
That sounded about right to me. The way I saw the 6th Street combatants approaching from the south didn't speak to me of an opportunistic attack; it spoke of preparation. I wonder if any of the patients I treated were still alive or if they all got a coup de grâce after 6th Street took over the Diablos' headquarters. It didn't really matter, I supposed. All the people I treated would have lived, even if a couple would have needed new limbs, and that's enough for my professional pride.
I didn't know much about 6th Street, but at least they pretended to be the good guys, which neither small gang actually did.
"Did we lose any equipment?" asked Jean, curious, and when I looked at him in the rearview mirror, I gasped, "You're shot!" I exclaimed.
He shrugged, holding up his arm that had a bunch of bandages wrapped around his forearm, "I mean, a little, mon." But then he reached down and grabbed something I hadn't noticed and held it up. It was two cybernetic arms tied together with some duct tape, "But I took these from the guy who did it, ya? I've been meaning to see about replacing these 'ganic arms, anyway. Don't worry; I'm headed to the Ripper first thing."
I just blinked at him and pulled the van over the road, and ordered, "Ruslan, you drive." After getting in the back with the dumb man who might have been Jamaican or might have been Haitian, I spent a few minutes examining his wound before rebandaging it and making him take a huff of a combination of anti-inflammatory and antibiotic from an inhaler I pulled out of one of my bags. I wouldn't bother wasting any MaxDoc, a general nanomed-based trauma medicine made and sold by Trauma Team, if he was actually going to have the arm replaced, "Don't carry anything with this arm. Your ulna is fractured, but you're a gonk, and you probably haven't noticed yet."
"Ahh... that explains why it hurts so much," he said genially.
I rolled my eyes and said amusedly, as a joke, "If you want anything for the pain, all I have is heroin."
"Hmm... I mean, a little heroin never hurt anyone. If a dirt, a dirt, ya?" he asked philosophically and, in my opinion, incorrectly. I stared at him for a moment. However, it was his body, but I wasn't about to enable intravenous drug use in the back of a van, so instead, I fished out another inhaler. I had dissolved measured doses of heroin in saline after figuring out its purity based on my first patient. Some of that I loaded in syringes, but this was set in an inhaler, along with a bit of topical anti-inflammatory that would make it easier on the mucosal tissues.
I handed it to him and said, "One puff per three hours." Then I frowned and readjusted based on his mass, "Make that two puffs, I suppose." There was quite a lot of drug in there, but it was a measured dose now. I emptied a majority of the heroin packets into a pot with some boiling saline in order to achieve some measure of sterility for the product before introducing it into the bodies of my patients earlier. Most I loaded into bags of saline in order to provide long-term pain relief, but some I drew up into syringes and also this inhaler.
He nodded and used the inhaler twice. Absorption by the mucal membranes was a pretty fast route of administration, so he should be fine in a few minutes. It was also a dose calibrated so he wouldn't get really snowed, which I felt might lower the abuse potential, "Thanks, Madison. Hey, Rus, you want some?"
I stopped myself from shrieking by force of will but instead said quite firmly, "Not while driving. Not when you have to drive within four hours. Not recreationally!" Although perhaps that last was too much to hope for. Most edgerunners abused some sort of narcotics, and some of the possibilities made heroin look like vitamins. After my outburst, I spent the rest of the time Ruslan was driving, looking over the two arms that Jean had brought with him, finally deciding that they were alright. It probably wasn't the first implant Jean had ripped out of a person, I guessed.
As we stopped, Ruslan said, "Got paid from the fixer; here's everyone's cut." And with that, he transferred me six thousand eddies. Not bad for a single day's work, to be honest, although it wasn't worth all the risks we had gone through. It would probably have been worth it if everything had gone as intended, though. With that, Ruslan and Jean hopped out of the van, grabbing their gear.
Kiwi jumped in the driver's seat, shaking her head a bit at the conduct of the two men. She glanced back at me, "Thanks, by the way. You might have saved my life in there."
I shrugged but then nodded, "Maybe. Maybe you wouldn't have stayed back at their HQ if I wasn't there to watch your back, though. It's kind of silly to be overly retrospective about things." I told her the last, even though I mostly ignored my own advice because it was different in my case.
As she pulled into my Megabuilding's parking garage, I asked her, "Do you mind helping me carry my loot upstairs?" She nodded, and we both got out of the van, loaded down pretty well. It might take two trips.
It did. On our second trip, the old granny that I buy noodles from that runs a shop across my own place saw us and smiled, waving. She pulled me over to the side and asked me conspiratorially, "Ah, Taylor-san. Atarashī kanojo desuka?"
I wasn't even close to fluent, nor even conversational even, but I knew some words, "kanojo" being one of them, even without the auto-translate on my optics. "No!" I replied heatedly at the old lady, who started laughing, chortling even.
"You live right next to one of the nicest brothels in the city, Madison! Or do you want me to call you Taylor here? Have you ever gone in?" she asked, either not noticing or understanding the old lady or ignoring her.
I grumbled, "Taylor is fine. And yes, but not as a customer. I've done some medical checkups for the dolls. It's quite classy inside, I guess." Then I unlocked the door, and we both stepped into my clinic area. She didn't really get a good look before, but now she does, "Shit, almost looks like you're a Ripperdoc, Taylor."
"I get that a lot, but I don't have the expertise or credentials to do that," I half-lied, "But I do operate a little walk-in clinic here on my days off. Regular maladies, occasionally a gunshot or knife wound, or misconfigured implant. Minor stuff like that."
She grinned and picked up a vibrantly coloured foam sword, taking a couple of swings, "What treatments use this? Stress relief?"
Oh, that was David's "wheapon." I bought it for him. He could say weapon, but he stressed the H-sound a lot. When Gloria asked what it was, he brandished it and said, "It is my wheapon, mom!"
The little gremlin had started going to kindergarten, apparently, this year. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. Public school was not going to help that little boy. I had given him a number of general cognitive tests, designed as games I had played with him, and he was close to three sigma above the mean as far as I could tell, at least for his developmental stages.
When I thought about a number of general cognition and IQ tests I had seen both in the Bay and here, my mental sense was disdainful, so I was a bit sceptical that they were accurate enough to be relied upon except for the most coarse of deductions, but I thought the way I had tested David was a bit better, even if I didn't feel it had the resolution or precision to apply a numerical "IQ" value to.
His developmental stages were a lot more cut and dried, though. Not only could little David count to a hundred and do basic arithmetic, including multiplying small numbers, but he could read slowly, so he was already ahead of the average public school kid four, maybe five years his senior. Not only that, he understood conditional hypotheses such as: "If you hadn't eaten breakfast earlier, how would you feel right now?"
Most five-year-olds, from her medical sense, which included developmental stages and disorders, would not understand the question. David, however, did and, after scrunching his face up, replied, "I would be hungry!"
As such, I was worried that public school would tend to harm his development. He would be an anomaly, a nail that would be hammered down all the harder for sticking out. It was that way even back in Brockton bay, but the Night City semi-privatised education system was even worse.
I mentioned all this to Gloria, and she told me she wanted to send him to a Corporate school. Although Militech ran its own school system, most corporations were subscribers to an education Corporation to send their dependants to. Despite being the same corporation that ran the "public schools," their private for-profit Corporate schools really did have a pretty good reputation.
However, NC Med Ambulance was not a subscriber, so Gloria would have to fund his tuition out of pocket. David was smart, perhaps even smart enough for a Corporation to notice him in ten years or so, as they did troll the public school system for likely candidates to invest in, but they wouldn't pay the tuition of a five-year-old, which would probably be at least fifteen thousand eurodollars a year.
Although Gloria was making fairly good money both picking up extra shifts in my "clinic" as well as continuing her Scav-operation. Apparently, she found a new partner that was open to assisting her, just like I had done. Perhaps she would be able to fund his tuition herself next year? I would be replacing some of my standard clinical equipment with the stolen goods I had, so perhaps she would be interested in purchasing my old kit. I would give her a good deal on them, maybe let her pay them off over six months to a year or so.
"It's the wheapon of a little boy. Son of an EMT that I used to work with, she works shifts in this clinic when I am on duty at Trauma Team," I tell her the truth, which gets a grin and another couple of swipes with the sword.
Before she got up to leave, I told her, "Not sure how many more gigs I intend to take with you guys if they're all going to be like this."
She grimaced and nodded, "They've been inching up my personal risk matrix as well, although the dosh has gotten a little bit better too." She sighed, "It's not to the point where I am thinking of breaking up the little team we have, but I might have thought differently if I had to exfiltrate that gang trap-house by myself."
I nodded. It was really more of a trap-building, though, I wanted to say. "I might have a job for you guys soon. With me as the client. I'm looking for someone, and when I find them, I want to ask them some questions." My eyes shifted to the half-built brain scanner on my workbench. It would work a fair bit better than the one they put my head in, at least how I thought that it worked. What was good for the gander was good for the goose, right?
At first, my power didn't want to help me a lot with it. I got the idea that I needed to perform more research on the human brain, but I had managed to find a broken twenty-year-old military fMRI machine designed for on-the-battlefield diagnosis. This machine was interesting because it had a "secret" secondary mode that functioned as a primitive version of these scanners intended for battlefield interrogations. This secret was well known, so a number of the devices were on the private market and I had found this broken one in an electronics store. My power was a lot more willing to help me repair and upgrade this device. I even got a sense of interest as I disassembled it.
I was starting to think my power was... not myself. I got the feeling of it as an excited dog as I took the machine to bits, but other times I got the feeling of boredom if I was helping someone with a rash. I didn't know if this was normal and parahumans just didn't talk about it or if I was an outlier. Perhaps powers worked differently on this planet, too.
Her eyebrows rose, "Like a black bag job?"
I nodded, "Yes, precisely. We'll need to wear disguises... well, except me. But I intend to drug them, so hopefully, the guy won't remember a thing, anyway." The Trauma Team intel guys told me they found a number of amnesiac drugs on site when I was rescued, although they wouldn't let me keep them nor even tell me what chemicals they were.
Still, I had considered similar ways to do the same thing, and I was pretty sure I had a way to chemically disconnect a person's short-term memory from their long-term memory temporarily. That would mean that nothing would be stored in their long-term memory, and they would forget everything after a few hours but wouldn't really notice they were impaired at all unless the questioning lasted for hours and they forgot how they got there.
It wasn't Armless I wanted to question, either. I didn't take him as the team leader, but if I could find Armless' actual identity, I could hire Kiwi on the side to help me find anyone connected to him.
"You're a bleeding heart. Usually, people ensure the people they interrogate don't talk about it by throwing them in the marina with concrete shoes," Kiwi said amusedly, and I got the feeling she wouldn't particularly mind such a mission. I was already very confident that neither Ruslan nor Jean would care.
I snorted. Maybe I was, but also doing exactly as they had done to me or intended to do to me, and that had a sort of moral symmetry to it, in the biblical eye-for-an-eye sense at least. I didn't tell her that, though, since I didn't want any more people to know about my incident. Plus, there was another important factor.
"It'll be better if he doesn't go missing afterwards," I said quietly, still a little afraid of that ninja man. If the mercenaries he hired suddenly vanished a month or so after he hired them, perhaps he wouldn't care, but perhaps he would investigate it? Who knew? But if the mercenary he hired had a hangover and woke up in a seedy brothel with a headache, well, that was just a regular day for a lot of mercs. The merc himself might not even realise anything untoward happened. That was exactly the sort of thing I couldn't do by myself at all, but a small team of edgerunners could easily accomplish it.
I wasn't even sure what I would find or if anything I found would be useful. Right now, it was more for the revenge more than anything, which I understood wasn't really a rational reason to pursue and kidnap someone, not to mention spending a lot of money to do it. But sometimes, you couldn't be rational. I was done allowing bullies to do something to me with no response at all.
They had kidnapped me and invaded the privacy of my mind so I would do the same thing. That was pretty much all there was to it, when it came down to it. Maybe I would find a way to trace the ninja, but maybe not. I honestly wasn't really sure I wanted to track him down in the first place. Our first meeting didn't go that well, and I got the impression he was playing pattycake with me, not taking me seriously at all.
"Alright, well, you can call me when you 'find the guy'," she said, grinning as I showed her to the door. I nodded, and after she left, I glanced around.
Well, I should unpack everything, inventory what I was keeping and change it out with my old equipment; then maybe I'd open the clinic to see if there was anyone amongst the masses of people in the Megabuilding that needed my services. Usually, I would get a text asking for an appointment, but I sometimes had walk-ups too.
First, though, I grabbed David's wheapon and threw it in my living room.
My first real ping on the fly-o-meter came a week in and in Watson. I noticed a very large grouping of several thousand flies at a guarded corporate campus. I couldn't get inside. The campus was for a large Japanese medical research Corporation, which was made up of a number of Japanese corps banding together for this new venture in Night City.
They were all small corporations if you took them individually, but they formed together into a rough keiretsu that intended to take advantage of the market in Night City since the eight-hundred-pound gorilla known as Arasaka was not around.
I doubted very much that he lived there, so he must have a job there, which tracked when I saw flies swarming one of the guard shacks. I frowned, watching through binoculars as a man in a one-piece worker's outfit sprayed chemicals in and around the guard shack. I would stop placing as many flies here.
I had a vector on the streets of how my target approached his workplace, and that could be useful. I'd drive down that direction and place some more flies well away from this campus.
"Hai, I'd like to move onto the next topic, if that is okay," a middle-aged man of European descent said in Japanese in a small conference room, glancing around at four other people there.
The leader nodded, "Ah, the plague of insects. Dozo."
"Hai. We received complaints about an unusual attack of swarming insects by our security people a couple of days ago. At first, we just called the exterminators, as bugs and Night City are not exactly unusual," the first man said, getting slight smiles from his compatriots.
The leader nodded and indicated he should continue.
"Well, we probably would never have known if not for my subordinate, who is something of an..." he paused, searching for a word and then finally settling on the English, "dipterologist. It is his hobby. That is the study of insects, specifically flies. When the man told me I had to cancel my one o'clock to hear something about flies... well," he shook his head ruefully, slowly.
He then nodded and continued, but not before setting what looked like a small jam jar on the table, with air holes poked in the tin top, "Apparently, this is the intruder. One of the few survivors. My subordinate at first thought it was a brand new species of fly, so he was quite interested, but quickly felt that instead, it was an artificial construct."
The leader nodded, looking both interested and concerned, "Interesting."
"Yes, quite. Anyway, he had captured a few of the survivors that made their way into the main campus and had one of the lab techs sequence their genomes. They are all definitely modified house flies. Moreover, they are all sterile clones. Identical. Also, our machines could not decode the extraneous portions of its genome," the man concluded, sitting with his hands on his lap.
The leader was a scientist himself, although it had been years since he actually had time for it. Still, his eyebrows rose, "An obfuscated genome? Is this an espionage or sabotage attempt, then, with a novel chimaera?" His thoughts went to Arasaka, as their group was kind of stepping on its toes by trying to profit due to their lack of presence rather than playing nice and subserviently like most of the "competition" did in Japan.
The man that had given the briefing nodded, "Hai, we think so. Although with so few survivors -- the spray those exterminators use is really, really effective -- we can't precisely figure out why they were so interested in the campus or why they didn't penetrate deeper sooner."
The leader hummed, glanced around and came to a decision. One small jam jar would be getting a private plane ride back to Japan, where they collectively had a lot more resources and equipment. Sadly, these attempts at studying the contents would not go any better despite the expense, and eventually, the Fly Swarm of '64 would go into the annals as one of the Seven Mysteries of the Night City Biomed Campus.
It took me one more week and many thousands of total flies to 'find the guy.' Longer than I was expecting, by far, and long enough that my first generation was getting close to the end of their natural lifespan. I hadn't bothered trying to devise longer-living flies; that sounded like potentially a longer project in the first place because a number of the fly's limits were mechanical ones, and already the flies the FlyHive made were slightly different than one would expect, with a larger head and more area for the homing organ.
I wouldn't need Kiwi's help at first to find this first man's identity, either. He lived in a small apartment building, and its security was not the greatest. I had already used my exceptional beauty, grace and invisibility to penetrate into the small manager's office while my mark was at work and the manager was out. His computer system hadn't been updated since the time of the red skies, probably, so it was easy to hack even with my meagre skills.
"Albert? Who names their child Albert?" I mused as I perused the information on each tenant and homed in on my target after watching video recordings of the man going to and from his apartment. It was definitely the right guy, as he had been missing an arm until about a week ago. I wonder why it took him so long to get a replacement, but it didn't particularly matter.
Sneaking out of the office and out of the building, I casually gave a small pump-style aerosoliser a few squeezes on and around the door. It was a deactivation pheromone, which would cause rapid programmed apoptosis in the flies. I didn't need them anymore, and Mr Armess might have already noticed he was popular with them. If any came around the building and entered through the front door at least, they would quickly die.
I had his data now, but I would call Kiwi in to assist me in finding his comrades. All I could really do was pay background investigation sites myself, and I figured Kiwi might have more sources.
"He has a part-time job as a security guard in Watson, but most of his money comes from the fact that he's a regular member of a local merc team. I don't know them, and I'd say they're at least one tier above the boys and us as far as their reputation and the types of jobs they receive," Kiwi told me straight up over the phone a day later.
I said firmly, "My target is the leader of the mercenary team."
"That's Gabriel Blaze... I wonder if that is his real name... yeah, it looks like it. Kind of unusual sounds like a gimmick name," Kiwi told me, amused.
I nodded, "Well, that's him, then. Do I need to tell Ruslan about wanting to hire you guys?"
She shook her head on the vidcall, "Nah. I'll talk to him and get back to you with a friends and family price. I'm guessing it will be between ten and fifteen thousand total, depending on how long we need to watch him and how we plan on taking him." She paused and then asked, "You said you had some sort of drug to make him forget. Do you think you could provide an anaesthetic similar to that grenade? Maybe like in darts or something to add to a drink or meal? Taking people alive and uninjured is a real pain."
I clucked my tongue and nodded, "Possibly. You'll have to give me a list of his implants ahead of time, so I can dose one that will actually take him down. Also, I don't know anything about darts." I was pretty sure I could make one that would knock him out pretty much regardless, but I wanted to indicate my abilities were more modest.
"I can bring you an example, and don't worry -- we'll definitely have his deets. Otherwise, we won't pull the trigger on the op if he is a total unknown," Kiwi said brightly.
Almost two weeks of off-and-on observations, mostly using cameras and analysed by automated tools, and the three of them had an operations plan, and I had timed it for my next hitch of five days off. I got a fairly good deal on the price I was paying because the surveillance didn't need to be in person, and they could take other gigs while waiting for the perfect time to strike on mine.
It was pretty simple; I had to admit. Originally they wanted to use a dart, like Kiwi had intimated, but they discovered an excellent opportunity after observing him for several days. He had a pretty set schedule on fridays and the weekends. He would get a burrito from his favourite place, and then each time, he would get a lemonade-flavoured carbonated drink at this one specific vending machine.
Instead of darting him, Kiwi hacked the vending machine. We had to take out all of the Diet Nicola Classic from its hopper, replacing it with one specially prepared drugged lemonade. Then, when he paid, he approached the vending machine, and Kiwi would reprogram it to dispense the drugged beverage to him.
So, here I was, sitting in the passenger seat of Ruslan's van while Kiwi was in the driver's seat. "He's approaching the vending machine as usual. Change! He got the special lemonade." With that, she put the van into gear to slowly creep forward, following along at a side street.
"Man, he can eat a burrito fast. He's gulped the lemonade," Ruslan said, then a few moments later, he yelled, "Come quick, he's about to keel over! That shit acts fast!" I nodded. It definitely did act a lot faster than most sedative drugs a person swallowed had a right to do.
Kiwi put the pedal to the metal and drove a full block before squealing to a halt, Ruslan and Jean dragging an unconscious man into the back of the van. Man, I always thought his van looked like it should have a "Free Candy" sign on the side, but this was really making it obvious. Also, that worked a lot simpler than I thought. I guessed not everything with these guys was a cluster fuck, just most things.
We drove to, amusingly enough, the same building they had interrogated me at. Nobody had taken down the faraday cage, and I felt it would be necessary. Plus, nobody looked at us weirdly for dragging a man into an abandoned building in Japantown.
Since I was going to be in the cage with him, I wasn't being as polite. He was shackled hand and feet with what would have been low-level Brute-level restraints back in Brockton Bay, along with the brain-scanning helmet that I had got working a couple of weeks ago. It began working right away. I couldn't download this man's memories, or anything, although that sounded like a pretty cool idea. But it didn't need the same interaction that the device used on me did.
Kiwi spent some time hacking his operating system thoroughly to disable it temporarily. It wouldn't do for him to trigger a contingency to begin transmitting right after we finished, record the entire interrogation, or even just take some notes on the Note app about what happened. He had a pair of Kiroshi Mk1s, so after she finished hacking his operating system, I casually disabled all user input with them with a small tool. He would be able to see but not use any of the Kiroshi-specific apps. He wouldn't even be able to move his eyeballs; he'd have to move his whole head to change what he was looking at.
Before he woke up, I also injected him with the tinkertech memory disconnector. It was unsure how much he would remember when he woke up. He might have forgotten everything since he woke up, or he might remember leaving his apartment. It depended on how much he has already put in his long-term memory as of right now.
"It's a shame he needs to be awake," Kiwi said as she watched me finish setting up by putting a set of headphones on him as well as carefully opening his eyelids so that he could stare at a screen. People often thought that when you slept, your visual senses were turned off, but this wasn't exactly the case. It would be sufficient for the brain scanner to run through the self-tests and get a sufficient baseline. Known sounds and visuals were piped into his ears and eyes, and the helmet used that to do most of the work.
I glanced at her. It was a shame that he had to be awake. I thought about it and couldn't think of any way that would work. Perhaps in subsequent versions.
After about five minutes, I took his headphones off and said, "Alright, I'm going to wake him up." They nodded and made sure all of their disguises were on, even if he couldn't turn in their direction.
Humming, I forced an inhaler into his mouth and triggered a puff. This was an antiagonist to the anaesthetic I used and had a half-life of about fifteen minutes, so I wouldn't be able to put this guy back to sleep for probably a little over a half hour or longer.
Stepping back, I sat in the same comfortable chair they had put me in. He got the metal one and was chained to the side of the cage. He glanced around groggily for a moment before saying, "What... the fuck... you're that girl."
"I'm that girl!" I agreed in a forced cheery tone. "You might or might not recognise what you have on your head, but you know what they say, right? What is good for the gander is good for the goose? I have some questions for you."
I paused, waiting to see if he would keel over dead or something. I didn't think he was anything but a mercenary, but from everything I've been told and the assumptions I have made, I felt that the standard "defence" to an interrogation under brain scan was an automated suicide implant.
Not only to prevent secrets from getting out, but I thought that the current state of the art in terrible things a person can be made to do against their will favoured, at present, conditioning over the capability to detect it right away, so it was possible to make double-agents with sufficient mental "coercion." I didn't want to know what was involved with that, but my medical sense gave me an idea anyway. Still, I thought that there likely was a degradation of utility on such prepared people, anyway, so I doubted they were useful for anything but sabotage or assassinations.
As such, for real intelligence assets, which I was pretty sure this man was not, I didn't think they would have ever repatriated him after an enemy like me got him in my clutches for an extended period of time. As if reading my mind, he did not keel over, which proved he was just a regular merc, as far as I was concerned, and instead shook his head and said, "Fuck, he's going to kill me and then you for sure."
Grinning, I pounced, "Who is he?" and got a lot of data from that question. The one part my system didn't have as well as the other was I had to pick all the questions and word associations myself. I was pretty sure that the blonde ninja was given a tree to work down with every word I had said, probably using some kind of weak artificial intelligence, which wasn't my forte at all.
Still, I was clever enough to make my own, I felt. He glared at me and refused to answer, but that just made things easier, "Me. Girl. Client. Ninja. Gigs. Speculation. Who hired you to help kidnap me?"
After that, I went through a list of prepared questions I had already thought up. I didn't really need to run through word associations to get the information I wanted, but I might towards the end.
"Who do you think hired you to help kidnap me?"
"What do you know about the person that hired you to help kidnap me?"
"What do you know about me?"
"How much were you paid?"
"What were the past jobs this person hired you for?"
"Do you have any speculation as to the motives of this person for any of these jobs, including the one where you kidnapped me?"
"What about any conversations with this person?"
I was getting some information which I could review on my optics, but it was only enough for me to know I was on the right track. I kept asking him questions for over a half hour, then shifted to word associations both about the ninja and as well as any other secrets he might have, which I could review later. There was no reason not to wring this man out like a sponge, after all. It was likely what would have happened to her.
I stood there, trying to think if I had forgotten anything to ask but shook my head. I nodded to Ruslan, who took out a dart gun with one of the darts we never had actually needed. May as well get some use out of it. It turned out I could make them easily because they were almost exactly like small little hypodermic needles. Ruslan didn't waste time and shot the mercenary captain in the neck like he was an angry gorilla at the zoo.
A second of shocked realisation and expression, along with an attempt to reach up to grab the dart of his neck. That was all it took before he slumped back in the uncomfortable metal chair. Still, I gave him a few minutes before I approached, "Alright, let's get these restraints off of him. Kiwi, double-check his system to make sure he wasn't able to re-enable it or take any kind of notes. Search him again for any electronic devices. Then we'll take him somewhere more interesting where he can wake up. If we're lucky, he will think he got drunk or high. If not, well... he still won't know what the hell happened."
I thought it was silly that the first thing the man said was that "he" would kill him, as she thought it was incredibly unlikely anyone would ever find out anything untoward happened in the first place.
They dropped me off back at the Megabuilding when we were finished, Ruslan commenting with a grin that this was the smoothest job they'd had in some time. Of course, it was; I had planned it!
After I got back to my apartment, I stripped off, letting clothes and underthings fall to the floor and took a long, hot shower. Then I crawled into bed under my heated duvet and sighed.
I felt better, and then again, I didn't. My revenge as pretty mild as Night City went, but it still didn't really feel very good now that it was over with, but at least I might learn something interesting, but perhaps not. This guy had the feeling of what Alt-Dad would probably have called a cut-out.
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- Location
- England
Did you just jump from 1st to 3rd person?
Did you also use your humility?
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They totally think she's a corpo princess don't they.
Probably proud. This seems like something that is incredibly common when you play at the lvl the Astros are.
Probably proud. This seems like something that is incredibly common when you play at the lvl the Astros are.
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Well, technically, she is. She just isn't aware that she is. Yet.
- Location
- Wall Gazing
5 gets you 10 that there are still sensors/cameras in the faraday cage building.
- Location
- Europe
The mercenaries even called her princess, so the results from the interrogation could be interesting depending on how literally they meant it.
There could have been monitoring devices left over, but I feel like Taylor would have found any while searching for clues, and since she knew the cage was still there she presumably scouted the place out. It's not like her kidnappers would have risked there being evidence of what they originally planned to do, so I don't think they'd have wanted to chance unnecessary records.
Professor Vesca
Good News Everyone!
No they don't, Mr. Merc is still alive after all.
- Location
- <CLASSIFIED>
You switched into 3rd person perspective there.
Rajvik_wolfboy
Wolf amongst the stars.
- Location
- Florida
No they don't, Mr. Merc is still alive after all.
Are you familiar with the concept of a coursing hound? I know it was made illegal to run hounds, (for deer and other game animals) in my state some years back, but the idea of using a participant to lead you back to their boss is an old trick
So have I, but it arguably works both ways
- Pronouns
- He/him
Oh great. Now I'm expecting her to wake up in a completely different location after having been kidnapped again. Ending the chapter with an obvious flag, and being asleep perhaps the most defenseless you can be. Someone needs to download a book on being Genre savvy
jesus
Arasaka VTuber PsyOps
consistent tense
third person
These guys are fun lmao. I hope they're not the ones that get Kiwi extra jaded, whether because they betray her or because somebody else does and they die. You really could do worse than heroin in NC though. It's not even really thaaat bad in our world, depending on who you are and why you're taking it. Thanks for the chapter. I start work again in a few hours after three months of paid leave so it was a nice way to start my day.
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- Location
- State of Confusion
I'm gonna laugh for five minutes straight if Taylor 'accidentally' recreates Soulkiller on a whim.
Same. It would also be more appropriate that way here, since 'gander' is a male goose. But we're just playing semantics at this point.
- Location
- Home
Did you also use your humility?
Humility? What's that? Can you eat it?
Nah, killing is the easy part for those guys. Having the self control to not murder the help used by people who piss you off so you can execute a plot against those truly responsible sounds like something they'd appreciate. If only because teaching a spoiled corpo brat to do that sounds hard.No they don't, Mr. Merc is still alive after all.
Trillionaire Sociopath: I'm so proud Borgfred. I was nearly 60 before I learned not to shoot the messenger.
Borgfred: They grow up so fast these days don't they Ma'am. Another glass of orphan tears to celebrate?
I thought the flip was deliberate because she was framing it as being the user of the scanner rather than the subject of it.
I'm just hoping that we get next chapter Taylor picking off more of the team but replacing them and the AI of her family finally picking up that the team members have all gone through 'benders' they don't remember starting and that the symptoms all match up and alerting people that taylor might be making a move
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This is Night City the real question is what does it sell for?
- Location
- Seattle
I wonder how her homebrew mind reader stacks up against the commercial variety. Of course, now Kiwi's crew is going to be ever more tempted to sell Taylor's information to their fixer, a house that looks like a ripper clinic, access to all kinds of specialty drugs, and mind scanner tech, that info could be worth quite a bit.