So Spira, did Gloria take Taylor's pet pug to Night City
How did you find these words? I can't believe I'm learning new vocabulary words
Did Taylor mention that she wanted to get kidnapped in the previous chapter?
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Skitterdoc 2077
- Thread starter SpiraSpira
- Start date
- Crossover
Aren't they normal words? Anyway, if you are looking for words similar to a given one, a thesaurus is the tool for the job.
Hasumi was held by Maelstrom, Tay probably assumed that they wouldn't be interested in raping a piece of useful meat.
Or just that she didn't want to think of the possibility.
Makes sense that it was only one guy, since there were 5 (four in this AU) escapees running closely together and in a predictable direction. Hardly a difficult shot (Though saw one commenter on SB mention that there's a theory an AI aided Lucy in her escape, but IDK about that.)
Back in Bodyblow said:
I imagine that, when Gloria got to the car, the pug was sitting in the front passenger seat already waiting, with a small pile of toys next to it 😇
- Location
- France
- Pronouns
- She/They
Catching up now. Taylor is blaming herself for not murdering a guy when she could afford not to, when it's obviously the NCPD and Night City's structure more generally that leads to guys like this getting released with basically no work done to ensure they're safe despite the data they have, which lead her to rationalize herself into basically a punisher stance on crime rather than make any reflection on how Night City (doesn't) handle criminals. Kinda sad when she clearly has the brains to think beyond that, but I guess never ask an expert his opinions on non subject related matters.
Of course the conclusion is still not wrong considering she can't change NC policing but she's jumping to the murder conclusion a bit too eagerly. I guess it could be blamed on trying to make Gloria feel better but that feels weak.
Edit: maybe I'm a bit mean to her, she does mention it.
Of course the conclusion is still not wrong considering she can't change NC policing but she's jumping to the murder conclusion a bit too eagerly. I guess it could be blamed on trying to make Gloria feel better but that feels weak.
Edit: maybe I'm a bit mean to her, she does mention it.
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Thanks, that's an excellent analysis.
Some of it might be survivor's guilt too, or a need for anyone to blame: it can be really difficult to accept that one made the morally-right decision, and still got a terrible outcome due to structural issues built deep into the system one lives in.
However, I suspect it largely ties into the hints we've had of her internalizing the local corporatist and might-makes-right mindset, due to some mix of her neural plasticity treatment (presumably she still uses the Tinkertech sleep inducers, rather than mass-produced ones) and I feel like it has sped up since she made herself multilocated.
Still, I hope she notices and realizes it's directly undermining her goals to unfuck the world: it's impossible to make long-term plans, if one's future-self will become uncaring of, or outright hostile to, those goals. I sure hope she isn't turning into "Grams." 🙀
PS: Miou :3
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- Location
- France
- Pronouns
- She/They
Oh yeah there's a heavy amount of self loathing involved in concluding you were personally responsible for a crime someone committed after leaving the cops' hands.
I don't think she could get welded to the status quo, because she will always have the urge to deploy more of her helpful tech. But if she adopts their cynical attitudes along the way she'll end up just another corp founder.
True Metal Power
Lisa: The Hintful
- Location
- Russia
My headcanon was that Cyberpunk has private prisons that are legal slavery, where inmates at best mine asbestos without protective equipment and at worst get roles at XBDs or end up as guinea pigs for corporate researchers.
And that the problem should not be that people get away with crimes(not unless they are rich or connected, and random Scavs are unlikely to be), the problem would be that cops will be grabbing whoever they can with fabricated charges and getting monetary rewards from prison companies.
And that the problem should not be that people get away with crimes(not unless they are rich or connected, and random Scavs are unlikely to be), the problem would be that cops will be grabbing whoever they can with fabricated charges and getting monetary rewards from prison companies.
tbh her occupations pretty much reaffirms that outlook: As an EMT, TT, surgeon etc she would constantly come across victims of such circumstances, and as a Fixer she would often get paid to 'facilitate justice', throw in a dash of edgerunning or even just going about your day in less than stellar areas and well. You'd get jaded fast in CP.
Especially once you're aware of the revolving door prisons.
Wouldn't worry about her just becoming another corpo, her empathy may be limited but she's been consistent in what she sees as crossing the lines. (No children, rape or scavs, and overall professionalism.) and she prefers to lead with the carrot rather than the stick or being obsessed with her bottomline.
- Location
- France
- Pronouns
- She/They
Eh I don't think having red lines or a moderate amount of empathy for people you personally interact with is a sufficient shield from becoming another corpo. They have plenty of tools to but layers between themselves and those issues. And I'm not sure how much the long time corpos are focused on the bottom line either. Funnily cyberpunk is a reversal of the trend we see in modern capitalism because the corps have a lot more long term thinking capacity. The corps aren't operating on shareholder value maximization, they're operating on the priorities of long term founders and execs who derive power from their structure and would really like them to last.
I'm also worried about that. Even without access to Taylor's tinker powers, I have trouble imagining that megacorps couldn't make significant improvements to air quality in cities, homelessness, safety, access to healthcare, etc. and that they wouldn't profit from it: generally, happy and healthy people are vastly more productive, and spend their money which always makes it back to the corps'.
Basically increase the overall wealth being produced, rather than play a zero-sum game against other corporations etc.
I believe that's similar to an IRL "collective blindspot" that seems fairly ubiquitous, for instance with organizations making marginal savings on facilities etc. only to lose a lot more on the difference in productivity. Or governments spending astounding amounts of money on ineffective policing and prohibition, instead of addressing any of the root causes. Or "saving money" by defunding social programs that have enormous returns on investment: turns out, people who have have their physiological and safety needs met, and have access to education, grow up to have more income and pay more taxes. >_>'
The stated goals of profit maximization is completely at odds with the actual decisions and outcomes, which can mean there are other structural forces that shape CP77's societies and prioritize other things; presumably, like most political structures, the unstated priority is to keep the people in power, in power.
I believe Taylor noticed that early on, for instance making the hypothesis literacy is delayed in (public school) children so that people significantly smarter than average are mostly of the "right" kind; or talking about the guanxi which ensures only "suits" can purchase certain products at reasonable prices, or at all.
She's still aware of that, at least, for instance mentioning she can't introduce Hiro to her wholesale contacts until he can present the right image. But there seem to be a lot less commentary about the system itself, which could be a sign Taylor is accepting/internalizing the system as it is, and less cognizant of its structural issues.
To be absolutely clear, the fiscal argument isn't my position on any of this: I think those things should be basic rights, and felt rather uncomfortable arguing for human dignity based on its profitability. 😬
PS: Damn you beat me to the finish line =^.^=
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PPS: In a sense, that's the organizational/generational equivalent of Gram's "wish to live forever" : the family/corpo/caste must sustain itself and will socialize its members into behaviors and systems that perpetuate the ingroup... simply because organizations that do not do this, are already gone long before they can accumulate significant power.
That's IMO a reason political parties seldom merge, even when they profess similar ideologies and goals, or just successfully run a common campaign. (And heck if I know who I'll vote for, in next year's European elections...)
I suspect that's also a reason why many electoral systems are highly susceptible to outright manipulation (like gerrymandering) or are intrinsically less favorable to smaller parties (e.g. each area electing few representatives, or requiring voters to each make a single choice rather than a ranked list of preferences)
- Location
- France
- Pronouns
- She/They
Cyberpunk is really fun like this because it's a frozen in time slice of speculative fiction. It's built on dystopic trends of capitalism, but it didn't quite guess all the right ones. There's of course the worry about Japanese domination as one of the egregious example of the genre's misses, but I think the greatest one it misses on is how self destructive corporations have become to fulfil shareholder value maximization. You're either an old corporation with real valuable chunks of the economy in the process of being hollowed out and letting those fall apart because investment could be share buybacks instead, or a new corporation vacuuming up investor money in your attempt at blitzscaling while making the target economic sector much more precarious.
Of course that's just western corporations and cyberpunk draw heavily from the Japanese conglomerates, but even those have gradually given up on lifetime employment and employee loyalty. And of course Japan's economy is a hollow shell of what it was when it inspired cyberpunk.
Of course that's just western corporations and cyberpunk draw heavily from the Japanese conglomerates, but even those have gradually given up on lifetime employment and employee loyalty. And of course Japan's economy is a hollow shell of what it was when it inspired cyberpunk.
- Location
- london
- Location
- Paradise, Hawaii
So, on a separate subject?
The Body in Space, how long will it take for her to earn enough for her to rent or own her very own Space in Space? If she does, what will she do with it?
Can she grow a garden in space?
Can Trees function or grow well in micro-gravity?
The Body in Space, how long will it take for her to earn enough for her to rent or own her very own Space in Space? If she does, what will she do with it?
Can she grow a garden in space?
Can Trees function or grow well in micro-gravity?
- Location
- london
Yes but they grow differently. GM space trees are possible, but they would need to be planted on a asteroid to provide the mass and probably need supplementary minerals to be brought from elsewhere.
When one lives in an area where the justice system is inherently unjust, then certain areas will be somewhat hands off for the corrupt cops, like the healthcare workers, certain government workers, people with pull and such outside of a war zone. Those individuals not employed in those areas realize there is no justice so when pushed they go to eliminating their crime problems permanently.
She got the job!
May 2067
Night City
Gloria's Apartment, Santo Domingo
"I tell you, that damn dog only likes you and David," grumbled Gloria as she stood, mostly paralysed, in the maintenance bay I built for her in her new apartment. The dog in question was right next to her, worrying on her shoe while softly growling.
She was renting a large three-bedroom apartment so that she and David could have their own rooms, which they had become accustomed to back in Los Angeles.
The last room was a guest room, but she mainly used it as a study for schoolwork for the both of them, as Gloria seemed to be intent on continuing her education, already talking about taking night and net classes when she hadn't even secured a job yet, but that shouldn't be an issue as qualified RNs were always in demand. It was in this room that I had placed the maintenance bay against on wall. It didn't take much space unless Gloria was inside it, so it was out of the way.
As full-body replacements went, Geminis didn't need a lot of maintenance. They were about a third biological, so that part was mostly self-repairing, but that wasn't to say that they didn't need any.
Ongoing maintenance was one of the ways full-body cyborg users were controlled. It was expensive, but it had no reason to be beyond the fact that it encouraged cyborgs to seek gainful employment where their maintenance could be provided as part of their wages, like health insurance. I was definitely breaking the agreement that Raven Microcybernetics had doctors who sold their equipment sign by installing this in the end-users apartment and even teaching her how to do most of the maintenance herself.
But I never signed that agreement in the first place as I bought the body on the black market, so there. Nyaa!
"He comes from a long line of wolves," I told her with a grin, "He is a predator."
She scoffed, kind of. She didn't have full control of all of her facial muscles, just enough to talk, "Predator? He can open the refrigerator door, and he has a habit of stealing cookies."
I snorted. Although he had a very dopey-looking face, he did seem to be pretty smart, just like Mrs Pegpig was. I had thought he was mentally challenged at first, but he was very sneaky with it. He did have a very stupid, dopey-looking face, though. I still wondered where the bird had found him. It wasn't like there were wild packs of pugs around. He was basically David's dog now, though.
After finishing the diagnostic, I nodded and told her, "There's a small capacitor that is in the process of going bad in some of the circuitry of your left leg. That's why you feel a bit off when flexing that leg." I shared the screen of the maintenance diagnostic and showed her how I had identified the problem, "It's not outputting the voltage it should, so we'll go ahead and change it. It shouldn't take very long."
With a mental flip of a switch, she was no longer paralysed. The scanning devices in the maintenance bay were purchased off the shelf, and the bay very much resembled the standard ones available for lease by Raven Microcybernetics. As such, they required the victim—err patient to be still in the process of scanning, so the simplest solution when dealing with a cyborg was just to turn off their ability to move their body. Gloria carefully pushed the pug away with her toe, which I found amusing.
I asked her to strip while I grabbed some tools, then glanced back and blushed faintly and told her she could keep the panties on. It was odd that I reacted at all, as I was very familiar with every centimetre of her body, but that was before she started using it. Things changed when someone was living in it for quite a long time.
This repair was lucky because the circuit board was available from one of the "access panels" on her calf. Rather than a panel, per se, it more resembled a very fine and almost invisible seam. I pulled the small circuit board out with a pair of forceps. Gloria frowned down at it, "And how would I repair it? Component-level repair of electronics is a little bit beyond my skill level."
I nodded. Although it was true that any modern Med Techie had a lot of practical electronics repair experience due to cybernetics, removing one small surface mount component on a very small board was not the level of skill even most doctors had.
I said, "You wouldn't—if I wasn't around, you'd need to hire an actual techie to do this part. But, if you're interested in expanding your skills in this direction, even if it is just to repair your own body, I can point you to some classes you can take or audit. I'd recommend you then start a hobby of repairing hand-held Agents. They're cheap and widely available, and it is not a big deal if you brick a few dozen and you're not out as much when you do. This small board would cost about two thousand eddies if I had to buy it from Raven." Agents were what I would call a "smartphone" in this world. In my mind, I still called them smartphones, though, but that wasn't a word that had survived the '90s in this universe, so people looked at me askance when I had used it a few times.
She nodded, seeming interested, and I sat the board on a table and used my high-magnification vision and tools to quickly unsolder and remove the faulty capacitor, replacing it with a slightly beefier version and walking her through the process. The last step involved brushing on a sort of clear-coat epoxy as a protective layer, which I had used solvent on a q-tip to remove previously. It took a few minutes for the epoxy to dry, so I spent the time explaining each stage of the repair.
I was already pretty sure what was wrong when she told me her complaint over the phone, so I had everything I needed just in case. There were a lot of complaints over the series of tantalum capacitors that the last few years of Gemini models used in some of their distributed control boards. It would have been better to use a straight graphene supercap as I had used it as a replacement, but those were a spacer product and about five times the price as traditional capacitors.
I slipped the board back in her calf, reconnected it and nodded, "Do a full body reset and physio-self test and calibration. See if that solved the problem." Gloria nodded and then froze for half a second before she started moving again in a type of slow kata-looking callisthenics routine.
She grinned, "Works great, now! That little lag is gone."
I tilted my head at her little routine and asked, "Is that some kind of martial art? I don't recognise it."
She nodded and grinned, "Yes, but I can't teach it to you."
"Oh? Is it secret? Do I need permission from your Shifu?" I asked amusedly. That suddenly gave me an idea for a short part of Rage of a Villainess, thinking the protagonist could say something along the lines of, 'I'm not permitted to teach this art before reaching the Nascent Soul stage!' I made an entry in my narrative notes file.
She chuckled and shook her head, putting her pants back on, "No. But it's a martial art designed for Borgs. Regular humans, even if they're somewhat strength-enhanced like you, just can't get anything out of it. Really, even Geminis are a little too weak and frail to get the maximum benefit out of it, too."
That surprised me. I wasn't aware of any Borg-specific martial arts, but it wasn't like I was anything but a hobbyist. Although I had started taking Kendo, Aikido and Judo classes as Hasumi, it wasn't like I was one of those types of people that hung around the gym or dojo all the time. The fact that she said that a Gemini was a little weak to get the full effect out of the art was also surprising. Gloria could bench-press over half a ton easily and might be able to do three-quarters of a ton with extreme effort. I arched an eyebrow, curious, "Where did you learn this?"
"Ah. I met a lot of other full cyborgs while I assisted on that professor's research project. Mostly borderline to actual cyberpsychos, but we got along pretty well, and they introduced me to a few people who could teach it," she then looked a little embarrassed and said, "I can't really talk about it with outsiders, but I've already found another teacher here in town, though."
Outsiders! I grinned wildly. How interesting. It seemed like there was some sort of full-borg secret society. I very much approved of Gloria being a part of it, too. When I first met Gloria, she literally had no life outside of work and taking care of David. Before I could express my approval, she asked, "Speaking of which... would you be willing to do some similar work for a few... well, I can't really call them friends precisely yet, but acquaintances? They're mostly in Alpha classes, but one of them is in an old IEC Wingman, and one other guy has a thirty-year-old Militech ninja body. They're all struggling a little bit with psychosis, but I think that the lack of routine maintenance is as big an issue as any psychological ones they have. Probably wouldn't be able to pay much, though..." she trailed off.
I blinked. Alpha classes, well... everybody and their brother made that kind of full-body replacement. It was the generic labourer type. Over ninety per cent of all Borgs were of this variety; they were "the clanking masses." Varied and highly customisable, the Alpha was the Toyota Hilux of full-body replacement.
However, the Wingman was a specialised body designed for fighter pilots and astronauts. Since IEC went out of business, they weren't sold anymore, but they were pretty unique. They were almost guaranteed to have very high-end boostware included too, and it would be interesting to see a type of boostware designed for Borgs and how it diverged from the kind designed for regular humans. It would be mostly neuro-focused, as you didn't really have to improve the latency in an already electronic nervous system equivalent.
It reminded me of the destroyed, semi-disassembled Dragoon I still had in my storage unit. Although I had come a long way, I was still pretty sure I wouldn't be able to completely repair it yet—but doing routine maintenance on other full-body replacements now was something I felt comfortable doing, even if they were entirely mechanical. However, as much as I would like to look at those two unique models, I was a bit leery of being too close to a "borderline cyberpsycho" full-body replacement.
After a moment of silence, I said, "Possibly—as long as you were with me." I'd also want a number of safety measures I didn't yet have in my clinic. Maybe a large directed EMP or a high-voltage security system.
Gloria laughed uneasily and said, "Ahahaha—of course, I was going to suggest that anyway."
I nodded and said, "If you want, let's try the Wingman guy first." Although kind of strong and very fast, they weren't as dangerous in most situations as the unstated "ninja" model. And what model was that? I didn't know. Maybe an old Eclipse? If so, that was about as unusual as my Dragoon, although much easier to hide, fit in and disguise as a regular Alpha-type or possibly an Enforcer-type police body than the Dragoon. There was no hiding that borderline mecha as anything but 'OMG. WTF.'
The Militech Eclipse was a very advanced full-body replacement at the time it was built in the early 2020s, and it was one of the few that they still managed to build after the DataKrash in limited numbers, at least for a little while. I believe the last year it was manufactured was in the early 2030s, similar to the Dragoon.
However, it suffered a bit from a jack-of-all-trades issue. It was designed for covert ops, but it had a little bit of everything, including things as wild as integrated hypodermic needles in the fingers and a detachable explosive rocket-propelled finger-bomb in the left ring finger. It ended up being good at a lot of things, but it wasn't the best at anything, and that sealed its fate because it was a specialised kit to begin with.
Heinlein would say that specialisation was for insects, not mankind, but cyborgs were different. Specialisation in cyborg bodies was very desirable, especially since you could, theoretically, wear them like clothes. Another point in favour of taking a look at the Wingman first was I was one hundred per cent sure I could find the maintenance manuals for the Wingman since IEC was defunct. Militech might guard the files on their old tech more strenuously; I just didn't know.
Plus, let's face it... I wanted to look at the old IEC body the most. As for the compensation, I shrugged. As Taylor Hebert, I had most of the liquid capital that Dr Hasumi made selling all of my sleep inducers. When I was kidnapped, I made sure to funnel most of it to Taylor through quite a lot of obfuscation layers since I felt that it might be difficult to send money from Hasumi to Taylor or Hana in the future.
It wouldn't be impossible, but it might be difficult; in fact, I was continuing to run the payment obfuscation service that Dr Hasumi set up. It was, by now, a trusted semi-legal service, and I took a percentage of all the transfers, but the main reason was the influx of money from a variety of sources allowed me to tumble all of Hasumi's money back to any place I wanted.
I could make use of that as Hasumi sending money to Taylor or Hana, and it would be challenging for Arasaka to trace the recipient, but it would be obvious I was sending money to someone, so that might be difficult to answer. As such, I had divested Hasumi of most of her money when she got kidnapped.
Right now, as Taylor, I had access to a little less than twenty million Eurodollars, which was enough to live a quiet life, as well as fund Hana's business prospects when she became more trusted in space. It would also be necessary to fund my "fourth body." That was going to be very special, and it was actually going to be wildly expensive for a number of reasons.
Now with Hasumi kidnapped, although I expected and even encouraged this outcome, I was again running into the issue of Taylor being a single point of failure. Neither Hasumi nor Hana, at the moment, could rapidly clone a replacement body if one part of me died. If Hana or Hasumi died, I, as Taylor, could easily clone a replacement body, but if "Taylor" died... well, I was shit out of luck unless I had Hana return to Earth. That had to change.
I talked to Gloria a little more about her request and agreed to see the Wingman guy in a week or two. Then, after their little group saw that I wasn't a risk, I would see the more physically dangerous ones. I grabbed the pug dog and asked Gloria, "What did David end up naming him, anyway?"
"The Honourable, Lord Percival Butterbutt the Fourth, Esquire," Gloria said with a straight face, "Butterbutt for short."
I stared into Lord Butterbutt's dumb but cunning eyes as he started panting and just shook my head.
May 2067
Aoyama (Special Ward of Tokyo)
Hasumi's Apartment Building
I panted as I returned the practice blade to a resting low-guard position, facing my instructor, who peered at me carefully before nodding. He said, "Alright, we're done for today." In the corner of the room, Yuki clapped wildly and cheered before walking up and offering me a towel and a glass of water.
I wasn't wealthy enough to have a gym in my apartment, but there were two inside the apartment building that I was now living in, and one of them had a large open area that was mostly used for Yoga and Pilates classes that a lot of house-wives and some house-husbands partook in. But when it was empty, other people were free to use it.
An instructor, well, that was actually very easy. Perhaps not too surprising, but Arasaka had a lot of what would be called on the street "cyber ninjas." My Kendo instructor was actually one of the security team members that I paid for, so it was a pretty simple decision for him to work a few hours a week when he wasn't on duty for some extra money.
At first, I expected to get just a regular Kendo instructor from a regular dojo down the street, but this idea was nixed. I needed a specialised instructor who also had close to equivalent or superior boostware as I did. Being over three times faster than the average person hid a lot of sins in terms of technique—even barely trained, I could probably beat many historical swordmasters just because I could smack them with my sword faster than they could react to, even if I was using it as nothing more than a bludgeon or crude chopping implement.
Yuki glanced down at my practice sword and said, "That sword is kind of weird, though. It looks vaguely European. Where did you get the idea from?"
I blushed. I couldn't very well say that I got it from a series of Earth Aleph high-fantasy novels that my mom and I both enjoyed, but I tried to copy the Heron-marked sword when I found out that Kendachi would provide both a customised practice sword as well as an actual blade with a monomolecular edge, and relatively cheaply too.
My instructor walked up and nodded his head, "It kind of reminds me of a German kriegsmesser crossed with a Chinese dao or maybe even a katana. It's quite interesting... most of the common katana forms work, but due to the heavier hilt, with an actual crossguard and pommel, the balance point is much closer to the hilt. This changes the types of moves somewhat." He took my practice blade and balanced it with one finger close to the crossguard.
He flipped it around with that finger, grabbed it by the blade out of the air and handed it back to me, "All in all, it's quite good. Katanas are designed to be quite a bit blade-heavier, so this makes them a bit slower. Historically, the trade-off is that, in exchange, you get more cutting force due to the leverage. But, in this day and age of augmented strength, I could definitely see how being a bit faster might be advantageous."
I chuckled and rubbed the back of my neck, "I'm not sure I thought it through that much, Tanaka-dono, but I thought that the mono-resistant treatment on the crossguard might save my fingers." I called him sensei while he was teaching me, but he refused that at all other times, but his recitation of the relative merits of different swords reminded me of a historical samurai, so I thought to be cheeky.
He grinned at me, "-dono, eh? I always did think I would look good with a top-knot. Ahh... to a simpler time, eh? Well, if you'll excuse me, I have to get ready to go on duty in a couple of hours."
Before he walked off, I asked, "Tanaka-san, do you know about any secret martial arts designed for full-body replacement users? I was reading something online and found the premise interesting."
He paused, blinked and then nodded, "There's a few, and none of them are secret, really. But, the most famous and effective has to be the so-called Panzerfaust. Made somewhat famous by our own Adam Smasher, but there are plenty of people that have a higher degree of mastery than him, like the Kazekage. Smasher will only beat you to death with his hands as a last resort or if he finds it particularly amusing." He paused, shook his head, making a small hand gesture that might be one to ward off evil and said, "Better not to speak his name lest we summon him."
I nodded, and he walked off. How interesting; I wonder if that was what Gloria was learning. Cursory net searches didn't show very much information except what I had just learned. It was featured in a few films, but everyone was positive that the depiction in the film had no bearing at all on what the actual martial art looked like in practice.
After Tanaka left, Yuki and I returned back to my apartment on one of the upper floors. I quickly took a shower, declining Yuki's offer to wash my back. One very interesting invention that I didn't even know existed was a kind of drying field installed in my bathroom. It didn't dry precisely, but I thought it used gravity manipulation technology to quickly pull all of the water off your body. That was my guess based on my internal accelerometers registering constantly changing but tiny amounts of "acceleration" while I just stayed very still in the shower.
Walking back out in a towel, I glanced at the clothes Yuki had set out for me and nodded. I didn't feel that comfortable being completely naked in front of him, but I didn't mind walking around in a towel. While he waited outside my room, I donned my outfit for the day. Asking him through the door, "Is there anything pressing today on my schedule?"
There was a pause before Yuki said, "Not pressing, exactly, but there is a small matter you might want to know about, but I'm not sure how to solve it."
I replied, "Oh? How interesting, since I am pretty sure you were trained from a young age to be a problem solver." Amongst other things, I thought but kept his obvious other uses to myself.
"Well, there is this woman; she lives in the building with us. She was recently promoted as an executive in the Intelligence division," Yuki began, and I didn't need to ask him whose Intelligence Division. Basically, only Arasaka employees lived in this building. Yuki paused, "Long story short, your arrival was somewhat unexpected, and you snagged the last AV pad on this side of the building out from under her. She had been planning on purchasing or leasing an AV since his promotion."
"Ah… this is in the nature of etiquette then," I mused. Really, I didn't need to do anything, and it was her own fault for not leasing the open pad when she had the chance. If she had, I was sure I would be living in a different building because access to an AV was required in my employment contract, "But I don't want to make enemies when I don't have to or needlessly antagonist my neighbours."
Yuki walked in, as he had a pretty good idea of how long it took for me to get dressed by now and nodded, "Right! But there's not a whole lot we can do."
"We bought a new AV and leased a slightly older one as a maintenance spare, right?" I asked him.
He shook his head, "We ended up doing the opposite. It just so happened we got a sweetheart deal on financing to buy the two-year-old model, and we're leasing a newer one. They're both comparable, though. The spare is based in a hangar at the airport."
"How about this, then… We'll need to hire a second flight crew, maybe on a PRN basis, but offer the Intel lady a fractional ownership or sublease of one of the AVs. Whoever gets to the pad first will take the first AV, then the PRN crew can fly the second aircraft to the pad to service whoever is still in the building," I offered. It would cause a delay if we both left the building at the same time, but I didn't have any fixed hours per se, and given my body's presence in space which used the Greenwich Mean Time time zone, I had planned to work odd hours here in Japan in any event. It was also somewhat expected for genius researchers to have odd proclivities, such as working odd hours or being recluses.
Yuki frowned, probably because he didn't like the idea that this might inconvenience me slightly in some situations, but he then nodded, "Okay. I'll figure out what an appropriate fee would be and reach out to her."
"There's no reason to price it too aggressively; it's okay if I lose a little money on the arrangement. Sometimes favours, especially from those in Intel, are worth more than gold," I reasoned and then walked out of my apartment, the pretty boy trailing about one and a half steps behind me as we and my security team boarded the AV-8 and flew five minutes into the business district. A five-minute flight would have been a forty-five-minute ground transport, so I could see the benefits.
I had a small team and a small lab, at least for now, but I still had a dozen researchers working underneath me, not including two administrators or Yuki. Their specialities were a bit broad, as I had stated that I intended to research bio-engineering, cybernetics and genetics. There was some overlap in the first two, of course, but genetics was a bit of an outlier. Still, even the two geneticists in my lab said they had no problem working on other projects. I intended to work on two projects at once, as a rule. In the future, one of the projects would be one of my "hobby projects", but both were intended to be profitable at the moment. I had to make a name for myself, after all.
My team met me in the large conference room, and I didn't waste any time, "Gentlemen," I began, as I noticed I was the only lady on my team. It was a bit of a surprise, as while it was still the case that men outnumbered women in the physical sciences and engineering, there were more females than not in the field of life sciences, including genetics, "Our first project is multi-pronged. First, we will be researching the incorporation of biological neural tissue as a replacement for silicon processors, neural network chips and ASICs." I clicked a slide with a photograph of one of my little spider bots, followed by more that showed an internal view of its primary processing ganglia. Surprisingly, neither my kidnappers nor Arasaka had twinged that these machines were a new invention, too. There were hundreds of models of small robots like this, though. The construction units and programming jigs were destroyed, though, along with other sensitive electronics in my factory. But, it wasn't as though I had ever gotten to the point where I could really mass produce them, either, so my first project was to duplicate this effort without any obvious Tinkertech involved in the programming/training base stations or the fast-cloning of the neural tissue itself.
"If that proves successful, then we will move on to specialised cloning techniques to produce lots of suitable neural tissue quickly and cheaply," I finished. I didn't waste a lot of time, and I already had individualised work-plans for most of the people here. For now, we could get as much neural tissue as we wanted from the morgues in Tokyo. A lot of people donated their bodies to Science after their death, especially since it came with a small honorarium paid to their surviving families.
One of the researchers asked, frowning, "How long are we planning on spending on this project if it's not fruitful?"
I hummed. I knew it could be successful, but shrugged, "We will drop it if there are no promising developments, especially in the economies involved, in six months, I suspect."
That got everyone nodding, and I dismissed the meeting. I didn't like unnecessary meetings, but I was still new here, so a few had to be accomplished. As for my next project? I didn't know. I wanted to prioritise things I could get a handle on quickly, which was why my spider bots were chosen. I had already built them, granted, using a lot of Tinkertech in the construction process, but I knew they were at least possible. To give myself ideas, I asked to review recent failed Arasaka projects in my area of expertise. To do so, I had to access a SCIF in the basement of the research complex. This special area was the only place highly classified datalinks were permitted, for example, to the core Arasaka databases, where I could just browse projects that I had both a clearance to see and fell into my competencies.
I was searched rather thoroughly before being allowed into the SCIF, which resembled nothing more than a padded room from an old-fashioned mental asylum. Inside there was no wireless connection at all, just a small desk that featured a simple data retrieval system like a library might have. I could sit at the desk and access confidential files, but I could only view them. I couldn't take them with me, except in screenshots from my eyes or my memory of in a scrolled BD, I supposed. That was always the risk when viewing classified files, and unless you had total control over the OS of the employee, it would always be a risk.
I browsed the list of projects and paused, finger over an entry. They were listed chronologically, so one of the first was called 'PROJECT DEEP VALKYRIE', and I noticed it because it was listed as both defunct and physically located in Honduras. I selected it. As I thought, it was the project involved in Old Net research that Yuki offered to see if I could be read in on. Apparently, the security levels were much lower on defunct projects, as it was just included in my general request to see defunct projects. It was listed as defunct due to primarily the deaths of all key project employees and secondarily the loss of project "assets."
Clicking my tongue, I read over the synopsis and reports. I didn't have full access. For example, I couldn't read the research papers or see diagrams of technology invented, if any. I'd have to request that specifically in a project I wanted to pursue, but I could read the bullet points. Pinching my glabella, I sighed. I knew that no matter who grabbed me, I would be working for something akin to an amoral or even immoral company, but this was pretty bad. I actually didn't have that much of an issue with training children to be specialist net runners… it was not that much different than what Militech was doing with NC-Taylor, except they started younger here. It wasn't like they murdered the rejects; they just sent them back to the orphanages.
However… then throwing your child-runners against the horrors on the Old Net? Yes, that was something that was bad. That explained the identity of those four children I helped back in Honduras, and I felt a lot better about my decision, sitting there smiling for a long moment. Looking through a few more reports, I widened my eyes. Wow. They totally destroyed the research personnel on this project. I couldn't really blame them, but the surveillance videos just showed people keeling over dead, being electrocuted or one case where someone's head legitimately exploded. I didn't even know how that was possible.
I shook my head. It was stupid. Training a net runner was the same as training a soldier. If you created a cadre of child super soldiers, then convinced them that you were basically murdering them one after another by forcing them to face suicidal odds, of course, they would mutiny and frag you. I looked briefly at all of the data on the project I was able to access, including a small dossier on each of the missing "assets." That might be useful for later, but as far as anyone could tell they were well in the wings.
I found one project that I could easily accomplish, namely a failed but ongoing project to decrypt the genome of my fuel algae. Hell, I could do that one in one afternoon! But I wasn't stupid enough to do so, so I barely even looked at it before moving on. I found a number of options but picked one that looked both easy and was more on the genetics side. My two geneticists wouldn't be getting too much work on the Spiderbot project, and we could simultaneously work on this project.
Going back upstairs, I drew the two geneticists, who were PhDs in their own right, into my office and grinned, "Us three will be working on a separate project. That's not to say you won't be possibly assisting on Project Alpha, but Project Bravo will be...." I made a silly da-da-da-daaah noise and finished with, in English, "Biometals!"
One of the geneticists tilted his head to the side and asked, "Like... calcium?"
I shook my head, "No, no... except that that is a metal that our bodies have evolved to process. What we will be researching are non-evolutionary biometals and possibly organometallic alloys. Specifically, the creation of novel organisms, perhaps bacteria, to process these metals."
The other geneticist made an 'Ahhh' of understanding, "Like a biological process of refining metals. I believe there was a research project along those lines a decade ago, but it didn't produce any useful results."
I grinned and nodded, "Yes! But I think that they almost did. A lot of money was put into this project, and several novel bacteria were created. I won't know for sure until the secure courier arrives with all their research data on a data shard, but I believe we can succeed where they failed. Sometimes all it takes is a new person looking at a problem to finish pushing the stone up the hill, eh?" Incidentally, this was one of the major weaknesses of the hyper-competitive world we were in. Results, even negative results like this project, were very rarely shared between Corporations, at least not for a long time.
Funnily enough, successful research projects would be more likely to be shared decades later, but a negative one where Arasaka wasted a lot of money? No. If they don't publicise it, not only will nobody know the money was wasted, but hopefully, some competitor will make the same mistake and waste a ton of their money! And if they did publish, the worst could happen—the competitor might make it work where they failed! Exactly what I had planned, in other words, except I wasn't a competitor, except for internal funding, I supposed.
The first one nodded, but the second one hedged, "As long as they don't start calling us Team Sisyphus, Hasumi-sama."
I chortled. That was a good reference. But I picked this rock to smash because I was almost certain it wouldn't be able to roll over me Indiana Jones-style... or Sisyphus-style, I supposed. I grinned, "We'll start with a thorough codon-by-codon examination of their novel additions to the bacteria in virtual. That may take a few weeks or even months. It took them years and years to build them, after all. Then, we'll brainstorm adjustments. Only when we're pretty sure will I send copies to be printed and tested in the BSL facility."
They both nodded, as that was the standard way to work on new organisms and viruses. These days, the geneticists and virologists rarely stepped near the actual BSL facilities that housed their creations. The people who worked there were, basically, technicians. All the development was done virtually until results needed to be tested in the real world.
Normally I would never start a research project involving the development of a novel bacteria that could be used to process and refine metals. It was designed as a cheap way to refine and separate recycled metals, but that was too similar to creating a novel bacteria that processed and refined carbon-containing gases into ethanol. I definitely didn't want anyone to know I did that or could do that.
But almost all of the work was already done, and while I hadn't seen the genome of the bacteria the last team created, based on the notes I did read, their approach should have worked.
If I could find some simple error or misunderstanding in the way genes were expressed and fix it, then it wouldn't really be seen as my research by a lot of the scientific community. The original researchers would get a lot of the credit. And all Arasaka would care about was that I produced profit from the aether—a win-win.
Our world had already reached the stage where most of the easily accessible resources had already been plumbed. All of the low-hanging fruits had been plucked. There were legal fights in the NUSA about ownership of landfills from the last century because they contained more valuable metals than most mines today. There were companies that mined hundred-year-old garbage piles like ore. The capability to cheaply and quickly do that as well as process recycled metals, would help keep the world's economies humming along a little longer.
In such a mature worldwide economy, the only way you could carve out new segments was to make advances like this. It wouldn't increase the amount of metals coming onto the market necessarily, but it would vastly lower both the energy requirements to do so, as well as shortening the turnaround, which would alter the economic calculus to recycle. That saved energy and time could be redirected to other sectors of the economy and would be the "profit" of this project if it worked.
Long term, though, I felt that true heavy industry would shift off-planet. At least, I hoped it did, but just saying that wouldn't make it happen any quicker.
June 2067
Night City
Pacifica
The pleasure town of Pacifica was in pain, and it wasn't even the fun sadomasochistic kind that the place was used to. It was the pain of the dying. It was known that the Playland at the Sea playpark was somewhat highly leveraged, but it had been making pretty good money up until the War started.
That all came to a crashing halt when NUSA started threatening anyone taking a vacation here. It was part of a pressure strategy that President Elizabeth Kress hoped would cause Night City to acquiesce and rejoin the Union. She basically said that if you decided to take a vacation here as a NUSA citizen, then you should expect a visit by an investigator for the "Department of Un-American Activities."
It came to a head when the NUSA claimed to have accidentally fired a hypersonic missile from a Naval ship. Well, they fired it intentionally, but they claimed it was supposed to be aimed at a Free State position. Instead, it accurately struck the large statue with the mascot for the Playland of the Sea, a playful winged pegasus, demolishing it. Although, surprisingly, nobody was injured, the message was sent. Pacifica wasn't safe. Insurance rating agencies upgraded the hazard rating for the entire sector.
That was a huge problem because most of the very wealthy couldn't just go where they wanted willy-nilly. They had to abide by all sorts of employer or insurance restrictions which demanded that the places they patronise had a base level of safety. This was the entirety of Pacifica's customer base! Now that the hazard rating had been upgraded, it was a ghost town.
It demonstrated exactly how precarious Night City's position as a "neutral" was. Neither the Free States nor NUSA was doing anything but chuckling over their misfortune here, and Night City didn't have an Army like the Free States had, although they were talking about training and arming some sort of Militia. Personally, I didn't think that was a good idea. They'd just turn into some sort of gang post haste.
But now, the damage was done. There was no new money coming into the Pacifica sector, and almost the entire sector was geared around tourism. It reminded me of a centrally planned 5-year-plan type of city back in the old Soviet Union, where people in charge would randomly assign certain tasks to certain areas with no rhyme or reason. Well, Pacifica was really pretty, so maybe it was suited for tourism, but if they had some other support, the entire place might not have been doomed.
As it was, banks had already begun foreclosing on most of the buildings here, and workers had already been evacuated. Unfortunately, the criminal element had also already begun moving in, filling the vacuum. I was here because I was planning on offering to purchase a building in this area.
The amenities and level of construction were excellent, and it had exactly what I needed for my "Project Four." Namely, multiple independent fibre-optic backbones and, most importantly, a large and undisclosed, invisible on city plans subbasement. The fibre connections totalled over five hundred terabits, as the building had been a large braindance parlour. Now, I just had to demonstrate to the bank that the building was a lost cause so that I could buy it for ennies on the eddie.
Unfortunately, Kiwi was out of town on a large and important gig in the Free States. I worried about that, as that sounded dangerous, but it also prevented me from using her team to accomplish some of these tasks.
As such, I was sneaking around, stealth system engaged, and booby-trapping important parts of the building, which was already being squatted in by some sort of drug gang that reminded me of the Merchant's back in Brockton Bay. They weren't really a threat, but I didn't want to clear them out because that would drive the building's property value up. I just wanted to stop them from destroying any important parts of the building while they temporarily stayed here.
Plus, I had to admit that I kind of liked doing this sort of thing. I had taken a couple of days off work to accomplish all this, too. I had to admit that I wasn't enjoying being a resident again; the work schedule was a bit too much.
Darting around a corner, I came face to face with one of the junkies, who waved his arms, hands grabbing out for me and yelled, "Woaahh, ghost titties!"
I ducked inside his attempt to cup my breasts, grabbed him carefully by the back of the neck, cradling his spine so that I didn't actually kill him, and smacked his head into the side of the corridor with sufficient force to concuss him. He wouldn't be unconscious long with that calibrated tap, so after he was down, I carefully injected him with a psychedelic concoction. It was vaguely disassociative, too, like Ketamine in high doses, so he wouldn't trouble me anymore. Plus, he probably wouldn't think it was anything else but some strange batch of whatever drug he was on.
He was the sixth person I had to temporarily incapacitate in that way in the past couple of days. I worked past him and found one of the larger network closets, and I sat my tools down and just welded the door closed. They couldn't destroy all of the sensitive equipment in there if they couldn't actually get the door open. I had done this several times in addition to setting booby traps at places that I couldn't block off. I was cautiously optimistic that I would be able to salvage a lot of the Braindance hardware too. There was no way that I could save all of it, as that was the reason this gang started squatting in this building in the first place, but I had closed off most of the parlours on the upper levels in a similar manner.
I carefully dragged the unconscious gang-member-cum-junkie into one of the open and trashed rooms and posed him there before taking a number of snaps that I would send to the bank. The building's price has just decreased!
Hearing a noise, I froze and then quickly jumped a good three metres into the air, perching on the metal gantries that used to house the drop-ceiling tiles, which had been totally ripped out by the gang for one reason or another. Activating the stealth system again, I watched a group of three or four of them enter the room and laugh at their incapacitated friend; he was no longer unconscious but just slightly twitching and drooling. After that, they settled down in individual braindance loungers, loudly chortling over some XBD that they planned to experience.
Honestly, just looking forward to experiencing an XBD made me want to kill them. Nothing could be called an XBD that was anything but incredibly vile and disgusting, but I left them to their amusements. Once they were all insensate, I fell back down onto the floor soundlessly and left.
That was enough for today; I had to backtrack and make sure nobody had fucked with my car. I hid it somewhere pretty good, but you just didn't know. My old Butte, I had taken it out of storage and given it to Gloria as a housewarming gift and unstated apology for uprooting her again. Surprisingly, she had accepted it. Gloria wasn't one to take charity, which meant that she agreed with me that it was warranted.
Walking back to where I had parked, I was startled by an incoming call, and from a nostalgic name and face. I instantly answered, grinning, "Dr Anno! Long time no see."
He smiled at me in the vidcall, "Hey, Taylor... I'm glad to see that you're okay. We were all worried something had happened to you, but then I heard that you're back in town and working as a surgical resident! You never called!"
Chuckling, I rubbed the back of my neck and looked embarrassed, "Yes, it was a sudden opportunity to attend that school, and I couldn't tell anyone; I just had to vanish. Sorry about that; I hope that I didn't burn any bridges over there."
He waved off a hand, "No, not at all! You paid the penalty, so you're definitely eligible for rehire. Interested?"
I blinked. Was he offering me a job? I grinned slyly at him, "Ohhh? Is this management responsibility I hear out of your voice, Dr Anno? Congratulations!"
He laughed good-naturedly and tried to look bashful, but he couldn't hide his pride. He nodded, "Thank you. Yes, I'm the newest Clinical Manager. So, how about it? A straight promotion to Senior Med Tech, too."
I shook my head, "I'm not done with my residency, so I'm not really a doctor by NUS standards. Plus..." I sighed and shook my head, "I do not intend to work any kind of full-time job even after I finish my residency. I have the opportunity to relax for a while, and I intend to take it."
"Oh? Does this have anything to do with me seeing your face in one of the gossip rags, going to the penthouse at the Azure Plaza?" he asked, teasing.
I grimaced. I was a bit annoyed at Grams for having the guards at the famous hotel treat me differently. My face had been plastered on a few of the BBSes that the elite and those wishing to appear to be used around town, no doubt taken by the optics of the other guests in the lobby at the time. I waved a hand and just lied, "I don't know what you're talking about. But I don't intend to work any full-time jobs, as I have a couple of businesses and my own practice I might be running myself."
He smiled, clearly not buying my lie but then shrugged, "So come work for us, PRN. You only have to work one shift a month to keep that status."
I opened my mouth to decline, paused and then closed it. I frowned and thought about that. I hadn't considered working at Trauma Team part-time. After a moment, I asked, "Would I have to go back through fucking basic?"
He shrugged, "Possibly a short refresher, but they'd probably do it here in town."
I paused and then suddenly narrowed my eyes and said, "Please excuse me for a moment." I pulled out my pistol and yelled, "Get the fuck away from my car." There were two unknown but dirty-looking individuals loitering by it. At first, they looked like they wanted some smoke, but I fired a couple of shots in their direction, intentionally missing, and they hoofed it.
Dr Anno nodded sagely and said, "Ah, yes. You seem just like the surgeon looking for a quiet practice, maybe a rocking chair in the summer. Just like I remember."
"Shut it, you.... I'll think about it. Was that why you called, though? Seems a bit odd to randomly solicit me a job after all this time," I said while inspecting the vehicle for damage. Scowling, I noticed some wear around the door handle as they appeared to have tried to force it open. I should have shot them! I glanced up, but they were already gone.
He shook my head, "No, no... I just got distracted. I'm actually calling checking references for a potential new hire."
Wait... the only person who had asked me to list myself as a reference was.. I grinned, "Gloria applied to Trauma Team?" She had steadfastly refused my offer to arrange for her a job, deciding that she wanted to find one by her own crook, although she accepted my offer of listing me as a reference. People only checked references when they were already fairly sure they wanted to hire you, after all.
He nodded, "Yes. I'm not sure how her application got through the filters, but the hiring manager was going to round-file it because she didn't have enough critical care nursing experience until he saw your name."
I scowled, "You should consider making an exception. Not only is she better than average, but she worked Night City EMS as an EMT for almost ten years. She was one of the ones the company would pair unknown, brand-new paramedics with. Like, say, me. She was my partner my entire time when I was working on the ground, and she was quite an excellent clinician, especially in emergency medicine. She's also a psychologically stable full-body replacement user, so she definitely won't slow the Security guys down."
He raised an eyebrow, "That's a very strong recommendation from you then. And her application didn't mention that she's a Borg... is this an old picture, or is she in a Gemini?"
"Gemini," I confirmed.
He drummed his fingers on the table he was sitting behind and was quiet for a time, "Okay. That definitely adds a new dimension. I'll extend her a job offer as a Flight Team Assistant Med Tech, but it will be contingent on her doing six months as a trauma centre RN in our Watson Trauma Centre first. Maybe less—just long enough for her to get a year's experience in critical nursing. We'll pay her at the Flight Team rate for this time, though. You're right; working on a ground EMS here in Night City, combined with being a full Borg, is quite a good deal for us, I think. Think she would accept that?"
I blinked and thought about it before nodding. "Yeah, I think she would." I started up my car, the CrystalDome activating and rendering the outside onto the bullet-resistant screens inside the cabin before quickly shifting into gear, and I was in third gear by the time I was out of the parking lot.
We finished our call, and I started driving home, but by the time I got back to Japantown, Gloria called me and asked me if I could come over to her place, to which I agreed.
Ringing her doorbell, she answered and seemed to be vibrating in excitement, yelling, "I got the job! Taylor, I got the job I really wanted!"
Night City
Gloria's Apartment, Santo Domingo
"I tell you, that damn dog only likes you and David," grumbled Gloria as she stood, mostly paralysed, in the maintenance bay I built for her in her new apartment. The dog in question was right next to her, worrying on her shoe while softly growling.
She was renting a large three-bedroom apartment so that she and David could have their own rooms, which they had become accustomed to back in Los Angeles.
The last room was a guest room, but she mainly used it as a study for schoolwork for the both of them, as Gloria seemed to be intent on continuing her education, already talking about taking night and net classes when she hadn't even secured a job yet, but that shouldn't be an issue as qualified RNs were always in demand. It was in this room that I had placed the maintenance bay against on wall. It didn't take much space unless Gloria was inside it, so it was out of the way.
As full-body replacements went, Geminis didn't need a lot of maintenance. They were about a third biological, so that part was mostly self-repairing, but that wasn't to say that they didn't need any.
Ongoing maintenance was one of the ways full-body cyborg users were controlled. It was expensive, but it had no reason to be beyond the fact that it encouraged cyborgs to seek gainful employment where their maintenance could be provided as part of their wages, like health insurance. I was definitely breaking the agreement that Raven Microcybernetics had doctors who sold their equipment sign by installing this in the end-users apartment and even teaching her how to do most of the maintenance herself.
But I never signed that agreement in the first place as I bought the body on the black market, so there. Nyaa!
"He comes from a long line of wolves," I told her with a grin, "He is a predator."
She scoffed, kind of. She didn't have full control of all of her facial muscles, just enough to talk, "Predator? He can open the refrigerator door, and he has a habit of stealing cookies."
I snorted. Although he had a very dopey-looking face, he did seem to be pretty smart, just like Mrs Pegpig was. I had thought he was mentally challenged at first, but he was very sneaky with it. He did have a very stupid, dopey-looking face, though. I still wondered where the bird had found him. It wasn't like there were wild packs of pugs around. He was basically David's dog now, though.
After finishing the diagnostic, I nodded and told her, "There's a small capacitor that is in the process of going bad in some of the circuitry of your left leg. That's why you feel a bit off when flexing that leg." I shared the screen of the maintenance diagnostic and showed her how I had identified the problem, "It's not outputting the voltage it should, so we'll go ahead and change it. It shouldn't take very long."
With a mental flip of a switch, she was no longer paralysed. The scanning devices in the maintenance bay were purchased off the shelf, and the bay very much resembled the standard ones available for lease by Raven Microcybernetics. As such, they required the victim—err patient to be still in the process of scanning, so the simplest solution when dealing with a cyborg was just to turn off their ability to move their body. Gloria carefully pushed the pug away with her toe, which I found amusing.
I asked her to strip while I grabbed some tools, then glanced back and blushed faintly and told her she could keep the panties on. It was odd that I reacted at all, as I was very familiar with every centimetre of her body, but that was before she started using it. Things changed when someone was living in it for quite a long time.
This repair was lucky because the circuit board was available from one of the "access panels" on her calf. Rather than a panel, per se, it more resembled a very fine and almost invisible seam. I pulled the small circuit board out with a pair of forceps. Gloria frowned down at it, "And how would I repair it? Component-level repair of electronics is a little bit beyond my skill level."
I nodded. Although it was true that any modern Med Techie had a lot of practical electronics repair experience due to cybernetics, removing one small surface mount component on a very small board was not the level of skill even most doctors had.
I said, "You wouldn't—if I wasn't around, you'd need to hire an actual techie to do this part. But, if you're interested in expanding your skills in this direction, even if it is just to repair your own body, I can point you to some classes you can take or audit. I'd recommend you then start a hobby of repairing hand-held Agents. They're cheap and widely available, and it is not a big deal if you brick a few dozen and you're not out as much when you do. This small board would cost about two thousand eddies if I had to buy it from Raven." Agents were what I would call a "smartphone" in this world. In my mind, I still called them smartphones, though, but that wasn't a word that had survived the '90s in this universe, so people looked at me askance when I had used it a few times.
She nodded, seeming interested, and I sat the board on a table and used my high-magnification vision and tools to quickly unsolder and remove the faulty capacitor, replacing it with a slightly beefier version and walking her through the process. The last step involved brushing on a sort of clear-coat epoxy as a protective layer, which I had used solvent on a q-tip to remove previously. It took a few minutes for the epoxy to dry, so I spent the time explaining each stage of the repair.
I was already pretty sure what was wrong when she told me her complaint over the phone, so I had everything I needed just in case. There were a lot of complaints over the series of tantalum capacitors that the last few years of Gemini models used in some of their distributed control boards. It would have been better to use a straight graphene supercap as I had used it as a replacement, but those were a spacer product and about five times the price as traditional capacitors.
I slipped the board back in her calf, reconnected it and nodded, "Do a full body reset and physio-self test and calibration. See if that solved the problem." Gloria nodded and then froze for half a second before she started moving again in a type of slow kata-looking callisthenics routine.
She grinned, "Works great, now! That little lag is gone."
I tilted my head at her little routine and asked, "Is that some kind of martial art? I don't recognise it."
She nodded and grinned, "Yes, but I can't teach it to you."
"Oh? Is it secret? Do I need permission from your Shifu?" I asked amusedly. That suddenly gave me an idea for a short part of Rage of a Villainess, thinking the protagonist could say something along the lines of, 'I'm not permitted to teach this art before reaching the Nascent Soul stage!' I made an entry in my narrative notes file.
She chuckled and shook her head, putting her pants back on, "No. But it's a martial art designed for Borgs. Regular humans, even if they're somewhat strength-enhanced like you, just can't get anything out of it. Really, even Geminis are a little too weak and frail to get the maximum benefit out of it, too."
That surprised me. I wasn't aware of any Borg-specific martial arts, but it wasn't like I was anything but a hobbyist. Although I had started taking Kendo, Aikido and Judo classes as Hasumi, it wasn't like I was one of those types of people that hung around the gym or dojo all the time. The fact that she said that a Gemini was a little weak to get the full effect out of the art was also surprising. Gloria could bench-press over half a ton easily and might be able to do three-quarters of a ton with extreme effort. I arched an eyebrow, curious, "Where did you learn this?"
"Ah. I met a lot of other full cyborgs while I assisted on that professor's research project. Mostly borderline to actual cyberpsychos, but we got along pretty well, and they introduced me to a few people who could teach it," she then looked a little embarrassed and said, "I can't really talk about it with outsiders, but I've already found another teacher here in town, though."
Outsiders! I grinned wildly. How interesting. It seemed like there was some sort of full-borg secret society. I very much approved of Gloria being a part of it, too. When I first met Gloria, she literally had no life outside of work and taking care of David. Before I could express my approval, she asked, "Speaking of which... would you be willing to do some similar work for a few... well, I can't really call them friends precisely yet, but acquaintances? They're mostly in Alpha classes, but one of them is in an old IEC Wingman, and one other guy has a thirty-year-old Militech ninja body. They're all struggling a little bit with psychosis, but I think that the lack of routine maintenance is as big an issue as any psychological ones they have. Probably wouldn't be able to pay much, though..." she trailed off.
I blinked. Alpha classes, well... everybody and their brother made that kind of full-body replacement. It was the generic labourer type. Over ninety per cent of all Borgs were of this variety; they were "the clanking masses." Varied and highly customisable, the Alpha was the Toyota Hilux of full-body replacement.
However, the Wingman was a specialised body designed for fighter pilots and astronauts. Since IEC went out of business, they weren't sold anymore, but they were pretty unique. They were almost guaranteed to have very high-end boostware included too, and it would be interesting to see a type of boostware designed for Borgs and how it diverged from the kind designed for regular humans. It would be mostly neuro-focused, as you didn't really have to improve the latency in an already electronic nervous system equivalent.
It reminded me of the destroyed, semi-disassembled Dragoon I still had in my storage unit. Although I had come a long way, I was still pretty sure I wouldn't be able to completely repair it yet—but doing routine maintenance on other full-body replacements now was something I felt comfortable doing, even if they were entirely mechanical. However, as much as I would like to look at those two unique models, I was a bit leery of being too close to a "borderline cyberpsycho" full-body replacement.
After a moment of silence, I said, "Possibly—as long as you were with me." I'd also want a number of safety measures I didn't yet have in my clinic. Maybe a large directed EMP or a high-voltage security system.
Gloria laughed uneasily and said, "Ahahaha—of course, I was going to suggest that anyway."
I nodded and said, "If you want, let's try the Wingman guy first." Although kind of strong and very fast, they weren't as dangerous in most situations as the unstated "ninja" model. And what model was that? I didn't know. Maybe an old Eclipse? If so, that was about as unusual as my Dragoon, although much easier to hide, fit in and disguise as a regular Alpha-type or possibly an Enforcer-type police body than the Dragoon. There was no hiding that borderline mecha as anything but 'OMG. WTF.'
The Militech Eclipse was a very advanced full-body replacement at the time it was built in the early 2020s, and it was one of the few that they still managed to build after the DataKrash in limited numbers, at least for a little while. I believe the last year it was manufactured was in the early 2030s, similar to the Dragoon.
However, it suffered a bit from a jack-of-all-trades issue. It was designed for covert ops, but it had a little bit of everything, including things as wild as integrated hypodermic needles in the fingers and a detachable explosive rocket-propelled finger-bomb in the left ring finger. It ended up being good at a lot of things, but it wasn't the best at anything, and that sealed its fate because it was a specialised kit to begin with.
Heinlein would say that specialisation was for insects, not mankind, but cyborgs were different. Specialisation in cyborg bodies was very desirable, especially since you could, theoretically, wear them like clothes. Another point in favour of taking a look at the Wingman first was I was one hundred per cent sure I could find the maintenance manuals for the Wingman since IEC was defunct. Militech might guard the files on their old tech more strenuously; I just didn't know.
Plus, let's face it... I wanted to look at the old IEC body the most. As for the compensation, I shrugged. As Taylor Hebert, I had most of the liquid capital that Dr Hasumi made selling all of my sleep inducers. When I was kidnapped, I made sure to funnel most of it to Taylor through quite a lot of obfuscation layers since I felt that it might be difficult to send money from Hasumi to Taylor or Hana in the future.
It wouldn't be impossible, but it might be difficult; in fact, I was continuing to run the payment obfuscation service that Dr Hasumi set up. It was, by now, a trusted semi-legal service, and I took a percentage of all the transfers, but the main reason was the influx of money from a variety of sources allowed me to tumble all of Hasumi's money back to any place I wanted.
I could make use of that as Hasumi sending money to Taylor or Hana, and it would be challenging for Arasaka to trace the recipient, but it would be obvious I was sending money to someone, so that might be difficult to answer. As such, I had divested Hasumi of most of her money when she got kidnapped.
Right now, as Taylor, I had access to a little less than twenty million Eurodollars, which was enough to live a quiet life, as well as fund Hana's business prospects when she became more trusted in space. It would also be necessary to fund my "fourth body." That was going to be very special, and it was actually going to be wildly expensive for a number of reasons.
Now with Hasumi kidnapped, although I expected and even encouraged this outcome, I was again running into the issue of Taylor being a single point of failure. Neither Hasumi nor Hana, at the moment, could rapidly clone a replacement body if one part of me died. If Hana or Hasumi died, I, as Taylor, could easily clone a replacement body, but if "Taylor" died... well, I was shit out of luck unless I had Hana return to Earth. That had to change.
I talked to Gloria a little more about her request and agreed to see the Wingman guy in a week or two. Then, after their little group saw that I wasn't a risk, I would see the more physically dangerous ones. I grabbed the pug dog and asked Gloria, "What did David end up naming him, anyway?"
"The Honourable, Lord Percival Butterbutt the Fourth, Esquire," Gloria said with a straight face, "Butterbutt for short."
I stared into Lord Butterbutt's dumb but cunning eyes as he started panting and just shook my head.
May 2067
Aoyama (Special Ward of Tokyo)
Hasumi's Apartment Building
I panted as I returned the practice blade to a resting low-guard position, facing my instructor, who peered at me carefully before nodding. He said, "Alright, we're done for today." In the corner of the room, Yuki clapped wildly and cheered before walking up and offering me a towel and a glass of water.
I wasn't wealthy enough to have a gym in my apartment, but there were two inside the apartment building that I was now living in, and one of them had a large open area that was mostly used for Yoga and Pilates classes that a lot of house-wives and some house-husbands partook in. But when it was empty, other people were free to use it.
An instructor, well, that was actually very easy. Perhaps not too surprising, but Arasaka had a lot of what would be called on the street "cyber ninjas." My Kendo instructor was actually one of the security team members that I paid for, so it was a pretty simple decision for him to work a few hours a week when he wasn't on duty for some extra money.
At first, I expected to get just a regular Kendo instructor from a regular dojo down the street, but this idea was nixed. I needed a specialised instructor who also had close to equivalent or superior boostware as I did. Being over three times faster than the average person hid a lot of sins in terms of technique—even barely trained, I could probably beat many historical swordmasters just because I could smack them with my sword faster than they could react to, even if I was using it as nothing more than a bludgeon or crude chopping implement.
Yuki glanced down at my practice sword and said, "That sword is kind of weird, though. It looks vaguely European. Where did you get the idea from?"
I blushed. I couldn't very well say that I got it from a series of Earth Aleph high-fantasy novels that my mom and I both enjoyed, but I tried to copy the Heron-marked sword when I found out that Kendachi would provide both a customised practice sword as well as an actual blade with a monomolecular edge, and relatively cheaply too.
My instructor walked up and nodded his head, "It kind of reminds me of a German kriegsmesser crossed with a Chinese dao or maybe even a katana. It's quite interesting... most of the common katana forms work, but due to the heavier hilt, with an actual crossguard and pommel, the balance point is much closer to the hilt. This changes the types of moves somewhat." He took my practice blade and balanced it with one finger close to the crossguard.
He flipped it around with that finger, grabbed it by the blade out of the air and handed it back to me, "All in all, it's quite good. Katanas are designed to be quite a bit blade-heavier, so this makes them a bit slower. Historically, the trade-off is that, in exchange, you get more cutting force due to the leverage. But, in this day and age of augmented strength, I could definitely see how being a bit faster might be advantageous."
I chuckled and rubbed the back of my neck, "I'm not sure I thought it through that much, Tanaka-dono, but I thought that the mono-resistant treatment on the crossguard might save my fingers." I called him sensei while he was teaching me, but he refused that at all other times, but his recitation of the relative merits of different swords reminded me of a historical samurai, so I thought to be cheeky.
He grinned at me, "-dono, eh? I always did think I would look good with a top-knot. Ahh... to a simpler time, eh? Well, if you'll excuse me, I have to get ready to go on duty in a couple of hours."
Before he walked off, I asked, "Tanaka-san, do you know about any secret martial arts designed for full-body replacement users? I was reading something online and found the premise interesting."
He paused, blinked and then nodded, "There's a few, and none of them are secret, really. But, the most famous and effective has to be the so-called Panzerfaust. Made somewhat famous by our own Adam Smasher, but there are plenty of people that have a higher degree of mastery than him, like the Kazekage. Smasher will only beat you to death with his hands as a last resort or if he finds it particularly amusing." He paused, shook his head, making a small hand gesture that might be one to ward off evil and said, "Better not to speak his name lest we summon him."
I nodded, and he walked off. How interesting; I wonder if that was what Gloria was learning. Cursory net searches didn't show very much information except what I had just learned. It was featured in a few films, but everyone was positive that the depiction in the film had no bearing at all on what the actual martial art looked like in practice.
After Tanaka left, Yuki and I returned back to my apartment on one of the upper floors. I quickly took a shower, declining Yuki's offer to wash my back. One very interesting invention that I didn't even know existed was a kind of drying field installed in my bathroom. It didn't dry precisely, but I thought it used gravity manipulation technology to quickly pull all of the water off your body. That was my guess based on my internal accelerometers registering constantly changing but tiny amounts of "acceleration" while I just stayed very still in the shower.
Walking back out in a towel, I glanced at the clothes Yuki had set out for me and nodded. I didn't feel that comfortable being completely naked in front of him, but I didn't mind walking around in a towel. While he waited outside my room, I donned my outfit for the day. Asking him through the door, "Is there anything pressing today on my schedule?"
There was a pause before Yuki said, "Not pressing, exactly, but there is a small matter you might want to know about, but I'm not sure how to solve it."
I replied, "Oh? How interesting, since I am pretty sure you were trained from a young age to be a problem solver." Amongst other things, I thought but kept his obvious other uses to myself.
"Well, there is this woman; she lives in the building with us. She was recently promoted as an executive in the Intelligence division," Yuki began, and I didn't need to ask him whose Intelligence Division. Basically, only Arasaka employees lived in this building. Yuki paused, "Long story short, your arrival was somewhat unexpected, and you snagged the last AV pad on this side of the building out from under her. She had been planning on purchasing or leasing an AV since his promotion."
"Ah… this is in the nature of etiquette then," I mused. Really, I didn't need to do anything, and it was her own fault for not leasing the open pad when she had the chance. If she had, I was sure I would be living in a different building because access to an AV was required in my employment contract, "But I don't want to make enemies when I don't have to or needlessly antagonist my neighbours."
Yuki walked in, as he had a pretty good idea of how long it took for me to get dressed by now and nodded, "Right! But there's not a whole lot we can do."
"We bought a new AV and leased a slightly older one as a maintenance spare, right?" I asked him.
He shook his head, "We ended up doing the opposite. It just so happened we got a sweetheart deal on financing to buy the two-year-old model, and we're leasing a newer one. They're both comparable, though. The spare is based in a hangar at the airport."
"How about this, then… We'll need to hire a second flight crew, maybe on a PRN basis, but offer the Intel lady a fractional ownership or sublease of one of the AVs. Whoever gets to the pad first will take the first AV, then the PRN crew can fly the second aircraft to the pad to service whoever is still in the building," I offered. It would cause a delay if we both left the building at the same time, but I didn't have any fixed hours per se, and given my body's presence in space which used the Greenwich Mean Time time zone, I had planned to work odd hours here in Japan in any event. It was also somewhat expected for genius researchers to have odd proclivities, such as working odd hours or being recluses.
Yuki frowned, probably because he didn't like the idea that this might inconvenience me slightly in some situations, but he then nodded, "Okay. I'll figure out what an appropriate fee would be and reach out to her."
"There's no reason to price it too aggressively; it's okay if I lose a little money on the arrangement. Sometimes favours, especially from those in Intel, are worth more than gold," I reasoned and then walked out of my apartment, the pretty boy trailing about one and a half steps behind me as we and my security team boarded the AV-8 and flew five minutes into the business district. A five-minute flight would have been a forty-five-minute ground transport, so I could see the benefits.
I had a small team and a small lab, at least for now, but I still had a dozen researchers working underneath me, not including two administrators or Yuki. Their specialities were a bit broad, as I had stated that I intended to research bio-engineering, cybernetics and genetics. There was some overlap in the first two, of course, but genetics was a bit of an outlier. Still, even the two geneticists in my lab said they had no problem working on other projects. I intended to work on two projects at once, as a rule. In the future, one of the projects would be one of my "hobby projects", but both were intended to be profitable at the moment. I had to make a name for myself, after all.
My team met me in the large conference room, and I didn't waste any time, "Gentlemen," I began, as I noticed I was the only lady on my team. It was a bit of a surprise, as while it was still the case that men outnumbered women in the physical sciences and engineering, there were more females than not in the field of life sciences, including genetics, "Our first project is multi-pronged. First, we will be researching the incorporation of biological neural tissue as a replacement for silicon processors, neural network chips and ASICs." I clicked a slide with a photograph of one of my little spider bots, followed by more that showed an internal view of its primary processing ganglia. Surprisingly, neither my kidnappers nor Arasaka had twinged that these machines were a new invention, too. There were hundreds of models of small robots like this, though. The construction units and programming jigs were destroyed, though, along with other sensitive electronics in my factory. But, it wasn't as though I had ever gotten to the point where I could really mass produce them, either, so my first project was to duplicate this effort without any obvious Tinkertech involved in the programming/training base stations or the fast-cloning of the neural tissue itself.
"If that proves successful, then we will move on to specialised cloning techniques to produce lots of suitable neural tissue quickly and cheaply," I finished. I didn't waste a lot of time, and I already had individualised work-plans for most of the people here. For now, we could get as much neural tissue as we wanted from the morgues in Tokyo. A lot of people donated their bodies to Science after their death, especially since it came with a small honorarium paid to their surviving families.
One of the researchers asked, frowning, "How long are we planning on spending on this project if it's not fruitful?"
I hummed. I knew it could be successful, but shrugged, "We will drop it if there are no promising developments, especially in the economies involved, in six months, I suspect."
That got everyone nodding, and I dismissed the meeting. I didn't like unnecessary meetings, but I was still new here, so a few had to be accomplished. As for my next project? I didn't know. I wanted to prioritise things I could get a handle on quickly, which was why my spider bots were chosen. I had already built them, granted, using a lot of Tinkertech in the construction process, but I knew they were at least possible. To give myself ideas, I asked to review recent failed Arasaka projects in my area of expertise. To do so, I had to access a SCIF in the basement of the research complex. This special area was the only place highly classified datalinks were permitted, for example, to the core Arasaka databases, where I could just browse projects that I had both a clearance to see and fell into my competencies.
I was searched rather thoroughly before being allowed into the SCIF, which resembled nothing more than a padded room from an old-fashioned mental asylum. Inside there was no wireless connection at all, just a small desk that featured a simple data retrieval system like a library might have. I could sit at the desk and access confidential files, but I could only view them. I couldn't take them with me, except in screenshots from my eyes or my memory of in a scrolled BD, I supposed. That was always the risk when viewing classified files, and unless you had total control over the OS of the employee, it would always be a risk.
I browsed the list of projects and paused, finger over an entry. They were listed chronologically, so one of the first was called 'PROJECT DEEP VALKYRIE', and I noticed it because it was listed as both defunct and physically located in Honduras. I selected it. As I thought, it was the project involved in Old Net research that Yuki offered to see if I could be read in on. Apparently, the security levels were much lower on defunct projects, as it was just included in my general request to see defunct projects. It was listed as defunct due to primarily the deaths of all key project employees and secondarily the loss of project "assets."
Clicking my tongue, I read over the synopsis and reports. I didn't have full access. For example, I couldn't read the research papers or see diagrams of technology invented, if any. I'd have to request that specifically in a project I wanted to pursue, but I could read the bullet points. Pinching my glabella, I sighed. I knew that no matter who grabbed me, I would be working for something akin to an amoral or even immoral company, but this was pretty bad. I actually didn't have that much of an issue with training children to be specialist net runners… it was not that much different than what Militech was doing with NC-Taylor, except they started younger here. It wasn't like they murdered the rejects; they just sent them back to the orphanages.
However… then throwing your child-runners against the horrors on the Old Net? Yes, that was something that was bad. That explained the identity of those four children I helped back in Honduras, and I felt a lot better about my decision, sitting there smiling for a long moment. Looking through a few more reports, I widened my eyes. Wow. They totally destroyed the research personnel on this project. I couldn't really blame them, but the surveillance videos just showed people keeling over dead, being electrocuted or one case where someone's head legitimately exploded. I didn't even know how that was possible.
I shook my head. It was stupid. Training a net runner was the same as training a soldier. If you created a cadre of child super soldiers, then convinced them that you were basically murdering them one after another by forcing them to face suicidal odds, of course, they would mutiny and frag you. I looked briefly at all of the data on the project I was able to access, including a small dossier on each of the missing "assets." That might be useful for later, but as far as anyone could tell they were well in the wings.
I found one project that I could easily accomplish, namely a failed but ongoing project to decrypt the genome of my fuel algae. Hell, I could do that one in one afternoon! But I wasn't stupid enough to do so, so I barely even looked at it before moving on. I found a number of options but picked one that looked both easy and was more on the genetics side. My two geneticists wouldn't be getting too much work on the Spiderbot project, and we could simultaneously work on this project.
Going back upstairs, I drew the two geneticists, who were PhDs in their own right, into my office and grinned, "Us three will be working on a separate project. That's not to say you won't be possibly assisting on Project Alpha, but Project Bravo will be...." I made a silly da-da-da-daaah noise and finished with, in English, "Biometals!"
One of the geneticists tilted his head to the side and asked, "Like... calcium?"
I shook my head, "No, no... except that that is a metal that our bodies have evolved to process. What we will be researching are non-evolutionary biometals and possibly organometallic alloys. Specifically, the creation of novel organisms, perhaps bacteria, to process these metals."
The other geneticist made an 'Ahhh' of understanding, "Like a biological process of refining metals. I believe there was a research project along those lines a decade ago, but it didn't produce any useful results."
I grinned and nodded, "Yes! But I think that they almost did. A lot of money was put into this project, and several novel bacteria were created. I won't know for sure until the secure courier arrives with all their research data on a data shard, but I believe we can succeed where they failed. Sometimes all it takes is a new person looking at a problem to finish pushing the stone up the hill, eh?" Incidentally, this was one of the major weaknesses of the hyper-competitive world we were in. Results, even negative results like this project, were very rarely shared between Corporations, at least not for a long time.
Funnily enough, successful research projects would be more likely to be shared decades later, but a negative one where Arasaka wasted a lot of money? No. If they don't publicise it, not only will nobody know the money was wasted, but hopefully, some competitor will make the same mistake and waste a ton of their money! And if they did publish, the worst could happen—the competitor might make it work where they failed! Exactly what I had planned, in other words, except I wasn't a competitor, except for internal funding, I supposed.
The first one nodded, but the second one hedged, "As long as they don't start calling us Team Sisyphus, Hasumi-sama."
I chortled. That was a good reference. But I picked this rock to smash because I was almost certain it wouldn't be able to roll over me Indiana Jones-style... or Sisyphus-style, I supposed. I grinned, "We'll start with a thorough codon-by-codon examination of their novel additions to the bacteria in virtual. That may take a few weeks or even months. It took them years and years to build them, after all. Then, we'll brainstorm adjustments. Only when we're pretty sure will I send copies to be printed and tested in the BSL facility."
They both nodded, as that was the standard way to work on new organisms and viruses. These days, the geneticists and virologists rarely stepped near the actual BSL facilities that housed their creations. The people who worked there were, basically, technicians. All the development was done virtually until results needed to be tested in the real world.
Normally I would never start a research project involving the development of a novel bacteria that could be used to process and refine metals. It was designed as a cheap way to refine and separate recycled metals, but that was too similar to creating a novel bacteria that processed and refined carbon-containing gases into ethanol. I definitely didn't want anyone to know I did that or could do that.
But almost all of the work was already done, and while I hadn't seen the genome of the bacteria the last team created, based on the notes I did read, their approach should have worked.
If I could find some simple error or misunderstanding in the way genes were expressed and fix it, then it wouldn't really be seen as my research by a lot of the scientific community. The original researchers would get a lot of the credit. And all Arasaka would care about was that I produced profit from the aether—a win-win.
Our world had already reached the stage where most of the easily accessible resources had already been plumbed. All of the low-hanging fruits had been plucked. There were legal fights in the NUSA about ownership of landfills from the last century because they contained more valuable metals than most mines today. There were companies that mined hundred-year-old garbage piles like ore. The capability to cheaply and quickly do that as well as process recycled metals, would help keep the world's economies humming along a little longer.
In such a mature worldwide economy, the only way you could carve out new segments was to make advances like this. It wouldn't increase the amount of metals coming onto the market necessarily, but it would vastly lower both the energy requirements to do so, as well as shortening the turnaround, which would alter the economic calculus to recycle. That saved energy and time could be redirected to other sectors of the economy and would be the "profit" of this project if it worked.
Long term, though, I felt that true heavy industry would shift off-planet. At least, I hoped it did, but just saying that wouldn't make it happen any quicker.
June 2067
Night City
Pacifica
The pleasure town of Pacifica was in pain, and it wasn't even the fun sadomasochistic kind that the place was used to. It was the pain of the dying. It was known that the Playland at the Sea playpark was somewhat highly leveraged, but it had been making pretty good money up until the War started.
That all came to a crashing halt when NUSA started threatening anyone taking a vacation here. It was part of a pressure strategy that President Elizabeth Kress hoped would cause Night City to acquiesce and rejoin the Union. She basically said that if you decided to take a vacation here as a NUSA citizen, then you should expect a visit by an investigator for the "Department of Un-American Activities."
It came to a head when the NUSA claimed to have accidentally fired a hypersonic missile from a Naval ship. Well, they fired it intentionally, but they claimed it was supposed to be aimed at a Free State position. Instead, it accurately struck the large statue with the mascot for the Playland of the Sea, a playful winged pegasus, demolishing it. Although, surprisingly, nobody was injured, the message was sent. Pacifica wasn't safe. Insurance rating agencies upgraded the hazard rating for the entire sector.
That was a huge problem because most of the very wealthy couldn't just go where they wanted willy-nilly. They had to abide by all sorts of employer or insurance restrictions which demanded that the places they patronise had a base level of safety. This was the entirety of Pacifica's customer base! Now that the hazard rating had been upgraded, it was a ghost town.
It demonstrated exactly how precarious Night City's position as a "neutral" was. Neither the Free States nor NUSA was doing anything but chuckling over their misfortune here, and Night City didn't have an Army like the Free States had, although they were talking about training and arming some sort of Militia. Personally, I didn't think that was a good idea. They'd just turn into some sort of gang post haste.
But now, the damage was done. There was no new money coming into the Pacifica sector, and almost the entire sector was geared around tourism. It reminded me of a centrally planned 5-year-plan type of city back in the old Soviet Union, where people in charge would randomly assign certain tasks to certain areas with no rhyme or reason. Well, Pacifica was really pretty, so maybe it was suited for tourism, but if they had some other support, the entire place might not have been doomed.
As it was, banks had already begun foreclosing on most of the buildings here, and workers had already been evacuated. Unfortunately, the criminal element had also already begun moving in, filling the vacuum. I was here because I was planning on offering to purchase a building in this area.
The amenities and level of construction were excellent, and it had exactly what I needed for my "Project Four." Namely, multiple independent fibre-optic backbones and, most importantly, a large and undisclosed, invisible on city plans subbasement. The fibre connections totalled over five hundred terabits, as the building had been a large braindance parlour. Now, I just had to demonstrate to the bank that the building was a lost cause so that I could buy it for ennies on the eddie.
Unfortunately, Kiwi was out of town on a large and important gig in the Free States. I worried about that, as that sounded dangerous, but it also prevented me from using her team to accomplish some of these tasks.
As such, I was sneaking around, stealth system engaged, and booby-trapping important parts of the building, which was already being squatted in by some sort of drug gang that reminded me of the Merchant's back in Brockton Bay. They weren't really a threat, but I didn't want to clear them out because that would drive the building's property value up. I just wanted to stop them from destroying any important parts of the building while they temporarily stayed here.
Plus, I had to admit that I kind of liked doing this sort of thing. I had taken a couple of days off work to accomplish all this, too. I had to admit that I wasn't enjoying being a resident again; the work schedule was a bit too much.
Darting around a corner, I came face to face with one of the junkies, who waved his arms, hands grabbing out for me and yelled, "Woaahh, ghost titties!"
I ducked inside his attempt to cup my breasts, grabbed him carefully by the back of the neck, cradling his spine so that I didn't actually kill him, and smacked his head into the side of the corridor with sufficient force to concuss him. He wouldn't be unconscious long with that calibrated tap, so after he was down, I carefully injected him with a psychedelic concoction. It was vaguely disassociative, too, like Ketamine in high doses, so he wouldn't trouble me anymore. Plus, he probably wouldn't think it was anything else but some strange batch of whatever drug he was on.
He was the sixth person I had to temporarily incapacitate in that way in the past couple of days. I worked past him and found one of the larger network closets, and I sat my tools down and just welded the door closed. They couldn't destroy all of the sensitive equipment in there if they couldn't actually get the door open. I had done this several times in addition to setting booby traps at places that I couldn't block off. I was cautiously optimistic that I would be able to salvage a lot of the Braindance hardware too. There was no way that I could save all of it, as that was the reason this gang started squatting in this building in the first place, but I had closed off most of the parlours on the upper levels in a similar manner.
I carefully dragged the unconscious gang-member-cum-junkie into one of the open and trashed rooms and posed him there before taking a number of snaps that I would send to the bank. The building's price has just decreased!
Hearing a noise, I froze and then quickly jumped a good three metres into the air, perching on the metal gantries that used to house the drop-ceiling tiles, which had been totally ripped out by the gang for one reason or another. Activating the stealth system again, I watched a group of three or four of them enter the room and laugh at their incapacitated friend; he was no longer unconscious but just slightly twitching and drooling. After that, they settled down in individual braindance loungers, loudly chortling over some XBD that they planned to experience.
Honestly, just looking forward to experiencing an XBD made me want to kill them. Nothing could be called an XBD that was anything but incredibly vile and disgusting, but I left them to their amusements. Once they were all insensate, I fell back down onto the floor soundlessly and left.
That was enough for today; I had to backtrack and make sure nobody had fucked with my car. I hid it somewhere pretty good, but you just didn't know. My old Butte, I had taken it out of storage and given it to Gloria as a housewarming gift and unstated apology for uprooting her again. Surprisingly, she had accepted it. Gloria wasn't one to take charity, which meant that she agreed with me that it was warranted.
Walking back to where I had parked, I was startled by an incoming call, and from a nostalgic name and face. I instantly answered, grinning, "Dr Anno! Long time no see."
He smiled at me in the vidcall, "Hey, Taylor... I'm glad to see that you're okay. We were all worried something had happened to you, but then I heard that you're back in town and working as a surgical resident! You never called!"
Chuckling, I rubbed the back of my neck and looked embarrassed, "Yes, it was a sudden opportunity to attend that school, and I couldn't tell anyone; I just had to vanish. Sorry about that; I hope that I didn't burn any bridges over there."
He waved off a hand, "No, not at all! You paid the penalty, so you're definitely eligible for rehire. Interested?"
I blinked. Was he offering me a job? I grinned slyly at him, "Ohhh? Is this management responsibility I hear out of your voice, Dr Anno? Congratulations!"
He laughed good-naturedly and tried to look bashful, but he couldn't hide his pride. He nodded, "Thank you. Yes, I'm the newest Clinical Manager. So, how about it? A straight promotion to Senior Med Tech, too."
I shook my head, "I'm not done with my residency, so I'm not really a doctor by NUS standards. Plus..." I sighed and shook my head, "I do not intend to work any kind of full-time job even after I finish my residency. I have the opportunity to relax for a while, and I intend to take it."
"Oh? Does this have anything to do with me seeing your face in one of the gossip rags, going to the penthouse at the Azure Plaza?" he asked, teasing.
I grimaced. I was a bit annoyed at Grams for having the guards at the famous hotel treat me differently. My face had been plastered on a few of the BBSes that the elite and those wishing to appear to be used around town, no doubt taken by the optics of the other guests in the lobby at the time. I waved a hand and just lied, "I don't know what you're talking about. But I don't intend to work any full-time jobs, as I have a couple of businesses and my own practice I might be running myself."
He smiled, clearly not buying my lie but then shrugged, "So come work for us, PRN. You only have to work one shift a month to keep that status."
I opened my mouth to decline, paused and then closed it. I frowned and thought about that. I hadn't considered working at Trauma Team part-time. After a moment, I asked, "Would I have to go back through fucking basic?"
He shrugged, "Possibly a short refresher, but they'd probably do it here in town."
I paused and then suddenly narrowed my eyes and said, "Please excuse me for a moment." I pulled out my pistol and yelled, "Get the fuck away from my car." There were two unknown but dirty-looking individuals loitering by it. At first, they looked like they wanted some smoke, but I fired a couple of shots in their direction, intentionally missing, and they hoofed it.
Dr Anno nodded sagely and said, "Ah, yes. You seem just like the surgeon looking for a quiet practice, maybe a rocking chair in the summer. Just like I remember."
"Shut it, you.... I'll think about it. Was that why you called, though? Seems a bit odd to randomly solicit me a job after all this time," I said while inspecting the vehicle for damage. Scowling, I noticed some wear around the door handle as they appeared to have tried to force it open. I should have shot them! I glanced up, but they were already gone.
He shook my head, "No, no... I just got distracted. I'm actually calling checking references for a potential new hire."
Wait... the only person who had asked me to list myself as a reference was.. I grinned, "Gloria applied to Trauma Team?" She had steadfastly refused my offer to arrange for her a job, deciding that she wanted to find one by her own crook, although she accepted my offer of listing me as a reference. People only checked references when they were already fairly sure they wanted to hire you, after all.
He nodded, "Yes. I'm not sure how her application got through the filters, but the hiring manager was going to round-file it because she didn't have enough critical care nursing experience until he saw your name."
I scowled, "You should consider making an exception. Not only is she better than average, but she worked Night City EMS as an EMT for almost ten years. She was one of the ones the company would pair unknown, brand-new paramedics with. Like, say, me. She was my partner my entire time when I was working on the ground, and she was quite an excellent clinician, especially in emergency medicine. She's also a psychologically stable full-body replacement user, so she definitely won't slow the Security guys down."
He raised an eyebrow, "That's a very strong recommendation from you then. And her application didn't mention that she's a Borg... is this an old picture, or is she in a Gemini?"
"Gemini," I confirmed.
He drummed his fingers on the table he was sitting behind and was quiet for a time, "Okay. That definitely adds a new dimension. I'll extend her a job offer as a Flight Team Assistant Med Tech, but it will be contingent on her doing six months as a trauma centre RN in our Watson Trauma Centre first. Maybe less—just long enough for her to get a year's experience in critical nursing. We'll pay her at the Flight Team rate for this time, though. You're right; working on a ground EMS here in Night City, combined with being a full Borg, is quite a good deal for us, I think. Think she would accept that?"
I blinked and thought about it before nodding. "Yeah, I think she would." I started up my car, the CrystalDome activating and rendering the outside onto the bullet-resistant screens inside the cabin before quickly shifting into gear, and I was in third gear by the time I was out of the parking lot.
We finished our call, and I started driving home, but by the time I got back to Japantown, Gloria called me and asked me if I could come over to her place, to which I agreed.
Ringing her doorbell, she answered and seemed to be vibrating in excitement, yelling, "I got the job! Taylor, I got the job I really wanted!"
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Hey, this isn't fallout!
Now you can die of depression as expected!
Raiseth
I Find Your Lack of Memes Disturbing
- Location
- Russia
Mmm, I'd have thought it would sooner remind her about Brockton Bay, especially with criminals moving in.
I mean, by Night City standards Taylor is almost a pacifistic grandma living out her retirement, yeah.
Soooo
The fourth body will be some kinda quasi-AI netrunning complex or something? Taylor looked at her Gram's AI and decided that rather than building one, she'd rather become it herself.
TennoTurian
Full of Quest Ideas but lack the drive to do most
- Location
- Under the floorboards
Ooh Taylor setting up shop in Pacifica? I wonder what she's going to turn the place into~
