I'm guessing it would look like very effective code obfuscation or encryption, except there wouldn't be any.
Skitterdoc 2077
- Thread starter SpiraSpira
- Start date
- Crossover
I mean we somekind of example on canon with Dragon code
Saint needed Teacher power to understand the basic of her code and even then he was basically lagging behind
Saint needed Teacher power to understand the basic of her code and even then he was basically lagging behind
Due to the whole Bonesaw!power* I would be surprised if she didn't end up rather heavily upgraded.
Especially since she's already getting more adventurous**, though odds are, that she will finish laying a proper foundation before making any radical changes to herself or others***.
*'dabbles' in hard, soft, and bioware
**Going through some relatively extensive procedures while awake, talking shop with the Doctors and Salesmen etc.
***Whether its finances, security, privacy, knowledge, tools and resources she has quite a bit of catching up to do if she wants to cut loose without attracting too much unwanted attention, and or bad ends.
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Cloak&Dagger
Definitely Insane
I have a feeling at somepoint somebody will ask Ripperdoc Taylor for a cybersecurity upgrade, she'll give them her meat upgrade, and then all kinds of shenanigains will ensue when it turns out they are IMMUNE to being hacked, and every single corp starts searching for the one who made the biocomputer.
I can't help but imagine MaxTac pigeons fighting bounty hunters. Chromed out flocks of pigeons descending on anyone who harms a bird, recreating Zelda cucco attacks.
Now, that is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever read.
I am so behind this becoming a thing in the story.
Thoughts
I've tried to get into a few Cyberpunk stories, some of which were Worm crossovers, and Skitterdoc is the first to actually hold my attention. A part of this is the slow buildup, and laying a proper foundation with the world building.
Another part is the focus: the medical angle; but also that there is a focus at all. Maybe I've just had bad luck, but a number of fics start with a revolving number of street level errands/jobs with no overarching goal, or a goal that's… ethereally disconnected from what the character is actually doing.
"Taylor goes to school." There is something so amusingly "practical" about ending up in a futuristic society and the fist major step is going to school. It's mundane. But it's refreshing in that it makes sense, it's obvious, and it's focused on the goal. It also helps establish a sense of belonging for Taylor, and us, in this world.
Also nice to see Taylor (what little school snippets we're getting) shine in an educational environment.
Taylor 'A' viewing Night City as an opportunity is great, and while we won't be seeing much more of her, Taylor "B" viewing Brockton Bay as a vacation was hilarious.
Strong start, and looking forward to more.
I've tried to get into a few Cyberpunk stories, some of which were Worm crossovers, and Skitterdoc is the first to actually hold my attention. A part of this is the slow buildup, and laying a proper foundation with the world building.
Another part is the focus: the medical angle; but also that there is a focus at all. Maybe I've just had bad luck, but a number of fics start with a revolving number of street level errands/jobs with no overarching goal, or a goal that's… ethereally disconnected from what the character is actually doing.
"Taylor goes to school." There is something so amusingly "practical" about ending up in a futuristic society and the fist major step is going to school. It's mundane. But it's refreshing in that it makes sense, it's obvious, and it's focused on the goal. It also helps establish a sense of belonging for Taylor, and us, in this world.
Also nice to see Taylor (what little school snippets we're getting) shine in an educational environment.
Taylor 'A' viewing Night City as an opportunity is great, and while we won't be seeing much more of her, Taylor "B" viewing Brockton Bay as a vacation was hilarious.
Strong start, and looking forward to more.
Extremely good story so far. I love RPGs involving a protagonist that does something other than "Warrior" (Probably why I love Rise of the Shield Hero so much.)
Taylor's done some awesome work, largely flying under the radar while improiving her skills, and her decision for bio upgrades is appropriate for someone who isn't seeking combat but wants to be ready should it befall her. The interactions with Mr. Jin are very interesting. I'm curious whether taylor realizes that the Tygers now see her as a potential emergency medical resource. (Which warrants additional cultivation, and meshed nicely for them with being "honorable" and giving a "gift of thanks".)
That being said, in a city this dangerous, being useful to an orginization that "protects" the building you live in can grant an additional form of protection and/or risk. (Decreased risk from common threats, but an increased risk from directed/large-scale threats)
love this story.
Taylor's done some awesome work, largely flying under the radar while improiving her skills, and her decision for bio upgrades is appropriate for someone who isn't seeking combat but wants to be ready should it befall her. The interactions with Mr. Jin are very interesting. I'm curious whether taylor realizes that the Tygers now see her as a potential emergency medical resource. (Which warrants additional cultivation, and meshed nicely for them with being "honorable" and giving a "gift of thanks".)
That being said, in a city this dangerous, being useful to an orginization that "protects" the building you live in can grant an additional form of protection and/or risk. (Decreased risk from common threats, but an increased risk from directed/large-scale threats)
love this story.
So i'm guessing that it would quite literally be like an eldritch abomination of code or straight up black box to anyone trying to breach or hack it, makes sense.
Now what would her specifically making it tinker-obfuscated even look like
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The code is written in Amogus symbols. And dick's.
Straight up bricks the computer attempting to view it, including supercomputers.
How often is normal type cyberware going to be used compared to bioware, considering bonesaws power i would think that they at least have equal priority in terms of tinkering, not sure which one would be better in performance, maybe cyber?
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Relics of a hard life
Getting my driver's license was one thing I didn't realise I would have to do. However, I found out that the required credentials for applying to an ambulance company included a driver's license and EVOC, which was an emergency vehicle operator's course.
It was similar to a driver's course but covered the additional things needed to know for anyone who drove a vehicle with red and blue flashing lights, namely ambulances and police vehicles. I discovered this when I was getting ready to apply to NC Med Ambulance, which was a medium-sized ambulance company in the city and one with a pretty good reputation for not being total dicks to either their workers or patients.
I had arranged for both classes at night about three months into my Paramedic course so that I would have everything completed in time to send my application for a job shortly before I graduated.
"Let's get on the highway, and we'll drive a few kilometres before returning to the office, where you can demonstrate parking. Then you can swap out with uhh..." he paused and glanced back behind him to the man in the back seat, who gave his name, "Jacob... and then sit in the back while he drives," said the man from the Night City motor vehicle division, seemingly bored.
Holding the car's wheel with a death grip at ten and two, I gritted my teeth and nodded. While unsure whether I believed it or not, I told myself, 'It's not that driving a car is scary; it's just that driving a car in this city is scary.'
I was surprised actual in-person vehicle training was still mandatory, even if it was only just for the test. I had done most of my "training" in braindances provided by the school remotely. In spite of that, I admit that they did a pretty good job of teaching me how to drive.
I didn't think my passing was in any doubt, as recommended by essentially everyone in my Paramedic course, I had already discreetly provided the requisite baksheesh, unasked, so I was pretty sure I was going to get my license so long as I didn't get us killed on the way back.
"Aahhhhhhh!" I cried from the passenger seat as the instructor demonstrated the latest in a long line of implausible and dangerous manoeuvres.
What the fuck was this? Fast and the Furious, Night City Drift?! I gripped the armrest of the car like I was an eighty-year-old lady as he pulled the vehicle in turn so tight two wheels seemingly came off the ground, briefly, before swinging it around the other way, one hand on the wheel, the other on the e-brake to slide the car almost sideways into a parking space, back in front of the office of the driving school.
In order to avoid being taken on another death race, I opened the door and jumped out when the car came to a complete stop. Despite my noodle legs, I patted myself down to ensure that I still had my pistol because I was considering shooting this man.
"Hey, what the fuck was that?" I yelled at him after he got out.
He chuckled and rubbed the back of his head, closing the car door and walking around the front of the car before saying, "Well, the course syllabus requires at least forty-five minutes of demonstrated manoeuvres at the instructor's discretion. It used to have a lot of specified things we had to go over, but all that got taken out except for operating the emergency lights, which I had you do in the beginning. See, this is a lot more fun, right?"
"No," I said firmly, shaking my head for emphasis.
He continued chuckling, as if that wasn't the first time he had heard that response, "But you'll remember it, I bet!" He then pulled out an actual honest to god paper business card. I hadn't seen one of those very often in Night City, and he handed it to me in the two-handed Japanese style.
Pissed as though I was, I accepted it two-handed as well and spent a moment inspecting it. It was a simple white card with the name "Yoshiaki Takeda (武田 義光)." There was a net address, and then below that, it said simply and in bold, "I drive the shit out of it."
Well, that was certainly true. On the flip side of the card was his hourly or daily rates. What kind of job needed an insane driver by the hour? Bank robberies? I placed the business card in a compartment in my purse politely before giving him a stare and telling him, "I'm not exactly looking for getaway drivers for my next caper."
That caused him to grin, and he shrugged, "You never know. Not that I would ever do anything illegal, of course. Ha ha ha ha."
I didn't believe that last bit for a second, but you know what? There was no harm in keeping the card.
He continued, "Now let's go inside; there is actually a fair bit of material we need to go over, as well as a number of tech mockups that they didn't actually put in the car because they're cheap bastards."
There were a fair bit of regulations, but what was emphasised the most was the unwritten rules. Ambulances, even privately owned ones, had the same scanning equipment as NCPD patrol cars; they just didn't include the machine-gun turrets. Why? Well, it was important because certain vehicles, mostly corporate convoys, had the right to open fire immediately on other vehicles if they were "startled." So it was important to run all the plates and registrations of any nearby car before you hit the lights and sirens for your own sake.
In most cases, passing a convoy with lights and sirens wasn't a big deal because they could see you coming. But just turning them on when you were right behind them? He highly recommended I never do it.
I hated this city sometimes.
I stayed a little while longer than I usually did to help Fiona with some things for our upcoming tests. She was doing well on the big cardiology issues but needed a little help with pulmonology and endocrinology, which medics often see.
All of the Militech medics had some issues with these areas because they all were previous medtechs either in the NUSA Army or Militech itself, and they had a laser focus on trauma, pharmacology, cardiology, and neurology. And to some extent, that made sense, but they still had to pass the final exam, and all of the stuff they probably never will use again or need to know will be on it.
"Thanks, Taylor. That helps a lot," the older woman told me, and I nodded and gathered my things, getting ready to leave. I helped her with simple mnemonic devices and flash cards. It seemed like flashcards as a learning aid had gone out of style in the past seventy or eighty years. I wasn't sure if it was because the paper was expensive for a time, but I reintroduced the concept to the crew, even writing a very simple flashcard app for any Kiroshi-compatible cybereye system, which almost everyone had, even if they didn't have genuine Kiroshis.
Shockingly, the optics software toolkit they used was an open standard, which allowed competitors to use it. It wasn't clear to me why I thought open standards wouldn't exist in this world, but they most certainly did. In particular, expensive products seemed to play well with competitors' tech.
I would round a few existing corners on the simple app and maybe place the source code on my net site. I had started an anonymous one, Little_Owl's Roost. Although I wasn't sure exactly how anonymous it was, I paid for it a year in advance and used multiple proxies and strong encryption whenever I accessed it. Because NetWatch had backdoors in all public networks due to the Blackwall, they could probably trace me more or less in real-time, but it would be a nontrivial problem for others to do so, at least over a short period. I thought.
I said goodbye to the others that were still in the library and left campus, getting on the train at the nearby station. However, instead of getting off at my usual stop after the train travelled east into Japantown, I stayed on as it continued into Watson, past the medical district in what they were starting to call Kabuki due to its high percentage of Japanese businesses and into the industrial area to the north.
It was already the beginning of the new year, and thinking about the holidays made me think about my dad back in Brockton Bay. I caught myself feeling more or less happy about my life so far the other day. Well, if not happy, then at least optimistic. That realisation caused me to descend into a spiral of self-loathing as I felt I had just abandoned my actual dad.
The fact that there was no way to actually go back, and no one in this world even knew about the existence of alternate universes, didn't help my illogical feelings. It was clear, however, that my life was much better than what I was experiencing in Brockton Bay. Only the very strong feeling that I had swapped places with Night City's version of me kept me from breaking down.
I often had fantasies of just vanishing when I was in Brockton Bay, being taken by the Sidhe into a faerie ring, and then maybe coming back out a hundred years later when all of my tormentors were dead. However, the only thing that kept those fantasies from being irresistible was how my disappearance would have crushed my father's spirit. He was barely hanging on after Mom died, and sure he hadn't been that great of a father for the past couple of years, but I hadn't been that great of a daughter, either.
However, if the faeries had indeed taken me, then they had replaced me with a changeling like in the stories, and I couldn't help but think that this was the best solution for all of those involved. But it still made me feel incredibly guilty at feeling such relief.
So, last night I resolved to check the storage unit Alt-Dad had left for me in Watson. I didn't know if it was because I was starting to bleed the feelings I had for my actual dad with Alt-Dad, or if I was just curious and felt that seeing what was in there would distract me, but I decided to check it out after school.
Watson was, for the most part, a pretty safe area. There was a lot of business activity and a lot of money in the district, mostly from Japanese corporations that had taken advantage of the fact that one of their biggest 800-pound gorillas of a competitor, Arasaka, could not come into Night City or the continent of North America at all.
It was actually, overall, much safer than Japantown, where I lived. I would have much preferred to have been given an apartment in one of the few Megabuildings in Watson, actually. However, I've gotten used to living in Japantown now.
Although it was mainly safe, it was a highly industrial area, especially the north part of town where the self-storage unit was located, as well as the waterfront docks area, and those types of places always had a larger amount of crime than pure residential or retail areas of a city.
Getting off the train, I walked down the street, following well-lit areas. I still had an hour before the sun would set, but I didn't know precisely how long I would be inside the storage unit. In the event that it was dark when I was leaving, I would probably call the friendly robotic taxi Delamain for assistance. From my perspective, he was much safer than human drivers in this city as far as taxis went. He was cheaper, too.
My destination was about a hundred metres ahead and to the right, but I spotted a food truck sitting next to the corner and glanced at its wares. Food was one of the few things that were not better than Brockton Bay, although, in the 2060s, the food was a lot better than it was forty or sixty years ago when over seventy per cent of all produced food was kibble, made by actual dog food companies.
That still existed, and if you were poor, it was the main source of calories you would receive if you were on welfare, but cloned fruits and even cereal crops were getting much more common, even though since all fuels seemed to be a sort of biodiesel that every calorie had to be weighed against the insatiable desire of more energy. There was only so much arable land in the world, after all.
I wasn't entirely sure what this food truck was selling, it was noodles of some kind, but it smelled quite good, so I ordered an extra large with shrimp. I doubted they were shrimp at all. Most meats were scop, or single-celled organic protein, a kind of meat substitute, but honestly, they had over fifty years to perfect it, and it didn't really taste that bad.
I hadn't tried the shrimp flavour, though, but the beef flavour did taste like beef, even if the consistency was a little bit off.
I took my food to-go and walked to the well-lit Secur-Stor-It building across the street. I had already looked up this location on the net before I decided to come. If it was an outside storage unit, then I wouldn't have come so close to sunset and would have had to schedule it for Sunday, which was one of the only days I had any time off at all.
The door into their lobby wouldn't open until I physically keyed in the twenty-four-digit pass key that I had gotten from Alt-Dad, after which the lobby opened, and an automated voice welcomed me and asked if I needed any assistance.
"No, thank you," I told the chatbot politely. The unit my Alt-Dad had left me was on the ground floor, but it was all the way in the back, next to a side door to leave the facility. I found it without too much trouble and carefully keyed in the password again. This caused a loud clicking sound as the slide-up door was magnetically unlocked. I rolled the door up just enough to duck my head under it and closed it behind myself, tapping a locked padlock glyph on the wall to reengage the locking systems.
"Now... what do we have here?" I asked as I found the light switch, along with several sheets of paper taped inside a plastic bag next to it, just like the letter said.
As the lights flickered on, my fingers fumbled, and the plastic bag with the inventory of the things in the room slipped from my fingers to fall to the floor as my jaw hit the floor at what I saw. Was that a small mech or a large set of Tinker power armour?!
I just blinked several times, looking at it, then moved closer to inspect it. I could see that it was clearly damaged; there was a small entry hole of some kind of incredible armour-piercing weapon going through the entirety of the torso of the armour. What weapon would have that much penetration on an obviously armoured suit like this? A crew-served railgun, perhaps?
I shook my head, walked over and grabbed the plastic bag off the ground, pulling the papers out. There was no additional message like I was wondering or hoping for, but it did have the items listed in a rough order of rarity. Next to each item was a code word that I couldn't decipher as well as a date. The date acquired, perhaps?
The top of the list was "Scorpion-22 | IEC Dragoon borg, damaged (irreparable), 2030 model, Value unknown or zero | 21 FEB 2059."
Ah. It wasn't a mech or an armour suit. It was a full-body conversion. You could have your entire body replaced with cybernetics, and this was one of the military models. I was suddenly very curious about where Alt-Danny was located towards the end of February 2059.
I walked back over to the Dragoon and very curiously looked in the back. There should be an access panel around... There! I found it and heaved a sigh of relief. When they converted you to a full body borg, they put your brain and part of your spinal column inside what was called a biopod, and they'd just slot this biopod into whatever body you happened to be "wearing."
I was a little worried Alt-Danny hadn't removed the former... occupant from this thing, and if so, it would have been less a statue and more of a corpse.
I glanced down at the list of items stored in the unit, raising my eyebrows again. There were a number of pieces of cybernetics, but most of the things here were... obvious souvenirs? The item listed with the most possible value was a signed Kerry Eurodyne guitar that he supposedly used in a show in Europe after he went solo when Johnny Silverhand died. It was marked "stolen", though, so perhaps I couldn't just put it on The Mad Closet auction net site.
Alt-Dad had always loved Kerry Eurodyne! The weirdest item was a broken wooden baseball bat, and I thought I could see some blood stains on it.
I was kind of sarcastic before when I thought Alt-Dad had been some kind of spy or on some black ops team, but it really looked like he had been. All of the cybernetics, a good half of which looked damaged or non-functional, were of the military variety that wouldn't be that useful to me at all. Were these taken from downed enemies?
I found one of the items I was interested in. It was a kerenzikov reflex boostware unit, listed in the manifest as "Kang Tao Kerenzikov, manufacture date 2057, value 5,000 to 10,000 eb." It was in a carefully packaged clear plastic bag. Not exactly what they were normally shipped in from the manufacturer at all.
I put on some nitrile gloves I kept in my purse, pulled the implant out of the plastic and inspected it close to my eyes.
I had finally Tinkered with some of the cybernetics in my body. My eyes, anyway. I realised I could take them out of my head one at a time, work on them and put them back. I wouldn't have to risk total blindness to adjust or add features to them, and I had been acquiring a lot more tools since I moved into the new apartment next to Clouds.
I had ventured into the black markets of Jig Jig street during the day to buy a set of somewhat sophisticated microwaldo tools and magnification equipment that were intended to be used to repair electronics. Not exactly intended for use in cybernetics, but ultimately cybernetics were electronics, too, and my Tinkering power let me cut a lot of corners that way.
Using these new tools and my good eye, I added additional features to my Kiroshis one eye at a time. They now had a low light vision mode, but more importantly, for my present purposes, they had a microscopic vision mode. I adjusted the zoom mechanism to also allow microscopic binocular vision, so long as what I was focusing on was somewhat near my eyes. I needed that to do the fine work necessary to replace the pigeon's cybernetic leg with a better one. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to see what I was doing at all during the surgery!
I inspected the kerenzikov closely and nodded. Definitely used. I could even detect the almost microscopic scarring of the unit when it was extracted from its previous owner. The idea that a lot of these cybernetics was from downed enemies my father met during his missions made sense. I didn't precisely know how I felt about that, though. I mean, both Alt-Taylor and I knew intellectually that Alt-Dad had to have killed people, but it was different from thinking that and staring at something he or one of his men extracted out of the spine of a fallen foe.
Placing the implant carefully back into its protective anti-static bag, I sat it down.
As I sighed, I realised that my noodles would become cold very soon. I needed to prioritise that first; it would also give me time to think.
Living in Japantown, I learned how to eat with chopsticks pretty quickly. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to eat in half of the restaurants or stalls in my Megabuilding.
These noodles were quite good. A lot better than the noodles I had during my first excursion out of my old apartment.
Not everything here could have been acquired during missions. There was just too much, for one thing, and second, there was just too much that was eclectic. There was what looked like a Polynesian war club. Tongan? There was a thirty or forty-year-old, fried cyberdeck that was affixed to a faux-wooden plaque as if it was a trophy. The Dragoon... maybe Alt-Danny killed it in a mission with a railgun, as I thought. But it was an old, 32-year-old model. I was pretty sure they didn't just change the exterior appearance every year like many of the car companies.
If it was a current-year model in operable condition... well, its worth would be inestimable. IEC did not really sell a lot of these things. Certainly, you couldn't buy them with something as pedestrian as money. But it made sense for old versions to find themselves in less aristocratic hands over the years. Perhaps you bought this unit new but eventually decided to upgrade to the newer version? Did you care who you sold the old and obsolescent versions to?
Perhaps even criminals might have access to these decades-old models. My impression was that the value of this particular example was mostly sentimental unless it could be repaired since it looked pretty well wrecked.
Repaired? I hummed, stood up and walked around it. I often had ideas on how to repair or improve cybernetics. I had no desire at all to use any kind of full-conversion cyberware, but I let my power consider how it might fix this Dragoon suit.
I stood there for over a minute and got nothing, nothing at all. I nodded slowly. My power wasn't considering this to have anything to do with a person's biology at all. I got the weak impression that it thought of it as a vehicle rather than as a piece of cybernetics that integrated with your body.
I bet I would have had ideas about the biopod that stored the operator's brain, though.
I grabbed a different item off a shelf after recognising the brand name on the black carbon fibre case. It read "Kendachi," and I had already identified it as one of the higher-valued items on the manifest and apparently one of the few pieces of cybernetics that hadn't come out of some poor sod's body.
It was listed as "2 x Kendachi monowire, manufactured 2055, value 10,000 - 15,000ea." I opened the case and raised an eyebrow. I was wondering why the case looked so large, there were two small boxes inside, but there was room for four more that were empty.
If he had to share some of his souvenirs with the men he worked with, then that would explain the absence. Maybe if he was the CO, he could claim two. Rank hath privileges, sometimes.
Kendachi was a famous Japanese company that produced all manner of monofilament blades, knives and swords, and of course, this monofilament wire implant served as an incredibly deadly built-in weapons system. You could sometimes see these on television and BDs, as it was very cinematic. It was depicted as more often the weapon of a femme fatale agent or faceless ninja assassin in media, who would be able to slice and dice mooks left and right with preternatural skill.
Alt-Dad had built-in weapons himself; he preferred a mantis blade in each arm. I had wanted something like that myself, but I didn't really want to replace my entire limbs with cybernetic limbs. Not only had I already paid twenty thousand dollars to get advanced bioware that relied on me keeping my meaty bits, but I wasn't sure I was ready to take those steps yet or possibly at all.
Something like this monowire would work... except it was incredibly hazardous to use! I could see myself whipping it around and accidentally decapitating myself if I just installed it and went to town. I had gotten a bit better with my pistol, I went to an indoor pistol range at least once a week, but I wasn't some kind of... ninja.
Still, I took one of the boxes out of the larger box and opened it. All the parts to install the device were there, including the special monoresistant ceramic components you needed to install on your hands and fingers. And a... data shard?
I blinked and found the documentation. It was a VR training scenario that Kendachi guaranteed was over 99.5% congruent with reality for operators to practice.
I got an interested look on my face. How many months would it take before I could not decapitate myself if I practised with this thing every day? A year? Years? The documents said that an experienced operator could be proficient in as few as fifty hours of practice using the VR simulator. Perhaps I should treble that estimate, or more, for myself. No, definitely more. I didn't know how long it would take me to feel comfortable not decapitating myself.
I didn't know, but I was going to find out. I carefully packed a few things I was taking back home with me. The kerenzikov, one of the monowires, an assortment of broken cybernetics, a fancy-looking Kang Tao submachine gun and an antique and fried-looking cyberdeck. I kind of wanted to take Kerry Eurodyne's guitar, but I didn't have a guitar case, and I didn't want to damage it, so it could stay there on its guitar rack for now.
I called Delamain and carefully locked up behind myself. Sitting in the back of the cab, I considered what I had found. There were a lot more things in there than I thought, but a lot of them were completely worthless.
I supposed they could be broken down into four categories, worthless things like the baseball bat, easily salable things, things I would have to sell on the black market and then things I couldn't sell no matter what, which might as well make them worthless. That last category was mainly the Dragoon full-body conversion, even if it was broken. Its weapon systems were intact, and surely there was some salvage value, but how would I sell any of it without being murdered?
I could maybe get thirty or forty thousand eurodollars if I sold all of the easily salable things. That would get me back up to the amount of money I had after I received Militech's settlement. Almost. As for the black market items? The absolute value was a lot higher, but.... That would be more difficult. My takeaway altogether might get me only maybe half again as much as the normal items because I doubted I would get even a fraction of the value for any of it. I didn't have those kinds of connections, and I was sure some of the names on the list my dad left would charge a fee.
The stuff was worth a lot of money, but it seemed like a big pain to liquidate it. Honestly, I was hoping there would be vast wealth in there. Maybe giant bags full of blood diamonds, or the original Mona Lisa painting or something.
I wasn't going to look at an entire storage unit full of free items worth tens of thousands of eurodollars askance, but in my fantastical heart, I was hoping I would have found something that would have solved my money problems entirely, allowing me to enrol in four years of medical school and live happily ever after.
Sadly, that wasn't the case. The more I thought about it, the more I thought I shouldn't even bother to sell the black market items unless I got desperate, even if they were to names Alt-Dad left behind. At least a third were military cybernetics that I would find interesting to study, like the boostware I was bringing home. The rest were just dangerous things neither the government nor the corps wanted people to have, like half of a Soviet-manufactured man-portable surface-to-air missile launcher.
I nodded. I'd get rid of the easily salable stuff quietly over the next few months and keep the rest in the storage unit for now, perhaps indefinitely. The unit was paid up till 2068, after all. There was no rush.
It was similar to a driver's course but covered the additional things needed to know for anyone who drove a vehicle with red and blue flashing lights, namely ambulances and police vehicles. I discovered this when I was getting ready to apply to NC Med Ambulance, which was a medium-sized ambulance company in the city and one with a pretty good reputation for not being total dicks to either their workers or patients.
I had arranged for both classes at night about three months into my Paramedic course so that I would have everything completed in time to send my application for a job shortly before I graduated.
"Let's get on the highway, and we'll drive a few kilometres before returning to the office, where you can demonstrate parking. Then you can swap out with uhh..." he paused and glanced back behind him to the man in the back seat, who gave his name, "Jacob... and then sit in the back while he drives," said the man from the Night City motor vehicle division, seemingly bored.
Holding the car's wheel with a death grip at ten and two, I gritted my teeth and nodded. While unsure whether I believed it or not, I told myself, 'It's not that driving a car is scary; it's just that driving a car in this city is scary.'
I was surprised actual in-person vehicle training was still mandatory, even if it was only just for the test. I had done most of my "training" in braindances provided by the school remotely. In spite of that, I admit that they did a pretty good job of teaching me how to drive.
I didn't think my passing was in any doubt, as recommended by essentially everyone in my Paramedic course, I had already discreetly provided the requisite baksheesh, unasked, so I was pretty sure I was going to get my license so long as I didn't get us killed on the way back.
"Aahhhhhhh!" I cried from the passenger seat as the instructor demonstrated the latest in a long line of implausible and dangerous manoeuvres.
What the fuck was this? Fast and the Furious, Night City Drift?! I gripped the armrest of the car like I was an eighty-year-old lady as he pulled the vehicle in turn so tight two wheels seemingly came off the ground, briefly, before swinging it around the other way, one hand on the wheel, the other on the e-brake to slide the car almost sideways into a parking space, back in front of the office of the driving school.
In order to avoid being taken on another death race, I opened the door and jumped out when the car came to a complete stop. Despite my noodle legs, I patted myself down to ensure that I still had my pistol because I was considering shooting this man.
"Hey, what the fuck was that?" I yelled at him after he got out.
He chuckled and rubbed the back of his head, closing the car door and walking around the front of the car before saying, "Well, the course syllabus requires at least forty-five minutes of demonstrated manoeuvres at the instructor's discretion. It used to have a lot of specified things we had to go over, but all that got taken out except for operating the emergency lights, which I had you do in the beginning. See, this is a lot more fun, right?"
"No," I said firmly, shaking my head for emphasis.
He continued chuckling, as if that wasn't the first time he had heard that response, "But you'll remember it, I bet!" He then pulled out an actual honest to god paper business card. I hadn't seen one of those very often in Night City, and he handed it to me in the two-handed Japanese style.
Pissed as though I was, I accepted it two-handed as well and spent a moment inspecting it. It was a simple white card with the name "Yoshiaki Takeda (武田 義光)." There was a net address, and then below that, it said simply and in bold, "I drive the shit out of it."
Well, that was certainly true. On the flip side of the card was his hourly or daily rates. What kind of job needed an insane driver by the hour? Bank robberies? I placed the business card in a compartment in my purse politely before giving him a stare and telling him, "I'm not exactly looking for getaway drivers for my next caper."
That caused him to grin, and he shrugged, "You never know. Not that I would ever do anything illegal, of course. Ha ha ha ha."
I didn't believe that last bit for a second, but you know what? There was no harm in keeping the card.
He continued, "Now let's go inside; there is actually a fair bit of material we need to go over, as well as a number of tech mockups that they didn't actually put in the car because they're cheap bastards."
There were a fair bit of regulations, but what was emphasised the most was the unwritten rules. Ambulances, even privately owned ones, had the same scanning equipment as NCPD patrol cars; they just didn't include the machine-gun turrets. Why? Well, it was important because certain vehicles, mostly corporate convoys, had the right to open fire immediately on other vehicles if they were "startled." So it was important to run all the plates and registrations of any nearby car before you hit the lights and sirens for your own sake.
In most cases, passing a convoy with lights and sirens wasn't a big deal because they could see you coming. But just turning them on when you were right behind them? He highly recommended I never do it.
I hated this city sometimes.
I stayed a little while longer than I usually did to help Fiona with some things for our upcoming tests. She was doing well on the big cardiology issues but needed a little help with pulmonology and endocrinology, which medics often see.
All of the Militech medics had some issues with these areas because they all were previous medtechs either in the NUSA Army or Militech itself, and they had a laser focus on trauma, pharmacology, cardiology, and neurology. And to some extent, that made sense, but they still had to pass the final exam, and all of the stuff they probably never will use again or need to know will be on it.
"Thanks, Taylor. That helps a lot," the older woman told me, and I nodded and gathered my things, getting ready to leave. I helped her with simple mnemonic devices and flash cards. It seemed like flashcards as a learning aid had gone out of style in the past seventy or eighty years. I wasn't sure if it was because the paper was expensive for a time, but I reintroduced the concept to the crew, even writing a very simple flashcard app for any Kiroshi-compatible cybereye system, which almost everyone had, even if they didn't have genuine Kiroshis.
Shockingly, the optics software toolkit they used was an open standard, which allowed competitors to use it. It wasn't clear to me why I thought open standards wouldn't exist in this world, but they most certainly did. In particular, expensive products seemed to play well with competitors' tech.
I would round a few existing corners on the simple app and maybe place the source code on my net site. I had started an anonymous one, Little_Owl's Roost. Although I wasn't sure exactly how anonymous it was, I paid for it a year in advance and used multiple proxies and strong encryption whenever I accessed it. Because NetWatch had backdoors in all public networks due to the Blackwall, they could probably trace me more or less in real-time, but it would be a nontrivial problem for others to do so, at least over a short period. I thought.
I said goodbye to the others that were still in the library and left campus, getting on the train at the nearby station. However, instead of getting off at my usual stop after the train travelled east into Japantown, I stayed on as it continued into Watson, past the medical district in what they were starting to call Kabuki due to its high percentage of Japanese businesses and into the industrial area to the north.
It was already the beginning of the new year, and thinking about the holidays made me think about my dad back in Brockton Bay. I caught myself feeling more or less happy about my life so far the other day. Well, if not happy, then at least optimistic. That realisation caused me to descend into a spiral of self-loathing as I felt I had just abandoned my actual dad.
The fact that there was no way to actually go back, and no one in this world even knew about the existence of alternate universes, didn't help my illogical feelings. It was clear, however, that my life was much better than what I was experiencing in Brockton Bay. Only the very strong feeling that I had swapped places with Night City's version of me kept me from breaking down.
I often had fantasies of just vanishing when I was in Brockton Bay, being taken by the Sidhe into a faerie ring, and then maybe coming back out a hundred years later when all of my tormentors were dead. However, the only thing that kept those fantasies from being irresistible was how my disappearance would have crushed my father's spirit. He was barely hanging on after Mom died, and sure he hadn't been that great of a father for the past couple of years, but I hadn't been that great of a daughter, either.
However, if the faeries had indeed taken me, then they had replaced me with a changeling like in the stories, and I couldn't help but think that this was the best solution for all of those involved. But it still made me feel incredibly guilty at feeling such relief.
So, last night I resolved to check the storage unit Alt-Dad had left for me in Watson. I didn't know if it was because I was starting to bleed the feelings I had for my actual dad with Alt-Dad, or if I was just curious and felt that seeing what was in there would distract me, but I decided to check it out after school.
Watson was, for the most part, a pretty safe area. There was a lot of business activity and a lot of money in the district, mostly from Japanese corporations that had taken advantage of the fact that one of their biggest 800-pound gorillas of a competitor, Arasaka, could not come into Night City or the continent of North America at all.
It was actually, overall, much safer than Japantown, where I lived. I would have much preferred to have been given an apartment in one of the few Megabuildings in Watson, actually. However, I've gotten used to living in Japantown now.
Although it was mainly safe, it was a highly industrial area, especially the north part of town where the self-storage unit was located, as well as the waterfront docks area, and those types of places always had a larger amount of crime than pure residential or retail areas of a city.
Getting off the train, I walked down the street, following well-lit areas. I still had an hour before the sun would set, but I didn't know precisely how long I would be inside the storage unit. In the event that it was dark when I was leaving, I would probably call the friendly robotic taxi Delamain for assistance. From my perspective, he was much safer than human drivers in this city as far as taxis went. He was cheaper, too.
My destination was about a hundred metres ahead and to the right, but I spotted a food truck sitting next to the corner and glanced at its wares. Food was one of the few things that were not better than Brockton Bay, although, in the 2060s, the food was a lot better than it was forty or sixty years ago when over seventy per cent of all produced food was kibble, made by actual dog food companies.
That still existed, and if you were poor, it was the main source of calories you would receive if you were on welfare, but cloned fruits and even cereal crops were getting much more common, even though since all fuels seemed to be a sort of biodiesel that every calorie had to be weighed against the insatiable desire of more energy. There was only so much arable land in the world, after all.
I wasn't entirely sure what this food truck was selling, it was noodles of some kind, but it smelled quite good, so I ordered an extra large with shrimp. I doubted they were shrimp at all. Most meats were scop, or single-celled organic protein, a kind of meat substitute, but honestly, they had over fifty years to perfect it, and it didn't really taste that bad.
I hadn't tried the shrimp flavour, though, but the beef flavour did taste like beef, even if the consistency was a little bit off.
I took my food to-go and walked to the well-lit Secur-Stor-It building across the street. I had already looked up this location on the net before I decided to come. If it was an outside storage unit, then I wouldn't have come so close to sunset and would have had to schedule it for Sunday, which was one of the only days I had any time off at all.
The door into their lobby wouldn't open until I physically keyed in the twenty-four-digit pass key that I had gotten from Alt-Dad, after which the lobby opened, and an automated voice welcomed me and asked if I needed any assistance.
"No, thank you," I told the chatbot politely. The unit my Alt-Dad had left me was on the ground floor, but it was all the way in the back, next to a side door to leave the facility. I found it without too much trouble and carefully keyed in the password again. This caused a loud clicking sound as the slide-up door was magnetically unlocked. I rolled the door up just enough to duck my head under it and closed it behind myself, tapping a locked padlock glyph on the wall to reengage the locking systems.
"Now... what do we have here?" I asked as I found the light switch, along with several sheets of paper taped inside a plastic bag next to it, just like the letter said.
As the lights flickered on, my fingers fumbled, and the plastic bag with the inventory of the things in the room slipped from my fingers to fall to the floor as my jaw hit the floor at what I saw. Was that a small mech or a large set of Tinker power armour?!
I just blinked several times, looking at it, then moved closer to inspect it. I could see that it was clearly damaged; there was a small entry hole of some kind of incredible armour-piercing weapon going through the entirety of the torso of the armour. What weapon would have that much penetration on an obviously armoured suit like this? A crew-served railgun, perhaps?
I shook my head, walked over and grabbed the plastic bag off the ground, pulling the papers out. There was no additional message like I was wondering or hoping for, but it did have the items listed in a rough order of rarity. Next to each item was a code word that I couldn't decipher as well as a date. The date acquired, perhaps?
The top of the list was "Scorpion-22 | IEC Dragoon borg, damaged (irreparable), 2030 model, Value unknown or zero | 21 FEB 2059."
Ah. It wasn't a mech or an armour suit. It was a full-body conversion. You could have your entire body replaced with cybernetics, and this was one of the military models. I was suddenly very curious about where Alt-Danny was located towards the end of February 2059.
I walked back over to the Dragoon and very curiously looked in the back. There should be an access panel around... There! I found it and heaved a sigh of relief. When they converted you to a full body borg, they put your brain and part of your spinal column inside what was called a biopod, and they'd just slot this biopod into whatever body you happened to be "wearing."
I was a little worried Alt-Danny hadn't removed the former... occupant from this thing, and if so, it would have been less a statue and more of a corpse.
I glanced down at the list of items stored in the unit, raising my eyebrows again. There were a number of pieces of cybernetics, but most of the things here were... obvious souvenirs? The item listed with the most possible value was a signed Kerry Eurodyne guitar that he supposedly used in a show in Europe after he went solo when Johnny Silverhand died. It was marked "stolen", though, so perhaps I couldn't just put it on The Mad Closet auction net site.
Alt-Dad had always loved Kerry Eurodyne! The weirdest item was a broken wooden baseball bat, and I thought I could see some blood stains on it.
I was kind of sarcastic before when I thought Alt-Dad had been some kind of spy or on some black ops team, but it really looked like he had been. All of the cybernetics, a good half of which looked damaged or non-functional, were of the military variety that wouldn't be that useful to me at all. Were these taken from downed enemies?
I found one of the items I was interested in. It was a kerenzikov reflex boostware unit, listed in the manifest as "Kang Tao Kerenzikov, manufacture date 2057, value 5,000 to 10,000 eb." It was in a carefully packaged clear plastic bag. Not exactly what they were normally shipped in from the manufacturer at all.
I put on some nitrile gloves I kept in my purse, pulled the implant out of the plastic and inspected it close to my eyes.
I had finally Tinkered with some of the cybernetics in my body. My eyes, anyway. I realised I could take them out of my head one at a time, work on them and put them back. I wouldn't have to risk total blindness to adjust or add features to them, and I had been acquiring a lot more tools since I moved into the new apartment next to Clouds.
I had ventured into the black markets of Jig Jig street during the day to buy a set of somewhat sophisticated microwaldo tools and magnification equipment that were intended to be used to repair electronics. Not exactly intended for use in cybernetics, but ultimately cybernetics were electronics, too, and my Tinkering power let me cut a lot of corners that way.
Using these new tools and my good eye, I added additional features to my Kiroshis one eye at a time. They now had a low light vision mode, but more importantly, for my present purposes, they had a microscopic vision mode. I adjusted the zoom mechanism to also allow microscopic binocular vision, so long as what I was focusing on was somewhat near my eyes. I needed that to do the fine work necessary to replace the pigeon's cybernetic leg with a better one. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to see what I was doing at all during the surgery!
I inspected the kerenzikov closely and nodded. Definitely used. I could even detect the almost microscopic scarring of the unit when it was extracted from its previous owner. The idea that a lot of these cybernetics was from downed enemies my father met during his missions made sense. I didn't precisely know how I felt about that, though. I mean, both Alt-Taylor and I knew intellectually that Alt-Dad had to have killed people, but it was different from thinking that and staring at something he or one of his men extracted out of the spine of a fallen foe.
Placing the implant carefully back into its protective anti-static bag, I sat it down.
As I sighed, I realised that my noodles would become cold very soon. I needed to prioritise that first; it would also give me time to think.
Living in Japantown, I learned how to eat with chopsticks pretty quickly. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to eat in half of the restaurants or stalls in my Megabuilding.
These noodles were quite good. A lot better than the noodles I had during my first excursion out of my old apartment.
Not everything here could have been acquired during missions. There was just too much, for one thing, and second, there was just too much that was eclectic. There was what looked like a Polynesian war club. Tongan? There was a thirty or forty-year-old, fried cyberdeck that was affixed to a faux-wooden plaque as if it was a trophy. The Dragoon... maybe Alt-Danny killed it in a mission with a railgun, as I thought. But it was an old, 32-year-old model. I was pretty sure they didn't just change the exterior appearance every year like many of the car companies.
If it was a current-year model in operable condition... well, its worth would be inestimable. IEC did not really sell a lot of these things. Certainly, you couldn't buy them with something as pedestrian as money. But it made sense for old versions to find themselves in less aristocratic hands over the years. Perhaps you bought this unit new but eventually decided to upgrade to the newer version? Did you care who you sold the old and obsolescent versions to?
Perhaps even criminals might have access to these decades-old models. My impression was that the value of this particular example was mostly sentimental unless it could be repaired since it looked pretty well wrecked.
Repaired? I hummed, stood up and walked around it. I often had ideas on how to repair or improve cybernetics. I had no desire at all to use any kind of full-conversion cyberware, but I let my power consider how it might fix this Dragoon suit.
I stood there for over a minute and got nothing, nothing at all. I nodded slowly. My power wasn't considering this to have anything to do with a person's biology at all. I got the weak impression that it thought of it as a vehicle rather than as a piece of cybernetics that integrated with your body.
I bet I would have had ideas about the biopod that stored the operator's brain, though.
I grabbed a different item off a shelf after recognising the brand name on the black carbon fibre case. It read "Kendachi," and I had already identified it as one of the higher-valued items on the manifest and apparently one of the few pieces of cybernetics that hadn't come out of some poor sod's body.
It was listed as "2 x Kendachi monowire, manufactured 2055, value 10,000 - 15,000ea." I opened the case and raised an eyebrow. I was wondering why the case looked so large, there were two small boxes inside, but there was room for four more that were empty.
If he had to share some of his souvenirs with the men he worked with, then that would explain the absence. Maybe if he was the CO, he could claim two. Rank hath privileges, sometimes.
Kendachi was a famous Japanese company that produced all manner of monofilament blades, knives and swords, and of course, this monofilament wire implant served as an incredibly deadly built-in weapons system. You could sometimes see these on television and BDs, as it was very cinematic. It was depicted as more often the weapon of a femme fatale agent or faceless ninja assassin in media, who would be able to slice and dice mooks left and right with preternatural skill.
Alt-Dad had built-in weapons himself; he preferred a mantis blade in each arm. I had wanted something like that myself, but I didn't really want to replace my entire limbs with cybernetic limbs. Not only had I already paid twenty thousand dollars to get advanced bioware that relied on me keeping my meaty bits, but I wasn't sure I was ready to take those steps yet or possibly at all.
Something like this monowire would work... except it was incredibly hazardous to use! I could see myself whipping it around and accidentally decapitating myself if I just installed it and went to town. I had gotten a bit better with my pistol, I went to an indoor pistol range at least once a week, but I wasn't some kind of... ninja.
Still, I took one of the boxes out of the larger box and opened it. All the parts to install the device were there, including the special monoresistant ceramic components you needed to install on your hands and fingers. And a... data shard?
I blinked and found the documentation. It was a VR training scenario that Kendachi guaranteed was over 99.5% congruent with reality for operators to practice.
I got an interested look on my face. How many months would it take before I could not decapitate myself if I practised with this thing every day? A year? Years? The documents said that an experienced operator could be proficient in as few as fifty hours of practice using the VR simulator. Perhaps I should treble that estimate, or more, for myself. No, definitely more. I didn't know how long it would take me to feel comfortable not decapitating myself.
I didn't know, but I was going to find out. I carefully packed a few things I was taking back home with me. The kerenzikov, one of the monowires, an assortment of broken cybernetics, a fancy-looking Kang Tao submachine gun and an antique and fried-looking cyberdeck. I kind of wanted to take Kerry Eurodyne's guitar, but I didn't have a guitar case, and I didn't want to damage it, so it could stay there on its guitar rack for now.
I called Delamain and carefully locked up behind myself. Sitting in the back of the cab, I considered what I had found. There were a lot more things in there than I thought, but a lot of them were completely worthless.
I supposed they could be broken down into four categories, worthless things like the baseball bat, easily salable things, things I would have to sell on the black market and then things I couldn't sell no matter what, which might as well make them worthless. That last category was mainly the Dragoon full-body conversion, even if it was broken. Its weapon systems were intact, and surely there was some salvage value, but how would I sell any of it without being murdered?
I could maybe get thirty or forty thousand eurodollars if I sold all of the easily salable things. That would get me back up to the amount of money I had after I received Militech's settlement. Almost. As for the black market items? The absolute value was a lot higher, but.... That would be more difficult. My takeaway altogether might get me only maybe half again as much as the normal items because I doubted I would get even a fraction of the value for any of it. I didn't have those kinds of connections, and I was sure some of the names on the list my dad left would charge a fee.
The stuff was worth a lot of money, but it seemed like a big pain to liquidate it. Honestly, I was hoping there would be vast wealth in there. Maybe giant bags full of blood diamonds, or the original Mona Lisa painting or something.
I wasn't going to look at an entire storage unit full of free items worth tens of thousands of eurodollars askance, but in my fantastical heart, I was hoping I would have found something that would have solved my money problems entirely, allowing me to enrol in four years of medical school and live happily ever after.
Sadly, that wasn't the case. The more I thought about it, the more I thought I shouldn't even bother to sell the black market items unless I got desperate, even if they were to names Alt-Dad left behind. At least a third were military cybernetics that I would find interesting to study, like the boostware I was bringing home. The rest were just dangerous things neither the government nor the corps wanted people to have, like half of a Soviet-manufactured man-portable surface-to-air missile launcher.
I nodded. I'd get rid of the easily salable stuff quietly over the next few months and keep the rest in the storage unit for now, perhaps indefinitely. The unit was paid up till 2068, after all. There was no rush.
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- Location
- Elsewhere
You don't drive through Night City, you drive despite Night City.
Normally you're lucky if they bother to pack it in old newspaper!
Easy.
All you have to do is convince your power it's a medical device.
A remote amputation tool.
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MaxTac pigeons equiped with boostware. God have mercy on Night City if Taylor fugues monowires onto a pigeon.
Also the biopod reminds me of the nightmare version canon Bonesaw made. Her head and spine launched from her body like a demonic snake and shoved her spine down Blasto's throat, puppeting his body.
Also the biopod reminds me of the nightmare version canon Bonesaw made. Her head and spine launched from her body like a demonic snake and shoved her spine down Blasto's throat, puppeting his body.
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Edifier
Trusted within thoughts.
- Location
- Court of Moon Wizards
Before you know it Taylor is performing field surgery with delicate and very lethal wires. Even a nanometer off the mark and the person becomes giblets.
Didn't Taylor already chuck her newfound ego up to being mild symptoms of Cyberpsychosis?
Since she noticed... what's the harm of a lil bit more, especially when it has so much superhuman potential. Just imagine how much superior she would be to the common rabble who have to react to things in human time.
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- Location
- Internet
I'm not expecting her to cure Cyberpsychosis, but I'm hoping she tinkers something up that can help alleviate it, or make treating it possible.
- Location
- Elsewhere
"I've created a treatment for cyberpsychosis!"
"How does it work?"
"It makes them act more like parahumans."
"How do parahumans act?"
"Like violence-seeking morons with superiority complexes."
"..."
Corpo: Tell me more, sound like a good product
- Location
- Home
Oh boy. Already toying with cybernetics and improving on them, and a bird is getting better care from his ripperdoc than most of night city.
- Location
- zwolle
fun stuff in the vault with the loot seems alt dad loot goblin-fu was strong ^^
interesting with the borg full suit will be fun to see what will happen with it one hand a borg doctor/EMT tickle's my funny bone the saint adam fem version would fit nice in the city.
still selling the stuff should pay for medical school the signed items could pay for everything me thinks ?
interesting with the borg full suit will be fun to see what will happen with it one hand a borg doctor/EMT tickle's my funny bone the saint adam fem version would fit nice in the city.
still selling the stuff should pay for medical school the signed items could pay for everything me thinks ?
- Location
- Elsewhere
Cloak&Dagger
Definitely Insane
I'm expecting her to cure cyberpsychosis. It's just a software bug that should be easily solved by her power.
Aurora Moon
Verfied Insomniac with too much time on her hands
- Location
- USA, Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I always thought of it as the software not knowing how to read and treat PTSD. like, the brain actually can become altered enough if it experiences enough Trauma with a capital T. The software in the cyberware is so thoroughly interfaced with the brain itself so any fleshy brain changes it wouldn't be able to handle too much. It also can't seem to handle very intense and strong emotions. and the anime seems to support this headcanon of mine.
the game itself, ehh... not so much.